The Beer Goggles - Does Alcohol make people more attractive?

Ben - Drinking alcohol makes everyone appear more attractive. Not just members of the opposite sex. Marcus Munafo was one of the researchers involved. Marcus, how did you actually test this out?

Marcus - We studied social drinkers. Relatively young social drinkers who were mostly in their twenties. We brought them into the laboratory and randomised them to receive a drink which either contained alcohol or didn’t. Then we asked them to rate 20 male and 20 female faces for how attractive they found them. We were interested in the effects of alcohol but we were also interested in whether or not the effects that were there might be specific to opposite sex faces. For that reason we explicitly recruited people who reported themselves as being heterosexual.

Ben - It seems to me that when you give someone a drink and you tell them that this is an alcoholic drink there may be a placebo effect. They assume that drinking alcohol seem more attractive so maybe that affected things. Did you control for that placebo?

Marcus - We did as best we can. We conducted the study double-blind so people received a drink which was either vodka and tonic with lime flavouring or just tonic water with lime flavouring and those drinks were chilled so that in fact when you’re drinking the drink, whether it contains alcohol or not, you’re not actually able to tell. The experimenter was also blind to the conditions. In that respect we did what we could to avoid expecting the effect. The problem is that when you’re dealing with a drug like alcohol half an hour later the effects become apparent. It’s difficult for participants to remain blind to which condition they’re in over the course of 45 minutes or an hour. Certainly when they were consuming the drink they didn’t seem to be able to tell the difference between the two.

Ben - What did you actually find?

Marcus - We found what you might expect which is that people in the alcohol condition rated faces on average about 10% more attractive than people in the placebo condition. We found a couple of interesting things. One was that actually the amount of alcohol that we used was relatively small. It was equivalent to maybe a large glass of wine or maybe a pint of beer. That was enough to elicit this 10% difference in rating attractiveness. That occurred without people showing any changes in their self-reported moods. We are seeking to also rate how they felt in themselves: happy anxious and so on. There was no difference between the alcohol and placebo conditions in ratings of mood. The other interesting thing was no effect specific to opposite sex faces. Men rated other men as more attractive as well as women. Women rated other women as more attractive, as well as men.

Ben - Could this be a general thing in that alcohol makes us more receptive? Does it make everything more beautiful? We know there are parts of the brain that specifically look for faces but would this also make a painting more attractive?

Marcus - This is something that we’d like to follow up. We didn’t include a control condition of pictures of animals, pictures of landscapes that people could meaningfully describe as attractive. In future studies it would be interesting to do that. To see whether or not the effect is specific to faces or not. Clearly an interesting question is, as you say, the extent to which this effect is specific to facial expressions or a more general effect on how we process visual stimuli in the environment and so on.

Ben - So sociologically what does this mean for us when we drink even a small amount of alcohol we find people both of the same sex and the opposite sex more attractive?

Marcus - This is part of a broader programme of research which is looking at the way in which alcohol affects processing of faces and in particular the processing of emotional cues in faces and attractiveness. The reason we’re interested in that is because certain behaviours become more common after alcohol. They include sex, aggression and so on. Some of those behaviours have an impact on society. It’s worthwhile understanding what mechanisms give rise to the increased likelihood of those behaviours. Our hypothesis is that if alcohol is affecting the way in which we interpret faces that might drive these behaviours particularly because facial expressions are a strong component of social interaction. Given that there are effects on ratings of facial attractiveness even at quite small doses that could in part explain why people drink alcohol in the first place. It may make the world around you a more pleasant place, it may make you more likely to drink in certain environments or when you’re around certain people. It also might explain why people are more likely to engage in particular behaviours such as unsafe sex, for example.

Ben - So does the fact that we appear to process faces differently account for why we become more violent? You’d have thought if we think things are more attractive then in fact we’d be more attracted to them and less likely to become violent?

Marcus - There are two aspects to that. One is that we have a separate series of studies which is explicitly looking at how we decode emotional expressions faces and we’re finding some interesting results there. For example, if you have ambiguous facial expressions which are a blend of anger and disgust then after alcohol consumption it seems you’re more likely to interpret those ambiguous faces as representing anger (as opposed to representing disgust). Those effects seem to be specific to male faces. There could be parallel effects. Alcohol could both be affecting how we’d rate the attractiveness of faces but also how we decode emotional cues in those faces. Those are not necessarily the same thing. They could be dissociated. A further line that we want to pursue is the extent to which social cues and social context modify the effect of alcohol. For example, in the present study we found that everyone rated everyone as more attractive but in more ecological studies that have been conducted in less controlled conditions but in a more representative environment in bars the effects do seem specific to opposite sex faces. It could be that there’s a general effect of alcohol on how we process facial expression. When that occurs in a particular social environment or context it becomes targeted on opposite sex faces. The interaction of the pharmacological effect of alcohol and the social effect of the environment is really where we’d like to go with this.

