Kory Floyd speaks about humans’ need for affection. Floyd spoke during the 13th annual Life Sciences and Society Symposium on Saturday, Oct. 7. | Photo by Roger Meissen, Bond LSC
By Samantha Kummerer | Bond LSC
Kory Floyd was stressed and having an all-around bad day, but then a coworker offered him a hug.
“That hug didn’t change anything about what had gone in my day but it changed everything about what the way that I felt,” Floyd said. “Suddenly all that stress, suddenly all that disappointment, all that worry, it didn’t go away but it seemed to lift off my shoulders, it wasn’t weighing me down.”
Floyd studies how prosocial communication, like affection, compassion, and trust, affect individuals psychologically.
He spoke specifically on communicating affection during the Life Sciences and Society Symposium on Saturday, Oct. 7.
Affection can be communicated through verbal and non-verbal communication as well as through supportive behavior. This last category is one he discovered through his research. Supportive behavior like keeping someone’s car in good condition or helping someone with a task is sometimes the most common way of expressing affection, especially between men.
The University of Arizona communications professor said he started his research by exploring an aspect of affection that confused him in his life. Growing up in a family of huggers, Floyd said he soon found out that not everyone appreciated the same type or kind of affection.
Expressing affection can be risky. Affection can be misinterpreted or not reciprocated, censured by culture, and even transmit disease.
So why bother?
For Floyd, the answer is simple, “Affection as an emotion and behavior is a fundamental human need.”
To elaborate on his belief, he pointed to how humans are born dependent on others to survive for many years. A child needs someone to feed, protect, provide for it and often make huge financial and personal sacrifices. As Floyd points out, many parents willing to do this due to love.
“I don’t think it’s necessarily a stretch to claim that an infant’s ability to get someone to love it is a matter of life or death.” He theorized. “It is a matter of that infant’s survival to get someone to feel a strong enough emotional investment that they are willing to make all the other kinds of investment that are required for that’s infant’s survival.”
As we age, affection transforms into something that feeds our need to belong.
Floyd’s studies have revealed positive associations between affection and happiness and social engagement. Other research revealed that affectionate communication is associated with mental wellness and physical health. When exposed to stressful events, highly affectionate people react with less arousal and recover faster. When compared to a less affectionate person, the more affectionate person has a better immune system, lower blood glucose levels and improved cortisol rhythm.
“It’s really difficult to thrive without some measure of affection,” Floyd concluded.
While not everyone needs the same amount of affection, it is a ubiquitous form of prosocial communication.
“None of what I described here is a prescription for you to go out and start hugging people on the sidewalk, that is not a pathway to health, that is a pathway to incarceration,” Floyd joked as he concluded his talk.
Instead, he highlighted that affection is different than other communication behaviors because it is something we reserve for only the important relationships in our lives.
“We talk to anybody, we gesture to anybody but we don’t kiss just anybody, we don’t hug just anybody,” He said. “This is a special behavior and its something that we preserve and reserve for the very special people in our lives.”
The 13th annual Life Sciences and Society Symposium, The Science of Love, started Friday, Oct. 6 and Saturday, Oct. 7. It features six experts that research various aspects of love, relationships and connection. The event will conclude on Friday, Oct. 13 with its last speaker, Jim Obergefell, who was the plaintiff in the 2015 Supreme Court case on marriage equality.
Hare explains survival of the friendliest as component of natural selection
Dr. Brian Hare speaks about how friendliness and natural selection are connected at the 13th annual LSSP symposium, The Science of Love. | photo by Roger Meissen
By Allison Scott | Bond LSC
Dogs really are a man’s best friend if you ask Brian Hare.
Our four-legged friends are a direct result of chance coupled with domestication. And over the course of hundreds of years, that domestication has led to deep bonds between humans and dogs.
“You love your dog, physiologically, the same way as your offspring or partner,” Hare said.
Throughout his career, Hare has analyzed various animals from dogs and foxes to chimpanzees and bonobos to determine how much friendliness actually is a factor in their survival.
Recently, Hare has focused on primates. In his studies, he’s observed distinct differences between chimpanzees and bonobos, both of which are closely related species.
