Can a cool head help cure your insomnia tonight?

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We are so stressed and sleep deprived. A new studyindicates that a cool head may help us sleep. Subjects using a special cooledwater cap helped them go to sleep more quickly and have a deeper nights sleep.
Until the cap comes out on the home shopping network Ithink I will try putting a gel sleep masks from the freezer on my head tonightand see if I wake up with my whole body feeling refreshed. I am hoping thatthis new study will lead to a simple cure for insomnia.
http://theweek.com/article/index/216295/can-brain-freeze-cure-insomnia
Can brain freeze cure insomnia?
Two sleep experts say they've devised a simple way tohelp insomniacs get some shuteye: Chilling their brains. Will that really work?
posted on June 15, 2011, at 11:45 AM


Sleep experts say a cool brain can helpinsomniacs get to sleep faster. Photo: Bloomimage/CorbisSEE ALL 22 PHOTOS
Good news for the 1 in 10 Americans afflicted withchronic insomnia: According to a new study, you might be able toforgo the sleeping pills, white noise machines, warm milk, hypnosis tapes, andother slumber strategies, and simply cool your forehead to lull yourself tosleep. University of Pittsburgh sleep experts Dr. Eric Nofzinger and Dr. DanielBuysse reported to colleagues this week that a water-circulatingcooling cap helped insomniacs doze off as easily as normal sleepers.Here, a brief guide:
What is this sleeping cap like?
The 24 test subjects — 12 with natural insomnia, 12with no sleep problems — wore soft plastic caps outfitted with tubes carryingtemperature-controlled water. They slept in a lab for two nights with no cap,two nights with the caps on a "neutral" setting of about 86 degreesFahrenheit, two more with the caps set to 72 degrees, and a final two nightswith 57-degree water cooling their heads. At the higher temperatures, the capsmade no difference, but on the 57-degree nights, about three-quarters of theinsomniacs said they slept much better.
How much did these caps help?
The cooling caps helped insomniacs sleep betterthan "normal" sleepers, apparently. The insomniacs fell asleepquicker — in 13 minutes, versus 16 minutes for the control group — and spentmore of the night in slow-wave sleep, which is the deepest, most restorativesleep cycle. Both groups spent an average of 89 percent of their time in bedasleep.
Why do the caps work?
Researchers already knew that insomniacs are"hyper-aroused," with a higher level of activity in their prefrontalcortex. Nofzinger and Buysse hypothesized that "frontal cerebral thermaltransfer," or cooling the scalp above that part of the brain, would slowthe brain's metabolism and help insomniacs sleep better. This research appearsto bear that out.
When will these miracle caps be available to buy?
Nofzinger will likely bring his invention tomarket, but only after more testing. The researchers don't foresee any safetyproblems — if the cap is too cold, people will just take it off. "Butbefore crafting your own brain-cooling device, keep in mind that the researchwas conducted under controlled conditions on a small sample," cautions MarianneEnglish at Discovery News. Also, while the capspromise greater success than sleeping pills and no side effects, there are somedrawbacks. "Most of us don't find it pleasurable to have a cold head — andcertainly not in bed," says British sleepconsultant Neil Stanley.
Sources: Daily Mail,Discovery News,Geekosystem,HealthDay,Los Angeles Times

Patti Wood, MA, Certified Speaking Professional - The Body Language Expert. For more body language insights go to her website at http://PattiWood.net. Also check out the body language quiz on her YouTube Channel at http://youtube.com/user/bodylanguageexpert.

First Impressions Do Count!

