That’s the takeaway finding from a new study from the McCombs School of Business at The University of Texas at Austin.

The researchers conducted experiments with nearly 800 smartphone users in an attempt to measure, for the first time, how well people can complete tasks when they have their smartphones nearby, even when they’re not using them.

In one experiment, the researchers asked participants to sit at a computer and take a series of tests that required full concentration in order to score well. The tests were geared to measure participants’ available cognitive capacity – that is, the brain’s ability to hold and process data at any given time. Before beginning, participants were randomly instructed to place their smartphones either on the desk face down, in their pocket or personal bag, or in another room. All participants were instructed to turn their phones to silent.

Brain drain

The researchers found that those whose phones were in another room significantly outperformed those with their phones on the desk, and they also slightly outperformed those participants who had kept their phones in a pocket or bag.

The findings suggest that the mere presence of one’s smartphone reduces available brain power and impairs cognitive functioning, even though people feel they’re giving their full attention and focus to the task at hand.

“We see a linear trend that suggests that as the smartphone becomes more noticeable, participants’ available cognitive capacity decreases,” said co-author and McCombs Assistant Professor Adrian Ward. “Your conscious mind isn’t thinking about your smartphone, but that process – the process of requiring yourself to not think about something – uses up some of your limited cognitive resources. It’s a brain drain.”

Dependence

In another experiment, researchers looked at how a person’s self-reported smartphone dependence – or how strongly a person feels he or she needs to have a smartphone in order to get through a typical day – affected cognitive capacity.

Participants performed the same series of computer-based tests under the same conditions as the first group. Those who reported being the most dependent on their smartphones performed significantly worse compared with their less-dependent peers, especially when they kept their smartphones on the desk or in their pocket or bag.

The researchers write “Ironically, the more consumers depend on their smartphones, the more they seem to suffer from their presence or, more optimistically, the more they may stand to benefit from their absence.”

An unconscious distraction

Ward and his colleagues also found that it didn’t matter whether a person’s smartphone was turned on or off, or whether it was lying face up or face down on a desk. Having a smartphone within sight or within easy reach was an unconscious distraction that reduced a person’s ability to focus and perform tasks because part of their brain is actively working to not pick up or use the phone.

“It’s not that participants were distracted because they were getting notifications on their phones,” said Ward. “The mere presence of their smartphone was enough to reduce their cognitive capacity.”

Natural Health News —The well-being and happiness of society are critical indicators of a nation’s economic and social development, and should be a key aim for policymakers, according to a new report.

The first World Happiness Report, released in 2012 ahead of the UN high-level meeting on Happiness and Well-being, drew international attention as a landmark first survey of the state of global happiness. The World Happiness Report 2015 digs even deeper into the data and looks at the changes in happiness levels in 158 countries, and examines the reasons behind the statistics.

This latest report also comes in a watershed for global citizens, with the pending adoption by UN member states of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in September to help guide the world community towards a more inclusive and sustainable pattern of global development. The authors believe their work offers world leaders crucial information on how to shape a happier, healthier society.

The report, produced by the Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN), contains analysis from leading experts in the fields of economics, neuroscience, national statistics, and describes how measurements of subjective well-being can be used effectively to assess national progress. It also identifies the countries with the highest levels of happiness as being:

1. Switzerland
2. Iceland
3. Denmark
4. Norway
5. Canada

“As the science of happiness advances, we are getting to the heart of what factors define quality of life for citizens,” said Professor John F. Helliwell, of the University of British Columbia and the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, one of the editors of the report. “We are encouraged that more and more governments around the world are listening and responding with policies that put well-being first. Countries with strong social and institutional capital not only support greater well-being, but are more resilient to social and economic crises.”

Happy children become happy adults

Where does your country come in the happiness chart? (Click to enlarge)

This year for the first time ever, the Report breaks down the data by gender, age, and region. It finds striking differences, some much larger than have previously been found.”A positive outlook during the early stages of life is inherently desirable, but it also lays the foundation for greater happiness during adulthood,” said Layard. “As we consider the value of happiness in today’s report, we must invest early on in the lives of our children so that they grow to become independent, productive and happy adults, contributing both socially and economically.”

Our happiness say the researchers is also strongly influenced by our social environment including family and friendships at the individual level, the presence of trust and empathy at the neighborhood and community levels, and power and quality of the over-arching social norms that determine the quality of life within and among nations and generations. When these social factors are well-rooted and readily available, communities and nations are more resilient.

The authors urge politicians and policymakers to take the importance of these factors seriously when formulating policies for change.