“Chimpanzees are like humans,” Hare said. “Bonobos have a different social system.”
Chimpanzees tend to be the more aggressive, male-dominated of the two. On the other hand, bonobos are the exact opposite and thrive on a more equal approach. Bonobos love to share with anyone and everyone, making them friendlier.
Hare has been able to support this difference through a series of experiments. They show that one bonobo will likely help a stranger in a cage get food that is just out of reach. These experiments showed that bonobos are willing to help others in most situations unless there’s a high cost or risk to self.
The evolutionary elements of friendliness and the traits behind kindness Hare identified as a possible reason homo sapiens won out over other human ancestors like Neanderthals. This is due, in part, to what Hare calls the ‘like me’ trait.
“If we as humans can categorize based on cultural or social characteristics that someone is “like us,” we’re more likely to help them out,” Hare said. “This leads to bonds.”
The opposite is also true, though. This means if we identify someon as “not like us,” we’re less likely to help them. That stark difference between humans and both chimpanzees and bonobos makes for a more complicated communication process, and contributes to humans being both the friendliest and cruelest species alive.
At the end of the day, though, Hare strongly believes the science supports friendliness as a component of natural selection.
“You can win big by being friendly in the evolutionary game,” Hare said.
The 13th annual Life Sciences and Society Symposium, The Science of Love, started Friday, Oct. 6 and Saturday, Oct. 7. It features six experts that research various aspects of love, relationships and connection. The event will conclude on Friday, Oct. 13 with its last speaker, Jim Obergefell, who was the plaintiff in the 2015 Supreme Court case on marriage equality.
Larry Young explores chemicals behind monogamy in prairie voles, humans
Dr. Larry Young opens the second day of The Science of Love. | photo by Roger Meissen
By Allison Scott | Bond LSC
Upon first glance, it wouldn’t seem that humans and small rodents have that much in common.
However, Larry Young extensively studies the prairie vole because their desire to mate for life.
“Prairie voles mate for life,” Young said. “That’s very unusual, in fact, only three to five percent of mammals do this.”
This commonality between the small mammal and humans allows Young to relate his research on voles to humans. His goal is to understand the neurochemical bond that occurs between two voles after mating.
Neurologically, this “pair bonding” occurs largely because of oxytocin. The brain houses receptors for this hormone that create pleasure from it. The resulting feeling’s mutual, and chemical, leading a bond to form.
“The brain’s reward system houses the receptors that make oxytocin an influential chemical,” Young said. “Prairie voles activate this when they bond.”
Young manipulates the prairie vole’s brain to try an understand why exactly pair bonding exists. He then takes brain scans of them, compares them to mice that aren’t monogamous and sees what’s happening differently in their brains. In doing so, he is able to pinpoint differences in the voles and apply that knowledge to humans.
“We should think of ourselves as part of a continuum,” Young said. “The voles have a similar makeup to humans, but we don’t say that they’re in love – we say they’re bonded.”
That distinction makes a difference in Young’s studies. However, he’s still able to learn a lot about people by observing voles, and it’s those revelations that Young enjoys most.
That insight might one day lead to treatments for autism or other disorders where issues in interaction and bonding affect people.
“The Science of Love isn’t just entertaining,” Young said. “It has the potential to change lives for the better.”
The 13th annual Life Sciences and Society Symposium, The Science of Love, started Friday, Oct. 6 and Saturday, Oct. 7. It features six experts that research various aspects of love, relationships and connection. The event will conclude on Friday, Oct. 13 with its last speaker, Jim Obergefell, who was the plaintiff in the 2015 Supreme Court case on marriage equality.
Helen Fisher delves into the relationships we choose and why in our digital age
Dr. Helen Fisher opens the 13th annual LSSP symposium, The Science of Love, on Friday, Oct. 6. | photo by Allison Scott
By Allison Scott | Bond LSC
We might not understand what drives us to establish and maintain romantic relationships, but Helen Fisher has made her living trying to figure it out.
The romantic love expert spoke Friday, October 6, in Bond LSC about the neurological reasons behind why humans behave the way they do.
“Romantic love is located right next to thirst and hunger in the brain – it’s a survival system,” Fisher said. “If we survive another million years, we will continue to fall in love.”
