how long does it really take to create a new habit? According to Lally’s study, implementing meaningful change in our lives requires 2 to 8 months. The variation is due to the type of habit in question, the person developing it and his/her circumstances. On average it takes 66 days
facial symmetry, averageness and above-average secondary/dimorphic sexual characteristics have been proposed to indicate hormonal and health markers for relational attraction. These traits are considered universal evolutionary important biological markers. Therefore, the hypothesis that attractiveness is processed unconsciously – i.e., subliminally – has been proposed and supported by the vast majority of topical research. […]
In this manuscript, […] we dispute subliminality […]
We demonstrate that attraction in response to human faces involves both conscious and unconscious elements […]
The experience of attractiveness was reported to precede the conscious awareness of attractiveness during overt presentations, but our current findings suggested that it recruited, influenced and was influenced by conscious perception and evaluation. […]
Previous research has made strong and repeated claims as to that attractiveness is
processed subliminally […] In this study, we presented strong evidence that this is not correct, and that the experience, evaluation and perception of attractiveness involves conscious awareness and unconscious, automatic and involuntary processes.
four appears to be the magic number when it comes to conversation […]
“You very rarely get more than four people in a conversation. In the normal run of things, when a fifth person joins a group, it’ll become two conversations within about 20 seconds” […]
groups that work in challenging situations — such as SAS patrols and surgical teams — tend to do best when there are four members. […]
“[Shakespeare] instinctively understood the mentalising capacities of his audience. He was anxious to ensure his audience wasn’t cognitively overloaded by the number of minds in the action on stage. [It is] a masterclass in the study of human psychology.”
photo { William Klein, Mten hidden their faces / 69 Sauna & Massage , 1980 }
Othello syndrome is a psychosis with delusions of infidelity, where the patient harbors a persistent, unfounded belief – a “delusion” – that their partner is being unfaithful. We report a rare case of a 50-year-old woman, with no previous psychiatric history, who developed a delusion of infidelity, leading to verbal and physical aggressions with bladed weapons, days after experiencing a bi-thalamic infarct due to the occlusion of the Percheron artery. […]
H.S. is a 50-year-old right-handed woman who had been in a joyful, jealousy-free marriage for three decades and was completely independent in all areas of daily living activities. Seventeen days from the onset of her symptoms and two days post-discharge, she exhibited symptoms of delusional jealousy, accusing her younger sister of having an affair with her husband and wanting to kick her out of the house, even though her sister had just come to visit her upon her hospital discharge.
She started repeating to everyone coming to visit her that the cause of her illness was her husband’s infidelity. She kept accusing her sister for a week and then shifted her accusations to her friend’s daughter. She became suspicious and hyper-vigilant, seizing every chance to check her husband’s phone, spying on him, and frequently waking him up at night to confront him, with accusations like “Why are you here sharing my bed when you’re cheating on me?”
A year later, she verbally and physically assaulted her husband, using a bladed weapon on two separate occasions. Despite denial of these attacks, she persisted in her accusations of betrayal.
{ Neurocase | Continue reading }
A 68-year-old, right-handed, married male was admitted to the psychiatric facility for evaluation of agressive behavior toward his wife, whom he believed was having an affair with their 25-year-old neighbor.
The patient developed the belief of his wife’s infidelity shortly after a right cerebrovascular infarction 1 year earlier. He became impotent after the infarction, and a urologic consult discovered no other identifiable medical etiology. The patient became suspicious of the alleged affair when he began “putting together” evidence from various sources. For example, he noticed that his wife began leaving the first floor bedroom window open at night, presumably to allow her “lover” to enter the room while the patient was asleep. He found tracks in the snow beneath the window, and he noticed that the dust was disturbed on the window sill, which he took as evidence that the neighbor had entered through the window.
On another occasion, the patient discovered that his neighbor had generously offered to perform routine chores around the couple’s home, including fertilizing their lawn. The patient’s physical disabilities prevented him fromperforming such chores, and he interpreted this gesture as a threat to his marriage.
In response to the patient’s accusations, his wife began severely restricting her activities. She became fearful of getting up at night to go to the bathroom because the patient often awoke to reassert his belief that she was getting up to meet with her lover.
Furthermore, despite his impotence, he became sexually aggressive with his wife, repeatedly approaching her whenever she came to bed and demanding verbally and physically that she engage in intercourse with him. His advances would keep his wife awake all night, so that she eventually moved to a second bedroom, a decision that was interpreted by the patient as further proof that his wife was having an affair. Psychiatric hospitalization was finally precipitated by the patient’s increased threats to assault his wife if she did not discontinue her alleged affair. At one point, the patient became angered at her denials of infidelity, and he tried to strike her with his cane, finally throwing it at her. […]
The fact that the neighbor was a newlywed did not seem to sway the patient’s belief in the affair, as he merely contended that the neighbor’s new bride was also having an affair with another neighbor. […]
Misrepresentation or misinterpretation of events is common in brain disease […] Numerous cases of these monosymptomatic or content-specific delusions have been reported in association with identifiable insults or degenerative processes, Such delusions as reduplicative paramnesia (the belief that familiar surroundings have been duplicated), Capgras syndrome (the belief that one’s family members have been replaced by imposters), and de Clérambault’s syndrome (the belief that one is involved in an amorous relationship with a famous person) have been recognized with increasing frequency in association with insults to right hemisphere and bilateral frontal systems.
