And now for something a little different. Here are a few full articles that piqued my interest today, followed by questions that you might consider. For those short on time, blue (or purple, depending on the monitor) text highlights key points. Thought I would share. Thank me later.

When Bad People Are Punished, Men Smile (but Women Don't)
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
Published: January 19, 2006

ROME, Jan. 18 - In "Don Juan" Lord Byron wrote, "Sweet is revenge - especially to women." But a study released Wednesday, bolstered by magnetic resonance imaging, suggests that men may be the more natural avengers.

In the study, when male subjects witnessed people they perceived as bad guys being zapped by a mild electrical shock, their M.R.I. scans lit up in primitive brain areas associated with reward. Their brains' empathy centers remained dull.

Women watching the punishment, in contrast, showed no response in centers associated with pleasure. Even though they also said they did not like the bad guys, their empathy centers still quietly glowed.

The study seems to show for the first time in physical terms what many people probably assume they already know: that women are generally more empathetic than men, and that men take great pleasure in seeing revenge exacted.

Men "expressed more desire for revenge and seemed to feel satisfaction when unfair people were given what they perceived as deserved physical punishment," said Dr. Tania Singer, the lead researcher, of the Wellcome Department of Imaging Neuroscience at University College London.

But far from condemning the male impulse for retribution, Dr. Singer said it had an important social function: "This type of behavior has probably been crucial in the evolution of society as the majority of people in a group are motivated to punish those who cheat on the rest."

The study is part of a growing body of research that is attempting to better understand behavior and emotions by observing simultaneous physiological changes in the brain, a feat now attainable through imaging.

"Imaging is still in its early days but we are transitioning from a descriptive to a more mechanistic type of study," said Dr. Klaas Enno Stephan, a co-author of the paper.

Dr. Singer's team was simply trying to see if the study subjects' degree of empathy correlated with how much they liked or disliked the person being punished. They had not set out to look into sex differences.

To cultivate personal likes and dislikes in their 32 volunteers, they asked them to play an elaborate money strategy game, where both members of a pair would profit if both behaved cooperatively. The ranks of volunteers were infiltrated by actors told to play selfishly.

Volunteers came quickly to "very much like" the partners who were cooperative, while disliking those who hoarded rewards, Dr. Stephan said.

Effectively conditioned to like and dislike their game-playing partners, the 32 subjects were placed in scanners and asked to watch the various partners receive electrical shocks.

On scans, both men and women seemed to feel the pain of partners they liked. But the real surprise came during scans when the subjects viewed the partners they disliked being shocked. "When women saw the shock, they still had an empathetic response, even though it was reduced," Dr. Stephan said. "The men had none at all."

Furthermore, researchers found that the brain's pleasure centers lit up in males when just punishment was meted out.

The researchers cautioned that it was not clear if men and women are born with divergent responses to revenge or if their social experiences generate the responses.

Dr. Singer said larger studies were needed to see if differing responses would be seen in cases involving revenge that did not involve pain. Still, she added, "This investigation would seem to indicate there is a predominant role for men in maintaining justice and issuing punishment."

(source)

Questions:
- Do you think differences in aggressive tendencies between the sexes are mostly genetic of environmental? Based on this study, it appears to be the latter, but could you argue otherwise?

- Is it possible that the particular tests run on these subjects affected the outcome in such a way that gave the reported result? In other words, could there be a built-in bias in this study that relates to money or whatever?

- If you agree with this study's conclusions, then what personality characteristics in males might relate to different levels of unconscious agression?


First Impressions of Beauty May Demonstrate Why the Pretty Prosper
January 18, 2006

PHILADELPHIA -- We might not be able to resist a pretty face after all, according to a report from the University of Pennsylvania. Experiments in which subjects were given a fraction of a second to judge "attractiveness" offered further evidence that our preference for beauty might be hard-wired. People who participated in the studies were also more likely to associate pretty faces with positive traits.

"We're able to judge attractiveness with surprising speed and on the basis of very little information," said Ingrid Olson, a professor in Penn's Department of Psychology and researcher at Penn's Center for Cognitive Neurosciece. "It seems that pretty faces 'prime' our minds to make us more likely to associate the pretty face with a positive emotion."

Olson, along with co-author Christy Marshuetz, of Yale University recently published their findings in the journal Emotion, a publication of the American Psychological Association. The researchers set out to study cognitive processes behind a very real phenomenon: physically attractive people have advantages that unattractive people do not.

