“Men are better drivers than women” Ever since I was a kid, that statement was thrown around like it was a fact. I have two older brothers, who were taught to drive way before I was, so once the opportunity arose itself for me to start driving, they continuously bellowed, “women can’t drive!” Me being as feminist as they come, I couldn’t (still can’t) see what having two X chromosomes had to do with one’s ability to mechanically control a vehicle. More so however, I was confused as to where they got this idea from? Where was the evidence to prove this stereotypical belief? Quite often when I asked my brother’s or any other male why they felt this way, they will start giving me personal anecdotes, “Well when I was on the highway last week…” or “The other day I almost got into an accident with a women for…” and so on and so forth. But as we learned in class, personal anecdotal observations are weak inference, thus don’t serve as true scientific proof.

Fast forward to current day, I have my drivers license and recently purchased my first car. So I would like to think I am a good driver. Not the best, but nonetheless better than most of my male friends. Yet, I still get told I can’t drive because I am a woman. So I decided to research this ‘theory’. Is there something in the make-up of women that makes us predestined to be (allegedly) worse drivers than men? Scientifically speaking, are men really better drivers than women? In simpler words show me the studies.Within minutes of doing research on google, I realized how detrimental it is to deem things as fact without scientifically backing it. I don’t know who was the first person to claim that men are better drivers than women, but somehow decades later, women are ridiculed on the internet as being terrible drivers because they are: easily distracted, read slower than the average man (do not understand that correlation), supposedly not good at distance judgement, or my personal favorite, the claim that women just don’t care. Just typing in “women can’t drive” on the search engine led me to discover tons of weak inferences. I just about given up the hope that there was any science behind this belief, for every article/study that concluded men are better drivers, there was one saying the opposite, as well as others who say there’s no definitive relationship between a person’s sex and their driving ability. In class we learned that we can never reduce uncertainty to zero, but ‘better’ data can help reduce this uncertainty as much as possible. Plus there are a lot of third variables in play that could lead to one concluding men are better drivers than women. Which raises my skepticism. So I decided I was going to do sort of a meta-analyses of as these studies, not to necessarily get a conclusive answer, for this is an on-going debate because the findings are so inconclusive, but to know what science says.

Looking at the Research:

What we know is that, for years now (at least a decade), insurance companies have charged men more for car insurance because statistics shows that women get into lesser accidents than men. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, male fatalities have outnumbered female fatalities in car accidents 2 to 1. Furthermore, according to the American Insurance Institute men are in 50 percent more life-threatening crashes per 100 million miles driven than females.

Counter research to this, conducted by the The National Organization for Women’s Insurance Project, is the findings that men drive more than women, so therefore more accident prone/chances to get into accidents

However, none of these studies can exactly pin-point the science behind why males get into more car crashes than women. Some researchers argue the nature vs. nurture theory as being a reason. Others blame natural male biochemicals; high testosterone levels in men leads them to take greater risk while driving.  An enlightening summary of the research by the Social Issues Research Centre digs a little deeper past the numbers and offers interesting insight as to why there is a disparity between females and males behind the wheel.

These factors can be split into three categories:

1. Speeding and violation of traffic laws 

A number of studies have shown that men have a higher propensity to ignore traffic laws than women and be in violation of driving etiquette. In 2004, Jennifer Schwartz reported, men are four times more likely to be arrested for drunk driving than women. Even taking the fact that men drive more into account that is still a high number. Fran H. Norris, B. Alex Matthews and Jasmin K. Riad by conducting a longitudinal study with a participant size of a 1000, found that in most cases, men are less likely than women to obey other traffic laws. In her study,”Gender and age-related differences in attitudes toward traffic laws and traffic violations,” Dana Yagil discovers a major reason why this is. She finds that women tend to obey traffic laws, even when safety is not a factor because they view them as necessary, while men tend to be more skeptical of them, thus more inclined to view them as somewhat optional.

