Monday 31 December 2018

Top 10 Tips on How to Beat the After-Christmas Blues

a post by Suzanne Kane for the World of Psychology blog


“I will honor Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year.” –Charles Dickens

After all the wrapping paper, bows and decorations are put away, all the big holiday meals a thing of the past, and the thought of all the credit card bills coming due to pay for everything, if you’re feeling a bit low, you’re not alone. The after-Christmas blues affect everyone in different ways, but it does seem to be hard to escape.

It doesn’t have to linger, though, and here are my top 10 tips on how to beat the after-Christmas blues.

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Suzanne doesn’t manage to say anything new but 10 tips in one place is probably a good thing!!
It’s all very general though.



The science behind why our brains make us cooperate (or disagree)

a post by the Charles Foch Foundation for the Big Think blog

Studies from neuroscience highlight how the brain both helps with and prevents collaboration.
  • Neuroscientists identify the parts of the brain that affect our social decision-making.
  • Guilt has a large affect on social interactions, find the researchers.
  • To find ways to cooperate, people need to let go of fear and anxiety, suggest studies
Why do we decide to work on a project or pursue a goal with someone? Or why do we treat some people like there's no way we can find any common language? Neuroscience says that the human brain contains underlying causes to all human cooperation and social decision-making.

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OCD and Multiple Sclerosis

a post by Janet Singer for the World of Psychology blog



Obsessive-compulsive disorder is a complicated illness, and the cause, or causes, remain unknown. Research has shown that OCD is seen more frequently than usual in those with various physical disorders, such as muscular dystrophy. An October 2018 study published in Frontiers in Immunology highlights a connection between OCD and another disease — multiple sclerosis.

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There was no relationship between obesity and poverty — until high-fructose corn syrup

a post by Derek Beres for the Big Think blog

A new study out of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville traces a disturbing correlation.

  • Before 1990, there was no noticeable correlation between obesity and poverty.
  • Within a quarter-century, impoverished regions showed a massive uptick in obesity and type 1 diabetes.
  • Researchers chart the relationship between "food deserts" along with obesity levels.

In 1841, Orlando Jones patented alkali starch extraction, a process that separated corn starch from kernels in what is known as wet milling. One year later, Thomas Kingford opened the first commercial wet milling plant in the States. Corn, an agricultural product dating back at least 6,000 years to the Oaxaca region of Mexico, was a natural fit for this process given its abundance. It would take another two decades for chemists to realizes corn starch could be used as a sweetener.

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The future of Public Parks in England: policy tensions in funding, management and governance

an article by Lynn Crowe (Sheffield Hallam University, UK) published in People, Place and Policy Volume 12 Issue 2 (December 2018)

Abstract

This paper examines the challenges for effective public parks management caused by increasing pressures on local authority funding due to the UK government’s austerity measures.

Current policy discourse calls for innovative and entrepreneurial approaches to resolving these challenges. This can bring real benefits and creative approaches to parks management, not least in terms of community engagement and the recognition of the wider public services provided by parks.

But tensions can also develop due to increasing dependency on volunteers and third sector organisations, the commodification of spaces and the commercialisation of services, even privatisation. Such conflicts may potentially undermine democratic accountability and a sense of community ownership, and potentially threaten the effective management of parks generally.

The paper concludes that current UK government policy is moving away from a social welfare model of public parks provision, and that we need to fully understand the impacts of these changes in order to avoid inadvertently reinforcing this approach to public service provision.

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Why We Abandon Ourselves and How to Stop

a post by Sharon Martin for the blog Happily Imperfect brought to us via the World of Psychology blog

Why We Abandon Ourselves and How to Stop. Transform self-abandonment to self-love, trust, and self-worth.

Do you have a hard time trusting yourself? Do you hide parts of yourself – your feelings, beliefs, and ideas – in order to fit in or please others? Do you diminish or discount your feelings because you think they don’t really matter?

This is self-abandonment.

We abandon ourselves when we don’t value ourselves, when we don’t act in our own best interest, and when we don’t encourage and comfort ourselves.

Notice how many of these examples of self-abandonment ring true for you.


Sunday 30 December 2018

10 for today starts with the sexing of fossils (you always wanted to know how to do it) and ends with a piece about emojis

Cloacae, sex arms and penis bones: the tricky art of fossil sexing
via the Guardian by Elsa Panciroli
 Penis bones, bacula from various mammals. From collection by Ray Bandar.
Penis bones: bacula from various mammals. From collection by Ray Bandar. Photograph: KPA/Zuma/REX/Shutterstock
“It was a slit, like this,” Vinther held his cupped hands side by side and opened and closed them, like a puppet’s mouth. “That’s it. That’s what a dinosaur cloaca looked like.”
For those who don’t habituate the often explicit world of natural scientists, let me explain. A cloaca is the opening through which most vertebrate animals excrete their waste and have sex. It is an all-purpose exit and entry-point. Jakob Vinther from the University of Bristol, and his colleagues, are currently describing the only known dinosaur cloaca. It belongs to a spectacular Psittacosaurus specimen that preserves details of skin texture and even colouration. Their upcoming research will be the first ever scientific description of actual dino-privates.
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10 of the Best Poems about Fire
via Interesting Literature
Are these the greatest fire poems?
Fire, one of the four Aristotelian elements, is a useful symbol for poets: it can denote passion, purification, anger, destruction, and, of course, literal blazes and conflagrations. Here are ten of the finest poems about fire.
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All Good Magazines Go to Heaven
via Arts & Letters Daily: David Shaftel in The New York Times

The Hyman Archive in London, the world’s largest private magazine collection according to Guinness, contains more than 120,000 titles. Its founder, James Hyman, began collecting magazines as a teenager.CreditCreditLauren Fleishman for The New York Times
LONDON — When James Hyman was a scriptwriter at MTV Europe, in the 1990s, before the rise of the internet, there was a practical — as well as compulsive — reason he amassed an enormous collection of magazines. “If you’re interviewing David Bowie, you don’t want to be like, ‘O.K., mate, what’s your favorite color?’,” he said. “You want to go through all the magazines and be able to say, ‘Talk about when you did the Nazi salute at Paddington Station in 1976.’ You want to be like a lawyer when he preps his case.”
Whenever possible, Mr. Hyman tried to keep two copies of each magazine he acquired. One pristine copy was for his nascent magazine collection and another was for general circulation among his colleagues, marked with his name to ensure it found its way back to him. The magazines he used to research features on musicians and bands formed the early core of what became the Hyman Archive, which now contains approximately 160,000 magazines, most of which are not digitally archived or anywhere on the internet.
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Ursula K. Le Guin and the power of science fiction
via the New Statesman by Sanjana Varghese
Texts where dragons, magic and extraterrestrial life are used to explore issues of morality and the value of life aren’t an easy sell.
In one of Ursula Le Guin’s most popular short stories, “The Ones Who Walk away from Omelas”, she describes a city overflowing with joy, where citizens spend their lives without a care in the world. The catch, of course, is the cost. Their continued happiness depends on the solitary imprisonment of one child. “The door is locked, and nobody will come.”
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A Childhood of Laughter and Forgetting
via 3 Quarks Daily: Jana Prikryl at n+1
One day in Czechoslovakia, not long after I was born, during the gray decade that was the ’70s, my 6-year-old brother came home from school and shared what he’d learned: “Lenin was a kind person. He liked children.” Those words have acquired the force of a proverb in our family: we assure each other that Lenin liked children whenever one of us lets fly with a statement that seems dangerously optimistic. The following may fall into that category: Czechoslovakia before 1989, when the Communist regime fell, was not a bad place to be a child. For my parents, who spent a large part of their adulthoods in the country, it wasn’t all free health care and underground rock ‘n’ roll. As everyone knows by now, most people had to keep their opinions to themselves, do without traveling abroad, wait in line for bananas, accept overt and subtle limitations in their lives. As soon as kids started going to school, they too slipped under the arm of the state—witness my brother’s first-grade indoctrination. In general, though, a political system that thwarted the better instincts and ambitions of adults seems, perversely, to have been mostly congenial and comfortable for children.
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Writing the first draft of history in the Middle Ages
via the OUP blog by Michael Staunton

