Brothers was a wife and stay-at-home mom in the mid-1950′s and believed that being home with her child was the best way to parent. However, the hard reality soon set in that her husband, who was a fresh med-school graduate, couldn’t support them on his residency income. On a whim, Brothers decided to try her luck as a quiz show contestant. After memorizing 20 volumes of an encyclopedia set, she made her way onto “$64,000 Challenge” and stunned everyone when she became the first female to win the big cash prize.

She found herself mixed up in a scandal, though, when the show’s producers were accused of giving the answers away to particular contestants. Brothers denied being involved in any cheating and was eventually cleared of any wrongdoing. But the scandal may have been the very thing to open doors for her; she was eventually offered a job as a sports interviewer, which led to appearances on talk shows, and in 1958 landed a job with an NBC show giving out advice to women on topics such as menopause and sex. She would go on to become one of the most highly sought-after psychologists of the day after hosting on a call-in radio show which dispensed a form of therapy to those in need.

Although her methods were criticized, Brothers insisted she was just doling out common sense.

“I don’t give advice. I just tell people, ‘This is what we know.’ ” she once said.

Brothers had her own advice column for over forty years in Good Housekeeping and kept up her celebrity through the ’80s and ’90s by appearing on sitcoms and talk shows. She was also the author of several books, including “Ten Days To A Successful Memory” (1964), “Positive Plus: The Practical Plan for Liking Yourself Better” (1995) and “Widowed” (1992).

The researchers stated that thermography, a technique that uses body temperature to detect changes in the body, can be used to identify a wide range of mental states. Changes in temperature are associated with the physical, mental, and emotional status of a person. Psychologists in the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Granada used thermography to determine the temperature changes in humans who are thinking hard, lying, exercising, or sexually excited.

Different types of exercise have different types of thermal “footprints.” This was demonstrated in the study by different types of dance.

“When a person is dancing flamenco the temperature in their buttocks drops and increases in their forearms. That is the thermal footprint of flamenco, and each dance modality has a specific thermal footprint,” said the study’s authors.

When thinking hard or expending significant mental effort, the temperature of the face was shown to drop. This contrasts with the emotional state of anxiety (such as lying), which raises the temperature of the face. The Granada researchers stated that an area of the brain called the “insula” is also activated when lying. The insula is involved in both the regulation of body temperature and the brain reward system. It only activates when “real” feelings are experienced, and the more active the insula is, the lower the temperature change is.

As for sexual excitement, the researchers stated that chest and genital temperature increases were observed in both men and women. The study claims to show that men and women get excited at the same time, even when women say they are not excited, or are only slightly excited.

(Image courtesy the University of Granada)

Robin Dunbar, professor of evolutionary psychology at the University of Oxford and co-author of the study, told Discovery News that language-based jokes are (obviously) specific to humans. Slapstick humor, however, does trigger what in apes is considered to be laughter. In addition, Dunbar said apes play practical jokes on each other and laugh with schadenfreude at others’ misfortune.

These observations aren’t part of the study, however, and Dunbar said they are only her casual observations. The actual study deals with how laughter can increase the size of a bonding group. Researchers hung around in bars in the U.K., France, and Germany, watching groups of people who exhibited coordinated laughter. It showed that laughter can increase the size of groups who bond from one-on-one to several people.

AOL has a short video on the ape-slapstick connection, which is embedded below. I can’t recommend it, though, as the host is annoying and his lines are even worse. It is hard to tell whether the clip was made for children or if it is just inept. Watch at your own risk.

Researchers at the University of Buffalo’s Research Institute on Addictions found that the your mental resources are finite and can quickly run out even after one completing one task. For busy people, this could leave their next task unfinished as they struggle to find the willpower to complete it. The solution to the problem, according to the researchers, lies in your favorite TV show.

Dr. Jaye Derrick, head of the research study, found that simply watching a re-run of your favorite TV show can return the mental energy you lost. The restorative powers of re-runs comes from the fact that they don’t challenge our minds in any way. We already know what’s going to happen so our minds can take a break.

Derrick conducted two studies from which she formed her findings. The first study had some participants complete a difficult puzzle while others were challenged with an easy puzzle. Some were then asked to write about their favorite TV show while the others were asked to list everything in the room.

The results found that those who wrote about their favorite TV show were able to perform better at solving the difficult puzzle because they wanted to spend more time thinking about said TV show.

