NASA has big plans for the coming decades. The agency's Artemis program has set its sights on returning to the Moon after an absence of nearly 50 years. Once there, the first woman and next man to walk the lunar surface will begin establishing a base camp, laying the foundation for the sustained exploration and economization of Earth's solar sibling. Then it's off to Mars.

But a journey to the ruddy planet, a distance of roughly 114 million miles, will require NASA to solve a myriad of logistical and engineering problems. Chief among them is the problem of food.

Although humans have maintained a continuous presence in space for 20 years aboard the International Space Station (ISS), food hasn't proven an issue as the station orbits a mere 220 miles above our terrestrial home. NASA and other space agencies can easily send astronauts care packages containing fresh fruit and veggies alongside shelf staples.

Mars-faring astronauts, however, will not have it so easy. The time and distance required for the expedition will make regular resupply infeasible. Astronauts will need to bring all their food with them, alongside the means of producing that food, and keep those supplies within the volume constraints of the spacecraft.

It's a problem with no obvious solution. That's why NASA is challenging entrepreneurs, college students, hobbyist investors, and you, if you're up for it, to help them devise one.

The way to an astronaut's heart

In a paper written for The Journal of Nutrition, Grace Douglas, NASA's lead scientist for advanced food technology at Johnson Space Center in Houston, outlined the necessities for food technologies in long-term space exploration. The most critical being, of course, survival.

"In the history of humankind, explorers set off to see what was over the horizon, and literally millions did not return because of food and nutrition failures," Douglas and her co-authors wrote.

The difficulty is that the processes we rely on to cook meals on Earth—such as boiling water, hot surfaces, and food preparation—work as they do because they are bound to an environment with gravity, atmosphere, atmospheric pressure, and even certain microbes. Spaceflight replaces that environment with one of microgravity, scarce resources, cabin pressure fluctuation, and unmitigated radiation, each adding their own variable to the cooking calculus.

To date, space food preparation has been limited to adding water or heating pre-packaged foods. When supplemented with fresh produce from Earth, the system works fine. But as mentioned, such a system would be infeasible for the more than two-year roundtrip to Mars and back.

Douglas and her coauthors conclude that any viable solution must provide safe, stable, palatable, and reliable food, while also overcoming environmental constraints, using minimal resources, and producing minimal waste. It would also need to provide all the micro- and macronutrients a spacefaring astronaut needs.

That alone is a tall order, but there is another wrinkle engineers must consider: the astronauts' mental wellbeing. Douglas and her co-authors note that it's a "common misperception" that astronauts will eat anything to complete the mission. While astronauts are high-performing individuals, they still require moments to revitalize their wellbeing against the stress, workload, and isolation inherent in such a mission.

Delicious, nutritious meals can provide such moments of mental reprieve, but they also must have variety. Even the tastiest meal in the finest of restaurants would become a mental chore if eaten day-in, day-out for two whole years. Substitute that with a tasteless, yet nutrient-dense food paste in the vacuum of space, and even the highest performers will develop a case of cosmic cabin fever.

One tough space nut to crack

To meet these challenges, NASA is crowdsourcing solutions through its Deep Space Food Challenge. In collaboration with the Canadian Space Agency, NASA is offering a $500,000 prize purse for solutions that add some flavor to extended spaceflight.

"NASA has knowledge and capabilities in this area, but we know that technologies and ideas exist outside of the agency," Douglas told UPI in an interview. "Raising awareness will help us reach people in a variety of disciplines that may hold the key to developing these new technologies."

The agency hopes the winning technologies will also bolster food production on Earth. If a system can offer tasty meals with minimal resources in space, the reasoning goes, then it may be modified for deployment to disaster areas and food-insecure regions, as well. The challenge is open to all U.S. citizens and closes on July 30, 2021. Information on the Canadian Space Agency's challenge is available on its website.

If food isn't your forte but you've got engineering chops, you can still help NASA solve the many other engineering and logistical problems facing the future of space exploration. Through the NASA Solve initiative, the agency is seeking ideas for breaking lunar ice, shrinking payload sizes, and developing new means of energy distribution.

And even if engineering isn't for you, you can still call your Congressional representative to request they support NASA and restore funding from budget cuts. We can all play a small, yet important, role in the future of space exploration and the advancing of scientific knowledge.

This story originally appeared on: Big Think - Author:Kevin Dickinson

When we think about our ancestors, our minds tend to wander to geography. We introduce our progenitors by noting they were Norwegian, Brazilian, Indonesian, or members of an American Native tribe. Personal genetic tests, such as those offered by Ancestry and 23andMe, offer customers a travel log of their lineages' global journeys. And some of our more obvious phenotypic markers, such as hair and skin color, evolved in relationship with the lands our ancestors called home.

Lost within this land-locked focus is the fact that social and cultural factors—how our ancestors cohabitated and interacted with each other—also influence gene flow. In doing so, these factors shaped our evolution and genetic diversity. As a new study has found, for the peoples of the Indian subcontinent, such social and cultural factors may be more important to their genetic variation than the deserts, grasslands, and tropical forests between them.

A new kind of mother tongue

The new study, published in Molecular Biology and Evolution, began when Aritra Bose, who earned his doctorate at Purdue in genetics and data science, was researching the close ties between genes and geography in Europe. Originally from Calcutta, India, Bose wondered if such a strong link would be true of his home country. He teamed up with Peristera Paschou, a population geneticist and associate professor of biological sciences at Purdue University, and Petros Drineas, associate head of Purdue's Department of Computer Science, to find out.

"Our genome carries the signature of our ancestors, and the genetic structure of modern populations has been shaped by the forces of evolution. What we are looking for is what led different groups of people to come together and what drove them apart," Paschou, who led the study with Drineas, said in a press release. "To understand the genetics of human populations, we created a model that allows us to consider jointly many different factors that may have shaped genetics."

The researchers developed a computer model called COGG (Correlation Optimization of Genetics and Geodemographics) to analyze population genetic substructure. They then feed COGG a dataset featuring 981 individuals from 90 Indian groups, further merging that with a dataset of 1,323 individuals from 50 Eurasian populations. The model crunched the numbers and found something surprising.

Studies looking at European populations have typically found a strong correlation between genotype and geography. As one National Geographic writer put it when discussing a study published in Nature: "The result was startling—the genetic and geopolitical maps of Europe overlap to a remarkable degree. On the two-dimensional genetic map, you can make out Italy's boot and the Iberian peninsula [sic] where Spain and Portugal sit. The Scandinavian countries appear in the right order and in the south-east, Cyprus sits distinctly off the 'coast' of Greece."

Such a confluence of the geo and the genome was not found in the India study; in fact, the analysis showed a weak correlation between genotype and geography. Instead, it was shared language that proved the major genetic link.

The researchers found that people who speak the same language were much more likely to be closely related, regardless of where they lived on the subcontinent. For example, their analysis showed that Indo-European and Dravidian speakers shared genetic drift with Europeans, while Tibeto-Burman speaking tribes shared it with East Asians.

Social structure also showed a stronger correlation than geography in their analysis. The researchers hypothesized this correlation originated from the social stratification imposed by India's caste system.

For several thousands of years, the caste system divided Hindus into hierarchical groups based on their karma (work) and dharma (duty). Marriage was strictly limited within one's caste, resulting in a long history of endogamy. Though the caste system was effectively expunged in 1950 by the Indian government, such endogamy held sway over Indian society long enough to have a powerful effect on the country's historic gene flow.

"Our results clearly show that endogamy and language families are pivotal in studying the genetic stratification of Indian populations," the researchers write in the study.

New dimensions for understanding ancestry

None of this is to say that geography played no part in the ancestral gene flow of India, nor that social and cultural factors didn't influence genotypes across Europe. They most certainly did. That Nature study, for example, discovered genetic clusters in Switzerland that were language-based. And Europe's geographic distribution may have more to do with historical sociopolitical realities than environmental ones.

The point of both studies, however, is not to tie our genetic history to land or language, but to understand how genes flowed throughout historical societies.

"It sheds light on how genetics work in our society," Bose said in the same release. "This is the first model that can take into account social, cultural, environmental and linguistic factors that shape the gene flow of populations. It helps us to understand what factors contribute to the genetic puzzle that is India. It disentangles the puzzle."