Map of Britain by Matthew Paris, circa 1250. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons
There are times when history seems to be moving at an unusual speed, when one piece of remarkable news can hardly be apprehended before it is overtaken by another even more extraordinary. Such was the case at the end of the twelfth century and the start of the thirteenth when England was ruled by the Angevin dynasty—the era of Henry II and Thomas Becket, Richard the Lionheart and Eleanor of Aquitaine, of rebellions at home and crusade abroad. That we are able to appreciate this as a time of major incident and development is due not only to the events themselves, but to the fact that it coincided with a burst of creativity in historical writing; in writing the first draft of history chroniclers preserved a monument to those times, but also a record of how learned, curious, and politically engaged people at the time saw the world, and tried to understand the changes that were happening around them.
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What Is the Physiological Basis of the Healing Touch?
via Big Think by Pavel Goldstein
Around 100 million adults in the United States are affected by chronic pain – pain that lasts for months or years on end. It is one of the country’s most underestimated health problems. The annual cost of managing pain is greater than that of heart disease, cancer and diabetes, and the cost to the economy through decreased productivity reaches hundreds of billions of dollars. Chronic pain’s unremitting presence can lead to a variety of mental-health issues, depression above all, which often intensifies pain. And our most common weapon against pain – prescription painkillers – generates its own pain, as the ongoing opioid crisis attests. But must we rely on pharmacology to stave off pain? Perhaps there is a more natural nostrum – partial and insufficient, but helpful nonetheless – closer to hand.
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The history of the Internet's first viral video
via Boing Boing by Clive Thompson
Wired has done a fun job of documenting the history of “badday.mpg" -- which became a passaround hit in 1997, making it probably the first viral video of the Internet.
Mind you, as the author Joe Veix notes, they didn't call it a "viral video" back then, because the very concept of "virality", as applied to culture, wasn't yet mainstream. Given how slow most people's Internet connections were back then – and, frankly, what a small percentage of the population was online – and given that there weren't any big social-networking tools, it's amazing the 5-meg video spread so wide.
Continue reading and watch that video

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May Sinclair’s Modernist Masterpiece: The Life and Death of Harriett Frean
via Interesting LIterature
In this week’s Dispatches from the Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle bangs the drum for an undervalued modernist novel
1922 was the annus mirabilis and high point of modernist literature. James Joyce’s Ulysses, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, Katherine Mansfield’s The Garden Party and Other Stories, and Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room were all published. On 18 May 1922, Joyce and Marcel Proust, two titans of the modernist novel in their respective languages, met at a disastrous dinner in Paris; the two writers spent the meal discussing their ailments, before eventually admitting that they hadn’t read each other’s work. Also present at this historic dinner party were Picasso and Stravinsky. 1922 was the point where a number of modernisms appeared to converge and collectively reach their zenith.
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Wright State student develops emoji software
via ResearchBuzz Firehose: Jim Hannah - for The Sidney Daily News
There is a smiley face and a frowny face. There are clapping hands, thumbs up and thumbs down. There are hearts and kissy lips. They are emojis – those wildly popular images that have become a language of their own among smartphone users.
And there are a lot of emojis – 2,766 to be exact. Wright State University researchers have created a new database that more precisely defines the meaning of each emoji and promises to improve communication between those who send and receive them. And the database is now being used by the largest group of computer scientists on the planet.
“Kno.e.sis is getting the attention of researchers in the computer science field and leaders in the computer science industry, such as Google and Microsoft, who are working on building algorithms that can understand and interpret emoji meanings,” said Amit Sheth, who oversees the research effort as LexisNexis Ohio Eminent Scholar and executive director of Wright State’s Ohio Center of Excellence in Knowledge-Enabled Computing, or Kno.e.sis.
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Saturday 29 December 2018

10 for today starts with musical instruments and ends, as seems usual, with poetry. Various interesting stuff along the way.

Royal College of Music launches new database of musical instruments
via ResearchBuzz Firehose: Freya Parr in the BBC Music Magazine
Royal College of Music launches new database of musical instruments
The Royal College of Music has launched a brand new database of musical instruments. MINIM-UK brings together over 20,000 instruments from more than 200 UK collections, making them digitally available to the public for the first time.
Britain’s musical heritage is documented by thousands of instruments. Many of these reside in remote local collections, or linger in museum storage where they are inaccessible to the public. However, these instruments often relate to important historical events, people and places. They all tell the story of the diversity and richness of national and regional music traditions in British homes, churches, and theatres, as well as on streets and battlefields. Cataloguers working on the MINIM project have travelled over 10,000 miles for 180 days to collect photographs, sound recordings and stories of instrument collections everywhere from Aberdeen to Bournemouth. All of the information they have gathered is now freely available online.
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Joni Mitchell's ferocious gift
via Arts & Letters Daily: Ivan Kreilkamp in Public Books

When Joni Mitchell first came to prominence, in the late-1960s “Summer of Love” era, she was often perceived as a kind of “poetess” or “nightingale” folk singer: a putatively pure origin of beautifully natural-seeming songs (“The Circle Game,” “Chelsea Morning, and “Both Sides, Now,” among many others).1 When the rapper Q-Tip declared (on Janet Jackson’s 1997 song “Got ’Til it’s Gone”) that “Joni Mitchell never lies,” he articulated a familiar understanding of the singer as, above all, truthful and authentic.
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Miscarriages of justice
via the OUP blog by Christopher Hilliard

Royal Courts of Justice, London by bortescristian. CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
Today we take it for granted that anyone convicted of a crime should be able to appeal to a higher court. However, this wasn’t always so. English lawyers traditionally set great store in the deterrent value of swift and final justice. Over the course of the nineteenth century, reformers pressed for the establishment of a court that could review sentencing and order retrials on points of law or new evidence. These advocates of change met with fierce resistance from the judiciary and much of the legal profession, and the cause of reform had little success until a spectacular miscarriage of justice came to light.
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How animators create realism by exaggerating movement
via Boing Boing by Andrea James

The Royal Ocean Film Society looks at the work of pioneering animator Richard Williams, whose work on Pink Panther and Roger Rabbit bucked animation trends and pushed for a more exaggerated style of movement.
Continue reading and watch the video

