Recent research published online in the journal Chemosensory Perception suggests that anxious men have a heightened sense of smell, presumably to detect predators or disease-carriers.

The study entitled Enhanced Olfactory Sensory Perception of Threat in Anxiety: An Event-Related fMRI Study tested 14 mens’ perception of odors, including bad ones.  In some trials, the men were in an MRI scanner, and odors were faint.

According to Scientific American, participants were simply asked if they could detect a scent, yes or no.  In addition, the subjects were also tested for anxiety: their breathing and skin electrical conductivity were measured, as in a lie detector.

The results?  More anxious men were significantly better at detecting lower concentrations of scents, particularly nasty ones. This suggests that anxiety evolved as an evolutionary trait to protect humans from predators.

What do you think about the results of this study? Do you think the findings make logical sense?

You can listen to the complete podcast from Scientific American here.

Technology has proven a life easing positive advancement for many individuals and an insurmountable web of confusion  for others.  There are those of us who can and those of us who simply can’t when it comes to the internet and social media.

It is clear that the divide is mostly between the generations who were only introduced to advanced Internet technology and social media in their adult lives and the generation who has grown up immersed in the world of social media, iPhones and the world wide net.

Take a look at the video below of a baby who can’t even talk but can use an iPad as if it were second nature. How does this video make you feel?

Click here to view the embedded video.

How does all this interaction with computers, the Internet, and social media such as Facebook
and Twitter really affect us especially the children who know no other way of living?

 WebProNews/Social Media has reported on the affect of social media on the world’s youth.

A study by Time Inc. compared two groups, those who were born into the world of Internet technology “Digital Natives” and those who were not “Digital Immigrants“.

The purpose of the study was to show how the proliferation of digital devices and platforms affect consumer consumption habits and whether different generations engage differently with various media platforms.

Which generation are you from? 

Interesting but perhaps not surprising, the study found that Digital Natives (DN’s) are much more connected with their technological devices than Digital Immigrants and this has various impacts on their behavior.

DN’s tend to switch their attention between media platforms (i.e. TVs, magazines, tablets, smartphones or channels within platforms) 27 times per hour, about every other minute and spend more time using multiple media platforms simultaneously, which was linked to a constrained emotional engagement with content.  That is they experience fewer highs and lows of emotional response and as a result.

The main point, if you have grown up with the Internet and social media then you are in some sense addicted to the various forms of social outlets and often use those to regulate your mood. They down side of this, well as soon as they grow tired or bored, Digital Natives turn their attention to something new.

What do you think about the results of this study? 

Are the effects of being a Digital Native bad? Or do they have necessary advantages?

Americans are a diverse group of people interacting on a daily basis often times in stressful situations.

How different are our cultural stress coping mechanisms and are they working?

The American Psychological Association, APA reports that according to UCLA psychologist Matthew Lieberman, Ph.D., the idea that putting problems into words will ease the emotional impact of those problems even across cultures.

Lieberman took this idea a step further, in 2003, by investigating it with the latest brain imaging technology (fMRIs).  “There’s this idea that putting bad feelings into words can help wash worries away,” he purported.

Lieberman and his colleagues found that social rejection activates a part of the brain that is also stimulated in response to physical pain.

Interestingly, they also found that people who had relatively less activity in that area-and who reported feeling relatively less distress-had more activity in the right ventral lateral prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain associated with verbalizing thoughts and language production.

Their study’s results which were published in Science suggest that “talking it out” can help ease a person’s emotional response to tough situations by suppressing the area of the brain that produces emotional distress.

I can almost hear groans of guys across the world who fear the words “we need to talk” but who will no longer be able to say “Nothing will come of it, or “talking never solves anything”.

On a more recent note, Lieberman and his colleagues conducted another study that will be published in Psychological Science that tests this hypothesis more directly.

They asked 30 participants to view pictures of angry, scared or happy-looking faces. Half of the time the participants tried to match the target face to another picture of a face with a similar expression. The other half of the time, they tried to match the face to a word that correctly labeled its emotion.

Using fMRI, the researchers discovered that when the participants labeled the faces’ emotions using words, they showed less activity in the amygdala-an area of the brain associated with emotional distress.  At the same time, they showed more activity in the right ventral lateral prefrontal cortex-the same language-related area that showed up in their previous study.

This is further evidence that verbalizing an emotion may activate the right ventral lateral prefrontal cortex, which then suppresses the areas of the brain that produce emotional pain.

What are your thoughts on this study?  Does “talking it out” really help the emotional impact of a problem?