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Monkey see, monkey do: Visual feedback is necessary for imitating facial expressions

Wednesday, January 2, 2013

Research using new technology shows that our ability to imitate facial expressions depends on learning that occurs through visual feedback.

Studies of the chameleon effect confirm what salespeople, tricksters, and Lotharios have long known: Imitating another person's postures and expressions is an important social lubricant. But how do we learn to imitate with any accuracy when we can't see our own facial expressions and we can't feel the facial expressions of others?

Richard Cook of City University London, Alan Johnston of University College London, and Cecilia Heyes of the University of Oxford investigate possible mechanisms underlying our ability to imitate in two studies published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

In the first experiment, the researchers videotaped participants as they recited jokes and then asked them to imitate four randomly selected facial expressions from their videos. When they achieved what they perceived to be the target expression, the participants recorded the attempt with the click of a computer mouse.

A computer program evaluated the accuracy of participants' imitation attempts against a map of the target expression. In contrast to previous studies that relied on subjective assessments, this new technology allowed for automated and objective measurement of imitative accuracy.

In one experiment, the researchers found that participants who were able to see their imitation attempts through visual feedback improved over successive attempts. But participants who had to rely solely on proprioception ? sensing the relative position of their facial features ? got progressively worse.

These results are consistent with the associative sequence-learning model, which holds that our ability to imitate accurately depends on learned associations between what we see (in the mirror or through feedback from others) and what we feel.

Cook and colleagues conclude that contingent visual feedback may be a useful component of rehabilitation and skill-training programs that are designed to improve individuals' ability to imitate facial gestures.

###

Association for Psychological Science: http://www.psychologicalscience.org

Thanks to Association for Psychological Science for this article.

This press release was posted to serve as a topic for discussion. Please comment below. We try our best to only post press releases that are associated with peer reviewed scientific literature. Critical discussions of the research are appreciated. If you need help finding a link to the original article, please contact us on twitter or via e-mail.

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Source: http://www.labspaces.net/126099/Monkey_see__monkey_do__Visual_feedback_is_necessary_for_imitating_facial_expressions

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Tuesday, January 1st, 2013 at 4:56 pm ?

Personal development is an ongoing process of making yourself into the best person you can be. It is reaching inside and pulling out your inner potential. Let this article inspire you to make those life-changing improvements. Some wonderful advice to get you started right now is contained in this article.

There other uses for exercise besides weight loss. There are so many different physical and emotional reasons to exercise. As you work out, your body will release chemicals necessary to relieving your stress.

Anytime you have the opportunity, take the time to speak with your pastor or a counselor. These professionals are trained and experienced in helping you understand and manage the issues you have. They can lend a sympathetic ear and help guide you on the right path. Taking the time to speak to a professional will help you to be a healthier and happier person.

Look for pieces of writing or prose that were created for motivation. Such texts might include religious scripture, inspirational books, poetry and other forms of writing. These materials are a good source of support during stressful situations.

Avoid shopping as a way to comfort yourself. Instead of shopping, spending money and adding more charges to your credit card bill, keep busy with a hobby. Not only will you have fewer debts to deal with, but your house will be less cluttered with stuff that you do not really need.

Treat all people with respect and kindness. Treat people well, it says a lot about what kind of person you are.

By using love, you can re-energize your faith and get closer to your self improvement goals. Love is a vital ingredient to faith. Using love and faith as foundations in your life makes you a happier person. In this way, you can be a living example to those around you.

Personal-Development1

It is essential to have a clearly outlined goal, when working toward improving personal development. Create specific goals. You will get better results when you define a specific goal.

A good attitude is essential to personal growth. Negative thinking leads to negative results.

It is destructive to your personal growth. Stay positive and keep telling yourself that a pleasant, upbeat attitude is the way to reach your goals.

It is important when you are working on your personal development that you know what you plan to do in your life. You need to set some goals for the long haul; they can put things into perspective.

Try and find what is in the way of you becoming a success. Many people have problems doing this. However, when you can find out what your weaknesses are, this becomes the first step in dealing with them and, eventually, changing them. By eliminating problems, you can find your future path easier.

