Have a hard time looking others in the eye? You aren’t alone, Canadian researchers report. Eye-to-eye contact rarely occurs when two people are talking, they found. “We discovered that participants spent only about 12% of conversation time in interactive looking, meaning that they gazed at each other’s faces simultaneously for just 12% of the interaction duration,” said lead researcher Florence Mayrand, a doctoral student with the McGill University department of psychology in Montreal. “Even more surprisingly, within those interactions, participants engaged in mutual eye-to-eye contact only 3.5% of the time,” Mayrand added in a university news release. But when someone does look you in the eye, take note — the gesture communicates nonverbal information that’s vital for future interaction, the researchers noted. For the study, the research team paired up participants and presented them with an imaginary survival scenario. In this scenario, they had to rank a list of items in order of their usefulness for survival, all while wearing mobile eye-tracking glasses. Researchers analyzed how often participants looked at each others’ eyes and mouths, as well as whether they followed the other person’s gaze. During the interactions, participants spent more time looking away than looking at their partner’s faces, researchers found. When they did look at each others’ faces, they looked equally often at the mouth and the eyes, and spent little time in…  read on >  read on >

A pregnant woman’s mental health might have profound effects on the mind of her unborn child, a new evidence review warns. Children appear to be at higher risk for mental health and behavior issues if their moms were highly stressed, anxious or depressed during pregnancy, researchers report. In particular, children were more likely to have ADHD symptoms or exhibit aggressive or hostile behavior if their moms reported more anxiety, depression or stress while pregnant. “Our research suggests that psychological distress during the pregnancy period has a small but persistent effect on children’s risk for aggressive, disinhibited and impulsive behaviors,” said researcher Irene Tung, an assistant professor of psychology at California State University, Dominguez Hills. For the review, Tung and her colleagues pooled and analyzed data from 55 studies involving more than 45,000 participants. All the studies measured women’s psychological distress during pregnancy, and then later measured their children’s “externalizing behaviors” — mental health symptoms directed toward others. The researchers also included only research where the mothers’ distress was measured both during and after pregnancy, to control for the potential effects of postpartum mental health problems on developing newborns. They found that even after controlling for mom’s postnatal distress, psychological symptoms during pregnancy independently raise children’s risk of mental health problems. The effect held true for both boys and girls. It was strongest in early childhood…  read on >  read on >

FRIDAY, Nov. 17, 2023 (Healthday News) — Scams are nothing new and older folks are known to be vulnerable to them, but a new poll adds another sad fact to the familiar story. Among people aged 50 to 80, those who reported being in fair or poor physical or mental health, those with disabilities and those who rated their memory as fair or poor were more likely than their healthier peers to say they’d been the victim of fraud. The study “adds important new data to ongoing efforts to reduce the devastating toll of scams on older adults’ finances and well-being,” poll director Dr. Jeffrey Kullgren said in a news release. “We also found that no matter what their health status, older adults feel strongly that government and businesses should do more to educate and protect against scams.” Overall, three of every four older adults said they have experienced a fraud attempt by phone, text, email, mail or online in the past two years, while 39% said they’ve been victims of at least one scam. But the poll uncovered an especially strong link between poor health and their vulnerability to scams – both being able to spot one and becoming the victim of one. Even if they’d hadn’t been scammed, older adults with health issues were more likely to lack confidence in their ability to…  read on >  read on >

Good news is fun to share, but you get more of a charge from it if you keep it under your hat for a while, a new study says. Keeping good news a secret for a bit before telling someone else appears to make people feel more energized and alive, according to findings published Nov. 13 in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The research provides a positive spin on secrecy, which up to now has only been researched in the context of hiding bad news, said lead researcher Michael Slepian, an associate professor of business at Columbia University in New York City. “Is secrecy inherently bad for our well-being, or do the negative effects of secrecy tend to stem from keeping negative secrets?” Slepian said in an American Psychological Association news release. “While negative secrets are far more common than positive secrets, some of life’s most joyful occasions begin as secrets, including secret marriage proposals, pregnancies, surprise gifts and exciting news.” In all, 3 in 4 people say the first thing they would do upon learning good news is share it with someone, according to a survey of 500 people conducted prior to the study. But five experiments with more than 2,500 participants indicate that keeping a positive secret could have mental health benefits. In one experiment, participants were shown a list of…  read on >  read on >

New mothers living in states with generous mandated paid family and medical leave are less likely to experience postpartum depression, a new study indicates. They also are more likely to breastfeed their newborns. “By increasing mothers’ ability to breastfeed and reducing postpartum-depressive symptoms, strong state paid family and medical leave laws provide a major boost to the health of postpartum women and infants,” said senior study author Joe Feinglass, a research professor of general internal medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago. The United States remains one of the few wealthy countries without federally mandated paid parental leave. For this study, researchers used data gathered by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to compare pregnancy outcomes in 43 states, taking into account each state’s level of support for parental leave. Women living in the eight states with the most generous paid family leave had a 9% greater chance of breastfeeding at six months postpartum, compared to the 26 states with little to no paid leave. And those living in states with moderate leave coverage had a 10% lower likelihood of developing symptoms related to postpartum depression. “Mental health conditions are the leading cause of maternal mortality in the U.S., with perinatal depression symptoms affecting about one in eight new mothers,” researcher Dr. Madeline Perry, a fourth-year resident in obstetrics and…  read on >  read on >