Other things came out: weekend are good, spending too much time alone is bad, illness is a major drain on your emotional well-being, and so is caring for another adult, or a child (major increases in worry and stress there). College graduates report more stress, and otherwise being a college graduation has no significant effect on your daily happy or sad events. Religion increases positive daily life events, but doesn’t decrease sadness or worry.

Smoking turned out to be a REALLY strong predictor of low emotional well-being, and came out regardless of income or education or anything else. (…)

The negative things in life seem to affect people making less than $75K a lot more than higher incomes. Things like headaches and illness are reported more frequently (but whether or not these are related to stress isn’t determined).

In addition, the pain of some life occurrences, like divorce or chronic disease, is made a LOT worse by being of lower income.

So basically, more money does NOT mean more problems, but at a certain level, less money DOES.

{ Scientopia | Continue reading }

Everyone knows someone who likes to listen to some music while they work. Maybe it’s one of your kids, listening to the radio while they try to slog through their homework. (…)

It’s a widely held popular belief that listening to music while working can serve as a concentration aid, and if you walk into a public library or a café these days it’s hard not to notice a sea of white ear-buds and other headphones. Some find the music relaxing, others energizing, while others simply find it pleasurable. But does listening to music while working really improve focus? It seems like a counterintuitive belief – we know that the brain has inherently limited cognitive resources, including attentional capacity, and it seems natural that trying to perform two tasks simultaneously would cause decreased performance on both.

The currently existing body of research thus far has yielded contradictory results. Though the results of most empirical studies suggest that music often serves more as a distraction than a study aid, a sizable minority have displayed some instances in which music seems to have improved performance on some tasks.

{ Cognition & the Arts | Continue reading }

artwork { Il Lee }

We’d like to believe that most of what we know is accurate and that if presented with facts to prove we’re wrong, we would sheepishly accept the truth and change our views accordingly.

A new body of research out of the University of Michigan suggests that’s not what happens, that we base our opinions on beliefs and when presented with contradictory facts, we adhere to our original belief even more strongly.

The phenomenon is called backfire.

{ NPR | Continue reading }

photo { Sandy Carson }

When we change our appearance, for example, by getting a haircut, friends will often note that we look different, but they may not be able to pinpoint exactly what has changed. This may result from our tendency to process faces holistically rather than by individual features.

In a recent study published in Psychological Science, volunteers were shown an image of a face or a house, followed by a similar image that may or may not have changed [images]. The volunteers were better at detecting that a change had occurred in faces than in houses, but they were surprisingly better at identifying which feature had changed in houses than in faces.

These findings suggest that holistic and feature-specific processing may be both advantageous and disadvantageous, depending on the nature of the task.

{ APS }

related { Questions about the safety of the latest sensation in hair care, the so-called Brazilian hair-relaxing treatment | NY Times | full story }

Raymond Moore recently described a study about the influence of romance novels on condom use. Erotic romance as a genre generally focuses on spontaneous and passionate sex. Since rubbers don’t exactly scream passion, love scenes rarely mention their use.

Researchers at Northwestern University were interested in how novels affected attitudes toward condom use in readers. They surveyed college students about their reading habits and found that students who read more romance novels had more negative attitudes towards condom use and less intention to use condoms.

{ Livia Blackburne | Continue reading }

photo { Barnaby Roper }

Eighty per cent of adults in the US and the UK are moderate users of the psychoactive drug, caffeine.

Of all the effects it has on our minds—enhanced attention, vigilance and cognition—perhaps least known is its tendency to make us more susceptible to persuasion.

This was demonstrated in a study by Pearl Martin and colleagues at the University of Queensland in Australia (Martin et al., 2005). In their experiment they tried to convince participants to change their minds about the controversial issue of voluntary euthanasia.

{ PsyBlog | Continue reading }

photo { Charles Brittin, Arrest at Los Angeles Federal Building Protest, 1965 }

Words do hurt. Ridicule, distain, humiliation, taunting, all cause injury, and when it is delivered in childhood from a child’s peers, verbal abuse causes more than emotional trauma. It inflicts lasting physical effects on brain structure.


The remarkable thing about the human brain is that it develops after birth. Unlike most animals whose brains are cast at birth, the human brain is so underdeveloped at birth that we cannot even walk for months. Self awareness does not develop for years. Personality, cognitive abilities, and skills, take decades to develop, and these attributes develop differently in every person. This is because development and wiring of the human brain are guided by our experiences during childhood and adolescence. From a biological perspective, this increases the odds that an individual will compete and reproduce successfully in the environment the individual is born into, rather than the environment experienced by our cave-man ancestors and recorded in our genes through natural selection. Developing the human brain out of the womb cheats evolution, and this is the reason for the success of our species.