According to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research, ethical consumption is motivated by a need for consumers to turn their emotions about unethical practices into action.

“Advocates of ethical consumerism suggest that consumers should consider the environmental and human costs of the products they choose, but unfortunately only a small number of people in North America consume ethically on a regular basis while most consumers just look for good deals and ignore the social impact of the products they buy. Why are some consumers willing to spend time, money, and energy on making more responsible choices?” writes author Ahir Gopaldas  of Fordham University.

After analysing dozens of websites of advocacy groups and companies driven by ethical mission statements, and conducting at-home interviews with people who identify as ethical consumers, the author identified three common emotions driving ethical behaviour – contempt, concern and celebration.

• Contempt happens when ethical consumers feel anger and disgust toward the corporations and governments they consider responsible for environmental pollution and labour exploitation.
• Concern stems from a concern for the victims of rampant consumerism, including workers, animals, ecosystems, and future generations.
• Celebration occurs when ethical consumers experience joy from making responsible choices and hope from thinking about the collective impact of their individual choices.

Advocates of ethical consumerism, he says, should consider the role of emotions in motivating consumers to make more responsible decisions. For example, anger can motivate consumers to reject unethical products and concern can encourage consumers to increase charitable donations, while joy and hope can lead consumers to cultivate ethical habits such as participating in recycling programs.

“This research has critical implications for advocacy groups, ethical brand managers, and anyone else trying to encourage mainstream consumers to make more ethical choices. It is simply not enough to change people’s minds. To change society, one must also change people’s hearts. Sentiments ignite passion, fuel commitment, and literally move people to action,” the author concludes.

A damning new study in the US,  published in the current edition of the Annals of Family Medicine looked at doctors prescribing habits. The researchers interviewed 58 clinicians and 70 patients at 44 primary care clinics in a low income area in the US state of Michigan.

They found that 40% of people over age 60 were taking 5 medications or more – a finding echoed by national figures from the US Centres for Disease Control data which show 37% of adults over 60 taking 5 or more medications.

In the UK more than 20% of adults over the age of 70 are taking five or more drugs.

Damaging to patient health and wealth

In the current study the average prescriptions per patient was 4.8. That figure is all the more shocking when you realise that this particular study focused mainly on clinics serving mainly low income and minority patients.

Cash-strapped clinics serving cash-strapped patients might be expected to follow a path of restraint and awareness not only of the cost of drugs, but the potential for drug cocktails to cause further harm to health. What is more the researchers noted that many patients were put onto drug regimes “after having moderately elevated test results (often at levels considered normal just a few years ago)”.

So why are the doctors prescribing drugs instead of lifestyle changes, which would probably be more effective?

These physicians, say the researchers, are caught up in an “auditing and reward system.” That means physicians are pushed by insurance companies to make patients ‘numbers’ (blood pressure and blood sugar, for example) fit into inflexible ‘norms’  that can only be achieved by multiple drug manipulation and then are rewarded by drug companies for prescribing more and more drugs. Nowhere in this system is it recognised that patient health and well being suffers as a result.

Drug reps influence prescribing habits

In this study 72% of the clinicians interviewed had regular contact with drug reps and 62% saw more than 10 reps each week. While protesting that they always were alert for commercial bias, 77% reported finding the information they received from the reps useful.

The result of throwing a lot of drugs at people with diabetes or hypertension is predictable

Adverse reactions go up, and because most physicians are trained to treat symptoms not causes what is called a ‘prescribing cascade’ (but which is more of an avalanche) kicks in.

For each new symptom a new drug is prescribed and the physicians either don’t recognise the adverse reactions for what they are, or else feel they pressured by guidelines over ‘healthy numbers’  to continue prescribing regardless.

The social cost impact of this avalanche of drugs is considerable. Patients, particularly those on incomes, end up spending more and more money on  drugs leaving less for the things that might truly enrich health – such as a healthy diet, or even a holiday.

Doctors with blinders on

According to the study around a quarter of the clinicians interviewed acknowledged the problem of managing multiple medications but, “When discussing these complicated issues, only 1 clinician mentioned prescribing fewer drugs; all the rest focused on reaching goal numbers by either adding or changing medications.”

Further quotes from the study are sad and revealing A typical case report showed:

“Her diabetes medications cause diarrhea and bouts of hypoglycemia, which interferes with her ability to leave her home because she must eat and go to the bathroom so frequently. She also had 5 visits to the emergency department in 1 month for excruciating headaches, before they were determined to be an adverse effect of the additional hypertension medication she had been prescribed after her diabetes diagnosis. … At her most recent appointment, her physician happily told her: ‘Your blood pressure is 130/78 [mm Hg], your A1c is 7.0[%], and your cholesterol was normal. Very good!'”

