The “Science” Of Physical Attractiveness: Now You Can Participate In The Research Online
Scientists in Australia and Hong Kong have conducted a comprehensive study to discover how different body measurements correspond with ratings of female attractiveness.
The study, published in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology, found that across cultural divides young, tall and long armed women were considered the most attractive.
“Physical attractiveness is an important determining factor for evolutionary, social and economic success,” said lead author Robert Brooks from the University of New South Wales. “The dimensions of someone’s body can tell observers if that person is suitable as a potential mate, a long term partner or perhaps the threat they pose as a sexual competitor.”
Traditional studies of attractiveness have been bound to the Darwinian idea of natural selection, which argues that an individual will always choose the best possible mate that circumstances will allow. Such studies have focused on torso, waist, bust and hip measurements. In this study the team measured the attractiveness of scans of 96 bodies of Chinese women who were either students or volunteers, aged between 20–49 years of age.
Videos of the models were shown to a sample of 92 Australian adults, 40 men and 52 women, aged between 18 to 58 years of age, and mostly of European descent. They then compared the attractiveness ratings given by the Australian group to the ratings from a group in Hong Kong to avoid cultural bias.
Both sample groups were asked to rate the models’ attractiveness on a 7 point scale; on average the raters took just 5.35 seconds to rate each model. The team then explored the statistical results, focusing on age, body weight and a range of length and girth measurements.
The results showed that there was a strong level of agreement between the 4 groups of Australian men and women, and Hong Kong men and women, with scans of younger, taller and lighter women being rated as more attractive. Women with narrow waists, especially relative to their height, were also considered much more attractive.
The study also revealed that BMI (Body mass index) and HWR (Hip to waist ratio) were both strong predictors of attractiveness. Scans of taller women who had longer arms were also rated highly, however leg size did not contribute significantly to the ratings.
“Our results showed consistent attractiveness ratings by men and women and by Hong Kong Chinese and Australian raters, suggesting considerable cross cultural consistency,” concluded Brooks. “In part this may be due to shared media experiences. Nonetheless when models are stripped of their most obvious racial and cultural features, the features that make bodies attractive tend to be shared by men and women across cultural divides.”
Brooks and his colleagues have taken their studies of the complexities of male and female attractiveness online at www.bodylab.biz.
Source: Wiley Blackwell
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A Spoonful Of Sugar DOES Makes The Medicine Go Down! Sweet Solutions Reduce Kids Experience Of Pain From Needles
Infants who receive sweet solutions before being immunised experience less pain and are more comfortable, reveals research published ahead of print in the Archives of Disease in Childhood.
Healthcare professionals should consider giving infants aged 1–12 months a sweet solution of sucrose or glucose before immunising a child, the international team of researchers recommended, because of the child’s improved reaction to injections.
Existing research shows the effectiveness of giving newborn infants and those beyond the newborn period, a small amount (e.g. a few drops to about half a teaspoon) of sucrose and glucose as analgesics during minor painful procedures.
Little is known, however, about the effect of such solutions on pain, so a team of researchers from Toronto in Canada, Melbourne in Australia and Sao Paulo in Brazil, funded by a Canadian Institutes of Health Research Knowledge Synthesis grant, collected the findings from 14 relevant trials involving 1,674 injections given to children aged 1–12 months.
They found that giving a child a small amount of sweet solution, compared to water or no treatment moderately decreased crying in the child during or following immunisation in 13 of the 14 studies (92.9%).
The authors conclude that infants aged 1–12 months given sucrose or glucose before immunisation had cried less often and for less time.
The amount of glucose or sucrose given made a difference and the researchers found that infants receiving 30% glucose in some trials were almost half as likely to cry following immunisation.
The researchers could not identify the ideal dose of sucrose or glucose because of the variety of volumes and concentrations used in the various trials.
Analgesic effects of sweet solutions given to older infants were more moderate than those in newborn infants.
They conclude: “Healthcare professionals responsible for administering immunisations should consider using sucrose or glucose during painful procedures.
“This information is important for healthcare professionals working with infants in both inpatient and out-patient settings, as sweet solutions are readily available, have a very short onset of time to analgesia, are inexpensive and are easy to administer.”
Source: Eurekalert
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Down By The River: 5 Minutes Of “Green Exercise” Boosts Your Mood
Just five minutes of exercise a day in the great outdoors can improve mental health, according to a new study, and policymakers should encourage more people to spend time in parks and gardens.
Read The Original Article (PDF)
Researchers from the University of Essex found that as little as five minutes of a “green activity” such as walking, gardening, cycling or farming can boost mood and self esteem.
“We believe that there would be a large potential benefit to individuals, society and to the costs of the health service if all groups of people were to self-medicate more with green exercise,” Barton said in a statement about the study, which was published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology.
Barton and Pretty looked at data from 1,252 people of different ages, genders and mental health status taken from 10 existing studies in Britain.
