Health Bulletin

Neat or messy? What does your desk say about you

In a study published in the journal Psychological Science, researchers found that working at a clean and tidy desk promotes socially acceptable behaviours, like generosity and healthy eating, while working at a sloppy desk promotes out-of the-box thinking and an openness to new ideas.

Researcher Kathleen Vohs and her colleagues at the University of Minnesota, United States, examined whether order encouraged people to act in a more socially acceptable, conventional way or if disorderly environments would encourage people to seek novelty and display unconventional behaviour.

Researchers found that 82 per cent of the participants in the neat room donated some money to charity, versus 47 per cent of those in the disorderly room.

People in the tidy room were also more likely to choose the apple over the candy bar, compared to those in the messy room.

The researchers believed the clean room encouraged people to do what was socially expected of them.

In addition, the study also revealed that people in the messy room came up with more interesting and creative ideas when evaluated by impartial judges, despite the fact that those in the clean room came up with the same number of ideas.

"Being in a messy room led to something that firms, industries and societies want more of: creativity," Vohs noted.

The researchers also found that when participants were given a choice between a new product and an established one, those in the messy room were more likely to prefer the new one, while participants in the tidy room preferred the established product.

"Disorderly environments seem to inspire breaking free of tradition, which can produce fresh insights. Orderly environments, in contrast, encourage convention and playing it safe," Vohs shared.

"Companies may want to tailor the environment for the behaviours they want," noted Joseph Redden, a co-author of the study.

Drug abuse affects men's sexual performance

Researchers at the University of Granada, Spain, and Santo Tomas University in Colombia have found that drug abuse negatively affects sexual performance in men, even after years of abstinence.

This finding contradicts other studies reporting that men spontaneously recovered their normal sexual performance at three weeks after quitting substance abuse.

The study revealed that alcohol is the drug that most affects sexual arousal. In addition, the researchers observed that men did not improve their sexual performance when they stopped drinking alcohol.

The study included 905 men of which 550 had been diagnosed with alcohol, cocaine, cocaine and alcohol, heroin, marijuana and speedball (cocaine and heroin) addiction. It examined and evaluated four areas of sexual performance: sexual desire, sexual satisfaction, sexual arousal, and orgasm.

The results of this study have been published in the Journal of Sexual Medicine and the authors are Pablo Vallejo Medina (a professor at Santo Tomas University, Colombia) and Juan Carlos Sierra, a professor at the University of Granada.

This is the first study to reveal the permanent effect of substance abuse on sexuality, even after long abstinence periods.

Active commuting to work can cut diabetes risk by up to 50%

A new study is showing that people who travel to work using public transport or who walk or cycle are at lower risk of developing diabetes than those who use private transport. Walking or cycling to a place of employment also reduced the risk for hypertension, reported Anthony A. Laverty, from Imperial College London, United Kingdom, and colleagues in American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

This research is some of the first to examine the impact of so-called 'active travel' on diabetes and hypertension, explained senior author Christopher Millett, PhD, from Imperial College London. He noted that they also found a similar protective effect against obesity in their study.

This is also some of the first work to show the protective effect of public-transport use, he added, explaining that such commuting usually means that people walk during certain sections of their journey. One United States study, for example, showed that those using public transport walked an average of 19 minutes as part of their journey.

The researchers found that those who walked to work had a 40 per cent lower risk for diabetes and a 17 per cent lower risk for hypertension than those who used private transport. And even just using public transport lowered the risk for diabetes by 18 per cent.

Reductions in overweight or obesity were along similar lines, with a 15 per cent reduction among those using public transport compared with private, a 20 per cent reduction for those who walked to work, and a 37 per cent lower risk for those who cycled.

Millett stated that the results mean that physicians "should encourage people to build physical activity into their everyday life, by adapting their commute to make it more physically active, it doesn't mean that people necessarily have to spend many sessions in the gym."