Gloomy moods better for memory

People are more likely to accurately remember details about their surroundings when in a gloomy mood, researchers have found.

The study was conducted over a two-month period at a suburban newsagency in Sydney, where 73 shoppers were asked to recall small background objects that they had encountered on the check-out counter.

On rainy, cloudy days, the researchers arranged for sad music to be played in the store to reinforce shoppers' negative moods. On bright, sunny days, customers heard happy music.

Researchers found that customers on rainy, cloudy days could list three times as many objects as those on sunny days. More importantly, the negative group's recall was far more accurate as well.

"Mild, fleeting moods can have a profound yet subconscious influence on how people think and deal with information," said Joe Forgas, a University of New South Wales professor who conducted the research.

"Being happy tends to promote a thinking style that is less focused on our surroundings. In a positive mood, we are more likely to make more snap judgments about people we meet," he said. "We are more forgetful and yet we are paradoxically far more likely to be over-confident that our recall is correct."

"Mild negative mood, in turn, tends to increase attention to our surroundings and produce a more careful, thorough thinking style," he said.

Forgas noted that accurately remembering mundane, everyday scenes is a demanding task and one that can be of crucial importance in certain situations, for example in forensic and legal practice.

More information is available from the University of New South Wales's press release.

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'Sex-bias' hormone identified

Scientists have identified a hormone that could be responsible for non-reproductive differences in male and female brains.


The hormone, called Müllerian Inhibiting Substance (MIS), occurs only in men, and has previously been thought to have the sole function of preventing the formation of a uterus.

However, according to a new study of male and female mice, MIS may contribute to sex-linked behavioural traits that the researchers call 'sex-biases'.

"The sex-biases in the body do not define a person's sex or sexuality," explained neurobiologist Ian McLennan, who conducted the research at the University of Otago, New Zealand.

"Empathy, for example, has a female bias, but some of the greatest men are empathetic. Likewise, girls engage in less rough and tumble play than boys, but a boy who shuns rough and tumble play is still a boy," he said.

McLennan and his colleague Kyoko Koishi found most neurons in mice to have an MIS receptor. They then charted the behaviours of particular male and female mice that were missing either the gene for MIS or its receptor.

Male mice missing either of these showed a feminisation of some behavioral traits. The researchers noted differences in the 'male tendency' to explore and spatial processing.

Further work is needed to determine which human traits are regulated by MIS; however, the researchers hope that their findings contribute towards a greater understanding of human diversity.

More information is available from the University of Otago's press release.

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Directing kids not just wasted breath

Frustrated parents rejoice: instructions to toddlers may not just be going 'in one ear, out the other' after all.

According to psychologist Christopher Chatham, young children tend to store instructions and recall them after the fact, rather than act on them instantly.

"For example, let's say it's cold outside and you tell your three-year-old to go get his jacket out of his bedroom and get ready to go outside," said Chatham, who is a doctoral student at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

"You might expect the child to plan for the future, think 'okay it's cold outside so the jacket will keep me warm'," he explained.

"But what we suggest is that this isn't what goes on in a three-year-old's brain. Rather, they run outside, discover that it is cold, and then retrieve the memory of where their jacket is, and then they go get it."

With psychology professor Yuko Munakata, Chatham conducted a study of three-and-a-half to six year olds.

The children were presented with a computer game that required them to press a button when the image appeared on screen.

Meanwhile, the researchers measured the diameter of the pupil of each child's eye to determine the mental effort of the child.

While older children completed the tasks relatively effortlessly, preschoolers were found to have more difficulty.

"The older kids found this sequence easy, because they can anticipate the answer before the object appears," Chatham said.

"But preschoolers fail to anticipate in this way. Instead, they slow down and exert mental effort after being presented with the [image], as if they're thinking back to the character they had seen only after the fact."

The researchers concluded that young children neither plan for the future nor live completely in the present. Instead, they call up the past as they need it.

More information is available from the University of Colorado's press release.

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A drug to end fear

Scientists may be a step closer to eliminating the emotional fear response by using a drug called propranolol.

In a recent study, psychologist Merel Kindt and a team of researchers from the University of Amsterdam showed images of two different spiders to 60 human volunteers.

One of the images was accompanied by a mild electric shock until the volunteers learned to exhibit fear and anxiety for the spider even without the shock being administered.