When that environment is hostile or socially unhealthy, development of the brain is affected, and often it is impaired. Early childhood sexual abuse, physical abuse, or even witnessing domestic violence, have been shown to cause abnormal physical changes in the brain of children, with lasting effects that predisposes the child to developing psychological disorders.

{ Psychology Today | Continue reading }

photo { Ken Rosenthal }

My problem is Judy loves chick flicks.

I can’t forget when she forced me to see Brokeback Mountain and insisted that I look at icky scenes that no red-blooded American boy like me should have to see.

No man (and that includes Alan Alda) is so sensitive that he can sit through these long-winded duller-than-dirt chick movies. And yet no man is ready to admit how much he hates these films. Why? For fear of sexual reprisals delivered in the form of “Not this year, dear. I have a headache.”

And do you want to know how far this sexual intimidation has come? I still have nightmares about the night in 1996 when we went to see The English Patient (the single worst movie I ever sat through in my life).

I remember the night Judy and I went to see this movie. The East Hampton Cinema was filled with couples. The women all fluttery . . . the men all reserved.

I remember looking at Judy and, quite frankly, I was turned on. I figured it was an early movie and the night was young and so was Judy. I planned on drinks and soft music and, you know . . .

Judy gets very emotional at movies and that night she was in fine form. She started to sob the minute they put on that computer-animated horror that tells you to eat popcorn and drink Coca-Cola but don’t talk, etc., etc.

“Judy,” I whispered. “Why are you crying? The movie hasn’t started yet.”

“I know but it’s going to be so . . . so . . . sad.”

Well, in The English Patient, Ralph Fiennes plays a Nazi who is badly burned in a plane crash. So the whole movie consists of this guy who I swear is so burned that he looks exactly like the creature in that monster film of the ’50s, Creature from the Black Lagoon.

I knew from the beginning of the movie he was going to die. Spending three hours watching a guy who is made up to look like a burned-to-a-crisp monster dying is not my idea of a fun Saturday night.

There were a lot of other story lines and characters in the movie – one duller than the other. The burned guy kept remembering this love affair he had with this married woman who was, you guessed it, his best friend’s wife.

Well, this was not one of those wham-bam affairs. No sir. This was slow. So slow that they managed to do the impossible . . . make sex boring. And the more the nurse who was taking care of the guy who was burned to a crisp heard the story of the affair, the more she was interested in climbing into bed with the crisp.

At one point I said to myself, “If she goes near this guy, I’m going to be sick. The only thing that is going to save me from throwing up is that this movie is so boring I’m starting to doze off.”

That’s when Judy poked me.

“Isn’t this wonderful?” she declared with tears streaming down her face. Her tone told me that if I told the truth I could forget about the drinks and soft music later. So I did what any red-blooded young man would do under the circumstances. I lied. “It’s wonderful . . . wonderful. It’s the best thing I’ve seen in years,” I said.

“How come you’re not crying?” she whispered.

“Well, to tell you the truth, I was so caught up in the story that I guess I forgot to cry,” I said.

{ Jerry Della Femina | Continue reading }

Light swearing at the start or end of a persuasive speech can help influence an audience.

The problem is that we run the risk of losing credibility and appearing unprofessional.

To see whether swearing can help change attitudes, Scherer and Sagarin (2006) divided 88 participants into three groups to watch one of three slightly different speeches. The only difference between the speeches was that one contained a mild swear word at the start: “…lowering of tuition is not only a great idea, but damn it, also the most reasonable one for all parties involved.” The second speech contained the ‘damn it’ at the end and the third had neither.

When participants’ attitudes were measured, they were most influenced by the speeches with the mild obscenity included, either at the beginning or the end.

{ PsyBlog | Continue reading }

Is expressing thanks a powerful motivator or just a social nicety?

According to positive psychologists, saying ‘thank you’ is no longer just good manners, it is also beneficial to the self.

Studies have suggested that being grateful can improve well-being, physical health, can strengthen social relationships, produce positive emotional states and help us cope with stressful times in our lives.

{ PsyBlog | Continue reading }

artwork { Roy Lichtenstein, Grrrrrrrrrrr, 1965 }

Speakers with a foreign accent are perceived as less believable than native speakers. A new study shows this isn’t just because of prejudice towards ‘outsiders’. It also has to do with the fluency effect, one manifestation of which is our tendency to assume that how easily a message is processed is a mark of its truthfulness. The effort required to understand an accented utterance means that the same fact is judged as less credible when uttered by an accented speaker, compared with a native speaker. This remains true even if the accented speaker is merely passing on a message from a native speaker.

