science wire

Thrill of victory: Success among many feels better
ANN ARBOR-Success feels good, but it is better when people win in big groups-even if the chance of success is the same, a new University of Michigan report indicates.

Grandparents gather for support at Waisman Center
Angie and Bob Tramburg (pictured, with their grandson, who is on the autism spectrum) help lead a group of grandparents that support each other in coping with the effects of autism and developmental disabilities.

Ties to culture may protect Latino teens from violence
ANN ARBOR-Latino kids who spend unstructured leisure time with friends, participate in certain nonschool activities and have part-time jobs may encounter high levels of violence in their communities.

How similar are the gestures of apes and human infants? More than you might suspect
Psychologists who analyzed video of a female chimpanzee, a female bonobo and a female human infant in a study to compare different types of gestures at comparable stages of communicative development found remarkable similarities among the three species. This is the first time such data have been used to compare the development of gestures across species.

GHLI Fellows to aid in improving health care abroad this summer
Four Yale students have been selected as Global Health Leadership Institute (GHLI) Fellows, and will work with country delegations attending the GHLI Conference, to be held June 9-14 at the University.

Depression raises diabetics’ risk of severe low blood sugar episodes
Patients with diabetes who are depressed are much more likely to develop episodes of dangerously low blood sugars, or hypoglycemia, than are those who are not depressed, a new study has found. These episodes typically occur when the drugs used to control high blood sugars drive down blood sugar levels too low.

U-M’s ISR awards $250,000 to young, innovative researchers
ANN ARBOR-The University of Michigan Institute for Social Research has awarded more than $250,000 in fellowships to 54 graduate students and researchers in its ongoing effort to support young scholars and innovative social science research.

Married Penn State Guggenheim Fellows a rarity
Guggenheim Fellows Judith Kroll and David Rosenbaum. The married recipients will use their fellowships to do research at UCLA in Los Angeles.

Stanford center highlights the benefits of compassionate workplaces
The Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education at Stanford brought together leaders in business and academia to talk about the role of compassion in business.

Why a wide-eyed expression of fear can be a good thing
Wide-eyed expressions that typically signal fear seem to enlarge our visual field making it easier to spot threats at the same time they enhance the ability of others to locate the source of danger, according to new research from the University of Toronto.

Salovey and six Yale faculty join Springsteen as new AAAS members
Seven Yale faculty members, including President-elect Peter Salovey, have been elected as members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, one of the nation's most prestigious honorary societies.

Research News Brief
A digest of new and noteworthy research to complement UC Berkeley press releases. A complete archive of all campus research news is available online. Berkeley - New research by neuroscientists at UC Berkeley, suggests that the human brain is not detail-oriented, but opts for the big picture when it comes to hearing.

Psychology Professor Awarded Grant to Study Genetic Root of Psychotherapy Response for Depression
AUSTIN, Texas — Depression, anxiety and many other crippling psychiatric disorders can be treated effectively with psychotherapy.

Book: Brain Imaging: What it Can (and Cannot) Tell Us About Consciousness
YaleNews features works recently or soon to be published by members of the University community. Descriptions are based on material provided by the publishers. Authors of new books may forward publishers' book descriptions to us by email.

Public support can influence soldiers’ mental health: study
Soldiers fighting in unpopular wars may have higher risk of developing post-traumatic stress disorder when they come home.

Wendy Silverman is appointed to the Alfred A. Messer Professorship
Wendy K. Silverman, newly named as the inaugural Alfred A. Messer Professor of Child Psychiatry, focuses her research on child and adolescent anxiety disorders.

Two Yale professors honored for ’a lifetime of significant contributions’ to psychology
Susan Nolen-Hoeksema and Allan R. Wagner will be honored with lifetime achievement awards by the Association for Psychological Science (APS).

Family dinners nourish mental health in adolescents
Regular family suppers contribute to good mental health in adolescents, according to a study co-authored by McGill professor Frank Elgar, Institute for Health and Social Policy. Family meal times are a measurable signature of social exchanges in the home that benefit adolescents' well-being - regardless of whether or not they feel they can easily talk to their parents.

Botín Foundation partners with Yale to examine creativity, emotion
Yale University has announced an agreement with the Botín Foundation to advance research in the area of emotional intelligence.

