It's true that politicians, orators, business executives, and other types of leaders tend to be fond of speaking with their hands, but does the habit actually have influence over how others interpret those words? A team of researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Radboud University, and TiCC Tilburg University—all located in the Netherlands—sought to find out.

In a paper published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the group detailed a series of experiments on volunteers who viewed videos of people speaking with and without hand motions. They found that hand gestures, when done right, do influence how certain words are heard.

The experiment

After showing the participants the videos of people speaking under different conditions, the researchers asked them questions about what they had heard. Those conditions involved the speaker emphasizing different parts of words in a sentence (e.g. OBject versus obJECT). Other conditions involved the speaker making various types of hand gestures. For example, chopping, pointing, or sweeping motions made with the hands and arms. Sometimes those hand motions coincided with sections of words being stressed, but sometimes they were random.

The team recorded the volunteers as they viewed the video recordings, questioning the participants afterward about what they had seen and heard. They found that the participants were more impacted by syllables spoken in conjunction with hand gestures: In 20 percent of the cases the viewer was more likely to have heard and interpreted the word being spoken when accompanied by a hand gesture. Interestingly, however, participants were 40 percent more likely to hear the wrong sound when a mismatch between the word spoken and the hand gesture occurred.

Perception of character

In addition to making your words more clear, past research has found that speaking with your hands really can alter the perception of your character. Markus Koppensteiner at the University of Vienna has analyzed the way that people talk with their hands and how the speaker is perceived. His research has suggested that certain hand gestures can signal extraversion and dominance.

For example, extraversion appeared to be associated with more hand movements overall. Vertical movements, meanwhile, seemed to be linked to the perception of authority. For example, hands sweeping up from torso to shoulder height. People making these expansive gestures with their arms tend to be rated lower in agreeableness, but higher in domination. This was, according to Koppensteiner, a consistent result in his papers.

According to body language expert Carol Goman, Ph.D., "Studies have found that people who communicate through active gesturing tend to be evaluated as warm, agreeable, and energetic, while those who remain still (or whose gestures seem mechanical or "wooden") are seen as logical, cold, and analytic." In fact, a 2015 study that analyzed TED Talks found that the most popular, viral speakers used nearly twice as many as the least popular speakers used.

Implications

The Dutch research team of this recent study suggests that their findings imply that hand gestures are an important part of in-person communications that have a direct impact on what the listener actually hears. Furthermore, they suggest that our responses to hand gestures used by someone speaking to us may be something that we learn as we grow up. Or, as they also note, it's equally plausible that there is an evolutionary reason for our enhanced responses to hand-talking rather than a learned behavior.

Although these experiments were conducted with only Dutch speakers, the team believes that it's likely they would have found the same results with other languages.

This story originally appeared on: Big Think - Author:Molly Hanson

You may have noticed, from cultural trends ranging from productivity tracking apps to the rising use of prescription amphetamines, that our society is a bit work-obsessed. The glamorization of hustle culture is unavoidable, permeating our language: "Hard worker" and "go-getter" are offered as the highest of praises, "busyness" is worn as a badge of honor, while laziness is a mortal sin.

But this collective worship for work and productivity come with psychological and physical health risks. One being putting an increasing number of individuals at risk of work addiction, or workaholism — an increasing public health concern in industrialized nations. In fact, research indicates that around 5–10% of the United States population meet the criteria for a work addiction. And while we've turned workaholism into a sort of joke, it is an addiction, and like other addictions it comes with a variety of serious mental and physical health concerns such as depression, anxiety, insomnia, or even chronic fatigue.

Who are 'workaholics'?

Workaholism is a behavioral disorder in which someone who typically works seven or more hours extra than others per week. Financial instability, marital problems, or pressure from a company or supervisor could all be reasons for working more hours than average. The difference is that workaholics are excessively involved in work when their employer doesn't require or expect as much time as the individual is putting into the job.

