NOW and then, researchers shy away from the trackless jungle at the edge of
knowledge and set up camp in more familiar territory. Such expeditions don鈥檛
yield many surprises, but it鈥檚 reassuring to know that the back garden looks
much as we thought it did.
Among the scientists found exploring terra cognita this year were those who
reported in the August issue of Psychosomatic Medicine that people are
much less likely to yell at their boss than at a member of their family. To
provide the data for this momentous conclusion, psychologists from the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the State University of New York
at Stony Brook asked 100 college students to wear blood pressure cuffs for a
week and keep notes about when they got angry and what they did about it.
The results were clear. How the volunteers chose to express their anger
depended heavily on the situation that made them irate. People bottled up anger
against their boss, who could fire them, but vented it against family members,
who could not. People also tended to be less volatile in public. 鈥淚t鈥檚 nothing
earth-shattering,鈥� admits one of the researchers, 鈥渂ut nobody had looked at it
产别蹿辞谤别.鈥�
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Another stone left unturned in the field of psychology was deftly rolled back
in September, when researchers at Iowa State University found that children take
after their parents. In particular, kids tend to adopt good exercise habits if
their parents work out, and they are more likely to smoke if at least one parent
lights up regularly. Not only that, the data revealed a clear 鈥済ender symmetry鈥�.
To put it another way: like father, like son. What might explain these
observations? 鈥淥ne possibility is imitation,鈥� suggested one of the
researchers.
Big words can make a self-evident result seem weightier. Psychologists at the
National Institute for Healthcare Research in Maryland used this technique
when they announced that when one person hurts another, 鈥渇orgiveness causes
restorations in relationship closeness鈥�. Couples who have adopted the 鈥渒iss and
make up鈥� strategy will no doubt be pleased to learn that there鈥檚 now a sound
scientific basis for their actions.
Psychologists aren鈥檛 the only ones meticulously proving the obvious. A team
of public health researchers at the University of Pittsburgh, for example,
wondered how women might avoid the moderate weight gain sometimes associated
with menopause. They monitored the body fat and blood cholesterol of 535 women
for over four years, and presented their conclusion last month at a meeting of
the American Heart Association. Apparently, exercise and a low-fat diet are just
the ticket.
And in the political arena, we have the discovery that voters are more likely
to go to the polls if someone urges them to. The Yale University political
scientist who led this study sent students out to local neighbourhoods to
deliver non-partisan get-out-the-vote messages to randomly chosen houses shortly
before an election. After the election, voting records revealed that the turnout
was 6 per cent higher among the households contacted, the researchers reported
last September in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Of course, that鈥檚 not peanuts given the lacklustre voter turnouts in the US
recently. But for anyone who might nevertheless cling to the notion that
citizenship is not dead, the experimenters tried several different messages. The
one most ignored by potential voters was the reminder that voting is a civic
duty.
Even boldly going where few have gone before does not always lead to radical
conclusions. Over the years, polar researchers have set up weather monitoring
stations in many remote corners of Antarctica. According to data from stations
on the Ross Ice Shelf, where Robert Scott鈥檚 ill-fated South Pole expedition
perished in 1912, only one of the past 15 summers has seen temperatures as low
as those Scott recorded in his journal.
This weight of evidence leads inexorably to one conclusion about what killed
Scott and his men, according to a November paper in the Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences that reported the data. It was the cold.