Category: Persuasion

The compounds found in this hot drink may provide new ways of treating high blood pressure.

Both black and green tea contain specific compounds that cause blood vessels to relax and widen, leading to lower blood pressure.

The antihypertensive properties of tea could provide promising treatment candidates for lowering blood pressure, scientists predict.

Tea leaves contain epigallocatechin-3-gallate and epicatechin gallate flavonoids, members of the catechin family.

A study found that these catechins can activate KCNQ5 which in turn causes blood vessels to relax.

KCNQ5 is a potassium channel found in the smooth muscle of blood vessels.

The catechins are antioxidants which have been shown to be effective against cancer and cardiovascular disease.

Professor Geoffrey Abbott, the study’s lead author, explained:

“We found by using computer modeling and mutagenesis studies that specific catechins bind to the foot of the voltage sensor, which is the part of KCNQ5 that allows the channel to open in response to cellular excitation.

This binding allows the channel to open much more easily and earlier in the cellular excitation process.”

Nearly one-in-three of the adult population have high blood pressure which is the leading risk factor for cardiovascular disease and premature death across the world.

Therefore, finding ways to treat this condition would save lives.

Past studies have suggested that drinking tea can consistently lower blood pressure in small amounts.

Understanding the effect of catechins on KCNQ5 can help with the development of anti-hypertensive drugs with higher efficacy.

Many countries, such as the USA and the UK, drink tea with milk but the antihypertensive benefits of tea may be reduced when it is mixed with milk.

The research team experimented with this idea and found that when milk was added to black tea it blocked the activation of KCNQ5.

However, Professor Abbott thinks that the human body will react differently:

“We don’t believe this means one needs to avoid milk when drinking tea to take advantage of the beneficial properties of tea.

We are confident that the environment in the human stomach will separate the catechins from the proteins and other molecules in milk that would otherwise block catechins’ beneficial effects.”

Moreover, the team has examined the effect of temperature on tea and found that at 35 °C the tea’s composition changes, giving greater effects on KCNQ5 activation.

Professor Abbott explained:

“Regardless of whether tea is consumed iced or hot, this temperature is achieved after tea is drunk, as human body temperature is about 37 degrees Celsius.

Thus, simply by drinking tea we activate its beneficial, antihypertensive properties.”

KCNQ5 is also expressed in the brain, playing a role in the regulation of neuronal function.

Mutations in KCNQ5 gene variants stops its channel working properly, causing brain disorders known as epileptic encephalopathy (seizures).

However, catechins have the ability to pass through the blood-brain barrier and activate KCNQ5.

This discovery might help scientists to develop a treatment for fixing broken KCNQ5 channels and amend brain sensitivity regarding seizure.

The study was published in the journal Cellular Physiology and Biochemistry (Redford et al., 2021).

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Misattribution of a memory is when some original true aspect of a memory becomes distorted through time, space or circumstances.

Misattribution of memory is a psychological phenomenon that involves the creation of memories that are false in some way.

Sometimes known as source misattribution, misattribution of memory sometimes involves false memories, sometimes when forgotten memories return (cryptomnesia) and also when confusing the source of memories.

However, it is best explained with a true story…

Example of misattribution

One evening in 1975 an unsuspecting Australian psychologist, Donald M. Thomson, walked into a television studio to discuss the psychology of eyewitness testimony.

Little did he know that at the very moment he was discussing how people can best remember the faces of criminals, there was someone encoding his own face as a rapist.

The day after the television broadcast Thomson was picked up by local police.

He was told that last night a woman was raped and left unconscious in her apartment. She had named Thomson as her attacker.

Thomson was shocked, but had a watertight alibi. He had been on television at the time of the attack and in the presence of the assistant commissioner of police.

It seemed that the victim had been watching Thomson on television just prior to being attacked.

She had then confused his face with that of her attacker.

That a psychologist talking about identifying the faces of criminals should be the subject of just such a gross memory failure – and at the very moment he was publicly explaining it – is an irony hard to ignore.

Donald Thompson was completely exonerated but many others have not been so lucky.

Gary Wells at Iowa State University and colleagues have identified 40 different US miscarriages of justice that have relied on eye-witness testimony (Wells et al., 1998).

Many of these falsely convicted people served many years in prison, some even facing death sentences.

Donald Thomson’s ordeal, though, is a perfect example of Harvard psychologist Daniel L. Schacter’s fourth sin of memory (Schacter, 1999).

