“The issue of death is one of the most important incidents that all societies deal with,” says Dr Matthew Engelke, at the London School of Economics. “I wanted to look at how, in contemporary society, people who do not believe in an afterlife are commemorated at a funeral.”

To carry out the research, Dr Engelke focused on funerals provided by the British Humanist Association (BHA). “It was clear that the people who chose these funeral services were not necessarily humanists or atheists. They generally described themselves as ‘non-religious’, which covered the entire spectrum from absolute atheist to a more general lack of commitment or belief, especially when it comes to organised religion.”

One of the most striking aspects of BHA funeral ceremonies is that they strive to be true to the individual, to reflect as best as possible the character, world views and the sensibilities of the person who has died. “The focus is almost exclusively on the person, which is often not the case with the more traditional religious ceremonies” says Dr Engelke.

This emphasis on the individual is an increasingly important phenomenon in modern Western life, suggests Dr Engelke. In many societies, and in ritual ceremonies down the ages, the place of the individual in the ritual is often the least important consideration.

In humanist ceremonies, being true to the individual is most central. Dr Engelke commonly came across family members and friends who said: “We told the funeral director John did not go to church so we did not want a vicar to take the funeral”.

“This gives an intriguing glimpse into the extent to which modern citizens feel it important to express their uniqueness and individuality”, says Dr Engelke.

“It is important for social scientists to look at these key moments in life, as it is through these that we get a sense of the most significant issues that matter to people and understand what it means to be non-religious in a modern British society,” continues Dr Engelke. “And I think one of the best places to start is ritual services such as funerals.”

“The preliminary results of our study suggest that people are more likely to disclose sensitive information via text messages than in voice interviews,” says Fred Conrad, a cognitive psychologist and Director of the Program in Survey Methodology at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research (ISR).

“This is sort of surprising,” says Conrad, “since many people thought that texting would decrease the likelihood of disclosing sensitive information because it creates a persistent, visual record of questions and answers that others might see on your phone and in the cloud.”

With text, the researchers also found that people were less likely to engage in ‘satisficing’ – a survey industry term referring to the common practice of giving good enough, easy answers, like rounding to multiples of 10 in numerical responses, for example. “We believe people give more precise answers via texting because there’s just not the time pressure in a largely asynchronous mode like text that there is in phone interviews,” says Conrad. “As a result, respondents are able to take longer to arrive at more accurate answers.”

Conrad conducted the study with Michael Schober, a professor psychology and dean of the graduate faculty at the New School for Social Research. Their research team included cognitive psychologists, psycholinguists, survey methodologists and computer scientists from both universities, as well as collaborators from AT&T Research. Funding for the study came from the National Science Foundation.

“We’re in the early stages of analyzing our findings,” says Schober. “But so far it seems that texting may reduce some respondents’ tendency to shade the truth or to present themselves in the best possible light in an interview – even when they know it’s a human interviewer they are communicating with via text. What we cannot yet be sure of is who is most likely to be disclosive in text. Is it different for frequent texters, or generational, for example?”

For the study, the researchers recruited approximately 600 iPhone-users on Craigslist, through Google Ads, and from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, offering them iTunes Store incentives to participate in the study. Their goals were to see whether responses to the same questions differed depending on several variables: whether the questions were asked via text or voice, whether a human or a computer asked the questions, and whether the environment, including the presence of other people and the likelihood of multitasking, affected the answers.

Among the questions that respondents answered more honestly via text than speech: In a typical week, about how often do you exercise? During the past 30 days, on how many days did you have 5 or more drinks on the same occasion?

And among the questions that respondents answered more precisely via text, providing fewer rounded numerical responses: During the last month, how many movies did you watch in any medium? How many songs do you currently have on your iPhone?

According to Schober and Conrad, changes in communication patterns and their impact on the survey industry prompted the study. About one in five U.S. households only use cell phones and no longer have landline phones. These households are typically not surveyed even though cell-only households tend to differ in important ways from households with landline phones. More people are using text messages on mobile phones, with texting now the preferred form of communication among many people in their teens and 20s in the U.S. Texting is extremely common among all age groups in many Asian and European nations.

Conrad and Schober are also finding that people are more likely to provide thoughtful and honest responses via text messages even when they’re in busy, distracting environments.

