Staying Busy Translates To Being Happy

An interesting new study suggests people who are extremely active are happier than people who sit idle.
The finding may explain why people confess to being so incredibly busy in today’s society.
“The general phenomenon I’m interested in is why people are so busy doing what they are doing in modern society,” says Christopher K. Hsee, of the University of Chicago. He co-wrote the study with Adelle X. Yang, also of the University of Chicago, and Liangyan Wang, of Shanghai Jiaotong University.
“People are running around, working hard, way beyond the basic level.”
Sure, there are reasons, like making a living, earning money, accruing fame, helping others, and so on. But, Hsee says, “I think there’s something deeper: We have excessive energy and we want to avoid idleness.”
For the study, volunteers completed a survey, then had to wait 15 minutes before the next survey would be ready. They could drop off the completed survey at a nearby location and wait out the remaining time or drop it off at a location farther away, where walking back and forth would keep them busy for the 15 minutes.
Either way, they would receive a candy when they handed in their survey. Volunteers who chose to stay busy by going to the faraway location were found to be happier than those who chose to be idle.
Not everyone chose to go to the faraway location. If the candies offered at the two locations were the same, the subjects were more likely to choose to stay idle. But if the candies offered at the two locations were different, they were more likely to choose the far location—because they could make up a justification for the trip, Hsee and his colleagues say.
The research is published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
Hsee thinks it may be possible to use this principle—people like being busy, and they like being able to justify being busy—to benefit society.
“If we can devise a mechanism for idle people to engage in activity that is at least not harmful, I think it is better than destructive busyness,” he says.
Hsee himself has been known to give a research assistant a useless task when he doesn’t have anything for them to do, so he isn’t sitting around the office getting bored and depressed.
“I know this is not particularly ethical, but he is happy,” says Hsee.

By Rick Nauert PhD Senior News Editor
Reviewed by John M. Grohol, Psy.D. on July 30, 2010
Source: Association for Psychological Science

Almost invisible mirrored tree house built in Sweden

They said it couldn't be done. When we first wrote about the almost invisible tree house to be built in Sweden by Tham & Videgard, 899 commenters thought it was computer-generated eye candy, impossible to build, and death for birds.
But the architects built it, one of six units in a "Treehotel," which recently opened 40 miles south of the Arctic Circle in Sweden.


The four-meter glass cube looks as spectacular in reality as it did in the rendering. Kent Lindvall, co-owner of the TreeHotel, has been quoted as saying:

Everything will reflect in this -- the trees, the birds, the clouds, the sun, everything. So it should be invisible nearly in the forest.

 
And what about the birds? According to Designboom, Lindvall says that a special film that is visible to birds will be applied to the glass.


The units are constructed from sustainably harvested wood and have electric radiant floor heating and "a state-of-the-art, eco-friendly, incineration toilet"
(Although I've owned an incinerating toilet, and it wasn't that eco-friendly. It used a lot of electricity and created noise and some smells. But perhaps they've improved.)
But other than that minor quibble, this appears to be a truly "eco" resort. The owners say in Designboom:

"This is untouched forest, and we want to maintain it the same way. We decided, for example, to not offer snowmobile safari which is very common up here," says Selberg. Instead, wilderness walks will be offered.

Where do I sign up?

By Lloyd Alter, TreeHugger

Posted Wed Jul 21, 2010 12:21pm PDT

All photos courtesy of Tham & Videgard.

Family Chats Can Help Students Learn

Taking the time to talk to your children about current events like the Gulf Oil spill - and using mathematical terms to do so - can help students develop better reasoning and math skills and perform better in school, according to a study by a University at Buffalo professor.

"When families chat about societal issues, they often create simple mathematical models of the events," says Ming Ming Chiu, a professor of learning and instruction at UB's Graduate School of Education with extensive experience studying how children from different cultures and countries learn. "Unlike casual chats, these chats about societal issues can both show the real-life value of mathematics to motivate students and improve their number sense."

The findings, published in the current issue of Social Forces, an international journal of sociology, was the first international study on how conversations among family members affect students' mathematical aptitude and performance in school. Chiu's findings were based on data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development; its Program for International Student Assessment collected almost 110,000 science test scores and questionnaires from 15-year-olds from 41 countries, including 3,846 from the U.S.

Interestingly, Chiu found that family chats about society and current events are uncommon, regardless of ethnic background or level of affluence. "They occur less than once a month for 58 percent of the children in the 41 countries," he says. "Students in richer countries, richer families, or with two parents do not have more family chats about societal issues than other students do."

