skip to main |
skip to sidebar
Socioeconomic Stresses Could Lower Life ExpectancySocioeconomic status can affect life expectancy, a Virginia Commonwealth University researcher said in a study published.
People who live in areas with lower household incomes are much more likely to die because of their personal and household characteristics and their community surroundings, according to Steven H. Woolf, M.D., M.P.H., director of the VCU Center on Human Needs, professor in the Department of Family Medicine and lead author of the study.
"It's tempting to assume that our findings are based on how much money people make," Woolf said. "But areas with high household incomes also tend to have better schools, a different racial and social mix and healthier community conditions."
In the study to be published in the April issue of the American Journal of Public Health and available online today, Woolf and his colleagues analyzed census data and vital statistics from Virginia counties and cities between 1990 and 2006. They demonstrated that one out of four deaths would have been averted if the mortality rates of Virginia's five most affluent counties and cities had existed statewide. In some of the most disadvantaged areas of the state, nearly half of the deaths would have been averted.
"Virginia is an excellent place to explore the connection between health and median household income. There are communities in Northern Virginia with some of the highest incomes in the nation and there are areas of the state, such as the Appalachian Southwest, Southside, the Middle Peninsula and the Eastern Shore, with high poverty and low high school graduation rates," Woolf said.
Regions of the state with deep poverty, large minority populations and lower educational achievement levels had high mortality rates in comparison with high household incomes.
"These findings are especially timely during the current recession. Policymakers typically think of the economy, jobs and education as separate issues from health care reform, but they're deeply connected," Woolf said. "Social care is health policy, probably saving more lives than anything done in health care."
About VCU and the VCU Medical Center: Virginia Commonwealth University is a major, urban public research university with national and international rankings in sponsored research. Located on two downtown campuses in Richmond, VCU enrolls more than 32,000 students in 211 certificate and degree programs in the arts, sciences and humanities. Sixty-nine of the programs are unique in Virginia, many of them crossing the disciplines of VCU's 13 schools and one college. MCV Hospitals and the health sciences schools of Virginia Commonwealth University compose the VCU Medical Center, one of the nation's leading academic medical centers.
Source: Virginia Commonwealth University
Mood Influences Search for Novelty | Psych Central NewsA new report from an international team of social and cognitive psychologists clarifies how mood influences our actions for exploring new avenues or remaining content with accustomed surroundings.
Researchers discovered a negative mood is associated with sticking to the familiar. Happiness, on the other hand, makes uniqueness attractive. The scientists say this is the first time the effect has been experimentally demonstrated in humans.
The study, by University of California, San Diego psychology professor Piotr Winkielman and Marieke de Vries, currently affiliated with the Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands, is published online in the journal Psychological Science.
The findings, Winkielman said, not only contribute to understanding basic human psychology but also have numerous applications, including parenting and other interpersonal relationships and even in many of the “persuasion professions.”
In business, in marketing and advertising and in political campaigns, people would be well-advised to take note of the research. When companies introduce novel products, for example, they may want to do so in settings that encourage a happy, playful mood. A surgeon’s office, meanwhile, Winkielman said, which people visit rarely and in stressful circumstances, should probably stay away from edgy décor, opting instead for the comfy and familiar.
“The research helps us understand, too,” said Winkielman, “why incumbent politicians seeking re-election fuel a negative, apprehensive mood and then offer up such tried-and-true symbols as the flag and apple pie.”
It is a classic psychological observation that people prefer familiar stimuli, described 100 years ago by British psychologist Edward Titchener as the “warm glow of familiarity.” In a century of research since, many studies have supported the notion and shown that even simple repetition will enhance liking of an object.
The current researchers wondered, however: Is familiarity always pleasant or warm? Perhaps, they reasoned, that varies with an individual’s mood.
“We thought the value of familiarity would depend on the context,” de Vries said. “Familiarity signals safety, which is pleasant in an unsafe or stressful context but might actually get boring when all is going fine.”
They examined the idea by presenting participants with random dot patterns resembling constellations in the sky and made these familiar through exposure. The researchers put some of the participants in a good mood and others in a bad mood – by asking them to recall joyous or sad events in their lives. They then maintained the mood by playing appropriate music during the remainder of the test.
Finally, they measured participants’ emotional and memory responses to the dot patterns with ratings and, critically, with physiological measures (skin conductors to assess sweat and facial electrodes to detect incipient frowns and smiles).
As predicted, saddened participants showed the classic preference for the familiar, even smiling at the sight of familiar patterns.
A happy mood, however, eliminated the preference.
“When you’re happy,” Winkielman said, “known things, familiar things lose their appeal. Novelty, on the other hand, becomes more attractive.”
Winkielman noted, too, that the physiological measures of the responses are particularly telling: “These are immediate bodily reactions – not just talk – we’re seeing genuine, if mild, emotional response.”
The study follows up on Winkielman’s earlier, related work on “beauty in averages” and on embodied emotion.
