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Vendors offer organically grown produce at the Union Square farmers market in New York City.

Renate Raymond has encountered her fair share of organic food snobs, but a recent trip to a Seattle market left her feeling like she'd stumbled onto the set of "Portlandia."

"I stopped at a market to get a fruit platter for a movie night with friends but I couldn't find one so I asked the produce guy," says the 40-year-old arts administrator from Seattle. "And he was like, 'If you want fruit platters, go to Safeway. We're organic.' I finally bought a small cake and some strawberries and then at the check stand, the guy was like 'You didn't bring your own bag? I need to charge you if you didn't bring your own bag.' It was like a 'Portlandia skit.' They were so snotty and arrogant."

As it turns out, new research has determined that a judgmental attitude may just go hand in hand with exposure to organic foods. In fact, a new study published this week in the journal of Social Psychological and Personality Science, has found that organic food may just make people act a bit like jerks.

"There's a line of research showing that when people can pat themselves on the back for their moral behavior, they can become self-righteous," says author Kendall Eskine, assistant professor of  the department of psychological sciences at Loyola University in New Orleans. "I've noticed a lot of organic foods are marketed with moral terminology, like Honest Tea, and wondered if you exposed people to organic food, if it would make them pat themselves on the back for their moral and environmental choices. I wondered if  they would be more altruistic or not."

To find out, Eskine and his team divided 60 people into three groups. One group was shown pictures of clearly labeled organic food, like apples and spinach. Another group was shown comfort foods such as brownies and cookies. And a third group -- the controls -- were shown non-organic, non-comfort foods like rice, mustard and oatmeal. After viewing the pictures, each person was then asked to read a series of vignettes describing moral transgressions.

"One vignette was about second cousins having sex," says Eskine. "Another was about a lawyer on the prowl in an ER trying to get people to sue for their injuries. Then the groups made moral judgments on a scale from one to seven."

In another phase of the study, the three groups were asked to volunteer for a (fictitious) study, with each person writing down the amount of time -- from zero to 30 minutes -- that they would be willing to volunteer.

The results did not bode well for the organic folks.

"We found that the organic people judged much harder compared to the control or comfort food groups," says Eskine. "On a scale of 1 to 7, the organic people were like 5.5 while the controls were about a 5 and the comfort food people were like a 4.89."

When it came to helping out a needy stranger, the organic people also proved to be more selfish, volunteering only 13 minutes as compared to 19 minutes (for controls) and 24 minutes (for comfort food folks).

"There's something about being exposed to organic food that made them feel better about themselves," says Eskine. "And that made them kind of jerks a little bit, I guess."

Why does eating better make us act worse? Eskine says it probably has to do with what he calls "moral licensing."

"People may feel like they've done their good deed," he says. "That they have permission, or license, to act unethically later on. It's like when you go to the gym and run a few miles and you feel good about yourself, so you eat a candy bar."

Eskine says he was surprised by the findings ("You'd think eating organic would make you feel elevated and want to pay it forward," he says) and hopes to do additional studies that look at conditions that might prompt people to act differently.

Until then, organic eaters may want to rein in those self-righteous stink-eyes.

"At my local grocery, I sometimes catch organic eyes gazing into my grocery cart and scowling," says Sue Frause, a 61-year-old freelance writer/photographer from Whidbey Island. "So I'll often toss in really bad foods just to get them even more riled up."

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Courtesy of Dana Marie Flores

Dana Marie Flores, a 42-year-old mother of two from Phoenix, has struggled with the compulsive urge to pick at her skin for years.

From time to time, everyone picks their skin, whether it's squeezing a pimple or removing peeling skin. But for people with compulsive skin picking, "We just take it to a whole new level," says Dana Marie Flores, who has struggled with this disorder for 30 years.

Flores started by picking at pimples on her face when she was 12 or 13. She'd spend hours with her face an inch away from the bathroom mirror picking at any acne bumps she saw and using her pinky fingernails to squeeze out the pus.