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First impressions do count: Research shows made-to-measure suit makes you appear more confident, successful September 16, 2011 (PhysOrg.com) -- It’s often said that we make judgments about people in the first three seconds of seeing them. Now new research from the University of Hertfordshire, in collaboration with Mathieson & Brooke Tailors (M&BT), shows how much clothing influences these opinions. The study shows that wearing a made-to-measure suit, rather than an off-the-peg equivalent, positively affects the judgments people make in those first three seconds. google_protectAndRun("render_ads.js::google_render_ad", google_handleError, google_render_ad);Ads by GoogleVistage® Gets Results. - Successful CEOs become members to get better business results! - Vistage.com In the research, conducted by the University of Hertfordshire and led by Professors Karen Pine and Ben Fletcher of the School of Psychology, over 300 participants (males and females aged from 14 to 67) viewed a series of separate images of a man and a woman for just 3 seconds. They were then asked to make ‘snap judgements’ about the person in the picture. When the man in the picture wore a made-to-measure suit he made a more favourable impression than when he wore a very similar off-the-peg suit of the same colour. People judged him to be more confident, successful, flexible and a higher earner than the same man wearing a similar high street equivalent. The man’s face in the picture was blanked out so these different judgments arose purely from observing his attire. Commenting on the importance of first impressions David Brooke of M&BT, who started his visiting tailoring business in 2004, says, “This research shows that twice as many people will view you as confident, flexible and successful in the first three seconds of seeing you if you are wearing a made-to-measure suit. We have believed for years that first impressions are important and now we can prove it. A made-to-measure, as opposed to an off-the-peg suit, gives you more confidence and ultimately success.” Speaking of her team’s findings, Professor Karen Pine says; “This research is very important in our ongoing work to better understand the psychology of fashion. This study endorses, with real evidence, the popular view that we make up our minds about people within the first three seconds of seeing them although this view comes mainly from research using human faces. In our study people formed very different views of the same faceless man or woman, in the same position, when an apparently minor change was made to what they were wearing. The two suits worn by the man looked very similar at first glance, yet the subtle differences clearly made an impact. This is big news for the fashion industry and certainly highlights the importance of good tailoring.” The findings of the research do raise obvious questions about the affordability of made-to-measure versus off-the-peg, particularly in the current economic climate. David Brooke is keen to answer them; “A made-to-measure suit is undoubtedly more expensive than some high street suits, but does not need to break the bank. In fact, an M&BT made-to-measure suit is always better quality and lasts far longer than off-the-peg suits.” He continues, “A bespoke, or made-to-measure suit, in light of this research, must be seen as an investment in your career and an essential ingredient to your personal success.” The University of Hertfordshire will be publishing the research in a peer-reviewed journal. The executive summary and key findings can be found here: blogs.herts.ac.uk/research/ . Provided by University of Hertfordshire

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2011-09-made-to-measure-confident-successful.html#jCp


Patti Wood, MA, Certified Speaking Professional - The Body Language Expert. For more body language insights go to her website at http://PattiWood.net. Also check out the body language quiz on her YouTube Channel at http://youtube.com/user/bodylanguageexpert.

