New study finds preference for children to cradle dolls on left is indicator of social cognitive abilities

June 27, 2018 by George Wigmore, City University London

Credit: FamVeld/Shutterstock.com

Children who cradle dolls on the left show higher social cognitive abilities than those who do not, according to new research from City, University of London.

The new findings, which also show deeply inbuilt facial recognition skills which enable children to interpret even simple approximations as human faces, suggest the children's cradling preference could help to indicate some social developmental disorders.
The study builds on previous knowledge of a 'left-cradling bias' – the phenomenon that humans will typically cradle a baby on their left side, enabling both parent and child to keep the other in their left visual field – which is unrelated to dominance of the use of right or left hand. Information from the left visual field is processed by the right hemisphere of the brain, which is associated with emotion and the perception of facial expression.
Further investigation could enable researchers to make important predictions about the trajectory of children's development based on their cradling responses, in association with social and communication abilities.
The research – led by Dr. Gillian Forrester of Birkbeck, University of London and Dr. Brenda Todd of City, University of London – was conducted with 98 typically developing children (54 girls and 44 boys) in reception or year 1 at a mainstream reception school in South London, who were given a human infant doll to cradle.
They were observed to hold the doll markedly more often in a left-cradling position, and those who showed this bias had a significantly higher social ability score compared with those who held the doll on the right.
The social ability traits tested including likeliness to follow rules, willingness to share with others and wanting to please their teachers.
As part of the study the children were also given a pillow to cradle, with three dots marked on to suggest a face. They were more likely to cradle this object on the left, which researchers say indicates the depth of the evolutionary bias, as even a hint of a face will trigger the response.
By contrast, when given a plain pillow, without a suggestion of a face, the children demonstrated neither a left nor right cradling bias.
Birkbeck's Dr. Forrester said: "Even babies recognise the simple design of three dots surrounded by a circle as a face. And faces receive special attention from our left visual field (connected to the right hemisphere), which is faster and more accurate at identifying individuals and their emotional expressions than the right visual field for the majority of the population. This left-visual-field bias is a natural ability, thought to have originated from a need to identify predators in the environment. In modern humans we believe that the left visual field bias for recognising faces and expressions supports our sophisticated social and emotional abilities.

"In our study, children held a plain pillow randomly in either arm, but adding a 'three-dot-face' resulted in a preference to hold in the left arm, mirroring the left-side cradling bias shown by mothers holding babies. The phenomenon, known as the 'left cradling bias', is not just present in humans—it is pervasive across the animal kingdom and found in species as different as gorillas and flying foxes. Keeping a baby in the carer's left visual field allows for more efficiently monitoring of the baby's wellbeing.
"Not surprisingly, the left cradling bias was also seen when children held a human baby doll, indicating that this behaviour is present early in development and you do not need to have had experience of holding babies to express this preference. What was interesting was that children who held the baby doll with a preference for the left arm scored higher on social ability tests, compared with children who held with a right-side preference, indicating that using the visual field linked to the dominant hemisphere for processing social stimuli gives the individual a real-life advantage."
The cradling bias was once thought to be associated with the prevalence of the of the right-handed population but is now known to result from a preference for using the left visual field to view faces – it is quicker and more accurate at identifying individuals and their expressions. Cross cultural studies indicate that approximately 80% of mothers naturally cradle on the left.
City's Dr. Brenda Todd said:
"I have previously studied mothers holding their own babies, finding that the left cradling is strongest in the first 12 weeks after the birth, when the babies are most vulnerable. It is very interesting to see that a similar bias is shown when young children hold a doll which depicts a young infant, indicating that this behavioural preference is apparent so early in our development."

The peer-reviewed study is published in Cortex. 