Aim to make each day better than its predecessor. Strive for constant and unceasing improvement. Whatever you did yesterday, do it that much better today.

Several people have difficulty meeting someone worthwhile to date. Have you considered online dating? Amazingly, meeting online is now how 40% of couples begin their relationship. There could be someone out there waiting to find you. There are both advantages and disadvantages to these sites.

Recognize that the person you are now is not the person you want to be. In order to improve yourself, you first have to come to that realization. If you are unwilling to make this commitment, you are unlikely to reach your full potential.

Ask others about their achievements instead of boasting about your own. This will help you to remain humble while giving you a picture of how people around you operate.

Use one or all of these tips to accelerate your own personal development goals. It may be a lot of hard work, but you can undertake that work joyfully knowing that you have some sound advice to give you a hand.

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Source: http://everettjsmith.com/increasing-your-personal-worth-through-self-improvement

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The House of Representatives passed the budget bill late Tuesday night, a contentious exercise because many Republicans had wanted a deal that did more to cut government spending.

By Christina Rexrode,?Associated Press / January 2, 2013

Traders work on the floor at the New York Stock Exchange in New York, Jan. 2. The 'fiscal cliff' compromise, for all its chaos and controversy, was enough to send the stock market shooting higher Wednesday, the first trading day of the new year.

Seth Wenig/AP

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The "fiscal?cliff" compromise, for all its chaos, controversy and unresolved questions, was enough to send the stock market shooting higher Wednesday, the first trading day of the new year.

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All the major U.S. stock indexes swelled by at least 2 percent in early trading before trimming some of those gains. The Dow Jones industrial average briefly surged to its biggest gain in six months.

Stocks around the world also leapt higher. The major indexes in Britain, France and Germany rose more than 2 percent. Markets in Greece and Spain were up more than 3 percent. Stocks in Asia also zoomed higher.

In the U.S., the rally was extraordinarily broad. For every stock that fell on the New York Stock Exchange, roughly 10 rose.

The Dow briefly surged as much as 273 points in early trading. At noon, it was up 229 points, or 1.8 percent, to 13,333.

The Standard & Poor's 500 was up 25, or 1.8 percent, to 1,451. The Nasdaq composite was up 70, or 2.3 percent, to 3,089.

Some investors cautioned that the euphoria can't last long.

The market's big escalation, they said, was driven not so much because investors love the budget deal that Republicans and Democrats hammered out, but because they're grateful there was any deal at all.

"Most people think that no deal would have been worse than a bad deal," said Mark Lehmann, president of JMP Securities in San Francisco. He called the current package "not too Draconian."

The U.S. House of Representatives passed the budget bill late Tuesday night, a contentious exercise because many Republicans had wanted a deal that did more to cut government spending. The Senate had already approved the bill, and it now needs the signature of President Barack Obama.

Because lawmakers didn't have a budget compromise in place when the new year started on Tuesday, the U.S. technically did go over the "fiscal?cliff." That means that certain tax increases and government spending cuts automatically kicked in that day, a scenario that some analysts worried would boot the U.S. back into recession.

The bill passed Tuesday night will prevent the "cliff" from taking hold. Still, it only postpones rather than solves many of the budget issues haunting the U.S.

The deal doesn't include any significant deficit-cutting agreement, meaning the country still doesn't have a long-term game plan for how to rein in spending. Big cuts to defense and domestic programs, which were slated to kick in with the new year, are still overhanging the market but just delayed for two months. And the U.S. is still set to bump up against its borrowing limit, or "debt ceiling," in about two months.

"There's definitely another drama coming down the road," said Lehmann. "That's the March?cliff."

Others worry that more political bickering could cause the U.S. to get its debt rating downgraded by the ratings agencies. The stock market plunged in August 2011 after Standard & Poor's cut the U.S. government's credit rating.

Wednesday's performance gave no hint of the dark clouds on the horizon.

