People who eat sweets are sweeter

Sweets, such as candy and chocolate, are known to lift children’s spirits, but new research from Gettysburg College, North Dakota State University (NDSU), Fargo and Saint Xavier University reveals that eating these treats can improve people’s dispositions as well.

During this multi-part study, which appears in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, researchers identified several examples of how individuals who eat sweeter foods have more social personalities. For example, one portion of the research revealed that participants who ate a specific brand of chocolate were more likely to volunteer to help someone in need compared to those who ate a cracker or nothing at all.

In another part of the study, researchers learned that people who enjoy sweet foods, such as candy or chocolate cake, tend to be more helpful or agreeable. These results have led those behind the research to believe that people can predict how nice someone will be based on whether or not he or she enjoys sweets.

“Our results suggest there is a real link between sweet tastes and pro-social behavior,” said Michael D. Robinson, professor of psychology at NDSU.

Individuals who have a sweet tooth and are curious to see how their eating habits affect their disposition may want to take a personality test.

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Video games can boost self esteem, reduce stress and improve your eyesight

Video games improve self esteem.

It always feels good to crush your opponent in Madden, which naturally makes you feel better about yourself. But did you know there have been games designed for the specific purpose of improving your self esteem? McGill University researchers focused on encouraging positive thoughts and positive attitudes in an effort to remove negative thought patterns. Of course, developing self-esteem is a bit more complex than just playing a video game, but it provides a good start for patterning behavior.

They reduce stress.

Not only do video games serve as a distraction, but they can fight anger. Researchers at Texas A&M University found that playing violent video games, such as Call of Duty 2, gave players an outlet in which to take out their aggression, contradicting the numerous studies that have indicated the opposite. Thinking of going postal? Play Playstation instead.

They improve your eyesight.

Forget LASIK eye surgery — you can spend $60 on a video game and experience improvement in your vision. According to researchers at the University of Rochester, people who played action video games for a month were able to identify letters presented in clutter 20% better than before. Incredibly, results were shown after just 30 hours of play. When you play action games, your vision is tested to its limit, and the brain adjusts accordingly. The human body is pretty neat.

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Sitting close to the TV will not hurt your eyes

Sitting too close to the TV will not damage your vision, contrary to popular belief.

So why do parents the world over still say this to their kids?  Surprisingly, there was actually a very brief period of time where sitting close to the TV could damage your eyes, assuming you owned a General Electric TV in the 1960s.  Specifically, in 1967, General Electric informed the public that many of their color televisions were emitting excessive x-rays due to a “factory error”.  GE fixed this problem by putting a leaded glass shield around the tubes.

Health officials at the time estimated that the amount of radiation being given off by these defective TVs was about 10 to 100,000 times higher than the rate considered acceptable.  They recommended, if you owned one of these TVs, not to sit too close.  As long as you were a few feet away and didn’t watch TV for more than an hour at a time or so at this close range, you were problem fine.  General Electric of course recalled all these TV’s and fixed the problem, so the issue went away.

However, moms the world over have every since felt it was bad for their kids to sit too close to the TV, even though that is no longer the case at all.  At worst sitting excessively close to the TV these days will just give you a headache and possible eyestrain, but for most people probably not even that, and even for those it does happen to, neither of those are in any way permanently damaging.  Both more or less fix themselves shortly after you stop sitting so close to the TV.

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Heavy Facebook users are more likely to believe other people have happier lives

New research suggests heavy Facebook users are more likely to believe other people have happier lives.

A newly published study suggests the phenomenally popular social networking site may be skewing the way users perceive their lives. It finds those carefully selected photos of cheerful, contented people cumulatively convey a self-esteem-shattering message: Our lives are fantastic! What’s wrong with you?

At least, that’s the conclusion of Utah Valley University sociologist Hui-Tzu Grace Chou, who conducted a study of 425 undergraduates at her school. Her paper, coauthored by Nichols Edge, was recently published in the journal Cyberpsychology, Behavior and Social Networking.

Participants read a series of self-defining statements — including “Most of my friends have a better life than me,” “Many of my friends are happier than me,” and “Life is fair” — and expressed the degree to which they agreed or disagreed with them. The students also estimated how much time they spend socializing with friends in a typical week.