2. Aggression

Lived experiences as well as studies highlight the fact that men tend to be more aggressive than women, in general. Research has found that this aggression flows over to their driving and behavior behind the wheel. According to Alan E. Gross and Anthony N. Doob, men are three times more likely to honk their horns on the road than women. And a number of other studies verify that men are more aggressive on the road. Needless to say, heightened behaviors of aggression can lead to not only the disregard of traffic/safety regulations but dangerous maneuvers and choices behind the wheel.

3. Sensation-seeking and risk-taking

Numerous studies find that men are more likely than women to engage in thrill-seeking activities or behaviors; sky-diving, bunjee-jumping, diving off of cliffs, and etc. So it’s no surprise that this thrill-seeking need can then be manifested by dangerous driving, this helps to explain why men tend to be faster drivers than women.  A paper by M. L. Chipman, C. G. MacGregor, A. M. Smiley and M. Lee-Gosselin, found that the men, in the Ontario study, greater distances (50% more) than women yet only spent 30 % more time achieving them.

Takeaways:

BUT…

While the greater disregard of traffic laws/road safety regulations, aggressive driving, and more risk taking are all causes of more male accidents and crashes, that doesn’t necessarily give evidence that women are better drivers than men. It simply falsifies the vice-versa. This is to prove that there isn’t any concrete evidence or experimental outcomes out there that will testify that gender CAUSES a person to either be a good or bad driver. Both sexes have the capability to be great or poor drivers based on practice and confidence while behind the wheel.

I watched an interesting video for another class the other day, titled cracking the code of silence. In the first part of this video there was a highlight of families dealing with the discovery of their child having Tay Sachs disease. As I was watching this video, I became overwhelmed with sadness. They were so young, so much life ahead of them, yet they were offered a death sentence with this disease. So then I began to wonder how many more babies have this disease in the U.S. How many parents are merely biting time while their offspring, their children, are dying, feeling hopeless. What I remember from several genetic disease lessons is that Tay Sachs disease is a deathly genetic disease resulting from the production of too little of of an enzyme necessary for the removal of excess lipid buildup in the brain tissue. This in turn is expressed in the individual by severe brain damage, enlargement of the head, convulsions, blindness, deafness then eventual death. Tay Sachs is a homozygous recessive disease (it isn’t represented by the dominant traits), where carriers (heterozygous individuals) are not affected.

A baby who died of Tay Sachs.

By doing Additional research I discovered that each year about 16 cases of Tay Sachs are diagnosed. In the video I shared above, both the parents were carriers of the disease. This is results in: 50% chance that their child will be a carrier, but not have the disease, or 25% chance that their child will not be a carrier and not have the disease, or 25% chance that their child will have the disease. Unfortunately in their case, both his child and his twin brother’s child had the disease. I learned through the video that a baby with classic Tay-Sachs starts to develop normally in the first few months of life. Signs and symptoms of the disease usually appear by about 6 months (like the babies in the documentary), when the baby slowly stops smiling, crawling, turning over and reaching out. The father mentioned that his baby stopped laughing and that’s when he knew that it was getting worse really quickly.

Debrielle; a Chicago child who was living with Tay Sachs. Evidence that the Jewish disease, now affects other ethnic groups.

As time passes, steadily, the baby loses skills and develops other dire health problems, including: Breathing problems, hearing, intellectual disabilities (problems with how the brain works that can cause a person to have trouble or delays in physical development, learning, communicating, taking care of himself or getting along with others. Paralysis (this is when you can’t feel or move one or more parts of your body. Seizures (his is when the whole body or parts of the body move without control). I can’t even imagine watching your baby go through that. What we knew, and come to accept about Tay Sachs, is that there is no cure for this disease, but that medicines and healthy eating can help manage them. That the only proactive action to avoid having a baby with Tay-Sachs is to get you and your partner genetically tested (such as prenatal test).