18 Attributes of Highly Effective Liars | Bering in Mind, Scientific American Blog Network

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Niccolò Machiavelli might well have titled his 16^th-century Dell’arte Della Guerra (" The Art of War ") as The Art of Lying, since verbal deception—mainly, how to get away with it—was so central to his political psychology. To say that the exquisitely light-of-tongue are "talented" is, of course, sure to be met with moral outrage. We place a social premium on the ability to ferret out other people’s lies, especially, as we’ve seen just this week in the news, when they may hide brutal and ugly crimes.
Still, there is something darkly fascinating about those skilled in verbal legerdemain. And at least one team of scientists, led by Dutch psychologist Aldert Vrij , believes that it has identified the precise ingredients of "good liars." These researchers outline the following 18 traits (pdf) that, if ever they were to coalesce in a perfect storm of a single perpetrator, would strain even seasoned interrogators’ lie-detection abilities:
(1) manipulativeness. "Machiavellians" are pragmatic liars who aren’t fearful or anxious. They are "scheming but not stupid," explain the authors. "In conversations, they tend to dominate, but they also seem relaxed, talented and confident."
(2) acting. Good actors make good liars; receptive audiences encourage confidence.
(3) expressiveness. Animated people create favorable first impressions, making liars seductive and their expressions distracting.
(4) physical attractiveness. Fair or unfair, pretty people are judged as being more honest than unattractive people.
(5) natural performers. These people can adapt to abrupt changes in the discourse with a convincing spontaneity.
(6) experience. Prior lying helps people manage familiar emotions, such as guilt and fear, which can “leak” behaviorally and tip off observers.
(7) confidence. Like anything else, believing in yourself is half the battle; you’ve got to believe in your ability to deceive others.
(8) emotional camouflage. Liars "mask their stark inclination to show the emotional expressions they truly feel" by feigning the opposite affect.
(9) eloquence. Eloquent speakers confound listeners with word play and buy extra time to ponder a plausible answer by giving long-winded responses.
(10) well-preparedness. This minimizes fabrication on the spot, which is vulnerable to detection.
(11) unverifiable responding. Concealing information ("I honestly don’t remember") is preferable to a constructed lie because it cannot be disconfirmed.
(12) information frugality. Saying as little as possible in response to pointed questions makes it all the more difficult to confirm or disconfirm details.
(13) original thinking. Even meticulous liars can be thrown by the unexpected, so the ability to give original, convincing, non-scripted responses comes in handy.
(14) rapid thinking. Delays and verbal fillers ("ums" and "ahs") signal deception, so good liars are quick-witted, thinking fast on their feet.
(15) intelligence. Intelligence enables an efficient shouldering of the “cognitive load” imposed by lying, since there are many complex, simultaneously occurring demands associated with monitoring one’s own deceptiveness.
(16) good memory. Interrogators’ ears will prick at inconsistencies. A good memory allows a liar to remember details without tripping in their own fibs.
(17) truth adherence. Lies that "bend the truth" are generally more convincing, and require less cognitive effort, than those that involve fabricating an entire story.
(18) decoding. The ability to detect suspicion in the listener allows the liar to make the necessary adjustments, borrowing from strategies in the preceding skill set.
Why give the criminals such helpful advice? The authors anticipated these concerns, clarifying that they hope this knowledge will assist interrogators, rather than those sitting on the other side of the table. Furthermore, "Undoubtedly," they write, "this [work] provides tips that liars could use to make their performance more convincing, but most characteristics we mentioned are inherent, and related to personality."
In other words, there’s still a certain, inimitable je ne sais quoi to the great deluders. And should you find yourself so burdened with this particular type of genius, perhaps, as Mark Twain offered:

… the wise thing is to train [yourself] to lie thoughtfully,
judiciously; to lie with a good object, and not an evil one; to lie
for others’ advantage, and not [y]our own; to lie healingly,
charitably, humanely, not cruelly, hurtfully, maliciously; to lie
gracefully and graciously, not awkwardly and clumsily; to lie firmly,
frankly, squarely, with head erect, not haltingly, tortuously, with
pusillanimous mien, as being ashamed of [y]our high calling.

Good advice from Samuel, as always.
Image: Niccolò Machiavelli by Santi di Tito, from Wikimedia Commons
About The Author: Want more Bering in Mind? Follow Jesse on Twitter @JesseBering, visit www.jessebering.com, or friend Jesse on Facebook. Jesse is the author of newly released book, The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny and the Meaning of Life (W. W. Norton).

Patti Wood, MA, Certified Speaking Professional - The Body Language Expert. For more body language insights go to her website at http://PattiWood.net. Also check out the body language quiz on her YouTube Channel at http://youtube.com/user/bodylanguageexpert.

Why Men Look Angry and Women Look Happy

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People are quicker tosee anger on men's faces and happiness on women's. Is this researchfinding  a simple case of genderstereotyping, or something more deeply rooted? When I was conducting researchon smiling my clients assumed that women always smiled more than men.Women do smile more than men, when they are in public. We like our women tosmile that makes all of us men and women feel safe. There are more interestinginsights in the following article by Beth Azar.
By Beth AzarApril 2007, Vol 38, No. 4
Print version: page 18