Fisher has worked in tandem with the dating site match.com for more than a decade to tailor sites like chemistry.com to look at how relationships actually work in our brains and in practice. Using data from match.com that represents the U.S. population, Fisher detailed how the digital age impacts the dating scene.
“Fundamentally, love isn’t changing,” Fisher said. “Courtship patterns are.”
He research indicates a tendency toward “slow love,” where partners tend to get sexually involved sooner, but are more cautious about marriage and take much longer than previous generations to pair up in that way.
Technology, meeting online and evolving social norms play huge roles in these changes, but she argued that dating sites aren’t really dating sites at all.
“They’re introducing sites,” Fisher said. “The only real algorithm is your brain.”
These changes in how people meet influence marriage, too. She highlighted how cohabitating influences the perception of marriage and its overall impact, as well as the increased tendency for more casual sexual encounters.
“What we’re seeing now is the expanding of the pre-commitment stage of romance,” Fisher said. “Marriage used to be the beginning of a relationship, but now it’s the end.”
While modern couples often postpone marriage, Fisher notes that most people do marry before they reach the age of 50 and she feels positively toward relationship trends and the direction that romantic love is headed.
“I’m extremely optimistic,” Fisher said. “We’re marrying later and moving toward relative marriage relationship stability.”
The 13th annual Life Sciences and Society Symposium, The Science of Love, started Friday, Oct. 6 and Saturday, Oct. 7. It features six experts that research various aspects of love, relationships and connection. The event will conclude on Friday, Oct. 13 with its last speaker, Jim Obergefell, who was the plaintiff in the 2015 Supreme Court case on marriage equality.
Computer scientists create applications to speed up research in the lab
Ph.D. student Ke Gao and computer scientist Filiz Bunyak collaborate with researchers at the Bond Life Sciences Center. The pair helps advance high-throughput phenotyping by developing applications and algorithms for image analysis. | Photo by Samantha Kummerer, Bond LSC
By Samantha Kummerer, Bond LSC
Three years ago, Ke Gao stood uncomfortably beside rows of biomedical students and plant scientists at the Bond Life Sciences research fair. His poster wasn’t discussing the DNA of seeds or how plants transport nutrients but rather a scientific device.
“At the beginning, the visitors didn’t understand what we were presenting, but once I explained how our application can help them accelerate their research and how we can really turn their phones into a research device, they got really excited,” Gao explained.
Gao’s presentation highlighted a mobile app that transforms images of seeds into objective, quantitative data.
It started with a simple problem. Plant scientists were manually comparing hundreds and in some cases thousands, of seed photos. The process was meticulous, slow and subjective.
The solution began with a collaboration with Michele Warmund (Plant Sciences), Tommi White (MU Electron Microscopy Core) and Filiz Bunyak (Computer Science) that led to a MU Interdisciplinary Innovations Fund grant.
Gao was part of this team that developed an algorithm to turn the photos of seeds from the field into data with the touch of the button.
Gao explained the app is very similar to Instagram.
A user takes or uploads photos of seeds. Then the app calculates measurements describing shape, color and size characteristics of the seeds. This data can be emailed or stored in a database.
Some experiments need thousands of seeds analyzed; this would be a massive feat for even a group of students. With this app, hundreds of seeds can be photographed and measured from a single photo. The app analyzes each seed individually and also computes measurement averages for groups of seeds.
There are other apps that analyze seeds, but this is the first mobile application as far as the team knows. Its ability to analyze multiple seeds at once, even if they are touching is also an outstanding ability. Bunyak’s previous experience developing applications to quantify microscopy images and videos of touching and clumping cells helped them design the algorithm to make that function possible.
This isn’t just a problem for researchers in this one lab or even at the University of Missouri.
MU Computer Science professor, Filiz Bunyak, said noninvasive methods to observe and understand biology, imaging equipment and corresponding computing devices have advanced considerably in recent years, leading scientists to produce large amounts of data. The ability for researchers to analyze and quantify this large amount of complex and unstructured data, however, was still missing. Bunyak said this app began as a project to advance scientists’ capabilities to automatically analyze image-based plant phenotyping.
