Psychoworld.sk – human psychology news

A link between breastfeeding and higher IQ was first spotted in 1929, and has been a controversial subject ever since, says Geoff Der, lead researcher. He said that not only do breastfed children generally perform better on intelligence tests, but they also tend to come from more advantaged backgrounds.

Breastfed babies are more intelligent because a higher percentage of highly educated mothers tend to breastfeed, say researchers from the Medical Research Council (UK) and the University of Edinburgh.

A higher percentage of breastfed babies are brought up in a mentally stimulating environment. You can read about this study in the British Medical Journal.

Benefits of the breastfeeding for the baby:
– Babies who are breastfed have better stabilized blood sugar levels
– Breastfed babies are less likely to have diarrhea
– Breastfed babies are less likely to have respiratory infections
– Studies have also indicated that breastfed babies are less likely to develop hypertension (high blood pressure) and obesity later in life
– Breastfed babies have fewer illnesses. The mother’s milk provides the infant with antibodies. 80% of breast milk cells kill bacteria, fungi and viruses (they are macrophages)

Breastfeeding benefits for mother

– It is less complicated. No bottles to organize, no formula to mix
– It helps the mother get back to her normal weight
– It helps get the uterus back to its normal size more quickly
– Breastfeeding often suppresses ovulation. This makes it less likely that the mother will get pregnant
– Breastfeeding is cheaper than bottle-feeding

Effect of breast feeding on intelligence in children: prospective study, sibling pairs analysis, and meta-analysisGeoff Der, G David Batty, Ian J DearyBMJ, doi:10.1136/bmj.38978.699583.55 (published 4 October 2006) Click here to view abstract online

Written by: Christian Nordqvist
Editor: Medical News Today

Compulsive buying is not just a problem that some women have – it seems that men are just as likely to suffer from it, say researchers from Stanford University, USA. About 5% of adults in the USA say they cannot refrain from shopping for stuff they probably don’t want or need.

The traditional view of women suffering from compulsive buying is probably the result of most studies being done mainly on women. Women are also more likely to admit to compulsive shopping than men.

You can read about this new study in the American Journal of Psychiatry.

Surprisingly, more people from lower incomes suffer from compulsive shopping than people from higher incomes. More here.

Good communication skills can help you in both your personal and professional life. While verbal and written communication skills are important, research has shown that nonverbal behaviors make up a large percentage of our daily interpersonal communication.

How can you improve your nonverbal communication skills? The following top ten tips for nonverbal communication can help you learn to read the nonverbal signals of other people and enhance your own ability to communicate effectively.

1) Pay Attention to Nonverbal Signals
2) Look for Incongruent Behaviors
3) Concentrate on Your Tone of Voice When Speaking
4) Use Good Eye Contact
5) Ask Questions About Nonverbal Signals
6) Use Signals to Make Communication More Effective and Meaningful
7) Look at Signals as a Group
Consider Context
9) Be Aware That Signals Can be Misread
10) Practice, Practice, Practice

Good communication skills can help you in both your personal and professional life. While verbal and written communication skills are important, social psychologists have suggested that nonverbal behaviors make up a large percentage of our daily interpersonal communication.

Hopes are that those tips above will help you out in the betterment of your own communication skills.

“Easy On The Eyes” May Hit Closer To The Mark Than We Thought.

Experiments led by Piotr Winkielman, of the University of California, San Diego, and published in the current issue of Psychological Science, suggest that judgments of attractiveness depend on mental processing ease, or being “easy on the mind.”

“What you like is a function of what your mind has been trained on,” Winkielman said. “A stimulus becomes attractive if it falls into the average of what you’ve seen and is therefore simple for your brain to process. In our experiments, we show that we can make an arbitrary pattern likeable just by preparing the mind to recognize it quickly.”

Humans have similar preferences for prototypes in a wide variety of other categories, including dogs, birds, fish, cars and even watches.

Yet the question “why?” has remained open. A popular explanation has been an evolutionary, sexual-selection one that goes something as follows: Like symmetry (another reliable predictor of attractiveness), prototypicality signals health and fitness – unusually protuberant eyes might be a clue to disease, for example – and so is a kind of shorthand for the value of a potential mate.
Read more.

