Male births are more likely to reduce quality of life and increase
severe post-natal depression

Giving birth to a boy can lead to higher levels of severe post-natal
depression (PND) and reduced quality of life than having a girl,
according to research published in the February issue of Journal of
Clinical Nursing.

A team of researchers led by Professor Claude de Tychey, from
Universite Nancy 2, France, found that just under a third of the 181
women they studied four to eight weeks after delivery had PND.

Nine per cent of the women in the study – carried out in a French
community where they didn’t face cultural pressures over the sex of
their baby - had severe PND and just over three-quarters of those had
given birth to boys.

The team also discovered that, even if women didn’t have postnatal
depression, giving birth to a boy was significantly more likely to
reduce their quality of life than delivering a girl.

“Post-natal depression is very common and poses a major public health
problem, especially if it is not diagnosed and treated” stresses
Professor de Tychey.

Children who have an active father figure have fewer psychological and
behavioral problems

Active father figures have a key role to play in reducing behaviour
problems in boys and psychological problems in young women, according
to a review published in the February issue of Acta Paediatrica.

Swedish researchers also found that regular positive contact reduces
criminal behaviour among children in low-income families and enhances
cognitive skills like intelligence, reasoning and language
development.

Children who lived with both a mother and father figure also had less
behavioural problems than those who just lived with their mother.

The researchers are urging healthcare professionals to increase
fathers’ involvement in their children’s healthcare and calling on
policy makers to ensure that fathers have the chance to play an active
role in their upbringing.

The review looked at 24 papers published between 1987 and 2007,
covering 22,300 individual sets of data from 16 studies. 18 of the 24
papers also covered the social economic status of the families
studied.

A close look at conflict
Margo Wilson & Martin Daly

Psychology, neuroscience and physiology are missing from a new
sociological study of violence.

BOOK REVIEWED-Violence: A Micro-Sociological Theory
by Randall Collins
Princeton University Press: 2008. 584 pp. $45.00, £26.95

Violence matters. It has been scrutinized by numerous researchers,
from anthropologists to zoologists. Yet virtually all the discoveries
and insights so accumulated — including those from sociology — get
short shrift in this ambitious book. Author Randall Collins discusses
"at least 30 types of violence", from bullying and domestic violence,
through staged fair fights and contract killings, to gang fights,
sporting brawls, riots, police brutality and warfare. He draws on a
vast opportunity sample of photographs, documentary films, and
participant and witness accounts. Nevertheless, his agenda is tightly
focused. He gives all these phenomena the same two-component 'micro-
sociological' analysis.

First, Collins describes the action in some detail — facial
expressions, body postures, approaches and retreats, the brandishing
and use of weapons. It is refreshing that he should tout the value of
watching...

Sex differences in the brain's serotonin system

A new thesis from the Swedish medical university Karolinska Institutet
shows that the brain's serotonin system differs between men and women.
The scientists who conducted the study think that they have found one
of the reasons why depression and chronic anxiety are more common in
women than in men.

Serotonin is a brain neurotransmitter that is critical to the
development and treatment of depression and chronic anxiety,
conditions that, for reasons still unknown, are much more common in
women than in men. A research group at Karolinska Institutet has now
shown using a PET scanner that women and men differ in terms of the
number of binding sites for serotonin in certain parts of the brain.

Their results, which are to be presented in a doctoral thesis by
Hristina Jovanovic at the end of February, show that women have a
greater number of the most common serotonin receptors than men. They
also show that women have lower levels of the protein that transports
serotonin back into the nerve cells that secrete it. It is this
protein that the most common antidepressants (SSRIs) block.