With an improved knowledge of historic gene flow, scientists may be able to further biomedical research to better detect rare genetic variants, assess individual risks to certain diseases, and predict which populations may be more or less susceptible to particular drugs. By opening the avenues we use to understand our genetic history, we can hopefully advance such knowledge and understanding.

This story originally appeared on: Big Think - Author:Kevin Dickinson

James Thurber's short story "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" follows its mild-mannered protagonist through another mundane day of thankless chores. But Mitty is a daydreamer. He spices up his humdrum existence—and, thankfully, the story itself—through fantasies. Real-world events cause Mitty to imagine he's an ace hydroplane pilot, a brilliant surgeon, and an assassin on trial.

Thurber's character fits many readers like a driving glove because, as science has discovered, we all have a little Walter Mitty in us.

Research suggests that our minds wander close to 50 percent of the time, and we use these mental getaways to imagine our lives in all manner of fun and fanciful scenarios. We fantasize about the perfect meet-cute, or starting an exciting new career, or what we'd do with superpowers, or unbridled sexual encounters. Mostly it's sex.

And despite admonishments from our Victorian-styled teachers and supervisors, a mind in the clouds comes associated with a bevy of cognitive benefits. These include greater creativity, improved productivity, better problem-solving, and progress toward goals. Daydreaming is, in short, a virtue.

Except when it isn't, and here the darker undertones of Thurber's story come into play. It's hinted that Mitty may not be enjoying playful escapism but suffering from an uncontrollable urge to disassociate from his life, his responsibilities, and his relationships. Today, psychologists are researching whether such a Mittyesque existence may be the result of a new disorder known as maladaptive daydreaming.

Maladaptive daydreaming

Daydreaming is an indulgence of the mind and imagination, one provided courtesy of the default mode network, a network of interacting brain regions that is active even when the conscious mind is not. But like so many of life's indulgences—wine, steak dinners, video games, and even exercise—too much daydreaming can be harmful to our well-being. When daydreaming crosses that threshold, it can be considered maladaptive.

This disorder was first identified by Eli Somer, a professor of clinical psychology at the University of Haifa, School of Social Work, in a 2002 paper. That paper looked to six patients in a trauma center whose daydreaming habits replaced human interactions or interfered with their standard life functions, such as going to school or holding down a job.

Since then, other case studies have looked at maladaptive daydreamers and compiled a list of potential symptoms. These include vivid, richly-detailed daydreams; abnormally long daydreaming sessions; daydreams triggered by real-life events; daydreaming sessions that interrupt sleep; and repetitive motions or whisperings while daydreaming. On average, one study reported, maladaptive daydreamers spend four hours a day housed in their imaginations.

"This is not like rehearsing a conversation that you might have with a boss," Somer told CNN. "This is fanciful, weaving of stories. It produces an intense sense of presence."

While such symptoms are common, though not comprehensive or guaranteed, how maladaptive daydreams manifest are naturally individual to the dreamers. In one case study, researchers analyzed the diary of a man codenamed "Peter." Peter described investing as many as 14 hours a day online. The news and images he happened upon would trigger related fantasies. For example, he may envision himself as a multimillionaire genius who could prevent bad news from occurring or self-insert himself into the power fantasies of superhero movies or police procedurals for hours at a time.

"When I felt this pain as a child, I started imagining how things could be different. I created stories which never happened. To suppress that pain I would hug my pillow or quilt, thinking I was being comforted by someone else," Peter wrote.

In an interview with CNN, Cordellia Rose described her maladaptive daydreaming like a drug and noted that her daydreams developed into intricate storylines that could last for years. These stories proved so distracted that she was unable to complete everyday tasks such as driving lessons.

"You get hooked on it, because it can be like an action movie in your head that's so gripping that you cannot turn off," Rose told CNN. "This [condition] needs to be public, because these are people suffering, and badly."

To be clear, maladaptive dreaming is not a psychotic disorder like schizophrenia. Daydreamers such as Peter and Rose are aware that their fantasies are as unreal as they may be unrealistic. Because of this, many maladaptive dreamers understand the difficulties they face and the real-life losses they have endured for the sake of their fantasies.

More research needed

Researchers don't have a standard diagnosis or treatment for maladaptive daydreaming because they aren't yet sure it's a unique psychological condition. Maladaptive daydreaming has not been included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition—blessedly abbreviated as the DMS-5—the definitive book on mental disorders. To date, there isn't enough evidence to determine if maladaptive daydreaming is a separate condition or a manifestation of an already listed disorder.

Somer has developed a 14-point scale to help people determine whether they are experiencing maladaptive-daydreaming symptoms, but the results only indicate whether an individual should seek help. They provide no formal diagnosis.

Also, maladaptive daydreaming is often expressed alongside other conditions, such as anxiety disorders, dissociative disorders, attention deficit disorders, and obsessive-compulsive disorders. And the researchers of Peter's case study noticed a striking similarity between his condition and those with behavioral addition response—including analogous responses with preoccupation, mood modification, tolerance, and withdrawal. It may be that maladaptive daydreaming is an expression of these, or other, disorders.

It's worth noting that similar empirical hurdles exist for other well-known, though not formalized, disorders. Orthorexia, sex addiction, misophonia, internet addiction, and parental alienation syndrome are all likewise absent from the DSM-5. For maladaptive daydreaming and these other conditions, it's simply a case of more evidence and research needed before a determination can be made.

A growing understanding of maladaptive daydreaming

The question of labeling is a tricky one—not only from a medical point-of-view but also a prosocial one. Some people find having a recognized condition validating; they feel it promotes social acceptance and makes seeking treatment easier. Others find such labels stigmatizing and restricting.

But the question of how to label something is an academic one. It isn't to say that the experience doesn't exist. It does, and whether maladaptive daydreaming ultimately enters the DSM-5 or not, awareness is growing. Online communities now exist to give support and spread awareness. And regardless of a condition's presence in the medical literature, if symptoms disrupt work, school, or social lives, help should be sought.

Thanks to the efforts of psychologists and the community, maladaptive daydreaming, unlike Thurber's literary creation, is no longer "inscrutable to the last." And those who suffer it are no longer relegated to a firing-squad of their own mind but can find they help the need.

This story originally appeared on: Big Think - Author:Kevin Dickinson

You may have noticed a trend in the last few years. At the beginning of every year, NASA and NOAA share their analyses of the previous year's climate data. And every year, their data reveal the previous year to be one of the hottest on record—with 2016 at the torrid top of 139 years of documentation. That's no coincidence. Climate change is happening, it's happening now, and it's human-caused.

That's the consensus of 97 percent of climate scientists, according to a 2014 report from the American Association for the Advancement of Science. That's the same percentage of physicians and cardiovascular scientists who agree that smoking causes lung cancer, and it's a consensus reached through decades worth of surveys and studies into the realities and causes of climate change.

Now, climate scientists have two more analyses to add to their overwhelming evidence. In a briefing at this year's 101^st American Meteorological Society Annual Meeting, representatives for NASA and NOAA revealed their independent analyses of 2020's climate data. And the trend continues.

A dead heat

For its 2020 analysis, NASA gathered surface temperature measurements from more than 26,000 weather stations. This data was incorporated with data from satellites as well as sea-surface temperatures taken from ship and buoy instruments. Once tallied, NASA's data showed 2020 barely edged out 2016 as the warmest year on record, with average global temperatures 1.02°C (1.84°F) above the baseline mean (1951-1980).

In a separate analysis of the raw data, NOAA found 2020 to be slightly cooler than 2016. This distinction is the result of the different methodologies used in each—for example, NOAA uses a different baseline period (1901–2000) and does not infer temperatures in polar regions lacking observations. Together, these analyses put 2020 in a statistical dead heat with the sweltering 2016 and demonstrate the global-warming trend of the past four decades.

"The last seven years have been the warmest seven years on record, typifying the ongoing and dramatic warming trend," Gavin Schmidt, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said in a release. "Whether one year is a record or not is not really that important—the important things are long-term trends. With these trends, and as the human impact on the climate increases, we have to expect that records will continue to be broken."

And they are. According to the analyses, 2020 was the warmest year on record for Asia and Europe, the second warmest for South America, the fourth warmest for Africa and Australia, and the tenth warmest for North America.