However, Chiu's findings conclude that the impact of chats and other family involvement is much greater in more affluent countries than those in developing countries. So these discussions often do more good in families within richer countries.

"In rich countries, most students have rulers, books, calculators and other physical resources, but they do not spend much time with their parents (family involvement)," he says, "So family involvement becomes more important to student learning in richer countries."

Chiu, whose previous published research includes how overconfidence can stunt reading skills among teenagers, used the data to make the following recommendations for parents and teachers:

• Chat with children about current social and political events. Chiu suggested creating simple mathematical models of current events ("The BP oil spill leaks 1 ½ million gallons of oil a day for 80 days. Half of 80 is 40, so 1 ½ times 80 is 80 plus 40 or 120 million gallons of oil spilling into the gulf."). These models or meaningful computations allow children to use their basic math skills in a concrete way that not only gets them to practice their math faculties, but also shows how math can help put the world in a more understandable context.
• Use familiar terms to describe quantities. For example, ask children to estimate how many gallons it would take to fill up their house, apartment or swimming pool.
• Ask for and listen to children's ideas about current events. Chiu says the research suggests that children's reasoning skills improve when their parents ask them what they would do if they faced a similar situation. ("How would you solve the oil spill?") Can they explain their decisions? ("Does burning the oil help?") Can they compare the real costs of different solutions? ("Does it cost less to burn the oil or use booms to contain it?")

Source:
Ellen Goldbaum
University at Buffalo 


Did you guys do this with your parents? 

Study: Body shape affects memory in older women

Memory loss in later life is more pronounced in women who carry excess weight around their hips, a study says.

       (CNN) -- A woman's body shape may play a role in how good her memory is, according to a new study.
      The more an older woman weighs, the worse her memory, according to research released this week from Northwestern Medicine at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.
       The effect is more pronounced in women who carry excess weight around their hips, known as pear shapes, than women who carry it around their waists, called apple shapes.
       The reason pear-shaped women experienced more memory and brain function deterioration than apple-shaped women is likely related to the type of fat deposited around the hips versus the waist.
        Scientists know that different kinds of fat release different cytokines -- the hormones that can cause inflammation and affect cognition.
       "We need to find out if one kind of fat is more detrimental than the other, and how it affects brain function," said Dr. Diana Kerwin, the lead author of the study and an assistant professor of medicine and a physician at Northwestern Medicine. "The fat may contribute to the formation of plaques associated with Alzheimer's disease or a restricted blood flow to the brain."
       The study published in Wednesday's Journal of the American Geriatric Society said, on average, there is a one-point drop in the memory score for every one-point increase in body-mass index -- a ratio of a person's height and weight. The study included 8,745 cognitively normal, post-menopausal women ages 65 to 79.
       "Obesity is bad, but its effects are worse depending on where the fat is located," Kerwin said.

       "The study tells us if we have a woman in our office, and we know from her waist-to-hip ratio that she's carrying excess fat on her hips, we might be more aggressive with weight loss," Kerwin said. "We can't change where your fat is located, but having less of it is better."

By the CNN Wire Staff

July 15, 2010 7:16 a.m. EDT

Can artwork influence suicidal thoughts?

The Dostoevskaya metro station in Moscow has mosaics depicting scenes from Fyodor Dostoevsky's fiction.

       (CNN) -- The Russian capital's shiny new metro station is called Dostoevskaya, after author Fyodor Dostoevsky. But that's not what's getting the buzz in the international press.
       The Moscow station has grayscale mosaics depicting scenes from Dostoevsky's stories, which are characteristically dark and violent. One image shows the "Crime and Punishment" protagonist murdering two women with an ax, and another shows a man holding a gun to his head. The latter isn't the focal point of the station; it's one of several artistic renderings of Dostoevsky's fiction on the walls.
        Still, the artwork has been raising eyebrows among mental health professionals and bloggers alike. The question remains: Could this subway station become a place that encourages suicidal behavior?
       It is, of course, too early to say what will happen, but having an image of someone with a gun to his head is problematic and could be inviting suicidal behavior, said Madelyn Gould, a psychiatrist at Columbia University.
       "You certainly don't want to do anything that might in any way contribute to someone's motivation to die by suicide," Gould said.
Images of suicide, be they in art, cinema or news media, can make the act seem more real to vulnerable people, who have probably been suffering from depression or other mental illness and feel stressed, experts say. Something like the mosaic at Dostoevskaya isn't all bad or good, but it can affect people already at risk, said Nadine Kaslow, a psychologist at Emory University.
       "For some people, it can be one more thing that makes them lean in an unsafe direction," she said.
People who have not already felt mentally distressed will probably not be affected by an image of a man with a gun to his head, she said.
       Portrayals of suicide, both fictional and nonfictional, have been blamed for deaths by suicide for centuries.
        "The Sorrows of Young Werther," a novel by Goethe published in the late 1700s, was implicated in suicides across Europe after its release, according to the World Health Organization. The hero shoots himself because he cannot be with the woman he loves, and many people who took their own lives soon after its publication did so in a similar manner.