To her, picking served a useful purpose. "When I first started to pick, it was self-soothing," admits Flores.  "If something came out [like pus], it's affirmation that something was in my skin." There was a feeling of satisfaction and relief.

Flores said picking at her face then evolved to picking at any bump she'd find on her arms or legs. "I'd think of it as fixing a problem, removing an ingrown hair, evening things out on my skin," she recalls.

When doing it, Flores says her mind enters a trance-like state. "It's really an escape, like a drug. It's so self-soothing you lose track of time," she explains.

Although the urge to pick is incredibly strong and it can seem hard to fight, the 42-year-old mother of two from Phoenix eventually recognized her behavior was "a grooming habit gone terribly wrong."

Compulsive or pathological skin picking, which is also known as dermatillomania, falls under the umbrella of a "body-focused repetitive behavior," says Dr. Ted Grosbart, PhD, a Boston-based clinical psychologist who specializes in dermatology.

People with this impulse-control disorder have a strong urge to pick at their skin over and over again to a significant enough degree that it does noticeable tissue damage and they experience it as a problem, Grosbart explains.

He says the condition, which is more common in women, has a genetic basis. And there's often an emotional stressor or hormonal trigger (like puberty), which touches it off.

"Skin picking is not a character flaw, and it's not a bad habit," Grosbart points out. "It's a real medical condition with a biochemical underpinning." Researchers are also noticing slight variations in brain structure and function in people with the condition.

According to Grosbart, skin picking is a "hidden epidemic." "We used to think it affects 3 to 4 percent of the population, but the latest studies suggest the lifetime incidence may be closer to 15 to 16 percent," he says.

Sufferers may at first rationalize the picking as a type of skin care but it then crosses the line into a form of skin abuse.

"The shame is huge," says Flores. "You assume you're the only person doing this, and you feel like a freak.

"The shame felt is often more damaging than the physical damage done to the skin," she adds.

Many skin pickers feel so ashamed they hide the behavior from their family members, spouses and friends. They conceal any scabs under clothing, or by wearing Band-Aids, or with makeup.

They might pick skin in less noticeable places, like the scalp or chewing the insides of their mouths. Or they make up excuses: A bad reaction to a new medication or an attack by mosquitoes.

If they finally open up and confide in someone, that person may have difficulty understanding why pickers just can't stop.

As Flores put it, "The 'just-stop theory' sounds great." But your skin is always available and you can't exactly get away from it, she says.

Flores makes the analogy that the strong temptation to pick her skin is like being a recovering alcoholic with hundreds of bottles of beer and booze tied to your body. With 24/7 access to her skin, picking is an easy behavior to fall into when she feels angry or stressed.

Flores' path toward healing began seven years ago when she saw a TV news story about people who compulsively pull out their hair, or trichotillomania. The story referred her to a website for the Trichotillomania Learning Center, a nonprofit educational organization, where she finally discovered information about skin picking.

"After 23 years of doing this, I could not believe there were other people out there like me," admits Flores. She joined a local support group, attends their annual retreats, and serves on their Board to help get the word out. 

She's learned new tools for keeping her hands busy -- playing with bubble wrap to give her the same tactile sensation of popping pimples -- to help curb the behavior. Still, it remains an ongoing struggle to battle the impulse.

"I don't base my recovery on how my skin looks, but on how I feel inside," Flores says. "And that has changed 1,000 percent."

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Wake up, folks: There is no health risk in rousing a sleepwalker from their somnambulistic stroll. Well, no risk to them, anyway. You, on the other hand, might suffer a swift, roundhouse kick to the dome.

