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Do you feel good when you go to church ?  I'm not talking about dropping the guilt for all the times you don't, but a true, down deep feeling of peace? That's your brain rewarding you, according to newswise.com. A new study has found that religious and spiritual experiences activate the brain reward circuits in much the same way as love, sex, gambling, drugs and music, report researchers at the University of Utah School of Medicine . “We’re just beginning to understand how the brain participates in experiences that believers interpret as spiritual, divine or transcendent,” says senior author and neuroradiologist Jeff Anderson, M.D., Ph.D. “In the last few years, brain imaging technologies have matured in ways that are letting us approach questions that have been around for millennia.” Specifically, the investigators set out to determine which brain networks are involved in representing spiritual feelings in one group, devout Mormons, by creating an environ...

OK, so it worked for one guy (and now he's the president-elect), but sexism has been found to be harmful to men's mental health, according to newswise.com. Men who see themselves as playboys or as having power over women are more likely to have psychological problems than men who conform less to traditionally masculine norms, reports research published by the American Psychological Association. “In general, individuals who conformed strongly to masculine norms tended to have poorer mental health and less favorable attitudes toward seeking psychological help, although the results differed depending on specific types of masculine norms,” says lead author Y. Joel Wong, PhD, of Indiana University Bloomington. I guess it makes sense but it doesn't stop some from still enjoying it (I hate to but I must reference the new president again). Wong and his colleagues conducted a meta-analysis of 78 research samples involving 19,453 participants that focused on the rel...

OK, so it's almost Thanksgiving and stories about gratitude abound. But here's a new one, at least to me. We all know that giving is better than receiving, right?  But what if you're giving an experience rather than an  XBox1 Virtual  Reality headset. People are more grateful for what they’ve done than what they have, and that gratitude can lead to greater generosity toward others, according to new research, newswise.com reports. The new study found that feelings of gratitude develop more often when people reflect on experiential purchases, such as vacations or tickets to events, than when they reflect on gadgets, furniture or clothes they’ve purchased. Reflecting on gratifying experiences also leads to more subsequent altruistic behavior than thinking about significant material possessions, the researchers found. In other words, when people are grateful for experiences, they treat the other people better as well. “We know a sense of gratitude carries...

Big boys don't cry.  Or talk about their emotions with their friends.  Or say "cute." According to a new study, real men don't say "cute." The study looked at data and Twitter to analyze the accuracy of stereotypes, newswise.com reports. From gender to education, the words used on social media carry impressions to others. Using publicly available tweets, social psychologists and computer scientists from the University of Pennsylvania Positive Psychology Center, Germany, and Australia are helping us to parse out the stereotypes formed by word choices on Twitter. Using natural language processing (NLP), a form of artificial intelligence, the researchers show where stereotyping goes from "plausible" to wrong. In a series of studies, participants were asked to categorize the authors of tweets based solely on the content of their social media posts. In these studies, people made judgements about a writer's gender, age, education le...

I'm one of those people who likes to spend, spend, spend, married to someone who doesn't like to part with a dime.  Cause stress?  You'd better believe it. And now a new study is saying that stress affects our spending and saving habits. It doesn't take a brain surgeon to figure this out but a new study proclaims that if you're feeling overwhelmed? Stressed about work, a family illness or election season? It turns out that worry and anxiety can have an impact on your wallet. “Stress leads consumers to favor saving money,” says Kristina Durante, an associate professor of marketing at Rutgers Business School who researches the effect of hormones and consumer behavior. Although stressed consumers want to save, when faced with a spending decision, stressed consumers will pay for necessities they think will help restore control rather than splurge on non-necessities, according to newswise.com. The study found that stress leads consumers to save money in ge...

Think of this the next time you pick up your cell . It call tell everything you do.  A new study has found that the molecules you leave on your phone every time you touch it can tell what you eat, what kind of moisturizer you use, even how healthy you are and, most scary of all, where you've been. Examining them for the trace chemicals, molecules and microbes on everything you touch can pretty much tell the story of your life, experts say.  These elements can construct lifestyle sketches for each phone’s owner, including diet, preferred hygiene products, health status and locations visited. And if you're inclined to commit a crime, watch out, because the number of applications, including criminal profiling, airport screening, medication adherence monitoring, clinical trial participant stratification and environmental exposure studies, can all be told from these simple if icky particles, according to newswise.com. “You can imagine a scenario where a crime scene inv...

Well, I lost some friends.  They didn't abandon me, I abandoned them.  How could they possibly have voted for Trump? Seems a lot of friendships have been riven, or at least changed, by this most divisive election.  But a new study says there are ways to repair the rift.  If you want. And where did I see it played out the most?  On Facebook.  During the presidential election of 2016, it was easy to avoid misinterpretation, escalation, damaged relationships and offending Facebook friends with differing opinions. Just never be on Facebook. Only about half a dozen Americans heeded that advice. The rest of the country is left on the day after the contentious election wondering how awkward Thanksgiving will be knowing exactly how Grandma felt about Hillary Clinton, Aunt Jane’s thoughts on Donald Trump and 18-year-old Susie’s impression of the entire electoral process, according to newswise.com. People who study abusive and controlling relationshi...