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People’s life goals relate to their personality type
In the first research of its kind, a new University of California, Davis, study suggests that for the most part, people formulate goals consistent with their personality traits — and an individual’s goals are related to how their personality subsequently changes over time.
The study surveyed more than 500 students when they started college, each year during college, and 20 years later on their goals related to being creative, having a successful career, having a family, being wealthy, or being active in religion or politics. The goals of these UC Berkeley students — about half were still responding after two decades — remained relatively stable over time, though there were some notable changes.
“This study was a unique opportunity to examine how individuals’ personalities and major life goals were related to each other across two decades of life,” said Olivia E. Atherton, the lead author of the study and former doctoral student in psychology at UC Davis. “We found that, in many ways, one’s personality shapes the types of life goals that are valued, and as a result of pursuing those goals, personality changes.”
Successful people stress goals
Various enormously successful people, such as Albert Einstein, have noted the importance of goals, researchers said. Einstein once said, for example: “If you want to live a happy life, tie it to a goal, not to people or things.” The personality characteristics he possessed were likely the driving force behind the types of goals he aimed to achieve, researchers said.
“Einstein’s tendency to be creative, curious, and intellectual likely fueled his scientific goals, as well as his more aesthetic goals, such as his passion for playing the violin,” the study authors wrote.
The study, “Stability and Change in Personality Traits and Major Life Goals from College to Midlife,” was published in late August in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.
Besides Atherton, co-authors include Richard Robins, a professor of psychology who is director of the UC Davis Personality, Self and Emotion Lab; as well as Emily Grijalva, University of Buffalo; and Brent W. Roberts, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
The personality traits examined in the present study are termed the “Big Five” in psychology. They are neuroticism, extraversion, openness to experience, agreeableness and conscientiousness. These five traits broadly capture most of the ways in which people differ from one another, and they are related to a wide range of important life outcomes.
Researchers examined these traits, along with aesthetic goals (wanting to be creative and artistic); economic goals (wanting to have a successful career and be wealthy); family/relationship goals (wanting to be married and have children); hedonistic goals (wanting to have fun and experience pleasure); political goals (wanting to have influence in public affairs); religious goals (wanting to participate in religious institutions); and social goals (wanting to help others in need).
.” .. We found that, on average, individuals increased in agreeableness and conscientiousness, decreased in neuroticism, and showed little change in openness to experience and extraversion from age 18 to 40,” researchers said.
Some goals become less relevant
They also found that people place less importance on all goals over time, suggesting that individuals winnow the goals they value with age, presumably because they are achieving milestones associated with those goals and thus, the goals become less important as a result.
“By identifying their own personal strengths and limitations, middle-aged adults may place less importance on certain major life goals because some goals may no longer be viewed as self-relevant,” researchers said.
The authors did find that personality traits are related to major life goal development over time. For example, individuals who become more agreeable, kind and compassionate, also tend to place more emphasis on social and family/relationship goals over time. And, individuals who become more responsible, organized and self-controlled tend to value more economic and family goals.
Epidemics and pandemics can exacerbate xenophobia, bigotry
When viruses, parasites and other pathogens spread, humans and other animals tend to hunker down with immediate family and peer groups to avoid outsiders as much as possible.
But could these instincts, developed to protect us from illnesses, generalize into avoidance of healthy individuals who simply look, speak or live differently?
Jessica Stephenson, an assistant professor in the Department of Biological Sciences in the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences, coauthored a paper exploring the answer, which was recently published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Series B.
One example noted in the study showed that black garden ants exposed to a fungus clustered together in groups much smaller than researchers could predict by chance, which effectively limited the spread of disease. Similar behaviors seen among 19 non-human primate species were also credited for lowering direct spread of parasites.
Human beings share these same biological impulses to separate into modular social groups. However, when pathogens are spreading, humans tend to also adopt a set of behaviors that are “hypervigilant and particularly error prone,” the researchers wrote.
“It’s interesting and really disappointing,” Stephenson said. And as COVID-19 continues its spread, humans are even more susceptible to the impulse.
