Threatening children does not promote truth-telling, according to research by McGill University scientists. In fact, using threats of punishment can have the opposite effect.
“Children often lie to try to avoid getting in trouble–especially when they have done something wrong,” Victoria Talwar, professor of educational and counseling psychology at McGill University and lead researcher on the report, told The Speaker.
Dr Victoria Talwar
“The bottom line is that punishment does not promote truth-telling,” Talwar said of her findings. “In fact, the threat of punishment can have the reverse effect by reducing the likelihood that children will tell the truth when encouraged to do so. This is useful information for all parents of young children and for the professionals like teachers who work with them and want to encourage young children to be honest.”
The study involved almost 400 children ages 4 through 8, who were each told not to peek at a toy while the researcher went out for a minute. Video cameras recorded that over two-thirds of the children peeked. Around the same amount of children lied about peeking.
For every month increase in age, children were less likely to peek, and for every month increase, children were more likely to lie and to be able to maintain their lies during later questioning.
“With age children have greater self-regulation/self control,” Talwar said. “We only left the room for a minute. If we had left for longer more children may have peeked. However, this is a common finding in the scientific literature that with age children are have better inhibitory control.”
The children more often told the truth when the experimenter told them that he or she would be happy if the child did so than if the experimenter told the children that the child him- or herself would be happy for telling the truth.
The research teams findings were what they expected–that the younger the child was, the more likely the reason they told the truth was to please an adult, but that older children more frequently told the truth because they felt it was the right thing to do.
Appeals based on punishment were not found to increase truth-telling. Overall, children were found to be less likely to tell the truth if they were afraid of being punished than either of the other two appeals.
Talway provided some comments on alternatives to punishment that may be more likely to achieve the effect parents desire.
“What seems to increase honesty is giving children explicit messages about the value of honesty. If we wish to teach children to act in prosocial ways, we need to teach children about those behaviors and why they are important.”
“We need to teach children about the value of being honest,” Talway told us. “When a child does something wrong a natural reaction is to punish their transgression. However, if they tell the truth about it, we can give them some recognition for it. ‘I’m not happy you broke my vase–and you can help me clean it up/fix it/use your pocket money to replace it–but I’m glad you told me the truth.’ If we recognize honesty that is a powerful way to encourage and teach children that honesty is valued.”
For the first time, doctors have been found to be making more money by ordering more procedures rather than for providing service to more patients. The results of recent UCLA research, which surprised the team behind the study, have led them to suspect that the pay-for-service system may encourage behavior that is not in the best interest of patients.
“The difference in earnings was highly significant,” Jonathan Bergman, an assistant professor of urology and family medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and a urologist and bioethicist at the Greater Los Angeles Veterans’ Health Administration, told The Speaker. “This resulted from higher services offered per beneficiary.”
The findings, the researchers reported, were “very surprising.” It was the first time that higher-earning clinicians had made more money because they had ordered more services and procedures rather than because they had seen more patients.
The team examined Medicare bills from the 2012 calendar year and compared this information with amounts paid to clinicians.
“What people can learn is that fee-for-service may not be the most reasonable way to pay doctors. Also, that charges outpace payments by three is like listing $3 as the supposed price of a $1 Coke,” Bergman told us.
Bergman also commented for a press release on some of the possible flaws in Medicare policy.
“Medicare spending is the biggest factor crowding out investment in all other social priorities,” said Bergman.
“Perhaps it would make more sense to reimburse clinicians for providing high quality care, or for treating more patients. There probably shouldn’t be such wide variation in services for patients being treated for the same conditions.
“[The] findings suggest that the current health care reimbursement model–fee-for-service–may not be creating the correct incentives for clinicians to keep their patients healthy. Fee-for-service may not be the most reasonable way to reimburse physicians.”
In order to more conclusively answer whether the fee-for-service system was flawed, Bergman said, more research was needed–particularly an assessment of whether treatment outcomes for patients differed for those who had more or less services ordered. This research could also show how best to use resources to maximize medical benefits for people, he added.
“The most important takeaway is that it is hard to evaluate appropriate compensation for doctors, much like it is for teachers,” Bergman told us. “The answer isn’t to rely solely on services done, which is as problematic as using test scores to identify the best teachers.”
Sensitive early care–or the lack thereof–has a significant effect on the relationships of adults, according to new research by scientists at the University of Delaware and the University of Minnesota. The researchers found that early care had long-term implications for relationships with others–including intimate partners–and that the effects were seen across all racial, gender and socioeconomic lines. Sensitive care had clear implications even 30 years later.
Dr Lee Raby
“The total effect of early sensitivity for supportive parenting in adulthood was somewhat surprising to me considering that nearly three decades separated those two measurement time-points,” Dr Lee Raby, postdoctoral researcher at the Infant Caregiver Project at the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at University of Delaware, told The Speaker.
To see how people were affected by childhood experiences over the course of their lives, the team drew from an ongoing 37-year study that focused on maternal insensitivity.
“Our research report was based on data from the Minnesota Longitudinal Study of Risk and Adaptation, which is a large research study of approximately 200 individuals who were born in the mid-1970’s to first-time mothers living in poverty,” Raby explained. “The participants have been continuously followed from birth to adulthood and currently are around age 37 years.”
The material included data on physiological responses, including skin conductance–an indicator of nervous system activity and therefore of emotional response.
The researchers wanted to find out if differences in the quality of care a child receives affected their nervous responses during adult conflicts.
They found that children who received sensitive mothering were better able to deal with difficult relationship issues as adults–their skin reactivity measured relatively lower. Those children who received less sensitive care exhibited more nervous arousal as adults while attempting to deal with difficult situations, which means that those adults would tend more towards emotional avoidance and withdrawal.
