Dr. Richard Stevens of Keele University has recently completed a fascinating study into the use of swear words when feeling pain - and has discovered as a result that swear words actually increase people's tolerance of pain.

In March this year, a Chinese builder hit the headlines when he used Buddhist breathing techniques to keep himself alive when he otherwise would undoubtedly have died. By slowing his breathing and being aware of how to breathe correctly, he managed to create an air pocket for himself as he lay trapped under rubble. Two hours later, when a rescue team dug him out, they were fully expecting the man to be dead, instead finding him alive and most definitely breathing.

Mary Pritchard of Boise State University noticed that research has been conducted into the relationship between gender and self-esteem, gender and weight preoccupation, and self-esteem and weight preoccupation. No studies have yet focused, however, on whether self-esteem is a moderating factor in the relationship between gender and weight preoccupation.

A group of researchers from the Department of Basic and Clinical Psychology and Psychobiology have recently been studying the type of personality that correlates with high alcohol consumption. The personalities of 539 college students - 283 women, 256 men - were analysed using four questionnaires. The researchers concluded that disagreeable disinhibition as a personality trait predicted alcohol consumption both during the week and at the weekend, whereas unconscious disinhibition correlated with alcohol consumption at the weekends only.

Researchers from Belgium and the USA have teamed up to study how personality traits correlate with different types of eating disorder. Working with forty eating disordered participants, they discovered that for patients whose disorder manifested itself through binging and purging, levels of behavioural inhibition, cognitive control and effortful control were significantly lower than those exhibited by patients whose eating disorders involved restricting instead.