They analyzed activities such as walking, gardening, cycling, fishing, boating, horse-riding and farming.
They found that the greatest health changes occurred in the young and the mentally ill, although people of all ages and social groups benefited. The largest positive effect on self-esteem came from a five-minute dose of “green exercise.”
All natural environments were beneficial, including parks in towns or cities, they said, but green areas with water appeared to have a more positive effect.
Read The Original Article (PDF)
Source: msnbc
Compulsive Collecting: Finding Hope In The Misunderstood Mess of Hoarding
Compulsive collecting or Hoarding is a misunderstood and debilitating mental health issue. Many psychologists and counsellors never see someone with this condition as they very rarely present for help. This article from an Australian newspaper provides an excellent overview of the condition and issues underlying hoarding, and I have included links to two brilliant books co-authored by the researchers discussed in the article, who have developed a wholistic and novel approach to it’s treatment.
Credit: Kate Benson, Sydney Morning Herald April 8 2010
They may dress well or hold down a good job. But hoarders are unhappy people who suffer from a debilitating condition.
Every suburb has one. The elderly woman weaving through an overgrown backyard full of cardboard boxes, old tyres and discarded furniture. Cats perch on every surface; kittens roll about among the rusted drums and long grass.
Inside, behind closed curtains, the rooms are piled high with papers, cups, plates and bottles. Broken toys, old clothes and shopping bags spill across kitchen benches and floor, smothering the stove and filling the sink, neither of which has been used in years.
The stench of cat faeces, urine and food scraps fill the house.
To her neighbours, she is an oddity. Or a pest, bringing down house values and encouraging vermin.
But to therapists she is one of a growing band across Australia suffering from a debilitating condition known as compulsive hoarding, where people feel a need to collect and store items that seem useless to others.
Their homes become havens of insurmountable clutter and junk, often leaving them unable to sleep in their beds or use appliances. Many end up with electricity or gas supplies disconnected or their fridge and washing machines unusable because they fear their lifestyle will be revealed if they contact a tradesmen to make repairs.
This secrecy and shame make it difficult to know exactly how many people have the disorder.
Some experts think between 200,000 and 500,000 Australians compulsively hoard, but others put the figure closer to 800,000.
“It’s a sleeping giant,” Chris Mogan, a clinical psychologist and expert on hoarding, says. “There is no systematic estimate of how many hoarders there are in any Australian setting. I suspect there are many, many more out there than we are aware of.”
Louise Newman, the president of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists, agrees.
“I’ve only seen one case in my career [because] these people usually only come to light when the council steps in and orders a clean-up. Hoarders desperately want to keep hoarding. They don’t want to be stopped.”
There is little research on the condition in Australia and not much in the way of funding or treatment programs, but experts are hopeful hoarding will be included in the next (fifth) edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the bible used by mental health experts to diagnose psychiatric conditions.
Many sufferers fall between the cracks because hoarding is not a clinical diagnosis in its own right, but is seen more as an offshoot of obsessive compulsive disorder, muddled with depression, anxiety, panic disorder and low self-esteem.
“But it is different to OCD and once we get it in the DSM-V, therapists, psychiatrists, psychologists and social workers can then be trained in the management of it [and] we can attract funding for research,” Mogan says.
Jessica Grisham, a clinical psychologist who specialises in obsessive compulsive disorder, also believes compulsive hoarding should be included in the next edition as it requires specialised treatment.
She cites recent neural imaging studies in the US that showed that different parts of the brain were activated in hoarders than in obsessive compulsive disorder patients.
Mogan and Grisham agree that cognitive behaviour therapy, where sufferers are slowly taught to change their thought patterns, is more effective than medication alone.
But hoarders responded better to a specially adapted version of the therapy, developed by the American hoarding experts Gail Steketee and Randy Frost. It had been achieving success with about 60 per cent of hoarders – far more than standard cognitive behaviour therapy.
“But it has to be a long-term project. You don’t go in to someone’s place and do a sudden excavation against their will,” Grisham says.
“That’s a violation and it’s very traumatic for them. It might make great TV, but it’s not good clinically.”
Mogan agrees. A pay TV show, Hoarders, was damaging to the public’s understanding of the illness, because it focused on forcefully cleaning houses in three days.
“Within six to 12 months that house will be recluttered because it is a compulsion … they suffer a lot of grief after things are taken away.”
Mogan makes weekly home visits to hoarders, and focuses on getting them to reduce the associated dangers by ensuring their home has two exits for safety, and working appliances and smoke alarms.
“Just as we do with drugs and alcohol, we’re into harm minimisation. Once the house is safe, we gradually set more goals. If they are comfortable with that, they will continue to stay in touch and not reject us.”
Sometimes the problem extends beyond mounds of paperwork and clothes. Mogan and Grisham know patients who hoarded urine or fingernail clippings. Some stored their own faeces or collected one particular item, such as bicycles. One sufferer was hoarding so much junk, the only access to the house was a 30-centimetre gap at the top of the front door.