“During epidemics, humans tend to become overly sensitive, so any sort of physical abnormality that somebody has suddenly becomes a potential indicator of infection. We become much more bigoted, we pay way more attention to things that differentiate people from what we perceive as our own phenotype. People who look different from us and sound different from us, which, of course, leads to a lot more xenophobia,” said Stephenson, who runs Stephenson Lab of Disease Ecology and Evolutionary Parasitology at Pitt.
A prior Stephenson study published in The Royal Society Biology Letters in November 2019 outlined how individuals differ in their response to potential contagion. In both humans and the guppies she studied, the individuals most susceptible to the disease showed the strongest avoidance.
During that study, male guppies were placed in a large tank, flanked by a smaller one containing a group of three female guppies that were visibly infected with parasites. Many males preferred to spend time near the female guppies, despite the risk of contagion. But some male guppies strongly avoided the other fish. The socially distant male guppies were later shown to be highly susceptible to worm infections.
Stephenson said human beings are generally “normal social animals in many of our behavioral responses to infectious diseases.” But, if humans choose social urges over infection control, efforts such as global disease surveillance and centralized public health responses could be wasted, she said.
“That the vast majority of our species has largely squandered the potential payoffs of these benefits is again consistent with other social animals: the cost of social distancing itself can outweigh the cost of contracting the disease,” Stephenson said.
But humans have a leg up on fish: access to information and means of virtual communication. Stephenson’s 2020 study noted that synchronous communication, virtual or not, can mitigate some of the effects of confinement. Computer-mediated discussions can also promote more equal participation from minority groups.
“For some, no amount of Zoom and FaceTime can make up for the lost benefits of social interactions. These frustrating, if wholly natural, behavioral decisions will result in the persistence of COVID-19 until the advent of perhaps our greatest advantage over other species facing emerging infectious diseases: vaccination.”
“We shouldn’t discriminate against different groups in our social distancing, or in our efforts to work together to beat the virus,” she added. “But I think our natural, evolved tendencies would be to associate only within our ingroups. We have to fight that natural antipathy towards people who differ from ourselves, and not shut down.”
World’s oldest animal sperm found in tiny crustaceans trapped in Myanmar amber
An international collaboration between researchers at Queen Mary University of London and the Chinese Academy of Science in Nanjing has led to the discovery of world’s oldest animal sperm inside a tiny crustacean trapped in amber around 100 million years ago in Myanmar.
The research team, led by Dr He Wang of the Chinese Academy of Science in Nanjing, found the sperm in a new species of crustacean they named Myanmarcypris hui. They predict that the animals had sex just before their entrapment in the piece of amber (tree resin), which formed in the Cretaceous period.
Fossilised sperm are exceptionally rare; previously the oldest known examples were only 17 million years old. Myanmarcypris hui is an ostracod, a kind of crustacean that has existed for 500 million years and lives in all kinds of aquatic environments from deep oceans to lakes and rivers. Their fossil shells are common and abundant but finding specimens preserved in ancient amber with their appendages and internal organs intact provides a rare and exciting opportunity to learn more about their evolution.
Professor Dave Horne, Professor of Micropalaeontology at Queen Mary University of London said: “Analyses of fossil ostracod shells are hugely informative about past environments and climates, as well as shedding light on evolutionary puzzles, but exceptional occurrences of fossilised soft parts like this result in remarkable advances in our understanding.”
During the Cretaceous period in what is now Myanmar, the ostracods were probably living in a coastal lagoon fringed by trees where they became trapped in a blob of tree resin. The Kachin amber of Myanmar has previously yielded outstanding finds including frogs, snakes and a feathered dinosaur tail. Bo Wang, also of the Chinese Academy of Science in Nanjing added: “Hundreds of new species have been described in the past five years, and many of them have made evolutionary biologists re-consider long-standing hypotheses on how certain lineages developed and how ecological relationships evolved.”
The study, published in Royal Society Proceedings B, also has implications for understanding the evolutionary history of an unusual mode of sexual reproduction involving “giant sperm.”
The new ostracod finds may be extremely small but in one sense they are giants. Males of most animals (including humans) typically produce tens of millions of really small sperm in very large quantities, but there are exceptions. Some tiny fruit flies (insects) and ostracods (crustaceans) are famous for investing in quality rather than quantity: relatively small numbers of “giant” sperm that are many times longer than the animal itself, a by-product of evolutionary competition for reproductive success. The new discovery is not only by far the oldest example of fossil sperm ever found but also shows that these ostracods had already evolved giant sperm, and specially-adapted organs to transfer them from male to female, 100 million years ago.
