Quitting Smoking Enhances Personality Change

"The data indicate that for some young adults smoking is impulsive," said Andrew Littlefield, a doctoral student in the Department of Psychology in the College of Arts and Science. "That means that 18-year-olds are acting without a lot of forethought and favor immediate rewards over long term negative consequences. They might say, 'I know smoking is bad for me, but I'm going to do it anyway.' However, we find individuals who show the most decreases in impulsivity also are more likely quit smoking. If we can target anti-smoking efforts at that impulsivity, it may help the young people stop smoking."

In the study, MU researchers compared people, aged 18-35, who smoked with those who had quit smoking. They found that individuals who smoked were higher in two distinct personality traits during young adulthood:

• impulsivity -- acting without thinking about the consequences
• neuroticism -- being emotionally negative and anxious, most of the time

Littlefield found that those with higher levels of impulsivity and neuroticism were more likely to engage in detrimental behaviors, such as smoking. However, Littlefield also found that those who quit smoking had the biggest declines in impulsivity and neuroticism from ages 18 to 25.

"Smokers at age 18 had higher impulsivity rates than non-smokers at age 18, and those who quit tended to display the steepest declines in impulsivity between ages 18 and 25," Littlefield said. "However, as a person ages and continues to smoke, smoking becomes part of a regular behavior pattern and less impulsive. The motives for smoking later in life -- habit, craving, loss of control and tolerance -- are key elements of smoking dependence and appear to be more independent of personality traits."

Despite the evidence from this study, substance use is still a complex relationship of genetic and environmental factors, Littlefield said.

The study, "Smoking Desistance and Personality Change in Emerging and Young Adulthood," has been accepted by the journal Nicotine and Tobacco Research. The study was co-authored by Kenneth J. Sher, a professor in the MU Department of Psychology.

Littlefield says the tobacco use study will contribute to ongoing research on the relationship between personality and substance abuse. He recently received a $30,000 grant from the National Institutes of Health to study genetic influences on personality and alcohol drinking motives.

A Father's Stress May Affect His Unborn Children

The risk of developing depression, which is significantly increased by exposure to chronic stress, is influenced by both environment and genetics. The interplay of these two factors is quite complex, but in fact, there is even a third factor that most of us know nothing about -- epigenetics. Epigenetics is the science of changes in genetic expression that are not caused by actual changes in DNA sequencing. It is these mechanisms that have been the recent focus of intergenerational investigations into the transmission of stress vulnerability.

Inheritance is complex. We've all known that mothers and fathers have tremendous influence on their children, but "this study highlights how complicated the relationship between genetic, epigenetic, and environmental contributions can be with regards to the inheritance of important behavioral traits," commented Dr. John Krystal, editor of Biological Psychiatry.

Most work to date has focused on maternal effects. In this fascinating new study, researchers investigated paternal effects instead, and found that male mice exposed to chronic stress pass those stress behaviors along to their offspring. Both their male and female offspring showed increased depression and anxiety-like behaviors, although the effects were stronger in males. Importantly, these behavioral changes were only present in offspring produced through natural reproduction, and not in those offspring that were produced via in vitro fertilization. That interesting twist suggests that most stress-related vulnerabilities are transmitted to subsequent generations behaviorally, rather than epigenetically.

"This type of translational animal work is important to help scientists focus their work in humans," explained lead author Dr. Eric Nestler, from Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York. "These findings in mice raise the possibility that part of an individual's risk for clinical depression or other stress-related disorders may be determined by his or her father's life exposure to stress, a provocative suggestion that now requires direct study in humans."

New Technique to Help Catch Sexual Offenders: Scientists Detect Condom Lubricant On Fingermarks for the First Time

There has been an increase in the use of condoms by sexual offenders, likely due to both to the risk of sexually transmitted diseases and to prevent the transfer of DNA evidence. The method developed by researchers at the University's Biomedical Research Centre (BMRC) can detect condom lubricant on fingermarks left by a suspect at a crime scene.

This can link a suspect, identified by their fingermark, to the crime in one analysis and can aid police in proving that an offence has taken place. And it is hoped the technique might be used to match lubricant found on a fingermark with residues from vaginal swabs collected from the victim.

Sexual Offenders Hoping To outsmart police by using a condom during their crimes may be out of luck thanks to a technique, being developed at Sheffield Hallam University, that can prove they have had contact with a condom & place them at the scene of the crime.