The following day, some of the volunteers were administered propranolol, while a control group of volunteers was given a placebo. The volunteers were then showed the spider images again.

While no difference was found between the fear response of the control group and those who had taken propranolol initially, differences became apparent on the third day.

On the third day, those who had received propranolol were found no longer to exhibit a fear response on seeing the spider, unlike those who had received the placebo.

While the volunteers could remember the association between the spider and the pain of an electric shock, this was found no longer to elicit any emotional response.

The researchers plan to investigate the long-term effects of administering propranolol, which currently is used to treat high-blood pressure.

They expect their results to contribute to a new procedure for the treatment of patients with anxiety disorders.

More information is available from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research

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Electronic babysitters raise a generation of TV devotees

Just under half of 3-month-old infants are regular viewers of TV, DVDs or videos, a recent survey has found. By the age of two, researchers say, 90 percent of children would have become devotees of the idiot box.

Conducted in the U.S. by researchers at the University of Washington (UW) and Seattle Children’s Hospital Research Institute, the study has been touted as the first to investigate the media diet of infants who are too young to speak for themselves.

Through random telephone surveys of more than 1,000 families with children under the age of two in the U.S. states of Minnesota and Washington, researchers found the median age at which infants were regularly exposed to media was 9 months.

Among those who watched TV, DVDs or videos, the average daily viewing time jumped from 60 minutes per day for those children younger than one year to more than 90 minutes a day by two years.

"Early television viewing has exploded in recent years, and is one of the major public health issues facing American children," said Frederick Zimmerman, lead author of the study and a UW professor of health services.

"Exposure to TV takes time away from more developmentally appropriate activities such as a parent or adult caregiver and an infant engaging in free play with dolls, blocks or cars," he said.

A majority of parents cited a belief in the educational properties of media as a reason for permitting their children to watch TV, while others believed viewing to be enjoyable or relaxing for the child. About one fifth of parents surveyed admitted to using electronic media as a babysitter, so they could focus on other chores.

While Zimmerman agreed that appropriate television viewing can be helpful for both children and parents, he warned that excessive viewing before the age of three has been shown to be related to attention problems, aggressive behaviour, and poor cognitive development.

Developmental psychologist Andrew Meltzoff, a co-author of the study and co-director of the UW’s Instutute for Learning and Brain Sciences said: "Most parents seek what's best for their child, and we discovered that many parents believe that they are providing educational and brain development opportunities by exposing their babies to 10 to 20 hours of viewing per week."

"We need more research on both the positive and negative effects of a steady diet of baby TV and DVD viewing," he said, "but parents should feel confident that high-quality social interaction with babies, including reading and talking with them, provides all the stimulation that the growing brain needs."

More information is available from the University of Washington’s press release.

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Study explains interpersonal barriers in autism

Facial expressions are normally thought to have a significant role in face-to-face communication, giving context and meaning to the words we hear. While most people take the ability to evaluate visual cues for granted, however, a new report has found autistic children lacking in the brain function to discern between a smile and a frown.

Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, studied the brain activity of 16 typically developing children and 16 high-functioning children with autism to determine their responses to faces depicting angry, fearful, happy and neutral expressions.

When children in the typically developing group were shown faces with either a direct or indirect gaze, the researchers found significant differences in activity in a part of the brain called the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC), which is known to play a role in evaluating emotions.

In contrast, the autistic children showed no activity in this region of the brain whether they were looking at faces with a direct or an indirect gaze.

"This part of the brain helps us discern the meaning and significance of what another person is thinking," said lead researcher Mari Davies, a graduate student in psychology. "Gaze has a huge impact on our brains because it conveys part of the meaning of that expression to the individual. It cues the individual to what is significant."

The results are said to explain why children diagnosed with autism have varying degrees of impairment in communication skills and social interactions and display restricted, repetitive and stereotyped patterns of behaviour.

"They don’t pick up what’s going on — they miss the nuances, the body language and facial expressions and sometimes miss the big picture and instead focus on minor, less socially relevant details," Davies said. "That, in turn, affects interpersonal bonds."

More information is available from the University of California’s press release.

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Sleep organises memories

We have usually quite strong memories of past events like an exciting holiday or a jolly birthday party. However it is not clear how the brain keeps track of the temporal sequence in such memories: did Paul spill a glass of wine before or after Mary left the party?