Long-repeated medical myths have held that if you forcibly snap a sleepwalker back to a wakeful state it will A) induce a state of shock or possibly even insanity, B) give them “lockjaw,” and, C), our personal favorite, cause their soul to become trapped outside their body. The truth matters now more than ever: On Monday, the Stanford University School of Medicine released new research estimating that 8.5 million U.S. adults (3.6 percent of the grownup population) went sleepwalking during the past year -- a far higher rate of nocturnal wanderers than previously thought by doctors. 

“It’s not dangerous for the sleepwalker to wake him up,” said Dr. Mark R. Pressman, a psychologist and sleep specialist at Lankenau Hospital in Wynnewood, Pa. “You’re not going to do them any harm.”

But there are two potential pitfalls in attempting to yank them back to the conscious world. First, sleepwalkers take their short journeys with eyes open yet without turning on a key part of their brain -- the frontal lobe, a portion that controls social interaction. They are momentarily trapped in an altered, gray state that falls between alertness and full sleep, making them quite difficult to bring back to the real world, Pressman said.

“You just can’t talk to them and say ‘Hey!” and have them wake up,” Pressman said. “I’m not even sure where that myth began that you shouldn’t wake them. But the more you dig back (to try research that legend), the more you’ll find that sleepwalking once was thought to be mixed in with spirits and demonic possessions.”

Most sleepwalking episodes last only seconds or a few minutes, ending with the person either sitting or lying on the floor and returning sleep or eventually trudging back to bed.

“It’s very likely to go away on its own while the family is watching,” Pressman said.

You can try to verbally redirect a sleepwalker -- especially a child -- by standing a short distance away and speaking to them in short, easy commands: “Stop, turn around, go back to bed.” But don’t expect them to answer or even to recognize you, Pressman said. Those particular neurons are still snoozing. “Hopefully they turn around and go the other way.

“There’s really no reason to dive in and stop it unless the sleepwalker is about to climb out a window or fall down some stairs. If that’s the case, the family member doesn’t really have much choice,” he added.

If you do approach a sleepwalker -- especially if you physically block or grab one -- they may flash some "defensive aggressiveness,” Pressman said. “This is a very primitive response to what they see as a potential attacker. They may become violent.

“The first thing, obviously, is you have to protect them anyway you can. That’s the bottom line: safety. So you may have to be prepared to take a punch or kick.”

Just don’t expect your zombified loved one or housemate to offer an apology. 

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• Suicide while sleepwalking is a real nightmare
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Lionsgate

Novels may have a lot more power than we think.

When you identify with a literary character, like Katniss Everdeen of the "Hunger Games" books, there’s a good chance you’ll become more like her, new study shows.

Researchers have found that when you lose yourself in a work of fiction, your behavior and thoughts can metamorphose to match those of your favorite character, according to the study published early online in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 

The researchers believe that fictional characters can change us for the good.

So, if you bonded with Atticus Finch in “To Kill a Mockingbird,” you might become more focused on ethical behavior, says the study’s lead author, Geoff Kaufman, a post-doctoral researcher at Tiltfactor Laboratories at Dartmouth College.

But the fiction-effect can have a dark side. “Think of 'American Psycho,'” Kaufman says. “The character is very likable and charismatic. But he’s a serial killer. To the extent that you connect with him, you may try to understand or justify the actions he’s committing.”

Kaufman and his co-author Lisa Libby of Ohio State University suspected that when people read a fictional story they vicariously experience their favorite character’s emotions, thoughts and beliefs in a process that’s been dubbed “experience-taking.”

Kaufman and Libby found that experience-taking can lead to real changes in the lives of readers. What the researchers can’t say yet is whether those changes are brief or long-lasting.

Kaufman suspects novels can sometimes be life-changing. “If you’ve got a deep connection with the characters, it can have a lasting impact,” he says. “It can inspire you to re-read something. And then the impact can be strengthened over time.”

The researchers ran several experiments to look at how we react to fiction. In one, they found that people who strongly identified with a fictional character who overcame many obstacles in order to vote were significantly more likely to vote in a real election days later than volunteers who read a different story.  

