Investigating sex differences in the role of stress and hormones on affiliative behavior by people was the goal of a recent study. For anyone interested in the influence of hormones on behavior, the results are exciting, but its the dog angle thats most noteworthy to me.

The study measured peoples affiliative behavior towards their dogs after victory or defeat in an agility competition. (A qualifying score of 85 or better was considered a victory. Scores below 85 were classified as defeats.) Its gratifying that the researchers recognized the truly competitive nature of canine agility and its usefulness for studying reactions to victory and defeat. The main finding was that men and women exhibit different patterns of affiliative behavior based on whether they experienced success or failure, but they did not show different amounts of affiliative behavior overall.

One specific finding was that after defeat, women were more affiliative towards their dogs, but that men showed the reverse patternmore affiliative behavior after victory. Additionally, the higher their cortisol levels (associated with defeat), the more affiliative behavior the women showed, but men responded to higher cortisol levels with lower levels of affiliative behavior. Their conclusion is that affiliative behavior is a sign of shared celebration for men, but of shared consolation for women. (Its not clear how this impacts peoples relationships with their dogs as that was beyond the scope of this study, but I would LOVE to see further research that explores that question.)

Since the paper is written mainly for scientists concerned with the role of social stressors and hormones on affiliative behavior rather than for people interested in dogs, they had to explain what agility is and make the case that it is truly competitive. They wrote, As a rule, contestants take these competitions very seriously,an obvious understatement.

With their choice to study human affiliative behavior in the context of agility, the authors demonstrated the ever- increasing recognition of the importance of dogs in peoples lives.

Excerpt from:
Studying Human Behavior in Dog Agility - The Bark (blog)

A scientist wanting to hack into an animals brain used to have three different tools to choose from: electriccurrent, drugs, and light. Now theres a fourth: magnetic fields. In a paper published last week in the open-access journal eLife, scientists at the University at Buffalo used magneto-thermal genetics to manipulate brain cells in mice, enabling the researchers to control the animals behavior.

Magneto-thermal genetics has been previously shownto activate neurons in anesthetized rodent brains, but this is the first time anyone hasreported using the tool to manipulate animal behavior, says Arnd Pralle, the University at Buffalo biophysicist who led the research.

Brain hacking tools help scientists better understand the wiring of the brainthe arrangement of neural circuits and which onescontrol different movements and behaviors. These tools could someday lead to the development of artificial human eyes and ears, or treatments for paralysis,traumatic brain injury, and diseases such as Parkinsons and depression.

Over the past few years, major funding agencieshave encouraged scientists and bioengineers to focus their work on the bodys internal wiring. The U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) and DARPA have been doling out grants for work on both the peripheral and central nervous systems.

Engineers play a key role in the research. The bodys nervous systems communicate, after all, in a language of electrical signals. Researchers must not only map those signals, but also figure out how to interface with them, and override them when they malfunction.

Magnetic fields can do the job (following some complicated, multi-step bioengineering). In Pralles experiments, he and his team injected a virus containing a gene and some helper genetic elementsinto the brains of mice. This genetic material gets incorporated into the DNA of the mouses brain cells, or neurons. The foreign gene makes the neurons heat sensitive. Next, they injected magnetic nanoparticlesinto a specific region of the mouse brain that latch onto the neurons in that region. They then applied alternating magnetic fields, which cause the nanoparticles to heat up a couple of degrees. The rise in temperature triggers the heat-sensitive neurons to open ion channels. Positively-charged ions flow into the neuron, causing it to fire.

Pralle demonstrated proof of the concept in 2010, and others, such as Polina Anikeeva, a professor of materials science and engineering at MIT, have since improved upon it. Those studies confirmed that the technique could indeed activate neurons in the rodent brain.

In the new study, Pralle and his team show how magneto-thermal genetics can manipulate behavior in mice that are awake and freely moving. In their experiments, they activated regions of the brain that made the mice run faster around the perimeter of their cages, spin in circles, and, eerily, freeze the motion of all four paws.

Those same behaviors have been induced in rodents by activating neurons using other brain hacking tools, including optogenetics (in which neurons are genetically sensitized to respond to light), and chemogenetics (in which neurons are genetically sensitized to respond to designer drugs).

Those three toolsmagneto-thermal genetics, optogenetics, and chemogeneticsare new and purely experimental. A fourth toolelectrical stimulationhas been around for decades, with some success in treating Parkinsons, depression, memory loss, paralysis, and epilepsy in humans.