The researchers retort:

“On the basis of current standards, the clinician classified this patient as healthy, a success story; however, this classification does not address the broader question of her well-being. Getting test numbers into the stipulated range jeopardized her employment and led to repeated hospitalizations and serious financial burden.”

In the mean time some clinicians seem genuinely bewildered by the fact that the drugs aren’t working:

“I’ve got patients on 4 different medications and their blood pressure is still uncontrolled. We try sending them to the cardiologists, and they say, ‘Just keep adding stuff because there’s really nothing we can do about this.’…Some people whose blood pressure that we do get normal again, they don’t function very well at all. I’m not sure why.”

Things need to change

With 45% of the US population having been diagnosed with a chronic condition and nearly 40% of people older than 60 taking five or more medications, researchers raise questions about the nature of the relationship between the expanding definition of chronic illness, the increasingly close relationship between doctors and pharmaceutical companies and the explosion in pharmaceutical use in the United States.

The authors identified several challenges to patient well-being resulting from the heavy reliance on pharmaceuticals, notably financial costs and adverse drug effects.

To reverse these trends and limit the influence of the pharmaceutical industry on clinical practice, the authors call for 1) policies that will exclude individuals or organisations with financial conflicts of interest from involvement with clinical guideline-writing panels, 2) physicians to be discouraged from seeing drug representatives, and 3) the monitoring of clinician auditing and reward plans for evidence of unintended negative effects on patients.

Where is the patient’s voice?

Interestingly, in this study patients’ views – on their health, or their level of satisfaction with this treatment were not reported. If they had they might have shown something similar to what has just been revealed in the UK.

A recent analysis of the British Social Attitudes Survey by the Kings Fund found that patient satisfaction with the NHS had dropped to just 58%. The researchers were loathe to blame poor care and instead shifted the blame to negative political rhetoric in the media. That was three months ago.

This week it was revealed that complaints against UK doctors have reached record levels, rising 23% in the last year alone. This means that 1 in 64 doctors now facing the possibility of an investigation by the General Medical Council. Figures for the first six months of 2012 show a further rise of 27%.

When doctor complaints rise the usual response is blame the patient. In this respect the ‘ chief executive Niall Dickson didn’t disappoint. He blamed the rise on patients’ “high expectations” of medical care.

In the US, figures from the American Medical Association show more than 60% of doctors over the age of 55 have been sued at least once in their career.

Satisfied patients don’t sue. Years of data have shown that what patients most want when they complain about a doctors is a dialogue about care that left them feeling uncared for. They want an explanation of what went wrong, an admission of that the doctors got it wrong, and an apology.

In both the UK and US most complaints never see the light of day. They are either denied or withdrawn before any possibility of such a dialogue.

Dead patients are the happiest

Measuring patient satisfaction is never easy or straightforward. In the US a recent survey found that the most satisfied patients had an 8% lower rate of visits to the emergency room compared to the least satisfied. Fair enough.

But it also found that:

• The most satisfied patients had a 12% higher hospital inpatient admission rate;
• The most satisfied patients had a 9% higher prescription and total healthcare costs; AND
• A 26% higher mortality.

Given the state of medical care on both sides of the Atlantic, is anyone particularly shocked that dead patients are more likely to be satisfied with their care? For them, at least, the ordeal of modern conventional healthcare is over.

In fact it’s very difficult to quantify, especially when comparing natural versus mainstream healthcare.

Now, the international campaign group, Alliance for Natural Health International in collaboration with Neal’s Yard Remedies, the UK-based natural beauty and health company, has published an elegant infographic that shows where food supplements and herbal remedies sit in the continuum of risk of death related to a range of everyday activities in the UK.

In spite of the irrational and more or less continual natural healthcare bashing that goes on in the mainstream media, both food supplements and herbal remedies come out  in the ‘supersafe’ category of individual risk  – meaning risk of death from their consumption is less than 1 in 10 million.

Startling data

The chart’s figures are startling. When compared with the risk of taking food supplements, for example, an individual is around 900 times more likely to die from food poisoning, 1,700 times more likely to die from a bicycling accident and nearly 300,000 times more likely to die from a preventable medical injury during a spell in a UK hospital (and the risk of dying in hospital is nearly identical to that of death to active military service in Iraq or Afghanistan!)

In addition, adverse reactions to pharmaceutical drugs are 62,000 times more likely to kill a UK citizen than taking food supplement, and 7,750 times more likely than herbal remedies.