"Research has demonstrated time and again that there are tremendous social and economic benefits to being attractive," Olson said. "Attractive people are paid more, are judged more intelligent and will receive more attention in most facets of life.

"This favoritism, while poorly understood, seems to be innate and cross-cultural. Studies suggest that even infants prefer pretty faces," Olson said.

In their report, the researchers describe three experiments to investigate the preference for attractiveness.

The first study tested the idea that beauty can be assessed rapidly by asking study participants to rate faces pictures of non-famous males and females taken from three different high school yearbooks and the Internet shown for .013 seconds on a computer screen.

Although participants reported that they could not see the faces and that they were guessing on each trial, they were able to accurately rate the attractiveness of those faces.

"There are no definite rules to what kind of face can be called beautiful, but we chose faces of either extreme very ugly or very pretty," Olson said. "Seen rapidly, viewers were able to make what amounted to an unconscious, albeit accurate, assessment of physical beauty."

In their second and third experiments, the researchers explored the notion of "priming" whether or not seeing a pretty face makes a viewer more likely to associate that face with positive attributes. The second experiment involved rapidly showing a face on the screen, followed shortly thereafter by a word in white text on a black screen. Participants were instructed to ignore the face and were timed on how quickly they could classify the word as either good or bad. Almost uniformly, response times to good words, such as "laughter" or "happiness," were faster after viewing an attractive face.

"In a way, pretty faces are rewarding; they make us more likely to think good thoughts," said Olson. "There are some underlying processes going on in the brain that prejudice us to respond to attractive people better even if we are not aware of it."

They repeated the priming test in a third experiment, this time using images of houses, to see whether the beauty bias is a general phenomenon or one that is limited to socially important stimuli such as faces. Unlike faces, response times to good words were not faster after having viewed an attractive house.

"Faces hold a special power for us, perhaps more so than art or objects," Olson said. "The beauty bias has a real influence upon us, something we should be mindful of when dealing with others."

(source)

Questions:
- Do you agree that physical attractiveness is an unconscious advantage for those who have it? Is it possible that something associated with attractiveness, but which is distinct from it, like fashion or body type, might be more responsible for causing a favorable outcome for the attractive person?

- How subjective is physical attractiveness? Is it mostly objective, as this and other recent studies seem to indicate, or is it mostly subjective, a matter of personal opinion?

- Is physical attractiveness more important than personality or intelligence in achieving those goals that require social interaction?


The Ear's Missing Link
By Elizabeth Pennisi
ScienceNOW Daily News
18 January 2006

Whether a heart, a toe, or a nose, evolutionary biologists are keen to know where our body parts came from. Now they're getting a better idea of how our ears formed thanks to a 370-million-year-old fish, whose jawbone was beginning to resemble a bone found in our middle ear.

Before we used the middle ear to amplify and transmit sound, fish used its components to breathe. Over time, a tube called a spiracle, which connects the gills to the water outside, evolved into a chamber behind the eardrum. And a bony strut that connects a fish's jaw hinge to the brain case became one of three tiny bones in this chamber.

The early stages of this transition have now been studied by Martin Brazeau, a graduate student in evolutionary biology at Uppsala University, Sweden, and his advisor, paleontologist Per Ahlberg. The researchers analyzed a skull of Panderichthys--an ancient fish that evolved at about the same time as tetrapods (early four-legged land-dwellers) from a common ancestor. The team compared the fish's bones and head structure to fossils of a more primitive fish and an early tetrapod.

To their surprise, the researchers discovered that Panderichthys wasn't very fishlike when it came to the spiracle and the bony strut. Its strut was much smaller and finer than those of the other fish studied were. And the spiracle was much larger than expected. Thanks to these modifications, the bony strut began to resemble the stapes, the middle ear bone that derived from it. "Our work overturns the previously held notion that Panderichthys was primitively fishlike in [what became] the middle ear region," says Brazeau. The findings indicate that these stages of ear evolution were set 10 million years before tetrapods appeared, the team reports 19 January in Nature.

The work "is filling an evolutionary gap," says paleontologist Tom Rich from Museum Victoria in Melbourne, Australia. Zhe-Xi Luo, a vertebrate paleontologist from the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, adds: "We now have a finer understanding about exactly where and when these features started to appear. They occurred earlier than we thought."

(source)

Questions:
- Isn't this just freaking awesome?