They then described their Facebook activity, including the number of online “friends” they have, and how many of them are people they don’t actually know. Ninety-five percent reported using Facebook; on average, they had been users for 2.5 years, and spent 4.8 hours per week on the site.

Rationally, of course, we may realize that our “friend” Jim is putting his best face forward on his Facebook page. But if we barely know Jim (or know him only in pixels) and his name comes up in conversation, those smiling, happy photos are what pop into our minds. These easily retrieved mental images can foster the feeling that Jim is leading an unusually joyous life.

Multiply that distorting dynamic by the number of Facebook “friends” you don’t actually know, and it’s easy to see how bitterness could begin to brew.

Evidence supporting this interpretation comes from another finding of the study. Participants who spent more time socializing with their friends were less likely to agree with the statement that other people have better lives than themselves. It seems interacting in person gives us a better sense that everyone’s life has its ups and downs.

So if you’re feeling bad about yourself, turn off the computer and spend some time actually talking with people face to face. You might be surprised to learn that everyone’s got it tough in some way — even if they don’t admit as much on their Facebook page.

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Internet addiction causes the same brain changes that are seen in alcoholics and drug addicts.

A new brain scan study shows not only can that be the case, but also that Internet addiction might cause the same brain changes that are seen in alcoholics and drug addicts.

For the study, published in the Jan. 11 issue of PLoS One, researchers studied 17 men and women who were diagnosed with Internet addiction disorder (IAD) and compared scans of their brains to scans of 16 healthy people who weren’t addicted to the web. Study participants were between the ages of 14 and 21 and lived in China.

The researchers found more patterns of  “abnormal white matter” on brain scans of Internet addicts, compared with scans of non-addicts. White matter areas in the brain contain nerve fibers that transmit signals to other parts of the brain.

These changes showed evidence of disrupting pathways related to emotions, decision-making, and self control.

The researchers said earlier studies have found similar white matter changes in the brain scans of people addicted to alcohol, cocaine, heroin, marijuana, meth, and ketamine (also known as “Special K”).

“The results also suggest that IAD may share psychological and neural mechanisms with other types of substance addiction and impulse control disorders,” the researchers wrote in the study.

Professor Gunter Schumann, chair in biological psychiatry at the Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College, London, told BBC News that he’s come across similar findings in brain scans of video game addicts.

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Sitting for too long can kill you

Sitting in your desk chair or sitting while watching TV could be killing you. The good news is there are simple steps you can take to get moving.

According to the Physical Living website the average person sits for 9.3 hours a day.

A person who sits to watch to TV for three hours a day is 64 percent more likely to die from heart disease than a person who doesn’t.

The risk of heart disease increases by 11 percent for each additional hour.

Sitting for long periods causes muscles to tighten which makes injury more likely.

Scientists have created porn for pandas in an attempt to boost the animal’s sex drive

Chuang Chuang the panda has been spending his days in front of a big-screen television watching panda porn.

Authorities at the Chiang Mai Zoo in northern Thailand hope the images will encourage him to mate with his partner, Lin Hui, and serve as an instructional lesson in how to do it right.

So far, it’s been a tough sell, the zoo’s chief veterinarian, Kanika Limtrakul, said Tuesday.

“Chuang Chuang seems indifferent to the videos; he has no reaction to what he’s seeing on TV,” Kanika said. “But we’re continuing to show him videos and hoping they will leave an impression.”

Pandas are threatened by loss of habitat, poaching and a low reproduction rate. Females in the wild normally have a cub once every two to three years.

There are as few as 1,600 giant pandas in the mountain forests of central China, according to the zoo. An additional 120 are in Chinese breeding facilities and zoos, and about 20 live in zoos outside China.

Zoo officials say Chuang Chuang will be reunited with his partner in about another week. The two pandas have been kept separate since late last year as part of efforts to spark some romance between them.

Chuang Chuang recently was put on a strict diet because zoo officials said he was too heavy to mate. The diet trimmed him down from 331 pounds to 313 pounds.

