NSF Study: Developmental Differences in Stress Responses

Adriana Galván, of UCLA, is exploring how daily stress and associated stress hormones impact decision making. Through a grant from the National Science Foundation, she is able to contrast the effect of stress on brain function in adolescents and adults.

Galván monitors the level of stress in her study participants four times per day. When an individual records high or low levels of stress, he or she immediately comes to the lab for evaluation.

Data suggest that the greatest sources of stress for teens are parents, while for adults stress tends to come from work or schoolwork.

There are also differences based on the time of day. While adults are most stressed in the morning, teens are most stressed in the early evening. Data also suggest that teens show greater cognitive impairment when stressed than adults.

Once the individuals come to the lab, their levels of cortisol are evaluated. Galván explained, "We expect diurnal patterns of cortisol release to differ between adults and adolescents and that this distinction will correlate with levels of stress. Previous work has shown that, under identical stress conditions, teens show greater cortisol release than adults."

Full Text via NSF and LiveScience

Why Men Don't Have To Die So Early (But Do Anyway): Sex and Gender Differences in Longevity

[Source] Data from August/September, 2001.

In a recent course on gender role socialization, I had the opportunity to do a bit of research into longevity, which is becoming a pet topic of mine. In doing so, I found a lot of information about why men die earlier - about 5.4 years earlier in the U.S. - than women. It seemed silly for only one person, a professor, to read it after I'd spent time on it. Especially since there is so much that men (both very gender-typed ones and males who eschew the label) in the internet audience, can do a lot to change health trajectories and add years to life. In just one testament to the amount of control we really have over our health, Dan Buettner, a researcher who focuses on twins' health outcomes and longevity, says that people, regardless of sex, have it within their power to add as much as 10 years onto their lives. With that in mind, enjoy factsnacking on this bloggofied version of the paper.

[Oh, and please forgive the writing style; I'm a social sciences person and we can be a little stiff like that. This is by no means a complete or exhaustive review of the literature on this, just a lil' something to raise awareness. As with all my original content, comments enouraged]

For more on why gender roles do real, measurable damage on men and women, see William Pollack, A New Psychology of Men, and the wiki on gender roles.

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Despite the longstanding patriarchic belief that females are naturally the weaker sex, modern research clearly demonstrates that men have significantly more impairments in physical health behaviors, predispositions, and outcomes. The mortality rate in the U.S. for men is consistently 1.5 to 3 times higher until 85 years of age. Men make up 70% of heart attack fatalities before the age of 65 as well as the majority of cases of mouth, throat, skin, and urinary organ cancer (Kilmartin, 2010, p. 178-9). Typically, men die 5.4 years earlier than women and have a 43% greater age-adjusted mortality rate (class notes). This has been the status quo long enough that the New Oxford American Dictionary makes reference to women as exemplar for longevity: “the greater longevity of women compared with men” (Longevity, 2005). Why should it be the case that so many more men die at younger ages? Why is it that women have a lead in longevity? Some theorists point to biological rationales, saying that differences in specific attributes of physical development are the root cause. Others point to social and psychological sources for the gender gap. These explanations are not mutually exclusive; framing the issue as nature versus nurture is a false dichotomy. In fact, the biological, socio-cultural, and psychological realms interact in a complex and recursive fashion.

Evolution Minute: New Study Establishes Relationships Among All Arthropods

  Lepidopterae, one example of the estimated 1.6 million different Arthropods 

  [around 90% of the Earth's biomass]

Researchers at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County have just finished a long awaited analysis of the evolutionary histories of Arthropods, an otherwise ragtag bunch known for wild variability, by carefully selecting representative DNA from 75 (often otherwise) disparate species. [link]

I like this article for several reasons, not the least among them is its final endearing image: fellow nerds at the beach.

A key problem that the research team had to solve was obtaining specimens of some of rare and obscure organisms whose DNA was needed for the analysis... Dr. Wetzer recalls lying on the beach with a microscope at Woods Hole, Massachusetts. She was hunting for specimens of a tiny, little-known crustacean that lives between grains of sand. "I got the mystacocarids we needed, but I think I also provided pretty good entertainment to the families at the beach that day," Dr. Wetzer said.

The Neuroscience behind Bias and Bad Science

Yo.

My bona fide cool boss sent me this article in Wired [two articles from one publication is considered a "kick" for me. Normally I like to wander from place to place.] I suppose it's because she'd like us all to do better science. The article goes into depth on why we expect to see what we do (and vice-versa), how we edit this information to fit our beliefs- making a convincing argument in favor of theoretical diversity and open debate.

Over the past few decades, psychologists have dismantled the myth of objectivity. The fact is, we carefully edit our reality, searching for evidence that confirms what we already believe... The problem with science, then, isn’t that most experiments fail — it’s that most failures are ignored.

The lesson: scientists, or any group of people working towards a common goal, could stand to benefit from being more social with thinkers from diverse theoretical backgrounds.

Dunbar [the principle investigator]... found that the intellectual mix generated a distinct type of interaction in which the scientists were forced to rely on metaphors and analogies to express themselves. (That’s because they lacked a specialized language that everyone could understand.) These abstractions proved essential for problem-solving, as they encouraged the scientists to reconsider their assumptions. Having to explain the problem to someone else forced them to think, if only for a moment, like an intellectual on the margins, filled with self-skepticism.

This is why other people are so helpful: They shock us out of our cognitive box. “I saw this happen all the time,” Dunbar says. “A scientist would be trying to describe their approach, and they’d be getting a little defensive, and then they’d get this quizzical look on their face. It was like they’d finally understood what was important.” 

Accept Defeat: The Neuroscience of Screwing Up