{ BPS | Continue reading }

photo { Christophe Kutner }

Cars kill a lot more people than spiders, bats, snakes and wolves, but why don’t we fear them in the same visceral way? (…)

Although some of us fear snakes more than others, all baby humans, chimps and monkeys are equally jumpy when confronted with a black plastic snake. That aversion probably grew out of the pressures of life in the jungle eons ago. Back then, encounters with certain snakes were a matter of life and death, and a healthy fear of snakes kept our ancestors alive long enough to procreate.

In the field of evolutionary psychology, the belief is that instinctive fears became hard-wired in our biology, through genes or other inheritance, during the time (the Stone Age) and place (the African jungle and savannah) of our development into the Homo sapiens we are today.

But some new thinking suggests that these adaptations might date back before the Stone Age, and some, perhaps, to more recent times. (…)

Fear of heights is so widespread and understandable that psychologists consider it a normal fear. (…) Other phobias that persist into modern times may have been fixed much more recently than snakes and spiders, say in the late Paleolithic age, about 100,000 years ago, or even more recently.

Take fainting in response to seeing blood or surgical instruments. Fainting, Bracha posits, might have been an adaptive female response to the frequent raiding bands in the early hunting-and-gathering societies. You might have been less likely to be murdered if you fainted at the sight of a sharp stick.

Then there are the fears that point to inherently dangerous things and that no doubt have an “adaptive” function, except that they’ve gotten out of hand. Fears of dirt, rats, mice and insects are obviously self-protective, since all these carry diseases. But most vermin-spread diseases probably were not a serious problem before people began creating cities several thousand years ago.

Instinctual repulsion to some of these critters, Bracha hypothesizes, might have arisen in the Neolithic period, which started about 10,000 years ago.

So why do some of us appear to be addicted to fear, as evidenced by the popularity of increasingly horrifying horror movies? (…)

“They are people who need strong feelings of arousal, and they get those from horror movies as well as sexy movies. Low-sensation-seekers don’t like to be aroused by unpleasant things. High-sensation-seekers can enjoy any vicarious experience if it’s strong enough.”

{ Washington Post | Continue reading }

photo { Helmut Newton }

Behavioral studies suggest that thinking about revenge stimulates the brain but that following through doesn’t improve mood.

Most of us have revenge fantasies, human behavior researchers say, and nearly everyone believes that punishing someone who did him wrong would feel tremendously satisfying. But new studies suggest the reality of revenge is far different. Acting on vengeful thoughts often isn’t nearly as gratifying as expected and — surprisingly — can even make people feel worse.

Still, the delicious pleasure anticipated from taking revenge is such a powerful drive that it appears to be hard-wired in the brain.

{ Chicago Tribune | Continue reading }

photo { SW▲MPY }

How much do you confide in friends?

In the United States, friends often share intimate details of their lives and problems, but in Japan this degree of self-disclosure between friends is much less common. A new study published in Psychological Science by an American researcher living in Japan suggests that this difference may be due to distinct social systems, in particular the extent to which there are opportunities to make new friends in each culture.

{ APS | Continue reading }

In the financial markets, a lot rides on the word of a company’s top executives. If a CEO tells a lie, a lot of shareholders can get hurt.

Now, after studying thousands of corporate earnings calls, two researchers from Stanford University think they’ve come up with a way to tell when senior executives are fibbing.

It’s a question that people have been wrestling with for as long as humans have been interacting with each other.

“I think since the Garden of Eden we’ve been trying to figure this out — who’s lying and who’s not lying,” says David Larcker, a professor of accounting at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. (…)

Kumar was asked, “Can your books be trusted?” And he replied by saying, “We hire the very best auditors.” Larcker says that can be a big warning sign.

“You basically are not answering the question. You’re basically making reference to somebody else, and those are the kinds of things in psychology you look for,” he says. (…)

Zakolyukina says lying executives tend to overuse words like “we” and “our team” when they talk about their company. They avoid saying “I.” (…) Lying CEOs also tend to use a lot of words that express positive emotion — things are fabulous and fantastic and extraordinary.

{ NPR | Continue reading }

related { Twitter Mood Predicts The Stock Market }

photo { Richard Avedon }

We do hate to give up control over the most important things in our lives. And viewing happiness as subject to external influence limits our control — not just in the sense that whether you get to live happily might depend on how things go, but also in the sense that what happiness is is partly a matter of how things beyond you are. We might do everything we can to live happily — and have everything it takes on our part to be happy, all the right thoughts and feelings — and yet fall short, even unbeknownst to us. That’s a threatening idea.