The team controlled for other factors that could reasonably be expected to effect relationship abilities, and found that, at least for the study, the results were not dependent on the types of relationships to which an individual belonged–gender, ethnicity or socioeconomic status also were not responsible for the results.
“Specifically, we observed that early supportive/sensitive caregiving was associated with more competent functioning in (a) peer relationships during childhood and adolescence, (b) romantic relationships during young adulthood, and (c) parent-child relationships at age 32 years,” Raby told us.
“The findings related to peers and romantic partners are not new though,” he noted. “Previous publications from this research project have included those findings, and those associations have been replicated in independent samples.”
The conclusion reached by Raby and his team was that insensitive parenting created adults who avoided conflict with their spouses, and sensitive parenting led to an ability to resolve conflicts with romantic partners, but Raby added that further research into the matter was necessary.
“The association between early caregiving experiences and later parenting quality was largely indirect, meaning that more supportive early caregiving predicted later relationships with peers and romantic partners which in turn predicted adult parenting quality. However, in other studies we have observed that early caregiving experiences do have a unique role in promoting functioning in adult relationships even after accounting for relationship experiences during the intervening years. Because the unique contributions of early caregiving are relatively small, large samples and many measurements are needed to detect these associations. I anticipate that future research will provide evidence that early caregiving experiences shape later parenting outcomes both directly and indirectly.”
Why the type of treatment experienced by a child affects his or her later relationships may be due to the ideas that are formed by the child during early years.
“We think the reason for this is that individuals are developing expectations, attitudes, and behavioral skills within these earlier relationships that they carry into their interactions with their romantic partners. Bringing these two ideas together, the current study indicates that romantic relationship quality may be both a cause and a consequence of parenting quality,” said Raby, noting that more tightly controlled experimental studies are needed to more conclusively make these kind of causal claims.
We asked Raby if he would comment on the record levels of single parenthood in the US and the high incidence of broken families in many parts of the world–many of which face prolonged conflict–and if the research might have some implications on these large issues.
Raby qualified that he wanted to be cautious in how far he extended the findings, but offered some educated guesses on how the findings might relate.
“Our goal was to test theoretical ideas about the developmental origins of parenting behavior and the way it is transmitted across generations. That said, I do believe the findings speak to the larger issues.
“First, we observed—as have others—that the presence and quality of adults’ romantic partnerships predicted the quality of parenting they provided to their children. This is perhaps not surprising since romantic relationships are one of the biggest sources of social support as well as stress during adulthood. Second, we also observed that romantic relationship functioning has its origins, at least in part, in earlier experiences with caregivers and peers.
“In other words, individuals who experienced more supportive care from their parents early in life and were more skilled at interacting with peers during childhood and adolescence were more likely to form high-quality, committed romantic partnerships during adulthood.
“In my opinion, the important take-away message is also the most basic one,” said Raby. “Early parent-child relationships play an important role in understanding later parenting quality in adulthood. Although our study was focused on the interpersonal experiences that account for this intergenerational association, our findings in no way mitigate the importance of early caregiving experiences.
“Importantly, researchers working with other longitudinal studies have reported almost identical results concerning the intergenerational associations in parenting. This is astounding to me and makes me very excited about continuing to work on this topic.”
Women are not comparing themselves with the thin, attractive models in the magazines they enjoy–some, at least. Instead, women are living vicariously through the thin, attractive models–engaging in “thinspiration,” according to new research from Ohio State University. Not only that, women who enjoy these magazines are actually less likely to make an effort to look more attractive, the researchers found.
“Women get the message that they can look just like the models they see in the magazines, which is not helpful,” said researcher Silvia Knobloch-Westerwick, who is professor and graduate studies director at Ohio State University ‘s School of Communication. “It makes them feel better at first, but in the long run women are buying into these thinness fantasies that just won’t come true.”
The study involved 51 female college students who participated in an online test. The women evaluated magazine articles and advertisements dominated by featured thin-ideal images accompanied by text over the course of five days.
Knobloch-Westerwick examined the data for magazine reading habits, body mass index, body satisfaction, and especially tendency to compare their own form with that of others.
The options given to the participants included statements like, “This woman is thinner than me,” and, “I would like my body to look like this woman’s body.”
Results showed that women who compared themselves to the thin models had lower satisfaction with their own body by the end of the study. They were also more likely to have reported dieting during the period of the study.
Women who reported comparing their body and feeling that they would like to look more like the models, however, had increased body satisfaction by the end of the study. This phenomena Knobloch-Westerwick dubbed “thinspiration.”
Thinspiration is a concept in which people believe that they can make themselves as attractive as the models they view.
“They felt better about their body instantly when viewing the images and related content. They weren’t thinking about what they had to do to look like these models.
“These women felt better about their own bodies because they imagined that they could look just like the models they saw in the magazines.” The women who experienced the greatest “thinspiration” from looking at magazines were the least likely to engage in weigh-loss behaviour in the real world.
The research also found that over time the women began to identify with the models more.
“They may begin to feel affiliated with the models, and start to think this person is someone like me, someone I can be friends with and emulate,” she said.
Knobloch-Westerwick’s research was unlike many other body-image studies in that it found that viewing images of more ideal beauty models lead to higher body satisfaction. Knobloch-Westerwick said she suspected that because her images were accompanied by text–unlike the simple images of beauty used in most studies–participants were influenced by positive messages about how they could look like the models.
