The next time you feel angry at a friend who has let you down, or grateful toward one whose generosity has surprised you, consider this: you may really be bargaining for better treatment from that person in the future. According to a controversial new theory, our emotions have evolved as tools to manipulate others into cooperating with us.
Until now, most psychologists have viewed anger as a way to signal your displeasure when another person does you harm. Similarly, gratitude has been seen as a signal of pleasure when someone does you a favour. In both cases, emotions are seen as short-term reactions to an immediate benefit or cost.
But it’s more cunning than that, says John Tooby, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Anger, he says, has as much to do with cooperation as with conflict, and emotions are used to coerce others into cooperating in the long term.
Tooby and his colleagues think that our anger or gratitude reflect our judgement of how much the other person is sacrificing enough for us – and whether they will continue to do so in future.
For instance, you might feel angry towards a friend who broke a dinner date to watch a TV programme, but not at one who did so to take his child to the hospital. Tooby points out that the harm to you is the same in each case, but the first friend’s behaviour indicates his low regard for your interests – triggering anger – while the second friend’s does not. (…)
Stronger men and more attractive women were quicker to anger, too, Sell reported last year.
Panspermia is the idea that life exists throughout the universe in comets, asteroids and interstellar dust clouds and that life of Earth was seeded from one or more of these sources. Panspermia holds that we are all extraterrestrials.
While this is certainly not a mainstream idea in science, a growing body of evidence suggests that it should be carefully studied rather than casually disregarded.
For example, various bugs have been shown to survive for months or even years in the harsh conditions of space. And one of the more interesting but lesser known facts about the Mars meteorite that some scientists believe holds evidence of life on Mars, is that its interior never rose above 50 degrees centigrade, despite being blasted from the Martian surface by an meteor impact and surviving a fiery a descent through Earth’s thick atmosphere.
If there is life up there, this evidence suggests that it could survive the trip to Earth.
All that seems well established. Now for the really controversial stuff.
In 2001, numerous people observed red rain falling over Kerala in the southern tip of India during a two month period. One of them was Godfrey Louis, a physicist at nearby Cochin University of Science and Technology. Intrigued by this phenomena, Louis collected numerous samples of red rain, determined to find out what was causing the contamination, perhaps sand or dust from some distant desert.
Under a microscope, however, he found no evidence of sand or dust. Instead, the rain water was filled with red cells that look remarkably like conventional bugs on Earth. What was strange was that Louis found no evidence of DNA in these cells which would rule out most kinds of known biological cells (red blood cells are one possibility but ought to be destroyed quickly by rain water).
The future of humanity is often viewed as a topic for idle speculation. Yet our beliefs and assumptions on this subject matter shape decisions in both our personal lives and public policy – decisions that have very real and sometimes unfortunate consequences. It is therefore practically important to try to develop a realistic mode of futuristic thought about big picture questions for humanity.
This paper sketches an overview of some recent attempts in this direction, and it offers a brief discussion of four families of scenarios for humanity’s future: extinction, recurrent collapse, plateau, and posthumanity. (…)
Predictability does not necessarily fall off with temporal distance. It may be highly unpredictable where a traveler will be one hour after the start of her journey, yet predictable that after five hours she will be at her destination. The very long-term future of humanity may be relatively easy to predict, being a matter amenable to study by the natural sciences, particularly cosmology (physical eschatology). And for there to be a degree of predictability, it is not necessary that it be possible to identify one specific scenario as what will definitely happen. If there is at least some scenario that can be ruled out, that is also a degree of predictability. (…)
Most differences between our lives and the lives of our hunter-gatherer forebears are ultimately tied to technology, especially if we understand “technology” in its broadest sense, to include not only gadgets and machines but also techniques, processes, and institutions. In this wide sense we could say that technology is the sum total of instrumentally useful culturally-transmissible information. Language is a technology in this sense, along with tractors, machine guns, sorting algorithms, double-entry bookkeeping, and Robert’s Rules of Order. (…)
Supposing that some perceptive observer in the past had noticed some instance of directionality – be it a technological, cultural, or social trend – the question would have remained whether the detected directionality was a global feature or a mere local pattern. In a cyclical view of history, for example, there can be long stretches of steady cumulative development of technology or other factors. Within a period, there is clear directionality; yet each flood of growth is followed by an ebb of decay, returning things to where they stood at the beginning of the cycle. Strong local directionality is thus compatible with the view that, globally, history moves in circles and never really gets anywhere. If the periodicity is assumed to go on forever, a form of eternal recurrence would follow.