Unlike the first three sins, which all involve being unable to access memories, this is the first sin that involves the creation of memories that are false in some way.

When a memory is ‘misattributed’ some original true aspect of a memory becomes distorted through time, space or circumstances.

Daily misattribution

While misattributions can have disastrous consequences, most are not so dramatic in everyday circumstances.

Like the other sins of memory, misattributions are probably a daily occurrence for most people.

Some examples that have been studied in the lab are:

• Misattributing the source of memories. People regularly say they read something in the newspaper, when actually a friend told them or they saw it in an advert. In one study participants with ‘normal’ memories regularly made the mistake of thinking they had acquired a trivial fact from a newspaper, when actually the experimenters had supplied it (Schacter, Harbluk, & McLachlan, 1984).
• Misattributing a face to the wrong context. This is exactly what happened to Donald Thomson. Studies have shown that memories can become blended together, so that faces and circumstances are merged.
• Misattributing an imagined event to…

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The cheerleader effect is that people appear more attractive in a group. It is explained by the averaging effect of the group.

The so-called ‘cheerleader effect’ is the phenomenon that people seem more attractive when they are in a group than when they are alone.

At least, so urban legend has it.

But now the cheerleader effect has scientific backing from a study published recently in Psychological Science (Walker & Vul, 2013).

In fact, the study finds that both men and women are perceived as more attractive when they are in a group than when alone.

Explaining the cheerleader effect

The effect is the result of the way we look at groups and what people, on average, deem an attractive face.

Generally people find ‘average’ faces most attractive.

When psychologists say ‘average’ in this sense, they mean if you average out the faces of lots of different people.

They don’t mean people who are average-looking.

Lead author of the study, Drew Walker, explains:

“Average faces are more attractive, likely due to the averaging out of unattractive idiosyncrasies.

Perhaps it’s like Tolstoy’s families: Beautiful people are all alike, but every unattractive person is unattractive in their own way.”

The cheerleader effect comes about, then, because when we look at a group of people, we see them as a group, and our brains average out their facial features.

In the study, people’s faces were shown to participants either alone or in group photos.

Sure enough, both men and women were rated more highly when presented in a group than when alone.

The effect was small but still noticeable.

The study’s co-author, Edward Vul, joked:

“The effect is definitely small, but some of us need all the help we can get.”

This leads to the idea that you might try to hang out with people whose ‘less average’ features complement your own.

The authors hint at some future research:

“If the average is more attractive because unattractive idiosyncrasies tend to be averaged out, then individuals with complementary facial features — one person with narrow eyes and one person with wide eyes, for example — would enjoy a greater boost in perceived attractiveness when seen together, as compared to groups composed of individuals who have more similar features.”  (Walker & Vul, 2013).

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Analysis of the 42 facial muscles which create emotional expressions reveals how many emotions there are.

How many basic human emotions are there?

Well, it depends who you believe.

Robert Plutchik, whose theories on the emotions were influential, thought there were eight primary emotions:

1. anger
2. fear
3. sadness
4. disgust
5. surprise
6. anticipation
7. trust
8. joy

He arranged them in a wheel to emphasise the idea that emotions can blend with each other, like colours, to create new emotions.

On the wheel shown below, the most intense emotions are in the middle, with milder emotions towards the outside.

Six basic emotions

Until recently many psychologists went along with the idea that there are six basic emotions:

1. happiness
2. sadness
3. fear
4. disgust
5. anger
6. surprise

This theory is largely down to psychologist Paul Eckman who came up with the scheme in the 1970s.

It is based on research finding that across different and varied cultures these six emotions are universally recognised.

Later on, though, Eckman added many more emotions to the list including amusement, awe, contentment, desire, embarrassment, pain, relief and sympathy.

Four basic emotions

More recent research from the University of Glasgow has challenged the established view that there are six basic emotions: anger, fear, surprise, disgust, happiness and sadness.

Instead there may only be four.

To reach their conclusions, Jack et al. (2014) looked at how the muscles in the face move when expressing a variety of emotions.

They found that fear and surprise shared a common signal — the eyes are wide open — suggesting they only constitute one basic emotion, not two.

Similarly, for anger and disgust they found that the nose initially wrinkles.

Anger and disgust may, therefore, constitute only one basic emotion.

No anger and disgust?

None of this is to say that anger and disgust don’t exist as separate emotions, of course they do.

