Tag: health

Emotional Expressions Reconsidered: Challenges to Inferring Emotion From Human Facial Movements

~ ABN ~ Leave a comment

Abstract

It is commonly assumed that a person’s emotional state can be readily inferred from his or her facial movements, typically called emotional expressions or facial expressions. This assumption influences legal judgments, policy decisions, national security protocols, and educational practices; guides the diagnosis and treatment of psychiatric illness, as well as the development of commercial applications; and pervades everyday social interactions as well as research in other scientific fields such as artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and computer vision. In this article, we survey examples of this widespread assumption, which we refer to as the common view, and we then examine the scientific evidence that tests this view, focusing on the six most popular emotion categories used by consumers of emotion research: anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise. The available scientific evidence suggests that people do sometimes smile when happy, frown when sad, scowl when angry, and so on, as proposed by the common view, more than what would be expected by chance. Yet how people communicate anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise varies substantially across cultures, situations, and even across people within a single situation. Furthermore, similar configurations of facial movements variably express instances of more than one emotion category. In fact, a given configuration of facial movements, such as a scowl, often communicates something other than an emotional state. Scientists agree that facial movements convey a range of information and are important for social communication, emotional or otherwise. But our review suggests an urgent need for research that examines how people actually move their faces to express emotions and other social information in the variety of contexts that make up everyday life, as well as careful study of the mechanisms by which people perceive instances of emotion in one another. We make specific research recommendations that will yield a more valid picture of how people move their faces to express emotions and how they infer emotional meaning from facial movements in situations of everyday life. This research is crucial to provide consumers of emotion research with the translational information they require.

link

Maybe it’s just me, but I have always thought these findings were extremely obvious. What is obvious is not just facial expressions. The same rough analysis applies to tone of voice, word choice, gesture, body language, perceived meaning, pragmatics of speaking and everything else involving interpersonal communication. For these reasons, I developed the FIML technique. FIML reduces the ‘irreducible complexity’1 of human interactions by examining small bits of interpersonal communications in real-time, real-world situations. Perfect communication between two humans (the smallest unit) is not possible. BUT, much better communication IS. FIML is not hard to do if you have a good partner who can understand why it is necessary. The world is a lonely place and good partners are rare mainly because interpersonal human understanding is really bad, frightfully so. If you do FIML, everything will be better for you. ABN

  1. See A theory of FIML ↩︎

Over 90% of children are DIRECTLY INJECTED with ALPHA-GAL-containing VACCINES before they’re allowed to enter school

~ ABN ~ Leave a comment

This may PRIME nearly the entire population’s immune system, so a later tick bite BOOSTS that response into full-blown Alpha-Gal Syndrome.

Or…

Repeated injection of alpha-gal-bearing vaccines could DIRECTLY INDUCE alpha-gal sensitization WITHOUT the tick.

It’s no surprise alpha-gal syndrome has skyrocketed 10,000% in a decade…

link

Study links coffee consumption to metabolic health and sex hormones

~ ABN ~ Leave a comment

Coffee is one of the world’s most widely consumed beverages, and previous research has linked its consumption to a lower risk of conditions such as type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease. However, the biological mechanisms behind these benefits remain unclear. A new Finnish study links habitual coffee consumption to healthier body composition and metabolic markers, while revealing distinct associations with sex hormones in men and women.

link

Taking the stairs could cut risk of early death

~ ABN ~ Leave a comment

Taking the stairs will help you live longer – according to new research from the University of East Anglia and the Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital.

A major new study published today reveals that climbing the stairs significantly reduces the risk of dying from cardiovascular disease.

Over the course of the study, people who regularly climb stairs were 39 per cent less likely to die from heart-related problems and 24 per cent less likely to die from any cause – compared with people who don’t climb stairs as often.

The study also reveals that people who climbed the stairs were less likely to develop major cardiovascular conditions such as heart attack, stroke and heart failure.

link

Trump signs Executive Order to maximize parental choice over vaccinations for their children

~ ABN ~ Leave a comment

DELIVERING GOLD STANDARD CHILDHOOD VACCINE RECOMMENDATIONS: Today, President Donald J. Trump signed an Executive Order to recognize Gold Standard Childhood Vaccine Recommendations that maximize parental choices over vaccinations for their children and align three categories of childhood immunizations with scientific evidence and best practices from peer, developed countries.