Symptoms of work addiction include:

• Putting in long hours at work, even when not needed
• Losing sleep to engage in work projects or finish tasks
• Obsessiveness with work-related success
• Feelings of intense fear of failure at work
• Sacrificing personal relationships because of work or using work as a way of avoiding relationships
• Working to cope with feelings of guilt, depression, or shame
• Working to avoid dealing with personal crises like death, divorce, or financial trouble.

Four types of work environments 

The researchers wanted to demonstrate the extent to which risk of workaholism is associated with the perception of work, i.e. job demands and job control, and mental health in four job categories frameworked in the Job Demand-Control-Support model (JDCS).

This model assumes four work environments broken into four quadrants in which employees likely experience different levels of job demands and job control, control being the extent to which an employee feels agency and control over their work. They are:

• Passive (low job control, low job demand)
• Low-strain (high job control, low job demand)
• Active (high job demands, high job control)
• Tense or Job Strain (high job demands, low job control)

People with "passive" jobs may find satisfaction as long as the worker reaches a set of goals. Those in the "low strain" job group are not at high risk for mental health problems as the category typically corresponds to creative or imaginative jobs such as researchers. "Active" are usually highly skilled professionals with a high amount of responsibilities, such as directors of companies. Though they have demanding tasks, they usually have high levels of decision making to solve problems. Employees at the highest risk for stress-related disorders are those in the final "tense" group where demand is high but control is low. Examples include healthcare workers from emergency departments who cannot control the huge workload or flux.

The study

The study was conducted in France, an industrial country with a growing number of occupations. The scientists collected data from 187 out of 1580 French employees who volunteered to participate in a cross-sectional study, which was conducted using the online platform WittyFit software. Participants were self-administered four questionnaires: the Job Content Questionnaire by Karasek, the Work Addiction Risk Test, the Hospital Anxiety and Depression scale, and socio-demographics. The researchers in the study divided all the participants on the basis of their occupational quadrants to investigate the relationship between work addiction risk and mental and physical health.

"One of the novelties of this research was to introduce vulnerable occupational groups to organizations or job holders. For example, if we find that work addiction risk can be found more in some occupations and may result in negative outcomes for the health situation then we can give this information to decision makers in this organization or, for example, to the ministry of health. And they could intervene to prevent this problem," explained Morteza Charkhabi, associate professor at the Institute of Education at the HSE University, in a press release.

Results: Who is at risk?

The research results found that jobs with high demands are the most strongly associated with work addiction risk, however the level of job control doesn't play as influential of a role.

Individuals in active and high strain job categories are more likely to be at risk for work addiction than the other job groups. These workers appeared to be more vulnerable and, thus, suffer more, from the negative results of work addiction risk such as depression, anxiety, sleep disorders, and other health issues such as a weakened immune system and increased risk of disease.

Side-effects of work addiction 

The scientists found that those with higher work addiction risk have twice the risk of developing depression as compared to people with low work addiction risk. Additionally, sleep quality was lower in workers with high risk of work addiction compared to workers with low risk of work addiction. Interestingly, women had almost twice the work addiction risk than men.

Work addiction can be difficult to treat in a culture that accepts and rewards workaholic behaviors. The most common approach for treating work addiction typically involves outpatient treatments such as cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), or Motivational Interviewing (MI). You can learn more here.

This story originally appeared on: Big Think - Author:Molly Hanson

Ginger is traditionally known to have anti-inflammatory and anti-oxidative effects, which has made it a popular herb in treating inflammatory diseases. Now, a new Michigan Medicine study on mice suggests that it could help counter certain autoimmune disorders.

The study, recently published in JCI Insight, found that the primary bioactive compound of ginger root, 6-gingerol, is therapeutic in countering the mechanism that facilitates certain autoimmune diseases in mice.

Treating lupus and antiphospholipid syndrome

Specifically, the researchers looked at lupus, which attacks the body's own immune system, along with antiphospholipid syndrome (often associated with lupus), which causes blood clots. Both the diseases cause widespread inflammation and ravage organs overtime. In mice with either of the disease, 6-gingerol stopped the neutrophil extracellular trap release caused by the diseases' production of autoantibodies.