All told, 2020 was 1.19°C (2.14°F) above averages from the late-19^th century, a period that provides a rough approximate for pre-industrial conditions. This temperature is closing in on the Paris Climate Agreement's preferred goal of limiting global warming to 1.5°C of those pre-industrial conditions.

2020's hotspot was—the Arctic?

Heatwaves have become more common all over the world, but a region that really endured the heat in 2020 was the Arctic.

"The big story this year is Siberia; it was a hotspot," Russell Vose, chief of the analysis and synthesis branch of NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information, said during the briefing. "In May, some places were 18°F above the average. There was a town in Siberia […] that reported a high temperature of 104°F. If that gets verified by the World Metrological Organization, it will the first there's been a weather station in the Arctic with a temperature above 100°F."

The Arctic is warming at three times the global mean, thanks to a phenomenon known as Arctic Amplification. As the Arctic warms, it loses its sea ice, and this creates a feedback loop. The more Arctic sea ice loss, the more heat introduced into the oceans; the more heat introduced, the more sea ice loss. And the longer this trend continues, the more devastating the effects.

For example, since the 1980s, there's been a 50 percent decline in sea ice, and this loss has exposed more of the ocean to the sun's rays. That energy then gets trapped in the ocean as heat. As the ocean heat content rises, it threatens rising sea levels and the sustainability of natural ecosystems. In 2020 alone, 255 zeta joules of heat above the baseline were introduced into Earth's oceans. In (admittedly) dramatic terms, that's the equivalent of introducing 5 to 6 Hiroshima atom bombs worth of energy every second of every day.

Looking beyond the Arctic, the average snow cover for the Northern Hemisphere was also the lowest on record. Like the Arctic sea ices, such snow cover helps regulate Earth's surface temperatures. Its melt off in the spring and summer also provides the freshwater ecosystems rely on to survive and farmers need to grow crops, especially in the Western United States.

Natural disasters get a man-made bump

2020 was also a record-breaking year for natural disasters. In the U.S. alone, there were 22 billion-dollar disasters, the most ever recorded. Combined, they resulted in a total of $95 billion in losses. The western wildfires alone consumed more than 10 million acres and destroyed large portions of Oregon, Colorado, and California.

The year also witnessed a record-setting Atlantic Hurricane season with more than 30 named storms, 13 of which were hurricanes. Typically, the World Meteorological Organization names storms from an annual list of 21 selected names—one for each letter of the alphabet, minus Q, U, X, Y, and Z. For only the second time in history, the Organization had to resort to naming storms after Greek letters because they ran out of alphabet.

For the record, there's a consensus about the record

Such records are a dramatic reminder of climate change's ongoing effect on our planet. They make for an eye-catching headline, sure. But those headlines can sometimes mask the fact that these years are part of decade-long trends, trends providing a preview of what a climate-changed world will be like.

And in case there was any question as to whether these trends were the result of natural processes or man-made conditions, Schmidt and Vose did not mince words.

As Schmidt said in the briefing: "Many, many things have caused the climate to change in the past: asteroids, wobbles in the Earth's orbit, moving continents. But when we look at the 20^th century, we can see very clearly what has been happening. We know the continents have not moved very much, we know the orbit has not changed very much, we know when there were volcanoes, we know what the sun is doing, and we know what we've been doing."

He continued, "When we do an attribution by driver of climate change over the 20^th century, what we find is that the overwhelming cause of the warming is the increase of greenhouse gases. When you add in all of the things humans have done, all of the trends over this period are attributable to human activity."

The data are in; the consensus is in. The only thing left is to figure out how to prevent the worst of climate change before it's too late. As bad as 2020 was, it was only a preview of what could come.

This story originally appeared on: Big Think - Author:Kevin Dickinson

In the film adaptation of "Bye Bye Birdie" (1963), Dick Van Dyke sings to a dour Janet Leigh to simply put on a happy face. "Wipe off that 'full of doubt' look, / Slap on a happy grin! / And spread sunshine all over the place[…]." This classic—if admittedly hokey—ditty it seems has become the mantra of our "service with a smile" corporate culture. And it may actually be good advice.

New research suggests that putting on a happy face reduces fatigue at work and improves our relationships, but only if we employ "deep acting" strategies over "surface acting" ones to regulate those emotions.

What is deep acting?

Deep and surface acting are the principal components of emotional labor, a buzz phrase you have likely seen flitting about the Twittersphere. Today, "emotional labor" has been adopted by groups as diverse as family counselors, academic feminists, and corporate CEOs, and each has redefined it with a patented spin. But while the phrase has splintered into a smorgasbord of pop-psychological arguments, its initial usage was more specific.

First coined by sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild in her 1983 book, "The Managed Heart," emotional labor describes the work we do to regulate our emotions on the job. Hochschild's go-to example is the flight attendant, who is tasked with being "nicer than natural" to enhance the customer experience. While at work, flight attendants are expected to smile and be exceedingly helpful even if they are wrestling with personal issues, the passengers are rude, and that one kid just upchucked down the center aisle. Hochschild's counterpart to the flight attendant is the bill collector, who must instead be "nastier than natural."

Such personas may serve an organization's mission or commercial interests, but if they cause emotional dissonance, they can potentially lead to high emotional costs for the employee—bringing us back to deep and surface acting.

Deep acting is the process by which people modify their emotions to match their expected role. Deep actors still encounter the negative emotions, but they devise ways to regulate those emotions and return to the desired state. Flight attendants may modify their internal state by talking through harsh emotions (say, with a coworker), focusing on life's benefits (next stop Paris!), physically expressing their desired emotion (smiling and deep breaths), or recontextualizing an inauspicious situation (not the kid's fault he got sick).

Conversely, surface acting occurs when employees display ersatz emotions to match those expected by their role. These actors are the waiters who smile despite being crushed by the stress of a dinner rush. They are the CEOs who wear a confident swagger despite feelings of inauthenticity. And they are the bouncers who must maintain a steely edge despite humming show tunes in their heart of hearts.

As we'll see in the research, surface acting can degrade our mental well-being. This deterioration can be especially true of people who must contend with negative emotions or situations inside while displaying an elated mood outside. Hochschild argues such emotional labor can lead to exhaustion and self-estrangement—that is, surface actors erect a bulwark against anger, fear, and stress, but that disconnect estranges them from the emotions that allow them to connect with others and live fulfilling lives.

Don't fake it till you make it

Most studies on emotional labor have focused on customer service for the obvious reason that such jobs prescribe emotional states—service with a smile or, if you're in the bouncing business, a scowl. But Allison Gabriel, associate professor of management and organizations at the University of Arizona's Eller College of Management, wanted to explore how employees used emotional labor strategies in their intra-office interactions and which strategies proved most beneficial.

"What we wanted to know is whether people choose to engage in emotion regulation when interacting with their co-workers, why they choose to regulate their emotions if there is no formal rule requiring them to do so, and what benefits, if any, they get out of this effort," Gabriel said in a press release.

Across three studies, she and her colleagues surveyed more than 2,500 full-time employees on their emotional regulation with coworkers. The survey asked participants to agree or disagree with statements such as "I try to experience the emotions that I show to my coworkers" or "I fake a good mood when interacting with my coworkers." Other statements gauged the outcomes of such strategies—for example, "I feel emotionally drained at work." Participants were drawn from industries as varied as education, engineering, and financial services.

The results, published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, revealed four different emotional strategies. "Deep actors" engaged in high levels of deep acting; "low actors" leaned more heavily on surface acting. Meanwhile, "non-actors" engaged in negligible amounts of emotional labor, while "regulators" switched between both. The survey also revealed two drivers for such strategies: prosocial and impression management motives. The former aimed to cultivate positive relationships, the latter to present a positive front.

The researchers found deep actors were driven by prosocial motives and enjoyed advantages from their strategy of choice. These actors reported lower levels of fatigue, fewer feelings of inauthenticity, improved coworker trust, and advanced progress toward career goals.

As Gabriel told PsyPost in an interview: "So, it's a win-win-win in terms of feeling good, performing well, and having positive coworker interactions."

Non-actors did not report the emotional exhaustion of their low-actor peers, but they also didn't enjoy the social gains of the deep actors. Finally, the regulators showed that the flip-flopping between surface and deep acting drained emotional reserves and strained office relationships.

