Wear Red and Learn ABC's for Heart Month

February is American Heart Month

Cardiovascular disease is the number one killer for Americans. One in three deaths is caused by heart attack or stroke, amounting to about 800,000 fatalities each year. Even if one survives a heart attack or stroke, the condition often leads to disabilities and loads of expenses. "Fortunately, there are many simple steps we can take to prevent heart disease, such as eating healthy foods, exercising regularly, and not smoking," said Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius in a statement today. The HHS department aims to prevent 1 million heart attacks and strokes by 2016 in a program aptly named "Million Hearts," which launched in September 2011. And just how will they pull this off? The program seeks to empower Americans to make healthy choices, by avoiding tobacco and reducing red meat and sodium intake, as well as improving care for people who already need treatment, by teaching them the ABCs. A: Aspirin for folks at risk; B: Blood Pressure Control; C: Cholesterol Control; and S: Smoking Cessation.

The American Heart Association, too, plays a big role in American Heart month. In fact, today is National Wear Red Day, to bring attention to cardiovascular disease and its threat to women.

Is Domestic Violence Most Common on Super Bowl Sunday?

Urban myths rarely have a useful purpose other than to confound, outrage, and frighten people into passing them along. But there's a silver lining to this one—the idea that Super Bowl Sunday is linked to the highest incidences of domestic abuse in the country.

While experts in the field dismiss that theory, they value the increased attention paid to domestic violence on the occasion.

"The Super Bowl does not cause domestic violence, and it doesn't increase domestic violence, but it does increase the public's awareness of the issue, which will help victims learn about help and resources," says Cindy Southworth, vice president of development and innovation at the National Network to End Domestic Violence. [Is Domestic Violence Most Common on Super Bowl Sunday?]

Does It Only Take 3 Weeks to Form a Habit?

I've heard it said hundreds of times, writes U.S. News blogger Yoni Freedhoff From patients, from colleagues, and sometimes from the media: "It takes three weeks to form a habit." But in my experience, both personally and professionally, the notion that true habits—behaviors that persist in the face of major life upheavals and adversities—can be forged in 21 days flies in the face of reality. So I decided to research the claim.

My readings took me to a self-help book written in 1960 by Maxwell Maltz, a cosmetic surgeon, who reported that it took 21 days for amputees to stop feeling phantom limb pain. Maltz then extrapolated that consciously cultivating a new behavior for just 15 minutes a day for 21 days could create a habit. This didn't strike me as particularly rigorous or convincing proof.

Looking to more modern research wasn't any more helpful. The most recent piece I could find was a 2009 study published in the European Journal of Social Psychology that looked at the time it took for subjects to "automate" an eating, drinking or exercise behavior "carried out daily in the same context"—i.e., a habit. And with examples such as the time it took to automatically drink a glass of water after waking, or to do 50 sit-ups before breakfast, they concluded that it took participants between 18 and 254 days for these behaviors to happen "automatically." [Read more: Does It Only Take 3 Weeks to Form a Habit?]

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Jack Lew’s Signature and Yours: What We Learn from Handwriting

On the heels of the hullaballoo surrounding Jack Lew's penmanship—should the treasury secretary nominee be confirmed, U.S. currency will feature his cartoonish loop-de-loop of a signature—and National Handwriting Week (yes, you read that correctly), U.S. News wondered what, if anything, can be learned from chicken scratch.

The short answer: depends on whom you ask.

Graphology, the craft of deducing one's character traits by handwriting analysis, holds that tremendous insight can be gleaned about a person by taking the sum total of myriad variables like letter size, stroke pressure, the slant of the script, and its position on a page.

"There's about 5,000 different things that handwriting can reveal," says Kathi McKnight, a Colorado-based graphologist. Among them, she says, are everything from "who is wounded in love, to who has high self esteem and determination, to who is wracked with self doubt." Psychologists, for example, work with McKnight to help them "get to the heart of things with a patient more quickly and deeply," and teachers can use graphology to spot signs of depression in children, she says.

"Everyone learned how to write the same (way) and yet no two people write alike, and one has to wonder why is that—and it's because it's actually 'brainwriting,' instead of handwriting," McKnight says.

While the hand may transmit the message, it's coming from the brain, explains Sheila Kurtz, president of Graphologyconsulting.com in New York City.

As for Lew's signature?

"The handwriting is so purposefully loopy and odd that there must be a good story behind it, which Mr. Lew hasn't yet publicly revealed," Kurtz says. Signatures, in fact, don't make the best samples for analysis since they're often carefully constructed, Kurtz explains. In Lew's case, it looks "like a logotype," she says. "It shows what the writer wants others to see, not always what may truly be."

Whether handwriting reflects the machinations of the brain is one thing. But the extent to which it reflects someone's character is another.

[See How Your Personality Affects Your Health.]

And that's where graphology gets very tricky, since it's used in such pivotal decisions as hiring personnel.

Such analysis "should not be used for anything that tries to assert a personality characteristic to handwriting. There is just no research that backs that up," says Arend Van Gemmert, who is studying handwriting to detect problems and associations in fine motor skills at Louisiana State University. "If you look at handwriting, what it can show you is if somebody has, for example, some problem with movement." But even then, one should "try to use it as part of the whole diagnostic battery, not just the handwriting itself."

[See Mind Games: How to Prevent Dementia.]

Mike Aamodt, an industrial-organizational psychologist with DCI Consulting Group, a Washington, D.C.-based human resources firm, also noted the lack of research supporting graphology's value.

"From what I can tell from the literature, it doesn't seem to predict anything," Aamodt says. "The graphologists are probably pretty good at being able to pick out the features" of handwriting, but "their interpretation I think of what that means is probably questionable."

Both Aamodt and Van Gemmert pointed out research published in 2003 in the International Journal of Testing that challenged the role of graphology in personnel decisions. Researchers with the University of Western Ontario's psychology department found that the content of one's writing—whether or not it's autobiographical—influenced the analysis of graphologists. But in either case, graphology was considered less valid than "other more commonly used personnel selection methods." The paper concludes with a position statement, which says: "Although the use of handwriting analysis in making personnel selection decisions has a very long history, the evidence available to date fails to support this practice."

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