Happiness: 10 Fascinating New Psychology Studies Everyone Should Know

From Psyblog..
Where we feel happiness in the body, how it affects our genetic code, why it changes with age, unexpected pleasures and much more…
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Kellogg Eye Center at U of Michigan is doing some cutting edge research in retinal disease
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Reuters | New KNFB smartphone app gives sight to the blind

National Federation of the Blind | Snap pictures, listen to printed text read aloud, store and share documents and more using the KNFB Reader iPhone app. The KNFB Reader app for iPhone is available in the Apple iTunes app store.

Does Your Toddler Need Glasses?

Toddlers wearing glasses look adorable, but the cuteness can cause problems. Many children who are still getting used to glasses find wearing them brings unwanted and unrelenting attention. Some people may even accuse parents of putting fake glasses on their children to be trendy.

Glasses have a serious function, though, and sometimes they are crucial to normal development of a child's vision and brain. Eyeglasses can fix more than near or farsightedness and may address common conditions such as amblyopia, or "lazy eye," and eye misalignment. Sometimes doctors require children to wear an eye patch to teach the brain to use vision stimulation from the weaker eye rather than ignore it.
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Moving fast to detect eyesight issues is crucial, doctors say, because correcting a child's vision early can help curb permanent damage.

"The brain is like cement hardening—you can't mold and shape it as easily the older children get," says Geoffrey Bradford, a professor of pediatric ophthalmology at West Virginia University School of Medicine and a member of the executive committee for ophthalmology for the American Academy of Pediatrics.

The pediatrics group recommends that vision screening begin at age 3 during the annual check-up with a pediatrician. At every well-child appointment before age 3, including at birth, doctors typically look for irregularities in the eyes and ask whether parents have any vision concerns, Dr. Bradford says.

Patients who have a family history of eye problems, or who exhibit symptoms such as eyes crossing, drooping eyelids or infections, should seek earlier attention.

Meanwhile, the American Optometric Association recommends that all babies be examined by an optometrist or ophthalmologist between the ages of six and 12 months, and annually after that.

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Doccupy, EHRs and the Affordable Care Act

It’s rare for doctors to turn out en masse for a public protest. But that’s what happened at “Doccupy” in Contra Costa County California in 2012. A group of safety net physicians testified before county supervisors — in what they only half-jokingly called “Doccupy” — that the cumbersome move to electronic health records (EHRs) had taken an enormous toll on patient care. The doctors saw half their usual number of patients. As a result, they told supervisors, one in ten patients left the emergency room without being seen and wait times ballooned from one to four hours — with one person waiting 40 hours for a hospital bed.

This protest came on the heels of a letter from a group of county jail nurses asserting concerns about the same electronic records system. A subsequent NYT article pointed out additional productivity and patient safety issues raised about electronic medical records at other locations, even from health care establishments as impressive as the Mayo Clinic.

It might be tempting to think of these stories as an aberrant blip. But surveys show Doccupy may have just been the first sign of trouble with electronic health records nationwide:

- See more at: http://www.docgurley.com/2014/02/doccupy-ehrs-affordable-care-act/#sthash.s8rcDZ9K.dpuf
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Is Exercise Bad for Your Teeth?

Vigorous exercise is good for almost all of the body — except perhaps the teeth, according to a surprising new study of athletes. The study, published in The Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports, found that heavy training may contribute to dental problems in unexpected ways.
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Compared with the control group, the athletes showed significantly greater erosion of their tooth enamel. They also tended to have more cavities, with the risk increasing as an athlete’s training time grew. Over all, the more hours that an athlete spent working out, the more likely he or she was to have cavities.

The researchers found no correlation, however, between consuming sports drinks or any other elements of the athletes’ diets and their oral health.

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The extent of the changes in the athletes’ saliva during a workout were something of a surprise, said Dr. Cornelia Frese, a senior dentist at University Hospital Heidelberg, who led the study.

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Training Dogs to Sniff Out Cancer

Since 2004, research has begun to accumulate suggesting that dogs may be able to smell the subtle chemical differences between healthy and cancerous tissue, including bladder cancer, melanomaand cancers of the lung, breast and prostate. But scientists debate whether the research will result in useful medical applications.

Dogs have already been trained to respond to diabetic emergencies, or alert passers-by if an owner is about to have a seizure. And on the cancer front, nonprofit organizations like the In Situ Foundation, based in California, and the Medical Detection Dogs charity in Britain are among a growing number of independent groups sponsoring research into the area.

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The next step will be to build a mechanical, hand-held sensor that can detect that cancer chemical in the clinic. That’s where Charlie Johnson a professor at Penn who specializes in experimental nanophysics, the study of molecular interactions between microscopic materials, comes in.