"I think the 'fake it until you make it' idea suggests a survival tactic at work," Gabriel noted. "Maybe plastering on a smile to simply get out of an interaction is easier in the short run, but long term, it will undermine efforts to improve your health and the relationships you have at work.

"It all boils down to, 'Let's be nice to each other.' Not only will people feel better, but people's performance and social relationships can also improve."

You'll be glad ya' decided to smile

But as with any research that relies on self-reported data, there are confounders here to untangle. Even during anonymous studies, participants may select socially acceptable answers over honest ones. They may further interpret their goal progress and coworker interactions more favorably than is accurate. And certain work conditions may not produce the same effects, such as toxic work environments or those that require employees to project negative emotions.

There also remains the question of the causal mechanism. If surface acting—or switching between surface and deep acting—is more mentally taxing than genuinely feeling an emotion, then what physiological process causes this fatigue? One study published in the Frontiers in Human Neuroscience measured hemoglobin density in participants' brains using an fNIRS while they expressed emotions facially. The researchers found no significant difference in energy consumed in the prefrontal cortex by those asked to deep act or surface act (though, this study too is limited by a lack of real-life task).

With that said, Gabriel's studies reinforce much of the current research on emotional labor. A 2011 meta-analysis found that "discordant emotional labor states" (read: surface acting) were associated with harmful effects on well-being and performance. The analysis found no such consequences for deep acting. Another meta-analysis found an association between surface acting and impaired well-being, job attitudes, and performance outcomes. Conversely, deep acting was associated with improved emotional performance.

So, although there's still much to learn on the emotional labor front, it seems Van Dyke's advice to a Leigh was half correct. We should put on a happy face, but it will only help if we can feel it.

This story originally appeared on: Big Think - Author:Kevin Dickinson

Escapism is one of the imagination's great joys. Through fantastic literature, we can explore the vast stretches Arrakis's deserts or the forests of Middle Earth alongside Gandalf the Grey. We can embark on vacations weeks in advance and enjoy a sunny beach while at our desks. We can relive a cherished memory with a favorite relative in an instant, and, of course, always rely on our flock of trusty sheep to lull us to sleep.

We manage this through what is colloquially called "the mind's eye," our ability to generate psychological images without sensory input. However, such escapism is not possible for people with the rare, and only recently identified, condition aphantasia. People with aphantasia cannot conjure mental images—original or from memory. Instead, their minds' eyes produce dark, blank canvases that cannot be painted in. As Wilma Bainbridge, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Chicago, told UChicago News:

"Some individuals with aphantasia have reported that they don't understand what it means to 'count sheep' before going to bed. They thought it was merely an expression, and had never realized until adulthood that other people could actually visualize sheep without seeing them."

For such individuals, literature may produce facts but not visual representations. Arrakis isn't a planet of vast deserts but vast emptiness, Gandalf the Grey a colorless, featureless blob. Sunny beaches can't be visited in their imaginations but must remain on the office calendar until summer vacation. And while memories exist, they cannot be visually recalled except between scrapbook cellophane.

Scientists don't yet know what causes aphantasia, whether it's a distinct psychological condition, or, indeed, if we are simply jarring against language's limited ability to accurately describe our internal realities. But a burgeoning body of research—among it a new study led by Bainbridge and published in Cortex last month—suggests the condition is more than misfiring expressions.

Changing our understanding of the mind's eye

Though no long-term studies have focused on aphantasia, its history stretches back more than a century. Francis Galton first described people with "no power of visualising" in 1880, an observation made during his breakfast-table survey. At that time, however, the science of psychology was still in its infancy, and Galton's observation was shelved like so many other early-day curios—brought down and dusted off by the occasional psychologist but given little attention before being shelved again.

That changed in 2003 when neurologist Adam Zeman was contacted by a 65-year-old man who claimed his mind's eye went blind. During a coronary angioplasty, the man suffered a small stroke that damaged his brain. Afterward, he lost his ability to render psychological imagery.

"He had vivid imagery previously," Zeman told Science Focus. "He used to get himself to sleep by imagining friends and family. Following the cardiac procedure, he couldn't visualise anything, his dreams became avisual, [and] he said that reading was different because previously he used to enter a visual world and that no longer happened. We were intrigued."

Zeman and his colleagues began a case study into the man's condition. Tests found he could describe objects and their color but could not visualize them. (He claimed he simply knew the answer.) He could rotate three-dimensional images in his mind, but it took him longer to manage than controls. And brain imaging showed brain regions associated with visualization to be dark when he tried to imagine images.

Zeman published his case study, and it was subsequently featured in Discover magazine. After the story's publication, more people reached out to Zeman. They too claimed their minds' eyes were blind, but unlike Zeman's original subject, many of these people had lived with the condition their entire lives. They only became aware of their condition later in life when, as Bainbridge mentions above, they realized that the mental worlds described by friends and family were based on more than fanciful expressions.

While some managed to live normal, even thriving, lives without visual memory, others found the condition distressing. As one subject told Zeman and his coauthors: "After the passing of my mother, I was extremely distraught in that I could not reminisce on the memories we had together. I can remember factually the things we did together, but never an image. After seven years, I hardly remember her."

Zeman published another case study focusing on 21 of these individuals in 2015. It was here that he coined the phrase* "aphantasia," from the Greek phantasia meaning "imagination." Since then, Zemen has connected with thousands of people claiming to have the condition, and his studies have raised intriguing questions for researchers interested in memory and the mind.

Visualizing the difference

Bainbridge is one such researcher. Her previous work has focused on perception and memory, both their underlying mechanics and how this content is stored. In her latest study, she and her co-authors aimed to not only tease out the distinctions between object and spatial memory but also deepen our understanding of aphantasia.

To do this, they invited 61 people with aphantasia and a group of controls to participate in their experiment. They showed each participant a photo of a room and then asked them to draw it in as much detail as possible. For one test, the participants were allowed to keep the photo for reference. For the next test, however, they had to draw the room from memory. Bainbridge and her coauthors then put the drawings online to be quantified by nearly 3,000 online assessors, who were asked to score both sets of test images for object and spatial details.

The results showed the aphantastic participants had difficulty with the memory experiment. They produced reproductions with fewer objects, less color, and fewer details than their control peers. Many leaned on verbal scaffolding in lieu of visual details—for example, one participant drew a rudimentary box with the word "window" rather than a window with a frame and panes of glass.

Although the aphantastic patients drew rooms with fewer objects, they were very accurate in their placement of those objects. They also made fewer errors than the controls and avoided incorporating features and furniture absent in the original images. The researchers write that this suggests high spatial accuracy despite a lack of visualization.

"One possible explanation could be that because aphantasics have trouble with this task, they rely on other strategies like verbal-coding of the space," Bainbridge told UChicago News. "Their verbal representations and other compensatory strategies might actually make them better at avoiding false memories."

The online assessors found no significant differences between the aphantastic participants and the controls when the original photo was available for reference. In fact, some of the aphantastic participants produced stunningly accurate and artistic recreations during this test.

Bainbridge and her coauthors suggest that these results not only support the idea that object and spatial information is store in separate neural networks. They also provide "experimental validation" for aphantasia as a valid psychological phenomenon.

Discovering a new reality in aphantasia?

And Bainbridge's study has joined an ever-growing panoply. A 2018 study, also published in Cortex, measured the binocular rivalry—the visual phenomenon in which awareness fluctuates when different images are presented to each eye—of participants with and without aphantasia. When primed beforehand, control participants choose the primed stimuli more often than not. Meanwhile, aphantastic participants showed no such favoritism, whether primed or not. Like Bainbridge's study, these results suggest a physiological underpinning for aphantasia.

Another critical factor is growing awareness. As more studies and stories are published, more and more people are realizing they aren't alone. Such a realization can empower others to come forward and share their experiences, which in turn spurs researchers with new questions and experiences to study and hypothesize over.

Yet, there's still much work to be done. Because this psychological phenomenon has only recently been identified—Galton's observation notwithstanding—there has been sparingly little research on the condition and what research has been done has relied on participants who self-report as having aphantasia. While researchers have used the Vividness of Visual Imagery Quiz to test for aphantasia, there is currently no universal method for diagnosing the condition. And, of course, there is the ever-vexing question of how one can assess one mind's experiences from another.