The yield on the 10-year Treasury note rose sharply, to 1.84 percent from 1.75 percent, as investors dumped safe harbor investments like U.S. government bonds and plowed money into stocks. Prices for oil and key metals, including gold, copper and platinum, were up.

Still, some investors also noted that the "fiscal?cliff," which has dominated headlines for weeks, is only masking serious problems punctuating the world economy, including middling growth for the U.S. economy and the still-unsolved European debt crisis.

There were new reminders of those issues Wednesday: The government reported that U.S. builders spent less on construction projects in November, the first decline in eight months. The president of debt-wracked Cyprus said he'd refuse to sell government-owned companies, a provision that the country's bailout deal says it must at least consider.

Among stocks making big moves, Zipcar shot up 48 percent, or $4, to $12.24 after the company said it had agreed to sell itself to Avis. Avis rose $1.02 to $20.84, about 5 percent.

Zipcar has a business model that's popular with drivers, allowing them to rent cars for just a few hours at a time. The company has struggled to win over investors, however, and its stock plunged nearly 39 percent in 2012. Avis rose 84 percent in the same period.

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/csm/~3/iJhij1m727o/Stock-markets-leap-after-fiscal-cliff-compromise-but-problems-lurk

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A new slow loris species was discovered in Borneo, named Nycticebus kayan.?The little primate weighs less than a pound.

By Jeanna Bryner,?LiveScience.com / December 14, 2012

The newly discovered slow loris primate (Nycticebus kayan) has a furry "face mask" distinct from other slow loris species.

Ch'ien C Lee

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A new small primate with a toxic bite and distinctive facial fur markings has been discovered in the jungles of Borneo.

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The new slow loris species is found in the highlands of the island of Borneo and has been named Nycticebus kayan, after a major river, the Kayan, flowing through the region. The trio of scientists also found that two species previously considered sub-species in the Nycticebus genus are officially unique species.

"Historically, many species went unrecognized as they were falsely lumped together as one species," researcher Rachel Munds, of the University of Missouri Columbia, said in a statement.

Closely related to lemurs, the slow loris is found across Southeast Asia, from Bangladesh and China's Yunnan province to Borneo. To distinguish between species, the researchers focused on the seeming face masks of Borneo's slow lorises; fur patches cover their eyes, while their heads are covered with differently shaped caps. The examined photographs and museum samples for eight face mask features, finding there were four species of Bornean lorises. [See Photos of the Slow Loris Primates]

The new species to science, N. kayan, showed a dark, highly contrasting face mask, with dark patches around its eyes. From the specimen examined, the species is about 10.8 inches (273 millimeters) long and weighs about 14.5 ounces (411 grams). The other species include: N. menagensis, N. bancanus and N. borneanus. (N. menagensis had already been recognized as a species.)

The newly identified species illustrate the breadth of biodiversity yet to be discovered in the jungles of Borneo and nearby islands, the researchers noted. The slow lorises, as with other animals on these islands, face threats from human activity.

"The pet trade is a serious threat for slow lorises in Indonesia, and recognition of these new species raises issues regarding where to release confiscated Bornean slow lorises, as recognition by nonexperts can be difficult," said study researcher Anna Nekaris, of Oxford Brookes University in England, in a statement.

Munds, Nekaris and co-author Susan Ford of Southern Illinois University also note this week in the American Journal of Primatology that their results confirm the use of fur color and pattern as a valid way of distinguishing between species of small primates. Some researchers, they wrote, had claimed that because Bornean slow lorises are not a diverse group because they share similar cranial features and all are lacking an upper second incisor. The new study suggests otherwise, the team added.

Follow LiveScience on Twitter @livescience. We're also on Facebook?& Google+.

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/science/~3/vb7CefVcHKk/Newly-discovered-loris-may-be-slow-but-its-bite-is-toxic

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Side-by-side comparisons of a conventional mammogram in which a breast cancer is hidden, and a new 3-D mammogram of the same breast that reveals a malignant tumor.

The past year has seen more debate about the best way to find breast cancers.

A recent analysis concluded that regular mammograms haven't reduced the rate of advanced breast cancers but they have led more than a million women to be diagnosed with tumors that didn't need to be treated.

