Haters really do gotta hate. Typically, we tend to view people's responses to items as being a product of the item's properties. But some researchers considered the possibility that some people may have inherent tendency to have positive or negative reactions to things—that people are likers or haters. They developed a large collection of unrelated items, such as architecture, cold showers, politics, and soccer, and asked people about how they felt about them. The result is a score they termed the Dispositional Attitude Measure. They found that this measure correlated with a number of other major personality traits, suggesting it is deeply connected with fundamental aspects of someone's personality. The authors suggest that other research, especially things like product evaluation, should incorporate this measure.

Well, that isn't exactly working as planned. Every four years, the US Department of Health and Human Services, in conjunction with the World Health Organization, performs a huge survey of American school children. Some researchers recently reanalyzed data from the 2005-2006 survey and found a rather unusual trend: schools that had an anti-bullying program in place tended to have more instances of bullying. This may be a matter of schools implementing programs in response to an ongoing problem, but one of the authors of the study suspects that the programs could make matters worse. University of Texas, Arlington professor Seokjin Jeong suggested that "students who are victimizing their peers have learned the language from these anti-bullying campaigns and programs." Jeong went on to suggest that the programs taught the bullies about the warning signs that parents and teachers were being told to look for, allowing them to avoid getting caught.

Fat transplant used as a medical intervention. When someone has a metabolic disorder, one of the last bits of medical advice you'd probably expect them to hear is "you need more fat." But researchers are now testing fat transplants in mice precisely because they think the transplants could be medically useful in some cases. The particular problem in these cases is a genetic disorder where certain amino acids from proteins aren't metabolized normally, and they end up building up in the blood stream. The metabolic break down of these amino acids normally occurs in fat. So the researchers transplanted in fat from normal mice, figuring it would be able to break them down. It worked—but only if the fat was injected into the mouse's back. Putting it in the gut led to inflammation and the death of the donor fat.

Familiarity has its limits. There's a well known effect where people respond more positively to just about anything they're familiar with. (Advertisers rely heavily on this, and it might be the basis of the saying that there's no such thing as bad publicity.) But this effect does have its limits, at least when it comes to art. Some researchers chose two artists, John Everett Millais and Thomas Kinkade, with the latter's art being described as "so awful it must be seen to be believed," according to the researchers. They then exposed a bunch of students to works by both artists over the course of several weeks, with different students getting a different number of views. When it came to Kinkade, the students with the most exposure rated him worse. So, at least in the case of bad art, familiarity breeds contempt.

The high cost of mistaken trauma. We usually blame things like hypochondria and the US healthcare system for forcing people to visit the emergency room when they don't need to. But a new study has found that the emergency medical system contributes significantly by sending people to trauma centers that don't belong there. The authors found the higher cost of care at a Level 1 trauma center adds up to an extra $5,590 per patient. Yet over a third of the patients brought to these centers did not have injuries that justified Level 1 care—a total of 85,155 cases over the two year study period.