Scientists from UCLA, UC San Francisco, Costa Rica and Colombia take steps to identify genetic component to mental illness
Scientists know there is a strong genetic component to bipolar disorder, but they have had an extremely difficult time identifying the genes that cause it. So, in an effort to better understand the illness’s genetic causes, researchers at UCLA tried a new approach. (more…)
UCLA anthropologists study how, why we read into potential peril
They went boating alone without life vests and gave no thought to shimmying up very tall coconut trees.
And although they were only figments of a writer’s imagination, the fictional adventurers helped provide new insight into how humans, especially men, gauge the threat of a potential adversary. Those reading the stories — dozens of residents of a small village on the Fijian island of Yasawa — judged the characters to be risk-seekers. (more…)
A genetic pathway involving proteins in the endosomes of cells appears to be misregulated in the brains of children with autism, according to a newly published statistical analysis in the journal Molecular Psychiatry. Previously the genes were shown to cause rare forms of the disease but the new study suggests they have a wider role.
PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — A new study finds that two genes individually associated with rare autism-related disorders are also jointly linked to more general forms of autism. The finding suggests a new genetic pathway to investigate in general autism research. (more…)
The stark contrast between America’s “me-first” culture and the “collective-good” mentality in China is reflected in the two countries’ use of social networking sites, according to a new study led by a Michigan State University scholar.
U.S. citizens spend more time on the networking sites, consider them to be more important and have more “friends” on the sites, the research found. The most popular social networking site in the United States is Facebook; in China, two of the most popular sites are RenRen and Qzone. (more…)
ANN ARBOR, Mich.— Texting while driving is a serious threat to public safety, but a new University of Michigan study suggests that we might not be aware of our actions.
U-M researchers found that texting while driving is predicted by a person’s level of “habit”—more so than how much someone texts.
When people check their cell phones without thinking about it, the habit represents a type of automatic behavior, or automaticity, the researchers say. Automaticity, which was the key variable in the study, is triggered by situational cues and lacks control, awareness, intention and attention. (more…)
*Study of Chinese citizens says jobs more important than salary when it comes to pro-environmental behavior*
People with good jobs found in large cities are more likely to engage in pro-environmental activities. So says a new study of China’s environmental behavior published this week in the British journal Environmental Conservation.
For the first time, scientists weighed employment and leadership when considering how people act regarding their natural surroundings. They found the status and political power of companies in cities such as Beijing, Shanghai and Tianjin strongly influence the conservation practices of their employees. (more…)
The ability to tolerate aggression is partly genetic, UCLA life scientists report in the first study to demonstrate a genetic component to a social network trait in a non-human population.
“The ability to tolerate aggression is passed on across generations; there is genetic variation in the ability to tolerate aggression,” said the study co-author Daniel T. Blumstein, professor and chair of ecology and evolutionary biology at UCLA.
Blumstein, a leader in the field of applying social network statistics to animals, and his colleagues studied four groups of yellow-bellied marmots, which are related to squirrels, over six years in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. Each group included 15 to 30 marmots. (more…)
Harvard graduate Kevin Lewis (left) and UCLA sociologist Andreas Wimmer are co-authors of a new Facebook study on how college students form friendships. Image credit: Luis Gomez
Race may not be as important as previously thought in determining who buddies up with whom, suggests a new UCLA–Harvard University study of American college students on the social networking site Facebook.
“Sociologists have long maintained that race is the strongest predictor of whether two Americans will socialize,” said Andreas Wimmer, the study’s lead author and a sociologist at UCLA. “But we’ve found that birds of a feather don’t always flock together. Whom you get to know in your everyday life, where you live, and your country of origin or social class can provide stronger grounds for forging friendships than a shared racial background.”
“We’ve been able to show that just because two people of the same racial background are hanging out together, it’s not necessarily because they share the same racial background,” said co-author Kevin Lewis, a Harvard graduate student in sociology. (more…)