A large portrait of Fyodor Dostoevsky watches subway passengers in Moscow.

 

       More recently, many systematic studies have found that media reporting can lead to imitative suicidal behaviors and that young people and those suffering from depression can be especially vulnerable.
       That's why organizations such as the International Association for Suicide Prevention caution media against describing or showing photographically the specifics of suicide method and location, as these details and images may encourage others to imitate the act. They also warn against glamorizing the suicides of celebrities, which can promote copycat suicides.
       A growing body of research has looked at suicide prevention by way of blocking the means of access -- in other words, restricting access to a method that someone might use in taking his or her own life.
       A study published this week in the British Medical Journal examined the effect of putting up a barrier on the Bloor Street Viaduct in Toronto, Ontario, which had about nine suicides a year from 1993 to 2002. The barrier was put up in 2003, and there had not been any suicides there afterward.
       Researchers found, however, that the annual rate of deaths by suicide from other bridges went up from 8.7 to 14.2, suggesting that some people who might have taken their lives at the Bloor Street Viaduct may have merely found other places to do so.
       But other suicide experts say barriers are crucial.
       It's important to note that the Toronto study was very small, and it is impossible to draw conclusions from it, said Matthew Miller, associate professor at the Harvard School of Public Health, who co-wrote the editorial that accompanied the study.
       There have been many instances in which lives have been saved by restricting access to a culturally acceptable method of suicide, Miller said.
       When domestic gas was detoxified in England and Wales in the 1960s and early 1970s, there was a drop in the suicide rate of about a third, researchers have argued.
       However, a 2000 study led by David Gunnell at the University of Bristol suggested that some people may have turned to drug overdoses instead, with those rates rising at the same time that suicides by gas decreased from 1973 to 1975.
      There is also evidence that the United Kingdom has had success reducing suicide attempts involving the pain reliever acetaminophen, also called paracetamol, by restricting the number of tablets of medication that could be sold in a packet, Gould said.
       "Saving lives in the short run by making it harder for people to die when they make an attempt saves lives in the long run," Miller said. "People can then get the help they need once the crisis has passed."
      While some people will simply turn to other methods, suicidal behavior is generally impulsive, and motivation waxes and wanes, Gould said. Any method of deflecting a person thinking about suicide can buy valuable time that may allow him or her to reconsider.
       But Kaslow cautioned that there is a broad range of impulsivity among people who are vulnerable to suicide, and some deaths are quite premeditated.
      The emphasis, she said should be on reducing stigma about mental health problems so that more people get the help they need.
      "If they get appropriate treatment, they don't feel as suicidal, and they're less likely to kill themselves, and that should be the first thing we do," she said. "That's going to matter more than blocking off hot spots."

By Elizabeth Landau, CNN

July 13, 2010 12:05 p.m. EDT

IF YOU NEED HELP

National Suicide and Prevention Lifeline: 1-800-273-8255 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting              1-800-273-8255     

U.S. soldier killed nearly 92 years ago finally buried at Arlington

An Army honor guard carries the casket of World War I casualty Pvt. Thomas Costello at Arlington National Cemetery on Monday.