After reading this heartbreaking essay written by a mom (Emily Rapp)  whose child has Tay Sachs disease (“Notes from a Dragon Mom”) I was determined to see what more was being done to find a cure. That’s when I came upon this experimental treatment that launched from the on-going Tay-Sachs Gene Therapy (TSGT) Consortium that raised the question about the ethics of science, such as what we discussed in class. For the first time, since the late 19th century, researchers from around the world including at the University of Massachusetts Medi

Emily Rapp with her son, who had Tay Sachs, published in her 2011 Essay.

cal School, Harvard University, Cambridge University, Boston College as well as Auburn University, believed that there could be a way to alter the devastating reality that is Tay Sachs. They, along with the help of other professionals (at Massachusetts General hospital) planned to launch a new gene therapy treatment that involved up to 12 children with Tay Sachs disease. This clinical trial (study) involved the deep implantation of engineered viruses in the brain, that would turn the brain’s cells essentially into ‘micro-factories’ that could produce the crucial enzyme that is missing from those diagnosed with this disease. This was all very exciting and the line of desperate parents to sign their newly diagnosed children up was long. But here comes the problem of ethics.

1. There’s absolutely NO guarantee that this trial would lead to anything other than failure. Positive results were only shown in feline cats; they possessed the similar enzyme loss, yet when they underwent the gene infusion were able to live months longer than the cats that didn’t (from 4 months to 18 months, some living till 2 years old). But we know from other scientific experiments that what works in another species wont necessarily work in humans. Is it ethical to then get the hopes up of these families to then present no results, or worse yet, if the trial were to lead to the sudden death of these newborns?
2. Gene therapy has led to unplanned deaths in the past (around the 90s); when infusion of viruses (used as vectors -carrying cancer or etc.) caused a deadly immune reaction to a patient in 1999. The uncertainty is very high and the subjects are very young.
3. The biggest ethical question is who who is allowed to be enrolled and who will be denied? Patient enrollment is a huge challenge becasue quite often researchers are playing God (not literally so to speak, since most of these choices are based on scientific preferences and health of patients). This experiment, unlike the one we discussed in class isn’t a randomized control, double blind placebo trial. As scientist/doctors must know the patient’s specific medical history, and it’s effect, to know the gene therapy’s effects on health. In this case, researchers such as Dr. Florian Eichler of Mass. General, believed that the earlier on in the disease the patient was, the better their chances at success in the trial. Even with this said, there is still something ethically unsettling about denying a newborn baby potential treatment of an otherwise fatal disease.

We discussed in class that breakthroughs happen in only 17% of trials because humans are somewhat shockingly bad at discovery. However, science is as we know a way of escaping that lousy intuition of ours. Since we cannot predict with accuracy when harm vs. good will be done, so we need evidence-based approaches. All in all, in 2016 the trials are still underway, so all we can do is hope that this gene therapy falls in that 17% of breakthroughs.

Even prior to stepping foot on a college campus I was made very aware of the excessive drinking that takes place. It wasn’t till l came to college that I understood college student’s need to binge drink. As a Sophomore  I have sort of become desensitized to drunken students wobbling down the street every weekend and I do not even bat an eye when I see someone passed out in the hallway of the residence halls. Has alcohol abuse become normalized on college campuses all over the world? I say yes. The entire culture of college encourages drinking and “turning up” as if it’s an Olympic feat.

Why is that? Is there a link between the stress of college and the amount of binge drinking college students partake in?

College Students Under Stress Turn To Alcohol

There were some new findings discovered by a team of Canadian researchers, in their study titled “Acute Stress Increases Voluntary consumption of Alcohol in Undergraduates” This study discovered that the presence of short term or acute stress had an impact on the amount of alcohol consumed by college students in their undergrad. This study indicated that students studying in higher education institutions experience greater, elevated level’s of acute stress caused by financial burdens, the extreme workload, and/or the copious amount of exams (Robotham and Julian, 2006).

Additionally, figures compiled by the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism depict that more than 40 percent students in undergraduate institutions in America binge drink at least once in a a 2 week span. I’ll however argue that, that number significantly doubles the bigger the students on campus. Here at Penn State for example, I’ll bet that our students will attest to drinking once or twice every week; what we here at Penn State call “Mad Max Monday’s”, “Turn up Tuesday’s”, “Thirsty Thursday’s “and etc.