In another experiment, the researchers compared two groups of volunteers who read different versions of a story in which the protagonist was gay. In one version, readers didn’t learn till the end that the character was gay. In the other, they learned that detail right at the beginning.

Study volunteers who learned about the sexual orientation of the hero at the end of the story expressed more positive feelings towards gay people when they were questioned later on.

That’s because they got to know the character and connect with him before they had a chance to cloud their impression with gay stereotypes, Kaufman explains. Those who learned about the character’s sexual orientation early on didn’t relate to him as much because their stereotypes put distance between them and the character.

Kaufman believes that the fiction-effect only comes with written works. “When we watch a movie, by the very essence of it, we’re positioned as spectators,” he explains. “So it’s hard to imagine yourself as the character. I suspect that if you read the screenplay it would be more powerful as far as experience-taking goes.”

So, who is Kaufman’s favorite fictional personality? Anna Karenina, the protagonist in Leo Tolstoy’s novel of the same name.

“My identification with her might have inspired my research,” Kaufman muses. “It’s the connection with a female character and understanding her struggles and difficulty in adapting to life and society. Looking back, I think a lot of my favorites are strong, complex female characters struggling in society.”

What literary character do you most identify with, and why? Let us know in the comments here, or over on our Facebook page -- we may use you in an upcoming msnbc.com post! 

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Rookie Bryce Harper of the Washington Nationals is a polarizing figure in baseball today, mostly due to his attitude. But recent discoveries in social psychology suggest our perceptions of Harper may be shaped by something a little hairier: the kid's facial hair.

Rookie Bryce Harper, all of 19 years old, has such a poor rep already in Major League Baseball that Cole Hamels felt justified in hitting him with a fastball, and then bragging about it afterwards, as Jelisa Castrodale of NBCSports.com points out.

Apparently there could be a number of reasons to explain the visceral reaction to Harper, including a propensity toward arrogance. But could the kid’s facial hair have anything to do with it?

Sounds bizarre, but maybe.

Last January, in the journal Behavioral Ecology, two researchers, Barnaby Dixson of Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand, and Paul Vasey, of the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada, released a study on reactions to men’s beards.

They pointed out that beard growth is under genetic control, and that it may serve as a sexual signal between men. In tests, women in both Samoa and in New Zealand did not rate bearded men as any more attractive than the same men pictured without beards, so beards weren’t helping the guys get girls. But other men (women, too) viewed bearded male faces as more threatening when the pictured males adopted an angry look.

Facial hair, the authors wrote “may intimidate rival males by increasing perceptions of the size of the jaw, overall length of the face, and by enhancing aggressive and threatening jaw-thrusting behaviors ... . The current study is the first to show that the beard augments a threatening behavioral display as bearded men with angry facial expressions received significantly higher scores for aggressiveness compared with clean-shaven faces ... . This suggests that the beard plays an important role in intermale signaling of threat and aggression.”

Other, past studies, have shown that when mock juries are presented with pictures of men accused of crimes like rape, the juries are much more likely to believe the bearded man is guilty. A 2004 study from researchers at Montclair State University in New Jersey asked 371 people to “sketch the face of a criminal offender. Eighty-two percent of the sketches contained some form of facial hair.” Yet beards have often been seen a sign of maturity, education, and competence. So what’s up?

A man’s facial features have been shown to reflect both his androgen status -- how much testosterone and related hormones he’s making -- and physical strength. Beards, themselves dependant upon androgens, can frame and accentuate those features.

This could be positive. “Both men and women ascribe positive attributes such as intelligence, courage, confidence and social maturity to beards,” Dixson explained in an email. But in his study, he included the angry expressions, and then, the beards made the men look threatening and meaner than when the same men were clean shaven.

So it’s all the above, suggested Dixson. “Beards appear to be linked with perceptions of elevated age (maturity), social status, dominance and threatening facial displays.”