 

        (CNN) -- The remains of a U.S. soldier missing for nearly 92 years were laid to rest Monday at Arlington National Cemetery, with military honors for an Army private who died in a World War I skirmish in France.
        Pvt. Thomas Costello was buried with honors including a casket team, a firing party that fired three volleys and a bugler who sounded taps. His grave is not far from the grave of World War I Gen. John J. "Black Jack" Pershing. Soldiers from the Army's 3rd U.S. Infantry Regiment, The Old Guard, conducted the ceremony.
        Fifteen people attended the graveside ceremony, including three relatives -- one of those was Michael Frisbie.
        Two years ago, U.S. military officials came knocking on Frisbie's door, asking for information about his family tree.
       They returned about a year ago, this time informing him that the remains of his great-great-uncle -- a soldier missing in action since World War I -- had been identified.
        "It was overwhelming," Frisbie's wife, Leanne, told CNN. "They were just looking through the family tree to make sure that they had the right family and, bingo, they found us."
         Frisbie, 43, says he had no clue Army Pvt. Thomas D. Costello even existed. Frisbie's parents divorced when he was only 6 months old and he never got to know his paternal relatives.
         "I can't believe they went to all this extent to find me, which is good though, because I want to honor the soldier," said Frisbie, who lives in Stockton Springs, Maine.
         At the conclusion of the ceremony, the flag that had covered the coffin was given to Frisbie. Military dignitaries including a brigadier general and the Army's deputy chief of chaplains participated in the service.
Costello, who was from New York City, enlisted in the Army on September 19, 1917, and was part of the 60th Infantry Regiment, 1st Brigade, 5th Infantry Division, according to military documents.
        On September 16, 1918, with World War I nearing an end, Costello and his fellow troops encountered heavy artillery and machine-gun fire near Jaulny, in northern France. He died of a shrapnel head wound, Frisbie said.
         Costello's fellow troops buried him with two other soldiers in a wooded area between Bois de Bonvaux and Bois de Grand Fontaine. Based on enlistment records, he was estimated to be 26 when he died.
         Despite efforts by his sister and Army officials to find and retrieve Costello's remains, the grave could not be found. Costello was not married and did not have children.
         In September 2006, French nationals hunting for metal in the area found human remains and World War I artifacts, U.S. Army officials said.
         A Defense Department search team, operating near the location, was notified of the discovery and recovered human remains upon excavating the site -- some 20 miles away from the coordinates Costello's commander gave when the war ended.
         Frisbie said buttons, gloves and boots were recovered at the site, which appeared to be at the edge of a field with overgrown trees, judging from photos given to him by the military.
        "They found some rosary beads, which we now have," he said, adding that since Costello's family was known to be Catholic, it was the one item that likely belonged to the fallen soldier.
        Scientists used dental comparisons as well as other forensic identification tools and circumstantial evidence in the identification of the remains.
        The tedious search by genealogists for relatives of unaccounted fallen soldiers is only part of the work done by an arm of the U.S. Defense Department led by the Defense Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel Office.
         Together with its operational units, some 600 personnel -- including forensic anthropologists, DNA scientists, archaeologists and explosive ordnance specialists -- work to locate, recover and identify remains and return them to family members. Many of the personnel come from military backgrounds, according to Larry Greer, the office's public affairs director.
         Once all the information about the remains is verified, the process of recovering a missing soldier is detailed in a book that is given to family members. It's through such a book that Frisbie was able to learn much about his uncle.
          "You can think of [each case] as a big-city police detective case; however, our cases are at a minimum 40 years old. And some of them are 60, 70 years old," said Greer.
         World War I finds are rare, though, and the DPMO has only identified five U.S. soldiers from the "great war" since 2006, Greer said. That still leaves more than 3,000 U.S. troops missing and unaccounted for in that war. It's a small proportion of some 80,000 still missing from other wars that have ended -- World War II, the Korean War, the Cold War, and the Vietnam War. All the service members listed as prisoner-of-war/missing-in-action in the 1991 Gulf War have been accounted for, according to the agency.
        "We have all the wartime records of everybody who is missing. Every day of the year, our analysts build case files," Greer said.
       "If a family member were to write us and say, 'Please, my loved one is missing, please go find him,' we would respond to that family member and say, 'Well, let us show you what we've already done on his case.' And oftentimes, they're quite surprised to learn of it."

        Some $105 million is allocated annually to recovering missing soldiers from past wars -- an amount, Greer said, that reflects the military's commitment to "leave no man behind."

