Weird Science
Marriage really does improve with age
Honeymoon long over? Hang in there.
A US study shows disagreements that can mark the early and middle years of marriage give way to humour and acceptance.
Researchers analysed videotaped conversations between 87 middle-aged and older husbands and wives who had been married for 15 to 35 years, and tracked their emotional interactions over 13 years.
They found that as couples aged, they showed more humour and tenderness towards one another.
Overall, the findings, published in the journal Emotion, showed an increase in positive behaviours such as humour and affection and a decrease in negative behaviours such as defensiveness and criticism.
The results challenge long-held theories that emotions flatten or deteriorate in old age and point to an
emotionally positive trajectory for longterm married couples.
So cute I could crush it
Have you ever looked at a puppy and had the urge to squeeze or even bite it? Or felt compelled to pinch a baby’s cheeks, albeit without a desire to harm them?
If you answered yes to either question, you’ve experienced cute aggression — and you’re far from alone.
Katherine Stavropoulos, an assistant professor at the University of California, Riverside, used electrophysiology to evaluate surface-level electrical activity that arose from neurons firing in people’s brains.
She gauged neural responses to a range of external stimuli in a group of 54 adults and found direct evidence of the brain’s reward system and emotion system being involved in the phenomenon.
“There was an especially strong correlation between ratings of cute aggression experienced towards cute
animals and the reward response in the brain toward cute animals,” she said.
“It confirms our original hypothesis that the reward system is involved in people’s experiences of cute aggression.”
She also found the relationship between how cute something was and how much cute aggression someone experienced toward it appeared to be tied to how overwhelmed that person was feeling at the time.
“Essentially, for people who tend to experience the feeling of ‘not being able to take how cute something is’, cute aggression happens,” Stavropoulos said. “Our study seems to underscore the idea that cute aggression is the brain’s way
of ‘bringing us back down’ by mediating our feelings of being overwhelmed.”
The deadly bug on everyone’s skin
Forget MRSA and E. coli, there’s another bacterium that is becoming increasingly dangerous due to antibiotic resistance — and it’s present on everyone’s skin.
A close relative of MRSA, Staphylococcus epidermidis, is a major cause of life-threatening infections after surgery, but is often overlooked because it is so abundant. Researchers from the University of Bath in the UK warn that the threat posed by this organism should be taken more seriously and extra precautions used for those at higher risk of infection who are due to undergo surgery. The researchers have identified a set of 61 genes that allow this normally harmless skin bacterium
to cause life-threatening illness.
The disease-causing genes were found to help the bacterium grow in the bloodstream, avoid the host’s immune response, make the cell surface sticky so that the organisms can form biofilms and make the bug resistant to antibiotics.
Surprisingly, however, there was a small number of healthy individuals who were found to be carrying the more deadly form of the bacteria without knowing it.
The researchers hope that by understanding why some strains of S. epidermidis cause disease in certain circumstances, they could in the future identify which patients are most at risk of infection before undergoing surgery.
“Staphylococcus epidermidis is a deadly pathogen in plain sight,” said Professor Sam Sheppard, of the university’s Milner Centre for Evolution.
“It’s always been ignored clinically because it’s frequently assumed that it is a contaminant in lab samples or simply accepted as a known risk of surgery.”