HENRY

PsyBlog reviews the psychological research on pick-up lines:

Indeed, a study by Chris Bale from the University of Central Lancashire
found that sexually-loaded remarks were the type of openers least
likely to lead to further interaction (Bale, 2006). Which begs the
question: why do men still use them?

…Chat-up lines may be a way for men to select for
a particular type of woman. In other words, men using sexually-loaded
remarks are looking for a certain type of woman (an easy one).
Similarly, at the other end of the scale, men who use
character-revealing or culture-based openers are probably trying to
show they are a good mate looking for a long-term partner.

I’d be most interested to hear what the ladies think of this, as well as any top-notch lines that you’ve encountered?

Out in P.N.A.S. shortly, will be “Dental evidence on the hominin dispersals during the Pleistocene” (doi:10.1073/pnas.0706152104). Get it before it gets embargoed -

A common assumption in the evolutionary scenario of the first Eurasian hominin populations is that they all had an African origin. This assumption also seems to apply for the Early and Middle Pleistocene populations, whose presence in Europe has been largely explained by a discontinuous flow of African emigrant waves. Only recently, some voices have speculated about the possibility of Asia being a center of speciation. However, no hard evidence has been presented to support this hypothesis. We present evidence from the most complete and up-to-date analysis of the hominin permanent dentition from Africa and Eurasia. The results show important morphological differences between the hominins found in both continents during the Pleistocene, suggesting that their evolutionary courses were relatively independent. We propose that the genetic impact of Asia in the colonization of Europe during the Early and Middle Pleistocene was stronger than that of Africa.

I’m  completely intrigued by ” The cabbage aphid: a walking mustard oil bomb” (doi:10.1098/rspb.2007.0237). The potential for self-seasoning coleslaw alone makes this worth a read.

Erica Cartmill and Richard Byrne announce in today’s Current Biology, that Orangutans Modify Their Gestural Signaling According to Their Audience’s Comprehension (doi:10.1016/j.cub.2007.06.069):

When people are not fully understood, they persist with attempts to communicate, elaborating their speech in order to better convey their meaning. We investigated whether captive orangutans (Pongo pygmaeus and Pongo abelii) would use analogous communicative strategies in signaling to a human experimenter, and whether they could distinguish different degrees of misunderstanding.

To do this, the Orangutans were offered two types of food - one which they really like, and one which is less tasty, and were given the one they gestured for. All the gestures were directed towards the tasty food, whilst the experimenter sat silently for 30 seconds, before giving the orangutan some food.

Some of the time, the experimenter gave the apes all of the tasty food they wanted, so that the gestural communication was successful: the orang communicated that they wanted the tasty food, and received the tasty food too. In other cases, the experimenter gave out a mix of half the tasty food, and half the less-tasty food (partially successful communication), or gave them all the disliked food (a complete failure to communicate effectively).

The types of gestures from the orangutans were quite varied:

The fascinating thing here, is that the Orangs responded differently to each condition. Once they communicated successfully, and gotten the food, the gestures stopped almost completely. In contrast, when they were partially successful, they tended to repeat the original gesture, but when communication was unsuccessful (and they got the yuck-food), they changed to a different gesture.

These results suggest that the Orangutans are actively monitoring their gestures with regard to their effectiveness at communicating: if the gesture only partially worked, they repeated it (stupid humans), or if it completely failed, they tried a different gesture.

The authors conclude that:

Although the communication sequences of the orangutans are perhaps not as sophisticated, they nonetheless accomplish the same objectives. By maximizing efficiency at searching for an understood signal and homing in on those that achieve partial success, orangutans are able to overcome misunderstandings. In the absence of a shared lexicon, one way of arriving at a shared meaning is to adopt a charades-like strategy, transmitting not only the content of the intended message but also a signal indicating how well you have been understood.

If the recipient can use this information, then the signaler and recipient will be able to arrive at a common understanding much faster. This strategy offers one possible pathway toward constructing a shared lexicon from learned or ritualized signals. Investigations into the structures of intentional communication by apes may therefore provide insight into the prelinguistic devices that helped construct the very earliest forms of hominid language.

Tom Currie’s organising a one day workshop on Modern approaches to investigating cultural evolution, in November:

The LERN (London Evolutionary Research Network) in association with AHRC CECD (AHRC Centre for the Evolution of Cultural Diversity) is pleased to announce an informal workshop for postgraduate and post-doctoral students to showcase modern approaches to investigating cultural evolution. The workshop represents an excellent opportunity for young researchers to learn about new techniques and approaches, talk about problems or difficulties with current research, and establish links with researchers from other disciplines.

Should be fun, and it’ll keep Tom out of mischief for a bit at least.

The ability (or curse) for remembering traumatic memories appears to be linked to a deletion in ADRA2β, a gene that codes for an adrenergic neuroreceptor. The authors of A deletion variant of the alpha2b-adrenoceptor is related to emotional memory in Europeans and Africans (doi:10.1038/nn1945), first surveyed a large group of people; around 450 volunteers. The volunteers were shown a set of photos ranging in subject matter from cute puppies to accident scenes, and asked to rate them as being either emotionally positive, neutral, or negative. 10 minutes after the experiment, they were asked to describe the pictures. Strikingly, the people with the ADRA2β deletion had significantly better recall for the emotionally charged pictures.

Since this deletion was strongly linked to the recall of emotional memories, is it possible that this is a major problem when there are things that you need to forget? To investigate, this the authors investigated around 200 refugees who survived the Rwandan civil war, and, unsurprisingly, almost 70% met the diagnostic criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder. In accordance with the previous results, the refugees who had the ADRA2β deletion, where the ones who had the worst symptoms.

The authors conclude -

The present findings suggest that the price for the deletion-related enhancement of emotional memory may be enhanced intrusive and distressing emotional memory for traumatic events. Consistent with the idea that a genetically anchored alteration in the noradrenergic system is related to traumatic memory, recent studies have indicated that the noradrenergic system is a promising target for pharmacological treatment of PTSD.

ScienceNow also has some brief coverage. Update: and neurocritic has some more.