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Frozen in a swamp, fearsome ancient warrior's hidden tomb is revealed
via the Big Think blog by Robby Berman
Archaeologists find the largest frozen Scythian burial site ever found in Siberia.
The Uyuk River Valley in the Russian republic of Tuva has been known to archeologists for some time as the site of ancient princely tombs belonging to fearsome and tattooed horse-riding nomadic troublemakers referred to by historians as the Scythians. The area is known as the “Siberian Valley of Kings,” and in it are a group of burial structures, or “kurgans,” built on river terraces. Archeologists have named them Arzhan 1-5, and Chinge-Tei 1. Now there’s Tunnug 1, lying frozen and buried in a swamp along the Uyuk River. It’s the earliest Scythian kurgan ever found, and may also be the most undisturbed, thanks to being so well-hidden in this already-remote region, and through preservation from permafrost. Bern University archaeologist Gino Caspari recently published Tunnug 1’s discovery in Archaeological Research in Asia.
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Death, the doctor and the detective writer
via The National Archives Blog by Eleanor Johnson Ward
Recently, while researching documents to use as part of a document display, I chanced upon a file relating to a murder which had occurred in the 1930s, very close to my childhood home. Idle curiosity led me to order the document and have a look at it.
There among the neatly-typed police reports and statements I was greatly surprised to find a letter penned by one of the greats of twentieth century detective fiction – Dorothy L Sayers – who had found herself drawn into the case by a bizarre and unexpected telephone call.
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Milton's Morality
via Arts & Letters Daily: Micah Mattix in the Weekly Standard
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Satan Exulting Over Eve, one of William Blake's illustrations of Milton's Paradise Lost
In 2016, during the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death, the Bard was feted by dozens of books, hundreds of magazine and newspaper articles, performances of his plays, lectures, and a Shakespeare Day gala attended by Prince Charles himself. The London Tube map replaced the names of its stops with titles of Shakespeare’s plays. Google, of course, did a doodle.
In 2017, it was all Jane Austen—the 200th anniversary of the novelist’s death. Like Shakespeare the year before, she was everywhere, not least in the pages of the New York Times, which ran some 20 articles on her, musing about everything from what she might tell us about Brexit to why the alt-right loves her so much. The Atlantic stated unambiguously that “ Jane Austen Is Everything,” and it sure did feel that way. Her face now graces the UK’s new £10 note.
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Life is common in the universe, new analysis of meteorites suggests
via the Big Think blog by Philip Perry
Picture this: you’re playing basketball after school with your friends. Just as you’re about to make a three pointer, a streak of fire cuts across the sky and the object causing it lands just a few yards away, embedding itself in the blacktop. You rush over to the site of a small, smoldering crater, where a meteorite appears. And that meteorite is carrying biological material from another planet. This might sound like the opening scene to the next big sci-fi thriller. But it actually occurred in real life.
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Logic gates made purely of joints and levers
via Boing Boing by Clive Thompson

Here's a paper outlining a way to make logic gates out of nothing but links and rotary joints.
It's quite ingenious -- binary states are indicated by the lean of the mechanisms, so you do calculations via entirely mechanical means, with the links shifting back and forth on the joints. They've worked out how you'd build everything from AND gates to NAND, NOR, NOT, OR, XNOR and XOR.
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A Short Analysis of Emily Dickinson’s ‘A little Dog that wags his tail’
via Interesting Literature
The meaning of Dickinson’s great dog poem
‘A little Dog that wags his tail’ is not one of Emily Dickinson’s best-known poems, so a few words of analysis may help to clarify its meaning. It starts off sounding as though it’s going to be a dog poem – a sort of companion-piece to Dickinson’s celebrated poem about a cat – but then it quickly turns into a poem about something else entirely…
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Friday 28 December 2018

Ageism Is One Of The Most Widespread Forms Of Discrimination: Here’s Why

an article by Estelle Huchet (Campaign and Project Officer, AGE Platform Europe) for the Human Rights News, Views & Info blog



“Why do they take the train during rush hour” or “why do they do their grocery shopping on Saturdays?” These seem like insignificant questions, but they’re ones we hear all the time.

They also come with a big assumption – that older people should organise themselves differently, so that other busy and productive people can make more efficient use of their time.

Some people might even go so far as to argue that this should be an act of intergenerational solidarity from older people. They suggest that the older generation should leave space free for working-age people, so they instead can access services and places when they’re not working.

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Is there a motherhood penalty in retirement income in Europe? The role of lifecourse and institutional characteristics

an article by Katja Möhring (University of Mannheim, Germany) published in Ageing & Society Volume 38 Issue 12 (December 2018)

Abstract

This study examines the retirement income of women in Europe, focusing on the effect of motherhood.

Due to their more interrupted working careers compared to non-mothers and fathers, mothers are likely to accumulate fewer pension entitlements, and consequently, to receive lower incomes in later life. However, pension systems in Europe vary widely in the degree to which they compensate for care-related career interruptions by means of redistributive elements or pension care entitlements.

Therefore, care interruptions may matter for the retirement income of women in some countries, but may be rather irrelevant in others.

On the basis of life history data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARELIFE) for women aged between 60 and 75 years in 13 European countries, the interplay of individual lifecourse characteristics with institutional and structural factors is examined.

The results show that the lower retirement income of mothers is mainly a result of fewer years in employment and lower-status jobs throughout the lifecourse. The analysis of institutional factors reveals that pension care entitlements are not able to provide a compensation for care-related cutbacks in working life.

A generally redistributive design of the pension system including basic or targeted pension schemes, in contrast, appears as an effective measure to balance differences in employment participation over the lifecourse.

Full text (PDF 30pp)


China and the Third World are not “catching up” to the rich countries

an article by Samuel T. King (Victoria University,  Melbourne, Australia) published in Journal of Labor and Society Volume 21 Issue 4 (December 2018)

Abstract

Income data show there has been no convergence in prosperity or developmental levels between rich and poor states during the neoliberal period.

Analysis of per capita income for every country between 1980 and 2015 reveals the widespread idea of a catch‐up by the so‐called “emerging market” economies, is not supported. Almost all states (98.6% by population) are either rich or poor, with 85% defined as poor.

There has also been a widening of the income gap between these two poles. The rise of average Chinese income over the period to a level similar to other large relatively developed poor states such as Mexico and Brazil fits very much within this pattern of global polarization and does not challenge it. What appears to have “emerged” in China and some other regions is a new relative level of development among still poor states, not new rivals to the world's richest countries.


From 1990 to 2016, dementia has more than doubled

a post by Robby Berman for the Big Think blog


  • The incidence of dementia is rising at an alarming rat
  • While it's primarily diagnosed over age 50, it starts decades earlier
  • Modifying behavior to avoid a handful of known risk factors can help reduce the chance of getting dementia

A multi-university study lead by the University of Melbourne and the University of Washington has found that the number of people living with dementia worldwide shot up from 20.2 million in 1990 to 43.8 million in 2016. The researchers analyzed data from the Global Burden of Disease Study 2016, publishing their results in The Lancet Neurology.

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Hazel’s comment:
I would very much like to see the correlation between the increase in dementia and the increase in the number of people aged over 50 in the world population.
I do not have access to the research to discover whether this comparison was done!




Do You Have a Healthy Personality?

a post by Kathryn Drury Wagner for the World of Psychology blog

A new study helps define what a healthy personality looks like.

Am I normal? Do I have a good personality? We’ve all wondered these things.

A new study from the University of California, Davis, presents insights in what the most psychologically healthy personality traits are. To create the theory, researchers used what’s called the “Big Five” personality traits, based on years of psychological models, so let’s take a quick look at those:

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Why insecure people buy more things

a post by Matthew Davis for the Big Think blog

Money may not buy you love, but it won't break your heart either.
  • The link between a poor interpersonal life and materialism has been known for decades, but the exact reason for this connection hasn't been clear.
  • New research shows that two problematic attachment styles can push people towards seeking the love and affection they crave in material wealth.
  • The study shows both how broken-hearted people use materialism as a crutch and how this dependency can be reversed.
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Escape Isn't Self-Care: What We Really Need to Feel Whole and at Peace

a post by Ethan Somerman for the Tiny Buddha blog


“A pause gives you breathing space so listen to the whispers of the real you waiting to happen.” ~Tara Estacaan

You and I, we’re much too busy. We’re doing too much. We’re stressed. We’re overscheduled and overwhelmed. And we’re not doing enough self-care.