It might not be surprising thatpeople find it easier to see men as angry and women as happy. Women do tend tobe the nurturers and men--well--men do commit 80 to 90 percent of all violentcrimes. More surprising, perhaps, is new research suggesting that theconnection between men and anger and women and happiness goes deeper than thesesimple social stereotypes, regardless of how valid they are.
Our brains automatically link angerto men and happiness to women, even without the influence of genderstereotypes, indicate the findings of a series of experiments conducted bycognitive psychologist D. Vaughn Becker, PhD, of Arizona State University atthe Polytechnic Campus, with colleagues Douglas T. Kenrick, PhD, Steven L.Neuberg, PhD, K.C. Blackwell and Dylan Smith, PhD. They even turned it aroundto show that people are more likely to think a face is masculine if it's makingan angry expression and feminine if its expression is happy. In fact, theirresearch, published in February's Journal of Personality and SocialPsychology (Vol. 92, No. 2, pages 179-190), suggests that the cognitiveprocesses that distinguish male and female may be co-mingled with those thatdistinguish anger from happiness, thereby leading to this perceptual bias.
Becker proposes that this bias maystem from our evolutionary past, when an angry man would have been one of themost dangerous characters around, and a nurturing, happy female might have beenjust the person to protect you from harm. Evolutionary psychologist LedaCosmides, PhD, agrees.
"If it's more costly to make amistake of not recognizing an angry man, you would expect the [perceptual]threshold to be set lower than for recognizing an angry female," saysCosmides, of the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB).
More than a stereotype
Becker first noticed that peoplefind it easier to detect anger on men and happiness on women a couple years agowhile working on his dissertation at Arizona State. He was testing whetherviewing an angry or happy expression "primes" people to more quicklyidentify a subsequent angry or happy expression. Becker confirmed his initialhypothesis, but when he ran an additional analysis to test whether the genderof the person making the facial expression affected his results, he found thatgender was, by far, the biggest predictor of how quickly and accurately peopleidentified facial expressions.
Becker couldn't find any mention ofthis gender effect in the literature. So he set out to confirm that people morequickly link men to anger and women to happiness and figure out why that mightbe.
In the first of a series of studies,38 undergraduate participants viewed pictures of faces displaying prototypicalangry and happy expressions. They pressed "A" or "H" on acomputer keyboard to indicate whether the expression was angry or happy, andthe researchers recorded their reaction times. As expected, participants werequicker to label male faces "angry" and female faces"happy."
The researchers then used a versionof the "Implicit Association Test" to uncover unconscious biases thatstudy participants may have linking men to anger and women to happiness. Thewell-documented test allows researchers to examine the strength of connectionsbetween categories, which lead to unconscious stereotypes. Becker testedwhether study participants unconsciously linked male names with angry words andfemale names with happy words. Most did.
However, 13 students showed theopposite association (male-happy, female-angry), implying that theirunconscious gender stereotypes run counter to those of the general public. Itwas an ideal opportunity to determine whether gender stereotypes are at the heartof the emotion/gender bias. They weren't: Just like the main group ofparticipants, this subgroup more quickly and accurately categorized male facesas angry and female faces as happy.
"While gender stereotypesclearly influence perception, the implicit association test results made usthink the effect is not solely a function of stereotypes," says Becker.
Overlapping signals
Since gender stereotypes don't seemto be the culprit, Becker looked toward more deeply rooted causes.
For example, perhaps we see more menwith angry faces--on television, in movies--than we see women with angry faces,so our brains are well practiced at recognizing an angry expression on a man.To investigate this possibility, one of the co-authors, Arizona StateUniversity graduate student K.C. Blackwell, suggested they flip the experimentaround. Instead of asking people to identify facial expressions while theexperimenters manipulated gender, they asked them to identify whether a facewas male or female while manipulating facial expressions.
"While you can argue that themajority of angry faces we see are male, it's tough to argue that the majorityof male faces we see are angry," says Becker. So, if the relationshipbetween emotional expression and gender is simply a matter of how frequently wesee anger on men and happiness on women, the effect should disappear whenresearchers flip around the question. What they found, on the contrary, wasthat people were faster to identify angry faces as male and happy faces asfemale.
To follow-up on this finding, theyconducted another study in which they used computer graphics software tocontrol not only the intensity of facial expressions, but also the masculinityand femininity of the facial features, creating faces that were just slightlymasculine or feminine. As predicted, people were more likely to see the moremasculine faces as angrier, even when they had slightly happier expressionsthan the more feminine faces.
These findings suggest that thebrain begins to associate emotions and gender very early in the cognitiveprocess, says Becker. One possible explanation is that the brain has an"angry male detection module" enabling fast and accurate detection ofwhat would have been one of the most dangerous entities in our evolutionary past.But Becker thinks there's a more parsimonious explanation.
"I'm more inclined to thinkthat we've got a situation where the signals for facial expressions and thosefor masculinity and femininity have merged over time," he says.
In particular, features ofmasculinity --such as a heavy brow and angular face--somewhat overlap with theanger expression, and those of femininity--roundness and soft features--overlapwith the happiness expression.
To test this hypothesis, Becker andhis colleagues used computer animation software to individually manipulatemasculine and feminine facial features of expressively neutral faces. Aspredicted, a heavier brow caused participants to see faces as both moremasculine and more angry, implying that the mental processes for determiningmasculinity and anger may be intertwined.
"These results make a lot ofsense," says University of Pittsburgh behavioral anthropologist and facialexpression researcher Karen Schmidt, PhD. "Faces have always had gender,so if we're always activating gender and affect at the same time then theprocessing is likely highly coordinated."
The paper raises new and interestingquestions about gender, says UCSB postdoctoral student Aaron Sell, PhD, whostudies the evolution of gender. "Specifically," he says, "whydo male and female faces differ, and what is the nature of emotiondetection?"
The data appear to suggest that theanger expression has evolved to make a face seem more masculine, says Sell.Even female faces may communicate anger more effectively the more masculinethey appear, says Becker. Future studies will have to tackle questions aboutthe intentions expressed by the angry face and why looking more male would bean evolutionary advantage in communicating these intentions.