Researchers successfully detected lubricant from two widely available condom brands on fingermarks for the first time, and the technique was proven to be successful even on fingermarks left several weeks before analysis.

And the academics hope the technique can eventually be used to identify distinctive lubricants that could indicate a specific condom manufacturer and possibly even a particular brand. This would allow the forensic case to be profiled in an even stronger way.

For the study, researchers used MALDI-MSI (matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionisation mass spectrometry imaging), a powerful technology that can be used to map fingermark ridge patterns.

Dr Simona Francese, from the University's BMRC, said: "Offenders are increasingly aware of forensic issues and it is common now for condoms to be used and removed from the scene of a sexual assault. However, they are less likely to consider the possibility of lubricant transferring onto their fingertips and then into fingermarks left at the scene.

"If condom lubricant can be detected in fingermarks it would improve the evidence for the prosecution by establishing the assailant's presence at the scene and, crucially, having had contact with a condom. This would enable forensic scientists to provide further support to the evidence in alleged cases of sexual assault."

Birth Control Pills Affect Memory, Researchers Find

Women who use contraceptives like birth control pills experience memory changes, according to new UC Irvine reseach.

"What's most exciting about this study is that it shows the use of hormonal contraception alters memory," UCI graduate researcher Shawn Nielsen said. "There are only a handful of studies examining the cognitive effects of the pill, and more than 100 million women use it worldwide."

She stressed that the medications did not damage memory. "It's a change in the type of information they remember, not a deficit."

The change makes sense, said Nielsen, who works with neurobiologist Larry Cahill, because contraceptives suppress sex hormones such as estrogen and progesterone to prevent pregnancy. Those hormones were previously linked to women's strong "left brain" memory by Cahill's research group.

"This new finding may be surprising to some, but it's a natural outgrowth of the research we've been doing on sex differences for 10 years," Cahill said.

A neurobiologist not involved in the latest work agreed it was a logical and intriguing next step in the examination of memory differences between the sexes. Like any research, she added, it would be important to validate it further.

"Larry Cahill is already well known for his phenomenal research linking sex to memory," said Pauline Maki, professor of psychiatry and psychology at the University of Illinois at Chicago, who specializes in memory and brain functioning. "The fact that women on oral contraceptives remembered different elements of a story tells us that estrogen has an influence on how women remember emotional events."

In the study, groups of women either on the contraceptive or experiencing natural hormonal cycles were shown photographs of a mother, her son, and a car accident. The audio narrative differed; some in each group were told the car had hit a curb, while others were told the car had hit the boy and critically injured him.

One week later, all were given surprise tests about what they recalled. Women using hormonal contraceptives for as little as one month remembered more clearly the main steps in the traumatic event -- that there had been an accident, that the boy had been rushed to the hospital, that doctors worked to save his life and successfully reattached both his feet, for instance.

Women not using them remembered more details, such as a fire hydrant next to the car.

Nielsen and fellow researcher Nicole Ertman agreed the findings could help lead to fuller answers about why women experience post traumatic stress syndrome more frequently than men, and how men remember differently than women. Men typically rely more on right-hemisphere brain activity to encode memory. They retain the gist of things better than details. Women on the pill, who have lower levels of hormones associated with female reproduction, may remember emotional events similarly to men. Nielsen plans to do her doctoral thesis on whether hormones affect the retention of details.

The work, funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, appears in the September issue of the journal Neurobiology of Learning and Memory. Additional authors include Cahill and UCI undergraduate research assistant Yasmeen Lakhani

Iranian Internet users were victim to spying: report

About 300,000 Internet users in Iran have been spied on last month by one or several hackers who stole security certificates from a Dutch IT firm, a report presented by the Dutch government said on Monday.

Using a stolen certificate the hacker, or hackers, monitored people who visited Google.com, could steal their passwords and could obtain access to other services such as Facebook and Twitter, said Dutch IT firm Fox-IT, which wrote the report.

A certificate guarantees that a web surfer is securely connected but a stolen certificate enables a hacker to pretend a web surfer is securely connected to a website without the surfer knowing he is being monitored.

The report, which Dutch Interior Minister Henk Donner sent to the Dutch parliament, confirmed a statement last week from Google when it said that it had received reports of attacks on Google users and that "the people affected were primarily located in Iran."

"The list of domains and the fact that 99 percent of the users are in Iran suggest that the objective of the hackers is to intercept private communications in Iran," Fox-IT said.