"For mammography screening to work, it must take women who are destined to develop late-stage cancers and find them when they're early-stage," Dr. H. Gilbert Welch, co-author of that analysis, tells Shots. "Unfortunately, it looks like screening has had very little impact on the rate at which women present with late-stage cancer."

Mammography's defenders say that analysis is deeply flawed.

"They just used the wrong numbers," says Dr. Daniel Kopans of Massachusetts General Hospital. "Had they used the correct estimate, they would have found there's been a major decrease in advanced cancers."

Kopans is promoting a new technology which he invented that promises to find even more and smaller breast tumors. We'll come back to that shortly.

The 2012 mammography debate is a continuation of a controversy touched off three years ago when the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force said women under 50 don't need regular mammograms. That panel says the risks of needless biopsies and unnecessary treatment outweigh the benefits in lives saved.

Faced with such conflicting claims, some women are forgoing regular mammograms. But the fear of breast cancer is so great that other women are doubling down. They're getting radical treatments, even double mastectomies, for precancerous tumors that some authorities think would never cause them harm.

Health writer Shannon Brownlee of the New America Foundation says the issue is a prime example of what she calls American medicine's tendency to overdiagnose and overtreat disease. She's the author of Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer.

Currently, Brownlee says, most doctors present annual mammograms as a "got-to-do-it" thing, not an individual choice.

Brownlee, who's 56, has made up her mind. She doesn't get regular mammograms. But she says it wasn't easy.

"We have been told for, oh, almost a century now that catching cancer early is always a good thing," she tells Shots. "So when people come along and say, 'Well, maybe screening may not always be such a great thing,' it's very, very difficult to contemplate that."

As she delved into the subject, Brownlee was impressed with the downside of routine mammograms.

Otis Brawley, an oncologist and chief medical officer for the American Cancer Society, tells Shots that 60 percent of women in their 40s who get yearly mammograms for 10 years will be told at some point that the test has found something suspicious requiring further tests. And 35 percent will be told they need a breast biopsy.

In the end, about 0.5 percent of these women will have breast cancer. And, many experts believe some of those would never have caused a problem if they hadn't been diagnosed.

When Brownlee decided she didn't want an annual mammogram, that put her at loggerheads with her doctor.

"She would say, 'You have to get a mammogram,' and I would demur," Brownlee explains. "And she would say, 'Not a week goes by that a patient of mine didn't have her life saved by getting a mammogram.' And I wanted to say, 'How do you know?' Because you can't know after the fact."

That, in fact, is true. While studies show routine mammograms do save lives overall, even their staunchest advocates acknowledge you can't know in a particular case.

Eventually, Brownlee and her doctor worked it out. She said she'd get an occasional mammogram in her 50s, and promised the doctor that she'd get treated if an invasive cancer was found. (The doctor had assumed that she wouldn't.)

Kopans, the mammography specialist in Boston, has an answer to those who lament the high rate of false positives from mammograms those indicating something suspicious that turns out not to be cancer. He's invented a 3-D mammogram called tomosynthesis.

It uses a computer to create 3-D pictures of the breast. It subtracts a lot of the visual fuzziness, or noise, in 2-D mammograms that obscures many breast tumors.

"With tomosynthesis, I can page through the breast as if it's the pages in a book," Kopans says, demonstrating the technology in a closet-sized room at Massachusetts General Hospital. "Now I'm pointing to a cancer that's much more easily seen because we've gotten what's in front and what's in back [of it] out of the way."

Kopans, who says he has no financial stake in companies marketing tomosynthesis machines, says 3-D mammograms will drastically reduce the percentage of women who are called back after a routine mammogram for further tests, including biopsies.

"It's pretty clear we detect more cancers with it," he says.

But some, like Brawley, worry that as doctors find more and smaller breast tumors, they'll also increase the detection of breast cancers that probably don't need to be treated. Specialists call that overdiagnosis.

"Some of the 3-D imaging machines are just spectacular in diagnosing small lesions," he tells Shots. "Now we don't know that they're diagnosing small lesions that need to be diagnosed and need to be treated."