By the CNN Wire Staff

July 12, 2010 6:07 p.m. EDT

The Power and Purpose of Dreams

        There's been a lot of talk about sleep lately. When I wrote Insomniac, I felt like a lone voice decrying the dangers of sleep-deprivation, the toll sleep loss takes on our minds, bodies, moods. As any insomniac will tell you (and I interviewed dozens), there's nothing so crucial as sleep for our mental, physical, and social well being. It seems those of us who have the hardest time sleeping are the ones who most appreciate how sleep keeps us glued together.        So it's terrific sleep is getting this long overdue attention. But I'm wondering, what about dreams? I haven't heard much about dreams in the discussion.
        When you wake to an early alarm, cutting off the last hour or two of sleep, the sleep you sacrifice is mainly REM, "rapid eye movement," the most dream-rich stage of sleep.  We dream in all stages of sleep, not just REM, but our most vivid and memorable and emotionally resonant dreams, those wild, phantasmagoric images and stories that play through our heads like films, occur mainly in the stretch of REM just before we wake up in the morning.




        What does it mean, to lose our dreams? A normal sleeper, a good sleeper, spends about a quarter of sleep time in REM, so a person who lives 90 years will spend 6 or 7 years in REM. And when researchers deprive people of REM, there is REM rebound, an increase in amount and intensity of REM equivalent to the duration of the deprivation. So it seems dreams are there for something, have some purpose.

         When researchers discovered REM in 1953, they were ecstatic to find that the eye movements were associated with dream recall. Most researchers studying the mind those days were Freudians, and Freud saw dreams as "the royal road to the unconscious"-so researchers thought they'd found the route to the innermost recesses of the self.
        It wasn't that simple, of course. Subsequent findings about the workings of the brain did not bear out Freud's ideas, and the focus of dream study shifted to the neurological bases of dreams, their physiological rather than psychological origins, the ebb and flow of neurotransmitters. At present, there is "precious little on which dream researchers agree," says Harvard sleep scientist Robert Stickgold, whose work suggests an association of dreaming with learning and the consolidation of memory.

        I've been attending annual meetings of the Associated Professional Sleep Society (APSS) since 2002. These are conferences where sleep scientists, physicians, psychotherapists, and pharmaceutical researchers gather to share the latest in research and treatments. In the years I've been attending, I've heard breakthrough discoveries about sleep and the brain that have brought researchers closer to understanding disorders such as narcolepsy, restless leg syndrome, even insomnia. But I've heard few presentations about dreams.

       At the 2009 meeting in Seattle, dreams were discussed in relation to post-traumatic stress syndrome, but- except for a talk by P.F. Pagel, University of Colorado Medical School-that was about all. Pagel commented wryly that he seemed to have moved into the study of dreams just as everybody else moved out, since his was the only presentation on dreams at this conference. He described a study he did with the Filmaking and Screenwriter Labs in Sundance that found a much higher recall and use of dreams among actors, writers, and directors than among participants from his sleep center: dream use increases, he concludes, in proportion to a person's interest in the creative process or product.

        It figures that filmmakers have this kind of generative conversation with their dreams, since film is, of all human creations, probably the most dream-like. But I came away from Pagel's talk thinking, wait a minute: artistic types are the only ones who have use for their dreams? Doesn't everybody-teachers and software designers and politicians and psychotherapists- need to think creatively? Would you want a sleep-starved surgeon wielding a scalpel (and doctors are the most sleepstarved of professionals): what if something goes wrong? When sleep-deprived subjects are given tests that require flexibility, the ability to change strategy and generate new ideas and approaches, they respond poorly, tending to fall back on rote, rigid thinking.
        Robert Stickgold finds that when people are awakened out of REM and given a word to associate to, their associations are more novel, more original than in other stages of sleep; they "ignore the obvious and put together things that make a kind of crazy unexpected kind of sense." Dreams, Stickgold says, are where we bring things together in fresh, often startling ways, drawing on stores of knowledge from the past, the present, the possible, to find new associations. Dreams may help us find new patterns and create combinations that break through well-worn ruts. "This is what creativity is," says Stickgold. Dreams, far from being idle fancies, are enablers of "the most sophisticated human cognitive functions."
        There are, of course, highly creative and productive people who have little or no dream recall. But dreaming may still work behind the scenes. I swear, I write better when I awake out of one of those intense, thrashing-it-through dreams. Even a troubling dream, a dream that churns up stuff I'd rather shove under the carpet, even a dream barely remembered, much less understood, seems to provide some kind of fluency, dream energy, fuel for thought. Those are the days that the words and images come, tumble out so fast that my fingers on the keys can barely keep up. I don't know how it works, but it does seem to work.

        And creativity isn't just for writers or artists, it's about basic survival, about finding new paths, figuring out what to do when something goes drastically wrong on the highway, in a marriage, in a work situation. We live in a complex world. We need our brains to be firing on all cylinders; we need to think creatively, flexibly, as we negotiate relationships with colleagues, co-workers, family, friends.