Social media such as Twitter and YouTube were used during protests in Iran after presidential elections in 2009, and Iranian authorities have been trying to fight opposition on the Internet, said Afshin Ellian, who fled Iran in the 1980s and is professor at Leiden University's law faculty.

"Tehran wants to be aware of oppositional activities inside and outside Iran. Using that information they can forcefully act against the opposition," Ellian said in his blog on the website of Dutch magazine Elsevier.

In April, there were signs Iran was helping Syria put down anti-government protests with advice on monitoring and blocking Internet use, a U.S. official said at the time.

Dutch minister Donner told reporters he had not been able confirm that the certificates, which were stolen from Dutch IT firm DigiNotar, were hacked by Iranian state authorities.

"The only thing we have been able to establish is that the people who complained were in Iran," Donner said.

The Dutch government said on Sunday that Dutch state websites may no longer be safe following the DigiNotar attack and the cabinet was investigating whether its sites were hacked by Iran.

The hacker or hackers also fabricated certificates for a website of Israel's intelligence service, Mossad, the CIA and Britain's Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, and other sites such as AOL and Microsoft, Fox-IT said.

"NO ANTIVIRUS PROTECTION PRESENT"

The hacker or hackers left their fingerprint with the Persian words 'Janam Fadaye Rahbar', meaning 'I will sacrifice my soul for my leader' and identical to a message left when IT company Comodo was attacked in March, Fox-IT said in the report.

DigiNotar's network and procedures were "not sufficiently secure" to prevent the attack, Fox-IT said.

"The software installed on the public web servers was outdated and not patched. No antivirus protection was present on the investigated servers," Fox-IT said.

The Dutch government was investigating who has been involved in hacking the Dutch firm DigiNotar and the company was held responsible for possible negligence, Donner said in a letter to parliament.

"We are looking at the criminal and civil responsibility. The company and its U.S. mother company are cooperating," Donner said.

DigiNotar is owned by U.S.-listed IT firm VASCO Data Security International, which said in a statement earlier on Monday it did not expect the "incident" to have a significant impact on its future revenue or business plans.

(Reporting by Gilbert Kreijger; Editing by Michael Roddy)

Alcohol Dulls Brain 'Alarm' That Monitors Mistakes, Study Finds

"When people make mistakes, activity in a part of the brain responsible for monitoring behavior increases, essentially sending an alarm signal to other parts of the brain indicating that something went wrong," said Bruce Bartholow, associate professor of psychology in the University of Missouri College of Arts and Science. "Our study isn't the first to show that alcohol reduces this alarm signal, but contrary to previous studies, our study shows that alcohol doesn't reduce your awareness of mistakes -- it reduces how much you care about making those mistakes."

During the study, Bartholow's team measured the brain activity of 67 participants, ages 21-35, as they completed a challenging computer task designed to elicit some errors. About one third of the participants were given alcoholic drinks, while the rest were given no alcohol or a placebo beverage. In addition to monitoring their brain activity, the researchers also measured changes in participants' mood, their accuracy in the computer task, as well as their perceived accuracy.

The findings showed that the brain's "alarm signal" in response to errors was much less pronounced in those who had consumed alcohol, and the response was largest for those in the placebo group. However, those in the alcohol group were no less likely to realize when they had made a mistake than participants in the other groups, indicating that alcohol's reduction of the brain's "alarm signal" did not occur simply because those in the alcohol group were unaware of their errors. The findings also showed that those who had consumed alcohol were less likely to slow down and be more careful in the task following errors.

"In tasks like the one we used, although we encourage people to try to respond as quickly as possible, it is very common for people to respond more slowly following an error, as a way of trying to regain self-control. That's what we saw in our placebo group. The alcohol group participants didn't do this," Bartholow said.

The researchers also found that the size of the brain's alarm signal was strongly associated with participants' mood at the time of the test, and that most of the participants in the alcohol group reported feeling "less negative" after drinking than before. Bartholow said the findings are an important step forward in understanding how alcohol's effects on the brain contribute to the kinds of mistakes and social blunders people sometimes make when they're drunk.

"There are certain circumstances under which reducing the brain's alarm signal could be seen as a good thing, because some people, like those with anxiety disorders, are hyper-sensitive to things going wrong. In some people, a small amount of alcohol can take the edge off those anxious feelings, but consistently drinking as a way to reduce anxiety can lead to serious problems, including alcoholism," said Bartholow. "But generally speaking, having a strong brain response to mistakes promotes better self-control and helps people avoid making further mistakes in the future."