The good thing is there’s help. There are headlines, hacks, and half-baked gurus who promise to bring us to the less-stressed light. And there’s a vast supply of products to help too. Bath salts, wine, essential oils, yoga classes, massages, chocolate cake, books, life coach packages, etc. But sometimes I wonder, are all the articles and products about becoming less busy actually helpful? Does the practice of self-care actually take care of yourself?

For the last few weeks I’ve been dosing myself regularly with the things prescribed as self-care. Bath soaks. Chocolate cupcakes. Mantras. Spa music. I’m doing it and I feel like if I fake it till I make it, maybe I’ll soon feel like my life is better managed. I’ll feel less stressed. I’ll run to social media and post a bunch of cloying hashtags: #blessed #metime #nofilter.

I’m somewhat inclined to think that most of the snake oil being peddled as self-care is feel good fluff. It’s not bad. Baths are lovely. Chocolate cupcakes are really lovely. But, it’s not self-care in and of itself. It’s escapism that that has often been packaged and sold to us.

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Thursday 27 December 2018

This book explains how to tell when your country's going to hell and how to stop it

a post by Seamus Bellamy for the Boing Boing blog



You may have noticed of late that things in America are becoming less, well, American.

A cruel misogynist with dangerously racist beliefs is running the show. Nazis and bigots of all stripes no long fear giving voice to their hatred in public. The nation's journalists and the free flow of information are under attack. The government is working hard to defund the healthcare apparatus designed to protect the country's most vulnerable citizens. Piece by piece, the country's institutions, its heart and soul are being torn asunder, paving the way for something new. After reading Timothy Snyder's most recent book, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, I gotta tell you, if you're scared of the outcome of all of this, chances are you're likely not scared enough.

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Passive Aggressive Behavior in Relationships (and How to Change It)

a post by Dr. Tarra Bates-Duford for YourTango.com [via World of Psychology blog]

Not you, of course… maybe.

Do you have a passive aggressive person in your life? Even more importantly, do you think that passive aggressive person might be you?

Passive aggressive behavior can be seriously damaging to relationships, so if you’re acting this way, you should probably know about it.

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How the future of work may unfold: A corporate demand-side perspective

a colunm by Jacques Bughin for VIX: CEPR’s Policy Portal

Advances in artificial intelligence have led to fears of job losses.

This column uses a global survey covering more than 3,000 executives across 14 sectors and ten countries to examine the impact of AI on the demand side of the labour market. Ultimately, the effect on employment will depend on whether companies choose to use current forms of AI for innovation or pure automation, and whether they foresee a return from it.

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Associations between informant ratings of personality disorder traits, self‐reports of personality, and directly observed behavior

an article by Aleksandra Kaurin (Johannes-Gutenberg University, Germany) and Kyle S. Sauerberger and David C. Funder (University of California, Riverside, USA) published in Journal of Personality Volume 86 Issue 6 (December 2018)

Abstract

Objective
Diagnoses of personality disorders (PD) must rely on judgments of observers—either clinicians or acquaintances—because personality disorders are primarily defined in terms of maladaptive interpersonal behavior. Little is known, however, about how closely acquaintances' judgments of PD traits relate to self‐reports of theoretically relevant Big Five traits or directly observed behavioral outcomes in interpersonal situations. The present study examines associations between judgments of the 10 PD traits provided by close acquaintances, self‐reports of PD‐relevant Big Five personality traits, and observed interpersonal behaviors across three different three‐person laboratory interactions (i.e., unstructured chat, cooperative task, competitive game).

Method
The sample consisted of 256 undergraduate students (130 females; Mage = 19.83, SD = 1.25). Four unacquainted observers independently rated participants' behaviors from video recordings.

Results
In line with previous work, informant reports of PD traits demonstrate strong convergent validity with relevant self‐reported Big Five traits (as identified by Lynam & Widiger, 2001). Directly observed behavior is meaningfully associated with acquaintances' judgments and self‐reports of PD‐relevant traits, and the associations between these judgments and behavior are strongest for traits associated with histrionic and schizoid PD. Vector correlations between behavioral profiles associated with informant and self‐reports show that both assessments have similar behavioral correlates. Associations between PD trait ratings and behavior appeared to differ as a function of gender, with males showing more and stronger correlations.

Conclusions
Informants' ratings of PD traits are impressively accurate, converging both with self‐reports of relevant traits and directly observed interpersonal behavior. Therefore, a comprehensive understanding of PDs and associated traits can be augmented by information from multiple acquaintances who have the opportunity to observe how an individual interacts with others on a daily basis across diverse contexts.


Political rhetoric and attitudes toward nationhood: A time-comparative and cross-national analysis of 39 countries

an article by Markus Hadler (University of Graz, Austria) and AnaÑ—d Flesken (University of Bristol, UK) published in International Journal of Comparative Sociology Volume 59 Issue 5-6 (October-December 2018)

Abstract

Research on the relationship between nationhood and individual attitudes prominently focuses on whether – and how – the distinction between ethnic and civic conceptions may be drawn in mass public opinion.

We depart from this literature to explain the effects of party rhetoric on shaping more restrictive conceptions of nationhood, which previous research refers to as “ethnic,” “objective,” or “ascriptive” views on nationhood.

We do so in three parts:

  1. we examine whether political rhetoric, in terms of party manifestos, and individual-level conceptions of nationhood are linked;
  2. whether the relationship depends on the ideological alignment between political parties and respondents; and
  3. whether political rhetoric and individual predisposition act in combination.

We analyze three waves of survey data from the International Social Survey Program’s National Identity module from 1995, 2003 and 2013, covering 58,498 respondents from 39 countries.

We find that political rhetoric influences respondents’ conceptions of nationhood. This effect, however, is not as straightforward as initially expected. While the overall political climate does not have a direct effect at the societal level, it does affect the way in which a specific party’s political messages influence the attitudes of their individual recipients.

Once the political climate is more ethnocentric, conceptions of nationhood tend to be more restrictive across the board, even among respondents aligned with parties that do not emphasize ethnic conceptions.


Can Humor Alter Your Brain Chemistry?

a post by Nichole Force for the World of Psychology blog



Do you know why everyone isn’t in a mental hospital? Because there isn’t enough room. Philosophers have long observed a dearth of happiness among humanity. Henry David Thoreau said, “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation.” John Stuart Mill observed, “Unquestionably, it is possible to do without happiness; it is done involuntarily by nineteen-twentieths of mankind.”

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Wednesday 26 December 2018

6 Common Types of Boundary-Pushers: Do You Have One in Your Life?

a post by Dana Belletiere for the Common Humanity blog [via the World of Psychology blog]



Do you have trouble holding your boundaries?

Do you find it even more difficult after a conversation with your significant other, your mother, your best friend? You might be in a relationship with a boundary-pusher.

Here are six types of common boundary-pushers I’ve identified in my years as a therapist (and as a human). It’s likely you’ll recognize at least one in the list!

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Tuesday 25 December 2018

10 for today starts with something like a virus and ends with poetry. A variety of "stuff" in between.