{ Opiniator/NY Times | Continue reading }

We can actually reprogram our brains to be happier, says Achor. “The brain is like a single processor in a computer.” Someone who is chronically negative or pessimistic is merely scanning first for the stresses and the hassles of life. And because the brain has finite resources, it cannot also scan for the positive elements. As a result, that person continuously reinforces his own negativity, causing himself to feel unhappy.

{ Big Think | Continue reading }

For more than three decades evolutionary psychologists have advanced a simple theory of human sexuality: because men invest less reproductive effort in sperm than women do in eggs, men’s and women’s brains have been shaped differently by evolution. As a result, men are eager for sex whereas women are relatively choosy. But a steady stream of recent evidence suggests this paradigm could be in need of a makeover.



”The science is now getting to a point where there is good data to question some of the assumptions of evolutionary psychology,” says social psychologist Wendy Wood of the University of Southern California (U.S.C.).
 (…)

The proportion of mating effort dedicated to short-term mating was the same for men and women. Similarly, both men and women showed an equivalent tendency to lower their standards for sex partners, and men did not report feeling constrained to have far fewer sexual partners than they truly desired.

“I’d certainly accepted the idea that men pursue purely sexual relationships with greater fervor than women do,” says Paul Eastwick of the Texas A&M University in College Station. “This is the first time I’ve seen data that makes me think, ‘Hmm, I wonder if that sex difference isn’t so robust.’” (…)

Surveys have indeed found that in the U.S. and several other industrialized countries more men than women express greater concern with sexual infidelity than with emotional infidelity (falling in love with someone else). But another recent study suggests jealousy patterns could have something to do with glitches in people’s ability to form secure relationships.

{ Scientific American | Continue reading }

Differences in our perception of physical beauty have an enormous impact on the fashion, cosmetics, and weight control industries, and more recently on aesthetic surgery trends. Understanding how culture and region alter the perception of beauty is therefore not only of anthropological and social interest but underpins multibillion dollar industries across the globe.

According to Anil Mathur of Hofstra University in New York and colleagues there and at the City University of New York, marketers can hope to expand their reach into overseas markets but they cannot build brand equity if they lack regional knowledge and an understanding of consumer characteristics and preferences across cultures.

Mathur and colleagues have now tested a physical vanity scale across China, India and USA and have established that the scale could be used across culturally diverse countries. (…)

The team found that while the details concerning beauty perception may differ, their data supports the notion that physical vanity is a universal construct that applies across cultures.

{ EurekAlert | Continue reading }

artwork { Modigliani, Seated Nude, 1916 }

In new research published in Psychological Science, scientists analyzed genes in the dopamine system and found a group of mutations that help predict whether someone is inclined toward sensation seeking.

Jaime Derringer and coauthors wanted to use a new technique to find out more about the genetics of sensation seeking. Most obvious connections with genes have already been found, Derringer says. Now new methods are letting scientists look for more subtle associations between genes and all kinds of traits, including behavior and personality.

{ APS | Continue reading }

{ 1. Joseph Jastrow’s Duck-Rabbit, 1899, based on drawing published in German humor magazine Fliegende Blatter, 1892 | 2. Taxidermed rabbit–duck | via Richard Wiseman }

I noticed a depiction of the famous “duck-rabbit” figure, described as an “illusion” and attributed to Wittgenstein (Malach, Levy, & Hasson, 2002).
 
Technically, the duck-rabbit figure is an ambiguous (or reversible, or bistable) figure, not an illusion (Peterson, Kihlstrom, Rose, & Glisky, 1992). The two classes of perceptual phenomena have quite different theoretical implications. From a constructivist point of view, many illusions illustrate the role of unconscious inferences in perception, while the ambiguous figures illustrate the role of expectations, world-knowledge, and the direction of attention (Long & Toppino, 2004).

For example, children tested on Easter Sunday are more likely to see the figure as a rabbit; if tested on a Sunday in October, they tend to see it as a duck or similar bird (Brugger & Brugger, 1993).

But the more important point of this letter concerns attribution: the duck-rabbit was “originally noted” not by Wittgenstein, but rather by the American psychologist Joseph Jastrow in 1899.

{ John F. Kihlstrom, | Continue reading }

Couples develop their own language of love that ebbs and flows depending on the state of their relationship, scientists believe. (…)

The study suggests style matching has the potential to quickly and easily reveal whether any given pair of people — ranging from business rivals to romantic partners — are psychologically on the same page and what this means for their future together. (…)

The researchers extended their work by analysing friendships such as that between Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung who wrote to each other almost weekly over a seven-year period as their careers were developing.

Using style-matching statistics, the authors were able to chart the two men’s tempestuous relationship from their early days of joint admiration to their final days of mutual contempt.

{ Telegraph | Continue reading }

photo { Lee Friedlander }