“This is the case even though people are more likely to be multitasking – shopping or walking, for example – when they’re answering questions by text than when they’re being interviewed by voice.”

“It appears from our research that administering vitamin K2 could possibly help patients with Parkinson’s. However, more work needs to be done to understand this better,” says Patrik Verstreken.

Malfunctioning power plants are at the basis of Parkinson’s.

If we looked at cells as small factories, then mitochondria would be the power plants responsible for supplying the energy for their operation.  They generate this energy by transporting electrons. In Parkinson’s patients, the activity of mitochondria and the transport of electrons have been disrupted, resulting in the mitochondria no longer producing sufficient energy for the cell. This has major consequences as the cells in certain parts of the brain will start dying off, disrupting communication between neurons.  The results are the typical symptoms of Parkinson’s: lack of movement (akinesia), tremors and muscle stiffness.

The exact cause of this neurodegenerative disease is not known. In recent years, however, scientists have been able to describe several genetic defects (mutations) found in Parkinson’s patients, including the so-called PINK1 and Parkin mutations, which both lead to reduced mitochondrial activity. By studying these mutations, scientists hope to unravel the mechanisms underlying the disease process.

Fruit flies (Drosophila) are frequently used in lab experiments because of their short life spans and breeding cycles, among other things.  Within two weeks of her emergence, every female is able to produce hundreds of offspring. By genetically modifying fruitflies, scientists can study the function of certain genes and proteins. Patrik Verstreken and his team used fruitflies with a genetic defect in PINK1 or Parkin that is similar to the one associated with Parkinson’s. They found that the flies with a PINK1 or Parkin mutation lost their ability to fly.

Upon closer examination, they discovered that the mitochondria in these flies were defective, just as in Parkinson’s patients.  Because of this they generated less intracellular energy – energy the insects needed to fly. When the flies were given vitamin K2, the energy production in their mitochondria was restored and the insects’ ability to fly improved. The researchers were also able to determine that the energy production was restored because the vitamin K2 had improved electron transport in the mitochondria.  This in turn led to improved energy production.

Vitamin K2 plays a role in the energy production of defective mitochondria. Because defective mitochondria are also found in Parkinson’s patients with a PINK1 or Parkin mutation, vitamin K2 potentially offers hope for a new treatment for Parkinson’s.

Guido Frank, MD, assistant professor director of the Developmental Brain Research Program at the CU School of Medicine and his colleagues used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine brain activity in 63 women who were either anorexic or obese. Scientists compared them to women considered “normal” weight.

The participants were visually conditioned to associate certain shapes with either a sweet or a non-sweet solution and then received the taste solutions expectedly or unexpectedly. This task has been associated with brain dopamine function in the past.

The authors found that during these fMRI sessions, an unexpected sweet-tasting solution resulted in increased neural activation of reward systems in the anorexic patients and diminished activation in obese individuals. In rodents, food restriction and weight loss have been associated with greater dopamine-related reward responses in the brain.

“It is clear that in humans the brain’s reward system helps to regulate food intake” said Frank. “The specific role of these networks in eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa and, conversely, obesity, remains unclear.”

Scientists agree that more research is needed in this area. The study was published in Neuropsychopharmacology.

By testing the controversial role of a gene called Glo1 in anxiety, scientists uncovered a new inhibitory factor in the brain: the metabolic by-product methylglyoxal. The system offers a tantalizing new target for drugs designed to treat conditions such as anxiety disorder, epilepsy, and sleep disorders.

The study, published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, found that animals with multiple copies of the Glo1 gene were more likely to exhibit anxiety-like behavior in laboratory tests. Further experiments showed that Glo1 increased anxiety-like behavior by lowering levels of methylglyoxal (MG). Conversely, inhibiting Glo1 or raising MG levels reduced anxiety behaviors.

“Animals transgenic for Glo1 had different levels of anxiety-like behavior, and more copies made them more anxious,” said Abraham Palmer, PhD, assistant professor of human genetics at the University of Chicago Medicine and senior author of the study. “We showed that Glo1 was causally related to anxiety-like behavior, rather than merely correlated.”