Brawley says research is under way to answer that important question.

"We're on the verge of some tests to actually be able to say, 'Mrs. Smith, you've got breast cancer, but it's the kind we need to watch. Mrs. Jones, you've got breast cancer, it's the kind we need to treat.' "

He thinks that's five to 10 years away. Meanwhile, the American Cancer Society recommends that women get regular mammograms, starting in their 40s as long as they understand it may lead them into difficult choices about what to do next.

Source: http://www.gpb.org/news/2013/01/01/breast-cancer-what-we-learned-in-2012

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Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Sen. Joseph Lieberman, I-Conn., right, accompanied by the committee's ranking Republican, Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, speaks during a news conference on Capitol Hill in Washington, Monday, Dec. 31, 2012, to discuss the committee's report on the security deficiencies at the temporary U.S. Mission in Benghazi, Libya. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)

Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Sen. Joseph Lieberman, I-Conn. listens at right, as the committee's ranking Republican, Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine speaks during a news conference on Capitol Hill in Washington, Monday, Dec. 31, 2012, to discuss the committee's report on the security deficiencies at the temporary U.S. Mission in Benghazi, Libya. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)

Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Sen. Joseph Lieberman, I-Conn. listens at right, and the committee's ranking Republican, Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, arrive for a news conference on Capitol Hill in Washington, Monday, Dec. 31, 2012, to discuss the committee's report on the security deficiencies at the temporary U.S. Mission in Benghazi, Libya. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)

WASHINGTON (AP) ? The FBI, CIA and other intelligence agencies ? but not the White House ? made major changes in talking points that led to the Obama administration's confusing explanations of the attack on U.S. diplomatic facilities in Benghazi, Libya, a Senate report concluded Monday.

The Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee report said the White House was only responsible for a minor change. Some Republicans had questioned whether the presidential staff rewrote the talking points for political reasons.

The committee, headed by independent Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut and Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, also said the director of national intelligence has been stonewalling the panel in holding back a promised timeline of the talking point changes.

U.S. Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens and three other Americans were killed in the Sept. 11 attack. The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, said she used the talking points to say in television interviews on Sept. 16 that it may have been a protest that got out of hand.

Rice's incorrect explanation may have cost her a chance to be nominated as the next secretary of state, as Senate Republicans publicly said they would not vote to confirm her. President Barack Obama instead nominated Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who is expected to win easy confirmation.

The State Department this month acknowledged major weaknesses in security and errors in judgment exposed in a scathing independent report on the assault. Two top State officials appealed to Congress to fully fund requests to ensure diplomats and embassies are safe.

Testifying before two congressional committees, senior State Department officials acknowledged that serious management and leadership failures left the diplomatic mission in Benghazi woefully unprepared for the terrorist attack. The State Department review board's report led four department officials to resign.

The Senate report said that on Sept. 19, eight days after the attack, National Counterterrorism Center Director Matthew Olsen told the Homeland committee that the four Americans died "in the course of a terrorist attack."

The same day, State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said the department stood by the intelligence community's assessment. The next day, Sept. 20, presidential spokesman Jay Carney said, "It is, I think, self-evident that what happened in Benghazi was a terrorist attack." Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton also used the words "terrorist attack" on Sept. 21.

Olsen's acknowledgement was important, the report said, because talking points prepared by intelligence officials the previous week had undergone major changes.

A line saying "we know" that individuals associated with al-Qaida or its affiliates participated in the attacks was changed to say, "There are indications that extremists participated."

The talking points dropped the reference to al-Qaida and its affiliates altogether. In addition, a reference to "attacks" was changed to "demonstrations."

The committee said the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, and representatives from the CIA, State Department, counterintelligence center and the FBI told the panel that the changes were made within the CIA and the intelligence community. The change from "we know" there was an al-Qaida connection to "indications" of connections to "extremists" was requested by the FBI.

The report said the only White House change substituted a reference of "consulate" to "mission."

