subject: What Can We Learn About Ourselves? [print this page] Women are more concerned about global warming than men are. A study published in the journal Population and Environment analyzed 8 years of data from Gallup's annual environmental poll. Although men are still believed to understand global warming better, more women believe it's happening now (59% to 54%). More women also believe it's primarily caused by human activities (64% to 56%). In fact, the 37% of women who are concerned about global warming affecting their way of life during their lifetime obviously want the 72% of men who aren't concerned to "warm up" to the idea.
Doctors haven't warmed up to the idea of taking their own advice. A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association analyzed a 2009 anonymous survey of 537 medical residents at 12 hospitals nationwide. Fifty-eight percent of the residents said they'd worked at least once while sick the previous year and 31% said they'd worked more than once. The Accreditation Council is calling on residents and faculty to make sure they're fit for duty and there's a growing effort to require all health workers to have flu shots. Otherwise, residents should take 2 aspirins and call the doctor in the morning.
Popular people -including medical residents - get the flu first. A study published in the journal PLoS ONE was based on the concept known as the "friendship paradox" - when people name their friends, their friends tend to have more social contacts than they do. When 319 Harvard undergraduates, randomly chosen, were asked to name their friends, the result was a group of 425 students. In the fall/winter of 2009 students in the "friends" group were diagnosed with the flu 14 days, on average, earlier than those students who were randomly selected. It seems when discussing flu, popular people are more "flu-ent".
Confident people are born that way. In a study published in the journal Science, 32 volunteers had to identify a patch of screen that was slightly brighter than the rest of the screen and say how confident they were about their answer. When researchers scanned the participants' brains, they isolated an area of the prefrontal cortex believed to be involved in high-level thought, conscious planning and brain activity monitoring. The volunteers who were good at assessing their confidence had more gray matter in that area and more connections to other parts of the brain. It seems confidant people are "better connected".