In 2005, a comparison of different mouse strains found a link between anxiety-like behaviors and Glo1, the gene encoding the metabolic enzyme glyoxylase 1. However, subsequent studies questioned the link, and the lack of an obvious connection between glyoxylase 1 and brain function or behavior made some scientists skeptical.

“When people discover a gene, they’re always most comfortable when they discover something they already knew,” Palmer said. “The alarming thing here was there was a discovery of something that nobody knew, and therefore it seemed less likely to actually be correct.”

A 2009 study from Palmer’s laboratory suggested that differences in Glo1 expression between mouse strains were due to copy number variants, where the segment of the genome containing the gene is repeated multiple times. To test this hypothesis, lead author Margaret Distler inserted two, eight or ten copies of the Glo1 gene into mouse lines. She then ran experiments such as the open field test, in which researchers measure how much time a mouse spends in the center of an arena versus along the walls, to detect changes in anxiety behavior.

The results confirmed a causative role for Glo1 copy number variants, as mice with more copies of the Glo1 gene exhibited higher anxiety-like behavior in their experiments.

“It’s the first study to show that it’s the copy number variant that has the potential to change Glo1 expression and behavior,” said Distler, an MD/PhD student in the Pritzker School of Medicine’s Medical Scientist Training Program. “Our study was a physiological representation of what it means to increase Glo1 expression for anxiety.”

The researchers then set about answering the mystery of how Glo1 expression influences anxiety-like behaviors. The primary function of glyoxylase 1 is to metabolize and lower cellular levels of methylglyoxal, a waste product of glycolysis. Distler produced the opposite effect by injecting MG to artificially increase its levels in the brain, finding that raising MG levels quickly reduced anxiety symptoms in mice.

“Methylglyoxal changed behavior within 10 minutes of administration, which means it’s a rapid onset. It’s not changing gene expression, and it’s not having long-term downstream effects,” Distler said. “That was our first breakthrough.”

The short time course suggested that MG might have a direct effect on neuronal activity. MG also demonstrated sedative effects at high doses, a hallmark of drugs that activate inhibitory GABA receptors on neurons. In collaboration with Leigh Plant, now at Brandeis University, the researchers demonstrated that MG activated GABA-A receptors on neurons, a previously unknown inhibitory mechanism.

“It’s a completely different system that is tying neuronal inhibitory tone into metabolic activity,” Palmer said. “That’s potentially really exciting in terms of re-evaluating what we thought we knew about inhibitory tone in the CNS. It turns out now that methylglyoxal, which has been around ever since glycolysis evolved, was also acting at these receptors, and nobody knew that.”

Conventionally, anxiety has been treated with drugs that activate the GABA-A receptor, such as benzodiazepines and barbiturates, which are prone to abuse and dangerous side effects. The researchers theorized that targeting the Glo1/MG interaction could provide a more selective strategy for reducing anxiety symptoms by subtly influencing inhibitory tone.

“The GABA-A receptor agents already out there have a lot of side effects, such as sedation and hypothermia, as well as a high abuse liability,” Distler said. “It’s possible that taking a Glo1 inhibitor will increase only MG levels to a certain maximum. You could have the potential for more specificity, given that you’re activating a system that’s already in place, not just dumping methylglyoxal or some other GABA-A receptor agent throughout the brain.”

Preliminary experiments with a small molecule inhibitor of Glo1 supported the theory. Injections of the inhibitor, developed by John Termini at the Beckman Research Institute of the City of Hope, reduced anxiety-like symptoms in mice.

“It’s a different way of hitting these GABA-A receptors,” Palmer said. “We have yet to determine if that’s a better way of doing it, but it’s certainly different, and it gives us a unique angle of attack on this system and potential advantages that we have yet to evaluate.”

Such a drug may also be useful in treating epilepsy and sleep disorders, where GABA-A drugs have shown success. While the therapeutic potential of manipulating this system is yet to be determined, the research clears the fog around the role of Glo1 in anxiety by adding behavioral and cellular evidence.

“What’s neat is that we started with exploratory, open-ended genetic studies in mice, and we’ve now gotten into some fundamental new physiology that nobody had appreciated or put together before,” Palmer said. “Now we’re starting to reap some of the fruit from those types of genetic studies to enrich our understanding of more classical aspects of biology.”

