Healthier people learn from mistakes
June 01, 2004

Having no regrets may sound attractive, but it is not necessarily wise, a new study suggests.

The study, published in the May 21 issue of the journal Science, compared the reactions to a gambling game among healthy participants and people who had injuries to the orbitofrontal cortex, a part of the brain that links regions involved in reasoning with other areas involved in emotion.

The players were asked to rate their feelings after each turn at the game, and the researchers tracked the participants' mood changes by measuring electrical properties of the skin.

When the players experienced disappointment, knowing that they had lost, the reactions in the two groups were not that different. But when the players were informed of what they would have won or lost had they chosen differently, adding the possibility that they might feel regret, the healthy players minded losing far more than the injured participants did.

The researchers then changed the odds, making bolder bets lose more often. The healthy subjects shifted to a cautious strategy, while those with injuries stuck to their original strategy.

One of the researchers, Dr. Angela Siricu of the Institute of Cognitive Science in Bron, France, said the study underscored the role emotions play in reasoning. People's anticipation that they will regret certain actions, she said, helps shape their actions.

By contrast, she said, people with a limited ability to feel regret often have problems with social interactions and with judging risks.

High blood pressure in kids a worry
High blood pressure in children is more like high blood pressure in adults than was once thought, and should be treated as aggressively, according to new government guidelines.

Dr. Bonita Falkner of Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, the chairwoman of the government panel that produced a report outlining the guidelines, said that in the past, doctors felt that there had to be some other illness, like kidney disease, behind a high blood pressure reading in children.

But new evidence has shown that many cases are the early manifestations of essential hypertension, the variety that accounts for most hypertension in adults, she said.

In children, high blood pressure is defined not by a cutoff point on the mercury scale, but by a series of readings that fall into the top 5 percent of measurements, adjusted for a child's age, size and sex. Falkner said that as many as 3 percent of children had high blood pressure and that another 10 percent or so were considered pre-hypertensive.

Under the new guidelines, presented May 20 at a meeting of the American Society of Hypertension in Manhattan, pediatricians should routinely evaluate children with high blood pressure for risk factors like elevated cholesterol or early signs of diabetes, as is done for hypertensive adults.