“If they just see an image of a thin model once and have to react immediately, they may indeed have poorer body satisfaction,” she said. “But if they look at images over the course of several days, readers may begin to feel more affiliated with the models, feel more like they could be like them. That could lead them to switch from comparing themselves negatively to the models to using these models as thinspiration.”
The bias groups have to view their own actions as driven predominantly by love while viewing the actions of their rivals as driven more by hate has been explained by recent research conducted by a team from Northwestern University. The researchers found that in reality conflicts were driven by the same motivations, but the view from each side of a conflict was skewed–partially by psychological bias, partly by experience. The researchers also found that the bias could be removed by incentivizing a more considerate understanding using a time-honored cooperative tool–money.
Dr Adam Waytz
“People are surprisingly motivated by the same things in conflict–wanting to do right by their own group, and wanting to show loyalty and affiliation toward their own group,” Dr Adam Waytz, Assistant Professor of Management and Organizations at Northwestern University’s Kellog School of Management and lead author of the study, told The Speaker.
“The Palestinian and Israeli conflict provides the clearest example,” Waytz told us. “I think most cases where a country decides on a violent or aggressive strategy to address conflict with another country means that they are assuming the other country is driven by hate.”
3,000 people were involved in the NU study, which included Israelis and Palestinians in the Middle East and Republicans and Democrats in the US.
The research team found that each side of a conflict felt that their group was motivated by love more than hate, but each also felt that the other group was motivated by hate more than love.
“We think people misinterpret others’ motives for two related reasons. One, they are motivated to see their own group as loving and their outgroup as barbaric,” Waytz told us, referring to a theory called motive attribution asymmetry. “Two, they simply encounter less instances of their outgroup engaged in acts of love, and therefore are blind to these motives,” said Waytz.
The researchers found evidence that each group regularly saw its own members engaging in acts of “love, care and affiliation,” but rarely saw rival group members acting from similar motives. In large part, this is because groups more often notice each other’s actions during moments of heated conflict.
Rival groups often can’t see eye to eye on possible solutions or find grounds for compromise because they can’t agree on the way they perceive each other. This creates an error or bias.
“If they believed that the other country was driven by in-group love, they would see diplomacy as a more effective tactic,.” said Waytz.
“It’s interesting to see that people can be blind to the source of behavior on the other side, that you can go from saying you are motivated by love of your own group and you can’t seem to apply that to reasoning about the other side,” Liane Young, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Psychology at Boston College and co-author of the research article commented in a press release.
“What’s interesting to me is there’s so much work on social psychology suggesting we first think about who we are and what motivates us and we tend to apply that other people,” said Young. “What we’re seeing here is just the opposite where I say one thing for me and instead of extrapolating that it would be the same for you, I say it’s just the opposite for you, that you’re motivated by your hatred of my group. That’s pretty striking to me.
“What we also found was that these attributions tend to also track with other sorts of consequences so if you think that the people on the other side are motivated by their hatred of your group, you also are unwilling to negotiate with that group,” continued Young. “You tend to think they’re more unreasonable, suggesting that people’s misattributions of other groups may be the cause of intractable conflict.”
The NU team found that biases towards motive attribution asymmetry could be removed by incentivizing more considerate judgement.
When money was offered, study participants were able to correctly assess an opponent’s motivation. The promise of money for finding the right answer seemed to help study participants find that “right answer.”
“We just simply told people they would get a bonus for getting the answer right so they had to buy into this idea that there was a right answer,” said Young. “It seems like we can at least move around people’s judgments and that people aren’t so hopelessly lost that they can’t get it right when they are motivated to get it right.”
The report, “Motive Attribution Asymmetry For Love vs. Hate Drives Intractable Conflict,” was authored by Adam Waytz of Northwestern University, Jeremy Ginges of the New School of Social Research, and Liane Young of Boston College, was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
MoPoTyse, an NGO based in Phnom Penh, is using a peer education model that is cheaper and more effective than utilizing conventional doctors and clinics. This method is proving to reach many more diabetics and those prone to it, initially in poor areas in the capital and eventually in the outlying rural provinces. Upwards of 10 percent of Khmer currently have the disease.
The director of MoPoTyso, Maurits van Pelt, has stated that there are some significant reasons as to why the disease has become a growing problem in the country. One of these is a degree of poverty that prohibits most Cambodians from seeking proper medical assistance. “Adequate care is unavailable or prohibitively expensive as most patients live below USD 2 a day. Premium levels for community based health insurance do not allow coverage of chronic patient routine health care costs.” In fact, average global costs for insulin is $4, while in Cambodia it’s $16.
Another reason cited by van Pelt was the misconception that healthier brown rice is not as good as the cheaper white variety, which raises the blood sugar level much more quickly. This notion came about during the Pol Pot regime, when people didn’t have the time to remove the husk of the rice. As van Pelt stated, “It’s associated with poverty. It has a bad reputation as something inferior.”
Since 2005, van Pelt’s peer educator system, which started in a slum in Phnom Penh, has used existing diabetics to act as mentors and guides to others that have the disease in their local area. “[These educators] were able to find other diabetes patients in the slums using a combination of urine glucose strips for postprandial screening and a handheld blood-glucose meter for confirmation blood glucose testing,” said van Pelt. These groups then hold weekly meetings at the home of the peer educator. There, they learn how to eat healthier foods, the importance of exercise, and take their own blood sugar.
Linda Meach, a peer educator, said that the majority of the diabetic newcomers to her meetings have very little knowledge of how to handle their disease. “Before they come to us, they do not know how to take care of their health,” said Meach, speaking of the program. “We teach them how to manage their food and exercise and how to use the medication.”