The second study was even more apparent with its findings. The participants were asked to keep a daily diary on “effortful tasks, media consumption and energy levels.” Those who performed difficult tasks were more likely to seek out a re-run of their favorite TV show. The same restorative effect was apparent in those who re-watched a favorite movie or re-read a favorite book.

Derrick is quick to point out that just watching any TV show that’s on will not restore your energy. She says that it has to be a favorite TV show that you are already familiar with. She also says that her study proves that TV is actually good for people. It’s a safe relationship that’s free of worry or stress.

If anything, the study gives me an even better excuse to re-watch all of Arrested Development before the new season airs on Netflix later this year.

A recent study from the Journal of Neuroscience sought to find out how much music training is needed to actually make an impact on the mind of a child. The study used 45 adults with varying degrees of music education. They were split up based upon how much music training they received as children and were then tasked to respond to complex sounds ranging in pitch. The results are actually pretty surprising.

The researchers from Northwestern University’s Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory found that adults who studied music as a child were better able to process the sounds being played. What’s interesting is that the amount of music training didn’t matter. Those with even a minimum amount of training (one to two years) were able to pull out low frequency sounds from the test noises.

So what does this say about music? It’s imperative that everybody be exposed to some kind of music education as a child. You don’t have to force children to take years of grueling music theory courses. They just need to take a few years of piano or another instrument in elementary school and they’ll be set for life.

The study only tested the participant’s ability to hear and pick out sounds. Music training definitely enhances your ability to hear, but it does so much more. Music is essentially the steroids for your brain. It makes children better at reading and math. There are probably other benefits that we don’t even know about yet. Most important of all, however, is that music is just fun. Inspiring a love of music into children at a young age guarantees them a life of at least occasional happiness as music is a great stress reliever.

Unfortunately, public funding for music and arts education is always declining. Schools are forced to focus on what they see as more important subjects like math and science. This latest study might help to convince some schools that music and art are just as important in fostering the kind of intellectual development that math and science require.

Just be sure that your music education is strictly about the classics. Modern pop music will probably just degrade your mind to the intellectual equivalent of a spoon.

[h/t: Scientific American]

The University of Massachusetts, Amherst, recently conducted a study on 66 women to study the effects of sleep on arachnophobia. The researchers created four control groups to find out how “fear extinction is affected by sleep, wakefulness and time of day.” The women were subjected to a rather tame, and pretty funny video, on spiders.

The time of day control groups watched the video 14 times in sessions that were two hours apart. These groups were used to rule out that time of day had any effect on fear. The two groups that are of interest is the sleep and wake groups. These groups watched the video 14 times in sessions that were 12 hours apart – either after being awake for 12 hours or being asleep for the same amount of time.

Now this is where things get interesting. To measure the fear in those watching the video, the researchers would set off a loud noise in 60 percent of the viewings. They used a system that measured palm sweat to calculate fear. The women were then subjected to old and new spider videos. The fear was measured in accordance with the old and new videos to see if there was a change in response.

The results might be a little surprising. They found that sleep did a better job of reinforcing a memory formed during exposure therapy. In essence, the women went to sleep with the memories of spiders fresh in their memory. By sleeping with these memories, it lessened the impact the spider videos had on them the next day.

So what about the women who watched spider videos and then stayed awake for 12 hours? They were found to have a worse response to watching more spider videos at the end of the day.

Interestingly enough, the sleep control group wasn’t even afraid of the new spider when it was introduced. The women who stayed awake were even more afraid of it.

So what do we take from all of this? You should expose yourself to fears and then sleep on it. Your brain will reintroduce you to these fears whether you know it or not during your REM cycle. You might even dream about the fear in question. So far, it seems to only have positive effects though as it might even cure said fears.

The study in question was only performed on those with arachnophobia because it’s probably the most prevalent fear among people. It opens up new avenues, however, of killing other irrational fears. My fear of flying may be a thing of the past if I’m able to get up in a plane and then sleep it off. Unfortunately, convincing myself to fly might be a little difficult.

[h/t: Harvard News]

While some may believe the high was the therapeutic effect many patients were after, Tzahi Klein, the man in charge of development at the firm who created it, claims that cannabidiol (CBD), a component of marijuana, helps treat diabetics, and also those diagnosed with various psychological disorders.

Tzahi Klein, head of development at Tikkun Olam comments on the new strain of marijuana:

“It has the same scent, shape and taste as the original plant — it’s all the same — but the numbing sensation that users are accustomed to has disappeared,”

According to Maariv Daily, a publication from Israel, the plant is also incapable of producing the hunger sensation which typically accompanies the high. This means cancer patients who suffer from loss of appetite due to chemotherapy treatments won’t find the plant to be of any therapeutic value.