It’s 1 p.m. on a Thursday and Dianne Bates, 40, juggles three screens. She listens to a few songs on her iPod, then taps out a quick e-mail on her iPhone and turns her attention to the high-definition television.
Just another day at the gym.
The technology makes the tiniest windows of time entertaining, and potentially productive. But scientists point to an unanticipated side effect: when people keep their brains busy with digital input, they are forfeiting downtime that could allow them to better learn and remember information, or come up with new ideas. (…)
At the University of California, San Francisco, scientists have found that when rats have a new experience, like exploring an unfamiliar area, their brains show new patterns of activity. But only when the rats take a break from their exploration do they process those patterns in a way that seems to create a persistent memory of the experience.
The researchers suspect that the findings also apply to how humans learn.
What is a healthy mind? Is it simply the absence of symptoms and dysfunctions, or is there something more to a life well lived? How can we embrace the diversity of behavior, temperament, values, and orientation across a wide range of cultures and still come up with a coherent definition of health? Just as some scientists are reluctant to define the mind, some people say that we shouldn’t define mental health at all, because it is authoritarian to do so—we shouldn’t tell others how to be healthy. But how do we account for the universal striving for happiness?
Positive psychology has offered an important corrective to the disease model by identifying the characteristics of happy people, such as gratitude, compassion, open-mindedness, and curiosity, but is there some unnamed quality that underlies all of these individual strengths?
Over the last twenty years, I’ve come to believe that integration is the key mechanism beneath both the absence of illness and the presence of well-being.
Integration—the linkage of differentiated elements of a system—illuminates a direct pathway toward health. It’s the way we avoid a life of dull, boring rigidity on the one hand, or explosive chaos on the other. We can learn to detect when integration is absent or insufficient and develop effective strategies to promote differentiation and then linkage. The key to this transformation is cultivating the capacity for mindsight.
Contrary to the Machiavellian cliché, nice people are more likely to rise to power. Then something strange happens: The very traits that helped leaders accumulate control in the first place all but disappear once they rise to power. Instead of being polite, honest and outgoing, they become impulsive, reckless and rude.
Psychologists refer to this as the paradox of power.
Psychologists and philosophers have long debated whether language shapes the way we think. While the most drastic viewpoint – that thought can’t exist without language — has fallen out of favor, psychologists still study more subtle effects.
The first study has to do with gender in language. Many languages assign genders to words. For example, in Spanish, the word for “key” is feminine, while the German word for” key” is masculine. Gender for the most part is arbitrary and varies from language to language, which allows for some interesting experiments. (…) German speakers described keys as hard, heavy, jagged, metal, and useful, while Spanish speakers described them as golden, intricate, little, lovely, and shiny. (…)
In a second experiment, Boroditsky looked at language and the conception of time. English speakers primarily speak of time in horizontal terms. For example, we talk about moving meetings forward, or pushing deadlines back. Mandarin speakers, on the other hand, use up/down metaphors as well. So a Mandarin speaker would refer to the previous week as “up week” and next week as “down week.”
A [2007] study analyzed the viewing patterns of men and women looking at sexual photographs, and the result was not what one typically might expect.
Researchers hypothesized women would look at faces and men at genitals, but, surprisingly, they found men are more likely than women to first look at a woman’s face before other parts of the body, and women focused longer on photographs of men performing sexual acts with women than did the males. These types of results could play a key role in helping researchers to understand human sexual desires and its ultimate effect on public health.
Previous study, published in Hormones and Behavior magazine concluded that sexual stimuli outlines gender differences, particularly for brain activity of men and women. Presumably women who took hormonal pills were more often focused on genitals and those who took no pills paid their attention to the context of the picture. Although it is known that men would more readily respond to visual stimulation, their concentration is initially less sexually oriented.