Each ostracod is less than a millimetre long. Using X-ray microscopy the team made computer-aided 3-D reconstructions of the ostracods embedded in the amber, revealing incredible detail. “The results were amazing — not only did we find their tiny appendages to be preserved inside their shells, we could also see their reproductive organs,” added He Wang. “But when we identified the sperm inside the female, and knowing the age of the amber, it was one of those special Eureka-moments in a researcher’s life.”
Wang’s team found adult males and females but it was a female specimen that contained the sperm, indicating that it must have had sex shortly before becoming trapped in the amber. The reconstructions also revealed the distinctive muscular sperm pumps and penises (two of each) that male ostracods use to inseminate the females, who store them in bag-like receptacles until eggs are ready to be fertilised.
Such extensive adaptation raises the question of whether reproduction with giant sperms can be an evolutionarily-stable character. “To show that using giant sperms in reproduction is not an extinction-doomed extravagance of evolution, but a serious long-term advantage for the survival of a species, we need to know when they first appeared” says co-author Dr Renate Matzke-Karasz of Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich.
This new evidence of the persistence of reproduction with giant sperm for a hundred million years shows it to be a highly successful reproductive strategy that evolved only once in this group — quite impressive for a trait that demands such a substantial investment from both males and females, especially when you consider that many ostracods can reproduce asexually, without needing males at all. “Sexual reproduction with giant sperm must be very advantageous” says Matzke-Karasz.
Health24.com | Hearing persists at end of life, brain waves of hospice patients show
- In their last hours, many people become unresponsive
- However, EEG data indicated that their awareness of sounds was similar to healthy people
- This suggests that they may still be aware of the presence of their loved ones, even though they seem unconscious
Even if they appear unresponsive, dying people may still be able to hear.
That’s the takeaway from a Canadian analysis of hospice patients in Vancouver.
Researchers compared electroencephalography (EEG) data – a measure of electrical activity in the brain – collected when patients were conscious and when they became unresponsive at the end of life. Those patients were compared to a healthy control group.
The study looked at brain response to various patterns of common and rare sounds that changed frequency, and found that responses of some of the dying patients were similar to those of healthy people – even hours before death.
Dying brain can respond to sound
“In the last hours before an expected natural death, many people enter a period of unresponsiveness,” said lead author Elizabeth Blundon, a doctoral student in psychology at the University of British Columbia at the time of the study.
“Our data shows that a dying brain can respond to sound, even in an unconscious state, up to the last hours of life,” she said in a university news release.
Co-author Lawrence Ward, a professor of psychology, said researchers were able to identify specific mental processes in both groups of participants.
“We had to look very carefully at the individual control participants’ data, to see if each one of them showed a particular type of brain response before we felt confident that the unresponsive patient’s brain reacted similarly,” he said in the release.
The findings were recently published in the journal Scientific Reports.
Being present is meaningful
“This research gives credence to the fact that hospice nurses and physicians noticed that the sounds of loved ones helped comfort people when they were dying,” said study co-author Dr Romayne Gallagher, a now-retired palliative care physician at St. John Hospice in Vancouver.
“And to me, it adds significant meaning to the last days and hours of life and shows that being present, in person or by phone, is meaningful,” she said. “It is a comfort to be able to say goodbye and express love.”
While the evidence of brain activity supports the idea that dying people might hear, it’s not known if they’re aware of what they’re hearing, Blundon noted.
“Their brains responded to the auditory stimuli, but we can’t possibly know if they’re remembering, identifying voices, or understanding language,” she said. “There are all these other questions that have yet to be answered. This first glimpse supports the idea that we have to keep talking to people when they are dying because something is happening in their brain.”
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Coronavirus: PM blames ‘colossal spike’ in demand for test problems
Boris Johnson also pledges to release a new “action plan” for care homes this week.
‘Not enough tests for five months due to winter coughs’
Normal coughs and fevers alone will lead to high demand for coronavirus tests over winter, it says.