Whether or not it’s deliberate strategy, the rash of beards among athletes, most famously Brian Wilson of the San Francisco Giants, is one way to intimidate the opposition. The callow Harper is just playing along.  

Brian Alexander (www.BrianRAlexander.com) is co-author, with Larry Young PhD., of "The Chemistry Between Us: Love Sex and the Science of Attraction," (www.TheChemistryBetweenUs.com)  to be published Sept. 13.

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In the movie “No Country for Old Men,” Anton Chigurh immediately makes people feel uncomfortable with his strange mannerisms and gait along with his awkward gaze. Even without knowing he is a killer, it's clear Chigurh is a creep.

People feel uncomfortable -- to the point of experiencing chills -- when they’re around creepy people, a new study confirms. Researchers believe an inability to correctly mimic nonverbal cues, such as hand gestures and eye contact, makes someone creepy.   

Mimicry occurs when one person copies the body language of another, explains Pontus Leander, co-author of the study and associate professor of psychology at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands.

Humans mimic all the time, starting in infancy. Children learn by observing adults and doing what they do -- think of peek-a-boo. As we age, most adults unconsciously mirror others as a part of normal interactions.

Leander and his colleagues created experiments to look at how people react to mimicry.

In one trial, a researcher attempted to be friendly with participants as if they were peers. Sometimes the researcher moved like the subject; if the participant touched his nose, the researcher would gesture similarly, such as scratching her head. But in other cases, the researcher would not mirror the subject’s actions. And this caused the participants’ skin to crawl -- if the researcher did not mimic the right cues, the subjects reported feeling colder. Creepers give us the chills. People believed the room temperature dropped to 68 when it remained at a steady 72.

“In the friendly situation, if you do not mimic, that’s when people’s coldness spikes,” Leander explains. “If you start feeling cold it could be an early warning sign.”

When people violate social norms, our bodies react with chills. Feeling cold is linked to a threat such as being forgotten (think left out in the cold") and the region of the brain that controls goosebumps also regulates feelings of trust and betrayal. The chills warn that something is off about a person who cannot follow social norms.  

“It is about expectancy violations. That’s what particularly novel [about this research],” says Geoffrey Leonardelli, an assistant professor at the University of Toronto department of psychology and Rotman School of Management.

Leonardelli did not participate in this study, but he wrote a pivotal paper about social embodiment, feeling a physical sensation such as chills when experiencing emotions such as sadness or loneliness. His paper “Cold and Lonely: Does Social Exclusion Literally Feel Cold?” showed that people who feel lonely also feel colder and crave warmth.  

“We just don’t expect that [feelings] would affect us physically,” Leonardelli says. “Exclusion leads to lower body temperature.”

In another experiment, Leander and his colleagues looked at how people react to mimicking in professional situations. When the subjects participated in mock professional setting they felt unnerved if the researcher used too much mirroring. But if the researcher reduced the mimicry, they felt more comfortable. 

“If you start mimicking in a situation where it is not expected,  it can be draining,” Leander says. “If there is mimicry going on when people aren’t friends it can be problematic.”

The third trial examined mimicry between white and non-white subjects. If a white researcher mirrored the behaviors of a non-white participant, the subject reported feeling colder, indicating social norms among races is constantly evolving. 

More importantly, it shows that communication is nuanced. Leander notes that participants who reported being more independent felt uncomfortable by mirrored behavior.  

“We are surrounded by people day in and day out and we’re building up this bank of information about what sort of nonverbal behavior is linked to certain cues. We all get some intuitive sense for it,” Leander says.

The article is in press at the journal Psychological Science. 

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featurepics.com

A hard-boiled news editor here at msnbc.com was recently amazed by the way the mood and sound of an entire newsroom changed when a baby appeared. Somebody brought the infant into the offices, and suddenly cooing, high-pitched voices, replaced the chatter and hum of reporters.

Which, naturally, led to a question: What’s up with that?

