Saturday saw the Guardian on fine form with a classic piece of bad neuro-journalism which made it all the way onto the front page:
What the research actually found was nothing to do with looking on the bright side of anything, and was nothing to do with depression either. In fact, it suggests that the gene in question doesn't cause mental health problems. So the headlines are a little misleading, then.
Psychologists find gene that helps you look on the bright side of lifeThose unfortunate enough to lack the 'brightside gene' are more likely to suffer from mental health problems such as depression
The study comes from Elaine Fox and colleagues from the University of Essex.* They took 111 people, presumably students, and got them to do a "dot-probe" task. Performance on this task was related to the genotype of the 5HTTLPR polymorphism, a variant in the gene which encodes ...