Rather it’s to suggest that anger and disgust only become obvious after the facial emotion has been given time to evolve, even if this development typically only takes a fraction of a second.

The authors argue that the facial expression associated with the basic emotions have an evolutionary function.

Lead author Dr. Rachael Jack said:

“First, early danger signals confer the best advantages to others by enabling the fastest escape.

Secondly, physiological advantages for the expresser–the wrinkled nose prevents inspiration of potentially harmful particles, whereas widened eyes increases intake of visual information useful for escape–are enhanced when the face movements are made early.”

Building blocks of emotion

The theory is that there are four biologically basic emotions — anger, fear, happiness and sadness — on top of which have evolved much more complex varieties of emotion over the millennia.

This doesn’t suggest that our emotions are any less complex, just that the basic building blocks could be four rather than six.

After all, the full complexity of life on earth is made possible from a sequence of just four nucleobases in DNA, commonly abbreviated to the letters G, A, T and C (guanine, adenine, thymine, and cytosine).

It’s the development of facial emotions over time that gives them their complexity:

“What our research shows is that not all facial muscles appear simultaneously during facial expressions, but…

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B12 deficiency is relatively easy to correct with a change in diet or supplementation.

A poor memory can be a sign of vitamin B12 deficiency, studies find.

People with a vitamin B12 deficiency sometimes have worse memories for both events and ideas.

Indeed, low levels of vitamin B12 and folate have both been linked to a higher risk of Alzheimer’s disease.

Folates include vitamin B9, folacin and folic acid.

Memory problems are one of the key symptoms of Alzheimer’s.

This link has been observed by researchers for more than three decades.

A deficiency in B12 or folate can cause higher levels of the amino acid homocysteine in the body.

Homocysteine has a neurotoxic effect and could lead to neurological conditions, such as Alzheimer’s.

One study followed 370 people over 75-years-old for three years.

In that time, 78 had developed Alzheimer’s disease, with more than half having a vitamin B12 or folate deficiency.

Dr Hui-Xin Wang, the study’s first author, said:

“In our study, we found that low levels of either of these two vitamins were related to an increased Alzheimer’s disease risk.

Monitoring B12 and folate levels is important in order to avoid unfavorable conditions, even for those elderly people who are quite healthy in terms of cognition.”

The good news is that B12 deficiency is relatively easy to correct with a change in diet or supplementation.

Good sources of vitamin B12 include liver, beef, fish, poultry, eggs and low-fat milk.

Fortified breakfast cereals also contain vitamin B12.

People who may have difficulty getting enough vitamin B12 include vegetarians and vegans, older people and those with some digestive disorders, such as Crohn’s disease.

If taking supplements, be careful not to have more than 2 mg per day — any more could be harmful.

The study was published in the journal Neurology (Wang et al., 2019).

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The trait is particularly important for general knowledge because it makes people more curious and motivates them to learn new things.

People who are open to new experiences tend to be more intelligent, psychological research finds.

Being open to experience means taking an interest in things that are new, complex and even unconventional.

Openness to experience is particularly important for general knowledge because it makes people more curious and motivates them to learn new things.

Openness to experience is one of the five major aspects of personality, which also includes neuroticism, extraversion, agreeableness and conscientiousness.

Being open, imaginative and sensitive to emotions, though, has the strongest link to a higher IQ.

The reason may be that being intelligent makes people more curious about the world.

This ‘cognitive hunger’ drives people to discover more about the world around them.

Being able to appreciate beauty and being curious are very strongly linked to a higher IQ.

The conclusions come from a study of around 500 people who completed personality and IQ tests.

The results showed that the strongest associations were seen between openness to experience and crystallised intelligence.

Openness has a number of facets of its own, the study’s authors explain:

“The Openness to Experience construct involves the tendency to fantasize (Fantasy), aesthetic sensitivity (Aesthetics), awareness of one’s emotions (Feelings), preference for novelty (Actions), intellectual curiosity (Ideas), and preference for nontraditional values (Values).”

Crystallised intelligence roughly equates to general knowledge: knowing many things about the world.

More intelligent people were particularly appreciative of beauty: they had a strong aesthetic sense.

They were also likely to be intellectually curious and to have an interest in ideas for their own sake.

These two facets of openness were most strongly linked to higher crystallised intelligence.

The study was published in the Journal of Research in Personality (Ashton et al., 2000).

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