“Whether it’s ensuring their children know about the history and culture of their ethnic or religious group, overseeing faith instruction, teaching them how to cook traditional foods, dressing in traditional clothes or introducing them to traditional music and dancing, it’s mostly mothers who are taking charge of ensuring their children appreciate their cultural heritage,” says researcher Professor Ros Edwards.

In a new collaborative initiative between the Universities of Southampton and London South Bank, and the relationship support organisation OnePlusOne, researchers have used their recent research findings on ‘mixed’ relationships to develop on-line resources that raise awareness about the sorts of issues ‘mixed’ couples may face, and to provide relationship support where needed.

‘Mixed’ relationships, where each partner is from a different racial or ethnic background, are increasingly common in Britain. And, although all couples face many similar relationship issues, research on ‘mixed’ couple relationships suggests that they may have their own distinctive experiences including:

• Possible disapproval and rejection from others based on assumptions and limited knowledge about ‘mixed’ families.
• Understanding and dealing with both cultural and individual differences within a couple relationships.
• Developing an identity and sense of belonging for themselves and their children.

“Once people come together in a ‘mixed’ relationship, we know that maintaining that relationship can be challenging for some couples, often because of other people’s attitudes,” Professor Edwards explains. “The issues that they may face can include having to deal with others disapproval, and in some cases, the exclusion from family and friends. Clearly, this can create stresses in their relationship and, based on our research, we provide examples of some of the successful strategies ‘mixed’ couples have employed to cope with these problems.”

Researchers stress, however, that it would be wrong to over-emphasise the challenges that ‘mixed’ relationships bring to a relationship. Findings clearly show that for many couples and their children, their different cultures and heritage were not overly an issue for them, or for the communities in which they lived. For many it was more often an issue for other people than those who are themselves mixing or of Mixed race.

‘Mixed’ couples deal with the same responsibilities and issues as other couples, and they see their family lives as no different to others in many ways. “In fact, much of the feedback we have received regarding our on-line resources is how pleased couples are to see their relationships treated as ‘ordinary’ not as something strange or inherently problematic,” Professor Edwards points out.

“This feedback is entirely in keeping with our finding that it is mothers in ‘mixed’ families who ensure their children are brought up appreciating the minority culture in their home. In this regard, women in ‘mixed’ families broadly reflect what goes on in most relationships, she concludes”.

The on-line relationship support resources for ‘mixed’ couples can be viewed at: http://thecoupleconnection.net/articles/mixed-couples-and-their-families

In a paper recently published in the PLoS One journal, researchers from Warwick Business School, the University College London and Dartmouth College, USA, carried out a series of experiments to see if people made decisions to trust others based on their faces.

They found people are more likely to invest money in someone whose face is generally perceived as trustworthy, even when they are given negative information about this person’s reputation.

The team used a computer algorithm to create a set of 20 pairs of faces at opposing ends of the trustworthiness scale. This computer software modifies the apparent trustworthiness of faces by altering their features. The researchers were able to experimentally manipulate the unfakeable features (those related to shape of the face) that make a face look trustworthy or untrustworthy. These 40 faces were then used in a series of trust games with human participants.

Each volunteer was given a sum of money and told they could invest any part of the amount in a trustee whose face appeared on the screen. Any amount they invested would be tripled and volunteers were told it was then up to the trustee to decide how much to send back to them. Thus participants had an incentive to invest only in trustees who could be expected to return more than the invested amount.

The researchers found that 13 out of 15 participants invested more, on average, in the trustworthy identities. In a second experiment, the researchers gave the volunteers information about whether the trustees had good or bad histories. Even with this inside information, the average amount invested in those who looked ‘trustworthy’ was 6% higher.

Dr Chris Olivola from the University of Warwick’s Warwick Business School said: “Trustees with good and bad histories benefitted equally from trustworthy-looking facial features. The temptation to judge strangers by their faces is hard to resist. Trustworthiness is one of the most important traits for social and economic interactions and our study examines whether people take potentially costly actions in line with their face-based trustworthiness judgments.

“It seems we are still willing to go with our own instincts about whether we think someone looks like we can trust them.”