Natural lightning is caused by the build-up of electric charge in thunderstorms. Florida, lying out as a prong between the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean, is especially prone to these. Sea breezes from the two warm bodies of water head inland and collide over the centre of the state. The warm air rushes upwards and then condenses into rain, ice, hail and something called graupel (a mixture of all three). As those particles collide and rub against each other, positive and negative electrical charges build up and separate in the clouds. Lightning occurs when those charges become so great that the air breaks down and conducts electricity between the two – mostly from cloud to cloud, but also down to the ground. “Triggered” lightning works by firing a rocket into the storm at around this moment. A copper wire attached to the rocket offers the charge an easy route to the ground and, about 70 per cent of the time, it takes it. (…)
The resulting wave of research, much of it funded by Nasa, laid the basis for current lightning safety. Many of lightning’s physical characteristics – its speed, temperature and current – were ascertained. Triggered lightning was used to test aircraft parts, runways, houses and power lines, and detection systems for lightning strikes were built across the world. Lightning still kills about 25,000 people a year (overwhelmingly in the developing world) and causes $1bn of damage annually in the US, but in terms of protection at least, a truce was declared.
In terms of how we understand it, however, lightning has only got stranger. The past 20 years have seen a series of confounding discoveries. In 1989, a group of scientists from the University of Minnesota were testing a video camera when they accidentally recorded an odd blossom of lightning rising out of the top of a storm. Over the next decade, other unexplained luminous phenomena (dubbed “Red Sprites”, “Blue Jets” and “Elves”) were also identified, billowing up from thunderstorms in columns and rings as high as 100km above Earth. Complicating matters further, in 2001 lightning was found to emit radiation. Not in odd or meagre quantities either. At every single stagger and step, lightning channels are now known to generate enough X-rays for a chest X-ray, despite having no obvious physical means to do so. Sometimes they also manage to blast off huge quantities of gamma rays, more often associated with collapsing stars – a process that may pose an as-yet poorly understood risk to aircraft.
We don’t yawn when we are out in the sun, when our body skin temperature is probably higher than the core temperature. We may inhale higher temperature air and that doesn’t seem to be required to cool the brain. So we don’t yawn?
But does the air we breathe normally reach near the brain or anywhere near it to cool some parts of it? No it is not air that reaches the brain, but cool blood.
There’s a puzzle at the heart of our economy that has troubled economists for decades. The question is this: why do people work hard in environments where they are poorly monitored and paid a fixed wage, rather than a performance-related one. Surely any rational worker would do the bare minimum to get by.
One line of thinking focuses on the relationship between the workers and their employer, which can be influenced by contracts set out in writing and by personal relationships between workers and their managers.
That suggests that one way for an employer to improve productivity would be to perfect its employment contracts.
Another line of thinking is that peer pressure plays an important role. The people around you may affect the way you work. For example, good workers, leading by example, might raise the quality of everybody’s work. On the other hand, bad apples may make the good ones rotten.
But working out which of these effects wins out is hard. Peer pressure is hard to quantify and the various results in this area are somewhat contradictory, suggesting that they may depend on the environment too.
But a new tool is emerging that can help, according to John Horton at Harvard University who says the recent development of online marketplaces, in which people can buy and sell services over the web, provides a fascinating laboratory in which to test these ideas. (…)
Horton’s work raises many questions, not least because it contradicts other work suggesting that it is possible to improve poor workers’ output by pairing them with good workers. By contrast, Horton found that “the bad apples ruined the good apples, and the good apples did nothing for the bad.”
This kind of work fascinates psychologists, economists and managers because it raises the possibility that productivity in the workplace can be manipulated by clever management rather than by expensive financial incentives.
Tracking your internal clock may be as easy as plucking a few strands of hair, according to a new study.
The research found that hair follicles hold a record of the gene activity that influences when we wake and when we sleep. The results could be used to diagnose and study sleep disorders and conditions like jet lag.
Whether you’re a night owl or a morning lark, your sleep-wake cycle is controlled in large part by genes called clock genes. These genes vary their activity throughout the day, setting the internal clock that drives our circadian rhythms.