None of the tools has made a dent, relatively speaking, in the range of functions that the brain, spinal cord and peripheral nerves control. Its like owning four different musical instruments and knowing how to play onlya few rudimentary toddler songs on each of them. That untapped potential has inspired scientists to continue to test and develop the tools.

That means overcomingthe shortcomings of each tool. Electrical stimulation of deep brain regions requires, at least for now, an invasive surgical procedure to implant electrodes. That limits the number of patients willing to undergo the surgery. The method is also limited in how specifically it can target small brain regions or cell types.

Optogenetic techniques can target specific neurons, but animals in these experiments usually have to be tethered to an optical fiber or other kind of implant that delivers the light, which can affect their behavior. Study animals undergoing chemogenetic modulation can run free, but their response to the drugs is much slower than to light or electrical stimulation.

Magneto-thermal genetic toolsare non-invasive, tetherless, and induce a response within seconds of turning on the magnetic fields. But theres controversy over how the tool works.

Pralles team has shown that the magnetic nanoparticles injected into the mouse brains latch onto the membranes of the neurons, thus restricting the heating to those membranes rather than diffusing out to the surrounding liquid. This makes little sense from a physics point of view, and contradicts basic principles of heat transfer, saysMarkus Meister, a bioengineer at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

Meister has also argued that previous experiments in magnetogeneticsa sister tool to magneto-thermal geneticsthat involves a different mechanismcontradict the laws of physics.He laid out his back-of-the-envelope calculations last year ina paper ineLife, whichgarnered a lot of attentionin the field of neuromodulation.

However, Pralles main claim, that he successfully used magnetic heating to control animal behavior, looks well supported, Meister says. Bottom line, the reported effects on behavior look real, but just what the mechanism is behind them remains to be understood.

Pralle says his work clearly demonstrates and measures local heating at the cell membrane, showing that it does indeed occur. Why thats happening, however, is unclear, he says.We cannot completely explain why the increase in heat stays within a few tenths or hundredths of nanometers of the neuronal membrane, Pralle says. The heat should diffuse more quickly into the [surrounding] water solution, so it shouldnt have much of a local heating effect.

Several theorists and experimentalists, including Anikeeva, have formulated and are testingmodels to explain the phenomenon. Similar effects have been seen, measured and correctly predicted for laser heating of gold nanoparticles in water, Pralle says.

Anikeeva says she sees nocontroversy in Pralles latest work. Meisters argument is based on a model that isnot applicable to nanoscale heat transport, she says.

Next, Pralle plans to develop, in collaboration with Anikeeva,a magneto-thermal genetics tool that can modulate multiple areas of the brain simultaneously, allowing the researchers to more fully control behavior, or multiple behaviors at one time. If we dream about it we can overcome the technical hurdles, Pralle says.

Go here to see the original:
Magnetothermal Genetics: A Fourth Tool in the Brain-Hacking Toolbox - IEEE Spectrum

An innovative and new behavioral study is being conducted on Block Island using a free smartphone app to examine how daily activities expose people to the risks of acquiring diseases transmitted by ticks. The all-mobile research study app, called the Tick App,is available to IOS and Android smartphone users.

The app was created by Columbia Universitys tick and Lyme disease research team, led by Dr. Maria Diuk-Wasser, a professor in the Department of Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Biology (E3B). It offers the Block Island community a way to understand what activities and specific locations on the island lead to the highest risk of tick exposure. The pilot study is open, and is seeking residents and visitors on Block Island to participate by utilizing the app through September 2017. Dr. Diuk-Wasser intends to report her findings before next spring.

A summary from the research team noted that the goal of the study is to evaluate the use of ecological momentary assessments as a tool to assess risk factors for Lyme disease. This study will be conducted on Block Island, and data on human behavior will be obtained from a smartphone application using momentary assessments methodology to assess real time behavior and movement.

Were excited about the app, said Dr. Diuk-Wasser, who noted that the pilot study was hatched out of collaboration with a colleague. Dr. Diuk-Wassers team began using the app in June, and will share the results with Dr. Peter Krause, a Senior Research Scientist studying vector borne diseases at Yale University. Dr. Krause and his team will test participants at the conclusion of the study at the end of September.