More information: G.S. Forrester et al. The left cradling bias: An evolutionary facilitator of social cognition?, Cortex (2018). DOI: 10.1016/j.cortex.2018.05.011

Journal reference: Cortex
Provided by: City University London


Source: https://medicalxpress.com/ (28/06/2018)

Happy employees contribute to better profits, says global report

Happy employees contribute to better profits, says global report

HRK News Bureau | New Delhi | Wednesday, 27 June 2018

The financial returns are higher for companies taking care of their employees, reveals a report by Globoforce WorkHuman and IBM Smarter Workforce.

Companies that score high on employee experience have better financial results as well. This reiterates the fact that employee happiness is a must for organisational success.

The newly published report, The Financial Impact of a Positive Employee Experience, by IBM Smarter Workforce Institute and the Globoforce WorkHuman establishes that employee experience is positively associated with employee work performance, discretionary effort, and turnover intention.

A key finding of this report is that organisations that score in the top 25 per cent of ‘employee experience’, report nearly triple the return on assets and more than twice the return on sales when compared to companies in the bottom quartile.

For this report, psychologists and experts in HR consulting from Globoforce and IBM surveyed 22,000 employees from across the globe, belonging to a cross-section of industries in thousands of organisations.
The investigation also resulted in the creation of the Employee Experience Index (EEI), which measures employee satisfaction under five headings— belonging, purpose, achievement, happiness and vigour.


Companies, which managed to score highly on EEI, reported returns that significantly outpace those of companies that didn’t perform well. The report is quick to stress that cashing in on this fiscal boost does not need to be a costly affair. It highlighted that improving employee experience is not resource-intensive but really more about making some key changes that will create a more ‘human’ workplace.

Globoforce and IBM stated that a human workplace is one characterised by allowing work–life balance, providing opportunities for feedback and growth, fostering positive co-worker relationships, enabling meaningful work, and empowering workers so that they feel they have a voice.
The study suggests that senior leadership and managers play crucial roles in creating many of those opportunities and ultimately ensure a positive and supportive work environment.

However, the study reveals that a majority - more than 70 per cent – of HR practitioners think that senior leadership could be doing more to improve employees’ experiences at work.

Organisation also need to improve on on two key parameters - work-life balance and better recognition for employees. According to the report, less than a quarter (22 percent) of hr practitioners say that  say their organisations do enough to provide opportunities to recharge, and less than half (49 percent) say there is sufficient recognition of the good work that employees do.

The report also stresses on recognising the humanity of employees and treating them as such.

Previously, this report released the rankings of international countries in which employees reported the highest levels of employee experience.
In the current report, this index has been married with analyses of some of the key metrics of fiscal success for a company.

Return on assets (ROA) and return on sales (ROS) are two of the most commonly used measures of profitability. ROA is the ratio of net income to assets and is used to determine how profitable a company is relative to its total assets. A high ROA indicates that a company is earning more money on less investment, which is obviously ideal.

Source: (27/06/2018).

Uranium ‘widespread’ in India’s groundwater

Uranium ‘widespread’ in India’s groundwater

Groundwater is used to re-supply dried-up wells Copyright: Jeremy Horner/Panos

Speed read

• Excessive groundwater extraction releasing uranium in aquifers
• Chemical traces in water linked to chronic kidney disease
• Routine groundwater testing needs to cover uranium aside from arsenic, fluoride

By: M. Sreelata

[NEW DELHI] Excessive withdrawal of groundwater across India is not only lowering the water table, it is also contaminating water with uranium.

According to a study published in Environmental Science & Technology Letters, uranium contamination is “an emerging and widespread phenomenon”. It analysed aquifers in 16 of India’s 29 states, focusing on western Rajasthan and Gujarat where uranium concentrations are higher than the WHO’s safe limit of 30 micrograms per litre.

Avner Vengosh, professor of geochemistry and water quality at Duke University in North Carolina, United States, who is the lead author of the study, tells SciDev.Net that “the decline in groundwater levels accelerates uranium mobilisation to groundwater”. Uranium build-up may also be linked to nitrate pollutants released from chemical fertilisers, which make uranium more soluble (as it is insoluble in its natural form).