Health24.com | Anxious teens may face higher odds for future heart attack
- Signs of stress, depression or anxiety beyond the normal teenage angst may predict future heart problems in men
- In a study, lower physical fitness was associated with poorer mental health
- Fitness in youth, which is sustained into middle age is, therefore, likely to protect against heart disease
Middle-aged men who were anxious or depressed teens are at increased risk for heart attack, according to a large, long-term study.
It included more than 238 000 men born between 1952 and 1956 who underwent extensive exams when they were 18 or 19 years old and were followed to age 58.
Men diagnosed with anxiety or depression in their late teens had a 20% higher risk of heart attack than those who didn’t, the study showed.
‘Be vigilant’
The findings only reflect an association. The link was partly, but not fully, explained by poorer ability to cope with everyday stress and lower physical fitness in teens with the mental health conditions, according to findings presented at a virtual meeting of the European Society of Cardiology.
The takeaway: “Be vigilant and look for signs of stress, depression or anxiety that is beyond the normal teenage angst: Seek help if there seems to be a persistent problem,” suggested study author Cecilia Bergh, a senior lecturer in health sciences at Orebro University in Sweden.
“If a healthy lifestyle is encouraged as early as possible in childhood and adolescence it is more likely to persist into adulthood and improve long-term health,” she said in a meeting news release.
Bergh said researchers already knew that men who were physically fit but stressed as teens seemed less likely to maintain fitness.
Strategies to deal with stress
“Our previous research has also shown that low stress resilience is also coupled with a greater tendency towards addictive behaviour, signalled by higher risks of smoking, alcohol consumption and other drug use,” she noted.
Better fitness in youth is likely to protect against heart disease, particularly if people stay fit as they age, Bergh said, adding that exercise may also alleviate negative consequences of stress.
“This is relevant to all adolescents, but those with poorer well-being could benefit from additional support to encourage exercise and to develop strategies to deal with stress,” she said.
Research presented at meetings is typically considered preliminary until published in a peer-reviewed journal.
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Health24.com | Cyberbullying could rise during lockdown, but parents can stop it
- Increased cellphone and social media use are causing teens to face more cyberbullying
- With unemployment and more parents at home, family dynamics have also changed
- Adolescents with loving parents are, however, less likely to engage in cyberbullying, researchers found
Cyberbullying is less common among teens who feel loved and supported by their parents, new research shows.
The findings could be especially relevant during the coronavirus pandemic, say a team from New York University.
“With remote learning replacing classroom instruction for many young people, and cellphones and social media standing in for face-to-face interaction with friends, there are more opportunities for cyberbullying to occur,” noted study author Laura Grunin. She’s a doctoral student at NYU’s Rory Meyers College of Nursing, in New York City.
“New family dynamics and home stressors are also at play, thanks to higher unemployment rates and more parents working from home,” she added in a university news release.
Emotional support
For the study, which was based on surveys from 2009 and 2010, Grunin and her team analysed responses from more than 12 600 US youth aged 11 to 15 years. The kids were asked about their bullying behaviours and their relationship with their parents.
The more adolescents considered their parents as loving, the less likely they were to cyberbully, the survey findings showed.
Those who said their parents were “almost never” loving were at least six times more likely to engage in high levels of cyberbullying than those who said their parents were “almost always” loving.
Other types of emotional support, including how much adolescents felt their parents help and understand them, also influenced cyberbullying behaviour, the researchers noted.
The study was published in the International Journal of Bullying Prevention.
Teen’s perception of emotional support
More than half of US teens say they’ve experienced online harassment, insults, threats or spreading rumours.
According to study co-author Sally Cohen, a clinical professor at NYU Meyers, “Understanding what factors are related to a young person’s cyberbullying of peers is important for developing ways that families, schools and communities can prevent bullying or intervene when it occurs.”
Grunin said the findings point to the importance of emotional support from parents.
“I would stress to parents it is not necessarily if they think they are being supportive, but what their adolescent thinks,” Grunin explained. “Parents should strive to discern their teen’s perception of parental emotional support as it might be associated with youth cyberbullying behaviour.”
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Health24.com | How to keep kids active while learning from home – and why that’s vital
- Many kids who are not physically going to school are losing out on exercise
- As it is, about 60% of US kids have an insufficient level of cardiorespiratory fitness
- With a bit of imagination, teachers and parents can adapt lessons to include physical activity
When schools close to protect families from the coronavirus, the main worry for many parents might be the lost learning. But for students who end up staying indoors and staring at phones and monitors most of the day, there could be health costs, too.