Regardless, Israel has strict laws on marijuana use and outlaw it for anything but the most essential medical purposes. To date, it has only been approved in about 6,000 cases.

Similar studies took place last year, where scientists were able to harness the anesthetic effects of marijuana without subjecting the patients to the psychotropic sensations typically caused by smoking the substance. The idea was to create a line of therapeutic remedies that would produce virtually zero side effects.

The new strain of marijuana was thought to be an excellent treatment for those suffering from the withdrawal effects that accompany alcoholism and for those who find themselves sensitive to taking aspirin or ibuprofen.

There are a lot of scientists who believe in the utility of marijuana in the medical world. The challenge has always been getting legislators to ease the laws to allow for it to be taken advantage of in clinical settings. Perhaps removing the disorienting effects responsible for the current stigma surrounding the plant could be a key step toward gaining wider therapeutic and government acceptance.

(Lead image courtesy of staplenews.com)

This wonderful news is certain to make both obsessively diligent workers and taskmaster bosses cringe comes by way of a new study by UC Irvine and the U.S. Army. The study revealed that cutting out the irresistible habit of constantly checking your email reduces stress and dramatically improves your ability to focus.

Yes, these days, with many of us plugged into more than one device that allows us to check our email virtually anytime and anywhere, the notion of not checking your email might be enough to give you separation anxiety and hasten your heart. Predictably, then, and somewhat humorously, the researchers didn’t have such an easy time finding people willing to sever themselves from the tether of their email.

Nevertheless, eventually enough people were collected so that the research could proceed. The study, “A Pace Not Dictated by Electrons,” involved a small group of participants who were attached to heart rate monitors as they used computers in a suburban office setting. The computers were equipped with software sensors to track how often the participants switched between screens. Participants worked in a variety of positions and were evenly split between sexes.

The results revealed that the people that checked their email flipped between screens twice as much and were in a constant state of “high alert” as they had more constant heart rates. However, those with no email – they were without email for five blissful days – were not perturbed by technology’s siren song and were observed to have more natural heart rates.

“We found that when you remove email from workers’ lives, they multitask less and experience less stress,” said UCI informatics professor Gloria Mark, who co-authored the study. The participants who had email felt a persistant itch to check their email and couldn’t help but scratch it: they flicked between screens an average of 37 times per hour. Those who had no email only switched screens about 18 times an hour.

“Email vacations on the job may be a good idea,” Mark added. Based on this knowledge of how email impacts people’s ability to stay focused, restructuring the way people communicate in the office could achieve a higher level of productivity. Mark suggested that one way to lessen the nag to check email so constantly was to bundle emails into a batch or even create an automated system that controlled how frequently an employee could log-in to their email.

One negative experience that participants reported was that, due to being disconnected from their email, they felt a bit isolated. If that may be too much for you to handle, Mark said that getting up from your desk and walking around a bit, maybe even visiting your officemates provides some physical rescue, too. Previous studies have advised people stuck behind a desk to do this anyways, as sitting down all day at your job is a deadly occupational hazard.

At what point did the appearance of doing work become more important than not only actually doing work, but producing quality work? In the past few decades we’ve developed this septic complex with how we approach our professional lives where we can never be attentive enough and can’t risk missing the latest memo to the point that our physiological response is a quickened heart rate. As the study discussed above, it’s also fracturing our minds to the point that we’re as focused as an over-caffeinated playground of second graders.

Some of us put in a mind-numbing amount of hours to the point that it’s actually counter-productive. We as imperfect human beings really only have about a good 40 hours to dedicate to productive work in a week. Our brains just aren’t wired for it. Yet we continue onward in spite of the fact that studies have shown that working more than 40 hours a week makes you a less efficient worker over both the long and short term.

So not only are we killing ourselves for our jobs, but we’re not even doing a good job at our jobs.

Say what you want about Google and Facebook with their various bad habits, one thing about them has seemed to remain true: they seem like amazing places to work. Facebook was ranked as the number one place to work in the tech industry in 2012 by due to the feedback from employees and if you’ve ever seen a video of what it looks like inside the Facebook’s Menlo Park headquarters or inside the Googleplex, it looks unlike any office you likely have ever worked in. Look at Facebook’s digs in this video and become filled with awe and envy (the Facebook feature starts at 2:08).