"Neutrophil extracellular traps, or NETs, come from white blood cells called neutrophils," explained lead author Ramadan Ali, Ph.D in a press release. "These sticky spider-web like structures are formed when autoantibodies interact with receptors on the neutrophil's surface."

The webs, according to Ali, play a fundamental role in the pathogenesis of lupus and antiphospholipid syndrome in which they set off autoantibody formation and contribute to clots in blood vessels and other damage.

Ginger's anti-inflammatory properties

The authors wanted to find out if the anti-inflammatory properties associated with ginger would extend to neutrophils. They also wanted to know if the natural medicine would be able to halt neutrophils from creating neutrophil extracellular traps that facilitate disease progression.

"This pre-clinical study in mice offers a surprising and exciting, 'yes'," Ali said.

The authors found that the mice had lower levels of NETs after being giving 6-gingerol. The NET's tendency to form clots was also dramatically reduced by the 6-gingerol, which also seemed to inhibit neutrophils enzymes called phosphodiesterases. This, in turn, reduced neutrophil activation.

Most surprisingly, the mice had reduced autoantibodies regardless of whether they had antiphospholipid or lupus. This suggests that the 6-gingerol was able to break the inflammatory cycle of autoantibodies stimulating NETs, which in turn stimulate more autoantibodies.

What's next?

The study was done on rodent models. However, the authors think that the promising preclinical data, which showed that 6-gingerol has surprising anti-neutrophil properties that may guard against the progression of certain autoimmune diseases, encourages the clinical trial development.

"As for basically all treatments in our field, one size does not fit all. But, I wonder if there is a subgroup of autoimmune patients with hyperactive neutrophils who might benefit from increased intake of 6-gingerol," Knight said, noting that it will be important to look and analyze neutrophils before and after treatment so to determine the subgroup most likely to see benefit.

While 6-gingerol won't be able to be the primary therapy for individuals with lupus or active antiphospholipid syndrome, the research team is eager to see if the natural supplement offers help to those at high risk for developing the diseases.

"Those that have autoantibodies, but don't have activated disease, may benefit from this treatment if 6-gingerol proves to be a protective agent in humans as it does in mice," Ali said.

"Patients with active disease take blood thinners, but what if there was also a natural supplement that helped reduce the amount of clots they produce? And what if we could decrease their autoantibodies?"

Giving herbal medicine a deeper look

Though the use of supplements has been growing in popularity in the U.S. over the past decade, it's still something that remains under-researched.

"Through my years of medical training I wasn't taught much about supplements, but it's something that so many patients ask me about," said study author and rheumatologist Jason Knight, M.D. in the press release. "When Ramadan brought the concept to me, I was enthusiastic to pursue it in my lab, as I knew it would matter to them. Sometimes our patients give us really good ideas!"

Other herbal supplements that have been found to treat health conditions include:

• Echinacea for strengthening the immune system
• Garlic for high cholesterol
• Hawthorn for heart-related conditions
• St. John's Wort for treating depression

However, it's important to remember that herbal supplements are not subject to regulation by the FDA, and so have not been tested in an FDA-approved clinical trial to scientifically prove their effectiveness in the treatment of the listed medical conditions. So it's critical to talk to your doctor about the use of herbal remedies for your symptoms before using them.

This story originally appeared on: Big Think - Author:Molly Hanson

The best science books have the power to shift perspectives, pushing us to think differently and even behave differently. The following titles push boundaries by making novel connections and challenging conventional wisdom about the world as we think we know it. Besides making us more knowledgeable, they inspire curiosity, passion, and empathy for the universe in and around us.

These are our picks for the 10 best books released in 2020, plus a few notable mentions too good to leave out.

Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures List Price: $19.15 New From: $14.17 in Stock Used From: $20.19 in Stock

Merlin Sheldrake's enthralling study of fungi will reframe your view of the world through the perspective of mycelium networks, providing a natural lesson in the interrelations between all living beings. Fungi have colonized nearly all of Earth's environments, and their interactions with other matter has been one of a subterranean magician creating and transforming the world we inhabit.

