News Item
A new Rice University study published in the Journal of Neuroscience found that socioemotional meanings, including sexual ones, are conveyed in human sweat.
Denise Chen, assistant professor of psychology at Rice, looked at how the brains of female volunteers processed and encoded the smell of sexual sweat from men. The results of the experiment indicated the brain recognizes chemosensory communication, including human sexual sweat.
Scientists have long known that animals use scent to communicate.
Chen's study represents an effort to expand knowledge of how humans’ sense of smell complement their more powerful senses of sight and hearing.
The experiment directly studied natural human sexual sweat using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Nineteen healthy female subjects inhaled olfactory stimuli from four sources, one of which was sweat gathered from sexually aroused males.
The research showed that several parts of the brain are involved in processing the emotional value of the olfactory information. These include the right fusiform region, the right orbitofrontal cortex and the right hypothalamus.
"With the exception of the hypothalamus, neither the orbitofrontal cortex nor the fusiform region is considered to be associated with sexual motivation and behavior," Chen said. "Our results imply that the chemosensory information from natural human sexual sweat is encoded more holistically in the brain rather than specifically for its sexual quality."
Humans are evolved to respond to salient socioemotional information.
Distinctive neural mechanisms underlie the processing of emotions in facial and vocal expressions. The findings help explain the neural mechanism for human social chemosignals.
The understanding of human smell at the neural level is still at the beginning stage. The present work is the first fMRI study of human social chemosignals.
The research, co-authored by Chen and Wen Zhou, graduate student in the Psychology Department, appeared in the December 31 issue of Journal of Neuroscience.
The research was supported in part by the National Institutes of Health.
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Friday, January 9, 2009
Tuesday, January 6, 2009
Smoking during pregnancy can lead to aggressive kids
News Item
Women who smoke during pregnancy risk delivering aggressive kids according to a new Canada-Netherlands study published in the journal Development and Psychopathology. While previous studies have shown that smoking during gestation causes low birth weight, this research shows mothers who light up during pregnancy can predispose their offspring to an additional risk: violent behaviour.
What’s more, the research team found the risk of giving birth to aggressive children increases among smoking mothers whose annual familial income is lower than $40,000. Another risk factor for aggressive behaviour in offspring was smoking mothers with a history of antisocial behaviour: run-ins with the law, high school drop-outs and illegal drug use.
Psychiatry professor and researcher Jean Séguin, of the Université de Montréal and Sainte-Justine Hospital Research Center, co-authored the study with postdoctoral fellow Stephan C. J. Huijbregts, now a researcher at Leiden University in the Netherlands, as well as colleagues from Université Laval and McGill University in Canada.
“Mothers-to-be whose lives have been marked by anti-social behaviour have a 67 percent chance to have a physically aggressive child if they smoke 10 cigarettes a day while pregnant, compared with 16 percent for those who are non-smokers or who smoke fewer than 10 cigarettes a day,” says Dr. Séguin. “Smoking also seems to be an aggravating factor, although less pronounced, in mothers whose anti-social behaviour is negligible or zero.”
The research was carried out as part of a wider investigation of children, the Quebec Longitudinal Study, which examined behaviors of 1,745 children between the age of 18 months to three and a half years. Aggressive offspring were characterized by their mothers as quick to hit, bite, kick, fight and bully others.
Although physical aggression is most common in preschool children, the researchers identified other prenatal factors associated with aggressive behaviour in children: mothers who are younger than 21, who smoke and who coerce their children to behave. The researchers also found that children from families who earned less than $40,000 per year were at an increased risk for aggressive behaviour.
In this category of families, heavy smokers had 40 percent chance of having highly aggressive children, compared with 25 percent for other mothers who were moderate or non-smokers. When income was greater than $40,000 annually, the gap between heavy smokers and others fell to 8 percent.
The effect of smoking on aggression in offspring remained significant – even when other factors were removed such as divorce, depression, maternal education and the mother’s age during pregnancy. Smoking during pregnancy is one factor that could be curbed to decrease risks of aggression and violent behaviour.
The research team recommends that low-income women, who are heavy smokers and who have a history of anti-social behaviour become a screening criterion for prenatal testing to determine what families need extra support to prevent development of aggressive behaviour.
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Women who smoke during pregnancy risk delivering aggressive kids according to a new Canada-Netherlands study published in the journal Development and Psychopathology. While previous studies have shown that smoking during gestation causes low birth weight, this research shows mothers who light up during pregnancy can predispose their offspring to an additional risk: violent behaviour.
What’s more, the research team found the risk of giving birth to aggressive children increases among smoking mothers whose annual familial income is lower than $40,000. Another risk factor for aggressive behaviour in offspring was smoking mothers with a history of antisocial behaviour: run-ins with the law, high school drop-outs and illegal drug use.
Psychiatry professor and researcher Jean Séguin, of the Université de Montréal and Sainte-Justine Hospital Research Center, co-authored the study with postdoctoral fellow Stephan C. J. Huijbregts, now a researcher at Leiden University in the Netherlands, as well as colleagues from Université Laval and McGill University in Canada.
“Mothers-to-be whose lives have been marked by anti-social behaviour have a 67 percent chance to have a physically aggressive child if they smoke 10 cigarettes a day while pregnant, compared with 16 percent for those who are non-smokers or who smoke fewer than 10 cigarettes a day,” says Dr. Séguin. “Smoking also seems to be an aggravating factor, although less pronounced, in mothers whose anti-social behaviour is negligible or zero.”
The research was carried out as part of a wider investigation of children, the Quebec Longitudinal Study, which examined behaviors of 1,745 children between the age of 18 months to three and a half years. Aggressive offspring were characterized by their mothers as quick to hit, bite, kick, fight and bully others.
Although physical aggression is most common in preschool children, the researchers identified other prenatal factors associated with aggressive behaviour in children: mothers who are younger than 21, who smoke and who coerce their children to behave. The researchers also found that children from families who earned less than $40,000 per year were at an increased risk for aggressive behaviour.
In this category of families, heavy smokers had 40 percent chance of having highly aggressive children, compared with 25 percent for other mothers who were moderate or non-smokers. When income was greater than $40,000 annually, the gap between heavy smokers and others fell to 8 percent.
The effect of smoking on aggression in offspring remained significant – even when other factors were removed such as divorce, depression, maternal education and the mother’s age during pregnancy. Smoking during pregnancy is one factor that could be curbed to decrease risks of aggression and violent behaviour.
The research team recommends that low-income women, who are heavy smokers and who have a history of anti-social behaviour become a screening criterion for prenatal testing to determine what families need extra support to prevent development of aggressive behaviour.
Read more!
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