A motivating factor for the participants at these meetings to do well is financially based. Those whose blood sugar has decreased, have lost weight, and have an improved understanding of diabetes receive access to discounted medication from the local pharmacies. One of the attendee’s of Ms.Linda’s meetings, Rose Nith, is hopeful for the future of the program. “Without this center our community will be in difficulty, since we rely on this center and it supports us,” said Nith. “Some people will die since they cannot afford to buy medicine without it.”
People are unaware that various innocuous-sounding things are actually affecting them on a regular basis, according to new research by Bayer College of Medicine. Newspapers, radio and tv can influence the way people act by using words that trigger powerful emotions, the researchers found–clean words cause clean thoughts, which produce ethical actions, and dirty words produce disgusted thoughts and immoral actions.
“People don’t know it, but these small emotions are constantly affecting them.” said Vikas Mittal, J. Hugh Liedtke Professor of Marketing Adjunct Professor of Family & Community Medicine, Baylor College of Medicine, and lead researcher on the study.
“What we found is that unless you ask people, they often don’t know they’re feeling disgusted,” Mittal said. “Small things can trigger specific emotions, which can deeply affect people’s decision-making. The question is how to make people more self-aware and more thoughtful about the decision-making process.”
This is because disgust is an emotion that causes people to protect themselves–that is, focus on their self.
However, lessening disgust causes people to behave more ethically again. This can be done by causing people to think of clean things–cleaning products such as Kleenex or Windex, for example. When disgust is lessened, the likelihood of cheating goes away.
The study involved two sets of randomized experiments with 600 participants. The researchers randomly disgusted their participants in three ways.
In one, participants evaluated antidiarrheal medicine, diapers, cat litter, feminine care pads and adult incontinence products. In another experiment, participants wrote out their most disgusting memory. In a third, a disgusting scene from the film “Trainspotting” was played for the participants. The scene shows a man diving into a dirty toilet.
The disgusted participants engaged in consistently self-interested behaviors at a significantly heightened rate.
After the participants were disgusted, another set of experiments was conducted.
The researchers had some participants evaluate cleaning products–disinfectants, body washes, household cleaners. These participants were returned to a normal level of deceptive behavior.
Managers could use this information to understand how to impact decision-making and cause ethical or unethical behavior, Mittal said. He commented on office cleanliness and cleanliness in the workplace in general.
“At the basic level, if you have environments that are cleaner, if you have workplaces that are cleaner, people should be less likely to feel disgusted,” said Mittal. “If there is less likelihood to feel disgusted, there will be a lower likelihood that people need to be self-focused and there will be a higher likelihood for people to cooperate with each other.”
“If you’re making important decisions, how do you create an environment that is less emotionally cluttered so you can become progressively more thoughtful?”
The report, “Protect Thyself: How Affective Self-Protection Increases Self-Interested Behavior,” was authored by Mittal and Karen Page Winterich, associate professor of marketing at Penn State’s Smeal College of Business, and Andrea Morales, a professor of marketing at Arizona State’s W.P. Carey School of Business, and will be published in the journal Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes.
Hundreds of paddle-powered boats raced at the Bon Om Touk water festival this month on the Siem Reap River, an occasion in which Cambodians celebrate the Mekong River’s biannual water flow reversal and the beginning of the fishing season. While the river itself wasn’t the main object of attention during the festivities in the Southeastern Asia country, it did serve to highlight the dire need of the country to clean up it’s drinking water after decades of inner turmoil.
There are several reasons for the lack of clean drinking water in the country, according to Nthabeleng Emmel, Programs Manager for Water for Cambodia in Siem Reap, who said that lack of access is a major inhibitor. “Most people in Cambodia have no access to safe drinking water; they use contaminated water sources such as rivers, ponds, [and] wells.” This can lead to many different kinds of complications, such as gastrointestinal diseases like diarrhea, Emmel explained. Also, many of the population, especially in the countryside, use large open jars called cisterns to collect lake, stream and rain water. If not properly treated, this water can contain mosquito larvae, leading potentially to malaria and dengue fever.
While wells can be dug and used to get water, the quality may not be so good, said Mrs. Emmel. “Deep wells are usually said to be clean and some organizations dedicate their time drilling wells for rural communities but the utilization of [these] wells is questionable. Some areas have high content of iron in the water which usually comes with color, smell and [a bad] taste.”
Emmel’s organization builds and installs Biosand Filters for rural populations–the ones which experience the greatest difficulty in obtaining clean drinking water. The filter uses sand and gravel to remove up to 99 percent of the bacteria and protozoa in the water which is poured into it. “Water for Cambodia has adopted a Biosand filter which provides safe drinking water to the rural population,” said Emmel. “By the end of 2014 we will have installed over 14,000 filters reaching out to at least 84,000 individuals.”
Once the filters have been installed, the organization soon returns to test the filtered water in their lab. “We follow up with water testing which we do in our own lab, do quality control by checking all installed filters for any maintenance that may be needed and any other support the families may need,” said Emmel. A part of this support is educating the receivers of the filter on its use. “The challenge which we hope to overcome is getting people to understand the importance of pouring water into this filter on a daily basis and doing proper maintenance which only requires a few minutes.”
Mrs. Emmel is hopeful that the Biosand filter will continue to give rural Cambodians clean drinking water well into the future. “Biosand filters are the best solution for Cambodia as they are easy to use, maintain and they have a long life span [at least 15 years]. Their maintenance is inexpensive as the contents of the filter do not need to be changed but rather cleaned [on a regular basis]”.