  • The Order provides recommendations that give parents more information and options when making immunization decisions for their children.
    • The Order recommends all children get immunizations to provide protection for 11 diseases – a decrease from the 18 diseases recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 2024. Immunizations no longer recommended for all children are now recommended for shared clinical decision-making, ensuring that parents have all options available to them. 
    • The Order recommends separating out the combined MMR vaccine into three single-disease shots and recommends administering all vaccines during separate medical visits to give parents more options regarding the timing and frequency of this vaccine administration.
    • States that enact school vaccine requirements are advised to consider the Gold Standard Childhood Vaccine Recommendations and consider updating their laws to reflect the recommendations.
    • All Federal agencies are advised to advance the Gold Standard Childhood Vaccine Recommendations based on their relevant authorities to ensure Americans have the best scientific information. 
  • The Order maximizes parental choice over childhood vaccines by promoting State compliance with constitutional and Federal law related to parental authority, religious freedom, disability accommodations, and equal protection under the law, including States’ obligations to provide religious and medical exemptions from childhood and adolescent immunization requirement.
  • The Order directs the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), through the HHS Task Force on Safer Childhood Vaccines, to present plans to the President to improve vaccine research and options for American parents, including continuous evaluation of the risk and benefit profiles of all childhood vaccines based on U.S. and international data. 

link

Looks like a good start.

When you consider the vaccine topic from a vague ‘national’ and ‘science’ POV, it can appear complex, leading to individual resignation or stubborn belief based on unthinking habituation. When you consider it from a state’s POV or a schoolboard’s, the absurdity of government coercing medical treatments for children is easier to see for what it is. The smaller the state or the dumber the schoolboard, the more obvious it becomes. USA local and state governments are filled with people entirely unqualified to rule on matters like this. When ‘national standards’ are blindly followed, anyone who can read and think understands relevant agencies have all been captured by Big Pharma and Big Money. ABN

Anti-Progesterone Linked to Chemical Abortion Pill Found in Water Supply of Three Cities

~ ABN ~ Leave a comment

A peer reviewed study found “significant amounts” of mifepristone, an anti-progesterone component of the chemical abortion pill, in the water supply of Austin, Texas, Blacksburg, Virginia and Carbondale, Illinois. Through various tests, the study found that typical water treatment methods were not effective in removing the endocrine disrupting component of mifepristone. The contamination could have serious effects on fertility, fetal development, and pregnancy. 

Low dose mifepristone use over time has been found to suppress ovulation and menstruation, and in some cases stop menstruation altogether. Mifepristone’s anti-progesterone effects can cancel out progesterone dosages that women may take for various health reasons, according to the study. The study also says that “low progesterone levels in women have been associated with multiple health problems including lower fertility rates, higher rates of miscarriage, and higher rates of other medical complications during pregnancy.”

link

Combined rattlesnake proteins prove 10 times more potent than current antivenom in lab tests

~ ABN ~ Leave a comment

A western diamondback rattlesnake. Credit: Sean B. Carroll

University of Maryland researchers discovered a new approach to treating venomous snakebites—using the same toxin-blocking proteins that snakes evolved to protect themselves. The team found that specific combinations of blood proteins from western diamondback rattlesnakes provided unprecedented neutralizing power against the venom of multiple dangerous snake species.

The research, led by Professor of Biology Sean B. Carroll and published July 29, 2026, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, offers a promising way to formulate more potent antivenoms against deadly snakebites—a significant problem in some parts of the world.

“This is one of those great stories when nature has already solved a problem we’ve been grappling with for decades,” said Carroll, who also holds the Andrew and Mary Balo and Nicholas and Susan Simon Endowed Chair at UMD.

A neglected treatment gap

Snakebites remain one of the world’s most neglected tropical diseases. The World Health Organization estimates that venomous snakebites kill 80,000 to 140,000 people each year and leave hundreds of thousands more with permanent disabilities. Many victims live in rural regions where access to effective antivenoms is limited.

link

Thoughts hidden by subjective phrases

~ ABN ~ Leave a comment

After years of clearing up my mind, I noticed that my inner voice sometimes uses short phrases to bring negative trains of thought to an end. It was a habit I was aware of but had never given any thought to.

The phrases are not pretty; e.g. “I hate them all,” “fuck them,” “who cares about assholes like that,” etc.

My guess is this kind of inner speech is not uncommon. I was using it to end various lines of thought that had wandered into painful territory.

Having a clearer mind today or at least believing I did, I decided that when phrases or words like that came up again, I would not let them shut off my thoughts as I had been doing. Rather I would let the thoughts continue, explore what was there.

What I found is a bunch of old memories and emotions that were fairly easy to clean up. They were not so much repressed as not having been visited for many years. The nasty phrases were like labels in an old, unused filing cabinet.

About half the material was out of date and easy to toss. Another one-quarter was pertinent but was stuff I had dealt with in other ways and was thus redundant.

Only about a quarter of the material lying behind those nasty phrases deserved more thought.

In some of the most interesting cases, I realized that I was letting someone off too easy by hiding their behavior inside a neutral memory. They actually had been horrible but I had been too young to understand (narcissists, for example). Analyzing that stuff over again in a more mature mind was a bit of a chore, but the results have been good, even refreshing.