The study "Alcohol Effects on Performance Monitoring and Adjustment: Affect Modulation and Impairment of Evaluative Cognitive Control," will be published in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology. The study was funded by University of Missouri Research Board and the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism

Russia Plans Orbiting Hotel In Space

ZHUKOVSKY, Russia, Aug 19 (Reuters) - A hotel in orbit, lunar sightseeing flights and luxury rides into the cosmos -- all are part of Russia's vision to ensure it is not left behind in the growing space tourism industry.
Russian firms unveiled their plans at the country's premiere air show this week at Zhukovsky, outside Moscow, saying the race was on to build a new craft to take people into space following the retirement of NASA's space shuttle in April.
RKK Energia unveiled plans for a replacement shuttle and Orbital Technologies said it hoped to build an orbiting hotel with room for seven guests by 2016. Other plans include flying tourists to the dark side of the moon and, by 2030, to Mars.
"Space tourism is a real and fast-growing business," said Sergei Kostenko, head of Russian firm Orbital Technologies, said at the MAKS air show. "Whoever builds the first new spaceship now will reap big dividends. "
Although Russia currently holds a monopoly on rides to space aboard its Soviet-designed Soyuz, it starts at a disadvantage .
Foreign experts say they doubt Russian firms can achieve their ambitious goals because they lack funding and even Russian officials said it would be hard to rival U.S. private sector firms now competing for contracts with NASA.
Funding for the U.S. space programme is much higher and NASA is expected to forge ahead with building a new generation of craft capable of travelling into deep space, with flights into low Earth orbit outsourced to private firms.
"The U.S. has more possibilities than us right now," said Alexander Derechin, deputy chief designer for Russia's partly state-owned space contractor RKK Energia.
He said the United States had made a "very wise decision" in planning a state-funded spaceship for deep-space flight and that Russia faced tough competition from companies such as Boeing Co and Lockheed Martin as well as start-up firms.
"But we must make a state-funded spaceship, though in such a way that it is also commercially competitive. It is a very difficult task," Derechin said.

RUSSIAN FIRMS AIM HIGH
A decade after it flew the first U.S. millionaire to space in 2001, Energia plans a six-person shuttle which it said would offer a softer landing for the super-rich than its 40-year-old Soyuz craft. It said it hoped it would be operating by 2015.
"People paying for the most expensive ticket in the world must be comfortable, not scared," said Vladimir Pirozhkov, who designed the model of the shuttle on show this week.
"This is just a glance at the future, but it is the ultimate transportation dream. It should be desirable."
Russia cannot sell tourist seats until 2013. It is carrying European and U.S. astronauts -- for more than $50 million a ride -- on its single-use Soyuz capsule, the only way of getting to the International Space Station since the U.S. shuttle was retired.
Russian officials say at least one of four U.S. companies at the forefront of the commercial space industry could develop space taxis by 2016 to take astronauts into low Earth orbit, up to an altitude of about 2,000 km (1,250 miles).
"We don't want to come late to the market," Derechin said.
Orbital Technologies said the planned new spacecraft would be able to take VIP clients to a hotel it plans to build in orbit 217 miles above Earth, catering for guests paying about $1 million for a five-day stay.
Orbital Technologies' Kostenko said the space hotel would be more comfortable than the space station, but did not promise luxury -- vacationers would still have to eat space food, take sponge baths and use vacuum toilets because of weightlessness.

DOUBTS OVER RUSSIAN GOALS
Foreign space officials and experts said they doubted Russian firms would be able to replace the 40-year-old Soyuz, much less launch a space platform, as quickly as planned.
Houston-based space consultant James Oberg said part of the publicity blitz at MAKS was "fantasy" aimed at helping Russian space agency Roskomos find foreign funding for new boosters, manned spacecraft and nuclear-powered Mars engines.
Roskomos' new head, Vladimir Popovkin, said at the air show the agency could no longer afford to spend nearly 50 percent of its budget on manned flights.
Oberg said Russia risked quickly losing its monopoly on transportation into space, adding: "This question is really worrying the more thoughtful Russian space strategists."
Russia "depends on an increasingly ageing workforce saddled with mostly obsolete ground equipment and a few basic 'old reliable' designs with little prospects for upgrade or improved economy," he said.


Wrishik Ganguly