"Our initial hypothesis was that feelings of guilt are more intense among females, not only among adolescents but also among young and adult women, and they also show the highest scores for interpersonal sensitivity," says Itziar Etxebarria, lead author of the study and a researcher at the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU).

The research, published in the Spanish Journal of Psychology, was carried out using a sample from three age groups (156 teenagers, 96 young people and 108 adults) equally divided between males and females. The team of psychologists asked them what situations most often caused them to feel guilt. They also carried out interpersonal sensitivity tests -- the Davis Empathetic Concern Scale, and a questionnaire on Interpersonal Guilt, created purposely for this study.

When it came to comparing the measurements of intensity of habitual guilt of these groups, the researchers saw that this score was significantly higher for women, in all three age groups. "This difference is particularly stark in the 40-50-year-old age group," points out Etxebarria.

Your finger is farther from your nose than your brain. So when your finger touches your nose, why do both organs feel the sensation at the same time?

The Blue Brain Project is the first comprehensive attempt to reverse-engineer human brain in order to understand brain function and dysfunction through detailed simulations

Dr. Henry Markram, Project Director of the Blue Brain Project will deliver a talk on the project on January 27th 2010. The Blue Brain Project is the first comprehensive attempt to reverse-engineer human brain in order to understand brain function and dysfunction through detailed simulations. Dr. Markram is being hosted by PIT Solutions which is based in one of the leading IT hotspots in India - Technopark Trivandrum. PIT Solutions, a leading IT services provider with offices in India and Switzerland, has business relationship with Dr. Markram on multiple IT projects over last couple of years.

The Blue Brain Project is basically an attempt to build a computerized copy of a brain - starting with a rat's brain, and then progressing to a human brain - inside one of the world's most powerful computers. It aims to bring scientists closer to a better understanding of the brain's architectural and functional principles, which would eventually lead to cures for many brain-related diseases. In due course of time, the 'Blue Brain' project is considered to rank as one of the most extraordinary endeavors in scientific history.

In a joint statement by Mr. Rafeek K Mohammed, CEO & Partner, PIT Solutions and Mr. Thomaskutty Sebastian, Head of Business Development & partner, PIT Solutions, they said "The partnership with Dr. Markram and his research team would enable PIT Solutions to enter an exciting and niche area in software development business thereby giving excellent opportunities for highly talented software professionals of the state to be involved in ground breaking software engineering projects. The team size at PIT Solutions is expected to grown in significant numbers in the next years."

Dr. Henry Markram, the Director of the Swiss Federal Institute's (EPFL) Brain Mind Institute heads the Blue Brain project. He says the mysteries of the mind can be solved - soon. Mental illness, memory, perception: they're made of neurons and electric signals, and he plans to find them with a supercomputer that models all the brain's 100,000,000,000,000 synapses. Situated in the heart of Europe, the Swiss Federal Institute (EPFL) is, with its sister school in Zurich, one of Europe's leading institutions of science and technology. It has long lasting relation with world's leading institutes including India's IIT's. EPFL's annual core funding of almost half a billion Swiss Francs is provided by the Swiss Federal Government, which has given EPFL a threefold mission to fulfill, with worldwide visibility and recognition:
- To educate engineers and scientists;
- To be a national center of excellence in science and technology; and
- To provide a hub for interaction between the scientific community and industry.

The study is by a team from the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience and was funded by the Medical Research Council and the European Union. Published in Nature, it uses brain imaging and virtual reality techniques to try to identify grid cells in the human brain. These specialised neurons are thought to be involved in spatial memory and have previously been identified in rodent brains, but evidence of them in humans has not been documented until now.

Grid cells represent where an animal is located within its environment, which the researchers liken to having a satnav in the brain. They fire in patterns that show up as geometrically regular, triangular grids when plotted on a map of a navigated surface. They were discovered by a Norwegian lab in 2005 whose research suggested that rats create virtual grids to help them orient themselves in their surroundings, and remember new locations in unfamiliar territory.

A grid cell. The black line indicates the path an animal took as it walked. Red dots indicate the animal's position each time the cell turned 'on'. Viewed together the triangular pattern of points is clearly visible

Study co-author Dr Caswell Barry said: "It is as if grid cells provide a cognitive map of space. In fact, these cells are very much like the longitude and latitude lines we're all familiar with on normal maps, but instead of using square grid lines it seems the brain uses triangles.

Lead author Dr Christian Doeller added: "Although we can't see the grid cells directly in the brain scanner, we can pick up the regular six-fold symmetry that is a signature of this type of firing pattern. Interestingly, the study participants with the clearest signs of grid cells were those who performed best in the virtual reality spatial memory task, suggesting that the grid cells help us to remember the locations of objects."

A virtual reality environment which human participants explored while lying in an fMRI brain scanner. An example of the spatially-organised firing pattern of a grid cell is overlaid on the arena floor

Professor Neil Burgess, who leads the team, commented: "The parts of the brain which show signs of grid cells - the hippocampal formation and associated brain areas - are already known to help us navigate our environment and are also critical for autobiographical memory. This means that grid cells may help us to find our way to the right memory as well as finding our way through our environment. These brain areas are also amongst the first to be affected by Alzheimer's disease which may explain why getting lost is one of the most common early symptoms of this disease."