Dr. Diuk-Wasser said subjects will participate using the app for about three weeks during the study. She said the app tracks the participants range of movement daily providing mapping information about dangerous areas on the island. She is hopeful that her research draws a large field of participants.

Dr. Diuk-Wasser has been working on Block Island since 2010, investigating links between the islands environment, animal populations, and human cases of Lyme disease. Other members of her research team are Pilar Fernandez, an Earth Institute post-doctorate fellow, and Pallavi Kache, who will be starting her PhD program at E3B in the fall.

Fernandez, who has been leading the teams communication efforts, said the app provides a way to use new tools and resources to conduct our research.She noted that users can participate using either a username, or their own name if they choose. Were the only ones who will be accessing the data from the study, she said.

According to a press release, The Tick App uses a combination of pop-up survey questions and geolocation technology to collect data. With these functions, Dr. Diuk-Wassers research team will be able to uncover how peoples day-to-day activities and movement around the island play a role in their risk for tick bites and tick-borne diseases. This information can help develop disease-control programs that take the lifestyle of the Block Island community into consideration and help develop educational programs to reduce disease risk.

The Tick App asks participants to:

Answer two multiple-choice questions sent at random times each day about their current activity

Answer two multiple-choice questions at the end of each day about all the activities they did that day

Answer one fill-in-the-blank questionnaire at the end of each day about how many ticks they found on themselves and their pet (if applicable)

Turn on location services so that the participants movement around the island can be detected

The summary states that the aim of the research is to recruit 100 Block Island residents and 100 visitors who have a personal smartphone. Vulnerable populations, such as pregnant women, the elderly, or children, will be excluded. The study will produce highly precise behavioral data about tick exposure which will lead to deepen our understanding on what intervention strategies might be most needed and most effective, pertaining to the fight against tick-borne disease.

The Block Island Times reported on Dr. Diuk-Wassers five-year research study that she presented at the Island Free Library on July 11, 2016. During her presentation she explained the pivotal role that deer and mice play in the spread of tick-borne diseases on Block Island.

To learn more about the app or to schedule an interview, contact: Maria Diuk-Wasser, PhD, Associate Professor, Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Environmental Biology at Columbia University. Phone: 212-854-3355 E-mail: bitickapp@gmail.com, Website: http://www.columbia.edu/~mad2256, Study Website: https://thetickapp.org/ and Twitter: @diukwasserlab. Dr. Diuk-Wasser said she is seeking additional funding to further the evolution of the app and her studies, which she hopes to continue into the near future.

Read more from the original source:
New app studies tick disease risks - Block Island Times (press release) (subscription) (blog)

When George Zimmerman went on trial four years ago for the shooting of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, the Sanford (Florida) Police Department senta request to the states attorney asking whether his death would be determined a justifiable homicide. Under Floridas stand your ground laws, such a designation would allow Zimmerman to claim his killing of Martin occurred in self-defense and he did so, successfully.

By the time the jury delivered a not guilty verdict for Zimmerman in 2013, self-defense had become an increasingly common rationalization for homicide cases in the U.S.as stand your ground laws proliferated state-by-state. In Florida,therateof justifiable homiciderose200%from 2005, when stand your ground went into effect, to 2013.

A new report by the Marshall Project published this month,which examines FBI data about 400,000 civilian homicides,finds that cases are far more likely to be determined justifiable homicides when the killer is white and the victim is black. In fact, while justifiable homicides only constituted 2% of all cases, that percentage swelled to 17%when the cases involved a white civilian killing a black civilian. According to the authors of the Marshall Project report:

The vast majority of killings of whites are committed by other whites, contrary to some folk wisdom, and the overwhelming majority of killings of blacks is by other blacks. But killings of black males by white people are labeled justifiable more than eight times as often as others. This racial disparity has persisted for decades and is hard to explain based solely on the circumstances reported by the police data.

The phrase justifiable homicide is one of those oddities of a justice system that seeks to make room for human fallibility in legal classification and language for example, homicides committed by domestic violence victims against their abusers. But these adjustments for the failures of human judgment end up accommodating prejudices and biases that disproportionately benefit nonblack defendants and victimize black victims. It's not just white-on-black self-defense claims, says Jody David Armour, a professor of law at the University of Southern California. It's any self-defense claims that include a black victim, whether the shooter is white, black, Latino, or Asian.

Jody David Armour. Photo courtesy of the University of Southern California.