“The urgent next step is to see if we can identify areas of high prevalence of kidney disease that could be associated with high uranium levels in drinking water”

- Avner Vengosh, Duke University

India is the world’s largest user of groundwater pumped up through borewells. The World Bank reports that more than 60 per cent of irrigated agriculture and 85 per cent of drinking water depend on the resource.

Vengosh suggests that India’s water agencies make groundwater management a priority to protect people from the harmful effects of exposure to uranium, which include a higher risk of chronic kidney disease (CKD). “The urgent next step is to see if we can identify areas of high prevalence of kidney disease that could be associated with high uranium levels in drinking water,” he says.

Sunderrajan Krishnan, executive director of the Inren Foundation, a non-profit water research body based in Gujarat state, says a key finding in the study was the link between water table fluctuations and the presence of uranium. He points out that this is especially noticeable when the water level depletes to the point where uranium-bearing rocks in the aquifers are exposed to oxidation.

“Half a century ago, water levels never reached that low,” Krishnan tells SciDev.Net.

The link between CKD and uranium in India was first made by the state-run Bhabha Atomic Research Centre in Mumbai, says Krishnan. The disease is prevalent in coastal parts of Andhra Pradesh state.

In light of the study’s findings, authorities should urgently make testing for uranium a routine part of groundwater quality monitoring, says Vengosh. Current tests in India include those for arsenic and fluoride, which are among the more serious contaminants that pose risks to human health.


Source:  

World Tobacco Day: One in three cops addicted to any form of tobacco in Mumbai, says Study [Free Press Journal, 31/05/2018]

World Tobacco Day: One in three cops addicted to any form of tobacco in Mumbai, says Study

— By Swapnil Mishra, Free Press Journal, May 31, 2018 07:44 am.

According to the study conducted by the doctors of Government Dental College, Mumbai, revealed one out of three policeman are addicted of consuming ...

Mumbai: According to the study conducted by the doctors of Government Dental College, Mumbai, revealed one out of three policeman are addicted of consuming tobacco in any form. Looking at the statistics, the researchers on the eve of World Tobacco Day, have appealed the state government to reduce tobacco consumption in policemen to in turn prevent threats of oral cancer.

Dr Akshay Chaturmohta, who was the part of the survey said due to long working hours policeman consume tobacco so that they can be awake at night when they are on duty. The study was published in ‘Advanced Human Biology’. “More than two thousand policemen from Mumbai were surveyed for the study, which showed 34 per cent were addicted to tobacco products, 12.3 per cent to smoking and 6.1 per cent to pan apart from 20 per cent being addicted to alcohol consumption,” added Dr Akshay.

The city-based psychiatrist said they have counselled many police officers who wanted to quit tobacco-eating, but most of the time they come late for counselling when they are too addicted. “Despite people know consuming tobacco in any form can cause cancer though they consume it. Once they are addicted it is hard for them to leave for which policeman comes for counselling,” said Dr Sagar Mundada, Pyschiatrist. According to data released by the Foundation for a Smoke-Free World showed that nearly 50 per cent of people attempt quit tobacco but they could not do it.

“Despite nearly seven of 10 smokers in India being aware that smoking is dangerous,” added doctor. Dr Bipeenchandra Bhamre, Cardio-Thoracic Surgeon at Sir H N Reliance Foundation Hospital and Research Center said, “Smoking increases the risk of developing cardiovascular diseases, which includes coronary heart disease and stroke. Smokers are almost twice as likely to have a heart attack compared with people who have never smoked.”

Source: http://www.freepressjournal.in/news/mumbai/page/2 (31/05/2018)

Going to church could help you live longer, study says

Going to church could help you live longer, study says

By Carina Storrs, Special to CNN

Updated 1712 GMT (0112 HKT) May 16, 2016

(CNN)Many Americans say they attend church because it helps them stay grounded and gives them spiritual guidance. A new study suggests that regular attendance may also help increase their lifespan.