A leading geoengineer has admitted that he is “terrified” of geoengineering technology. Dr Matthew Watson, principal investigator for the Spice project, said that humans may have to admit having failed as planetary stewards, commenting on his own and others’ technology–used to reduce the amount of sunlight reaching the earth though manipulation of the atmosphere–science that, experts openly own, is not understood in terms of costs and benefits and which they suspect will be neither “magic bullet or Pandora’s box.”
“Personally, this stuff terrifies me,” said Dr Matthew Watson of University of Bristol, principal investigator for the Spice project (Stratospheric Particle Injection for Climate Engineering), one of several teams at the forefront of geoengineering science.
“It’s a watershed for our relationship with the Earth and with nature. It fundamentally changes the way seven billion people are going to interact with the world, and I’m not sure the system is going to be controllable in the way we want.”
“I’m easily terrified,” qualified Watson. “I think if we ever deploy SRM (Solar Radiation Management) it will be the closest indication yet that we’ve failed as planetary stewards. I believe that.”
SRM is a process by which water droplets or sulphur particles are used to reduce the amount of solar radiation that reaches the Earth, and the Spice project is looking at ways of simulating the cooling effects of volcanoes.
After major volcanic eruptions, the Earth is cooled because rays from the sun do not reach the surface of the planet.
However, the Spice experiment, despite being one of the first projects to take geoengineering out of the laboratory, was cancelled earlier this year over alleged conflicts of interest.
The Spice project was planning to test SRM by deploying a weather balloon that would inject 150 litres of piped water into the atmosphere.
Geoengineering is a science that is not fully understood. Scientists are still working out the potential hazards associated with blocking the sun’s rays from reaching Earth.
Among the hazards being considered is the risk of disturbing the delicate balance of land and sea influences. Disruption can lead to drought and extreme rainfall in different parts of the world.
Risks associated with the use of sulfur particles are also being considered. Sulphur particles have been linked to the destruction of atmospheric ozone. A depleted ozone layer has been associated with increased incidence of skin cancer and damaging effects on plants and animals.
Although Dr Watson did not suspect that SRM would be used within the current decade, he said he believed its use may be inevitable.
“Unless we’re very wrong about climate change or quickly change our ways, at some point we’re going to have to ‘go outside’,” said Watson, commenting on current trends in global warming. It is estimated that by 2100, global temperatures may increase almost 4C.
“That’s going to have a profound effect on the planet,” said Watson.
Another proposed solution involves spraying sea salt into low clouds. The brighter, more reflective clouds will capture and bury more carbon underground, raising levels of sea plankton, which absorb carbon. Another proposal involves the use of reflective materials to better bounce the sun’s rays back from the Earth’s deserts.
All of the proposed geoengineering solutions are considered to be too expensive still. Climate Geoengineering Governance (CGG) investigator Professor Steve Rayner, from Oxford University, said of the technology, “Mostly it is too soon to know what any of these technology ideas would look like in practice or what would be their true cost and benefit. But it’s almost certain that geoengineering will be neither a magic bullet nor Pandora’s Box.”
While Costa Rica prepares for its annual high-season, store fronts reopen, restaurants become chaotic, and tourists flock to the elegant beachfront hotels of Guanacaste. Despite the surplus of business and affluent tourists, a devil lurks within the most peculiar of places: the Aedes mosquito.
With globalization on the rise, infectious, virulent diseases have become an increasing problem, causing previously extinct diseases to resurface and others to become virtually uncontrollable. Dengue has reemerged in the last decade and has been raving havoc upon the inhabitants of Costa Rica. With over 100 cases seen this week in the Tamarindo area alone, dengue is certainly turning heads and making a name for itself in the viral-borne world. Though dengue has become one of Costa Rica’s most prominent vector-borne diseases, few precautions have been taken to avoid infection.
Although the Ministry of Health (MOH) is the organization that handles, manages, and investigates health complications, they have failed to provide Costa Rican inhabitants with proper preventive measures.
In accordance with Municipality of Santa Cruz, mosquito-preventive sprays are only occurring after a case has been confirmed in an area, leaving thousands of people at risk. A tactic which professional fumigation expert, Leo Perron, find useless, “Personally, I believe it is totally inefficient. That smoke kills almost nothing, it chases the mosquitos away for awhile, but they come back after an hour or so.”
Currently there is no vaccination to protect oneself from exposure, but there are measures that can be used to prevent the disease from consuming a patient’s health. Removing oneself from mosquito vulnerable situations is the first and foremost action one can take to avoid exposure to dengue. Remaining inside a home two hours before sunrises and sunsets, avoiding standing water, and liberally applying mosquito repellent will decrease your chances of a bite.
The incubation period of dengue lasts roughly fifteen days, a period in which patients normally reveal signs of high fever, headaches, weakness, and skin rashes. “When I see these types of symptoms, I immediately administer a blood test. My dengue patients are suffering from a loss of blood platelets and faltering immune systems,” Dr. Amanda Robles said in a recent interview.
According to Dr. Amanda Robles, sustaining a healthy immune system and leading a healthy lifestyle are two of the easiest ways to prevent dengue, “We cannot compete with the fact that mosquitos are present and that they will bite us. If you keep a strong immune system and live a healthy life, your chances of infection are considerably lower.”
Dengue is a vector-born disease, meaning, it can strike at any moment. A disease which was once only detected during the wet season is now appearing year-round. The mass dispersion and mutational perseverance of the Aedes mosquito has allowed it to become permanently relentless.
Unfortunately, the Aedes species of mosquito prefers to dwell in close proximity to human environments. “They’ve adopted an inclination to prefer human blood, and commonly breed in water-bearing containers such as, flower pots, vases, and trash bins,” says Dr. Ivan Mendez.
