People often sit on secrets that gnaw away at them because they’re worried others will judge them harshly. But those fears are overblown, a series of psychological experiments demonstrates. Folks tended to be much more charitable than expected when told a secret considered shameful by the person who held it, researchers found. Secret holders consistently overestimate the reactions others will have if dirty laundry is aired, said co-researcher Amit Kumar, an assistant professor of marketing with the University of Texas at Austin. “When we’re thinking about conveying negative information about ourselves, we’re focused on the content of the message,” Kumar said in a university news release. “But the recipients are thinking about the positive traits required to reveal this secret, such as trust, honesty and vulnerability.” Kumar and his colleagues conducted a series of 12 experiments designed to accurately assess the fallout from revealing secrets. For example, they asked several groups to imagine revealing a negative secret, and then predict how their confidante would judge them. Each participant then revealed their secret to that person, and the confidante was asked how they responded to learning the secret. The expected judgment was consistently worse than how the confidante actually responded, Kumar said. This overestimation held for secrets divulged to a wide range of people – strangers, acquaintances, friends, family members and romantic partners. “Their expectations were…  read on >  read on >

It’s easy to see the immediate health hazards of wildfire smoke, as people struggle to breathe through a sooty haze. But a new study finds that harmful chemicals found in wildfire smoke can linger in a person’s home for weeks after the immediate threat has passed, posing a continuing health threat. The chemicals — compounds called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) — are highly toxic and can be found in household air filters, glass surfaces and cotton cloth more than a month later, researchers report. “They are associated with a wide variety of long-term adverse health consequences like cancer, potential complications in pregnancy and lung disease,” said researcher Elliott Gall, an associate professor of mechanical and materials engineering at Portland State University in Oregon. “If these compounds are depositing or sticking onto surfaces, there are different routes of exposure people should be aware of,” Gall added in a university news release. There’s lots of good advice out there on what to do during a wildfire, researchers noted — close windows and doors, run an air purifier, wear a mask. But there’s not much to guide people on how to best clean up afterward, researchers said. For this study, Gall and his team looked at how PAHs stuck to glass, cotton and air filters during a four-month span. They found it took 37 days for PAHs to…  read on >  read on >

Teenagers who’ve packed on extra pounds have a significantly increased risk of developing kidney disease as a young adult, a new study finds. Obesity increased risk of later kidney disease as much as ninefold in boys and fourfold in girls, according to results published recently in the journal JAMA Pediatrics. Even a few extra pounds increased a teen’s risk of kidney disease, researchers found. “The association was evident even in persons with high-normal BMI in adolescence, was more pronounced in men and appeared before the age of 30 years,” wrote the research team led by Dr. Avishai Tsur, of the Hebrew University Department of Military Medicine in Israel. Prior research has linked high BMI to kidney disease in older folks, but there hasn’t been much investigation into the potential risks of childhood obesity for kidney health, the researchers said. The study tracked more than 593,000 Israeli adolescents ages 16 to 20 who were born after 1974, all of whom underwent medical assessments for mandatory military service. After an average follow-up of 13 years, researchers found that nearly 2,000 of the participants had developed early chronic kidney disease. The teens’ risk of kidney disease increased with their excess weight, results show. Boys with severe obesity had a nine times higher risk of kidney disease, while those with mild obesity had a nearly seven times higher risk…  read on >  read on >