Previous findings from a research group headed by Jan Born at the University of Lübeck have confirmed the widely held view that long-term memories are formed particularly during sleep, and that this process relies on the brain replaying recently encoded experiences during the night. The same research group now provides evidence that sleep not only strengthens the content of a memory but also the particular order in which they were experienced, probably by a replay of the experiences in "forward" direction.

Students were asked to learn triplets of words presented one after the other. Afterwards they slept, whereas in a control condition no sleep was allowed. Later, recall was tested by presenting one word and asking which one came before and which one came after during learning. Sleep was found to enhance word recall, but only when the students were asked to reproduce the learned words in forward direction.

This finding shows that sleep associated consolidation of memories enforces the temporal structure of the memorized episode that otherwise might be blurred to a timeless puzzle of experiences.

Findings of the study are reported in the international online journal of the Public Library of Science, PLoS ONE

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Chill out, live longer

A psychological study has linked neuroticism and mortality, suggesting that mellowing with age could help people live longer.

In the study, researchers tracked the change in neuroticism levels of 1,663 aging men over a 12-year period.

A neurotic personality was defined as a person with the tendency to worry, feel excessive amounts of anxiety or depression and to react to stressful life events more negatively than people with low levels of the trait. Neuroticism levels were measured using a standardized personality test.

Using the data gathered in the first analysis, researchers calculated the men's mortality risk over an 18-year period using the average levels and rates of change.

By the end of the study, half of those men classified as highly neurotic with increasing levels of neuroticism had died while those whose levels decreased or were classified as less neurotic had between a 75 percent and 85 percent survival rate.

"We found that neurotic men whose levels dropped over time had a better chance at living longer," said Dan Mroczek, an associate professor of child development and family studies at Purdue University, who conducted the study. "They seemed to recover from any damage high levels of the trait may have caused. On the flip side, neurotic men whose neuroticism increased over time died much sooner than their peers."

The study will be published in the print edition of the U.S. journal Psychological Science in late May. More information is available from Purdue University’s press release.

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Harvard study uncovers soccer referee bias

By Reidar von Hirsch
Fans of football will be relieved by the findings of a new report soon to be released at Harvard University - all those hours in the stands cheering at the team and shouting at the referee have not been in vain.

A study by Harvard University professor, Ryan Boyko, has found evidence that supports a long-held assertion by fans of the game - that playing at home gives the extra push to ensure a victory.

Boyko himself is a life-long footballer on youth and amateur level, now turned football referee in the US College divisions. Feeling the pressure from the crowd he decided, together with his brother Mark Boyko, to look into whether this could be statistically proven.

"We decided to look into what research had been done before and found a number of studies suggesting that crowd noise can bias referees toward the home team but nothing that actually demonstrated it had real effects on the game," he said.

"The obvious difficulty being that it's difficult to show that it is the referees being biased as opposed to the away players playing dirtier or worse, but our idea was that if referee psychology was the culprit different referees would respond significantly differently to crowd noise and this is exactly what we found."

A look at the final table for the A-League last season shows that winners Melbourne Victory actually won more away games than home games - according to this study a damning verdict on their fans, or perhaps the fans of their away game opponents. The Victory won six home games and eight away games in the 2006-7 season.

But perhaps more importantly, the study also shows something far more worrying, that also the referees are prone to influence from the home crowd. The team playing at home is more likely to get a penalty kick than the opposing team.

"The most interesting revelation unrelated to referee home bias that we found was that how many cards a team received in a match seem to be most determined by how many cards opponents of the other team generally get, not on any characteristic of the particular team in question," Boyko said.

"Thus it seems that certain teams are better at drawing fouls from the other team and that this effect is more important even than a team's propensity to get in trouble themselves."

Another phenomenon in big league football that also can be explained by this study is a claim by fans of smaller clubs - that referees more often take the side of the bigger team. This might be true simply because bigger teams have bigger crowds. Crunching the numbers, Boyko's studies found that ten percent more goals were scored by a home team per 10,000 spectators.

"Teams that consistently draw more spectators do seem to have a bigger home advantage and our study was unable to definitively answer whether this was due to merely having more spectators or some other variable correlated with number of spectators, such as team or player reputations."