Brain Cells Share Information With Virus-Like Capsules
via 3 Quarks Daily: Ed Yong in The Atlantic
Virus-like shells budding off from one neuron and moving to another.
Virus-like shells budding off from one neuron and moving to another. CHRIS MANFRE
When Jason Shepherd first saw the structures under a microscope, he thought they looked like viruses. The problem was: he wasn’t studying viruses.
Shepherd studies a gene called Arc which is active in neurons, and plays a vital role in the brain. A mouse that’s born without Arc can’t learn or form new long-term memories. If it finds some cheese in a maze, it will have completely forgotten the right route the next day. “They can’t seem to respond or adapt to changes in their environment,” says Shepherd, who works at the University of Utah, and has been studying Arc for years. “Arc is really key to transducing the information from those experiences into changes in the brain.”
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Max Carrados, the Blind Sherlock Holmes
via Interesting Literature
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle enjoys the once-popular but now largely forgotten detective stories of Ernest Bramah
The name Ernest Bramah may be largely forgotten now, but he created a detective whose popularity rivalled that of Sherlock Holmes (at least so it is rather improbably claimed). Bramah (1868-1942) created Max Carrados, a popular sleuth whose adventures appeared in The Strand magazine, which also published Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. But there is one important difference between Max Carrados and Sherlock Holmes: Carrados is blind.
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From prudish Victorians to arrows in the eye – 10 things from history everyone gets wrong
via the Guardian by Rebecca Rideal
Genghis Khan
Genghis Khan was not just a brutal warlord.
Photograph: Universal History Archive/UIG via Getty Images
You wait years for a historical theory to be debunked and then three come around at once. So far this week [in January 2018], we have been told that the mysterious pestilence that wiped out 15 million Aztecs between 1545 and 1550 was not smallpox or measles, but enteric fever, that the Black Death was spread by fleas and lice from humans as well as rat fleas (a theory that, in truth, has been around for a while), and that the supposed origins of the phrase “whipping boy” (where surrogates were punished in place of young royals) seem to be false. In the spirit of debunking myths, here is my (in no way exhaustive) list of 10 historical “mythconceptions”.
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The place of gin in Orwell's 1984
via Boing Boing by Rob Beschizza

One of the few permitted vices in Nineteen Eighty-Four is Victory Gin, which oils the outer party and offers suggestions of Englishness and party power: it's always served with clove bitters, implying that Oceania's boots are on the ground in Asia. Chemistry professor Shirley Lin wrote an interesting post about gin's place in Orwell's dystopia.
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Writing wrongs
via Arts & Letters Daily: Daisy Dunn in the TLS

Murasaki Shikibu, “Lady Murasaki”, by Tosa Mitsuoki (1617–91)
© SuperStock

Modigliani would be out drinking in Paris when a sudden desire came over him to remove his clothes, flex his naked body, and give a performance of Dante’s Divine Comedy. If it wasn’t Dante then it was something else – he could recite dozens of poems from memory, even while drunk, a skill that served him particularly well when he met the young Russian poet Anna Akhmatova in 1910 and determined to win her heart. She was on her honeymoon at the time but Modigliani was undeterred. They soon began an affair, absconding to the Jardin du Luxembourg to sit in the rain and intone the poetry of Verlaine. “We rejoiced that we both remembered the same work of his”, Akhmatova recalled later.
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10 Classic Wilfred Owen Poems Everyone Should Read
via Interesting Literature
The best poems of Wilfred Owen
Previously, we’ve selected ten of the best poems about the First World War; but of all the English poets to write about that conflict, one name towers above the rest: Wilfred Owen (1893-1918). Here’s our pick of Wilfred Owen’s ten best poems.
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Researchers Figure Out How Anesthesia Works
via the Big Think blog by Robby Berman
Propofol does more than knock a patient out — it blocks neural connections.
To fully understand how anesthesia works on human consciousness, we’d have to first understand exactly how consciousness works. So that’s a problem. The most frequently used anesthesia is propofol, which knocks out patents quickly and smoothly and prevents them from feeling pain during surgery. But exactly how propofol and other anesthetics do what they do has been unknown. “It is indeed a 180-year-old question, one of the unresolved mysteries in medicine, Bruno van Swinderen tells ScienceAlert van Swinderen is the senior author of a new study that suggests a possible solution: Propofol disrupts communication between neurons. It shuts off thinking while you sleep.
Continue reading [Note: the article starts with a picture of a canula in the back of someone's hand.]

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Strangest things: fossils reveal how fungus shaped life on Earth
via the Guardian by Susannah Lydon
Detail of a fungal mycelium
Detail of a fungal mycelium Photograph: Alamy
Fossil fungi from over 400m years ago have altered our understanding of early life on land and climate change over deep time
Much of the weirdness depicted in the TV show Stranger Things is distinctly fungal. The massive organic underground network, the floating spores, and even the rotting pumpkin fields all capture the “otherness” of fungi: neither plants nor animals, often bizarre-looking, and associated with decay. As weird as they may seem to us, fungi are integral to the story of the evolution of our landscapes and climate.
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The wild physics of superblack "bird of paradise" feathers
via Boing Boing by Clive Thompson

How are the feathers of Papua New Guinea's "birds of paradise" so freakishly black?
Because, man, they really are. Crows and blackbirds look, y'know, black-like ... but birds of paradise look like a hole has been punched in reality. It's like they've been coated in Vantablack, the freakily engineered substance you can coat on objects to make them superdark. The birds also often have striking colors, of course; but the parts of them that are black are inkily so.
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A Short Analysis of Anne Bradstreet’s ‘The Author to Her Book’
via Interesting Literature
A reading of a poem by America’s first poet
Anne Bradstreet (1612-1678) was the first person in America, male or female, to have a volume of poems published. She’d been born in England, but was among a group of early English settlers in Massachusetts in the 1630s. In 1650, a collection of her poems, The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung up in America, was published in England, bringing her fame and recognition. This volume was the first book of poems by an author living in America to be published. She continued to write poetry in the ensuing decades. In ‘The Author to Her Book’, one of Bradstreet’s most widely studied and analysed poems, she addresses The Tenth Muse.
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Monday 24 December 2018

Hitting the books: student loans and the public finances

a post by Matthew Whittaker for the Resolution Foundation blog

With everything that’s going on in British politics right now, it’s easy to forget that the government was celebrating some seriously good news just seven weeks ago. You might remember that the Chancellor got handed a £74 billion fiscal windfall at the Budget that allowed him to deliver the long-promised extra spending on the NHS without having to make any significant changes to his borrowing plans or push through any controversial tax rises. Indeed, he was even able to throw in an income tax cut and restore some previously-removed funds to the Universal Credit budget. Things have, of course, turned a little sour for the government since then. And they may just have got a little bit more difficult again as of today.

Usually it’s the Office for Budget Responsibility’s (OBR) sofa down the back of which extra money is found and lost; this time however it’s the moving of furniture at the Office for National Statistics (ONS) that matters. Specifically, it’s today’s conclusion of the ONS’ review of the accounting treatment of student loans that will be concerning Philip Hammond. It’s a technical exercise, and ultimately it won’t change the true cost to government of providing student loans. But, by changing the presentation of that cost, it could well have big implications for the Chancellor’s fiscal rules.

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There are links to some explanatory stuff as well as the clearly set out information in the blog post itself.
Even I understood it.


An East–West comparison of healthcare evaluations in Europe: Do institutions matter?

an article by Tamara Popic (Institute for Social and Political Sciences, University of Lisbon, Portugal) and Simone M. Schneider (Max Planck Institute for Social Law and Social Policy, Germany) published in Journal of European Social Policy Volume 28 Issue 5 (December 2018)

Abstract

Differences in welfare attitudes of Eastern and Western Europeans have often been explained in terms of legacies of communism.

In this article, we explore evaluations of healthcare systems across European countries and argue that East–West differences in these evaluations are explained by differences in the current institutional design of healthcare systems in the two regions.

The empirical analysis is based on the fourth round of the European Social Survey, applying multilevel and multilevel mediation analysis. Our results support the institutional explanation. Regional differences in healthcare evaluations are explained by institutional characteristics of the healthcare system, that is, lower financial resources, higher out-of-pocket payments, and lower supply of primary healthcare services in Eastern compared to Western European countries.