It’s not just squiggly, bright-eyed babes that can induce this reaction, but tiny baby clothes, or even non-human babies, like puppies and kittens. We all know we do this -- we’ve seen and heard it hundreds of times -- but why?

The short answer is that we like “cute.” Cute makes us feel good, and, in reaction, we want to approach whatever it is that’s cute, so we speak in higher voices, say gentle, soothing things, and are easily distracted from, say, reporting a story about politics or food safety.

In 1943, the famous ethologist Konrad Lorenz created a term he called “baby schema.” The baby schema is how a baby appears, with chubby cheeks; big, round eyes; soft chubby body; a head that seems far too big for its body. Babies are helpless. The only tool they have to motivate others to care for them is cuteness, and they wield the tool with amazing effect.

In 2009, a German-American team led by Melanie Glocker of the University of Muenster put adult women who had never given birth into an fMRI machine to look at their brains. They exposed the women to images of babies, and they manipulated the images to make the babies appear to be closer to, or further from, the ideal baby schema. (In other words, they uglied up the babies.)

The images that most adhered to the baby schema were deemed “cuter” by the women. All the images activated key brain regions involved in face processing and reward, especially the nucleus accumbens, a key reward region, but the higher the baby schema, the more powerful the accumbens activation. The cuter the baby, the better the women liked it, the more motivated they were to approach it. 

Other studies have shown that men react this way to babies, too, just not as powerfully as women. And one experiment showed that when adults looked at “very cute” images of puppies and kittens, or grown dogs and cats, those who looked at the puppies and kittens performed better on the kids’ game “Operation” indicating, the researchers said, that “human sensitivity to those possessing cute features may be an adaptation that facilitates caring for delicate human young.” 

In a fascinating study of how well cute sells, marketing researchers led by Curt Dommeyer of California State University Northridge, positioned themselves outside a Los Angeles grocery store and asked store patrons to stop and complete a survey about organ donation. Half the time, they displayed a picture of a baby boy dressed in a tiny tropical flower shirt on the table.

Without the picture, 26 percent of passersby agreed to complete the survey. With the picture, 49 percent did. A similar test, using a puppy this time, also got a higher response rate, though the difference wasn’t as big. In both tests, women were more likely to complete surveys than men, showing a stronger effect of cuteness on females.

No studies seem to have documented the raised voice pitch when we encounter babies, but it seems likely it’s the result of our brain’s motivating us to nurture. Evolution has wired our brains to be drawn in by cuteness which is why Knut, the baby polar bear, sparked nationwide love across Germany, while, say, the Hungerford’s Crawling Water Beetle goes unloved.     

Brian Alexander (www.BrianRAlexander.com) is co-author, with Larry Young PhD., of "The Chemistry Between Us: Love Sex and the Science of Attraction," (www.TheChemistryBetweenUs.com)  to be published Sept. 13.

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By Jennifer Welsh
LiveScience 

What gives you the motivation to go the extra mile for a promotion or a perfect test score? It may be your levels of a brain chemical called dopamine. Researchers have found amounts of this chemical in three brain regions determine if a person is a go-getter or a procrastinator.

Dopamine does different things in different areas of the brain. So while high levels in some brain regions were associated with a high work ethic, a spike in another brain region seemed indicate just the opposite — a person more likely to slack off, even if it meant smaller monetary rewards.

"To our surprise, we also found a different region of the brain, the anterior insula, that showed a strong negative relationship between dopamine level and willingness to work hard," study researcher Michael Treadway, graduate student at Vanderbilt University, told LiveScience.

The fact that dopamine can have opposing effects on different parts of the brain puts a wrench in how psychotropic drugs that affect dopamine levels are used for the treatment of attention-deficit disorder (ADD), depression and schizophrenia, Treadway noted. The general assumption has been that these dopamine-releasing drugs have the same effect throughout the brain.

