Emotionally draining jobs bring few monetary rewards if the employment does not require great intellectual demands, a new University of Florida study finds.

Friendly waiters, angry bill collectors and nurturing child-care workers are among the many American workers who experience emotionally charged encounters that require shows of empathy or other feelings but have little recompense, said John Kammeyer-Mueller, a UF management professor and one of the study’s researchers.

A substantial number of older persons — from 2 to 10 percent of the elderly population — are physically or mentally abused, and mistreated seniors are three times more likely to die within three years than those who are not abused, report two Cornell University gerontologists in this week’s issue of the medical journal The Lancet.

Reviewing more than 50 articles, Karl Pillemer, professor of human development in the College of Human Ecology at Cornell, has collaborated with D

A study by Cornell University researchers finds that when young adults are served larger portions from one week to the next they overeat by almost 40 percent. Eating larger portions over time could account for the growth of the American girth over the past 20 years, the researchers say.

“The more food we served to the college-student volunteers in our eating study, the more they ate,” says David Levitsky, professor of nutritional sciences and of psychology at Cornell. “Since we k

The current debate about increasing the level of compulsory pension contributions is a contentious one for individuals, trade unions, employers and the state. While trade unions urge increased compulsion, and both employers and government resist this, the needs of a large section of society are being overlooked. Due to women’s typically lower pay, part time employment and interrupted careers while caring for others, compulsory additional payments into private pension schemes would not address the

CT-guided radiofrequency ablation (RFA) is effective in easing the symptoms of lung tumors that cannot be removed by surgery, and enhancement pattern and changes in the size of the tumor as shown on CT are the most important factors for determining whether that ablation has been successful, according to a pair of independent studies in the October 2004 issue of the American Journal of Roentgenology.

For the first study, researchers from Caserta’s S. Sebastiano Hospital in Ita

A study published today in the American Gastroenterological Association’s journal Gastroenterology concludes that patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus who require long-term insulin therapy are at a significantly increased risk for colorectal cancer.

Results of this retrospective cohort study, conducted on 24,918 people with type 2 diabetes, suggest that those who received more than three years of insulin therapy during the follow-up period of the study have more than three t

GVG may reduce addictive effects of ’huffing’

A new study by scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory suggests that vigabatrin (a.k.a. gamma vinyl-GABA or GVG) may block the addictive effects of toluene, a substance found in many household products commonly used as inhalants. These results broaden the promise of GVG as a potential treatment for a variety of addictions. The study will be published in the December 1, 2004 issue of Syn

A new study shows that a history of smoking affects survival in patients with cancer of the head and neck. Patients who had smoked fewer than 100 cigarettes in their lifetime were three times more likely to have better overall survival, disease-specific survival, and recurrence-free survival compared with patients who had a current or previous history of regular smoking. There are approximately 38,000 new cases of head and neck cancer cases in the U.S. each year, the vast majority of which occur

Despite Government efforts to promote ‘lifelong learning’ and a more equitable and inclusive ‘learning society’ there is little special or new about adult learning in the digital age, according to research at Cardiff University.

The Adult Learning@Home project, which was funded by ESRC, concluded that ICT has not increased participation and achievement rates in adult education. Instead, e-learning tends to be associated with the same factors that determine school-leaving age, such as

Researchers at Purdue University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have completed a mathematical analysis showing that it isn’t quite possible to build a so-called “perfect lens,” but the underlying theory still makes it feasible to design better imaging systems.

A perfect lens would be able to focus light more narrowly than conventional lenses, making it possible to etch finer electronic circuits and create more compact and powerful computer chips. Such lenses also m

Arsenic trioxide – a highly poisonous substance best known as an effective weed killer or pesticide and notorious for being a favourite ’weapon’ of choice in murder mystery novels, is being re-invented as a treatment for a rare type of leukaemia.
It is already licensed as an orphan drug (the term for drugs intended to treat rare conditions) for patients who have relapsed after initial therapy for acute promyeloctytic leukaemia (APL).

But now, a research team led by Dr.

A University of Southampton academic, who is investigating love songs from the 16th century to the 1970s, claims that not only is that not the case, but also that song plays a vital role in constructing myths of romantic love.

The research, provisionally entitled Silly Love Songs: Gender, Performance and Romance, investigates the relationship between song and romance, tracing the different ways that songs interact with other media, such as novels and films, to articulate the prevaili

Benefits of non-drug techniques top most popular sleeping pill, Ambien

A study by researchers at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) and Harvard Medical School has found cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is more effective than sleeping pills in treating chronic sleep-onset insomnia. The findings, which appear in the Sept. 27 issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine, show non-drug techniques yield better short and long-term results than the most widely prescribed sleeping

First study in early-stage patients provides additional insight into how psychosocial interventions impact disease management

A new study shows that cognitive-existential group therapy (CEGT), a psychosocial intervention designed to improve the mood and attitude of patients with breast cancer, does not improve survival of women with early-stage disease. The study, to be published online September 27 in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, is the first to evaluate the impact of CEGT on

A study in the recent issue of Psychological Science in the Public Interest addresses how economic status is no longer a sufficient gauge of a nation’s well-being. The authors argue that the psychological well-being of its citizens is the greatest measure of a nation– not the well-being of its economy. “While wealth has trebled over the past 50 years…well-being has been flat, mental illness has increased at an even more rapid rate, and data, not just nostalgic reminiscences, indicate that t

CBEN pioneers method of mitigating nanoparticle toxicity via surface enhancement

Researchers at Rice University’s Center for Biological and Environmental Nanotechnology (CBEN) have demonstrated a simple way to reduce the toxicity of water-soluble buckyballs by a factor of more than ten million. The research will appear in an upcoming issue of the journal Nano Letters, published by the American Chemical Society, the world’s largest scientific society. One of the first toxi