We conclude that specific aspects of the current institutional design of healthcare systems are crucial for understanding East–West differences in healthcare evaluations and encourage research to further explore the relevance of institutions for differences in welfare state attitudes across socio-political contexts.


Body Obsession: How My Weight Consumed My Life and Why I'm Done with Dieting

a post by Vania Nikolova for the Tiny Buddha blog


“You are not a mistake. You are not a problem to be solved. But you won’t discover this until you are willing to stop banging your head against the wall of shaming and caging and fearing yourself.” ~Geneen Roth

I’ve spent so much time on the dieting hamster wheel that I am almost too ashamed to admit it. Throughout my teen years I went from one crash diet to the next. When this proved more than unfruitful and disappointing, I changed strategies.

The next twelve years I spent searching for the “right lifestyle” for me, which would allow me to shrink to an acceptable size, be happy and healthy, and make peace with my body.

You can probably guess that I never found such a lifestyle. And I’m sure that it doesn’t exist for me. I’m still making peace with my body, but now I know this is internal work. No diet or size can bring me to this place.

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Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression - and the Unexpected Solutions by Johann Hari

From the New York Times bestselling author of Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs, a startling challenge to our thinking about depression and anxiety.

Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression - and the Unexpected Solutions

Award-winning journalist Johann Hari suffered from depression since he was a child and started taking antidepressants when he was a teenager. He was told—like his entire generation—that his problem was caused by a chemical imbalance in his brain. As an adult, trained in the social sciences, he began to investigate this question—and he learned that almost everything we have been told about depression and anxiety is wrong.

A friend recommended this on Goodreads. It might be worth looking in your local library for a copy.


Always tired? Your immune system may be overactive

a post by Stephen Johnson for the Big Think blog

A new study provides strong evidence that chronic fatigue syndrome is linked to abnormal reactions in the immune system.
  • Chronic fatigue syndrome affects millions of people worldwide, but scientists still aren't quite sure what causes it.
  • A new study tracked people suffering from Hepatitis C (HCV) as they underwent a treatment course.
  • The results showed that people with overactive immune responses developed chronic fatigue months following the treatment, and that the fatigue persisted even after their immune responses returned to normal.
A new study builds upon previous research showing that an overactive immune system might be a key cause of chronic fatigue syndrome.

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Keep Your Spiritual Practice Strong During Difficult Times

a post by Philip Goldberg for the World of Psychology blog



Your spiritual practice is more essential now than ever before.

Recently, someone told me she was so riled up about our current political climate that she can’t meditate. She’d grown increasingly irritated, angry, and despondent, and now, after the unspeakable violence in Pittsburgh, the pipe bombs that mercifully failed to go off, and the daily vitriol of the midterm election campaign, she says she is so agitated that she can’t settle down, and she feels so compelled to hear the latest news that she won’t take the time for a valued practice she’d been doing for more than twenty years.

“I can’t turn within with so much going on and so much at stake,” she said.

My response was, “You have it backwards. At times like this, you want to meditate more, not less.”

To those who appreciate the value of spiritual practice—not just meditation, but also devotional rituals, mindfulness exercises, yoga asanas, breathwork, prayer, contemplation, etc.—are not things to do only when you have time to spare, like hiking in the woods; not merely an occasional uplift like going to a museum; not just therapies to obtain when needed, like a massage. They’re all-purpose disciplines, ideally performed on a daily basis, with immediate value in the moment and transformative impact over time as their effects on the mind, body, and spirit accumulate.

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I’m so wound up at the moment that the last thing I can do is to meditate but I do understand what is being said. I managed yoga on Wednesday last but the effect wore off before I had been home more than half an hour.



Saturday 22 December 2018

10 for today starts with "men v. women" and wanders through a variety of subjects to end with Damascus steel knives

Scientists confirm what women always knew: men really are the weaker sex
via the Guardian by Kate Hodal
In Zanzibar, Tanzania, 88-year-old Ernestina Felix makes orange juice to sell to neighbours
In Zanzibar, Tanzania, 88-year-old Ernestina Felix makes orange juice to sell to neighbours. Photograph: Kate Holt/Age International
Women are more likely than men to survive in times of famine and epidemics, research has found.
While it has long been known that women have a higher life expectancy than men in general, analysis of historical records stretching back 250 years shows that women have, for example, outlived men on slave plantations in Trinidad, during famines in Sweden and through various measles outbreaks in Iceland.
Even when mortality was very high for both sexes, women still outlived men, on average, by six months to four years, according to the report (pdf) by Duke University in North Carolina.
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Does the Story of Adam and Eve Work Scientifically?
via the Big Think blog by Philip Perry
The Bible’s creation myth is famous the world over. It’s also helped shape Western civilization. According to Stephen Greenblatt’s book, The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve, "Over many centuries, the story has shaped the way we think about crime and punishment, moral responsibility, death, pain, work, leisure, companionship, marriage, gender, curiosity, sexuality, and our shared humanness." What’s called into question is not its influence or importance, but the literal idea encapsulated within one of humanity’s most famous origin stories.
Could two people literally populate the Earth? It’s highly unlikely. Why? One reason, such a scenario would’ve made it difficult for humans to become the dominant species on Earth. In 2013, a team of researchers determined the minimum size population required 60,000 years ago for humans leaving Africa to eventually become the top species. For worldwide expansion to be successful, 2,250 individuals would be needed to make the journey northward, into Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, while 10,000 were thought to remain back in Africa.
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How do you play this boardgame from 375 C.E.
via Boing Boing by David Pescovitz

This board game was found in Poprad, Slovakia inside a German prince's tomb that dates to 375 C.E. Now, researchers at Switzerland's Museum of Games are trying to figure out how to play it.
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Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the Poets: Criticism on Principle
via Interesting Literature
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle reads Dr Johnson’s witty and penetrating critical biographies of the great and good
By 1779, Samuel Johnson had attained that title by which he would become familiarly known: ‘Dr Johnson’. He wasn’t ‘doctored’ when he completed his most defining work (‘defining’ in every sense), the Dictionary of the English Language, in 1755. But when he came to write his Lives of the Poets, just five years before his death, he had become the era’s most celebrated man of letters, with an annual pension from the state to honour his services to scholarship and literature, and a reputation – and, indeed, a celebrity status – that continues to dwarf that of all other eighteenth-century writers. Who can picture Henry Fielding, or envisage Samuel Richardson? But Johnson, with his one-line pronouncements on everything from London to literature, death to dictionaries, remains remarkably alive to us.
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558m-year-old fossils identified as oldest known animal
via the Guardian by Anthea Lacchia
The cliffs in which the fossils were found, on the coast of the White Sea in Russia.
The cliffs in which the fossils were found, on the coast of the White Sea in Russia. Photograph: Ilya Bobrovskiy
A fossilised lifeform that existed 558m years ago has been identified as the oldest known animal, according to new research.
The findings confirm that animals existed at least 20m years before the so-called Cambrian explosion of animal life, which took place about 540m years ago and saw the emergence of modern-looking animals such as snails, bivalves and arthropods.
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Cells hack virus-like protein to communicate
via 3 Quarks Daily: Sara Reardon in Nature
SEM of a fruit fly (drosophila sp.)
A protein in the neurons of flies (Drosophila) is a surprising communicator.Credit: David Scharf/SPL.
The genomes of plants and animals are littered with the remains of viruses that integrated themselves into their DNA hundreds of millions of years ago. Most of these viral remnants are inactive, but the latest research suggests that some evolved into genes that let cells communicate. A pair of papers published in Cell on 11 January suggest that the protein encoded by one such gene uses its virus-like structure to shuttle information between cells: a new form of cellular communication that may be key to long-term memory formation and other neurological functions. Two research groups came across the phenomenon independently while studying extracellular vesicles — pieces of cell membranes that pinch off into bubbles and float away from the cells. These vesicles circulate throughout the body, but little is known about their function. The teams, led by neuroscientist Jason Shepherd at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City and cell biologist Vivian Budnik at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester, looked at mice and flies (Drosophila melanogaster), respectively.
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A brief history of how the rich world brutalized and looted Haiti, a country the US owes its very existence to
via Boing Boing by Cory Doctorow