The researchers scanned the brains of 25 young adult volunteers and put them through a test to see how hard they were willing to work for a monetary reward. They would choose either an easy or a difficult button-pushing task, and get rewarded either $1 or a variablevalue of up to $4. They repeated these 30-second tasks for 20 minutes.

Some of the participants opted to work harder for the larger reward by completing thedifficult task, while others chose the easier task more often and accepted the small reward. Does this choice make them lazy? Maybe, Treadway said: "They were less motivated by this particular task. We suspect it predicts, to a certain extent, how motivated they might be in other contexts."

They compared testing data with brain scans of these patients, with and without administration of the dopamine-releasing drug amphetamine, which provides a reading of how much dopamine is normally released in different areas in the brain. [Inside the Brain: A Journey Through Time]

"You've got someone deciding, 'Do I want to work a bit more or a bit less? How do I factor in these odds?' Some people just went for it," Treadway said. The researchers found that these hardworking people had the most dopamine in two areas of the brain known to play an important role in reward and motivation, and low dopamine levels in the anterior insula, a region linked to motivation and risk perception.

These differences may mean that the choice between working hard and slacking off depend on how the brain weighs risk and reward, the researchers said. Some people are more wary about taking a risk and expending extra energy for an unlikely, but larger, reward. Other people concentrate more on the big reward they could get, and downplay the possible losses (of energy and time).

These findings could be important in getting a better grip on mental illnesses characterized by a lack of motivation, such as ADD, depression and schizophrenia, the researchers said. "Understanding some of these region-specific patterns may help us, at some point down the line, do a better job of predicting how patients may respond to different types of medication,"

"We think that part of what is going on in depression is some alteration in motivation pathways and part of the impetus for this study was working towards a model to be able to test the role of motivation in depression," Treadway said. "This may be a way to assess the motivational side of depression."

The study was published today (May 1) in the Journal of Neuroscience.

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Robert Byron / Featurepics.com

Think about steak, eat broccoli. This probably doesn't work for vegetarians.

Do you still act like the kid on the school lunch line who grumbles when he's served a pile of flaccid carrots? Here's a weird trick: Staring at a picture of a T-bone beforehand may make your vegetables more enjoyable, according to a new study in PLoS ONE.

When you view a salivating picture, your orbital frontal cortex, the region of the brain responsible for coding pleasant experiences, lights up and convinces your tongue that the bland food you're eating is tastier than it actually is, explains study author Johannes Le Coutre, Ph.D, head of perception physiology at Nestle Research Center in Switzerland.

We don't expect you to carry around pictures of juicy steaks or blistered pizza, but you can make your own healthy meals look and taste more like caloric feasts. We've recruited food stylist Brian Preston-Campbell, who is also a trained chef, to give us a few tips on how to make the following five health foods more tantalizing.

Related: Takeout That Delivers

1. Broccoli: Salt It
Green vegetables should always be cooked in salted boiling water because it not only seasons the produce, but enhances the color. Then shock them in ice water to halt the cooking process and lock in that emerald beauty.

2. Cauliflower: Add Color
"Steamed white cauliflower is a food stylist's death knell, only made worse when it is paired with steamed chicken breast or baked tilapia in a white butter sauce," says Preston-Campbell. One remedy? Leave some stem on the florets to help to break up the rounded tops of the cauliflower pieces and add a little contrast. Then add some color and texture to the dish with breadcrumbs, herbs, or spices. You can also mix it with colorful vegetables. (Need more great ways to spice up your food? Watch how chef Eddie Huang reinvents junk food.)

3. Yogurt: Strain It
Line a fine mesh strainer with a coffee filter or clean paper towel, and place on top of a bowl to catch the yogurt's liquid. Pour in the yogurt, and drain overnight in the refrigerator. In the morning, you'll be left with a thick, velvety yogurt that can hold a swirled texture (like a spiraling cone of soft serve).

