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When my mom died a few years ago, my siblings and I were discussing the many ways life would be different without her. МNo more presents,Н my brother noted.

My mother was passionate about gifts. As an adult, I often urged her to stop giving presents and spend the money on herself, but she refused. She liked giving gifts too much.

Gift giving has long been a favorite subject for studies on human behavior, with «topics.nytimes.com», anthropologists, economists and marketers all weighing in. They have found that giving gifts is a surprisingly complex and important part of human interaction, helping to define relationships and strengthen bonds with family and friends. Indeed, psychologists say it is often the giver, rather than the recipient, who reaps the biggest psychological gains from a gift. Frustrated by crowds, traffic and commercialism, people can be tempted at this time of year to opt out of gift giving altogether. A 2005 survey showed that four out of five Americans think the holidays are too materialistic, according to the Center for a New American Dream, which promotes responsible consumption.

But while itЙs reasonable to cut back on spending during the holidays, psychologists say that banning the gift exchange with loved ones is not the best solution. People who refuse to accept or exchange gifts during the holidays, these experts say, may be missing out on an important connection with family and friends.

МThat doesnЙt do a service to the relationship,Н said Ellen J. Langer, a «topics.nytimes.com» «topics.nytimes.com» professor. МIf I donЙt let you give me a gift, then IЙm not encouraging you to think about me and think about things I like. I am preventing you from experiencing the joy of engaging in all those activities. You do people a disservice by not giving them the gift of giving.Н

The social value of giving has been recognized throughout human history. For thousands of years, some native cultures have engaged in the potlatch, a complex ceremony that celebrates extreme giving. Although cultural interpretations vary, often the status of a given family in a clan or village was dictated not by who had the most possessions, but instead by who gave away the most. The more lavish and bankrupting the potlatch, the more prestige gained by the host family.

Some researchers believe evolutionary forces may have favored gift giving. Men who were the most generous may have had the most reproductive success with women. (Notably, the use of food in exchange for sexual access and grooming has been documented in our closest ape relative, the chimpanzee.) Women who were skilled at giving be it extra food or a well-fitted pelt helped sustain the family provider as well as her children.

Margaret Rucker, a consumer psychologist at the University of California, Davis, says men are typically more price-conscious and practical when it comes to the gifts they give and get, while women tend to be more concerned about giving and receiving gifts with emotional significance.

Dr. Rucker says she often recounts the story of a man who climbed a tree to retrieve a robinЙs egg that matched his girlfriendЙs blue eyes. МWomen say, ИOh, how romantic,ЙН she said. МBut men say, ИThatЙs the dumbest thing IЙve ever heard of, and also what about the mama bird?ЙН

Gender differences in gift giving seem to emerge early in life. Researchers at Loyola University Chicago studied 3- and 4-year-olds at a day-care center, all of whom had attended the same birthday party. The girls typically went shopping with their mothers and helped select and wrap the gift. Boys, meanwhile, were often unaware of what the gift was. МTheyЙd say, ИI took a nap while my mom went shopping for it,ЙН said Mary Ann McGrath, the associate dean of the graduate school of business at Loyola.

Gift giving is often the most obvious way a partner can show interest, strengthen a bond or even signal that a relationship should end. One colleague of Dr. RuckerЙs noted that she knew her marriage was over when her husband handed her a gift in a brown grocery bag.

People who stop giving gifts lose out on important social cues, researchers say. МWho is on your gift list is telling you who is important in your life,Н Dr. McGrath said. МIt says who is more important and who is less important.Н

But the biggest effect of gift giving may be on ourselves. Giving to others reinforces our feelings for them and makes us feel effective and caring, Dr. Langer said.

For a glimpse into the psychology of giving, researchers at «topics.nytimes.com» recently studied gift giving by pet owners, finding that it stemmed from a desire to make pets happy and offer gifts that would improve a petЙs comfort and care. The research, to be published next year, may seem frivolous, but it also gives insight into the self-serving nature of giving, since pets canЙt reciprocate, the researchers note.

МWhen youЙre giving to another person, you have this pressure of reciprocity, but itЙs not there with a pet,Н said Tracy Ryan, an associate professor of advertising research at Virginia Commonwealth. МIt shows that a lot of the pleasure is in the giving, knowing youЙve taken care of someone.Н

well@nytimes.com

Some tales are so tall that they trip over their own improbable feats, narrative cracks and melodrama. That one-on-one playground victory over Kobe Bryant back in the day; the 34 hours in labor without painkillers; the former girlfriend or boyfriend who spoke eight languages and was a secret agentbesides.