Sheldrake, a mycologist who researches underground fungal networks, takes the reader on a journey into unsettling mysteries that shroud his field of study. At the center, just how alive are these networks? Weaving together stories, scientific observations, and philosophical questions, "Entangled Lives" is a book on how beings contaminate and change one another in a perpetual, transformative dance of matter.

Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art List Price: $16.80 New From: $16.79 in Stock Used From: $12.79 in Stock

From wildfires intoxicating our air quality, to a pandemic caused by a respiratory-system attacking virus, to the social justice cry "I can't breathe," the mundane act of breathing was brought to the forefront in 2020. It's the most fundamental thing to our lives, marking the beginning and the end of it, and yet our culture rarely gives it a second thought. Journalist James Nestor sought to amend that in "Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art," as he interviews men and women around the world to trace the origins of our failure to remember correct breathing, what the consequences have been, and how it can be fixed.

This is an enrapturing look at the history of human breathing through a physiological, evolutionary, cultural, and spiritual lens. Far more exhilarating than a description of pulmonology lab studies, Nestor finds answers in ancient burial sites, New Jersey choir schools, and Soviet facilities. He also offers practical breathing exercises to give the reader a hands-on experience into the simple power of breathing correctly.

Caste (Oprah's Book Club): The Origins of Our Discontents List Price: $19.20 New From: $19.20 in Stock Used From: $18.00 in Stock

This year was one defined by heartbreak and pain across the globe. This was especially the case for Black Americans for whom COVID-19 exposed the ugly racial inequalities in our healthcare system and the loss of more Black lives at the hands of police officers revealed the fundamental injustice of the American justice system. And, so, 2020 saw backlash against the legacy of white supremacy in America.

In her latest book "Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents," Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson met this revolutionary year with her groundbreaking exploration of identity in America. Wilkerson radically and powerfully reframes injustice, racism, and inequality in the United States as undergirded by a caste system likened to those in India and Germany's Nazi regime. Applying more than a decade of research, ethnography, and reporting for the book, Wilkerson offers us a deep revisionist history through interviews with experts along with ordinary people, and stories from her own life. Woven together, she creates an electrifying and perspective-flipping theory of injustice and racism in America, and the role we all continue to play in perpetuating it.

A Life on Our Planet: My Witness Statement and a Vision for the Future List Price: $23.40 New From: $23.40 in Stock

Renowned and beloved naturalist, journalist, and defender of the planet David Attenborough delivers a witness statement of the state of life on planet Earth. This book was awarded this year's Goodreads Choice Award in Science and Technology.

Part testimony, part heartening memoir, and part battlecry, Sir Attenborough's book proves a much needed imagining of the future if through collective, rapid action we can save Earth's beautiful and wild places and before it's too late.

Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family List Price: $25.95 New From: $22.23 in Stock Used From: $14.98 in Stock

A gripping tale that is part medical mystery and part case study of abnormal psychology, Robert Kolker presents a riveting piece of narrative non-fiction. "Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of An American Family" is the story of a seemingly cookie-cutter '60s American family: the Galvins. Kolker, a decorated crime journalist, digs under the picture-perfect surface to spotlight a family ravaged by mental illness, violence, and trauma.

Of the Galvin's ten sons, six developed schizophrenia, transforming their home into a traumatic and abusive environment. The book traces scientists' quest to find out if this family's genetics could hold the key to the many unanswered questions the medical and psychiatric field has about the disease.

How to Argue With a Racist: What Our Genes Do (and Don't) Say About Human Difference List Price: $15.95 New From: $11.11 in Stock Used From: $10.38 in Stock

Of course, it's shameful that a book debunking racist pseudosceince had to have been written at all. Nevertheless, geneticist Adam Rutherford's "How to Argue With a Racist: History, Science, Race, and Reality" is a remarkable telling of the shared ancestry of the human race. The book is a treasure trove filled with gems of knowledge from the field of genetics and what it knows about skin color, intelligence, ancestry, athletic ability, and racial superiority.