Traditionally, the Othello syndrome, and obsessive jealousy in general, has been treated purely as a symptom of a primary psychiatric disorder. In fact, delusional jealousy is not uncommonly found in association with chronic alcohol abuse, schizophrenia, primary delusional (paranoid) disorder, or as a secondary symptom in affective disorder. […]
one can argue that the patient’s inability to “fertilize his lawn” was a metaphor for his sexual dysfunction [“Our bodies are our gardens, to the which our wills are gardeners.” (Othello, I, 3)][…]
Delusional jealousy is rarely reported as a mono-symptomatic phenomenon of underlying neurologic disease. This is the first reported case of the Othello syndrome that clearly developed in association with a structural lesion and in the absence of general paranoia.
{ Othello Syndrome Secondary to Right Cerebrovascular Infarction (1991) | PDF }
Spending time alone is a virtually inevitable part of daily life that can promote or undermine well-being.
Here, we explore how the language used to describe time alone—such as “me-time” “solitude,” or “isolation”—influences how it is perceived and experienced […]
linguistic framing affected what people thought about, but not what they did, while alone […]
simple linguistic shifts may enhance subjective experiences of time alone
We do not have a veridical representation of our body in our mind. For instance, tactile distances of equal measure along the medial-lateral axis of our limbs are generally perceived as larger than those running along the proximal-distal axis. This anisotropy in tactile distances reflects distortions in body-shape representation, such that the body parts are perceived as wider than they are. While the origin of such anisotropy remains unknown, it has been suggested that visual experience could partially play a role in its manifestation.
To causally test the role of visual experience on body shape representation, we investigated tactile distance perception in sighted and early blind individuals […] Overestimation of distances in the medial-lateral over proximal-distal body axes were found in both sighted and blind people, but the magnitude of the anisotropy was significantly reduced in the forearms of blind people.
We conclude that tactile distance perception is mediated by similar mechanisms in both sighted and blind people, but that visual experience can modulate the tactile distance anisotropy.
At the root of post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, is a memory that cannot be controlled. It may intrude on everyday activity, thrusting a person into the middle of a horrifying event, or surface as night terrors or flashbacks. Decades of treatment of military veterans and sexual assault survivors have left little doubt that traumatic memories function differently from other memories. […]
The people listening to the sad memories, which often involved the death of a family member, showed consistently high engagement of the hippocampus, part of the brain that organizes and contextualizes memories. When the same people listened to their traumatic memories — of sexual assaults, fires, school shootings and terrorist attacks — the hippocampus was not involved. […]
“traumatic memories are not experienced as memories as such,” but as “fragments of prior events, subjugating the present moment.” The traumatic memories appeared to engage a different area of the brain — the posterior cingulate cortex, or P.C.C., which is usually involved in internally directed thought, like introspection or daydreaming. The more severe the person’s PTSD symptoms were, the more activity appeared in the P.C.C. What is striking about this finding is that the P.C.C. is not known as a memory region, but one that is engaged with “processing of internal experience”
quote { Emmanuel Levinas, Time and the other (page 69), 1979 | PDF }
Unrealistic optimism or optimism bias—the tendency for individuals to overestimate the chance of favorable outcomes occurring and underestimate the chance of bad —has been found to be one of the most pervasive human traits across many domains. For instance, research has shown that individuals tend to underestimate the likelihood of developing a drinking problem or getting divorced and to overestimate their future earnings and how long they are going to live. Our established tendency toward unrealistic optimism poses an evolutionary puzzle as normative models of human judgment, like expected utility theory, suggest unbiased assessments of probabilities are advantageous. Like any other judgmental bias, optimism bias distorts the decision-making process, leading to systematic decision errors, increased rash and risky behavior and a failure to take precautionary measures. […]
There are reasons for expecting that the optimism bias may be associated with cognitive ability. Supportive empirical evidence for this framework comes from the experimental literature on cognitive ability and judgmental biases. For instance, intelligence has been found to lower one’s susceptibility to hindsight bias, overconfidence, framing, and the sunk cost fallacy. […]
we used an unbalanced panel of 36,312 respondents […]
The findings we present provide evidence that forecasting accuracy is linked to cognitive ability. Specifically, we find that higher cognitive ability is associated with a higher incidence of realism and pessimism in beliefs and a lower incidence of unrealistic optimism.
Taken together, our results lead us to conclude that the rash and risky behaviors associated with excessive optimism may be a side product of the true driver, low cognitive ability.
{ Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin | Continue reading }
A cornerstone of cognitive science is that mental systems are limited: There is a maximum amount of information they can process or store, beyond which performance breaks down. Yet so far the study of such limits has been focused on core systems like attention and memory. Here we explore the limit of self-representation, the ability to represent someone or something as you. […]
results are consistent with the view that the mind employs a cognitive architecture that can represent at most one self at a time, and which serially switches out the items it represents. […]
The self-representational limit of one item at a time differs markedly from known limits on other systems, like attention and short-term memory. The number of items we can both track and remember in short-term memory is greater than one, and somewhat flexible depending on the nature of the stimuli and their relations. For instance, people can track more items if they are evenly spaced out on the display rather than clumped together (Alvarez & Franconeri, 2007), remember more items if they are less complex (e.g., simple colors rather than shaded cubes) (Alvarez & Cavanagh, 2004), and both track and remember more items if they span the visual hemifields rather than occur within a single visual hemifield (Alvarez & Cavanagh, 2005; Strong & Alvarez, 2020). Self-representation appears to have a limit that is more severe and inflexible.
Adult individuals frequently face difficulties in attracting and keeping mates, which is an important driver of singlehood.
In the current research, we investigated the mating performance (i.e., how well people do in attracting and retaining intimate partners) and singlehood status in 14 different countries, namely Austria, Brazil, China, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Japan, Peru, Poland, Russia, Spain, Turkey, the UK, and Ukraine (N = 7,181).
We found that poor mating performance was in high occurrence, with about one in four participants scoring low in this dimension, and more than 57% facing difficulties in starting and/or keeping a relationship.
Men and women did not differ in their mating performance scores, but there was a small yet significant effect of age, with older participants indicating higher mating performance.
design { Ken Kelleher }
Previous studies on aesthetic chills (i.e., psychogenic shivers) demonstrate their positive effects on stress, pleasure, and social cognition. We tested whether we could artificially enhance this emotion and its downstream effects by intervening on its somatic markers using wearable technology.
Evaluating other people’s sincerity is a ubiquitous and important part of social interactions.
Fourteen experiments show that response speed is an important cue on which people base their sincerity inferences. Specifically, people systematically judged slower responses as less sincere […].
the present study highlights the potential effects that may be observed in judicial settings, since the response speed of innocent suspects may mislead people to judge them as insincere and hence guilty.
painted glass, in 26 parts { Xia Xiaowan, Lao P, 2005 }
What if a pill can change your politics or religious reliefs? […] Psychotherapy assisted by psilocybin, the psychedelic compound in “magic mushrooms,” seems to be remarkably effective in treating a wide range of psychopathologies, but also causes a raft of unusual nonclinical changes not seen elsewhere in medicine. […]
Although its precise therapeutic mechanisms remain unclear, clinically relevant doses of psilocybin can induce powerful mystical experiences more commonly associated with extended periods of fasting, prayer or meditation. Arguably, then, it is unsurprising that it can generate long-lasting changes in patients: studies report increased prosociality and aesthetic appreciation, plus robust shifts in personality, values and attitudes to life, even leading some atheists to find God. What’s more, these experiences appear to be a feature, rather than a bug, of psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy, with the intensity of the mystical experience correlating with the extent of clinical benefit.
Faces provide not only cues to an individual’s identity, age, gender, and ethnicity but also insight into their mental states. The aim was to investigate the temporal aspects of processing of facial expressions of complex mental states for very short presentation times ranging from 12.5 to 100 ms. […]
Results show that participants are able to recognise very subtle differences between facial expressions; performance is better than chance, even for the shortest presentation time. Importantly, we show for the first time that observers can recognise these expressions based on information contained in the eye region only.
Self-promotion is common in everyday life. Yet, across 8 studies (N = 1,687) examining a broad range of personal and professional successes, we find that individuals often hide their successes from others and that such hiding has relational costs. […]
Whereas previous research highlights the negative consequences of sharing one’s accomplishments with others, we find that sharing is superior to hiding for maintaining one’s relationships.
{ Journal of Personality and Social Psychology | Continue reading }
signs of dishonesty decreased trust but only in those who had not previously built a good reputation as honest partners.
On the contrary, those who could establish a good reputation were trusted even when they were no longer trustworthy, suggesting that participants could not successfully track changes in trustworthiness of those with an established good reputation.
lithograph { Ellsworth Kelly, Blue Curve, 2013 }
A number of studies – including our own – find a mid-life dip in well-being. […] The effects of the mid-life dip are comparable to major life events like losing a spouse, losing a job or getting cancer. They are clearly not inconsequential.
Emerging findings suggest that decision-making competence may tap not only into fluid intelligence but also into motivation, emotion regulation, and experience (or crystallized intelligence). Although fluid intelligence tends to decline with age, older adults may be able to maintain decision-making competence by leveraging age-related improvements in these other skills.
photo { Stephen Shore. Image from “Transparencies, Small Camera Works 1971-1979 }
David Silver [the creator of AlphaZero] hasn’t answered my question about whether machines can set up their own goals. He talks about subgoals, but that’s not the same. That’s a certain gap in his definition of intelligence. We set up goals and look for ways to achieve them. A machine can only do the second part.
So far, we see very little evidence that machines can actually operate outside of these terms, which is clearly a sign of human intelligence. Let’s say you accumulated knowledge in one game. Can it transfer this knowledge to another game, which might be similar but not the same? Humans can. With computers, in most cases you have to start from scratch.
photo { Kelsey Bennett }