It’s like a land of really hip lotus eaters inside that place. So when it comes to the design and approach to work in the rest of the world, why haven’t we taken a clue from these companies?

With nearly every innovation that has advanced our society, we’ve adjusted and changed according to the technological potential of the time. We use computers instead of typewriters, we ditched land lines for cell phones, we send emails now instead of snail mail or inter-office memos. While the environment around our work lives has changed dramatically in the past twenty years, changed so much to the point that it’d hardly be recognizable to someone from 1980, why are we still structuring our jobs the same way we did two generations ago?

We’re literally killing ourselves by trying to keep up with the hare’s pace of technology by riding along with a turtle’s desperation.

A new study published on Psychology Today took a look at the study habits of roughly 300 students from middle school, high school, and university. The researchers were interested in observing whether the students could maintain focus for fifteen minutes while studying “something important” in a familiar environment or, if they couldn’t, what was causing distractions for the students.

Beyond the discouraging result that these students couldn’t maintain focus for more than an average of three minutes, the researchers found that the number one distraction for the students was technology, mostly in the form of computers and smartphones. Dr. Larry Rosen, a Professor of Psychology at California State University, Dominguez Hills, describes the further investigation into whether these distractions were predictive of academic performance, as well as what the seemingly benign effect of checking Facebook was:

We also looked at whether these distractors might predict who was a better student. Not surprisingly those who stayed on task longer and had study strategies were better students. The worst students were those who consumed more media each day and had a preference for working on several tasks at the same time and switching back and forth between them. One additional result stunned us: If they checked Facebook just once during the 15-minute study period they were worse students. It didn’t matter how many times they looked at Facebook; once was enough.

In other words, Facebook slaps a stranglehold on your cognitive abilities. When Rosen’s team asked students why they felt so compelled to check Facebook, some of them replied that it was due to an alert they received. However, some of them simply admitted that they were sitting there wondering if somebody had responded to their Facebook post yet.

The overlap between social media and work is increasing more and more although it’s possible that constantly checking out what’s going on Facebook could be killing productivity in the workplace. Rosen’s research seem to not only corroborate the fact that Facebook wrecks your motivation to get tasks done in the office, but it could also be the reason you got crummy grades in school.

[Via LifeHacker.]

A new study by Time Inc. compared these two groups to investigate any behavioral differences between the generations and what their emotional engagement to the behavior (if any) could be. The study, “A Biometric Day in the Life,” divided everybody into two groups: “Digital Natives,” who are consumers who grew up with mobile technology as part of their everyday lives; and “Digital Immigrants,” those who first learned about mobile technology in their adult lives. The purpose of the study was to show how the proliferation of digital devices and platforms affect consumer consumption habits and whether different generations engage differently with various media platforms.

The study combined types of technology to collect data from participants, including a system of biometric monitoring developed by Innerscope Research, a marketing research firm that specializes in measuring the unconscious emotional response of consumers to marketing stimuli. The emotion-gauging metric was combined with point-of-view camera glasses that monitored what type of medium or platform the participant used and when they altered their visual attention between devices.

The study found that Digital Natives switch their attention between media platforms (i.e. TVs, magazines, tablets, smartphones or channels within platforms) 27 times per hour, about every other minute. See, people don’t have ADHD – they just have too many distractions in their life thanks to all of the stimuli.

Speaking of psychological effects, Digital Natives were also found to spend more time using multiple media platforms simultaneously, which was linked to a constrained emotional engagement with content. They experience fewer highs and lows of emotional response and as a result, Digital Natives more frequently use media to regulate their mood – as soon as they grow tired or bored, they turn their attention to something new.

Digital Natives willfully tether themselves to mobile technology, as well. They were found to take their devices from room to room with them (65% vs. 41% for Digital Immigrants) – rarely more than an arm’s length away from their smartphones, thus making switching platforms even easier. Given how easily bored and distracted they become, it’s no wonder they probably feel separation anxiety if their smartphone or tablet is beyond the reach of their fingertips.

Dr. Carl Marci, CEO and Chief Scientist at Innerscope Research, argued that the findings from this study suggest a changing psychological landscape of the American consumer. “This study strongly suggests a transformation in the time spent, patterns of visual attention and emotional consequences of modern media consumption that is rewiring the brains of a generation of Americans like never before,” he said.

So let’s make sure everyone is on the same page: growing up in an environment over-saturated with tech stimuli can shape you into an emotionally wooden, attention-deficient, gadget-dependent person who is easily bored.

Great.