By showing how ancestry and family trees scientifically work, Rutherford proves the concept of racial purity to be an erroneous delusion. "For humans," Rutherford explains, "there are no purebloods, only mongrels enriched by the blood of multitudes." The reader is provided the fascinating scientific weaponry to confidently take on questions about race, genes, ancestry. Ultimately, Rutherford's book is a challenge against the manipulation, misrepresentation, and abuse of science to justify hatred and prejudice.

T-Minus AI: Humanity’s Countdown to Artificial Intelligence and the New Pursuit of Global Power List Price: $19.16 New From: $17.86 in Stock Used From: $17.44 in Stock

While nations and leaders have entered into a battle to rule the big data sphere, most of us still remain in the dark about AI — a subject shrouded in complex lexicon and confused with sci-fi plots. But AI is real, here to stay, and already has profound and alarming implications on our world. Michael Kanaan, a nationally recognized expert of the topic of artificial intelligence, details these realities in a way that the everyday person can grasp.

Detailing the global implications of AI, Kaan also presents the ways that cultures and nations have failed to adjust their policies and ethical questions to meet the rapid growth of modern computing, and the erosion of democracies around the world as dubious leaders weaponize the technology to spread misinformation. We're entering this brave new world, there is no turning back, and "T-Minus AI" is our survival guide coming at a critical moment in time.

Vesper Flights List Price: $18.41 New From: $17.11 in Stock Used From: $12.45 in Stock

"Vesper Flights" is Helen Macdonald's dazzling collection of essays about human and other-than-human relationships. The naturalist and poet explores and meditates on subjects ranging from nostalgia for landscapes to the migrations of songbirds from the Empire State Building to the challenges of farming ostriches. And, of course, her own vespers.

Woven throughout the collection of her writings are the themes of captivity and freedom, immigration and flight, precarity and enchantment, time and memory, and ultimately, love. Helen transports the reader into intimate observations of the natural world such as watching tens of thousands of Hungarian cranes, encountering a wild boar, foraging for mushrooms, and the peculiarities of bird nests. "Vesper Flights" re-enchants and brings back to life the world of the other-than-human as more than the backdrop of the human drama. In a time of isolation, Helen reminds us that we are part of a multitude of narratives at play in the natural world, and the wondrous and baffling magic found in paying attention to it.

The Alchemy of Us: How Humans and Matter Transformed One Another (The MIT Press) List Price: $24.95 New From: $20.81 in Stock Used From: $20.72 in Stock

In "The Alchemy of Us: How Humans and Matter Transformed One Another," Ainissa Ramirez explains how inventions from the clock to steel rails to hard disks have powerfully transformed society. By ingeniously describing how matter has transformed humans as we create inventions out of it, Ramirez shows how eight inventions created the world as we know it today, and molded our perception of it.

Ramirez, a material scientist and science writer, illustrates how clocks, steel rails, copper telegraph wires, photographic film, carbon filaments for light bulbs, hard disks, scientific labware, and silicon chips revolutionized modern society. The chapters each tell the story of the creation and rise of one of the inventions and the impact it had on the world. For example, how the railway contributed to the commercialization of Christmas. Ramirez's storytelling and expertise give life to the innovations by contextualizing them in history and providing the biography of the creators behind them. This includes those who have been overlooked in historical tellings of innovation, such as women and people of color. Ultimately, this is about how we manipulate matter, and the matter changes us.

The Human Cosmos: Civilization and the Stars List Price: $20.99 New From: $19.64 in Stock Used From: $20.88 in Stock

For centuries, human art, religious beliefs and rituals, our social hierarchies, value systems, scientific innovations and discoveries, and even our DNA has been shaped by the heavens. Yet over the last few decades, we have severed that innate and intimate relationship with the cosmos, which are today experienced through screens and mind-numbing data fields. And it's come at a cost.