The findings contradict stereotypes presented in previous studies that describe female terrorists as socially isolated and vulnerable to recruitment because they are uneducated, unemployed and from a foreign land, psychologists reported in a study published online in the APA journal Law and Human Behavior. These assumptions are not supported by evidence, according to the study authors.

“We discovered that some of the popular notions about female terrorists do not reflect what has occurred in the past,” said the study’s lead author, Karen Jacques, PhD. “A more realistic description is helpful because it provides insights into the social dynamics that might promote an individual’s involvement in terrorist activities.”

Researchers at Lancaster University in the United Kingdom examined archival biographical data from multiple sources on 222 female and 269 male terrorists connected to one of 13 conflicts involving nationalist-separatists, social revolutionaries or religious fundamentalists, including al Qaeda, the Irish Republican Army and the Popular Liberation Army of Colombia.

Jacques and her co-author, Paul J. Taylor, PhD, examined eight variables for each terrorist: age at first involvement, education, employment status, immigration status, marital status, religious conversion, criminal activity and activist connections.

The majority of both female and male terrorists were between 16 and 35 years old, native residents, employed, educated through secondary school, not converted from another religion and rarely involved in a previous crime, the study said. Compared to male terrorists, the researchers found, women had on average more education, with the majority continuing beyond secondary school, and were more likely to be divorced or widowed, less likely to be employed and less likely to be immigrants. Collectively, the findings for female terrorists indicated more of an emphasis on individual motivations, such as personal revenge for the death of a loved one, rather than collective engagement in terrorism, the authors said.

“A surprising finding was that, unlike for other criminals, there were very few instances of previous involvement in criminal activity among both females and males,” said Jacques. “This could be because they were unwilling to confess to other crimes, because criminality could attract authorities’ undue attention to potential terrorists, or the possibility that having a criminal career is not a significant precursor to terrorism.”

About a third of both male and female terrorists had prior connections to terrorism activities via their families. However, more than 50 percent of those with family connections to terrorism indicated that family influence did not motivate them to carry out terrorist activities, the study said.

Using a convergent functional genomics approach that incorporates a variety of experimental techniques, the scientists also were able to apply a panel of their top genes to data from other studies of schizophrenia and successfully identify which patients had been diagnosed with schizophrenia and which had not, according to a report published online today by the journal Molecular Psychiatry.

Evaluating the biological pathways in which the genes are active, the researchers also proposed a model of schizophrenia as a disease emerging from a mix of genetic variations affecting brain development and neuronal connections along with environmental factors, particularly stress.

“At its core, schizophrenia is a disease of decreased cellular connectivity in the brain, precipitated by environmental stress during brain development, among those with genetic vulnerability,” said principal investigator Alexander B. Niculescu III, M.D., Ph.D., associate professor of psychiatry and medical neuroscience at the IU School of Medicine and director of the Laboratory of Neurophenomics at the Institute of Psychiatric Research at the IU School of Medicine.

“For first time we have a comprehensive list of the genes that have the best evidence for involvement in schizophrenia,” said Niculescu, who is also staff psychiatrist and investigator at the Richard L. Roudebush Veterans Affairs Medical Center.

Schizophrenia is a relatively widespread psychiatric disease, affecting about 1 percent of the population, often with devastating impact. People with schizophrenia can have difficulty thinking logically and telling the difference between real and unreal experiences, and may engage in bizarre behavior.

When the test estimating the risk for schizophrenia is refined, it could provide guidance to caregivers and health care professionals about young people in families with a history of the disease, prompting early intervention and treatment when behavioral symptoms of schizophrenia occurred among those at higher risk, Dr. Niculescu said.

He stressed that a score indicating a higher risk of schizophrenia “doesn’t determine your destiny. It just means that your neuronal connectivity is different, which could make you more creative, or more prone to illness.”

“It’s all on a continuum; these genetic variants are present throughout the population. If you have too many of them, in the wrong combination, in an environment where you are exposed to stress, alcohol and drugs, and so on, that can lead to the development of the clinical illness,” he said.

The prototype test was able to predict whether a person was at a higher or lower risk of schizophrenia in about two-thirds of cases.