“You have to give the parents some grace and say we’re all sort of in survival mode right now,” said Hildi Nicksic, a clinical assistant professor in the department of health and kinesiology at Texas A&M University in College Station. Still, the increase in screen time and inactivity makes for “a really scary reality”.
If you’re a kid who has lost access to school, you’ve also lost recess and all the other opportunities for moving around during a school day. You’ve lost physical education classes and sports teams. “And really, you might not even be going outside because maybe you live in an area where your parent doesn’t feel comfortable with you exiting the house,” Nicksic said.
Families can find ways to cope, said Dr Geetha Raghuveer, a paediatric cardiologist at Children’s Mercy in Kansas City, Missouri. But it starts with knowing how vital it is for a child to stay physically active.
Benefits beyond basic health
According to a 2020 report in Circulation written by an American Heart Association panel Raghuveer led, about 60% of US youth have a less-than-healthy level of cardiorespiratory fitness.
The effects of low fitness are multifaceted, she said. “It’s physical, it’s cardiac, it’s mental, it’s academic, it’s long term, it’s short term.”
Federal guidelines recommend children and teens ages six to 17 get at least an hour of moderate to vigorous activity a day, including more intense activities at least three times a week.
Nicksic, who spent more than 10 years as a teacher in public schools before earning her doctorate, said the benefits of activity go beyond basic health.
Regular physical activity has been shown to boost academic results. “A lot of the improvement is seen specifically in math, but there is a general understanding that that benefit will happen across subjects,” she said.
And it might make things easier on teachers and parents by helping kids focus, studies have shown.
Adapt lessons to include action
“If you take a 60-minute lesson, and you pare that down to 55 minutes and have five minutes of physical activity, the remaining 55 minutes is likely going to be a more productive learning time,” Nicksic said.
Breaks aren’t the only way to get kids to move. Teachers – or parents – can adapt lessons to include action. Younger students learning to use a ruler can actively measure things around the room instead of sitting in front of a piece of paper. A teacher working with students over video could ask them to fetch a topic-relevant item from somewhere in their home. “That gets the student away from just looking at the screen, even if it’s just to stand up, move around and come back and sit down.”
The Wide Open School project offers additional ideas, in English and Spanish, at wideopenschool.org. Nicksic compiled her own list at classroomsinmotion.com. The American Heart Association has suggestions through efforts such as Kick Cabin Fever to the Curb and the NFL Play 60 Challenge.
Ultimately, Nicksic and Raghuveer said, fitness works best as a family activity.
“It helps a lot if the family can engage in physical fitness activities as a family as opposed to just telling the kid to go out and do something,” Raghuveer said.
Some families are privileged
That approach has worked for Jenny Groshong, a fourth-grade teacher in Eugene, Oregon.
Her daughters – Libby, 13, and Peyton, 12 – have had plenty of screen time this year, she said. But when it got to be too much, she didn’t always just tell them to put the screen down.
“I’m a runner, so I would make one of them come with me. Some days, the other one would just jump up and say, ‘I’m coming too,’ and they ride their bikes while I go run.”
Their family also hikes. An old tandem bike even gets hauled out sometimes. “Every once in a while, they’ll get on that, which is hysterical,” she said, laughing. “You want to teach your kids how to get along? Put them on a tandem.”
She’s aware that her family is privileged to get to do all they do. “When families are in crisis, or they’re struggling financially, or they’re having a hard time getting food on the table, they don’t have the luxury of hopping in their Suburban and driving an hour to go on a hike,” she said.
Okay to start small
Groshong, who teaches at a school with many students from low-income families, found small ways to work movement into her curriculum. This spring, as the region’s abundant plant life was in full bloom, she sent students (who had school-issued equipment) to capture images of flowers in “all the colours of the rainbow” and arrange them in a colour-wheel collage. Not every kid had to walk very far, she said. “But at least they got outside.”
Raghuveer and Nicksic would approve. Both emphasized it’s OK to start small.
“Baby steps are fine,” Nicksic said. “You don’t need to go from no physical activity to making sure your kid goes for an hour-long walk or something. Anything helps.”
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