"Skeptics could claim that aphantasia is itself a mere fantasy: describing our inner lives is difficult and undoubtedly liable to error," Zeman and his co-authors wrote in their 2015 case study. "We suspect, however, that aphantasia will prove to be a variant of neuropsychological functioning akin to synesthesia [a neurological condition in which one sense is experienced as another] and to congenital prosopagnosia [the inability to recognize faces or learn new ones]."

Time and further research will tell. But scientists need phenomenon to test and questions to experiment on. Thanks to researchers like Zeman and Bainbridge, alongside the many people who came forward to discuss their experiences, they now have both when it comes to aphantasia.

* Zeman also coined the term "hyperphantasia" to describe the condition in which people's psychological imagery is incredibly vivid and well-defined.

This story originally appeared on: Big Think - Author:Kevin Dickinson

New York City is a vibrant, vivacious city. No one knows this better than the people who live on its Upper East Side. Residents of this Manhattan neighborhood enjoy easy access to Central Park, a panoply of top-tier restaurants and markets, and some of the country's most renowned museums and cultural venues. But the real perk to calling the Upper East Side home is measured in years.

Upper East Side residents maintain an average life expectancy of 86.4 years, a number on par with the most peaceful, prosperous countries in the world. For a population to enjoy so many precious years represents historic achievements in education, infrastructure, and health care. Yet these hard-won achievements have not been distributed equally. A mere 15 miles away, in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Brownsville, the average life expectancy is a full decade shorter.

Such life-expectancy gaps are common across the United States. Residents of Chicago's Streeterville neighborhood can rest easy knowing they will live to be, on average, 90 years old. Chicago's Englewood neighborhood, however, maintains a life expectancy of around 60 years. That's ten years lower than the world average—in the world's most affluent country. The phenomenon is not just an urban affliction. On the whole, rural community members have lower life expectancies as they become more likely to die from these five leading causes than their city-dwelling peers.

While it may be tempting to write off these life gaps as the result of lifestyle choices or bad luck, they aren't. They are the consequences of a complex intersection between social, environmental, and cultural conditions that fall under 'social determinants of health.'

You can have the best treatments, the best physicians, the best facilities, but unless a patient's non-clinical needs are addressed, none of it will make a difference.

The 80/20 rule of health

Social determinants of health are those conditions in a person's life and environment that can either aid or degrade their health. They include employment, education, food availability, living conditions, communal support, neighborhood quality, socioeconomic status, and the wider systems that surround these conditions. When such determinants aren't wholesome, they erode health long before someone enters a hospital—at which point, health professionals may have only minutes to turn the tide of years of eroded health.

As Udai Tambar, vice president for community health at Northwell Health, said, "You can't medicate for social issues, and that's, in a way, the system we have developed. We're trying to medicate for social risks and social factors. You can have the best treatments, the best physicians, the best facilities, but unless a patient's non-clinical needs are addressed, none of it will make a difference."

Today, experts generally agree that 20 percent of health outcomes are derived from the care received at medical facilities, 80 percent from the non-clinical care attributed to one's lifestyle, environment, and social circumstances.

The data bear this out. U.S. health-care spending has nearly quadrupled since 1980, and the country has invested that bankroll heavily in hospitals, nursing facilities, prescription drug development, and medical specialist training. Each is valuable in its own right, yet as a systematic whole, this massive, decades-long investment has not netted proportionate health dividends. In addition to country-wide life gaps, the U.S. has one of the lowest life expectancies, the highest suicide rate, the highest chronic disease burden, and the highest obesity rate when compared to other major OECD nations.

These other OECD countries don't spend more on health than the United States. In terms of absolute dollars, the U.S. handily outspends these countries. Instead, these countries spend a larger portion of their GDP on social services, helping to mitigate deleterious social determinants long before a hospital visit. By one estimate, other major OECD countries allot, on average, $1.70 for social spending for every dollar on health. The U.S. system is almost the inverse, spending .56 cents on social services for every dollar on health.

"You need social equity to get health equity," Tambar added.

There’s no pill to cure poverty

This pattern of spending is one reason for the U.S. health-wealth divide, a pernicious and destructive social determinant of health. We've seen this divide's handiwork in the life expectancy differences between the Upper East Side and Brownsville, but those are samples of a whole. According to a 2017 paper in The Lancet, the "life expectancy of the wealthiest Americans now exceeds that of the poorest by 10-15 years." And these life-gap metrics signal the end consequences of a myriad of unmet social needs.

Consider the health barriers common in impoverished areas, where residents lack access to healthy, affordable food. Limited funds make it impossible to update or maintain safe housing without mold or lead-contaminated paint or water pipes. Narrow or nonexistent transportation options cut off residents from employment opportunities or health-care access. And being surrounded by street crime, unsafe public spaces or no greenways generates sustained high stress, which research shows grinds away at our physical health as fiercely as it does our mental wellbeing.

Each of these conditions is bitter in and of itself, but these social determinants often come packaged as part of a social circuit that magnifies the effects of each.

Unfortunately, dietary fads and the U.S.'s rugged individualism have loudly espoused health to be the culmination of lifestyle choices (for some, even moral rectitude). While lifestyle and choice certainly have their role, an understanding of these social determinants shows how inextricably tied our choices are to our social conditions. As Tambar points out, a person can be well-versed in nutrition, but if their neighborhood is a food desert, their choices are constrained. Social circumstances can limit or adversely influence health in inimical ways.

As Dr. Mary Travis Bassett, Director of the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University, told Big Think: "Nobody picks a substandard building to live in with terrible issues of rodent infestation and indoor allergens that trigger asthma. That's not a lifestyle choice. […] It's not about choice; it's about the fact that people don't have enough choice."

Going to the source

Negative social determinants of health provide a massive challenge to the health-care community, but experts and medical professionals aren't powerless to meet it. As Michael Dowling, CEO of Northwell Health, writes in his book "Health Care Reboot":

This trend toward greater awareness of the social determinants of health is one of the most encouraging developments in health care, for it creates greater awareness among providers of the whole patient, including all of the various elements—most of them outside what might be considered strictly medical issues—that affect an individual's overall health and wellbeing.

An outgrowth of this growing trend goes by the name "upstreamism." Upstreamist practitioners don't only focus on the patient's downstream symptoms; instead, they also turn their attention upstream to incorporate the patient's social determinants of health in their diagnosis. Dowling illustrates this paradigm with an example of a patient with chronic, life-interrupting headaches. Her upstreamist doctor provided her the usual medication but added the unusual prescription of a visit by a community health worker. The health worker found the patient's apartment walls to be infested with high levels of mold. The doctor and health worker told the patient to have her landlord fix the problem and provided the number for a public-interest attorney should the landlord fail to comply.

Dowling's story shows the holistic approach of upstreamism: to take into account all the determinants of health, not only those found within hospital walls. Sometimes, Dowling notes, that will require medical professionals to take the lead. But other times, when there are extra-symptomatic drivers of health, it will mean partnering with or supporting social service workers, law enforcement, or legal minds to secure a combination of services to heal the whole person.

It's for these reasons that many health-care organizations are spearheading initiatives and outreach programs to directly target social determinants of health before they become medical issues. Examples include Northwell's first-of-its-kind gun-violence screening program and the American Academy of Pediatrics' fight for food security for U.S. children.

As Tambar points out, this holistic outlook means changing our approach to more than just medicine. It will require many aspects of our society to adopt a multi-lens approach, one that adds an interdisciplinary depth to social problems beyond a solitary profession's expertise. He concluded, "What people are realizing is to holistically serve someone, it's not about you doing it all. It's about partnering with the best person who can do something you can't do."

This story originally appeared on: Big Think - Author:Kevin Dickinson

The year 2020 was an unrelenting nightmare of negative stimuli. The coronavirus hit early and, in coastal cities like Seattle and New York, hit hard. Daily news reports tallied a death toll that today accounts for more American lives lost to coronavirus than battles in World War II. Unemployment reached unprecedented levels as schools rushed to implement remote-learning contingencies. Then there were the violent displays of racial inequality, the revelations of America's devastating health gaps, and widespread disasters that hit with devastating force. Oh, and it was an election year, a time customarily reserved for bickering and the revocation of goodwill.

Many of us know that 2021 won't bring miraculous change, like a hard reboot of America's fractured systems and growing cultural distrust. But with New Year's quickly approaching, we also can't help but revel in its symbolism, a fresh start to a new (hopefully better) year.