        Are we a society that's losing its dreams, that's cutting short dreaming with "alarms"? Are we dumbing ourselves down with overwork, sleeping too little and working too much, undercutting the very efforts we make by working so hard? When you get up to an early alarm, you gotta ask, are you really gaining productivity with that time, or dulling the creative edge that might make you far more productive? Sleep has survival value not only for you as an individual but for a society whose vitality depends on individuals' thinking outside the box.
        So, yes, let's sleep to get healthy, to get thin, to feel better, to get smarter- and remember that that extra hour of sleep is dreamtime that brings incalculable benefits.



http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/sleep-challenge-2010-wome_b_409973.html?&just_reloaded=1
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gayatri-devi-md/sleepless-in-seattle-the_b_417313.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/cindi-leive/sleep-challenge-2010-the_b_449860.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/qanta-ahmed/be-your-own-sleep-special_b_442802.html
actors use their dreams
Sarah Kershaw, "The role of their dreams," NYT, May 7, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/07/fashion/07dreams.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print
Robert Stickgold on dreams
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/dreams/ask.html
Rebecca Cathcart, "Winding through ‘big dreams' are the threads of our lives,"
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/03/health/psychology/03dream.html

WoW = Real life rescue?

Norwegian Boy saves Sister from Moose Attack using World of Warcraft Skills

Hans Jørgen Olsen, a 12-year-old Norwegian boy, saved himself and his sister from a moose attack using skills he picked up playing the online role playing game World of Warcraft.
Hans and his sister got into trouble after they had trespassed the territory of the moose during a walk in the forest near their home. When the moose attacked them, Hans knew the first thing he had to do was ‘taunt’ and provoke the animal so that it would leave his sister alone and she could run to safety. ‘Taunting’ is a move one uses in World of Warcraft to get monsters off of the less-well-armored team members.
Once Hans was a target, he remembered another skill he had picked up at level 30 in ‘World of Warcraft’ – he feigned death. The moose lost interest in the inanimate boy and wandered off into the woods. When he was safely alone Hans ran back home to share his tale of video game-inspired survival.

I just LOVE LOVE LOVE this Picture

Picture

Relationship Breakup Similar to Addiction Withdrawal

     Rejection by a romantic partner is a bitter pill. New research suggests the trauma is severe because love rejection affects primitive areas of the brain associated with motivation, reward and addiction cravings.
     The study is published in the July issue of the Journal of Neurophysiology.
     Lucy Brown, Ph.D., clinical professor in the Saul R. Korey Department of Neurology and of neuroscience at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University, is the corresponding author of the study.
     Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), researchers recorded the brain activity of 15 college-age adults who had recently been rejected by their partners but reported that they were still intensely “in love.”
     Upon viewing photographs of their former partners, several key areas of participants’ brains were activated, including the ventral tegmental area, which controls motivation and reward and is known to be involved in feelings of romantic love; the nucleus accumbens and orbitofrontal/prefrontal cortex, which are associated with craving and addiction, specifically the dopaminergic reward system evident in cocaine addiction; and the insular cortex and the anterior cingulate, which are associated with physical pain and distress.
     By tying these specific areas of the brain to romantic rejection, the research provides insight into the anguished feelings that can accompany a breakup, as well as the extreme behaviors that can occur as a result, such as stalking, homicide and suicide.
     “Romantic love, under both happy and unhappy circumstances, may be a ‘natural’ addiction,” said Dr. Brown.
     “Our findings suggest that the pain of romantic rejection may be a necessary part of life that nature built into our anatomy and physiology. A natural recovery, to pair up with someone else, is in our physiology, too.”

Source: Albert Einstein College of Medicine
By Rick Nauert PhD Senior News Editor
Reviewed by John M. Grohol, Psy.D. on July 7, 2010

Personality as a Composite of Traits

This article is a bit longer then the ones I usually post, but I found it VERY interesting. It focuses on the difference between the diagnosis of personality types/disorders that used to be prevalent in the psychological world and the emerging scale methods which judges traits to be healthy or unhealthy depending on one's lifestyle and environment.  If you read it I would love to hear your thoughts!

Am I Normal?: A more organic take on human nature is emerging. It sees
behavior as a product of distinct personality traits that we
all have to a greater or lesser degree. In this new view, we're
all just a little bit crazy.