But for Allie Jalbert, of the RSPCA, the most distressing hoarders are those who keep scores of cats and dogs, all battling for attention and food on a crowded suburban block.
She has been calling for years to have hoarding classified as an illness in its own right to allow more people to receive treatment and put an end to the 100 per cent recidivism rate.
“Often, we find that hoarders might be treated for peripheral symptoms such as anxiety or depression, but their core problem, the hoarding, is not addressed. So once we have cleaned out the house, they reoffend, which is very, very frustrating for everyone involved,” Jalbert says.
Some people threatened suicide and had to be removed by police when faced with the prospect of giving up their animals or clutter.
“There’s a mixed bag of emotion when you deal with hoarders. Firstly, there is the concern for your personal safety but there is also a degree of empathy because often these people are quite emotional and attached to the animals. But it’s quite frustrating to see animals living in such horrific situations,” she says.
“I’ve seen bathtubs full of faeces and rubbish, sinks that no longer work, homes with no heating or cooling. Sometimes it’s quite an overwhelming experience.”
Who develops the condition and why?
Some studies have shown that many hoarders have been brought up in households where chaos reigned. Some were neglected as children and witnessed pets being treated poorly.
Mogan accepts the aetiology is mostly unknown, but cites an Australian study that found sufferers reported failing to connect with their parents or growing up in households lacking emotional warmth.
“The lack of attachment causes them to become ambivalent about their identity and about other people. As a compensatory mechanism, they link with things, which they find more compelling, more predictable and dependable and less rejecting.”
But Grisham believes there is no real trigger, apart from children of hoarders being rewarded for saving things and getting punished for discarding. “Sometimes there is a traumatic head injury but those cases are very rare.”
The condition affects slightly more women than men but is found across all occupations, age groups and ethnicities. “And they are in relationships,” Mogan says. “Albeit strained ones.
“Some are going out to work, but they make sure no one comes to their house. They’re not agoraphobic. On the contrary, many hoarders go out a lot to escape. But their children’s lives can’t be normalised because they can never sit down for a meal or find space to do homework. It’s a real impost on the family experience.”
Mogan runs group therapy sessions in Melbourne and says that many patients do want to be cured.
“This condition is a disability and the source of quite a lot of human suffering and neglect. A lot of these people are quite relieved to get help.”
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Landmark US study finds Australia’s Triple P-Positive Parenting program lowers child abuse injuries and fosters placements
This news article from the University Of Queensland News pages is very exciting, as I was involved in the original research of the efficacy of Triple P as a graduate student in the early ’90’s!
A landmark US study has found that The University of Queensland’s Triple P – Positive Parenting Program can significantly lower rates of child abuse injuries and foster care placements when offered to parents community-wide.
Results of the five-year study, which was funded by the prestigious Center for Disease Control and Prevention and led by Dr Ron Prinz at the University of South Carolina, were published today in the online edition of the Prevention Science journal.
It is the first large-scale study to show that providing all families – not just families at risk – with access to proven parenting information and support can reduce rates of child maltreatment.
The study found that making Triple P available to all parents led to significantly lower rates of confirmed child abuse, fewer out-of-home placements and fewer hospitalisations from child abuse injuries, when compared to communities without access to Triple P.
Researchers estimate for every 100,000 children under the age of eight, the results could translate annually into 688 fewer cases of child maltreatment, 240 fewer children in care and 60 fewer children being admitted to hospital or emergency departments with abuse injuries.
Study co-author, UQ’s Professor Matt Sanders said the research added to the already-strong evidence base of Triple P.
“We already know Triple P can alleviate parents’ stress and depression and help prevent and reduce child emotional and behavioural problems,” said Professor Sanders, who is the founder of Triple P and director of the Parenting and Family Support Centre at The University of Queensland.
“But this research shows that by providing all parents – not just those at risk – with parenting support through evidence-based programs, we can have a major impact on child maltreatment.
“We can hold back the growth in child abuse, keep kids out of foster care and in their own homes and see fewer injured children in hospitals.”
The US study was conducted in 18 counties in South Carolina, nine of which were chosen randomly to receive Triple P. Parents of children from birth to 12 years could easily access Triple P information through a variety of methods, include mainstream media, brief public seminars and trained counsellors at clinics, schools, churches and community centres.
“We would expect similar results in Australia if all families here were offered easy access to Triple P.
“Parents are looking for practical solutions to parenting problems that work,” Professor Sanders said.
The CDC chose Triple P as its preferred parenting method for the study because of its solid evidence base and its flexibility for parents seeking support.
Triple P was developed at The University of Queensland by Professor Sanders and colleagues and is based on 30 years’ clinical research. The program is now used by governments and health authorities in 17 countries – The United States, England, Scotland, Ireland, Canada, Sweden, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Iran, Japan, Germany, Belgium, Singapore, Switzerland, The Netherlands, Curacao and Australia
(Sourced from http://www.uq.edu.au/news/)