After the fusillade of negativity that was 2020, though, we may need some help rerouting our mental circuitry toward positivity. Here are five helpful reminders of the value of sporting a positive outlook backed by science—and not self-help quackery.

Positivity correlates with better health

It's difficult to say whether a positive outlook nurtures health, success, and life satisfaction or if people who are healthy, successful, and satisfied maintain a positive outlook for, well, obvious reasons. While establishing a causal relationship has been difficult, research does suggest that happiness, extraversion, and optimism—the traits of a positive affect—influence beneficial life outcomes as much as it is a byproduct.

A longitudinal study in Psychological Science found that enthusiastic, cheerful people experienced less memory decline with age. The researchers tested nearly 1,000 middle-aged and senior U.S. adults and found a strong association between having a positive affect and a stronger performance on the memory test.

As study authors Claudia Haase and Emily Hittner, an associate professor a Ph.D. graduate at Northwestern University, respectively, said in a release: "Our findings showed that memory declined with age. However, individuals with higher levels of positive affect had a less steep memory decline over the course of almost a decade."

Preliminary research looking at the broaden-and-build theory suggests that a positive affect not only helps people cope with stress but makes them more psychologically resilient to future stressors. And studies have found that a positive outlook boosts immune responses while reducing the likelihood of heart attacks or other coronary problems. (Though, again, it is unclear in the literature whether positive people make healthier choices or if the positive affect influences these boons).

Positivity is contagious

The emotional contagion phenomenon describes the tendency for us to acquire the emotions of the people around us. Hanging out with happy, enthusiastic people, researchers have discovered, makes us happier and more enthusiastic ourselves, leading to windfalls such as less stress and increased energy. Of course, the phenomenon works in the opposite direction, too. Our minds can become the harbors of others' misery.

"Just as some diseases are contagious, we're found that many emotions can pulse through social networks," sociologist Nicholas Christakis told Harvard Medicine in an interview. Unlike a real disease, however, emotions don't have to be transmitted through contact. They can infect our minds through social networks and even online.

A study out of the University of Chicago found that they could alter people's opinions of a product by simply revealing peer evaluations. Sharing the negative opinions of others turned previously positive opinions sour and entrenched the already negative ones.

As Christakis added later in the interview, "Rather than asking how we can get happier, we should be asking how we can increase happiness all around us. When you make positive changes in your life, those effects ripple out from you and you can find yourself surrounded by the very thing you fostered."

Social connections support positivity

If emotions are contagious, then it stands to reason that positive social connections support personal positivity. And that's exactly what the research shows.

In 2019, the American Psychological Association published a meta-analysis surveying two decades of longitudinal research. All told, the report analyzed more than 47,000 participants across 52 studies looking at the effect social relationships had on self-esteem. The researchers found that social relationships, social support, and social acceptance helped develop positive self-esteem throughout people's lives.

"For the first time, we have a systematic answer to a key question in the field of self-esteem research: Whether and to what extent a person's social relationships influence his or her self-esteem development, and vice versa, and at what ages," Michelle A. Harris, study author and psychologist at the University of Texas, Austin, said in a release. "The reciprocal link between self-esteem and social relationships implies that the effects of a positive feedback loop accumulate over time and could be substantial as people go through life." Harris added that the effect did not differ significantly across the studies analyzed, suggesting a robust finding.

We have a bias toward positive language

Researchers at the University of Vermont wanted to test the Pollyanna Hypothesis, the idea that there is a universal human tendency to—feel free to whistle along—look on the bright side of life.

To test it, they asked the native speakers of ten different languages to rate individual words on a 9-point scale. Nine equaled broad-smiley face, while one was for deep-frowny face. For example, among English speakers, "laugher" rated a happy 8.5, "the" a neutral 4.98, and "terrorist" a depressing 1.3. The researchers then gathered a data set containing billions of words from 24 sources in those languages, from books to tweets, websites to music lyrics, and, of course, news stories.

An analysis of the data showed that humans typically use language to imbue a, in the researcher's words, "usage-invariant positivity bias." Every one of their 24 sources rated above the neutral score of five across all ten languages. Though it's certainly not true of all songs or novels—no amount of data massaging could turn The Road into anything other than a bummer—the researchers found that overall humanity "use[s] more happy words than sad words." Counterintuitive as it sounds, Twitter really is a gathering of the Pollyannas.

Positivity is not a self-fulfilling prophecy

Do these findings mean we should give ourselves over to the cult of positivity come 2021? Should we ignore every one of life's difficulties, view every rain cloud as a cotton-candy-laced fantasy, and use positive thinking to ween away our every foible until we become new-age Übermenschs? Absolutely not. Without realism to serve as ballast, positivity can become a flight of fancy that drifts us over dangerous territories.

One study compared people's financial expectations in life with their ultimate outcomes over 18 years. They found that participants who set realistic expectations based on accurate assessments of their situations had higher wellbeing than those who set unrealistic expectations based on overly positive attitudes. Crucially, realists had a higher well-being score than pessimists, too.

"I think for many people, research that shows you don't have to spend your days striving to think positively might come as a relief. We see that being realistic about your future and making sound decisions based on evidence can bring a sense of well-being, without having to immerse yourself in relentless positivity," Chris Dawson, study author and associate professor of business economics at Bath University, said in a release.

Positivity must also be measured against a realistic accounting of our emotions. Sometimes, life just sucks. It isn't fair. We lose the people we love, our hard work goes underappreciated, and we struggle to traverse the paths that others seem to bypass. To just think positively and assume everything will be fine is what psychologist Susan David calls the "tyranny of positivity." Rather than ignore these parts of our life, David suggests that we should accept them.

"Difficult experiences are part of life. They are part of life's contract with the world. They're part of our contract with the world simply by virtue of being here," David told Big Think during an interview. "It is really important that as human beings, we develop our capacity to deal with our thoughts and emotions in a way that isn't a struggle, in a way that embraces them and is with them and is able to learn from them."

Positive realists don't ignore life's hardships and challenges, nor do they let the negativity bias worsen such struggles. They approach both rationally and with measured expectations. When remembering a year or period in their lives, they may also choose to treasure its positive qualities. And after a year like 2020, we can all be forgiven if, in 2021, we err on the bright(er) side of life.

This story originally appeared on: Big Think - Author:Kevin Dickinson

2020 sucked. That's hardly news to anyone, nor a hot take that will stir up much in the way of debate. But a look at Google's past "Year in Search" results shows how starkly different 2020 has been from any other year the tech giant has chronicled.

Every year since 2001, Google has tabulated its annual "Year in Search" results by aggregating the trillions of searches on its site. Google then highlights the searches that showed the highest percentage increase over the year. This method means terms like "Netflix," "Facebook," and "YouTube" don't appear on the list despite a high search volume as their percentage change is negligible compared to previous years. What the method does provide, however, is a window into our changing needs, desires, and questions year-over-year.

In 2011, for example, Google's analytics reveal an America obsession with sports, DIY glitter shoes, and images of planking. We craved information on the latest technology, home appliances, and diets we absolutely stuck with (thank you very much). Political impasses and scandals remained as ubiquitous as ever, but there was a sense that we were finally rebuilding from the Great Recession. And the year's biggest letdowns—Google+ and "Game of Thrones"—wouldn't disappoint for several years yet.

Google's "Year in Search 2020" results inflect with a markedly different tone—one that's bleary, scared, and subdued, but also humane and compassionate. It was the year that, according to Google, more Americans than ever were asking, "Why?" It was also the year that, more than ever, we needed those answers.

The year of coronavirus

In any other year, an outbreak of a novel coronavirus strain—such as SARS and MERS—would have been a story tucked into the Science and Health section. In 2020, it was the issue that mattered most. The term "coronavirus" saw the second-largest increase in searches in the U.S., behind only "election results." Worldwide, it was number one.

Those entries, however, don't reflect coronavirus's hold over the year. The pandemic infected nearly every category in Google's annual analytics. People needed to know about coronavirus symptoms and keep up-to-date on the virus's spread. Trending news terms included "stock market," "stimulus check," and "unemployment," all driven by the dire economic straits the pandemic plunged the U.S. into this March. And top word searches ensured "pandemic," "quarantine," and "asymptomatic" would become commonplace in our national word-stock.

