Editor's Selections: Chocolate, Sex, The Female Touch, and Cigarettes

Here's are my ResearchBlogging Editor's Selections for this week.

Topics covered this week are: chocolate, sex, the female touch, and cigarettes. Good times.

• First, Bill Yates of the Brain Posts blog examines the relationship between eating chocolate and depression. I like his prescription: "If you like chocolate, depressed or not, enjoy in moderation."
• Are male and female brains "wired" differently? Kevin Mitchell of Wiring the Brain suggests that "the behaviours that show the most robust and innate differences between the sexes are involved in mating, reproduction, parental behaviour, territoriality and aggression and it is the brain areas that control these behaviours that are the most obviously sexually dimorphic." A fascinating explanation of some of the central differences in the organization of human male and female brains.
• Daniel Hawes of Ingenious Monkey | Twenty 2 Five asks, "Consider this choice: I will give you 20 dollars for certain or I will give you a lottery ticket with a 50/50 chance of winning either 40 dollars or receiving nothing. Which one would you prefer?" Would you believe that both men and women are more likely to take financial risks if they are touched on the shoulder by a female experimenter, rather than by a male experimenter?
• Finally, Are R-rated movies actually bad for your kids? An interesting study is described at The MacGuffin blog concerning the possible effect of R-rated movies on cigarette smoking in kids. The answer may not be as straightforward as you think.