Armour is the author of Negrophobia and Reasonable Racism: The Hidden Costs of Being Black in America, a 1997 book that examined how unconscious racism against black people manifests systemicallyin institutions like the justice system.

The key legal test for determining whether a homicide was justifiable is something called the reasonable person standard, says Armour in cases involving civilians or a police officer. The test asks one simple question: Would a reasonable person in this situation detect an imminent threat by the victim?

The way the law defines 'reasonable' is not 'rational,' says Armour. Reasonable does not mean right. All reasonable means is 'typical.' 'Ordinary.' You're a reasonable person if you're an ordinary person, if you're the average person.

A persons reasonableness insulates them from accountability when their mistakes are determined to fall within the spectrum of typicalhuman behavior and inadequacy. The reasonable person test says you don't condemn somebody who's just expressed ordinary human frailty in whatever they've done, says Armour. But human failure is not always natural or predetermined its often influenced by the social environments in which we are raised.

The problem with the typical is reasonable approach, which is the one we use in a court, is that it would let off the hook a lot of, for example, Germans in Nazi Germany in 1939 or 1940, adds Armour. If they could say, Hey, I was anti-Semitic but it was typical to be anti-Semitic. You can't blame me for being anti-Semitic if most people around me were.

Though Charlottesville made it clear that anti-Semitism is on the rise in America, racism is undeniably a foundational characteristic of contemporary American society, embedded in the body politic. So it stands to be argued that a reasonable person in the United States is likely a racist one, too.

We know that at an unconscious level, ordinary people harbor negative stereotypes about blacks, says Armour. And among those stereotypes that ordinary people harbor about blacks are that blacks are more violent and crime-prone. That stereotype can operate unconsciously, automatically.

A 1976 study by University of California, Berkeley, professor Birt Duncan exemplifies the ways in which these unconscious beliefs function in real life. Duncan made his subjects of varied races view and evaluate a taped interaction between two people having a discussion about another colleagues job placement. The conversation becomes heated, and one of them gets up to leave, ambiguously bumping the other person on their way out.

When someone black initiated that ambiguous bump, the subjects were much more likely to interpret the bump as hostile or violent. When someone white initiated the same bump, the subject was much more likely to interpret it as merely horseplay or dramatized, says Armour. This pattern of judgment was the same whether the subject was black or white. These findings reveal how ordinary Americans have been socialized to read aggression into the behaviors and movements of black people behaviors that would otherwise be read as nonthreatening when performed by a white people.

If 'reasonable' means 'typical,' then the question becomes, 'Does a typical person in America consider race, consider blackness, when they're assessing the dangerousness of an ambiguous or suspicious person? asks Armour. And the tragic truth is, study after study shows and we know it if we just consult our own intuition that ordinary people in America, ordinary people do consider race when they're assessing someone's dangerousness.

This is why, for example, black men frequently observe white women clutching their purses a little tighter when they walk past them on the street. Its a psychological tic that reporter Frederick H. Lowe explored in an article for the Chicago Reader called the The Clutch of Fear, calling it a form of racist signaling. In it, he interviewed psychiatrist Carl Bell, who said:"It's a nonverbal kinetic that wears at a black man's self-esteem. A white woman sees a black man and she instantly stereotypes him as someone who plans to rape and rob her.

There is a mental tax for these kinds of interactions, levied mostly against black men. This type of projection depletes a black man's energy because he constantly thinks about it, said Bell. It limits his mobility. And it impinges on his life, because he's constantly kept off guard, preventing him from focusing on other issues."

And in places where guns are easily accessible, its not just a black persons energy or mental health that is threatened its their very life, as demonstrated in the case of Trayvon Martin. Zimmerman, an ordinary person, harboring many of the same prejudices that the white women in The Clutch of Fear cling to, determined that Martins behaviors were hostileand that Martin, a 17-year-old boy, posed an imminent threat to his life. Zimmermans possession of a gun allowed him to act on that split-second judgment with violence, taking Martins life.

But in the eyes of the law, Zimmermans killing was consideredjustifiable because his perceptions matched those of an ordinary jury. This legal applicationempties the word of its meaning what becomes clear is that in at least one case of justifiable homicide, justicewas not dispensed.

Share image and top image byKena Betancur/Getty Images.

See the article here:
The Killings Of Black Men Are More Likely To Be Labelled 'Justifiable' - GOOD Magazine