Personality has no effect on cancer risk or cancer survival, concludes a new study based on the largest and most relevant dataset to date. Other recent studies have also found no link or have been inconclusive. Read article.

An acupuncturist’s communication style may influence the patients’ level of pain reduction and satisfaction, although no benefit was observed for traditional Chinese acupuncture (TCA) compared with sham acupuncture in patients with osteoarthritis of the knee, a new study has found. Read article.

A group of professional couch potatoes, as one researcher described them, has proven that even moderate exercise,  in this case walking at ones own pace for 40 minutes three times a week,  can enhance the connectivity of important brain circuits, combat declines in brain function associated with aging and increase performance on cognitive tasks. Read article.

“When two people working together can discuss their disagreements, two heads can be better than one,” explains Professor Frith. “But, when one person is working with flawed information – or perhaps is less able at their job – then this can have a very negative effect on the outcome. Being able to work together successfully requires that we know how competent we are. Joint decisions don’t work when a member of the team is incompetent, but doesn’t know it. Read article.

In the first study of its kind, researchers have found compelling evidence that our best and worst experiences in life are likely to involve not individual accomplishments, but interaction with other people and the fulfillment of an urge for social connection.  Read article.

While success is surely sweeter than failure, it seems failure is a far better teacher, and organizations that fail spectacularly often flourish more in the long run, according to a new study by Vinit Desai, assistant professor of management at the University of Colorado Denver Business School.

Desai’s research, published in the Academy of Management Journal, focused on companies and organizations that launch satellites, rockets and shuttles into space b an arena where failures are high profile and hard to conceal.

Working with Peter Madsen, assistant professor at BYU School of Management, Desai found that organizations not only learned more from failure than success, they retained that knowledge longer.

“We found that the knowledge gained from success was often fleeting while knowledge from failure stuck around for years,” he said. “But there is a tendency in organizations to ignore failure or try not to focus on it. Managers may fire people or turn over the entire workforce while they should be treating the failure as a learning opportunity.”

Read article.

You know those goody-two-shoes who volunteer for every task and thanklessly take on the annoying details nobody else wants to deal with?

That’s right: Other people really can’t stand them.

Four separate studies led by a Washington State University social psychologist have found that unselfish workers who are the first to throw their hat in the ring are also among those that coworkers most want to, in effect, vote off the island.

Read article.

When it comes to our own pleasure, we like having a choice, but when it comes to utilitarian goals, we’re just as happy being told what to do, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research. Read article.

Oxytocin (OT) is a hormone that plays an important role in social behavior—it has even been nicknamed “the love hormone” and “liquid trust.” Increased levels of OT have been associated with greater caring, generosity, and trust. But does OT increase people’s trust in just anybody or does it act more selectively?

Psychological scientist Moïra Mikolajczak from the Université catholique de Louvain (Belgium) and her colleagues investigated just how trusting OT can make us. In this experiment, volunteers received either a placebo or OT nasal spray. Then, they played a trust game in which they received a certain amount of money which they could share with a partner (any amount shared with the partner would then triple). The partner then decides what to do the money—they can keep it all for themselves or split the amount with the giver. If the volunteer is trusting, they will share more money with their partner (in the hopes of having some of it returned to them) than volunteers who are not as trusting. The participants played the trust game against a computer and virtual partners (which were supposedly in another room), some of whom appeared reliable (they seemed likely to share the money with the participants) and some of whom appeared unreliable (they seemed likely to keep the money for themselves).

The results, reported in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, showed that volunteers who received the OT nasal spray were more trusting of the computer and the reliable partners—that is, they offered more money to the computer and the reliable partner than did volunteers who received the placebo nasal spray. However, OT did not have an effect when it came to sharing with a seemingly unreliable partner—the volunteers were not generous towards a potentially unreliable partner, regardless of which nasal spray they received. Read article.

Researchers from Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) have found that yoga may be superior to other forms of exercise in its positive effect on mood and anxiety. The findings, which currently appear on-line at Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, is the first to demonstrate an association between yoga postures, increased GABA levels and decreased anxiety. Read article.