"I see this article as openingthe book on a new research topic more than having the final say on theissue," says Sell.Beth Azar is a writer in Portland,Ore.

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Patti Wood, MA, Certified Speaking Professional - The Body Language Expert. For more body language insights go to her website at http://PattiWood.net. Also check out the body language quiz on her YouTube Channel at http://youtube.com/user/bodylanguageexpert.

Cost of Anger in the Workplace

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Joe, a participant in my workshop, was upset when he came in thismorning and in the first exercise shared his frustration. “I don’t understandwhy I was sent to this interpersonal skills workshop. I am a great manager. Iam at work before everybody and I am the last one to leave. I walk around Itell my employees over and over again what they need to do to complete theirwork. I am there for them. I have an open door policy. They can talk to meanytime they want. But, everyone is walking around tense and they don’t dotheir work. Joe’s classmates that day already knew what could be the problem.Joe was yelling out his frustration and gesturing at us with his fist. Theywere scared of him. Joe needed to see how his behavior was affecting his bodylanguage and his health and his anger's impact on everyone he worked with.

”Workplace anger is costly to the employee, the company, and coworkers.Studies show that up to 42% of employee time is spent engaging in or trying toresolve conflict.  This results in wastedemployee time, mistakes, stress, lower morale, hampered performance, andreduced profits and or service.

In 1993 the national Safe Workplace Institute released a study showingthat workplace violence costs $4.2 billion each year, estimating over 111,000violent incidents. Further, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics,about 500,000 victims of violent crime in the workplace lose an estimated 1.8million workdays each year.

Clearly, poorly handled anger, frustration and resentment will sabotagebusiness productivity.

One solution for your workplace anger is to “Check In” on your behavior.Anger can be recognized by certain facial and body language cues. Notice whatyou are showing about your behavior.
Patti Wood, MA, Certified Speaking Professional - The Body Language Expert. For more body language insights go to her website at http://PattiWood.net. Also check out the body language quiz on her YouTube Channel at http://youtube.com/user/bodylanguageexpert.