From a psychological perspective it is clear that explicit sexual imagery does a great job at attracting our attention, but it has also been shown in multiple studies that most people, if they make the effort to think about it more carefully, respond negatively to advertising in which the sexual image has little relevance to the advertised product and generally consider overly gratuitous use of sexual imagery in advertising unethical. Then again, it is also clear that most of us don't usually pay a lot of attention to advertising content, and that our spontaneous, non-controlled reactions to sex-based advertising can be very different to our deliberate, more carefully considered responses. For example, there exists experimental evidence that under cognitive load (i.e. when people are actively thinking about something else - for example, they may be trying to memorize a 10 digit number - people do not across the board dislike sexual ads. Here, the scientific evidence up to date, suggests that men tend to prefer sexually explicit ads, while women usually respond negatively to explicitly sexual ad content.

One popular interpretation of this result (and results from related experiments) is that men and women possess different underlying attitudes and beliefs about sex, and reasons for having sex. While these differences in attitudes and beliefs are sometimes explained in terms of biological evolution, cultural socialization or the likely combination of both, it has been a commonly stated conclusion that

"Men tend to adopt a relatively recreational orientation [to sexuality], an approach that emphasizes physical gratification and views sex as an end in itself.

and

"women tend to adopt a relationship-based orientation to sexuality, an approach that emphasizes the importance of intimacy and commitment in a sexual relationship"

In order to investigate the relevance of this hypothesis in the domain of advertisement and people's responses to sexually explicit advertising content, University of Minnesota Psychologist and marketing professor Kathleen Voohs, recently designed a number of smart experiments that appeared in the Journal of Consumer Research.

The main experiment was designed to measure people's response to sexually explicit ads when these ads were linked to intimacy and commitment, as compared to sexually explicit ads without any such relational connotation. In particular, participants were presented with a sexually explicit advertisement for a watch and asked to rate this ad. In one experimental condition, the watch within the sexually explicit ad was depicted with a red ribbon, and presented as a gift from the man to the women, in the other condition the ad was devoid of any such indication of intimacy or commitment that is associated with gift giving. In a randomized trial, in which all participants simultaneously memorized a 10 digit number while viewing the advertisements (to induce "cognitive load" and simulate the preoccupation with other things, that usually characterizes the way we engage with advertisement in real life), men showed no preference between the two sexually explicit images. Women, in contrast seemed to respond negatively to the sexual ad which was devoid of relationship connotations.

This result was investigated further by a series of three additional experiments, in which commitment and intimacy were attached to non-sexual ads, or presented as acts from the woman to the man (rather than from the man to the woman), or in which participants were subliminally primed with thoughts of intimacy and commitment, rather than having these concepts present in the actual ads.

The results all seem to confirm the previous hypothesis that commitment and intimacy are important qualifiers of women's response to sexuality. In particular, women respond negatively to sexually explicit advertising in which sexuality is presented without implications of commitment and intimacy, but women respond favorably to ads in which men (as opposed to women) appear to be signaling intimacy and commitment.

Men on the other hand, seem rather unaffected by accompanying messages of commitment, and generally favor all sexually laden ads. Although, one small exception exists: Men seem turned off (so to speak) by sexually explicit ads in which a man signals commitment and intimacy involving a very costly investment. But then again, this is only the case if for very large financial investments, and does not appear to hold in the case of large emotional investments.

For toilet paper manufacturers this means: Make your ad sexy, but don't forget to place a red ribbon and a small price tag around the toilet roll...sort of.

 

Researchers have known for 80 years about a symbolic connection between speech and size: back-of-the-mouth vowels like the “o” in “two” make people think of large sizes, whereas people associate front-of-the-mouth vowels like “ee” with diminutiveness. Marketers can use this effect to make consumers think a discount is bigger or smaller than it truly is, according to a study soon to be published in The Journal of Consumer Research by Keith Coulter of Clark University and Robin Coulter of the University of Connecticut.

In one experiment, researchers told consumers the regular and sale prices of a product, asked them to repeat the sale price to themselves, and then, a few minutes later, told them to estimate the size of the discount in percentage terms. Products with “small-sounding” sale prices (like $2.33) seemed like better deals than products with “big-sounding” sales prices (like $2.22).

In another experiment, the researchers used a pair of sale prices — $7.88, which sounds “big” in English, and $7.01, which sounds “small” — but are the other way around in Chinese. Chinese and English speakers had opposite perceptions of the products’ relative value.

In the United States alone, more than 100,000 people are waiting for new hearts, lungs and kidneys. Many of these patients will die waiting.

Frustrated, some patients turn to a global black market in organs.

To tackle the organ shortage, countries are experimenting with various strategies.

Israel just enacted a new law to boost the number of donors.  The law favors donors over non-donors when it comes to receiving an organ. And some Americans are pushing a controversial solution – legalizing the buying and selling of organs.

Iran is already doing that. The Iranian government gives every kidney donor $1200 and one year of free health care. This system has increased the availability of organs, but at what price?

Dr. Mustafa Al-Mousawi, past president of the Middle East Society for Organ Transplantation, argues that the Iranian system may have reduced the organ shortage, but it is unfair to the donors, who are often poor and underprivileged.

Listen to a story about Israel’s new law and the interview with Dr. Al-Mousawi here.

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