Sunday Science Highlights!

People Who Are Angry Pay More Attention to Rewards Than Threats

Anger is a negative emotion. But, like being happy or excited, feeling angry makes people want to seek rewards, according to a new study of emotion and visual attention. The researchers found that people who are angry pay more attention to rewards than to threats -- the opposite of people feeling other negative emotions like fear.

Previous research has shown that emotion affects what someone pays attention to. If a fearful or anxious person is given a choice of a rewarding picture, like a sexy couple, or a threatening picture, like a person waving a knife threateningly, they'll spend more time looking at the threat than at the rewarding picture. People feeling excitement, however, are the other way -- they'll go for the reward.

Adult Autism Diagnosis by Brain Scan

Scientists from the Institute of Psychiatry (IoP) at King's College London have developed a pioneering new method of diagnosing autism in adults. For the first time, a quick brain scan that takes just 15 minutes can identify adults with autism with over 90 per cent accuracy. The method could lead to the screening for autism spectrum disorders in children in the future.

Neurological Process for the Recognition of Letters and Numbers Explained

How does the brain link the visual basic traits of letters and numbers to abstract representations and to words? Scientists from the Basque Research Center on Cognition, Brain and Language have analyzed the influence of context on the visual recognition of a written word regardless of the format in which these letters may be display.

"We analyzed the influence of the context given by a word when linking the physical traits of its components to the abstract representations of letters," explains Nicola Molinaro, main author of the study and researcher of the Basque Research Center on Cognition, Brain and Language (BCBL).

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Should teachers suggest diagnoses like ADHD?

Nice piece on CNN.com regarding teachers telling parents their children have ADHD. While initally pushing the hysteria button by suggesting that teachers are acting as doctors, the article settles into a nice discussion about listening to professionals who see hundreds of children and are better equipped than parents to see differences in learning styles and behaviors that parents may not see. It also points out that, while ADHD does appear to be real, there can be many non-ADHD related causes for a child's inappropriate behavior: family traumas, anxiety, depression (though I'd personally be very very careful about diagnosing a child as depressed in a clinical sense)...and, most importantly, inappropriate parenting styles. By that I mean a style that is not suited to that child. I rarely meet 'bad' parents (and the 'bad' parents I do meet are almost always impaired due to cognitive reasons or socioeconomic reasons)...but I do meet many parents whose styles do not work well for their particular child. One of the things I tell them is, "It's important for you to parent the child you have, not the one you want."

Here are some good excerpts:

"I think that sometimes folks want an immediate answer and they want to help a child as quickly as possible," said Cheryl Rode, Director of Clinical Operations at the San Diego Center for Children in California. "Medication is quick and easy but it's not the answer alone for working with kids who have ADHD."

For a teacher to suggest that a child has ADHD is "inappropriate and dangerous," says Dr. Elizabeth Roberts, child psychiatrist in Murrieta, California. Depression, anxiety and abuse are all possibilities in a child's life that could lead to attention problems, Roberts said. That means that many children are receiving medication for the wrong problem.

Alana Morales, of Thornton, Colorado, is one of those teachers who has brought up the subject of ADHD testing with many parents. She doesn't tell parents to medicate their kids, but brings up the subject of getting children tested because she thinks it's important for parents to know.

"You have to be so careful because, again, we are not doctors," she said. "But does that mean we don't recognize it? No."

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Welcome to the revolution.

Adam