The process is ongoing. It does resemble cleaning an attic or an old filing cabinet. The stuff I found behind those nasty phrases was not all the stuff from my past. It was just stuff where I was blaming someone or feeling angry about something or had been harmed by someone. The bad stuff I’ve done is elsewhere in my mind.

I am struck by several things concerning those phrases and what lay behind them. One is a lot of that material dates back to childhood and early adulthood. It was not so much unconscious as not having been visited for a long time. Though most of it does not have strong emotional valence, some of it is very revealing because it brings together memories that had been disconnected, leading me to understand dramas or aspects of experience I had not understood before even though I had lived them. I also notice that it was just a few words that closed off those “files.”

The power of words to command silence in the mind is enormous.

I had been dismissing all that material with just a few words whenever I didn’t feel like going there, which was every time. After not going there for many years, it was refreshing to poke around and rearrange those parts of my mind. I am quite sure I freed up some memory space and removed some snags in my thinking by dealing with that stuff. I also see new patterns within my general sense of my past, patterns with better explanatory power, both truer and more concise.

I see our minds as having a structure sort of similar to language or a forest. Trees of ideas, memories, and feelings grow and change. It’s good to remove some of them sometimes, put the space to better use. Buddhist practice is very helpful in endeavors like this. Rather than get all worked up with Freudian passions and delusions, we can simply observe, dismiss, refile, erase, upgrade, or reimagine as needed based on our capacities and understanding of what’s best.

Our bhavanga or “storehouse consciousness” contains memories, pictures, ideas, words., explanations They flow along with us, in many ways are us. When the mind is clear, a lot of that material can be rearranged for the better. There aren’t many rules for that. Just do your best.

Chicken is not as healthy as most people believe

~ ABN ~ Leave a comment

link

I, for one, believe this is true. Not sure what people say today, but in the not-so-distant past many Chinese believed chicken causes cancer. Modern factory-bred and raised chickens live gruesome lives. For this and many other foods and products, farm-fresh and close to home quality produce is well-worth the extra money it costs. If it’s a good product from a good outfit, that’s the right thing to buy. Think of it as charity-spending if you like. Either that or try raising your own high-quality chickens (or anything else) and selling them; then you will see how much work it is. Farming and ranching are hard work and small producers who provide quality products should be supported by their communities. I hope in the future, assuming we have one, many more people will be able to make a good living providing high-quality foods and artisan products. Good food, reasonable exercise and sunlight are the keys to good health and a healthy mind. Being generous with local quality producers is key to getting more of them everywhere. Full disclosure: I do not own a farm but have worked extensively on one. ABN

A normal fasting glucose gets read as an all-clear for metabolic health. It’s the last thing to break, not the first — William Wallace

~ ABN ~ Leave a comment

In the Whitehall II study, 6,538 adults without diabetes were tracked for years, and the researchers reconstructed the path of those who developed type 2 diabetes up to 13 years before diagnosis. Insulin sensitivity fell steeply over the five years before diagnosis. Fasting glucose stayed flat and only began its sharp climb about three years out, rising from 5.79 to 7.40 mmol/L. Beta-cell function actually rose first, the pancreas compensating, then collapsed as diagnosis closed in.

Glucose reads normal for years because insulin is quietly working overtime to hold it there. As tissues resist insulin, the pancreas pumps out more to keep the line. Fasting glucose is a lagging indicator: it only moves once the beta cells can’t keep up. Fasting insulin, or HOMA-IR, captures the compensation phase a glucose test misses entirely. By the time glucose crosses the diabetic threshold, the machinery has been straining for years.

Whitehall II was 71% male and 91% white, an occupational cohort, and the pattern can run faster in other populations, as the companion South Asian analysis showed. It’s observational, mapping natural history, not proof that measuring insulin earlier changes anything. Fasting insulin assays aren’t standardized, part of why it isn’t a routine test, and HOMA-IR is a surrogate, not a gold-standard clamp.

insulin resistance is measurable years before fasting glucose moves, so a normal glucose says little about the insulin behind it, and fasting insulin opens a much longer runway to catch dysglycemia early. However, that fasting insulin is a validated screening test with agreed cutoffs, or that acting on it sooner improves hard outcomes. The open question is whether routine fasting-insulin screening plus early intervention lowers diabetes incidence. That trial hasn’t been run.

link

How to fix BPPV (vertigo) — MT Bowden, MD

~ ABN ~ Leave a comment

BPPV is the most common cause of vertigo, and one of the most common things I see misdiagnosed. It can be diagnosed and treated in the office – but if you go to the hospital with “dizziness,” you’ll get a CT scan and a prescription for meclizine. Every ER doctor, neurologist and PCP needs to learn the Dix-hallpike and Epley maneuver!

link