He is developing what he calls Cyborg sensors, which include biological and mechanical components – a combination of carbon nanotubes and single-stranded DNA that preferentially bond with one specific chemical compound. These precise sensors, in theory, could be programmed to bind to, and detect, the isolated compounds that Dr. Otto’s dogs are singling out.

“We are effectively building an electronic nose,” said Dr. Johnson, who added that a prototype for his ovarian cancer sensor will probably be ready

in the next five years.

Some experts remain skeptical.

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Learning How to Exert Self-Control

PARIS — NOT many Ivy League professors are associated with a type of candy. But Walter Mischel, a professor of psychology at Columbia, doesn’t mind being one of them.

“I’m the marshmallow man,” he says, with a modest shrug.

I’m with Mr. Mischel (pronounced me-SHELL) in his tiny home office in Paris, where he spends the summer with his girlfriend. We’re watching grainy video footage of preschoolers taking the “marshmallow test,” the legendary experiment on self-control that he invented nearly 50 years ago. In the video, a succession of 5-year-olds sit at a table with cookies on it (the kids could pick their own treats). If they resist eating anything for 15 minutes, they get two cookies; otherwise they just get one.

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Famously, preschoolers who waited longest for the marshmallow went on to have higher SAT scores than the ones who couldn’t wait. In later years they were thinner, earned more advanced degrees, used less cocaine, and coped better with stress. As these first marshmallow kids now enter their 50s, Mr. Mischel and colleagues are investigating whether the good delayers are richer, too.

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Part of what adults need to learn about self-control is in those videos of 5-year-olds. The children who succeed turn their backs on the cookie, push it away, pretend it’s something nonedible like a piece of wood, or invent a song. Instead of staring down the cookie, they transform it into something with less of a throbbing pull on them.

Adults can use similar methods of distraction and distancing, he says. Don’t eye the basket of bread; just take it off the table. In moments of emotional distress, imagine that you’re viewing yourself from outside, or consider what someone else would do in your place. When a waiter offers chocolate mousse, imagine that a cockroach has just crawled across it.

“If you change how you think about it, its impact on what you feel and do changes,” Mr. Mischel writes.

He explains that there are two warring parts of the brain: a hot part demanding immediate gratification (the limbic system), and a cool, goal-oriented part (the prefrontal cortex). The secret of self-control, he says, is to train the prefrontal cortex to kick in first.

To do this, use specific if-then plans, like “If it’s before noon, I won’t check email” or “If I feel angry, I will count backward from 10.” Done repeatedly, this buys a few seconds to at least consider your options. The point isn’t to be robotic and never eat chocolate mousse again. It’s to summon self-control when you want it, and be able to carry out long-term plans.

Japanese woman is first recipient of next-generation stem cells

Surgeons implanted retinal tissue created after reverting the patient's own cells to 'pluripotent' state.

A Japanese woman in her 70s is the world's first recipient of cells derived from induced pluripotent stem cells, a technology that has created great expectations since it could offer the same advantages as embryo-derived cells but without some of the controversial aspects and safety concerns.

In a two-hour procedure starting at 14:20 local time today, a team of three eye specialists lead by Yasuo Kurimoto of the Kobe City Medical Center General Hospital, transplanted a 1.3 by 3.0 millimetre sheet of retinal pigment epithelium cells into an eye of the Hyogo prefecture resident, who suffers from age-related macular degeneration.

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8 Facts that Explain What's Wrong with American Healthcare

Excellent article- worth the time to read in full .
Uvealblues
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Some highlights:

The reason that American health care is expensive is all about the price: when we go to the doctor, it costs more than when, say, someone in Canada goes to the doctor.

Part of this is about the price per unit of health care in the United States. From prescription drugs to imaging scans, nearly everything costs more when it's prescribed in America. Take the heartburn medication Nexium: the exact same medication costs $215 here and $23 in the Netherlands.

Most other countries have some form of price controls; the government negotiates with drug companies and device makers for lower prices, and the government has the power to win those negotiations. The United States doesn't do that. It leaves the negotiations up to individual insurers. And they tend to lose.

There are more nuanced ways that our health-care prices are more expensive, too. Harvard University's David Cutler points out that we have much higher administrative costs than most other countries — and those costs get tacked onto the bill when we go to the doctor. The average American doctor spends All those extra billing specialists' salaries have to get paid somehow — and that gets worked into our prices.

The National Institute for Health Care Management estimates that, in 2009, about half of health spending ($623 billion) went towards 5 percent of the population. On average, these are people who use $40,000 of health care annually.

As to who makes the most money, it's mostly drug companies and device manufacturers — the people who make the things that insurance companies buy. They typically run profit margins around 20 percent.