America, are you happy? The emotional words contained in hundreds of millions of messages posted to the Twitter website may hold the answer.
Computer scientist Alan Mislove at Northeastern University in Boston and colleagues have found that these “tweets” suggest that the west coast is happier than the east coast, and across the country happiness peaks each Sunday morning, with a trough on Thursday evenings. The team calls their work the “pulse of the nation”. link to read article Source:New Scientist hat tip 😉 @NewScientist
Breaking up really is hard to do, and a recent study conducted at Stony Brook University found evidence that it may be partly due to the areas of the brain that are active during this difficult time.
The team of researchers, which included Arthur Aron, Ph.D., professor of social and health psychology in the Department of Psychology at Stony Brook University, and former graduate students Greg Strong and Debra Mashek looked at subjects who had a recent break-up and found that the pain and anguish they were experiencing may be linked to activation of parts of the brain associated with motivation, reward and addiction cravings. The study was published in the July issue of the Journal of Neurophysiology. [continue reading…]
Most people know that high cholesterol levels place them at increased risk for heart disease and stroke. Prior research has shown that particular types of strokes contribute to one’s risk for depression, and that abnormal blood lipid levels can increase the risk of depression in the elderly. [continue reading…]
Regardless of culture, language, era, or individual artist, the arts consistently depict depression using darkness. Scientific findings now lend empirical support to this representation of depression that everything looks gray when you feel blue. [continue reading…]