Researchers looked at data on nearly 75,000 middle-age female nurses in the United States as part of the Nurses' Health Study. The participants answered questions about whether they attended religious services regularly every four years between 1992 and 2012, and about other aspects of their lives over the years.

The researchers found that women who went to church more than once a week had a 33% lower risk of dying during the study period compared with those who said they never went. Less-frequent attendance was also associated with a lower risk of death, as women who attended once a week or less than weekly had 26% and 13% lower risk of death, respectively.

Women who regularly attended religious services also had higher rates of social support and optimism, had lower rates of depression and were less likely to smoke. However, the researchers took into account these differences between churchgoers and non-churchgoers when they calculated the decrease in death rates of 13% to 33%.

Going to church could have a number of additional benefits that could, in turn, improve longevity, but the researchers were not able to examine them with the available data. Attendance could promote self-discipline and a sense of meaning and purpose in life, or it could provide an experience of the transcendent, said Tyler J. VanderWeele, professor of epidemiology in the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. VanderWeele led the new research, which was published Monday in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine.

"Our study suggests that for health, the benefits outweigh the potentially negative effects," such as guilt, anxiety or intolerance, VanderWeele said.

Most of the women in the study were Protestant or Catholic, so it is not clear whether a similar association would be found between religious service attendance and longevity for people of other Christian religions, Judaism or Islam.

The study also did not explore the association in men. Previous research suggests that male churchgoers also benefit, though their decrease in death rate is not as large as among women, VanderWeele said.

"There have been literally thousands of studies" looking at whether religion is good for your health, said Dr. Dan German Blazer II, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Duke University Medical Center. The findings have been mixed about whether aspects of religious devotion such as prayer and spirituality -- such as reading the Bible or other religious literature -- improve longevity.

"The one (aspect) that is significantly more predictive of good health is about religious service attendance," said Blazer, who wrote an editorial about the new study in the same issue of JAMA Internal Medicine.

Most people report that they are spiritual, and it is possible that actually attending religious services is good for their health because they are taking actions that are in line with their beliefs, Blazer said. "You have a more integrated life in this sense." However, this explanation is purely speculative, and studies have not explored this theory, he added.

The suggestion that attending religious services regularly could boost longevity has met with some criticism in the field. Other researchers have pointed out that the relationship could be due to other factors, such as the possibility that healthier people are more likely to go to church, perhaps because they are more mobile.

The main strength of the current study is that the researchers were able to look at whether participants reported attending religious services at several points over many years, making it easier to find out which came first, religious activity or disease and health outcomes, Blazer said.

Nevertheless, Blazer warns that it is important not to make too much of the new findings. "This study does not suggest that clinicians prescribe attending religious services as a way to be more healthy," he said. It was not meant to assess going to church as an actual medical intervention.

On the other hand, the study does suggest that "clinicians who know their patients well and follow them over a period of time, like primary care doctors, inquire when it is appropriate about their religious beliefs and practices," Blazer said. That way, if patients say that attending religious services is important to them, the doctor can help ensure that they maintain a good relationship with their church, temple or mosque.

This attitude about the place of religion in medical care is becoming more common among health care professionals and has been introduced into the curriculum of more and more medical schools, Blazer said.

Source: https://edition.cnn.com/2016/05/16/health/religion-lifespan-health/index.html (18/05/2018)

Love Eating Grilled Meats? They May Make Your Blood Pressure Rise, Warns Study

Love Eating Grilled Meats? They May Make Your Blood Pressure Rise, Warns Study

A new research conducted by Harvard has shown that tucking in well-cooked meats, may up your risk of developing high blood pressure.