Acute Stress and College Drinking  

Acute Stress is broadly described by psychologist and mental health professionals alike as a type of stress associated with situations or events happening in the present or near-future, along with recent past events and situations. Some indicators of this short term form of stress are; the “stress emotions” (depression, irritability, anger and/or anxiety). These individuals who continually experience acute stress reactions are said to have a separate and more severe form of stress exposure known as episodic acute stress. This I argue is what most college students have.

“I’m stressed, I need a Drink”

Researchers at Queen’s University, in the study published in Alcohol and Alcoholism, used results they accumulated from a small experiment containing 75 individuals to gauge the impact that acute stress has on the binge drinking that college students partake in during a drinking session. These subjects were all college students in their undergrad years between the ages of 17 and 23. In their study, these researchers used a procedure called the Trier Social Stress Test to provoke and measure acute stress reactions in participants.

In this study, some of the students had unlimited access to alcohol where others had unlimited access to the placebo -which was designed to look and taste just like alcohol or a identified non alcoholic drink. They prompted these students to participate in a half hour drinking session.  After the study the researchers concluded that the students with access to alcohol substantially increased the amount they drank after they were exposed to acute stress. However, neither the subjects who received the placebo or the ones receiving the clearly identified ‘non-alcoholic beverage’ had an increase in their level of consumption when exposed to acute stress levels. So based on their findings, the conclusion was that stress levels have a significant impact on the amount of alcohol consumed by college students in a typical drinking session.

What this goes to prove is that there is a correlation, not a causation -given there’s other mitigating factors, between the amount of stress college students withstand in higher education and the amount of drinking they participate in.

in simpler terms, Universities are helping to turn our students into alcoholics.

If interested in this conversation further, here’s a study on the Prevalence of binge drinking and associated behaviours among 3286 college students in France. A paper on the Influences of Stress and Beliefs on Alcohol Use. As well as a study disagreeing with the points I made, concluding that there is no relationship between high stress levels and harmful alcohol use, based on research done on 221undergraduate students in Botswana.

A meta-analysis of all the studies shows that there isn’t one definitive answer. Some studies say that the stress of college is a huge factor in college students binge drinking and dangerous alcohol use, while other say there isn’t a direct causation between the two (that there are third confounding variables; relationships, home-sickness, peer-pressure, etc.)

Nobody appreciates sleep as much as a college student. With that being said, no one sleeps less than a college student … OK, maybe a mom of a newborn baby. Point is, sleep in college is always like chasing someone you really like that plays hard to get. Personally speaking, the only time I am able to sleep the recommended 7-9 hours a night is on the weekends -given I don’t have dance practice that next morning.  I know very little about the human body, but I figure that has to be terrible for my overall physical and mental health. So for this blog post I figured I’ll find out just how important sleep is to human body, just how much sleep do we really need and am I going to die early because for the lack thereof?

What Does Science Say About Sleep? 

The American Sleep Association recommends 8 hours as the optimal amount of rest needed to prevent sleep deprivation. However, recent data received from National Institute of Health, the American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM), and the Sleep Research Society indicate that the old recommendation of a solid 8 hour a night isn’t necessarily the case for everyone. Researchers are starting observe that the amount of sleep that a person requires depends on their circadian rhythm -your body’s internal clock. 

Author of Sleep for Success, James Maas, PhD, former professor and chair of psychology at Cornell University says the proper amount of sleep is defined as what is needed for an individual to remain awake, refreshed and focused without the aide of stimulants, such as coffee or energy drinks. He added that if you aren’t able to stay awake, alert and focused from solely the amount of sleep you received the night before then you are suffering from some form of sleep deprivation. So, literally meaning me, everyday in college. 

So How many hours of sleep do you need?

The National institute of health says that the average adult sleeps roughly 6 hours a night. And while this may seem like enough given how fast paced everything is in society today it is proven to be that most healthy adults need between 7.5 to 9 hours of sleep each night to function at their best. In fact researchers at the University of California, Sans Francisco discovered that only 3% of the worlds population has a gene that allows them to be able to do well on only 6 hours of sleep a night. Meaning that the rest of us, 97% of us, need that recommended 7.5-9 hour rest to be fully great.  With that said, the chart below indicates that the younger you are the more sleep you need to meet your full potential awake. 

