Splitdecisions
A new study reveals how our frame of mind shapes our sense of right and wrong. Imagine you are sitting at the train track switch, suddenly faced with a life-or-death decision. A train is barreling unstoppably toward five people. The good newsIJ There’s a Y junction in the train’s path, and you could divert the train onto another track. The bad newsIJ Doing so will kill one person standing on the other track. What will you doIJ Scientists call this test the “Trolley Dilemma,” and how you respond to it reveals your “moral orientation.” If you don’t switch the track, you’re “rule-oriented else you are “consequence-oriented.”
Battleof the sexes
Men are generally happier than women although women are more satisfied with their sex lives, according to a new study. The conclusions were drawn from a survey that found men had a brighter outlook due to earning more and fulfillment at work, among other factors. However women were happier with more personal aspects of their lives, including health and sex. Concerns about money were most likely to prevent both sexes feeling content, with 46 per cent of people worried about their finances, the study found. On average an additional $132 per month would ease such worries and make people happier. The study, found that married couples were more likely to be happier than single men and women.
Key to happiness
A new study shows how seeking happiness at the right time may be more important than seeking happiness all the time. Allowing yourself to feel emotions appropriate to a situation — whether or not they are pleasant in the moment — is a key to long-lasting happiness. In the study, published in the journal Emotion, researchers Maya Tamir and Brett Ford had 175 people participate in role-playing exercises that were either confrontational, such as pretending to be a police officer interrogating a suspect, or collaborative, such as a politician lobbying for a bill. The researchers also examined emotional preferences related to other signs of well-being, asking the participants questions about their psychological health, satisfaction with life.
Breath prints
Our breath may be as unique as our fingerprint. Compounds in exhaled air produce a unique and stable molecular autograph or “breathprint” — one that could be used to monitor disease or track response to medication. Renato Zenobi at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich and his colleagues discovered breathprints by analysing the breath of 11 healthy individuals. The team did this four times a day over nine days, and used a technique called mass spectrometry to identify the molecules in each breath sample.The team was interested in metabolites, compounds produced by the body's metabolism.
Control your appetite
Researchers at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have made a discovery in neuroscience that could offer a long-lasting solution to eating disorders such as obesity. It was previously thought that the nerve cells in the brain associated with appetite regulation were generated entirely during an embryo's development in the womb and therefore their numbers were fixed for life. But research published in the Journal of Neuroscience has identified a population of stem cells capable of generating new appetite-regulating neurons in the brains of young and adult rodents.