It's Your Brain's Fault Your Family Drives You Nuts

If you ended your holiday visit home with frayed nerves, blame your brain, not your brother's snoring, Discovery reports. Family members prompt activity in a different part of the brain from friends and strangers, a new study shows. Researchers used MRIs to look at subjects' brains while they viewed photos of biological relatives and people who liked like the subjects, as well as photos of friends and strangers who weren't lookalikes.

"We like to be around people that look more like us, but we do not find them as sexually attractive," said one of the study's authors. It's likely that faces that resemble ours seem friendly, a psychology professor noted, but those people might drive us batty because we may link how we feel about them to how we feel about ourselves.
(More scientific study stories.)