Natasha Jategaonkar who is a project manager for the Framework Convention Alliance told me a little bit about the world’s first public health treaty. In this excerpt from our conversation, Nat comments on the role of tobacco advertising in relation to the treaty. Listen to Nat here.

Here are some funny math inspired cartoons. 

If you’ve ever dated a math major you may also find this and this and this funny.  If you’re in grad school you might like this.  Remember the right hand rule?  Also, you can’t have a sciency website without a little dark global-warming-humor.

Dr. Aufses kindly sent me a follow-up after reading the first Food Environment post. Unlike the work related to the Retail Food Environment Index, which looks the proportion of grocery stores and farmers’ markets, compared to fast food and convenience stores, this work looks at the disparity in the availability of specific healthy foods at local stores in different neighborhoods in New York City (East Harlem versus The Upper East Side).

One thing that is nice about the work is the community based, participatory design (members of the East Harlem community helped design and implement the work). That said, in considering what to do about these macro level disparities (i.e., in this case, how can we expect people to eat healthy food if it is unavailable where they shop?), the researchers suggest that “East Harlem residents need to take the following steps to procure diabetes-healthy food:

a) become familiar with which food items (such as low-fat milk) are healthier,

b) recognize that many of their neighborhood stores do not carry these foods and forgo shopping at these undesirable stores,

c) be aware that other stores may offer healthier food choices, and

d) shop at these desirable stores instead.”

While these recommendations clearly make logical sense, another part of the story presented in the paper is the fact that residents of East Harlem may shop in local community stores because they are comfortable and familiar, may extend credit to neighborhood residents. Asking residents to completely change their shopping patterns does not seem to account for these types of psychological factors. Instead (or in addition), it seems that it would make more sense to provide incentives for small local stores to carry healthy foods.

Today is my sister Lily’s birthday.  Given Lily’s interest in astronomy, black holes, and the like, this post is for her:

While many movies have been made about life on other planets, alien invasions and parallel universes, check out Science Magazine’s latest on a solar system much like our own.

Lily, you will especially like the clever technique they use to figure this stuff out.

I just got back from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology’s Annual Conference, this year in Albuquerque, NM.  Some of the highlights in my book included talks on SCN and neuro-endocrine interactions:

Symposium on Social Cognitive Neuroscience Perspectives on Intragroup and Intergroup Relations.  Of particular interest here, Jay Van Bavel discussed his work with Dominic Packer and Will Cunningham, using a minimal group paradigm (with mixed race teams).  As in previous work, participants showed ingroup bias (they favored people on their own team over people on the other team).  Using fMRI, the group found that viewing photos of ingroup members (compared to viewing photos of outgroup members) was associated with increased activity in regions of the brain that are associated with affective processing (amygdala, striatum).  This is especially interesting considering the fact that the amygdala is usually thought of as a “fear” region.  This work adds to the mounting evidence that the amygdala may be more broadly associated with motivationally relevant affective processes.  The work is also interesting because it adds to the literature suggesting that there is something special about the idea of an ingroup, regardless of familiarity/ race.

Jenn Pfeifer also presented results (from an impressive longitudinal fMRI study of children and adolescents) demonstrating increased amygdala activity in imitating facial expressions of ingroup compared to outgroup members (in this case, ingroup = gender).  Furthermore, across several areas of the brain that are typically associated with shared representations of the self and others, “children who were more biased in favor of their own gender showed greater activity in response to gender ingroup members, while in other preliminary data, girls with higher levels of estradiol [female sex hormone] showed greater activity in response to boys.”  In fact, in young girls who did not consciously show interest in boys, levels of sex hormones were associated with the ways that they responded to photos of the opposite sex in the scanner.  Hormones are powerful things…

Continuing on the topic of hormones, at a symposium on Social Endocrinology: How Hormones Can Contribute to Research in Social and Personality Psychology, Pranjal Mehta presented data suggesting the importance of considering the role of multiple hormone systems in concert.  Pranjal’s data demonstrated an interaction between cortisol and testosterone levels in predicting a response to defeat in a competition.  From Pranjal’s absract: “After facing social defeat, high testosterone- low cortisol individuals were more likely to choose to compete again than high testosterone, high cortisol individuals.  Hormones were unrelated to the decision to compete again after victory.  These data support the hypothesis that when social status is threatened, testosterone increases the motivation to gain status, whereas cortiso influences behavioral approach and avoidance.”   Given how much we have come to rely on hormonal measures to link psychology and health outcomes, I was especially interested to see how important the interaction of multiple hormones was in predicting the “dominance behavior” outcomes discussed.  This is potentially of interest to people interested in health as well, because dominance hierarchies seem to play such a key role in health outcomes.

