Social Sciences

People who offer love, listening and help to others may be rewarded with better mental health themselves, according to a new study of churchgoers in the September/October issue of Psychosomatic Medicine.

The study is one of the first to track the positive health benefits of altruistic behavior, say Carolyn Schwartz, Sc.D., of the University of Massachusetts Medical School and colleagues.

“The findings really emphasize how helping others can help oneself,” Schwartz says.

Short people may be short-changed when it comes to salary, status and respect, according to a University of Florida study that found tall people earn considerably more money throughout their lives.

“Height matters for career success,” said Timothy Judge, a UF management professor whose research is scheduled to be published in the spring issue of the Journal of Applied Psychology. “These findings are troubling in that, with a few exceptions such as professional basketball, no one cou

The citizens of Kuwait became more supportive of democracy during the mid- to late-1990s, but that did not include a desire for closer ties with the United States and other Western countries, a new study found.

A survey of 1,500 Kuwaiti citizens conducted in 1994, 1996, and 1998 found that the citizens became less interested in trade alliances with the West and less likely to pay attention to Western media over that time period.

The long-term survey is one of the first in the Arab

Different parts of brain are activated

In the first study ever to examine how the brain functions when making judgments about forgivability and empathy, researcher Tom Farrow, B.Sc. (Hons.), Ph.D., found that different regions of the brain are activated when a person makes judgments about forgiving.

The findings will be presented at the Scientific Conference on Forgiveness along with studies from over 40 of the top scientists in the world who study forgiveness. The conferen

One year after miscarrying, two-thirds of women say their relationships with their husbands or partners stayed the same or improved, according to a recent study. The remaining third said their relationships grew more distant over the same time span.

“It seems that when miscarriage affects couples, it may stimulate growth or, conversely, unearth inability to support each other through troubling times,” says Kristen M. Swanson, R.N., Ph.D., F.A.A.N., professor of family and child nursing at

Could help improve treatment of anxiety

Behavior therapists may have a better way to help anxious patients, thanks to insights from a UCLA study of different ways to get mice past their fears. Rodents have long been used to study learning by association. Neuroscientists compared different ways of exposing mice to a stimulus that they had learned to fear, and found that “massing” the feared stimulus -– delivering it in concentrated bursts, not pacing it with longer pauses in between –