On a stadium like Old Trafford, where famous Manchester United just this week played a stunning 7-1 win against Italian number-twos Roma, this means almost 75,000 spectators, or an output of no less than 0.75 goals per match.

In the Asian Champions League and the European Champions League, the home advantage is taken into account in the tournament regulations with the so-called away-goal rule. However, this does not officially relate to the home-bias refereeing revealed in Boyko's study, but to the pressure a team feels from playing on hostile grounds. A team in these tournaments that scores more away goals than its opponent in a knock-out game proceeds if the overall standing is a tie.

When it comes to doing something about the home-bias, Boyko says referee training and assessment could be effective. Any kind of video refereeing, meaning the game is stopped to make sure what really has happened is one of the most controversial debates in football today - some say it would make it more fair, others claim it would slow it down and take away the magic of the game. Boyko agrees that it probably wouldn't be worth it to implement full video refereeing, as is common in other forms of football.

"One relatively simple thing that could be done is installing goal line cameras such that a judge in a booth can review perhaps the most important decision of all - whether a goal has been scored or not. In this instance it could be done in a matter of seconds and probably wouldn't break up the flow of the game much. In other cases it might not be worth trying to move decisions away from the referee on the field as it might slow the game down too much and take away from the essence of the sport."

"These are questions that should be thought about intelligently and addressed by the governing bodies of professional and international soccer in light of the evidence from our study and others' studies," he said.

Reidar von Hirsch is a soccer enthusiast and freelance journalist in Sydney, Australia.

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Brain’s breaking mechanism revealed

As wise as the counsel to ‘finish what you've started’ may be, it is also sometimes critically important to do just the opposite - stop. And according to a recent cognitive study, the ability to stop quickly, to either keep from gunning the gas when a pedestrian steps into your path or to bite your tongue mid-sentence when the subject of gossip suddenly comes into view, may depend on a few ‘cables’ in the brain.

Researchers led by cognitive neuroscientist Adam Aron, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of California, San Diego, have found white matter tracts - bundles of neurons, or 'cables', forming direct, high-speed connections, between distant regions of the brain - that appear to play a significant role in the rapid control of behaviour.

The study is the first to identify these white matter tracts in humans, confirming similar findings in monkeys, and the first to relate them to the brain's activity while people voluntarily control their movements.

"Our results provide important information about the correspondence between the anatomy and the activity of control circuits in the brain," Aron said. "We've known for some time about key brain areas involved in controlling behaviour and now we're learning how they're connected and how it is that the information can get from one place to the other really fast."

"The findings could be useful not only for understanding movement control," Aron said, "but also 'self-control' and how control functions are affected in a range of neuropsychiatric conditions such as addiction, Tourette's syndrome, stuttering and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder."

To reveal the network, Aron and a team of researchers from UCLA, Oxford University and the University of Arizona performed two types of neuroimaging scans on healthy volunteers.

They used diffusion-weighted MRI, in 10 subjects, to demonstrate the "cables" between distant regions of the brain known to be important for control, and they used functional MRI, in 15 other subjects, to show that these same regions were activated when participants stopped their responses on a simple computerized "go-stop" task.

Renderings of the brain’s "braking" network, viewed from the front and side. A cutaway of the right hemisphere reveals white matter tracts, or "cables," that connect three distant regions of the brain known to be important for controlling behaviour - David Flitney, Oxford University
One of the connected regions was the subthalamic nucleus, within the deep-seated midbrain, which is an interface with the motor system and can be considered a ‘stop button’ or the brake itself. A second region was in the right inferior frontal cortex, a region near the temple, where the control signal to put on the brakes probably comes from.

"This begs the profound question," Aron said, "of where and how the decision to execute control arises."

While this remains a mystery, Aron noted that an additional, intriguing finding of the study was that the third connected node in the network was the presupplementary motor area, which is at the top of the head, near the front. Prior research has implicated this area in sequencing and imagining movements, as well as monitoring for changes in the environment that might conflict with intended actions.

The braking network for movements may also be important for the control of our thoughts and emotions.

There is some evidence for this, Aron said, in the example of Parkinson's patients. In the advanced stages of disease, people can be completely frozen in their movements, because, it seems, their subthalamic nucleus, or stop button, is always ‘on’. While electrode treatment of the area unfreezes the patients' motor system, it can also have the curious effect of disinhibiting them in other ways. In one case, an upstanding family man became manic and hypersexual, and suddenly began stealing money from his wife to pay for prostitutes.