Further collaboration
Bunyak and her students are advancing the field of high-throughput phenotyping beyond this mobile app.
High-throughput phenotyping (HTP) refers to the process of connecting an organism’s DNA makeup to its physical characteristics; it is also a hot topic buzzing through the science community in the last five years.
Two years ago, Bond LSC scientist David Mendoza, who studies how plants collect nutrients, said he never imagined he would be doing HTP.
“The old way of doing this is growing plants on plates and, I’m not kidding, with a ruler you measure how long the roots are,” Mendoza explained of the traditional process that now seems archaic.
Now, the lab is working with computer scientists to design a robot to code the measurements for multiple roots at a single time. For a student, it would take 15 minutes, but now it’s complete in an instant.
Speed isn’t the only reward researchers are reaping.
Bunyak said computational image analysis allows researchers to come up with new ways to quantify and study data that they were not even able to do before, leading to the design of novel experimental methods.
Ruthie Angelovici is another Bond LSC researcher who uses computer scientists to aid in her research.
She said without computer imaging there would be no way for her team to do research that measures plants physical and biochemical traits. Angelovici’s lab uses Bunyak’s mobile app system but on a computer. Eight plants are photographed at once and the application keeps track of features of plants such as shape, color and area as they develop.
What is really revolutionary to Angelovici is the ability for the data of plant growth parameters to be stored and revisited without the need to re-grow. This contrasts with past experiments where researchers would scribble some notes and never be able to return.
“It’s not lost and I think that’s a big step in this field,” Angelovici said.
The collaboration is creating more than advanced tools by fostering a new way to think and approach research.
Rather than buying pre-existing software, the groups from Bond LSC utilizes the resources on campus to build their own devices.
“I would have been in front of a black box that is doing things for me and that would not have given me the tools to teach to my students,” Mendoza reflected. “Now I know what they need to learn to be competitive. Now I know what the gaps are and how they can be filled. I think that was worth it.”
Mendoza’s team publishes all the instruction to its robot online, so the technology can aid other labs in making faster discoveries at a lower price.
Angelovici compared it to buying a cake versus making a cake — at the end of the creation process, she said she would have the knowledge to do a lot of other experiments.
This new way of thinking already began to pay off this summer when her lab expanded computer software to analyze seed size.
“We only approached it because we saw how things worked together. I just pitched a project to engineering about seed collector. Again, this opened my eyes that even undergraduates can do something not so difficult for engineers, but I have no clue how to do it,” Angelovici said.
Mendoza agreed the collaboration is exciting but challenging, “You got a Ph.D. and you got a faculty position and you think you know stuff. When I started this I realized how much I don’t know, but at the same time it reminded me that it is really cool to learn something new.”
Both teams continue to work towards maximizing the functions of their individual machines, but even after the projects reach fruition the collaboration will not be over.
“On the contrary, I think we’re going to keep building more and more and better,” Mendoza said.
Nowadays, Gao no longer feels out of place at the Life Sciences fairs. Researchers from various labs come up to him and ask how they can implement his app in their own lab.
“It seems like I’m doing something that can really help people, so that’s the best part of this process,” he said.
Ruthie Angelovici is an assistant professor in the Division of Biological Sciences and is a researcher at Bond Life Sciences Center. She received her degrees in plant science from institutions in Israel — her B.S. and M.S. from Tel Aviv University, and her Ph.D. from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the Weizmann Institute and at Michigan State University and has been at MU since fall of 2015.
David Mendoza is an associate professor in Plant Sciences, Life Sciences Center investigator and a member of the Interdisciplinary Plant Group. His research focuses on the mechanisms plants use to resist toxic elements or acquire nutrients. He received his Ph.D. in biochemistry from UNAM in Mexico City and continued on to do post-doc training at UC San Diego.
Filiz Bunyak is an assistant research professor in the Department of Computer Science. She received her bachelors and masters degree from Istanbul Technical University and her Ph.D. from the University of Missouri- Rolla. Her work focuses on computer imaging, image processing, and biomedical image analysis.
Ke Gao is a doctoral student in the University of Missouri’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He earned his bachelor’s of science from the Henan University of Science and Technology in China.