Jo Marchant's spellbinding book seeks to put the sense of awe, wonder, and mystery back into our relationship with the stars. Presenting various ways that different cultures have celebrated the once-mystical majesty of celestial cycles, she invites you to experience the night through your naked eyes fixed unto the star-spangled sky. It's an experience that has sparked imaginings and ideas that have radically transformed human civilization for millennia, even, Marchant argues, made us human. In "The Human Cosmos," you'll discover Chumash cosmology, learn about Tahitian sailors who navigated by way of celestial maps, and understand how Einstein arrived at his revolutionary theory that space and time are the same entity.

Notable mentions 

There were so many brilliant books released in 2020, and these picks are just the tip of the iceberg. Here are several other books that almost made our top ten list.

• "All We Can Save" edited by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katharine K. Wilkinson
• "Owls of the Eastern Ice: A Quest to Find and Save the World's Largest Owl" by Jonathan C. Slaght
• "Explaining Humans" by Dr. Camilla Pang
• "Children of Ash and Elm: A History of Vikings" by Neil Price

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This story originally appeared on: Big Think - Author:Molly Hanson

According to a new study, the top rap songs in the U.S. are making increasingly frequent references to mental health problems, particularly suicide and depression.

Lyrics and mental health

The lyrics were analyzed for references to anxiety (e.g. "Do you experience nervousness or shakiness inside, faintness and dizziness?"); depression ("Went through deep depression when my mama passed…"), and suicide or suicidal ideation ("Only once the drugs are done / Do I feel like dying.").

Overall, the researchers found that about about one-third of the 125 songs referred to anxiety, 22 percent to depression, and 6 percent to suicide. Alarmingly, these percentages had more than doubled in 2018 as compared to 1998.

Zooming in closer, general mental health-related metaphors in the lyrics had increased from 8 percent to 44 percent over the two decades. References to suicide rose from 0 percent to 12 percent, and references to depression from 16 percent to 32 percent over the last 20 years. Anxiety-related references did not increase significantly.

America's youth is not okay

This isn't just a rapper thing, as research trends over the years are indicating that young Americans are not okay. The trend in emotionally darker rap lyrics mirrors what has been referred to as the "mental health crisis" in the United States.

Some data has found that psychological stress and suicide risk as rocketed from 2008 to 2017, and that's particularly true among 18 to 25 year-olds. The prevalence of "major depressive episodes" among US adolescents also increased from 2005 to 2014. According to X, anxiety affects around 30 percent of adolescents, with 80 percent never seeking treatment. The crisis reached a fever pitch in 2017 when the suicide rate among 15 to 24 year olds in the United States peaked at its highest level since 1960. From 2007 to 2017, suicide rates among people aged 10 to 24 rose by a grim 56 percent. Another analysis found that suicide attempts among Black youth rose by 73 percent from 1991 to 2017, while declining for whites.

The finding that rap lyrics have increasing references to mental health problems is significant because of the genre's popularity amongst American youth, who now spend nearly 40 hours per week listening to music. The authors note that rap artists influence "the development of these young people's identities."

The researchers noted that they could not determine "whether these lyrical references to mental health are due to rap artists' desires to self-disclose or to instigate discussions about mental health," according to the study. "Because rap is an autobiographical art form, the artists and younger adults may have observed and reflected national trends of distress experienced by themselves or people close to them."

Shifting social stigmas 

Over the past two decades, rappers have begun to embrace emotional vulnerability in ways they hadn't previously, for example Kanye West and J. Cole. In fact, researchers of the study suggested that the increase of references was linked to Kanye West's 2008 album "808s & Heartbreak," noting that artists such as Drake, Juice WRLD, and Post Malone (all of whom had songs examined in the study) have nodded to West's album as having had influence on their music styles. Even before male emotional introspection and mental health were part of the mainstream discourse, they were being embraced in rap.

More research will be necessary, the authors write, to understand "how this music can improve the mental health of its listeners or how it might lead to greater risk." In conclusion, the authors highlight that the study underscores a need to examine rap music and now, depending on the messaging, it may be able to reduce stigma surrounding mental illness by putting it in the spotlight.

This story originally appeared on: Big Think - Author:Molly Hanson