4. Kale: Perfect Its Color
Buy the freshest, most vibrantly green bunch you can find, you want to start with a quality product. Then heavily salt the water to perk up the color and boil for only one or two minutes, just to soften these hardy leaves. Then, saute for about 5 minutes (don't let it brown) with some garlic, pine nuts, bacon or pepper flakes for added color and flavor. Avoid mixing in acids such as vinegar or lemon juice, which will make these leaves wilt in vibrancy and texture. (Start stripping off extra pounds with the newly expanded 2012 edition of Eat This, Not That!)

5. Tilapia: Keep It Moist
Tilapia doesn't look appetizing because it's flat, white, and simply not as exciting as a thick piece of bright red tuna or fresh fillet of salmon. Cooking this fish in a tomato broth will add color and keep the fish moist. Follow Preston-Campbell's recipe: Puree two cored and coarsely chopped tomatoes, the juice of half a lemon, a dash of dried oregano, and a tablespoon of extra virgin olive oil in a blender. Salt and pepper to taste. Strain into a saute pan and bring to a simmer. Place the tilapia fillets in the pan and poach the fish (just below a simmer on low heat, don't let it boil!) until they are cooked through, about 8 minutes.

Related: The Best and Worst Foods for Your Cholesterol
Make healthy miso-walnut dressing for a kale salad

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• Cauliflower Power
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• Why room-temperature coffee tastes so bad
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At some point most of us confuse left and right like we’re in a scene from an old Three Stooges one-reeler: “The one in your left hand!” “No, your other left!” Bonk!

It seems silly. After all, it’s not like we’re new to the concept; we’ve been using our left and right hands all our lives. Yet we sometimes flub -- some of us more often than others.

I’m not referring to people who’ve had strokes or suffered some other injury or illness. Then there’s often a clear explanation for what neuroscientists call “left-right confusion.”

But in 1978, researchers polled 364 university faculty, none of whom had any known neurological problems, and all of whom would seem to be smarter than the Three Stooges. It turned out that left-right confusion was common, especially among the women. The question was, why?

It’s now 34 years later and, said Eric Chudler, director of the Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering at the University of Washington, whose work depends on knowing left from right, “that’s a difficult question. I don’t know if any answer exists.”

According to M.K. Holder, executive director of the Handedness Research Institute, and an adjunct assistant professor of psychological and brain sciences at Indiana University, the link between brain “lateralization” -- the way specific functions appear to reside in left or right sides of our brains -- and handedness (or even what we mean when we say “handedness”) is still unclear.

But there does appear to be a link between degree of lateralization and confusion.

For example, left-right confusion may be related to spatial reasoning. If so, it might help explain why it’s more common in women than men; as a group, women tend to underperform on a critical test of spatial reasoning, called mental rotation, that requires subjects to mentally rotate images to tell if they’re identical or mirror images of each other.

In 2011, though, a team of German scientists disputed that connection by testing men and women who were matched in mental rotation ability before subjecting them to two standard tests of left-right confusion. (The tests require people to make a quick decision in response to directional words or symbols.) Their report, which appeared in Brain and Cognition, found that “matched participants showed robust sex differences in favor of men in all [left-right confusion] measurements. This suggests that pronounced sex differences…are a genuine phenomenon that exists independently of sex differences in mental rotation.”

The degree of asymmetry of one’s brain hemispheres, or the degree of lateralization, may be important. In 2009, British scientists found that those whose hearing was more biased toward one ear over another, a sign of asymmetry, were more likely to display confusion. Still, there’s no definitive answer yet.

Meanwhile, if you’d like to test your own degree of left-right confusion, Chudler has a test on his website.  

Brian Alexander (www.BrianRAlexander.com) is co-author, with Larry Young PhD., of "The Chemistry Between Us: Love Sex and the Science of Attraction," to be published Sept. 13.

Related:

• New book explains the mysteries of southpaws
• Always lost? It may be in your genes

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