Culture

Nearly a third of college marching band members surveyed in a national study observed hazing in their programs but few of the students reported the activities, often because of fears of retribution or loss of social standing, according to researchers.

Allowing both males and females in hunter-gatherer groups to choose their living companions reduces the number of family members in individual hunter-gatherer camps, a new study shows.

More than half of all Medicaid enrollees use hospital emergency departments to receive care for conditions that could be treated at a primary care clinic. Why? Some of it may be urgency, and it may be cheaper for them, since they won't miss work. But it isn't cheaper for the rest of society and as the Affordable Care Act ballooned the use of Medicaid, the costs have gone up as well.

The diagnosis of the first case of Ebola in Lagos, Nigeria in July last year set off alarm bells around the world. The fear was that it would trigger an apocalyptic epidemic that would make the outbreaks in Liberia, Sierra-Leone and Guinea, where 1322 cases were reported and 728 people had died within five months, pale in comparison.

A new study suggests that medical marijuana pills may not help treat behavioral symptoms of dementia, such as aggression, pacing and wandering. The research is published in the May 13, 2015, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. However, researchers did find that the drug dosage used in the clinical trial was safe and well-tolerated.

The type of perfectionist who sets impossibly high standards for others has a bit of a dark side. They tend to be narcissistic, antisocial and to have an aggressive sense of humor. They care little about social norms and do not readily fit into the bigger social picture. So says Joachim Stoeber of the University of Kent in the UK, who compared the characteristics of so-called other-orientated perfectionists against those of perfectionists who set the bar extremely high for themselves. The study is published in Springer's Journal of Psychopathology and Behavioral Assessment.

Children in European countries tend to report higher levels of satisfaction with their friendships while children in African countries tend to be happier with their school lives. Children in northern European countries are particularly dissatisfied with their appearance and self-confidence. Most of the 50,000 children in the 15 countries rated their satisfaction with life as a whole (on a scale from zero to ten) positively, but the percentage of children with very high well-being (10 out of 10) varied from around 78% in Turkey and 77% in Romania and Colombia to around 40% in South Korea.

For a recent article, 216 sexual minority men were surveyed to better understand the relationships among sexual minority men’s objectification experiences, childhood harassment for gender nonconformity, and body image concerns.

Male toddlers with autism have significant structural differences in their brains compared to females with the condition, according to research in Molecular Autism. Autism spectrum conditions are more common in males than in females, with a 2 or 3:1 male to female bias in prevalence consistently found in studies. Why this is the case is still not fully understood.

In the first study of its kind, a research team led by Massey University professor Murray Cox et al., in a publication in the advanced online edition of Molecular Biology and Evolution, has examined the effects of arranged marriages on genetic diversity.

From hemophilia and color blindness amongst British and Russian monarchies, people have long known the potential damaging genetic consequences of inbreeding. But until recently, no one could measure or understand the impact of marriage rules on genetic diversity.

The act of identifying a perpetrator does not just involve memory and thinking, but also constitutes a moral decision. This is because, by the act of identifying or not identifying someone, the eyewitness runs the risk of either convicting an innocent person or letting a guilty person go free.

Education reform policies that penalize struggling schools for poor standardized test scores may hinder -- not improve -- students' college readiness, if a school's instructional focus becomes improving its test scores, suggests a new study that explored efforts to promote a college-going culture at one Texas high school.

Published recently in The High School Journal, the case study reveals the unintended consequences of school reform policies, and how these mandates may warp schools' instructional focus and thwart students' academic success.

Virginia Commonwealth University Massey Cancer Center researchers recently conducted a study that found low-income and uninsured women in states that are not expanding their Affordable Care Act (ACA) Medicaid coverage are less likely to receive breast and cervical cancer screenings compared to states that are implementing expansions.

In a study that compared three sites within the Dja Conservation Complex in Cameroon, Africa, investigators found that the presence of a conservation research project acts as a deterrent to chimpanzee and gorilla poachers, and community awareness and involvement in research lead to an increased value of apes and intact forests to local people, thus limiting hunting practices.

The results provide evidence that the mere existence of research programs exerts a positive impact on the conservation of wildlife in their natural habitats.

A gap year between high school and the start of university studies does not weaken young people's enthusiasm to study or their overall performance once the studies have commenced. On the other hand, adolescents who continue to university studies directly after upper secondary school are more resilient in their studies and more committed to the study goals. However, young people who transfer directly to university are more stressed than those who start their studies after a gap year.