Coronavirus widened the country's already intractable polarization, revealed its devastating health gaps, and, as of this writing, has killed nearly 300,000 Americans. The potential long-term effects faced by America's 15 million COVID-19 survivors are unknown but may include complications of the cardiovascular, respiratory, and neurological systems.

While Russia announced the world's first COVID-19 vaccine in August, those claims were scientifically dubious. Since then, more rigorously tested vaccines have been green-lighted in the United Kingdom and the United States, and both countries have begun administering it to high-risk populations and front-line workers. However, the vaccine's effectiveness and how readily it will be available to everyone remains to be seen. For its first few months, at least, 2021 may be the pandemic sequel no one asked for.

The new national pastime

Thanks to an anemic baseball season, politics became not just America's new pastime but the world's. The U.S.'s number one trending search term was "election results," and it was number two globally. Politicians became popular search terms, too, with "Joe Biden," "Kamala Harris," and "Pete Buttigieg" leading the pack. And coronavirus-related changes to traditional voting methods in many states propelled Americas to google about early voting, how to vote, and where they could vote.

While American politics have been contentious more often than not, the 2020 election proved fraught, vitriolic, all-encompassing, and seemingly everlasting. The political parties sparred over issues such as the economy, immigration, violent crime, racial inequality, climate change, and, of course, the incumbent's response to the coronavirus. The September passing of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg added another ideological melee into the larger political fray, and the entire process was further complicated by social media and the debate over its culpability in the spread of false information.

Worse, for many, the usual avenues of escape and mental decompression were barricaded by pandemic restrictions and mandates.

This national drama, which normally would have ended on Super Tuesday, entered its third act with a protracted vote count. As critical battleground states slowly tallied the influx of mail-in ballots, "who is winning the election" quickly became one of Google's most searched for questions of the year. The answer was determined to be challenger Joe Biden, bringing a decisive end to one of 2020's most challenging moments.

Kidding! In an unprecedented move, incumbent Donald Trump claimed the results were fraudulent and has (as of this writing) refused to concede. He and his legal team have filed more than 50 lawsuits to contest the results, most of which have been shot down as frivolous. For the record: There has been no evidence of widespread fraud in the election.

The Electoral College has since cemented Joe Biden's victory, and it looks like this is one 2020 contention that we can safely put behind us come New Year's. Kidding, kidding! A cohort of Republican lawmakers has proposed challenging the Electoral College votes when Congress convenes to confirm them on January 6. Sigh.

Livin' in virtual insanity

Conspicuously absent from Google's "Year in Search 2020" are the usual events and happenings. With Americans forced to shelter-in-place and events canceled under pandemic restrictions, we've transitioned to a year of virtual living.

"Zoom" entered the top trending searches at number six, and "virtual" became a trending category. Many of the year's virtual inquiries related to education and student enrichment—with "virtual field trips," "virtual museum tours," "virtual learning," and "virtual classroom" all landing in the top ten virtual searches.

For schools, parents, and students alike, remote learning has proven one of the year's Herculean labors. While there is evidence that remote education has decreased anxiety for some children, there's also evidence suggesting that such setups are taking a mental health toll on others. Unfortunately, we likely won't know for some time how a year of peer separation will affect student's social development or their scholastic achievements.

American adults have also felt the social claustrophobia of stay-at-home orders and are seeking a virtual escape. Trending searches include "virtual marriage," "virtual baby shower," "virtual NBA fans," and "virtual EDC raves." As with their pint-sized peers, it remains unknown how this year of isolation will affect mental health in adults. However, data suggest stress, anxiety, depression, and other mental maladies have become more widespread alongside altered health habits and a lack of access to mental health support services.

These virtual events may serve as an analgesic, but they aren't a cure for the problem.

Personal growth becomes personal beauty

Personal growth and health habits typically have a strong standing in Google's "Year of Search," but in 2020, diets and mindfulness took a backseat to the how-to's. How-to questions became trending searches thanks to Americans being cut off from amenities such as beauty parlors and nail salons.

Most of the trending how-to searches were for hair care. How to cut men's hair and women's hair. How to plop hair, color hair, and style curtain bangs. Americans clearly pined for their stylists in 2020.

Other notable how-to's included dermaplaning, washing hands properly, sewing a face mask, and rocking sweatpants with style. And if that list doesn't signal just how difficult 2020 was, then what else does?

Mother Nature pushes back

Well, science news may. 2020's trending science searches centered on natural disasters. Americans googled "fires near me" as conflagrations devoured the West Coast, destroying forests, neighborhoods, and even whole towns as they went. Hurricane Laura, a Category 4 storm, also trended after slamming into Louisiana this August.

All told, 2020 witnessed record-breaking levels of natural disasters, many hitting with a force more devastating than previous years. This rise in climate emergencies is part of a two-decade trend that scientists have linked to climate change and increased global temperatures.

When not worrying about natural disasters, Americans were fretting over "murder hornets," another trending term. Entomologists discovered the murder hornets—actually named the Asian giant hornets—in Washington state this year. Because native bees have no natural defenses against this invasive species, their colonies can be massacred by a few dozen hornets in mere hours. While one murder hornet's nest was discovered and destroyed near Blaine, Washington, experts worry there may be more.

At least there was that baby platypus to enjoy. Except no. In true 2020 fashion, that picture was bogus—although, not to be a total buzzkill, real platypus babies are darn cute.

Aiming to make 2021 a better year

If we're looking for a silver lining to 2020—and at this point it'd be nice—it's that people were actively searching for ways to make the world better.

The categories "how to donate" and "how to help" both trended in the United States. People wanted to know how to help Yemen, Beirut, Black Lives Matter, and the Australian bushfires. They searched how to assist during the pandemic or help someone having a panic attack. They wanted to donate to Goodwill and send N95 masks to medical facilities. Even search terms about how to donate blood and plasma became trending in 2020.

As mentioned at the beginning of this article, that means that more people were searching for answers to these questions than in previous years, a likely sign of people trying to help others. So while 2020 certainly sucked, it would have been worse without the people who made it better in their own small way.

As we look to New Year's Eve, we can crank up Elton John's "I'm Still Standing" and take heart that if next year is better, it is because of the efforts we made in 2020. Because 2021 has got to be a better year. Right?

This story originally appeared on: Big Think - Author:Kevin Dickinson

What propels some young adults to successful careers and life satisfaction while others seem destined to perpetual struggle? Social science has long recognized the role socioeconomic status and cognitive abilities play in success, and we've developed necessary interventions to improve young people's odds. Social programs help struggling families climb a rung or two up the economic ladder, and compulsory education aims to sharpen children's cognitive faculties early and enshrine life-long learning habits.

But what about personality? While personality certainly plays a role in life and career success, its development has long been underplayed or ignored. Folk knowledge views it as immutable, something etched onto us during childhood and inescapable thereafter. More high-brow theories have dismissed the idea of personality entirely, viewing it as a heuristic for understanding behavior or a responsive by-product to situational stimuli.

A growing body of research, however, has shown that not only are personality traits real, but they can be changed over a lifetime. And that growth is an important factor in predicting life and career success.

Success with the Big 5

That's the conclusion of a recent longitudinal study published in Psychological Science. The study followed two samples of Icelandic youths from roughly ages 17 to 29. Its researchers used data across three and five time points to measure the young adults on the Big Five personality traits (openness, extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and emotional stability). It also surveyed them for five indicators of early career success. These were income, degree attainment, occupational prestige, and job and career satisfaction.

The study's findings showed that personality growth predicted career outcomes better than "adolescent trait levels and crystallized ability." Across both samples, the researchers found extroversion, conscientiousness, and emotional stability to have the strongest effects. Specifically, conscientiousness was tied to career satisfaction, emotional stability to income and career satisfaction, and extroversion to job and career satisfaction.

"Overall, the findings highlight the importance of personality development throughout childhood, adolescence and young adulthood for promoting different aspects of career success," Kevin Hoff, lead author and assistant professor of industrial-organizational psychology at the University of Houston, said in a release.

Hoff believes these results support policies designed to help young people develop personality-based skills. "The study showed you're not just stuck with your personality traits, and if you change over time in positive ways, that can have a big impact on your career," he said.