“Sleep Health”

Sleep Health is a modern field of research dedicated to studying the effects sleep has on your body. I’ll share one of it’s four broad categories, “Science,” which serves as the nuts and bolts of what sleep does for parts of your body internally as well as describes what sleep deprivation can do to decrease their levels of efficiency:

• The BRAIN:
  • Sleeping allows for cerebral spinal fluid to be pumped at a much higher/quicker rate than when you are awake. Your brain makes brain cells, the cerebral spinal fluid being pumped throughout the brain acts as sort of a ‘dishwasher’ ridding your body of the waste products created by these brain cells. Allowing you to wake up feeling refreshed and in sense, literally ‘clean’.
  • When sleep deprived your brain isn’t on it’s ‘A game, your mind slows down a lot;  you become forgetful and skills you may normally have when fully rested (good speaking capabilities, writing, etc.) are impaired slightly. Maas says there’s also sort of a reduction in your decision making capabilities due to your lack of focus.
  • Sleep deprivation effects your response time and messes with not only your form but your motor skills. Which explains while driving while sleepy is single handedly one of the hardest things one can do. Nothing works, rolling down the windows, blasting music, nothing but a good nights rest.
• Your LUNGS
  • While awake breathing patterns tend to vary significantly. For example, physical exercise, fear, excitement speeds up breathing rate. While you are asleep however, your breathing rate is slowed and regulated.
• Your HEART
  • Your heart works extremely hard during the day and during the Non-REM cycle part of sleep your heart gets a well deserved break. Sleeping allows your heart to be reduced as well as your blood pressure.
• Your MUSCLES
  • The more you sleep, the more and better equipped your body is to repair itself. Growth hormones, that work to build and strengthen your muscles and joints are released while you sleep.
• Your IMMUNE SYSTEM
  • Cumulative sleep deprivation over time can lessen your body’s ability to fight off an infection. Josiane Broussard, PhD, researcher and assistant professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, found that sleep deprivation -more specifically one night of no sleep, was just a detrimental to a person as having a high fat diet. Meaning that pulling an all righter can result in insulin sensitivity, a key predictor of type-2 diabetes, just as much as six months on a high-fat diet. Which was SHOCKING for me to learn. 

SO WHAT? 

I can give it to you 6 different ways, but no matter which way I put it, scientifically, psychologically speaking, SLEEP IS IMPORTANT. We all, myself included, are guilty of accumulating a large amount of Sleep Debt, and instead Just shaking it off, going “I’ll catch up on sleep this weekend.” But that is not how your body works; you can not make up for continuous sleep deprivation with one night of full rest. The science shows that there is a direct causation between the amount of sleep on gets and the productivity of their day and mind. I understand we are all in college and have busy, demanding school, work and social schedules, but it is rather imperative that we take care of ourselves if we have any hope of succeeding at any of these endeavors. 

Given that most of us are between the ages of 18-21 I will assume that we’ve all had our hearts broken at least once or twice. Heart break can be caused by many different things, and that’s what makes this mind-numbing emotion easily recognizable by nearly every person in the world.  Such as the physical/emotional loss of a loved one, or pet. It can even be caused by the feelings of betrayal, disappointment, and the realization that the love of a significant other is drifting far apart from where it originally was. Feelings of anxiety and panic -“Are we breaking up” -usually precede this heartbreaking emotion.

For those of you reading that statement and going “I can’t relate,” well you my friend, are very lucky. Getting your heart broken absolutely sucks. When your heart is broken it can feel like the end of the world. The type of heart break I’m unfortunately most familiar with is the heart break that follows a failed relationship. The heartbreak that has led me to binge eating, binge crying, and most noteworthy, Netflix binge-watching.

