Whether women or men become parents depends on many social, cultural and political factors. But that's not all: personality also has a decisive influence on whether and how many children one decides to have – albeit somewhat differently for women and men.
 
The decision to have a child can limit self-realization and personal freedom, values that are very important today. Steffen Peters from the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research examined how the five most important personality traits of empathy, conscientiousness, extraversion, neuroticism and openness influence this individual decision.
 

He found that empathy is linked to the likelihood of having a child. Conscientiousness and neuroticism, on the other hand, had no effect. For women, extroversion was also unrelated to the number of children, but it was different for men: extroverted men were more likely to have one child but less likely to have another.
 

Peters suggests that while extroverts may find it easier to find a partner because they are extroverts, they may feel restricted and isolated by having a child, making them unwilling to have another child. In addition, the personality can change with the birth of a child, which is a decisive event in life. She suspects that the second child will have less of an impact on personality since the routines were already established in the previous parenting.

Quelle: Demografische Forschung aus erster Hand 2/23

Scents can improve mental health. A study of 43 people aged 60 to 85 found that diffusing natural scents in the bedroom before bed improved mental performance.

For six months, 20 people diffused natural oils of rose, orange, eucalyptus, lemon, peppermint, rosemary, and lavender in bedroom diffusers every night. The control group, on the other hand, used solutions that contained only traces of odorous substances. On neuropsychological tests measuring memory, language, planning and attention, the scent group performed more than twice as well as the control group.

Brain scans also showed significant changes in areas important to memory and thinking. This was published by a research team from the University of California in the journal Frontiers in Neuroscience. "The sense of smell has the special privilege of being directly connected to the memory circuits of the brain," explained neurobiologist Michael Yassa.

Only healthy people took part in this experiment. Researchers therefore hope to be able to investigate in the near future whether people with mild dementia can also benefit from the use of aromatic oils. Animal experiments have shown that environmental odors stimulate the networks between neurons even in neuropathic animals.

Quelle: DOI 10.3389/fnins.2023.1200448