These data, collated by Ron Law, an independent New Zealand-based risk management consultant, are laid out in two formats – an easy to understand bubble chart (see below) and a more traditional bar chart.

Click here to see full sized version

Shining a light

ANH International executive and scientific director, Robert Verkerk PhD, hailed the figures as shedding new light on the vexed question of natural healthcare’s safety.

“These figures tell us not only what activities an individual is most or least likely to die from, but also what the relative risks of various activities are to society as a whole. It puts some real perspective on the actual risk of death posed by food supplements and herbal remedies at a time when governments are clamping down because they tell us they’re dangerous.”

Neal’s Yard Remedies’ owner Peter Kindersley said he he looked forward to releasing further data based on EU-wide data very soon.

“There have been many attempts to discredit the safety of natural supplements by ‘Big Pharma’ which sees them as a threat its singular goal – global domination of the health market. With 30 years’ experience in natural health we know how safe, but also how effective supplements and natural remedies are. More and more people are beginning to assert their rights to maintain their health through natural methods. It’s important to have research -based information that they can understand and trust to support them in their choices.”

Both men stress that the data include only risk of acute, or sudden, death, rather than the risk of death from chronic, long-term exposure, or the risk of sub-lethal side effects. Nevertheless the overall pattern of risk from various activities continues to show that food supplements are by far the safest group of substances consumed by humans.

Time for officialdom to take notice

The hope, say both Verkerk and Kindersley, is that these new figures should help to put pressure on European and UK authorities to reduce regulatory burdens on natural health products.

Both are keen for people to read and understand these figures, to get some perspective on the safety of natural products and to spread the word by sharing the charts and references on Facebook, Twitter and other social media and by passing them on to  friends and family members.

“Governments justify the increasingly elaborate and restrictive new laws affecting natural health products on grounds of public safety”, said Verkerk. “But the evidence is simply not there – where are the bodies?”

Kindersley adds that the more informed people are the harder it will be for detractors of natural medicine to claim that it is a danger to the public and in need of further regulation or banning.

UPDATE: An additional graphic based on EU-wide data is now available – click here.

• Download the UK relative risks bubble chart as a PDF / data sources as a PDF
• Download the UK relative risks bar chart as a PDF / data sources as a PDF

US researchers conducted a series of eight studies in which their participants were asked to predict various future outcomes, including the 2008 US Democratic presidential nominee, the box-office success of different movies, the winner of American Idol, movements of the Dow Jones Index, even the weather.

Despite the range of events and prediction horizons (i.e.when the future outcome would be determined), the results across all studies consistently revealed that people with higher trust in their feelings were more likely to correctly predict the final outcome than those with lower trust in their feelings. The researchers call this phenomenon the emotional oracle effect.

Across studies, the researchers used two different methods to manipulate or measure how much individuals relied on their feelings to make their predictions. Their findings are published in the Journal of Consumer Research.

Highly accurate predictions

Regardless of the method used, however, participants who trusted their feelings in general or were encouraged to trust their feelings experimentally were more accurate in their predictions compared to participants with lower trust in their in their feelings and participants in a control group.

In one study involving the Clinton-Obama contest in 2008, high-trust-in-feelings respondents predicted correctly for Obama about 72% of the time compared with low-trust respondents, who predicted for Obama about 64%of the time – a striking result given that major polls reflected a very tight race between Clinton and Obama at that time.

For the winner of American Idol, the difference was 41% for high-trust-in-feelings respondents compared to 24% or low-trust respondents. In another study participants were even asked to predict future levels of the Dow Jones stock market index. Those who trusted their feelings were 25% more accurate than those who trusted their feelings less.

Feelings are a synopsis of what we know

The researchers explain their findings through a “privileged window” hypothesis. Lead author Professor Michel Pham, Kravis Professor of Business, Marketing, Columbia Business School explains: “When we rely on our feelings, what feels ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ summarises all the knowledge and information that we have acquired consciously and unconsciously about the world around us.

“It is this cumulative knowledge, which our feelings summarise for us, that allows us make better predictions. In a sense, our feelings give us access to a privileged window of knowledge and information – a window that a more analytical form of reasoning blocks us from.”

Local knowledge helps

The researchers do caution, however, that some amount of relevant knowledge appears to be required to more accurately forecast the future.

For example, in one study participants were asked to predict the weather. While participants who trusted their feelings were again better able to predict the weather, they were only able to do so for the weather in their own zip codes, not for the weather in Beijing or Melbourne.