Thailand rented 6-year-old Chuang Chuang and 5-year-old Lin Hui from China for $250,000 in October 2003 for 10 years. They are expected to generate millions of dollars in revenue from Thai and foreign tourists.

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Drinking alcohol helps certain areas of our brain to learn and remember better.

The common view that drinking is bad for learning and memory isn’t wrong, says neurobiologist Hitoshi Morikawa, but it highlights only one side of what ethanol consumption does to the brain.

“Usually, when we talk about learning and memory, we’re talking about conscious memory,” says Morikawa, whose results were published last month in The Journal of Neuroscience. “Alcohol diminishes our ability to hold on to pieces of information like your colleague’s name, or the definition of a word, or where you parked your car this morning. But our subconscious is learning and remembering too, and alcohol may actually increase our capacity to learn, or ‘conditionability,’ at that level.”

When we drink alcohol (or shoot up heroin, or snort cocaine, or take methamphetamines), our subconscious is learning to consume more. But it doesn’t stop there. We become more receptive to forming subsconscious memories and habits with respect to food, music, even people and social situations.

In an important sense, says Morikawa, alcoholics aren’t addicted to the experience of pleasure or relief they get from drinking alcohol. They’re addicted to the constellation of environmental, behavioral and physiological cues that are reinforced when alcohol triggers the release of dopamine in the brain.

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Men spend more money when they don’t have women.

The perception that women are scarce leads men to become impulsive, save less, and increase borrowing, according to new research from the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management.

“What we see in other animals is that when females are scarce, males become more competitive. They compete more for access to mates,” says Vladas Griskevicius, an assistant professor of marketing at the Carlson School and lead author of the study. “How do humans compete for access to mates? What you find across cultures is that men often do it through money, through status and through products.”

To test their theory that the sex ratio affects economic decisions, the researchers had participants read news articles that described their local population as having more men or more women. They were then asked to indicate how much money they would save each month from a paycheck, as well as how much they would borrow with credit cards for immediate expenditures. When led to believe women were scarce, the savings rates for men decreased by 42 percent. Men were also willing to borrow 84 percent more money each month.

In another study, participants saw photo arrays of men and women that had more men, more women, or were neutral. After looking at the photographs, participants were asked to choose between receiving some money tomorrow or a larger amount in a month. When women were scarce in the photos, men were much more likely to take an immediate $20 rather than wait for $30 in a month.

According to Griskevicius, participants were unaware that sex ratios were having any effect on their behavior. Merely seeing more men than women automatically led men to simply be more impulsive and want to save less while borrowing more to spend on immediate purchases.

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Studies show that gossip can have social and psychological benefits

For centuries, gossip has been dismissed as salacious, idle chatter that can damage reputations and erode trust. But a new study from the University of California, Berkeley, suggests rumor-mongering can have positive outcomes such as helping us police bad behavior, prevent exploitation and lower stress.

The study also found that gossip can be therapeutic. Volunteers’ heart rates increased when they witnessed someone behaving badly, but this increase was tempered when they were able to pass on the information to alert others.

So strong is the urge to warn others about unsavory characters that participants in the UC Berkeley study sacrificed money to send a “gossip note” to warn those about to play against cheaters in economic trust games. Overall, the findings indicate that people need not feel bad about revealing the vices of others, especially if it helps save someone from exploitation, the researchers said.

“We shouldn’t feel guilty for gossiping if the gossip helps prevent others from being taken advantage of,” said Matthew Feinberg, a UC Berkeley social psychologist and lead author of the paper.

300 participants from around the country were recruited via Craigslist to play several rounds of the economic trust game online. They played using raffle tickets that would be entered in a drawing for a $50 cash prize —an extra incentive to hold on to as many raffle tickets as possible.

Some players were told that the observers during a break could pass a gossip note to players in the next round to alert them to individuals not playing fairly. The threat of being the subject of negative gossip spurred virtually all the players to act more generously, especially those who had scored low on an altruism questionnaire taken prior to the game.

Together, the results from all four experiments show that “when we observe someone behave in an immoral way, we get frustrated,” Willer said. “But being able to communicate this information to others who could be helped makes us feel better.”

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