August 2008

Treating Age-Related Macular Degeneration

Meera - Recently I went to the Globe theatre in London for a special event organised by the London Project to Cure Blindness. The event aimed to increase awareness about therapies currently in development to age-related macular degeneration or AMD, the most common cause of blindness in people over 60. Given how common this disease is there are currently few treatments available with one form of the disease having no treatment at all. The director of the London Project is Pete Coffey from University College London. I spoke to him at the event to find out more about the therapies he’s working on and also to find out just what age-related macular degeneration is.

Pete - It’s a disease of the eye which affects the elderly, typically over the age of 60. It affects the cells at the back of the eye. That’s the seeing part of the eye. These cells in a very small area, known as the macular which is where your highest visual acuity is deteriorate, die and then no longer support the retina. The retina starts to die as well and that’s when the person goes blind. There’s a form called ‘wet.’ The reason it’s called wet is that during the disease process vessels at the back of the eye start to grow into it and become very leaky. There’s a dry form in which you get the cells dying but you don’t see that bleed into the eye typically. The largest population is the dry form and the dry form today doesn’t have any clinical therapy available. What this project is trying to do is to replace those cells.

Meera - How many people are affected with AMD?

Pete - In Europe about 14 million people suffer from some form of age-related macular degeneration; in the UK typically 25% of the population over the age of 60. This is a huge problem: much bigger than neurological diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

Meera - What are some of the major problems experienced by someone with AMD?

Pete - They’re unable to read in the first instance. They find it very difficult to read text even when it’s magnified. They then lose the ability in all the central vision so they can’t even recognise faces, they’re own family to the point where very blurred peripheral vision is the only thing they experience.

Meera - What are you hoping to look into with the London Project?

Pete - The London Project wants to use stem cells, turn the stem cells into eye cells and replace those dead cells at the back of the eye. The way in which we aim to do that is to deliver a patch of cells which can be placed into a patient’s eye surgically within a 30 minute surgical procedure.

Meera - Why are stem cells good for this?

Pete - Stem cells are very good for this because they are very young. They are very plastic. Because the eye in the elderly patient is aged, it’s diseased we can replace them with healthy, young, new support cells.

Meera - Do you have any idea of the success rate hoped for?

Pete - At the moment in late stage disease when we’ve used the patient’s own cells we’re getting about 25% success rate. We hope to improve that and perform the operation much earlier in the disease which will give a greater success.

Meera - You say you’ve used the patient’s own cells, form their own eyes?

Pete - From their own eyes. The cells have been harvested from non-diseased areas. You take those cells from an area which they won’t miss vision from so very peripheral and you place them under the very high acuity area which is the macular.

Meera - What happens to the region which you’ve just removed the cells from?

Pete - The region from which we’ve removed them from does actually go blind because you’ve taken those support cells away. It’s very peripheral and the patient doesn’t mind that as long as they can see where they’re going, what they’re eating. They are more concerned their high visual acuity rather than their peripheral vision.

Meera - One of the current treatments involves taking some healthy support cells from the undamaged region of an AMD patient’s eye, usually cells from the periphery and transplanting those healthy cells into the same patient’s damaged macular region to restore central vision. This method isn’t possible in patients with severe damage and isn’t always guaranteed. With the London Project the team are researching possible treatment using human embryonic stem cells. These stem cells can be guided into becoming support cells and create a small patch of these cells that can then be put straight into a patient’s eye where they then support the retina and potentially give the patient their sight back. It sounds promising but have they got any evidence with stem cells to prove that it’s really possible?

Pete - We’ve shown that they have the profile we would want them to have as eye cells. We’ve managed to put them on patches. We’ve managed to place them in animal models of the disease. We’ve also gone through a surgical procedure exactly the same way as we would do it in the clinic and it’s been very successful.

Meera - That night I also met the surgeon who was hoping to make this all happen. Dr Lynden da Cruz from Moorfields Eye Hospital. He told me how in practice these stem cell patches are going to make treatment for AMD easier.

Lynden - These stem cell patches we hope to be delivered much more simply by a larger number of surgeons and might be available across a greater number of people such that we could create thousands of the patches and then have them available.

Meera - Part of the problem you were saying when it comes to treating the dry form is that there’s quite a narrow window because you don’t want to do it to early before because the procedures are complex. If you do it too late it’s too late, basically. How is this stem cell procedure going to help with that timing?

Lynden - That’s a good point. In wet degeneration which we’ve been treating people would lose their vision over a very short period of time, maybe a week or even two weeks. That flagged up the period from when they went from a normal retina to a retina they couldn’t see with. That meant that the retina was pretty healthy. We could do our transplants or translocations and we have good results. With dry degeneration it progresses over months or even years. That means the vision is slowly being lost. We often end up doing the operations very late. This means the chance of getting good recovery’s low. By creating a stem cells patch, a much simpler operation with lower risks we’ll be able to do the operation much earlier in the disease and hopefully rescue a lot more vision.

Meera - Research into the potential use of stem cell patches to be transplanted into the eye could lead to treatment for a disease that not only affects so many in our population but also currently has no treatment available at all. The therapy has only been verified in animals so far but if the research continues to develop it could potentially help and entire generation to live a lot more comfortably.