When Donald Trump calls Haiti a "shithole country," he's dismissing one of the hardest-done-by countries in the history of the world – and moreover, a land whose sacrifices made the US itself possible.
Haiti (then called Saint-Domingue) was France's most brutal, most profitable colony, a tiny island that supplied 75% of the world's sugar, sending more wealth to France than the all 13 of the original US colonies combined.
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Animal of the Month: Ten things you didn't know about squirrels
via the OUP blog

Squirrel by Oldiefan. Public domain viaPixabay
Whether they’re gray or red, climbing a tree or scurrying on the ground, squirrels are one of the most ubiquitous mammals in the world. They are found in almost every habitat imaginable from tropical rainforests to deserts, avoiding only the most extreme conditions found in the high polar and arid desert regions. Different types of squirrels are indigenous to almost every continent including the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Africa. Humans introduced this bushy-tailed creature to Australia.
We’ve all seen squirrels scampering around placing seeds and nuts in hollowed out tree trunks and under roots to keep them hidden from the competition. As herbivores, these are their main sources of nutrition but many will eat small insects and even small vertebrates if there is a need for it. Their rodent-like teeth allow for a varied diet.
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10 of the Best Poems about Walking
via Interesting Literature
Classic poems about long walks
‘I like long walks,’ Noel Coward is said to have once quipped, ‘especially when they’re taken by people I dislike.’ The Romans had a phrase: Solvitur ambulando, meaning ‘it is solved by walking’. The Victorian poet Arthur Hugh Clough used it as the epigraph for his long epistolary poem, Amours de Voyage. There is a long-standing and deep-rooted relationship between walking and poetry, as these classic poems demonstrate.
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Watch a blacksmith create a gorgeous Damascus steel knife
via Boing Boing by Andrea James

Damascus steel is renowned for its use in ancient edge weapons and for its unusual mottle pattern. Blacksmith Dmitriy Shevchenko demonstrates his blade-making technique, since the manufacturing techniques of old were not meticulously recorded.
Continue reading and do watch the video.

Friday 21 December 2018

Don't let the cosy stable fool you – the Virgin Mary's story is brutal

an article by George Pitcher for the New Statesman

Virgin Mary

And so she makes her annual appearance on the nation’s Christmas cards and in a million crib sets. Mary, Mother of Heaven, the Blessed Virgin, demure, devoted, obedient. Invariably blue. It’s not just the churched who love her; the fiercely unchurched are more than willing to gather at the manger in December to pay their respects.

This should be a source of joy for those of us in the church business. And it is really. But allow me to play the Grinch for a moment to make a missing-the-point case – and, please, this is not the usual attack on the Black-Everyday shop-fest.

The point I want to make is a political one. Mary’s story is brutal and about as far as it is possible to be from a pretty Madonna in a cosy stable, with cute and clean farmyard animals (no dung). It is about oppression, displacement, refugees, genocide, anti-semitism, misogyny and abuse.

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Progesterone and plasma metabolites in women with and in those without premenstrual dysphoric disorder

an article by Arianna Di Florio (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA; Cardiff University, UK), Danny Alexander (Metabolon, Inc.,  Durham, North Carolina, USA) and Peter J. Schmidt and David R. Rubinow (NIMH, Bethesda, Maryland, USA) published in Depression & Anxiety Volume 35 Issue 12 (December 2018)

Abstract

Background
The molecular mechanisms underpinning the progesterone‐triggering mood symptoms in women with premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD) are unknown. Cell metabolism is a potential source of variability. Very little is known about the effect of progesterone sensitivity on the metabolome. In this study, we aimed to characterize the effects of progesterone on the global metabolic profile and explore the differences between women with PMDD and controls.

Methods
Plasma was obtained from 12 women with prospectively confirmed PMDD and 25 controls under two hormone conditions: (1) gonadal suppression induced by leuprolide acetate (3.75 mg IM monthly) and (2) add‐back phase with leuprolide and progesterone (200 mg twice daily by vaginal suppository). The global metabolic profile was obtained using liquid and gas chromatography followed by mass spectrometry. Differences between groups and time points were tested using repeated measures analysis of variance. The false discovery rate was calculated to account for multiple testing.

Results
Amino acids and their derivatives represented 78% (28/36) of the known compounds that were found in significantly lower plasma concentrations after progesterone administration than during gonadal suppression. The concentration of tyrosine was nominally significantly decreased after progesterone add‐back in controls, but not in cases (P = 0.02).

Conclusion
Plasma levels of some amino acids are decreased in response to progesterone. Albeit preliminary, evidence further suggests that progesterone has a different effect on the metabolic profiles of women with PMDD compared to controls. Further research is needed to replicate our findings in a larger sample and to identify the unknown compounds, especially those differentially expressed.


What's worse than drug addiction? The cruelty of drug treatments.

a post by Maia Szalavitz for the Big Think blog

Drug treatment centers pose potential threats to drug addicts.
  • Many drug treatment centers are run as for-profit institutions. Making a buck off of treating people's addictions often runs counter to actually helping addicts.
  • Some Chinese drug centers are experimenting with removing an addict's nucleus accumbens, which saps them of their ability to feel pleasure.
  • The solution to drug addiction may be creating better drugs to use, says author and journalist Maia Szalavitz.
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and you will discover that the post is primarily an advert for a book. I think I might try it -- maybe, just may be, I will get some tip on living with an alcoholic without murder or suicide being the end,



Engaging mental health online: Insights from beyondblue’s forum influencers

an article by Anthony McCosker (Swinburne University of Technology, Australia) published in New Media & Society Volume 20 Issue 12 (December 2018)

Abstract

Digital platforms offer an important means for improving the reach, scale and accessibility of community-based support for those dealing with mental health issues. They enable new forms of health participation.

A research gap remains in understanding the role of peer mentors in building effective digital environments for mental health support.

This article presents part of a larger study centred on the digital interventions of prominent mental health organisation beyondblue.

It combines qualitative content analysis and interviews with prominent peer mentors. The analysis presents insights into how some peer mentors are able to act as mental health influencers and examines their impact and role in activating supportive mental health publics.

Effective mental health influencers build demonstrable non-professional expertise and authority and, through affective practices, play an active role in framing and re-framing mental health and recovery, stimulating cohesion-generating cycles of impact feedback among forum participants.


9 Powerful Ways to Care for Your Emotional Health

a post by Margarita Tartakovsky for the World of Psychology blog



We tend to dismiss our emotional health. We certainly don’t talk about it around the dinner table, at the office, or really anywhere. If we talk about any kind of health, we prefer to chat about our physical wellness: what we’re eating, and not eating, what kind of exercise we’re trying, and not trying, how much we’re sleeping or not sleeping.

One reason we do this is because talking about our physical health offers external validation from others, said Marline Francois-Madden, LCSW, a psychotherapist and owner of Hearts Empowerment Counseling Center in Montclair, New Jersey.

Talking about our emotional health, however, feels too vulnerable, she said. And this is understandable. Our pain feels fresh, tender, private. Often, we don’t even admit we’re hurting to ourselves.