Other talks at this symposium addressed the role of testosterone in decision making (e.g. testosterone made people more likely to maximize their gains in an ultimatum game, but placebo effects/ thinking you had received testosterone made people more likely to behave in aggressive ways).   I am not sure what to make of the data since the manipulations typically involved administering testosterone exogenously, and who knows whether giving someone testosterone is the same thing as having the body produce it in response to outside influences.  I actually thought one of the most interesting points here related to the placebo effects– despite the fact that actually receiving testosterone made people behave in one way, the belief that one had received testosterone made them behave in the opposite (aggressive) way that is typically depicted in the media.  Does testosterone as an excuse make men think that they can behave in aggressive ways?

More updates on SPSP soon.

Socioeconomic status (SES) is linked to health outcomes across a range of diseases, with increasing health at *every* level of the SES gradient (so it’s not just that being super poor is a risk factor, it’s that with every incremental increase in wealth, we see improved health).  Data suggests that in addition to the obvious culprits (access to health care, access to good food, health behaviors, etc.), stress is a major factor in SES/health disparities.

A recent article in SCAN reported one possible pathway linking SES and stress:

“after accounting for potential demographic confounds, subclinical depressive symptoms, dispositional forms of negative emotionality and conventional indicators of SES, self-reports of low subjective social status uniquely covaried with reduced gray matter volume in the perigenual area of the anterior cingulate cortex (pACC)—a brain region involved in experiencing emotions and regulating behavioral and physiological reactivity to psychosocial stress.^“

Reduced ability to regulate stress and emotion may have major health implications.

^{See also: why zebras don’t get ulcers and Naomi Eisenberger’s commentary on the article above.}

Baldwin Way wrote a really awesome primer on genetics for those of us who didn’t major in genetics or microbiology, but still want to capitalize on the power of the many new “-omics” technologies. Check it out.

I have been working on a script that will read in MacStim like code (tab delimited with same column concepts), and will play in MatLab.  I am so sick of only being able to use .sfil to play audio, and having to specify the length of each audio and video piece.  The default here (if you don’t specify a stimulus length) is to play for the length of the audio or video file.

I attended the 12th Annual Healthcare Symposium at UCLA today.  Robert Brook presented the following idea to the medical students in the room:

See if you can all get together and agree to give the president and congress an ultimatum.  Tell them that they have one year to come up with some kind of healthcare legislation– it can be anything they think will work, but after that one year, the stipulation will be that you will treat them as if they have no insurance, whatever that means under the plan developed. 

 Although there is no chance of this happening, the idea does have appeal

 Another challenge put forth by Brook to doctors:

How would your practice change if I told you that your 401k would be dependent on how many of your patients who are currently under 18 graduate from college?

These two ideas exemplify the type of thinking that I believe we need– health, education, the environment, and income are all linked.  We can not continue to address them in isolation. 

Sue Babey and the folks over at the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research are doing some really cool work looking at the relationship between your food environment (what kind of retail food establishments are available around your home) and health outcomes, like obesity. They have developed an index called the Retail Food Environment Index (RFEI), where the RFEI of a given area is calculated by (# of fast food stores + # of convenience stores)/(supermarkets + produce markets + farmers markets). Not surprisingly, areas that tend to be lower income neighborhoods have a much higher RFEI (meaning worse food environment) than affluent areas. Interestingly, the RFEI correlates with prevalence of obesity, even controlling for the income of people in the neighborhood, as well as a bunch of other demographic variables. Bring on the produce markets!