Co author, Professor Leonard Lee, Associate Professor, Marketing, Columbia Business School, explains this is because “…they don’t possess a knowledge base that would help them to make those predictions.” As another example, only those who had some background knowledge about the current football season benefited from trust in feelings in predicting the winner of the national college football BCS game.

All in all, the study is a really interesting endorsement of the fact that given a proper knowledge base, the future need not be totally indecipherable if we simply learn to trust our feelings. Or to put it another way – just try to follow your heart!

In fact, research shows that people who place a high value on wealth, status and stuff are more depressed and anxious and less sociable than those who do not.

New evidence shows that materialism, however, is not just a personality defect but arises from cues in our environment. The study appears in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

Consumerism’s antisocial effects

In two of four experiments, university students were put in a materialistic frame of mind by tasks that exposed them to images of luxury goods or words mobilising consumerist values (versus neutral scenes devoid of consumer products or words without such connotations).

Completing questionnaires afterwards, those who looked at the pictures of cars, electronics, and jewellery rated themselves higher in depression and anxiety, less interested in social activities like parties, and more in solitary pursuits than the others.

Those primed to materialism by exposure to certain words evinced more competitiveness and less desire to invest their time in pro-social activities like working for a good cause.

In two other experiments, participants completed tasks that were framed as surveys – one of consumer responses, another of citizens’.

Greed divides us

The first experiment involved moving words toward or away from the participant’s name on a computer screen – positive and negative emotion words and “neutral” ones that actually suggested materialism (wealth, power), self-restraint (humble, discipline), transcendence of self, or self-indulgence.

The people who answered the “consumer response survey” more quickly “approached” the words that reflected materialistic values than those in the “citizen” survey.

The last experiment presented participants with a hypothetical water shortage in a well shared by four people, including themselves. The water users were identified either as consumers or individuals. Might the collective identity as consumers – as opposed to the individual role – supersede the selfishness ordinarily stimulated by the consumer identity? No.

The “consumers” rated themselves as less trusting of others to conserve water, less personally responsible and less in partnership with the others in dealing with the crisis. The consumer status, the authors concluded “did not unite; it divided.”

Redefining ourselves

The findings have both social and personal implications, says lead author psychologist Galen V Bodenhausen at Northwestern University, Illinois. “It’s become commonplace to use consumer as a generic term for people,” in the news or discussions of taxes, politics, or health care.”

But using terms such as Americans or Britions or simply “citizens” instead, he noted, “activates different psychological concerns.”

According to Bodenhausen, “We can also take personal initiative to reduce the depressive, isolating effects of a materialist mindset by avoiding its stimulants – most obviously, advertising. One method: “Watch less TV.”

The Happiness Index

The study emerges at the same time as a UN conference in New York, where delegates packed the hall to discuss the notion that happiness is just as important to a country’s success as its gross national product (GNP).

Hosted by the Kingdom of Bhutan, where ‘gross national happiness‘ (GNH) is acknowledged as being more important than ‘gross national product’ (GNP), the three-day conference aimed to produce a comprehensive report for UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon with a road map indicating how to improve happiness around the world.

A key idea of the conference is the major role that environmental stability and “fair use” of resources plays in a nation’s happiness. Costa Rica, which has the greenest economy in the world, was lauded as a model.

Speakers included Ban, Costa Rican President Laura Chinchilla, and ministers from India, Japan, Israel, Morocco, Thailand, Australia, and the United Kingdom. It also featured 2001 Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and Jeffrey Sachs, director of Columbia University’s Earth Institute.

Beyond  GNP

Sachs took the opportunity to launch the Earth Institute’s first World Happiness Report. Perhaps inevitably  some of the richest countries such as Denmark, Norway, Finland, and the Netherlands were also amongst the happiest while the least happy countries were all poor countries in sub-Saharan Africa such as Togo, Benin, Central African Republic and Sierra Leone .

But wealth alone, argued Sachs, was not the most important indicator of happiness. Rather it as what countries did with their wealth and the values around which they organised their societies. The strength of social support, the absence of corruption and the degree of personal freedom were also vital.

“GNP by itself does not promote happiness,” Sachs told the conference. “The US has had a three time increase of GNP per capita since 1960, but the happiness needle hasn’t budged. Other countries have pursued other policies and achieved much greater gains of happiness, even at much lower levels of per capita income.”

Happiness can be learned

Happiness, Sachs said, is a trait that can be learned – such as by teaching children honestly, and altruistic and compassionate values.

The report also listed a number of practical suggestions for governments to promote happiness among their citizens including helping people meet their basic needs, reinforcing social systems, implementing active labour policies, improving mental health services  and – echoing the findings of the Northwestern study – helping the public resist hyper-commercialism.