Yes, uh-huh, really. Is it closing timeyet?

Yet in milder doses, self-serving exaggeration can be nearly impossible to detect, experts say, and there are severalexplanations.

A series of recent studies, focusing on students who inflate their grade-point average, suggests that such exaggeration is very different psychologically from other forms of truth twisting. Touching up scenes or past performances induces none of the anxiety that lying or keeping secrets does, these studies find; and embroiderers often work to live up to the enhanced self-images they project. The findings imply that some kinds of deception are aimed more at the deceiver than at the audience, and they may help in distinguishing braggarts and posers from those who are expressing personal aspirations, howeverclumsily.

“Its important to emphasize that the motives driving academic exaggeration seem to be personal and intrapsychic rather than public or interpersonal,” said Richard Gramzow, a psychologist at the University of Southampton in England who has led much of the research. “Basically, exaggeration here reflects positive goals for the future, and we have found that those goals tend to berealized.”

Psychologists have studied deception from all sides and have found that it usually puts a psychological or physical strain on the person doing the dissembling. People with guilty knowledge Д of a detail from a crime scene, for example Д tend to show signs of stress, as measured by heart and skin sensors, under pointedquestioning.

Trying to hold onto an inflammatory secret is mentally exhausting, studies have found, and the act of suppressing the information can cause thoughts of it to flood the consciousness. When telling outright lies, people tend to look and sound tenser thanusual.

“Specifically, people are especially more tense when lying, compared to telling the truth, when they are highly motivated to get away with their lies and when they are lying about a transgression,” said Bella DePaulo, a visiting professor of psychology at the University of California, SantaBarbara.

But a study published in February in the journal Emotion found that exactly the opposite was true for students who exaggerated their grades. The researchers had 62 Northeastern University students fill out a computerized form asking, among other things, for cumulative grade point average. The students were then interviewed while hooked up to an array of sensitive electrodes measuring nervous system activation. The scripted interview covered academic history, goals andgrades.

The researchers then pulled the students records, with permission, and found that almost half had exaggerated their average by as much as six-tenths of a point. Yet the electrode readings showed that oddly enough, the exaggerators became significantly more relaxed while discussing theirgrades.

“It was a robust effect, the sort of readings you see when people are engaged in a positive social encounter, or when theyre meditating,” said Wendy Berry Mendes, an associate professor of psychology at Harvard and senior author of the study. Gramzow and Greg Willard, then at Northeastern and now at Harvard, wereco-authors.

The researchers videotaped the interviews, and independent observers rated how students looked and behaved. “The ones who exaggerated the most appeared the most calm and confident” on the ratings, Mendessaid.

The grade inflation was less an attempt to deceive, the authors concluded, than a reflection of healthy overconfidence and a statement of aspirations. “Its basically an exercise in projecting the self toward ones goals,” Gramzowsaid.

In earlier studies, Gramzow and Willard found that students who bumped up their averages in interviews subsequently improved their grades Д often by the very amount they hadexaggerated.

The findings provide another lens through which to view claims, from Senator Hillary Rodham Clintons story of sniper fire in Bosnia to exaggerations of income, charitable contributions and SAT scores. As much as these are embroideries, they are also expressions of yearning, and for reachablegoals.

In that sense, fibs can reflect something close to the opposite of the frustration, insecurity and secretiveness that often fuel big lies. That may be why they can come so easily, add up so fast and for some people Д especially around closing time Д become indistinguishable from thetruth.

The Well column will return May20.

Doctor Mom’s admonition, “Don’t peel your apple,” is getting new scientific support from scientists in New York, who are reporting isolation of chemical compounds from apple peel that may be involved in the apple’s beneficial health effects. Their report is scheduled for publication in the May 30 issue of ACS’s Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.

In the study, Rui Hai Liu and Xiangjiu He point out that apple consumption has been linked to a reduced risk of chronic health problems such as lung cancer, heart disease, and stroke. Traditional advice on eating apple peel was based mainly on its fiber content, with peel packing about 75 percent of the dietary fiber in an apple. More recently, however, scientists have shown that the peel also contains most of the beneficial phytochemicals believed to be responsible for the apple-a-day-keeps-the-doctor-away effect.