Admittedly, the number of dengue cases is considerably lower than last year, a number that is a direct reflection of the extreme drought that hit the Guanacaste region earlier this year. There were nearly 50,00 confirmed cases of dengue by the end of 2013, while only 9,692 have been recorded as of November 19, 2014 (Ministerio de Salud, Santa Cruz).
This tremendous decline of dengue is a result of the minimal rainfall seen in Guanacaste this past season. With fewer spawning areas, the Aedes mosquito becomes less threatening to Ticos, ultimately allowing preventive measures to have a greater impact.
As Ticos become more aware of the consequences that accompany a mosquito bite, fewer cases of dengue will surface. “Dengue is a strong virus that humans need to evolve from. Twenty years ago, people didn’t know about it (dengue), but cases were still out there. As information builds and people become more knowledgable, we are seeing less cases. In a decade or so, when our immune systems have become resilient to the virus, there will be significantly fewer infections,’ says Robles.
The Speaker recently interviewed Dr Shane Gero, a marine biologist who has been studying sperm whales in the Caribbean for the past 10 years. We talked to Gero
Dr Shane Gero
about his research in Dominica as well as his current project, which represents many firsts in the science of sperm whale communication. Gero’s findings offer a greater understanding of what happens when sperm whales talk to each other.
The whales, Gero has found, are using language for many communicative purposes–including, it seems, greeting other whales using first and last names. Also, sperm whales from different parts of the world and from different social groups speak the differently. Not only do they speak their language differently, they also exhibit varying cultures depending on where they live and which social group they belong to.
“The focus of my study has been at the level of the individual whale.” Gero told us. “We’ve been able to follow these animals year after year–the same about two dozen families–some of them we’ve spent hundreds of hours wit.”
“We’ve collected a huge data set on who has spent time with who–but also, from a communications standpoint, who says what to whom. And that’s really a first: being able to look at individuals chatting with each other at a conversational level.
“This new study that’s happening in the next couple of years is, for the first time, going to be able to place those conversations into a context in the open ocean.”
The new project takes Gero’s previous decade of experience with sperm whales one step further, and will serve as a lead-up to a fuller understanding of what sperm whale language is.
“Previously we would record animals, and be able to figure out who was saying what, but we didn’t know where they were relative to each other, or the ‘when’ context… in terms of when they were actually talking to each other…
“We’ve done well in the last 10 years to answer the ‘who’ and the ‘what’ of these conversations. The ‘where’ and the ‘when’ are the subject of the current research. Hopefully this will lead us to one day answer the really interesting ‘why’ questions. ‘What are they saying to each other? What does it all mean?'”
Gero gave us some details about sperm whale society. These whales live in a hierarchical society, and spend their day to day life in what the researchers call “social units.” In Dominica, there are some 400 sperm whales, and all of them belong to one matriline–grandmothers, mothers and daughters–which spend their full lives together. The Dominica group spends most of their lives within 20 miles of the shore.
“These animals in the Caribbean are really island-associated animals,” said Gero of the group. “It’s really easy to call them families, because that’s what they are.”
“On the average day, there’s only one family off the coast of the island. But every now and again, two families will join up and spend anywhere from a few hours to a few days together socializing.
When talking about language, Gero told us that we must keep in mind that sperm whale language is very different from human language–and is also different from the language of other whales–including the language of the more familiar humpback whale.
“Language is a big question. Language comes with syntax and it comes with meaning and orders, and we haven’t figured all that out yet. But what we do know is that sperm whales use a system of clicks to communicate with each other.
“It’s kind of like Morse code. So, some calls sound like this: ‘tap-tap-taptaptap,’ where others sound like this: ‘taptaptaptaptaptaptap.’ And different rhythms are used at different times. Animals exchange these back and forth, kind of like you would using Morse code.”
Sperm whales throughout the world exhibit common features of communication, but also exhibit variation, Gero explained. The variation seemingly depends on the geographic origin of a particular whale, among other factors, and serves the whales as a social marker.
“So, what’s interesting about variation in the world is that animals in the Caribbean sound different from animals in the Mediterranean, and they sound different from animals in the Gulf of Mexico and so on.
“At least in the Atlantic, it seems like it’s geographic. So all the animals in the Caribbean sound very similar, but they sound different from the animals in the Med–that sound very similar.
“But in the Pacific it’s different. In the Pacific you actually have different sperm whale dialects living in the same area. So some of the animals off the Galapagos sound one way, and some of the animals sound differently. But what’s really neat about that is that they seem to use these dialects to segregate their society.
“So as a whale that means making a certain type of coda,” said Gero. Codas are patterns of clicks used by whales to communicate.
Gero offered an example of the individuals that live in these segregated sperm whale groups. “I only spend time with animals that make that same sound. It would be similar to living in a multi-cultural country like Canada or the United States, but then only socializing with anyone who speaks the same language as you.”
“In the Caribbean we hear a lot of a one-plus-one-plus-three coda. So it sound like this: ‘tap-tap-taptaptap.’ And that’s the only place that it’s been recorded–in the Caribbean. And all the animals make it very similarly. So, we think that it acts as a marker of ‘I’m from the Caribbean.’ Whereas in the eastern tropical Pacific, the Galapagos, the coast of Chile and Ecuador–there are several different coda repertoires.”
Gero contrasted this five-part coda with the five-part codas used by other whales around the world.
“One of the groups makes very regularly timed codas. So, they’ll make a five-regular, which is five clicks that are very evenly spaced, so it sounds something like this: ‘tap-tap-tap-tap-tap.’ And they also make a six-regular and a seven-regular, and so on.