To identify and prioritize the genes reported Tuesday, the researchers combined data from several different types of studies. These included genome-wide association studies, gene expression data derived from human tissue samples, genetic linkage studies, genetic evidence from animal models, and other work. This approach, called convergent functional genomics, has been pioneered by Niculescu and colleagues, and relies on multiple independent lines of evidence to implicate genes in clinical disorders.

The authors noted that the results were stronger when analyses were performed using gene-level data, rather than analyses based on individual mutations — called single nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs — in those genes. Multiple different SNPs can spark a particular gene’s role in the development of schizophrenia, so evidence for the genes, and the biological mechanisms in which they play a role, was much stronger from study to study than was the evidence for individual SNPs.

Past research looking at individual mutations was difficult to replicate from study to study, Dr. Niculescu said. Tuesday’s paper, however, indicates that much of the research done in recent years has in fact produced consistent results at a gene and biological pathway level.

“There is a lot more reproducibility and concordance in the field than people realized,” he said.

“Finally now, by better understanding the genetic and biological basis of the illness, we can develop better tests for it, as well as better treatments. The future of medicine is not just treatment but prevention, so we hope this work will move things in the right direction.”

Researchers say that 57.6 percent of patients prescribed antipsychotic medications in data from 2003 did not have schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, the conditions for which the drugs were approved for use. Use of medication for treatments that is not FDA-approved is called off-label use.

“Given healthcare reform and widespread crisis in state revenues, state Medicaid programs will be under pressure to serve larger patient populations, increasing their fiscal stress,” said Douglass L. Leslie, Ph.D., professor of public health sciences. “Medicaid prescription drug programs covered 75 percent of all antipsychotic prescription medications in the United States in 2002. Reducing off-label antipsychotic use may generate savings with little impact on patient outcomes.”

Researchers looked at data for 42 states from 2003, the latest data available at the time of analysis, from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. They report their results in a recent issue of American Journal of Managed Care. Patients in a Medicaid fee-for-service plan for the entire year were chosen using de-identified patient information that could not be traced to the individuals. The researchers chose patients without a diagnosis of either schizophrenia or bipolar disorder during 2003 who received an antipsychotic medication.

During 2003, 372,038 patients received an antipsychotic medication. Of these patients, 214,113, or 57.6 percent, did not have a diagnosis of schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. Diagnoses included other mental disorders: 35 percent, minor depression — 25.4 percent, major depression — 23.2 percent, no mental disorder — 18.8 percent, conduct disorder — 18.8 percent, and anxiety disorder — 16.2 percent.

“A high rate of off-label antipsychotic use would not necessarily be of concern if there were scientific evidence supporting the effectiveness of these medications for conditions other than schizophrenia and bipolar disorder,” Leslie said.

Off-label use is supported in the medical community, with the American Academy of Neurology endorsing the use of quinine for treatment-resistant leg cramps, for example. Since 2003, some of the antipsychotic medications have been approved by the FDA for the treatment of other conditions, including irritability in autism and treatment-resistant depression. However, at the time the data were collected they were considered off-label.

The rate of off-label use of antipsychotics is high compared to other medications. Other studies have shown off-label medication use includes cardiovascular drugs: 46 percent, anticonvulsants — 46 percent, and antiasthmatics — 42 percent.

“Antipsychotics were the highest selling medication class at $14.6 billion in 2009,” Leslie said. “Medicaid bears a significant proportion of these costs. Hence, off-label use may be responsible for a considerable portion of state Medicaid budgets, with little or no documented clinical benefit and a substantial risk of adverse effects. Off-label use may be an area of potential savings with little impact on patient outcomes.”

The newest antipsychotic drugs can cost up to $10 per day at doses recommended for patients with schizophrenia.

According to the researchers, more research is needed to determine if off-label use of antipsychotic medications yields substantial clinical benefit and to identify how doctors decide to prescribe these drugs for non-FDA approved conditions.

Reasons why drugs may be prescribed off-label include a lack of research results showing the drug’s effectiveness in certain patients or for other conditions, or that the drugs may be used as a last resort for those patients who have not responded to other treatments. Further research is needed on the decision-making process of doctors to prescribe off-label.

“Where there is limited evidence of clinical benefit, greater caution should probably be used before prescribing these drugs off-label because they can have hazardous side effects,” Leslie said.