According to the release, the study is the first to assess the predictive link between personality growth and career outcomes across a decade of young adulthood. While preliminary, it does fit in with other studies looking into the relationship between personality traits and career success.

A 2003 study published in the Journal of Career Assessment surveyed more than 5,000 individuals. Its results found that conscientiousness, extroversion, and openness correlated with career satisfaction. Similarly, a 2006 study published in Personnel Psychology drew on data from the Intergenerational Studies. It found that conscientiousness positively predicted extrinsic career success (i.e., income and status) as well as intrinsic success (i.e., job satisfaction).

The change you want to be

William James famously penned that personality becomes "set in plaster" by the age of 30, never to soften again. There's some truth to this. Personality traits do remain relatively stable throughout our lifetimes. Your inherently disorganized friend won't transform into Marie Kondo because they watched a YouTube tutorial on shirt folding.

But many studies show that our personalities aren't immutable, either. We can remold ourselves well beyond 30, shifting our traits on their continuum in ways that can be either beneficial or deleterious. One such study, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, assessed participants' personality traits for 50 years. If found that as people mature over time, they also accumulate personality changes.

"The rankings (of personality traits) remain fairly consistent. People who are more conscientious than others their age at 16 are likely to be more conscientious than others at 66. On average, everyone becomes more conscientious, more emotionally stable, and more agreeable," Rodica Damian, the study's lead author and the director of the Personality Development and Success Lab at the University of Houston, said in a statement.

Cultivating such growth can be difficult as these traits often require the very talents we feel we lack. To become more extroverted, for example, one needs to be less introverted. It seems both obvious and self-defeating—if one was more outgoing, one would be more outgoing. Because of this, interventions typically focus on actions that alter how we typically think or behave (hence the name cognitive-behavioral therapy). These actions can be small at first, but they have to be deliberate and specific, the so-called SMART goals.

To become more extroverted, introverts don't have to throw lavish, hedonistic house parties to rival those of rock-'n'-roll legends. Instead, the introvert starts by attending a small book club on a specific day and tasking themselves to talk at the meeting This is the first step that makes subsequent steps easier, and after an accumulation of such steps, self-perspective begins to shift.

"Once you start to change those behaviors, you'll start to change the way you see yourself," Susan Krauss Whitbourne, Professor Emerita of Psychology and Brain Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, writes. "That change in identity may provide the key to personality trait change. You change the narrative from 'I've always been an introvert' to 'I've usually engaged in introverted behavior.' Seeing yourself as in charge of your personality rather than being run by it may be the key to having your personality suit instead of define you."

The same goes for conscientiousness. Taking on tasks and responsibilities that require one to utilize conscientiousness brings about that change over time. As Damian noted, people typically become more conscientious as they get older. One reason is simply that adulthood requires more diligence, discipline, and self-control than high school and punishes a lack of those traits more harshly. Adult environments also tend to reward and support such characteristics. By realizing that with intention, we can self-furnish our environments to support and foster that change.

We can also hack our metacognition—the way we think about our thinking—to great effect. Such techniques are often used in emotional regulation therapy to intervene in heightened or easily triggered outbursts. Mindfulness, for example, teaches people to identify their emotions, and the practice helps people from becoming overwhelmed through the act of labeling an emotion as something distinct from themselves. Recognizing the difference between being angry and feeling angry assists in self-modulation.

Some techniques and interventions may improve certain personality traits better than others, but they all demonstrate a key takeaway. Practice won't make perfect, but it can shift personality to be more in line with our goals. While personality may not be the only factor in career and life success, self-improvement will pay dividends to both.

This story originally appeared on: Big Think - Author:Kevin Dickinson

Singapore faces a problem. The city-state currently imports the bulk of its food from overseas, producing only 10 percent domestically. This state of affairs leaves Singapore in a vulnerable position. An outbreak of disease, for example, could have outsized consequences on the country's food supply, so could the souring of fruitful political or economic partnerships. Looking into the future, climate change and population growth could see today's trade-friendly ports shuttered with closed signs as global food supplies become more tenuous.

In light of this reality, Singaporean leaders are doing something drastic and unprecedented for a world government. They're planning ahead.

Under the "30-by-30" Plan, Singapore aims to produce 30 percent of its food by the year 2030. But unlike the dominant food-producing countries—China, India, the U.S., and Brazil—this tiny island nation lacks the acreage to dedicate to traditional agriculture, so they've turned to modern technology. To produce more with less, the Singapore Food Agency is experimenting with rooftop gardens, high-rise hydroponic farms, and high-yield genetic crops.

Singapore is also looking at lab-grown meat as a sustainable, secure alternative to today's factory farming. In a recent step toward that future, its officials have given regulatory approval to sell lab-grown meat.

Approve for your dining pleasure

Eat Just, a company that produces animal-alternative food products, announced the news earlier this week. In what the company is calling a world first, Singapore has given it permission for a small-scale commercial launch of their GOOD Meat brand product line. For the initial run, the cultured chicken meat will be sold as an ingredient in "chicken bites."

"Singapore has long been a leader in innovation of all kinds, from information technology to biologics to now leading the world in building a healthier, safer food system. I'm sure that our regulatory approval for cultured meat will be the first of many in Singapore and in countries around the globe," Josh Tetrick, co-founder and CEO of Eat Just, said in a release.

According to the release, Eat Just underwent an extensive safety review by the Singapore Food Agency. It provided officials "details on the purity, identity and stability of chicken cells during the manufacturing process, as well as a detailed description of the manufacturing process which demonstrated that harvested cultured chicken met quality controls and a rigorous food safety monitoring system." It also demonstrated the consistency of its production by running more than 20 cycles in its 1,200-liter bioreactors.

While Eat Just did not offer details on its propriety process, it likely follows one similar to other lab-grown meats. It starts with muscle cell samples drawn from a living animal. Technicians then isolate stem cells from the sample and culture them in vitro. These cultured stem cells are then placed in a bioreactor, essentially a fermenter for fleshy cells. The bioreactor contains scaffolding materials to keep the growing tissue from falling apart as well as a growth material—the sugars, salts, and other nutrients the tissue needs to grow. As the cells grow, they begin to differentiate into the muscle, fat, and other cells of meat tissue. Once grown, the tissues are formed into a meat product to be shipped to restaurants and supermarkets.

An abattoir abatement?

Singapore's approval is an important step in support for clean meats—so-called because they don't require animal slaughter and would likely leave a reduced carbon footprint—but hurdles remain before widespread adoption is possible.

The most glaring is the price. The first lab-grown hamburger was eaten in London in 2013. It cost roughly $330,000. As with any new technology, investment, iteration, and improved manufacturing will see the price drop substantially and quickly. For comparison, Eat Just's chicken will be priced equivalent to premium chicken.

Other hurdles include up-scaling production, the need for further research, and developing techniques to reliably produce in-demand meats such as fish and beef. Finally, not all countries may be as receptive as Singapore. Countries with large, entrenched meat industries may protect this legacy industry through a protracted and difficult regulatory process. Though, the meat industry itself is investing in lab-grown meat. Tyson Foods, for example, has invested in the food-tech startup Memphis Meats, the company that debuted the world's first beef meatball.

"I would imagine what will happen is the U.S., Western Europe and others will see what Singapore has been able to do, the rigours of the framework that they put together. And I would imagine that they will try to use it as a template to put their own framework together," Tetrick told Reuter's during an interview.

Regardless of the challenges, the demand for meat substitutes is present and growing. In 2020, plant-based substitutes like Beyond Meat and Impossible foods gained a significant foothold in supermarkets as meat-packing factories became coronavirus hotspots. The looming threat of climate change has also turned people away from meat as animal products. Livestock production is environmentally taxing and leaves a much larger carbon footprint than grain and vegetable production.

Then there's the moral concern of animal cruelty. In 2018 alone, 302 million cows, 656 million turkeys, 1.48 billion pigs, and a gob-smacking 68 billion chickens were slaughtered for meat worldwide. And those figures do not include chickens killed in dairy or egg production.

If brought to scale and widely available, clean meats could become serious competitors to traditional meat. One report has even predicted that 60 percent of the meat people eat by 2040 won't come from slaughtered animals. It could be just the thing for people looking for a meat substitute but who find tofurkey as distasteful as, well tofurkey.

This story originally appeared on: Big Think - Author:Kevin Dickinson