U.S. psychologists say people made to think quickly report feeling happier and more energetic, creative and self-assured.

In other words, such people reported a whole set of experiences associated with being manic, said Princeton University psychologist Emily Pronin, co-author of the study.

Fast thinking, or racing thoughts, is most commonly known as a symptom of the clinical psychiatric disorder of mania.

But Pronin says most healthy people have experienced racing thoughts at some point in time, such as while excited about a new idea or while brainstorming with a group of people.

The researchers found people felt happier and more energetic, creative, powerful and grandiose when made to read a statement at a fast, rather than slow. More here.

Giving your children music lessons could be one of the best things you ever do for their education, claim researchers.

Unique brain testing shows how early musical training improves memory and IQ – within as little as four months.

Experts say music should be routinely taught in pre-school and primary school to maximise children’s brain development.

Brain scanning showed children aged between four and six who received music lessons generated more sophisticated responses than those who did not. Read more…

Researchers at the University of Warwick and Watson Wyatt have been examining just how much money one needs to win in the lottery to have a long term impact on personal happiness.

Unsurprisingly the researchers found that small wins in tens or hundreds of pound made little long term difference, but they also found one did not need to win the jackpot to gain a significant increase in long-term mental wellbeing.

Intriguingly the researchers also found that this increased happiness is not obvious immediately after the medium-sized win and takes some time to show through. Economist Professor Andrew Oswald from the University of Warwick said:

“This delay could be due the short term disruptive effect on one’s live of actually winning, but a more plausible explanation of the delay is that initially many windfall lottery funds are saved and spent later.” Read more.

After comparing children who had music lessons with those who didn’t, scientists from McMaster University, Canada, found that those who took music lessons had different patterns of brain development.

The children with music lessons had better memories as well as higher literacy and math levels. All the kids in the study were aged 4-6 years.You will be able to read about this study in the October issue of Brain.

Professor Laurel Trainor, team leader, said “This is the first study to show that brain responses in young, musically trained and untrained children change differently over the course of a year.”

While all the children listened to two sounds, a violin tone, and a white noise burst – the scientists used magnetoencephalography to measure their brain activity. All the kids responded more to the violin tone than the white noise burst.

This indicates that the children’s brains are being used more when the sound is meaningful. During the year-long study the researchers also noticed that all the children’s brains gradually responded more rapidly to sounds – indicating brain maturity. Read more.

Anyone who has traveled has experienced jet lag—that groggy realization that while your day is beginning in Washington, D.C., the night you just left in San Francisco is hardly over.

Jet lag is an inconvenient reminder that the body is set to a 24-hour clock, known by scientists as circadian rhythms, from the Latin circa dies, “about one day.” An internal biological clock is fundamental to all living organisms, influencing hormones that play a role in sleep and wakefulness, metabolic rate, and body temperature.

Disruption of circadian rhythms not only affects sleep patterns but also has been found to precipitate mania in people with bipolar disorder (manic-depressive illness). Other types of illnesses also are affected by circadian rhythms; for example, heart attacks occur more frequently in the morning while asthma attacks occur more often at night.

Although biological clocks have been the focus of intensive research over the past four decades, only recently have the tools needed to examine the molecular basis of circadian rhythms become available. Early studies pointed to an area of the brain, the hypothalamus, as the location of the circadian pacemaker in mammals. More findings here.

Using marijuana in adolescence and early adulthood increases the likelihood of psychotic symptoms in later life, a new study suggests. The risk of developing these symptoms is “moderate”, say researchers, though is higher in people with a pre-disposition to psychosis.

A team led by Jim van Os of the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands followed 2437 people aged between 14 and 24. After four years, 21% of cannabis users had experienced psychotic symptoms compared with 15% of non-users. And the more a participant used cannabis, the more likely they were to develop symptoms.

Family history

The risk appears greatest for those with a predisposition to psychosis, as evidenced by mild signs of psychosis at the outset of the study.