Source: University of California, San Diego
CBC News - Technology & Science - Bright, clean rooms promote good behaviourThe smell of citrus promotes generosity, while dim rooms increase dishonesty and selfish behaviour, psychology researchers suggest in recent studies.
Chen-Bo Zhong, a psychologist at the University of Toronto, and his colleagues in the U.S. have conducted a series of small experiments designed to test how changes in an environment — differences in lighting or smell — can affect human behaviour.
In one experiment, participants were given $10 in change and 20 mathematical problems, and sent into either a room brightly lit with florescent lights or one with a third as many lights on.
The subjects were asked to complete as many of the problems as they could in five minutes and to keep 50 cents for each problem they solved. They were asked to put the rest of the change in an envelope when they were done.
Typically, the participants were able to complete seven problems in the time allowed, but since the test was anonymous, they could keep as much of the money as they wanted without getting caught.
While the tests had no names or numbers on them, the problems themselves revealed whether the participant had been in a brightly lit room or a dim one.
Dark offers anonymity
"What we found was that participants randomly assigned to the dimmer room … were more likely to lie or cheat compared with participants in the well-lit room," Zhong said.
Zhong said that the rooms with the dim lighting created a sense of anonymity, what he calls illusory anonymity.
"The idea is that when we experience darkness, we disregard what other people may still be able to see or hear or observe," he said. "The illusory sense of anonymity can license unethical behaviour."
In interviews with the participants after the experiments about what happened and what determined their behaviour, few of the participants even noticed the difference in lighting.
In a similar study, participants were asked to wear either a pair of sunglasses or a pair of glasses with clear lenses.
"What we found was that wearing a pair of sunglasses led to greater self-interested behaviour," said Zhong.
Zhong said the sunglasses didn't make the participants anonymous or less visible, of course, but still had an effect on their behaviour, making them less likely to see themselves from another person's perspective.
"We perceive ourselves to be anonymous even if the darkness only applies to ourselves, as in the case where we wear a pair of sunglasses or are in a room that is dim but not exactly dark," Zhong said.
Zhong likened the sunglasses experiment to toddlers playing peek-a-boo.
"This is almost like kids playing a hide-and-seek game who will close their eyes and think that other people won't be able to see them," he said.
Scents affect ethics
The subconscious changes in behaviour weren't limited to visual changes. Zhong conducted similar experiments that used the sense of smell.
Participants were randomly assigned to rooms, some sprayed with citrus-scented window cleaner. In some of the experiments, the participants played a game of trust with an anonymous partner, again involving money.
The way the game typically works is that one partner is given a sum of money and told to put some or all of the money in an envelope. He is told his anonymous partner will receive triple that amount and will give some of the money back. Of course, the second partner could just keep all the money.
In Zhong's experiment, the participants played the role of the second partner and were all told their partner had given them the full mount, $4, which was then tripled to $12.
The participants were free to anonymously return some or none of the money.
"What we found was that in the citrus-scented room, people were more likely to engage in good behaviours," Zhong said. "They were more likely to honour the trust that other people displayed."
Real-world questions
Zhong said that it would be interesting to see how the findings would translate to real-world situations.
"Based on the experiments we have conducted and the findings we've found, I think it's reasonable to speculate that people in a real environment, where they can smell these scents that are associated with purity and cleanliness, also may tend to be behave more ethically or socially," he said.
In another paper published prior to Zhong's, researchers found people eating cookies in a citrus scented room were less likely to leave crumbs behind than those in an unscented room.
Zhong said he wanted to take that finding to the next level, to explore the "metaphorical and psychological connections between physical cleanliness and moral purity."
English is full of metaphors relating cleanliness to moral behaviour, from "clean conscience" to "money laundering" to "dirty jokes."
In previous research, Zhong and his colleagues explored the connection between unethical behaviour and physical cleanliness, something Zhong called the Lady Macbeth effect, after the Shakespeare character who obsessively washed her hands because of her role in the murder of the king ("Out, damn spot. Out, I say!").
"We asked people to recall unethical behaviours they have done, like lying to parents or betraying their friends," Zhong said. Another group was asked about their prior ethical acts.
The participants were then asked to rate items on a list of products by how much they wanted them. The participants who were asked about their unethical behaviour were more likely than the other group to rate cleaning products higher than household products that have nothing to do with cleaning, such as CDs.
Zhong said these findings suggest that abstract concepts, such as morality, or even time, are connected to physical experience. We think "back" to the past and look "forward" to the future, for example.
"Human perception or cognition are not as abstract as we typically assume," Zhong said. "We don't simply store information in our brain. Instead, our cognition is much richer than that. For every abstract construct we associate physiological experience."
The metaphorical connections could even transcend language barriers, although Zhong said there hasn't been research to see if the behaviour is consistent across cultures.
"In Chinese, we refer to a pair of dirty hands, for example, to refer to someone who steals."