Until now, however, scientists had not identified the specific phytochemicals responsible for apple’s anti-cancer effects. Xiangjiu He and Liu processed 231 pounds of Red Delicious apples and extracted phytochemicals from about 24 pounds of peel. They screened the compounds for anti-cancer effects in laboratory cultures of human liver, breast, and colon cancer cells. In doing so, they identified a group of compounds with “potent” anti-cancer effects.

ARTICLE #3 “Triterpenoids isolated from Apple Peels Have Potent Antiproliferative Activity and May be Partially Responsible for Apple’s Anticancer Activity”

CONTACT:
Rui Hai Liu, Ph.D.
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York 14853

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The American Chemical Society - the world’s largest scientific society - is a nonprofit organization chartered by the U.S. Congress and a global leader in providing access to chemistry-related research through its multiple databases, peer-reviewed journals and scientific conferences. Its main offices are in Washington, D.C., and Columbus, Ohio.

Contact: Michael Woods
http://www.acs.org/

In 1950, in a letter to bishops, Pope Pius XII took up the issue of evolution. The Roman Catholic Church does not necessarily object to the study of evolution as far as it relates to physical traits, he wrote in the encyclical, “Humani Generis.” But he added, “Catholic faith obliges us to hold that souls are immediately created by God.”

Pope John Paul II made much the same point in 1996, in a message to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, an advisory group to the Vatican.

Although he noted that in the intervening years, evolution had become “more than a hypothesis,” he added that considering the mind as emerging merely from physical phenomena was “incompatible with the truth about man.”

But as evolutionary biologists and cognitive neuroscientists peer ever deeper into the brain, they are discovering more and more genes, brain structures and other physical correlates to feelings like empathy, disgust and joy. That is, they are discovering physical bases for the feelings from which moral sense emerges - not just in people but in other animals as well.

The result is perhaps the strongest scientific challenge yet to the worldview summed up by Descartes, the 17th-century French philosopher who divided the creatures of the world between humanity and everything else. As biologists turn up evidence that animals can exhibit emotions and patterns of cognition once thought of as strictly human, Descartess dictum, “I think, therefore I am,” loses its force.

For many scientists, the evidence that moral reasoning is a result of physical traits that evolve along with everything else is just more evidence against the existence of the soul, or of a God to imbue humans with souls. For many believers, particularly in the United States, the findings show the error, even wickedness, of viewing the world in strictly material terms. And they provide for theologians a growing impetus to reconcile the existence of the soul with the growing evidence that humans are not, physically or even mentally, in a class by themselves.

The idea that human minds are the product of evolution is “unassailable fact,” the journal Nature said this month in an editorial on new findings on the physical basis of moral thought. A headline on the editorial drove the point home: “With all deference to the sensibilities of religious people, the idea that man was created in the image of God can surely be put aside.”

Or, as V. S. Ramachandran, a brain scientist at the University of California, San Diego, put it in an interview, there may be soul in the sense of “the universal spirit of the cosmos,” but the soul as it is usually spoken of, “an immaterial spirit that occupies individual brains and that only evolved in humans - all that is complete nonsense.” Belief in that kind of soul “is basically superstition,” he said.

For people like the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, talk of the soul is of a piece with the rest of the palaver of religious faith, which he has likened to a disease. And among evolutionary psychologists, religious faith is nothing but an evolutionary artifact, a predilection that evolved because shared belief increased group solidarity and other traits that contribute to survival and reproduction.

Nevertheless, the idea of a divinely inspired soul will not be put aside. To cite just one example, when 10 Republican U.S. presidential candidates were asked at a recent debate if there was anyone among them who did not believe in evolution, three raised their hands. One of them, Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas, explained later in an opinion piece published in The New York Times and the International Herald Tribune that he did not reject all evolutionary theory. But he added, “Man was not an accident and reflects an image and likeness unique in the created order.”

That is the nub of the issue, according to Nancey Murphy, a philosopher at Fuller Theological Seminary who has written widely on science, religion and the soul. Challenges to the uniqueness of humanity in creation are just as alarming as the Copernican assertion that Earth is not the center of the universe, she writes in her book “Bodies and Souls or Spirited Bodies?” Just as Copernicus knocked Earth off its celestial pedestal, she said, the new findings on cognition have displaced people from their “strategic location” in creation. (A century before her, Freud, in his “Introductory Lectures to Psychoanalysis,” listed the findings of Copernicus and Darwin as two of the three “wounding blows” to mans narcissism. The third “blow” was his own “discovery,” psychoanalysis.)