August 2008

Chemistry Rap and the Contraceptive Pill

Meera - World-renowned chemist, Professor Carl Djerassi gave a talk at the Royal Society in London. Carl’s quite a legend as he was the creator of the first steroidal contraceptive pill but he’s retired from the world of chemistry now and mastered the profession of playwriting. Occasionally even using rap as a medium to communicate science. His event in London was titled ‘Washing dirty labcoats in public.’ I met up with him to find out what exactly he was trying to portray in his talk.

Carl - When one talks to the general public about science one usually talks about the science that has been done: the discoveries, the inventions. I wanted to talk about the behaviour and culture of scientists which is totally unknown really to the general public, or else exaggerated as Frankensteins or nerds. I am sure that we are human beings with all of our qualities as well as foibles. I try to illustrate this both in my novels which I call Science in Fiction and in my plays which I call Science in Theatre.

Meera - Would you say you’re trying to get people to see the darker sides because there’s not enough of that shown in the public as it is or are you trying to show it as the culture as a whole? Both the positives and the darker sides?

Carl - Absolutely the latter! I come from that culture and I cannot shed it. I think it is really the most cooperative of human endeavours and the most brutally competitive at the same time. That is the unusual thing. It is important that people realise this. I think the unrealistic thing is to put scientists on a pedestal. The other thing is, since I’m talking to a woman, it’s one of the evolving issues in every one of my plays and novels that they were all of modern women in a male-dominated discipline. There’s a very phallo-centric nature of science which is expected because it was created exclusively by men who established the rules of the game. Now that women are getting those chairs and professorships of departments so I’m writing about this. I’m writing about the barriers.

Meera - It’s interesting that you talk about the role of women in the world of science. Some of your earlier discoveries had an effect on the place of women in society to begin with. You obviously were one of the inventors of the first steroidal contraceptive pill. Is that something that has resulted from things like the pill?

Carl - I was involved in the first chemical synthesis of the oral contraceptive pill. I’m a chemist. That we did in 1951. Norethindrone was the first kind of oral contraceptive to be synthesised. The recognition and impact that oral contraceptives would have on women in the world, I think one would be lying if one said, all these people knew that in the 1950s. No one expected women would accept it that quickly and on that huge scale. The implications which also happened, people forget this, in the 1960s people say the pill caused the sexual revolution. In the 1960s was the decade of rock and roll, music, the hippy culture and most importantly the women’s liberation movement which really moved in the middle and late 1960s, particularly in The States. It was that mixture, even though the chemical was done in 1951, the approval in the United States only came in 1960. It came at exactly the right time.

Meera - Are you quite proud what’s happened as a result of you creating such a steroid?

Carl - Absolutely. If I could do it all over again would I do it? I say the answer’s yes.

Meera - You had a very flourishing career as a chemist. What made you want to start writing plays to show the culture of science today?

Carl - It was a remarkable transition because through the work on the pill there was a lot of lecture and teaching and directed research in this area for a number of years. I realised there what I really was talking about was the culture and psychological, legal aspects which are much more complex. I’d decided to become an intellectual smuggler. Really smuggle information that people either don’t want to hear or they’re afraid of it or they’ve no opportunity for it in the guise of fiction. That’s why I call it science in fiction rather than science fiction but hide it within an interesting story so people would continue to read and turn the pages. When they did get to the last page they’d learn something they didn’t know before.

Meera - You said you use some things like a rap in order to get our information across. How well have those been received?

Carl - That went fantastically well. These two raps that I commissioned, I didn’t do them – nor did I sing them, I commissioned for Oxygen and NO. I did this rap yesterday, one of them – the Oxygen rap at the Royal Society. There weren’t any young people there but they were all beaming and bouncing. Rap is a very interesting style. If you think about even some vicious rap it has some interesting pedagogical information transmittal aspects. It’s a very modern form of music and it’s unusual to do it on the concept of science. I will, of course, give them unusual names so people get interested and to see if they’ll absorb some information.

Meera - What part of your career would you say you’ve enjoyed the most? The part as a chemist or the part as a novelist playwrite?

Carl - What I’m doing now is one play that I’m writing now, again some non-fiction in dialogic form and giving lots of lectures, particularly in Europe. I enjoy that now, no question. One of the reasons is because I am entirely, totally 100% involved in this without any infrastructure. As a scientist in a team you have to write grant applications, this, that and so on. Things move on even if you don’t do anything. Well, now if I don’t write no one else is going to do it for me. I enjoy that most.

Meera - Even if anyone else did do it for him I don’t think they’d do it as well. Karl’s now written over ten plays and even more novels which have all had success world-wide in portraying the culture of science. I’ll leave you with another insert of his modern method of chemistry education.

August 2008

Swinging for the Sweet Spot

Have you every wondered why when you hit a ball sometimes it goes miles and other times you just end up with a ball at your feet and a very painful hand? Find out here.

What you need

What to Do

What may Happen

You should find that the ball seems to bounce off parts of the bat better than others, and sometimes when it doesn't bounce well the bat vibrates a lot.