Intelligence officials differed over whether the al-Qaida reference should remain classified, the report said. It added, however, that the analyst who drafted the original talking points was a veteran career analyst in the intelligence community who believed it was appropriate to include a reference to al-Qaida in the unclassified version.

The analyst came to that conclusion because of claims of responsibility by a militant group, Ansar al-Sharia.

The committee said Clapper offered to provide the committee a detailed timeline on the development of the talking points. Despite repeated requests, the committee said the information has not been provided.

"According to a senior IC (intelligence community) official, the timeline has not been delivered as promised because the administration has spent weeks debating internally whether or not it should turn over information considered 'deliberative' to the Congress," the report said.

The report added that if the administration had described the attack as a terrorist assault from the outset, "there would have been much less confusion and division in the public response to what happened there on Sept. 11, 2012."

"The unnecessary confusion... should have ended much earlier than it did," the committee said.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/89ae8247abe8493fae24405546e9a1aa/Article_2012-12-31-Benghazi%20Report/id-6d2146ca5f65491e9a385c8d00728006

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NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - A group of American pediatricians is telling school districts that children need recess and free time during the school day, and it should not even be taken away as punishment.

"We consider it essentially the child's personal time and don't feel it should be taken away for academic or punitive reasons," said Dr. Robert Murray, who co-authored the new policy statement for the American Academy of Pediatrics.

The statement, published Monday in the journal Pediatrics, says recess is a "crucial and necessary component of a child's development."

Recess helps students develop communication skills, such as cooperation and sharing, and helps counteract the time they spend sitting in class, according to the statement.

"The cognitive literature indicates that children are exactly as we are as adults. Whenever they're performing a complicated or complex task, they need time to process the information," said Murray, a professor at Ohio State University in Columbus.

"Kids have to have that time scheduled. They're not given the opportunity to just get up and walk around for a few minutes," he added.

Previous research, according to the statement's authors, found children pay closer attention and perform better mentally after recess.

Last January, a review of 14 studies found kids who get more exercise from - among other things - recess and playing on sports teams tend to do better in school (see Reuters Health story of January 3, 2012 here:.)

But a 2011 survey of 1,800 elementary schools found about a third were not offering recess to their third grade classes (see Reuters Health story of December 5, 2011 here:.)

Murray told Reuters Health that schools in Japan offer children about 10 minutes of free time after every 50 minutes of class, which he said makes sense.

"I think you can feel it if you go to a lecture that after 40 to 50 minutes of a concentrated activity you need to take a break," he said.

Currently, the American Heart Association calls for at least 20 minutes of recess every day, but Murray said recess needs depend on the child.

"Most schools - on average - are working on the framework of 15 to 30 minute bursts of recess once or twice a day," he said.

There is, however, consensus on when in the day children's recess should take place.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the U.S. Department of Agriculture both recommend schools schedule recess before lunch.

Previous studies have found that children waste less food and behave better for the rest of the day when their recess is before their scheduled lunch, the pediatricians' statement notes.

The statement also says schools should not substitute physical education classes for recess.

"Those are completely different things and they offer completely different outcomes," said Murray. "(Physical education teachers are) trying to teach motor skills and the ability of those children to use those skills in a bunch of different scenarios. Recess is a child's free time."

The pediatricians also warn against a recess that is too structured, such as having games led by adults.

"I think it becomes structured to the point where you lose some of those developmental and social emotion benefits of free play," said Murray.

"This is a very important and overlooked time of day for the child and we should not lose sight of the fact that it has very important benefits," he added.

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/HjQ8dI Pediatrics, online December 31, 2012.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/pediatricians-kids-recess-during-school-054737400.html

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moina snowdrop

Thursday, January 3, 2013

Monkey see, monkey do: Visual feedback is necessary for imitating facial expressions

Wednesday, January 2, 2013

Increasing Your Personal Worth Through Self Improvement |

Stock markets leap after 'fiscal cliff' compromise, but problems lurk

Newly discovered loris may be slow, but its bite is toxic

Breast Cancer: What We Learned In 2012

Tuesday, January 1, 2013

Report details changes in Benghazi explanations

Pediatricians say kids need recess during school