“But then there’s another dialect that’s all plus-one. So, rather than making a five-regular, they would make a four-plus-one, which sounds like this: ‘taptaptaptap-tap.’ And they also make a five-plus-one and a six-plus-one and so on.
Gero and his fellow researchers assume that the whales are using their calls to identify themselves on a first and last name basis. The assumption is based on the common usage of a one-plus-one-plus-three coda in a similar way, while each individual whale uses a five-R in a slightly different way. “It seems as though they sort of have this nested, hierarchical recognition, so there seems to be the five-R coda, which you hear everywhere in the world.”
Gero then explained the first names.
“It has the variability to function as an individual identifier,” said Gero. “It’s potentially used to mark differences between individuals. So if you’re looking within an family, you can actually tell the individuals apart by how they make that coda. So its kind of like a first name. And, at least in the Caribbean, it seems that they use different codas that are all four clicks in length, but each family unit has a different four click coda. So that’s sort of like a last name. And then we know for sure that the animals in the animals in the Caribbean use the one-plus-one-plus-three, and that’s the only place that has been recorded. So we think that it probably functions in a way of marking their geographic origin or their cultural group–the vocal dialect that they have. So they have this nested kind of first name-last name cultural group.
“In the same way, I would say that my first name is Shane, my last name is Gero, and I come from Canada.”
Gero told The Speaker that testing the function of these calls is a matter of his current research. They are looking at how the animals use the calls and when they use them. The whales may use the calls like the bottlenose dolphins being studied by the Sea Mammal Research unit at the University of St Andrews, which have been observed exchanging their calls when meeting at sea. “They actually say, ‘Hey it’s me’–‘Oh, hey, it’s you. Great,'” commented Gero.
Sperm whales not only vary in the languages they speak, they vary culturally based on what group they live among.“And the neatest part about them is that these vocal clans–these whale cultural groups that use these different dialects–don’t only segregate their society socially, but they also behave differently. They have different movement patterns and different foraging habits and reproductive success, as it turns out. And so they really are really equatable to human ethnic groups.”
When we asked Gero about whether different codas were used by the animals to represent various parts of their lives, he gave us an idea of where his research was headed.
“That’s really what I’m studying in Dominica, because it’s the first time we’ve been able to follow families over such a long period of time, and hear them communicate with each other in different contexts.”
Although the “why” of sperm whale calls is a matter of Gero’s future research, he was willing to offer some educated guesses.
“The ocean is mostly a dark space on a big-area scale of thousands of square kilometers in which there is not a lot of stuff. And the most important thing that you have with you is your family members. And so, keeping track of where your family members are as individuals–whether it’s your mom or your baby-sitter or your aunt or your grandmother–is important.
“But then even more importantly, its critical to figure out what family you’re coming up on. So if one family is swimming north and the other family is swimming south, they need to figure before it’s too late whether or not they want to spend time with each other or avoid each other, and whether or not they recognize that family group.
“So having that layer of recognition to recognize individuals and families and the society that they come from is really important when you live in a vast, dark ocean,” said Gero.
This has a lot to do with feeding habits, explained Gero.
“Sperm whales feed on squid, and squid is very patchily distributed in the ocean. And so, you don’t want to spend time in a bigger group with animals that you don’t know, in order to deplete that resource. So, we know that sperm whales–at least on the day to a week scale–travel around basically following the squid that they’re trying to eat. And so, in order to maximize the amount of food you get, you want to minimize the amount of animals that are eating that patch of squid.
“So, it’s important to find out who is there in order to maximize your foraging success in some respects.”
Tag developers Mark Johnson (right) and Peter Tyack (left) with the DTAG. (WHOI)
“D-tags were pioneered out of Woods Hole Oceanographic in the US. They are being heavily used at [Gero’s] lab at Aarhus University,” Gero told us.
“Basically, they’re about the size of your cell phone. And it works like your cell phone in some respects. It can measure the 3-d movement. So, it’s kind of like if you’re looking at a picture on your phone, and you turn your phone sideways: the picture orients itself and gets bigger. That’s because the phone knows that it’s being turned sideways. And these tags know that as well. So, we get 3-dimensional fine-scale movement by putting them out on the animal.
“But they also have two little microphones at the front, so we also get really high-resolution stereo sound.
Tagging of a Whale using a cantilever pole.
“The tags get deployed with a really long pole, and they stick to the whales with four small suction cups. So they don’t implant into the whale. You basically poke the animal with a long stick, and the suction cups stick onto the back of the animal, and then they can last for about two days. And then they computer inside tells the suction cups it’s time to release, and it lets a little bit of water into the suction cup and the suction cup falls off, and the tag floats back to the surface.
“And then it has a little VHS transmitter in it, and that allows us to track it down. Just as other biologists in Africa tracking lions or elephants would.
“And what this gives us, if we put out three of them at the same time, or five of them at the same time on a family of whales… If the family of whales is only seven animals, we get all the relative positions of all the adult females in the family. And so we get all of the exchanges of the calls between them as well. So we know that Pinchy–a female–just dove and has left her calf, Tweak, at the surface, and is now calling to Fingers, whose coming back up from the deep, and so it gives us not only the context but also what they’re saying to each other.
“And the context is really important. So now we know that it’s a mother diving, leaving her baby at the surface, and communicating with the primary baby-sitter.
“And so its a lot easier to interpret what the meaning of that conversation was, because we know all of this background information about the animals, and now we know the physical relative position of them when they’re talking with each other.”
To be continued…
Look forward to part two of this interview, in which Dr Gero explains the dangers and concerns facing sperm whales and other marine life in our increasingly trafficked oceans.