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Thursday 20 December 2018

Why victims of childhood adversity have a harder time achieving their goals

a post by Mike Colagrossi for the Big Think blog

Childhood trauma can affect a child's brain in dramatic ways for the rest of their lives.

  • New findings suggest that childhood adversity may be directly linked to depression.
  • Adverse childhood experiences include a wide range of stressful or traumatic events brought upon by abuse and neglect.
  • Important landmark studies from the '90s suggest that these experiences are common and lead to a number of health, social and behavioral problems throughout life.

New research published in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience in October suggests that there is a connection between childhood adversity and depression.

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A burden to the welfare state? Expectations of non-EU migrants on welfare support

an article by Marco Albertini and Michela Semprebon (University of Bologna, Italy) published in Journal of European Social Policy Volume 28 Issue 5 (December 2018)

Abstract

In recent decades European institutions have been promoting the broadening of immigrants’ social rights, while at national levels political battles have been led around the definition of the legitimate community of welfare receivers.

Immigrants have been often depicted as undeserving individuals threatening welfare state sustainability, although existing research does not fully support this view. At the same time, political and academic debates on immigrants and welfare have diverted attention away from immigrants themselves, failing to address their experiences and welfare support expectations.

This article aims to contribute to filling this gap by addressing to what extent non-European immigrants expect the Italian welfare state to provide support for their family. The empirical evidence builds on a survey administered, between 2014 and 2015, to about 350 immigrants from Maghreb, China and the Philippines residing in the Emilia-Romagna region.

By means of a mixed-method comprising qualitative and quantitative analyses, the article shows that only a minority of respondents, particularly Maghrebis, have some expectations in terms of public welfare support. It suggests that such support is almost exclusively expected to cope with the needs of the young-family generation, while the needs of the elderly members are assumed to be met through relatives’ informal support.

Moreover, the article highlights marked differences in expectations across specific groups and points to explicatory variables such as country of origin, gender, educational level, age on arrival and length of stay. It further reflects on immigrants’ degree of knowledge of the welfare state functioning and specifies the rationales, based on perceived rights or meritocratic criteria, explaining expectations for support.


Alcohol use and personality change in middle and older adulthood: Findings from the Health and Retirement Study

an article by Martina Luchetti,  Antonio Terracciano and Angelina R. Sutin (Florida State University College of Medicine, USA) and Yannick Stephan (EuroMov, University of Montpellier, France) published in Journal of Personality Volume 86 Issue 6 (December 2018)

Abstract

Objective
Personality is known to predict alcohol consumption, but how alcohol use is related to personality change is less clear, especially at older ages. The present study examined the effects of level of alcohol consumption and history of dependence on change in the Five‐Factor Model personality traits in a national cohort of Americans aged over 50.

Method
Over 10,000 adults who participated in 2006–2008 waves of the Health and Retirement Study reported on personality and alcohol use and were followed over 4 years.

Results
Latent difference score models indicated decreases in Extraversion to be attenuated for individuals categorized as light‐to‐moderate drinkers at baseline, whereas decreases in Conscientiousness were accentuated by having experienced alcohol dependence symptoms. Moreover, personality difference scores correlated with changes in the amount of alcohol consumed at follow‐up.

Conclusions
The findings suggest that patterns of alcohol consumption are associated with changes in personality across the second half of the life span.


Demography, unemployment, and automation: Challenges in creating (decent) jobs until 2030

a column by David Bloom, Mathew McKenna and Klaus Prettner for VOX: CEPR’s Policy Portal

Future global employment needs are of central importance for policymakers.

This column estimates that, based on growth in the working-age population, labour force participation rates, and unemployment, about three quarters of a billion jobs will need to be created in 2010–2030.

It also discusses how automation will add to the number of jobs required.


Grief Isn't Something You Live Through, It's Something You Live With

a post by Ellie Batchiyska for the Tiny Buddha blog


“Obstacles do not block the path, they are the path.” ~Zen proverb

I thought the concept of a “cold sweat” was unreal and paradoxical until the evening of August 27, 2014. That was my first cold sweat. My first of a lot of things.

My heart jack-hammered in my chest.

I heard my pulse in my ears.

I gasped for air on my dorm room floor in New York, while my mom tried to calm me down on the other end of the phone in Los Angeles.

“It’s just a panic attack, sweetie. Just breathe deep.”

No, no, no, I thought. Panic couldn’t possibly evoke this kind of physiological response. My arm hurt, my chest hurt. Was it possible to have a heart attack at age nineteen?

I didn’t sleep for days after that. I was afraid I wouldn’t wake up again.

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I wish I had heard about living with it rather than through it when *my* father was killed in a road traffic accident. It has taken me a very long time to get to the point where I can accept that the feeling of loss will be with me until I die but that I *can* live with it.


The ‘Problem’ with the Employment Tribunal System: Reform, Rhetoric and Realities for the Clients of Citizens’ Advice Bureaux

an article by Eleanor Kirk (University of Strathclyde, UK) published in Work, Employment and Society Volume 32 Issue 6 (December 2018)

Abstract

Successive reforms of the Employment Tribunal System, based upon the interlinked assumptions that there are too many claims and that it is too easy for people with nothing to lose to lodge deliberately vexatious claims in the hope of a large payout, have made it progressively more difficult to bring claims against employers.

This article challenges these persistent, though unsubstantiated assumptions, used to justify weakening employment rights enforcement and further deregulate the labour market.

It draws upon the experiences of 158 clients of Citizens’ Advice Bureaux, who were tracked over the course of their disputes, as they sought to resolve work-related grievances.

Among this group, it can be argued that rather than too many, too few claims go forward, discouraged by the real and imagined costs of making a claim. Financial compensation is usually the only (less than satisfactory) remedy offered.


The Difference Between Narcissism & Narcissistic Personality Disorder

a post by John M. Grohol for the World of Psychology blog

The Difference Between Narcissism & Narcissistic Personality Disorder

People throw around the term “narcissism” all the time. And that’s not surprising, in an age where our technology (e.g., social networks and social media) reinforce narcissistic behaviors through social comparisons.

What can get confusing is understanding the difference between a personality trait – narcissism – and a full-blown personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder. Let’s dive into understand the similarities and differences between these two related psychological concepts.

Some narcissism – called healthy or normal narcissism – can be perfectly normal and good in a person’s life.

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Wednesday 19 December 2018

Credit booms and information depletion

a column by Vladimir Asriyan, Luc Laeven and Alberto Martin for VIX: CEPR’s Policy Portal

Credit booms are perceived to fuel resource allocation and often end in crises that are followed by protracted periods of low growth.

This column investigates the macroeconomic effects of credit booms using a new theory of information production. The theory predicts that when the economy enters a collateral boom, the price of collateral rises and lenders rely more on collateralisation and less on information-producing screening of entrepreneurs.

Empirical evidence based on US data confirms the model’s predictions.

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How to Stop Rescuing Other People as a Way to Feel Good About Yourself

a post by Andrew Cain for the Tiny Buddha blog


“If your compassion does not include yourself, it is incomplete.” ~Jack Kornfield

It seemed like the natural thing to do.

A middle-aged man had dropped his keys near me. I jumped up, hopped over, picked the keys up, and gave them back to him.

Not so unusual, except I had a badly twisted ankle after slipping on a walking holiday and needed to rest it while the pain and swelling went down. I struggled back to my seat, wincing.

It was a small incident but symbolic of my rescuing, codependent instinctive habits at the time. If something needed doing, I would be the one to do it. If there were a problem around, I’d jump to fix it.

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Guilty as charged!