Food | NDTV Food Desk | Updated: March 23, 2018 10:55 IST

Highlights

1. A Harvard study has linked high BP to consumption of well-cooked meats.
2. Roasting, broiling and grilling were highlighted as 3 main culprits.
3. High temperature cooking releases a chemical that may up your BP.

Eating a grilled chicken sandwich more often, might not be as 'healthy' as you earlier thought it to be. A new research conducted by Harvard has shown that tucking in well-cooked meats including chicken and fish, may up your risk of developing high blood pressure. The three ways of cooking that were highlighted as culprits by the study included grilling, broiling and roasting. The results were presented at the American Heart Association's Epidemiology and Prevention, Lifestyle and Cardiometabolic Health Scientific Sessions 2018 in New Orleans.
The study showed that people who grilled, roasted or broiled their chicken, beef or fish more than 15 times a month, had 17 per cent more chances of having high blood pressure than those who restricted their well-cooked meat intake to less than four times a month. Overall, for people who preferred their meals well-done, the risk was 15 per cent higher than for those who preferred to eat rarer meats. The reason behind this was the fact that High-temperature cooking releases chemicals that may raise your blood pressure levels.

Increased blood pressure is often a precursor to many cardiovascular diseases. The study looked at the cooking methods of 103,941 men and women, who regularly ate chicken, beef and fish and analysed the development of high blood pressure in their bodies. Lead author of the study, Gang Liu, who is a postdoctoral research student at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston said, "The chemicals produced by cooking meats at high temperatures induce oxidative stress, inflammation and insulin resistance in animal studies, and these pathways may also lead to an elevated risk of developing high blood pressure."

Atherosclerosis or hardening of arterial walls is the underlying process for a lot of heart diseases and its causes include oxidative stress, insulin resistance and inflammation. Liu said: "Our findings suggest that it may help reduce the risk of high blood pressure if you don't eat these foods cooked well done and avoid the use of open-flame and/or high-temperature cooking methods, including grilling/barbequing and broiling." The study is still a preliminary one since it hasn't been published in any peer-reviewed journal yet and hence, must be taken with a pinch of salt.
(With IANS inputs)

Source: https://www.ndtv.com/food/eating-well-cooked-meats-linked-to-increased-risk-of-high-blood-pressure-says-study-1827388 (23.03.2018)

Mental Health Risks to Girls who Spend more than an Hour a Day on Social Media – New Study

Mental Health Risks to Girls who Spend more than an Hour a Day on Social Media – New Study

, March 20, 2018 5.13pm AEDT

Author: Cara Booker,

Research Fellow and Deputy Director of Graduate Studies, Institute for Social and Economic Research, University of Essex

For tweens and early teens, the rise in time spent on Snapchat, WhatsApp, Instagram and other social media is really quite dramatic. Culture minister Matt Hancock recently suggested the government could impose limits on the amount of time children spend on social media. In February, the House of Commons Science and Technology Select Committee launched a new inquiry to examine the health risks to children and young teens of increasing amounts of time on social media.
Our new study set out to look at patterns of behaviour among ten to 15 year olds in the UK, and their levels of well-being, to see if all this time spent online was having a detrimental impact on their mental health. We found that teenage girls are by far the highest users of social media, and those who are using it for more than an hour a day are also at the highest risk of developing well-being problems in later teen years.
We used the youth participants’ data from the UK household longitudinal study, Understanding Society, following almost 10,000 young people from diverse backgrounds across the whole country between 2009 and 2015.
We asked the young people to report on how much time they spent on social media on a “normal school day”. A few reported no internet access or no time spent at all, but some were on it for four hours or more. We found that 10% of ten-year-old girls reported spending one to three hours a day (compared with 7% of boys) and this increased to 43% of girls at age 15 (and 31% of boys).
We assessed two measures of well-being for these young people. The first was a combined score of their answers to questions about satisfaction with schoolwork, friends, family, appearance, school and life as a whole. The second measure was a well-established questionnaire which asked the young people about their social and emotional difficulties.
At age ten, girls who interacted on social media for an hour or more on a school day had worse levels of well-being compared to girls who had lower levels of social media interaction. Additionally, these girls with higher social media interaction at aged ten were more likely to experience more social and emotional difficulties as they got older. While our study was unable to say that the higher level of social media use among young girls directly caused the mental health issues, there was a strong association.
For both boys and girls, levels of happiness decreased between the ages of ten and 15, however the decrease among girls was greater than that of boys.