Violence returns to the streets of Northern Ireland
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. - In 1998, the Real Irish Republican Army, an IRA splinter group, detonated a car bomb in a shopping area of Omagh, Northern Ireland, that killed 29 people.

Psychology professor Ed Diener receives lifetime achievement award

Save your teens, save your marriage: Stanford’s brief interventions
Stanford Report, February 22, 2013 Short psychological interventions can change preconceptions, altering how people interact with their world.

Males’ superior spatial ability likely is not an evolutionary adaptation
CHAMPAIGN, lll. - Males and females differ in a lot of traits (besides the obvious ones) and some evolutionary psychologists have proposed hypotheses to explain why. Some argue, for example, that males' slight, but significant, superiority in spatial navigation over females - a phenomenon demonstrated repeatedly in many species, including humans - is probably “adaptive,” meaning that over the course of evolutionary history the trait gave males an advantage that led them to have more offspring than their peers.

Preference to save the best for last fades with age
Will you save the best chocolate in the box until last? Do you want the good news first or the bad? Your preferences may depend on your age, reports a Cornell study published in Psychology and Aging (Vol.

Even toddlers tell untruths
Why and when young children lie are just some of the insights into human development found in new studies from U of T's Kang Lee - research that's grabbing headlines around the world. In January, the University Distinguished Professor with the University of Toronto's Eric Jackman Institute of Child Study published a major study on lying, in Developmental Psychology which sparked widespread attention.

Hazleton professor studies how relationships make us better
Assistant professor of communication arts and sciences Daniel Hans Mansson spoke Swedish into his office computer at Penn State Hazleton.

’We’ll always have Paris’: To feel happier, talk about experiences, not things
To get the biggest psychological bang for the buck, talk about your experiences, whether a hike in the woods or a trip to Rome, rather than your things, according to a new Cornell study.

Kathleen Carroll appointed the Albert E. Kent Professor of Psychiatry
Kathleen M. Carroll, recently named as the Albert E. Kent Professor of Psychiatry, focuses her research on methods to improve the effectiveness of addiction treatment.

To motivate many Americans, think ’me’ before ’we,’ say Stanford psychologists
Stanford Report, January 28, 2013 Researchers find that if you want to motivate many Americans to think and act interdependently, it's best to emphasize their independence. If you hear that getting a flu shot is the responsible thing to do to keep others from getting sick, will you get it? And if you're told recycling is better for the planet and humanity, will you do it? It turns out that for many Americans, the answer is no.

Do the Right Thing
"Liar, liar, pants on fire!" Name-calling is not nice. And resorting to schoolyard taunts is surely not the way to make the world a better place. But a little bit of ego sting may not be such a bad thing. Reminding people of the link between behaving unethically and being an unethical person keeps people honest, suggests research led by UC San Diego's Christopher Bryan, assistant professor of psychology in the Division of Social Sciences.

Poor sleep can leave romantic partners feeling unappreciated
Spouses and other romantic partners often complain about feeling unappreciated, and a new study from UC Berkeley suggests poor sleep may play a hidden role. A study looking into how sleep habits impact gratitude found that sleep deprivation can leave couples "too tired to say thanks" and can make one or the other partner feel taken for granted.

Book: Why Smile?: The Science Behind Facial Expressions
YaleNews features works recently or soon to be published by members of the University community. Descriptions are based on material provided by the publishers.

Don't read my lips! Body language trumps the face for conveying intense emotions
Be it triumph or crushing defeat, exhilaration or agony, body language more accurately conveys intense emotions, according to recent research that challenges the predominance of facial expressions as an indicator of how a person feels. Princeton University researchers report that facial expressions can be ambiguous and subjective when viewed independently.

Facebook Beats Books - and Faces - in Memory Test
If this were a Facebook post, you would remember it - better than a stranger's face or a line from a published book.

Math explains a chef’s intuition
This is an excerpt from an article by Carolyn Y. Johnson published in the Boston Globe on December 19, 2012. L. Mahadevan, an applied mathematician at Harvard University, delights in unraveling the principles that underlie seemingly simple phenomena, ranging from how cucumber tendrils coil around supports to help plants climb , to the optimal way to balance on a tightrope.

Training Xchange puts UW research advances into practitioners’ hands
Posted under: Education , Engineering , For UW Employees , Health and Medicine , Learning , News Releases , Research , Science , Technology , UW and the Community UW Training Xchange is on a mi