In the three days and change since Ron Wilson was fired as Sharks coach by Doug Wilson, the sighs of relief by people tired of getting their Wilsons crossed have caused a small tornado. This will continue unless the new Sharks coach is Landon Wilson, Mike Wilson, Murray Wilson, Rick Wilson or the other Ron Wilson.

Who, by the way, are probably the only people who haven’t been rumored to be Ron Wilson’s replacement.

But while the guesswork has only begun on the identity of the next Sharks coach (and get ready for a prolonged wait, as several potential candidates haven’t even been fired by their present teams yet), the more interesting development won’t be in the coach’s chair anyway, but a level up, where Doug Wilson (as opposed to Carey Wilson, Mitch Wilson, Rik Wilson or Roger Wilson) is now confronted with a bigger issue, namely:

How to wean himself from the comforting role of being the nice guy.

He broke through the initial barrier by firing Ron Wilson, a man he genuinely likes and respects, because he couldn’t provide President Greg Jamison or himself a compelling reason not to do so. Make no mistake, though; he’s not nearly as disappointed in his ex-coach as he is in his current employees.

Which is why the next coach - be he Pat Burns, or Tim Hunter, or John Tortorella, or Peter Laviolette, or Alain Vigneault - is likely to find a more chastened and less enabled roster.

Lost in the buzz about Ron Wilson being human-resourced out of town (and probably to Atlanta as the Thrashers’ next coach) and the identity of the next coach is the fact that Doug Wilson is learning the benefits of fear in the workplace.

He sees Mike Babcock, the Detroit coach who was facing a player mutiny a couple of years ago before general manager Ken Holland gave him carte blanche to crush the mutineers. He sees Randy Carlyle, nobody’s idea of fuzzy/cuddly, having won the Stanley Cup last year in Anaheim. And he sees a team here that is (a) clearly not Cup ready after years of thinking it was, and (b) far too satisfied for its own good.

Thus, while you may be surprised by the next coach, you shouldn’t be surprised by the notion of a message trade, in which a seeming untouchable is sent out of town as an indication to the rest of the union hall that this isn’t the NHL’s Chuck E. Cheese any more. You can even ask him Tuesday in the annual Bizarro-World “State of the Sharks” reverse fan-fest at the arena - his first chance to be flogged by the fans for whatever reason strikes them.

You may also see more movement once the new coach comes to town and has seen a training camp and some actual games. It all depends on what Doug Wilson sees once he’s had his postseason evaluation with himself.

What he’s likely to see is a man who has built a good team on not a lot of money (in fact, less than should be spent for any team with real championship aspirations), but a team that believes in itself far more than the evidence justifies. Rarely criticized by the home folks, praised for its young players who got regular ice time in good times and bad (except for defenseman Matt Carle) and beloved without portfolio by pundits three time zones away, the organization got fat on the junk food that is regular-season love.

And Wilson is likely to see in himself a man who has played his part in making San Jose a comfortable place to play - knowing as he did how fruitlessly uncomfortable it could be in Chicago when he was a player. And now he’s likely to see a man who’s seen that comfort only goes so far unless the players are extraordinary talents or self-motivated Type AAs - which not all the Sharks are.

He can’t come out and say he has no untouchables, because he’d be considered an idiot. Joe Thornton isn’t touchable, and neither is Evgeni Nabokov. After those two, though, it is reasonable to assume that every Shark is in play, and offers that were rejected in the past are now potentially appealing.

It means that Wilson has to fall out of love with the roster he so painstakingly crafted, and to remind some players that there are teams in Miami and Columbus, where the winning is harder, or Edmonton and Buffalo, where the winter is harder, or Toronto or Ottawa, where the mean-spirited scrutiny is harder.

In short, the substantive change happens not at the Ron Wilson level but the Doug Wilson level, and judging by the edge in his voice during Monday’s conference call with the jackals, he seems ready to do so. We’ll see if in fact he changes the culture he helped build, but the semi-not-completely-uneducated guess here is that he will - that the new coach will not be shackled to the past everyone now seems so anxious to disavow.

E-mail Ray Ratto at rratto@sfchronicle.com.