What makes girls different?

There are number of possible reasons why girls are more affected by social media use than boys. Girls participate in more comparisons of their own lives with those of the people they are friends with or follow. Viewing filtered or photoshopped images and mostly positive posts may lead to feelings of inadequacy and poorer well-being. Girls also feel more pressure to develop and maintain a social media presence than boys. Social media presence requires constant updating and having friends share or like their content. If their perceived popularity decreases over time, there may also be an increase in social and emotional difficulties.
Boys, on the other hand, are much more likely to participate in gaming online and via consoles than they are social media, and that wasn’t covered by our study. Boys’ levels of well-being may be more related to gaming.
So what can be done to help protect young people from the potential damage to their mental health? Social media interaction does not appear to be a short-lived phenomenon. A recent report by the Children’s Commissioner for England, Life in Likes, suggested imploring social media platforms to check underage use and preparing children better for life in a digital age. The recommendations did not discuss potential gender differences; but the findings from our study suggest that boys and girls can have varying responses to high levels of social media interaction.
There have also been calls for the technology industry to look at in-built time limits. Our study really backs this up – the amount of increasing time online is strongly associated with a decline in well-being among the young, especially for girls. Of course, young people need access to the internet for homework, for watching TV and to keep in touch with their mates. But they probably don’t need to spend two, three or four hours chatting, sharing and comparing on social media every school day. 
 

Source: http://theconversation.com/mental-health-risks-to-girls-who-spend-more-than-an-hour-a-day-on-social-media-new-study-93406 (20.03.2018)

60, Not 50, Is The New Middle Age, Study Says

60, Not 50, Is The New Middle Age, Study Says

The Huffington Post, 16/04/2015 10:29 PM IST | Updated 07/12/2017 8:50 AM IST

• Yagana Shah
  

Getty Images/Tetra images RF

Dreading the big 5-0? Fear not. A new study says that 60 -- not 50 -- is the new middle-aged.

Researchers from the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis and Stony Brook University say we've been thinking about old age all wrong, and that age is more than just the number of years you've been roaming the Earth.
"Age can be measured as the time already lived or it can be adjusted taking into account the time left to live," the study's lead author, the IIASA's Sergei Scherbov said in a release. Someone who is 60-years-old today, I would argue is middle-aged. Two hundred years ago, a 60-year-old would be a very old person."
The researchers used projections of Europe's population until the year 2050 to look at how an increasing life expectancy changes the definition of "old." They used different rates of increases, ranging from a stagnant life expectancy to one which grew 1.4 years per decade, to look at the portion of the population who was considered to be old. They looked at both the conventional definition, which considers people over age 65 old, and a new measure, which advances the threshold for old age as overall life expectancy grows.
The findings, published in the journal PLOS ONE, say that as the life expectancy increased with the new measure of old age, the proportion of older people in the population continually fell. The researchers say that we must adjust the threshold we use to determine old age, otherwise the proportion of older people will grow as life expectancy increases.
"What we think of as old has changed over time, and it will need to continue changing in the future as people live longer, healthier lives," Scherbov said.
It's especially important as Americans are living longer than ever. A 2014 survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that in 2012, the U.S. life expectancy reached a record high of 78.8 years. The expectancy was higher for women than men; they also reported that death rates have fallen 1.1 percent since 2011.
Time to rethink aging.

Source: https://www.huffingtonpost.in/entry/60-is-the-new-middle-age_n_7079006