Side Note: after getting my heart broken the summer following my senior year, I watched the entire series of Naruto Shippuden (anime lovers unite). Yes, from the beginning. Yes, I was in a very dark place.

Lets Talk About The Physical Pain

Anyone who has ever gone through a heart break can attest to experiencing some type of physical pain, “My heart hurts!” This is due to the fact that emotions affect the physical health of an individual far more than we often realize. But I was curious as to how exactly do our body’s feel this emotional loss; in other words, what is it that brings the physical pain to our heart breaks? What is the Science behind it?

Can Heart Beaks Occur -Literally?

There have been several studies on heartbreaks and how it affects people. Most of which find a connection between emotional pain and the literal form of heart break -heart attack. The emotional stress of heartbreaks is harmful and it’s said to be a possible cause of what is called Broken Heart Syndrome (Takotsubo Cardiomyopathy), laid out in the image below.

Takotsubo Cardiomyopathy, something similar to a heart attack. occurs as a result of the body becoming overwhelmed with severe emotional/physical stress. These stressors can range from losing someone you love to fatal accidents. The exact cause of this is still up for debate but many experts believe that the surge of hormones (ex. adrenaline) brought on by emotional or physical stress essentially ‘stun’ the heart, triggering the heart muscle cells in it’s main chamber, the left ventricle, to change, This inevitably effects the way the heart contracts. Although it doesn’t completely kill the heart muscle, like a real heart attack, it sort of renders it useless.

The Science Behind Heartbreak

In 2010, at The University of Kentucky College of Arts and Sciences, a team of researchers, under the leadership of psychologist C. DeWall, Published a study examining the possible connection and overlap between physical pain and emotional (social) pain.

The first experiment contained a group of 62 healthy individuals who agreed to take 1,000 mg daily of acetaminophen (the active ingredient in Tylenol) or a placebo. Each night, the subjects then reported to researchers, using a  version of the  “Hurt Feelings Scale,”  how much they experienced social pain. The Hurt Feelings scale is a valid tool widely accepted by psychologist to measure one’s reported social pain. What researchers discovered was that ‘Hurt Feelings’ and overall social pain decreased over time in participants taking the daily acetaminophen, while the placebo subjects didn’t show any signs of change. There was no significant change in the levels of positive emotions observed in either group, that remained rather stable. The results of this study thus indicate that by impacting emotions linked to ‘hurt feelings’ using acetaminophen may decrease social pain over time.

Although DeWall was very excited about the findings, he knew the next step was to identify the neural mechanisms that lay beneath the results. This led to a second experiment.

In this second experiment, unlike the first, 25 healthy individuals were told to take 2,000 mg daily (twice the dose of the first experiment) of either acetaminophen or a placebo. After about three weeks of being on the pills, these participants in a computer game designed to create feelings of social rejection. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (f MRI) was used during the game and the findings were that in the brain regions associated with social pain as well as ones with the component of physical pain, acetaminophen decreased subjects neural responses to social rejection. In these regions, also known as the the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and anterior insula, the parts of the brain that are associated with physical pain lit up in the subjects taking the placebo, where as the subjects taking acetaminophen pills displayed significantly less brain activity in these areas as they responded to rejection.

The research results showed that the areas of the brain that resonate with emotional discomfort is also where physical pain is experienced. Which then offers and explanation for the subject that were taking the acetaminophen pill reported not having any physical pain yet were experiencing less feelings of hurt and rejection than that of the participants that were only taking the placebo substance.

Someone who is considered an expert in romantic relationships and co-authored the Kentucky study, Geoff MacDonald, PhD, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Toronto stated that the centers of our brain that feel pain can not really differentiate between what we consider to be physical vs. emotional pain. He also reminded us that physical pain, is just as serious as emotional pain and we shouldn’t dismiss the ‘touchy-feely’ aspect of it for the sake of it being superficial.

So there you have it. Next time, you are heart broken and someone tells you to “get over it” or “it’s not that deep” or something else insensitive along those lines, tell them that your heart is physically hurt . Then, show them this as proof that it’s not just you being whiny, you are scientifically justified to be sad.