Examples like these motivate Aron to investigate the generality of the braking mechanism.

"The study gives us new targets for studying how the brain relates to behavior, personality and genetics," Aron said. "Variability in the density and thickness of the 'cable' connections is probably influenced by genes, and it would be intriguing if these differences explained people's differing abilities not only to control the swing of a bat but also to control their temper."

More information is available from the University of California’s press release.

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Subconcious tactics of penalty box soccer

By Reidar von Hirsch
Scientists at Hong Kong University have come up with a theory that might prove extremely useful for football players around the world. Had Mark Schwarzer known in the fateful World Cup match against Italy last year what these Hong Kong scientists know today, Australian soccer fans might still be cheering.

As it turns out, a small tweak in where the goal keeper is positioned in the goal can make a player send the ball in a particular direction. By just standing a couple of centimetres to the right or left instead of in the middle of the goal, the goalie might thus be able to subconsciously convince the player to kick the ball into his or her path.

Rich Masters, assistant director of research and associate professor at the Institute of Human Performance at the University of Hong Kong, is one of the researchers behind the report. He became a football fan after spending some time in England.

"I studied for my Ph.D. in England and spent 14 years there. Gradually soccer just seeped into my blood. So I love to watch it, but play badly," he said in an interview.

Masters is an experimental psychologist with further interest in implicit knowledge, which he explained as such: "If something is implicit, it influences your behaviour without your knowledge. The penalty-taking study was a 'what-if' moment."

Football players and fans have long suspected the keeper´s position in the goal is important, and the article published by Masters and his colleagues John van der Kamp and Robin Jackson in the U.S. journal Psychological Science proves these speculations right. By standing six to ten centimetres off the centre of the goal - a displacement the penalty taking player is unlikely to notice - the chances are ten percent higher the player will send it towards the wider space.

Many fans loathe the idea of a game being decided on penalties, and it has been a long running debate both in England and internationally as to what extent this should be allowed to happen. The BBC recently reported on a decision by the English Football Association (FA) that stated that replay matches are still to decide who advances in the domestic FA-cup, instead of penalties as suggested by several managers.

Masters believes this kind of research can be helpful both for other parts of the game and for other sports, also here in Australia. "Recently I have been involved with both your Australian Institute of Sport and the New Zealand Academy of Sport because of the relevance of implicit motor learning to sport."

Perhaps these findings might help change the scene for penalty takers, so that the keeper is at less of a disadvantage, since today only 18 percent of penalty shots are saved.

One can only hope that the next time Francesco Totti rocks up against the Socceroos at the penalty spot in a vital World Cup game, he has not heard about this report.

Reidar von Hirsch is a soccer enthusiast and freelance journalist in Sydney, Australia.

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Metalheads not boneheads

A recent psychological study has drawn links between heavy metal music and gifted youths with low self esteem.

Researchers surveyed 1,057 students aged between 11 and 18 years old to find out about their families, school attitudes, hobbies and media preferences. The students were also asked to rank favoured genres of music.

Rock was found to be the most popular form of music, followed closely by pop. But there were also differences between the type of music the young people liked and their attitudes – with those who liked heavy metal having lower self-esteem and ideas about themselves.

Engineers by day, metal aficionados by night: The Banned Substances - CSE Revue 2006Further interviews were conducted with 19 gifted students to find out their views on heavy metal. These students said they did not consider themselves to be ‘metalheads’ but identified with specific aspects of this youth culture.

They spoke specifically about using heavy metal for catharsis, literally using the loud and often aggressive music to jump out frustrations and anger. Although the more ardent fans stated that ‘there’s metal out there for every occasion’, many also stated they listen to the music when they are in a bad mood.

Stuart Cadwallader, who conducted the study with professor Jim Campbell of the National Academy for Gifted and Talented Youth at the University of Warwick, speculated that gifted students who feel the pressure of their ability could be using heavy metal music to get rid of negative emotions.

“Perhaps the pressures associated with being gifted and talented can be temporarily forgotten with the aid of music,” he said. “As one student suggests, perhaps gifted people may experience more pressure than their peers and they use the music to purge this negativity.”

More information is available from the University of Warwick's press release.

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