Dr Shane Gero completed his doctoral studies at Dalhousie University, Canada, and is currently an FNU Research Fellow at Aarhus University in Denmark. Gero splits his time between Dr. Peter Madsen’s Marine Bioacoustics Lab in Denmark, his human family in Canada, and the sperm whale community off the island of Dominica in the Caribbean.
Photos: Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Three Fish Sleeping, Jessie Hodge, Flying Kiwi Tours, Bing, Chelsea Leven
Montana State University environmental scientists have found conclusive evidence that hailstones originate in biological material. MSU researcher Alex Michaud turned travesty into understanding by peeling back the onionlike layers of the crystalline compositions he collected from the Bozeman and two other Rocky Mountain hailstorms, and the results promise to increase our understanding of the role of aerosol particles in atmospheric condensation and, as a part of the bigger picture, improve our model inputs to the Earth’s energy balance.
“A hailstone is a very complex weather phenomenon, Alex Michaud, MSU doctoral student and first author of the paper, told The Speaker. “It can tell us a lot about the properties of the clouds in which it was formed.”
MSU’s Alex Michaud holds one of the hailstones that fell June 30, 2010 in Bozema
“While they cause lots of damage there are many things to be learned from hailstones. They’re more than just a clump of ice falling from the sky,” Michaud told us.
“This is the first paper to really show that biological material makes hailstones,” commented John Priscu, a polar scientist and professor at MSU’s Department of Land Resources and Environmental Sciences, with whom Michaud regularly works and who coauthored the report. “Despite the millions in dollars of damage the storm caused in Bozeman, the damaging hailstones provided us with a better understanding of hailstone formation, which will help us understand the role of aerosol particles in the formation of precipitation.”
After the Montana storm, Michaud collected and stored hailstones–averaging 1.5 inches in diameter. He also collected hailstones from two other local storms that year and the next.
Michaud peeled back the crystalline layers of the hailstones and found that they had formed around a biological embryo.
“We can assume–quite safely, except maybe in the dead of winter–that biological material is constantly being taken up into the air,” said Michaud. “Many surfaces give off biological material such as leaf surfaces, lakes, oceans, animals, my dandruff, etc. They are emitting bacteria, fungal spores, detritus, and so forth.”
Michaud elaborated to explain that biological material in the air was not the only thing required to create hailstones.
“Certainly the atmospheric and meteorological conditions need to fit a certain set of conditions in order for a hailstorm to occur and produce hailstones. These particular conditions are best answered by a meteorologist, but suffice it to say that you need a very strong thunderstorm conditions to generate a hailstorm. So not all biological material turns into hail because meteorological conditions need to be appropriate to support hailstone formation.”
In his research, Michaud was also able to gauge the temperatures at which the hailstone embryos formed by analyzing stable isotopes in water. The temperatures at which hail froze were warm, Michaud found.
“Warm freezing temperatures–warm, sub-zero temperatures–is indicative of ice nuclei that are efficient at catalyzing ice nucleation. Water needs a template or a nucleus in order to form an ice crystal, only once water reaches ~-40C does it spontaneously freeze. So for something to freeze at warm subzero temperatures means that it provides a good template of an ice crystal, which is found in biological material much more often than abiotic–dust, minerals, etc–material.”
The study builds on previous findings that warm temperature ice nucleation indicated that biological material was likely the nuclei of hailstones.
Among past researchers in hailstones was Tina Santl Temkiv, a postdoctoral researcher at Aarhus University in Denmark, with whom Michaud consulted.
“It was very coincidental that she published two hailstone microbiology papers two years before me and we ended up at the same university for a few month,” said Michaud. “Plus, we are the only ones to work on hailstone microbiology since a 1973 paper in Nature.”
Michaud also said that hailstones were a nice model for studying atmospheric ice nucleation and cloud processes because of the way hailstones grow.
“Hail is a good model system for understanding precipitation formation and nucleation,” said Michaud. “We can trace the life history of a hailstone all the back to the part of the hailstone that was present when it was first started, the embryo. This ability to trace a hailstones life back to its beginnings, and those life history stages are layers of ice that can be peeled away–sort of like an onion–we can be more definitive in saying what was present when the embryo of the hailstone formed.”
Michaud explained to us how the new evidence could contribute to our understanding of the role of aerosol particles in the formation of precipitation.
“Aerosols are a broad term for any particle that is aloft in the atmosphere. These aerosol particles play a large role in reflecting solar energy and in cloud formation–which also reflects solar energy. So understanding how aerosols form precipitation and/or clouds will help with meteorological models and the earth’s energy balance.
“Certainly the last one is a bit of a stretch for my work, but knowing that biological ice nuclei are active in forming clouds and precipitation–rain, snow, and, now, hail–will improve the model inputs to earth’s energy balance. It’s a piece to a much bigger puzzle.”
Michaud was uncertain if the results would have any immediate practical implications.
“On improving our use of aerosol particles, I’m not too sure. In California they are trying to perform cloud seeding to increase snowpack in the Sierras to decrease drought conditions, which is through the use of particular aerosols. I don’t think I am qualified to speak to how we–the royal we, humans–can improve our use of aerosol particles.”
The report, “Biological ice nucleation initiates hailstone formation,” was authored by Alexander B. Michaud, John E. Dore, Deborah Leslie, W. Berry Lyons, David C. Sands andJohn C. Priscu, and was published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres.
Photo: Alex Michaud, Andrew Slaughter and Kelly Gorham, MSU
“And the neatest part about them is that these vocal clans–these whale cultural groups that use these different dialects–don’t only segregate their society socially, but they also behave differently. They have different movement patterns and different foraging habits and reproductive success, as it turns out. And so they really are really equatable to human ethnic groups.”
