Faced with a moral dilemma, people make more pragmatic, hard-nosed decisions if they're speaking in a language other than their native tongue, says a study in PLOS One.
People faced with a moral issue made more pragmatic decisions when speaking in a language other than their native tongue, researchers found. Adam Doughty
Judgments about right and wrong are generally thought to result from deeply held personal principles, irrespective of language, the researchers said. This study suggests using a learned language creates a psychological distance from issues that allows people to make less emotionally driven, utilitarian decisions.
Communicating in a foreign language may affect judgments made by immigrants on jury panels, and by corporations and organizations, such as the United Nations, that use foreign languages on a daily basis, the researchers said.
A research team from Spain and the U.S. conducted a series of experiments with university students in five countries who had learned a second language during childhood.
In one experiment, 317 subjects from the U.S., South Korea, France and Israel were asked to imagine an oncoming train about to strike five people on a footbridge hanging low above the track because of the weight on it. The choices were doing nothing, which would result in the deaths of all five people, or taking the logical, but perhaps emotionally difficult, decision to push a heavy man off the bridge, and thereby saving four.
Half of the subjects in each country were instructed to answer the question in their native language and half in their acquired language. Among the participants speaking an acquired language, 33% opted to push the man. But when people were speaking their native tongue, only 20% chose that option.
The same question was posed to 725 participants in Spain—397 were native Spanish speakers who spoke English and 328 were native English speakers who spoke Spanish.
When answering in their native tongue, 18% chose pushing the man off the bridge. When using the learned language, 44% chose to push the man.
Subjects who were more proficient in a foreign language made decisions that resembled native-language speakers, further experiments showed.
Caveat: None of the Korean participants chose to push the man to his death, possibly due to cultural values, researchers said.
Growing corneas: Amniotic fluid from pregnant women stimulated the growth of new corneal cells in laboratory cultures, according to a report in the May issue of Experimental Eye Research.
The fluid contains proteins, vitamins and growth factors that can enrich standard cell cultures to grow healthy, new corneal cells for use in transplants, the study suggests.
Corneal injuries and disease are a leading cause of blindness world-wide. In the U.S., donated corneas resulted in some 47,000 transplants last year, according to the Eye Bank Association of America. Many countries have a shortage of donated corneal tissue.
Researchers conducted experiments on 96 corneas from 75 donors, ages 5 to 51 years old, from Tehran, Iran. The corneas weren't suited for transplant, the researchers said.
The cells were cultured in mediums containing 10%, 20% and 30% amniotic fluid collected from women who underwent amniocentesis, a genetic test conducted in the first trimester of pregnancy. (No genetic abnormalities were found.)
Control cultures contained 20% fetal bovine serum, a common ingredient in standard lab cultures.
After four weeks, corneal cells grown in cultures containing 20% amniotic fluid had a more uniform and distinctive hexagonal corneal shape than cells grown in the other mediums. The density of corneal cells from the 20% amniotic medium was significantly greater than cells grown in the control culture, and somewhat greater than those in the other amniotic cultures.
The amniotic fluid had no toxic effects on the cornea.
Caveat: The proteins and nutritional factors in amniotic fluid may vary among donors and at different stages of pregnancy, researchers said.
Migraine link: Repairing a common heart defect may improve migraine headache symptoms, according to a meta-analysis in the current issue of the American Journal of Medicine.
The defect, called the patent foramen ovale, is a small hole in the wall separating the heart's upper chambers. The hole has an important role in fetal circulation and normally closes during infancy. It doesn't close in about 27% of people, allowing blood to flow from the right to the left chambers. The defect is associated with a higher risk of stroke.
It also has been linked to migraine attacks, but this latest study found the defect is more common in migraine patients than the general population. Closing the hole significantly improved headache symptoms, though the placebo effect, which is often seen in migraine treatments, may have been a factor, researchers said.
The analysis, at the University of Birmingham in the U.K., pooled the findings of 41 studies from 1998 to 2012. Approximately 5,500 subjects in 11 countries were involved. Twenty studies examined the prevalence of the PFO defect in migraine sufferers and 21 assessed the effects of closing it on migraines. Follow-up periods ranged from 90 days to about five years.
The prevalence of the defect ranged in the underlying studies from 15% to 67% in migraine sufferers and was significantly higher in migraines with sensory changes known as aura. Closing the hole alleviated symptoms in a range of 4% to 93% of patients with aura and 14% to 83% of those without aura.
About half of the studies found no change in a range of 1.5% to 33.3% of subjects while two studies reported a worsening of migraine symptoms in 4.5%.
Caveat: Most of the studies failed to report patients with no change or whose conditions worsened, researchers said. Study design and follow-up periods varied widely. Migraine attacks were mostly self-reported.
Dental stimulus: For some people, an economic downturn can lead to an unlikely new habit: dental hygiene. A study in the current issue of Community Dentistry and Oral Epidemiology found dental health behaviors significantly increased during a severe economic crisis, mainly among employed men and unemployed women.
Previous research has shown that people often adopt healthy behaviors during tough economic times, such as walking more and smoking less, but the impact on dental habits wasn't known, researchers said.
The study, part of a larger Nordic health study, compared dental habits in the months before and after the 2008 collapse of the Icelandic banking system. Iceland's universal health-care system doesn't cover dental care and there is no private dental insurance.
From October to December 2007, the frequency of dental checkups and daily brushing and flossing was assessed in questionnaires completed by 5,910 men and women. The subjects were contacted again from November to December 2009.
Employed men were 28% more likely to visit a dentist at least once a year after the collapse than before. Unemployed women were almost twice as likely to have an annual checkup in 2009 than employed women, who showed no significant changes. Overall, annual dental checkups increased to 46% in 2009 from 44% in 2007, the study found.
Daily flossing increased among all subjects: 43% were flossers post-recession compared with 40% in 2007. Only men with jobs brushed their teeth more often during the collapse.
Caveat: Employment status and occupations varied and may have resulted in different responses to the economic collapse, researchers said. Dental habits were self-reported.
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