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Women who dine together copy each other in pace and amount

Researchers say women who dine together tend to eat at the same pace, meaning people on a diet should not eat out with friends who eat too much.

A team of Dutch researchers found that women who dine with companions are likely to eat a similar amount and at the same pace as they do. 

Researchers brought together 70 pairs of normal-weight young women including a participant and an actor for a meal together and measured the length of time they took between bites. 

They found that the two women immediately began mimicking each other in the number and timing of their mouthfuls and took a bite within five seconds of the other person took one. 

Women were three times more likely to do this at the beginning of the meeting, possibly in order to ingratiate themselves with each other. 

“We found a really strong correlation between how many bites the young women took. When the other person ate a lot they also did, and when the other person ate less they followed them too,” said Lead author Roel Hermans of Radboud University. 

Previous findings said men also copied each other's eating to an extent, but were less concerned about the social norms surrounding food, researchers wrote in the journal PLoS ONE. 

“As long as such important influences on intake are not wholeheartedly acknowledged, it will be difficult to make healthy food choices and maintain a healthy diet, [when] people are often exposed to the eating behavior of others,” they added. 

Hermans and colleagues suggested further studies be conducted to see whether the mimicking effect is stronger or weaker for a family member or friend compared with a new companion.

Source: www.presstv.com

Mother's affection boosts child's brain development

Children whose mothers show more love and affection from early days develop brains with a larger hippocampus, a key region in learning and stress response.

Researchers at the Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis studied 92 mothers and their preschool children. 

During the first phase which included an experiment called “the waiting task” the children were given a present and asked to wait eight minutes before unwrapping it. Scientists filmed each mother and child to evaluate the level of support provided by the mother. 

When the studied children turned the age of 7 and 13, scientists studied their brain development by carrying out brain scans and comparing the images. 

Results showed that the kids whose mothers provided the most support to reduce their stress during the earlier task had larger hippocampus, says the article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal. 

“The importance of this effect is underscored by the fact the hippocampus is a brain region central to memory, emotion regulation and stress modulation, all areas key to healthy social adaptation.,” said senior researcher Professor Joan Luby. 

“This study validates something that seems to be intuitive, which is just how important nurturing parents are to creating adaptive human beings,” Luby added. 

“I think the public health implications suggest that we should pay more attention to parents' nurturing, and we should do what we can as a society to foster these skills because clearly nurturing has a very, very big impact on later development.”

Source: www.presstv.com