Oxytocin rate strangers as more attractive!

A chemical best known for cementing the bond between a mother and her newborn child could also play a part in picking mister (or miss) right. A new study shows that men and women who inhale a whiff of the hormone oxytocin rate strangers as more attractive. When oxytocin courses through our blood, "we are more likely to see people we don't know in a more positive light," says Angeliki Theodoridou, a psychologist at the University of Bristol, UK, who led the new study.
This effect adds to the hormone's known role in human relationships. One study found that oxytocin levels spike after new mothers look at or touch their newborns and may help bonding. Other work has hinted at the importance of oxytocin in social situations between adults too. People administered the hormone make overly generous offers in an economic game that measures trust, while men who got a dose of oxytocin proved better at remembering the faces of strangers a day later, compared to subjects who got a placebo.
Dampened fear?
In the latest trial, Theodoridou's team tested 96 men and women in a double-blind placebo-controlled trial. After participants got either a spritz of oxytocin or a placebo, they rated pictures of 48 men and women for attractiveness and 30 for trustworthiness. Her team also tested for mood.
No matter their sex or mood, volunteers who received oxytocin rated male and female strangers as both more attractive and trusting. Theodoridou's study did not examine how oxytocin could affect social judgements, but she speculates that the hormone dampens brain activity in a region involved in processing fearful emotions, called the amygdala. A previous study found that oxytocin tempered amygdala activation in volunteers who saw a face that had previously been paired with a slight shock.
Love spray
Although Theodoridou's study shows that oxytocin acts similarly on men and women when rating strangers, sex differences could emerge in real-world situations, says Jennifer Bartz, a psychologist at Mount Sinai Medical School in New York. More research is needed to see if this is the case, she says.Unsurprisingly, entrepreneurs are already trying to make a buck off of oxytocin's social effects. One company offers a spray that claims to engender trust in others, though it offers little more than testimonials as evidence that it works.Could a similar spray spark romances between total strangers? Theodoridou doesn't think so. "I would not endorse any of these products," she says.

Shoppers about what!

People grumbling their way through the grimness of winter have better recall than those enjoying a carefree, sunny day, Australian researchers have found.The University of New South Wales team used a Sydney news agency to test whether people's moods had an impact on their ability to remember small details.Researchers placed 10 small items on the shop counter, including a toy cannon, red bus and a piggy bank, and quizzed shoppers about what they remembered seeing upon their exit.
Lead researcher Joseph Forgas said subjects were able to remember three times as many items on cold, windy, rainy days when there was sombre classical music playing as they were when conditions were sunny and bright.Rainy-day shoppers were also less likely to have false memories of objects that weren't there, said Forgas."We predicted and found that weather-induced negative mood improved memory accuracy," he wrote in the study, which was published in the latest edition of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.
"Shoppers in a negative mood showed better memory and higher discrimination ability."Forgas said a worse mood helped to focus people's attention on their surroundings and led to a more thorough and careful thinking style, while happiness tended to reduce focus and increase both confidence and forgetfulness."This finding suggests that some allowance for such mood effects could be incorporated in applied domains such as legal, forensic, counselling and clinical practice," he said.

An entirely separate emotion!

The reason why you immeasurably care for a person without any thought of reward is one of science’s biggest mystery. Now, researchers at
Montreal University claim that they have unravelled the secret behind unconditional love.
The research team, led by Professor Mario Beauregard, of Montreal University’s centre for research into neurophysiology and cognition, found that the emotion emerges from a complex interplay between seven separate areas of the brain.
Such brain activity has only limited overlap with the cerebral impulses seen in romantic or sexual love, suggesting it should be seen as an entirely separate emotion.
“Unconditional love, extended to others without exception, is considered to be one of the highest expressions of spirituality. However, nothing has been known regarding its neural underpinnings until now,” The Times quoted Mario, as saying.
To reach the conclusion, the volunteers were recruited on the basis that they had a proven ability to feel strong unconditional love: low-paid assistants looking after people with learning difficulties.
In the study, Mario asked them to evoke feelings of unconditional love and hold them in their minds while they had a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan.
Of the seven brain areas that became active, three were similar to those of romantic love. The others were different, suggesting a separate kind of love.
The findings showed that some of the areas activated when experiencing unconditional love were also involved in releasing dopamine – a chemical deeply involved in sensing pleasure, with rising levels strongly linked to feelings of reward and even euphoria.
In a research paper in an academic journal, Mario said: “The rewarding nature of unconditional love facilitates the creation of strong emotional links. Such robust bonds may critically contribute to the survival of the human species.”

God is not confined in form or ritual!

People often ask, “What is the logic of meditation? What is wrong with idol worship?”
many have clarified that there is nothing wrong, but it is a limitation. And if God is everywhere, it is a denial of that truth to have to go to a temple to find Him there. If He is in everything, surely He is in me as much as in that place of worship. Why not seek Him within?
An idol is a representation of the Divine. If a person is capable of understanding this, then there is nothing wrong in idol worship. When we are able to transfer our worship to the Ultimate, then where is the need to depend on a representation?
God is not confined in form or ritual, nor is He resident in scriptures. We have to seek Him in the innermost core of our heart. It is good to be born in a religion, but it is bad to die in a religion. It means that you start off with something — a capital, a heritage, a system of philosophy, but you have to grow out of it eventually.
It is felt that we prefer to worship Him outside us because it is possible then to isolate Him from ourselves. A God in the temple can be safely locked up until one needs Him again. A God within is perhaps a perpetual ‘nuisance’ for one whose intentions are not so genuine, whose aspirations are not so good, whose practices are not so ethical. He does not want a permanent witness. Idol worship has perhaps evolved out of this need to isolate God from our existence, to be accessed when we need Him, through prayer or offering so that we can come back thinking, “I have sacrificed, and surely I will get,” forgetting that what we have is also His.
In meditation the adoration is, therefore, directed to one’s own heart, to the divinity present therein, and by this act of transcendental worship, the divinisation of human beings is made possible, to culminate in the ultimate achievement of total divinisation of the individual.
The message of spirituality is: “Look within.” “I am in the heart of every creative being. Look for me there. I am you.”The ones who are aware of the divinity within would say, “Where religion ends, spirituality begins; where spirituality ends, reality begins; where reality ends, bliss begins.” The system must conform to the time in which we live, so that the situation in which we are placed in our temporal existence enables us to do these things satisfactorily, continuously, regularly, and effectively.