The first human clock gene was discovered almost 10 years ago, but isolating the genes efficiently enough to study sleep-wake cycles in real time has proved difficult. When the genes are active, they transcribe their DNA into RNA, the first step in producing various proteins that essentially carry out a gene’s instructions and, in this case, influence circadian rhythms. The RNA can be found in cells all over the body, from white blood cells to the lining of the mouth, but techniques for extracting it from these cells proved unreliable.
Humans are dumping more plastic than ever, but not all of it is accumulating in the garbage patches of the Atlantic as expected, scientists reported.
Of the millions of metric tons of plastic produced annually, an enormous proportion ends up as tiny debris in the open ocean. The currents loosely gather it together in vast, swirling ‘garbage patches’ near the surface.
But the amount of floating plastic accumulating in the Atlantic Ocean has remained curiously static over the last two decades, in spite of the fact that plastic waste by humans has increased significantly over the same timeframe, according to a new study published in the journal Science.
“Surprisingly, over the 22-year period of the study (1986-2008) we did not observe an increase in the amount of plastic floating in the western Atlantic in the region where it is most highly concentrated,” said Kara Lavender Law of the Sea Education Association and lead author of the study.
Plastic debris has been accumulating in the world’s oceans for decades, but until recently we have had only a peripheral understanding of its extent.
A major pollutant, plastics have far reaching environmental impacts in the ocean, including entanglement of marine fauna, particle ingestion by seabirds and other organisms, dispersal of invasive species to non-native waters and the transport of organic contaminants.
The researchers discovered that while highest concentrations of plastic debris occurred in an area where ocean-surface currents converge - the North Atlantic Subtropical Gyre - over the last two decades there has not been a substantial increase in the overall amount. (…)
Marine scientist Richard Thompson of the University of Plymouth warns that “while the study clearly shows no consistent trend in the abundance of debris in the North Atlantic subtropical Gyre we should not extrapolate this to other regions. Over the same time period there are reports of plastic accumulating in remote regions including the Antarctic and in substantial quantities in the deep sea.”
Whether it’s a company like BP apologising for causing environmental catastrophe or a political leader expressing regret for her country’s prior misdemeanours, it seems there’s barely a day goes by without the media watching hawkishly to find out just how the contrite words will be delivered and what effect they’ll have on the aggrieved.
Surprisingly, psychology has, until now, paid little attention to what makes for an effective apology. (…)
The three apology types or components are: compensation (e.g. I’m sorry I broke your window, I’ll pay to have it repaired); empathy (e.g. I’m sorry I slept with your best friend, you must feel like you can’t trust either of us ever again); and acknowledgement of violated rules/norms (e.g. I’m sorry I advised the CIA how to torture people, I’ve broken our profession’s pledge to do no harm).
Fehr and Gelfand’s hypothesis was that the effectiveness of these different styles of apology depends on how the aggrieved person sees themselves (known as ’self-construal’ in the psychological jargon). To test this, the researchers measured the way that 175 undergrad students see themselves and then had them rate different forms of apology. (…)
The researchers found that a focus on compensation was most appreciated by people who are more individualistic (e.g. those who agree with statements like ‘I have a strong need to know how I stand in comparison to my classmates or coworkers’); that empathy-based apologies are judged more effective by people who see themselves in terms of their relations with others (e.g. they agree with statements like ‘Caring deeply about another person such as a close friend is very important to me’); and finally, that the rule violation kind of apology was deemed most effective by people who see themselves as part of a larger group or collective (e.g. they agree with ‘I feel great pride when my team or work group does well’ and similar statements). These patterns held regardless of the severity of the misdemeanour.
The quality and quantity of individuals’ social relationships has been linked not only to mental health but also to both morbidity and mortality. (…)
Humans are naturally social. Yet, the modern way of life in industrialized countries is greatly reducing the quantity and quality of social relationships. Many people in these countries no longer live in extended families or even near each other. Instead, they often live on the other side of the country or even across the world from their relatives. Many also delay getting married and having children. Likewise, more and more people of all ages in developed countries are living alone, and loneliness is becoming increasingly common.
In the UK, according to a recent survey by the Mental Health Foundation, 10% of people often feel lonely, a third have a close friend or relative who they think is very lonely, and half think that people are getting lonelier in general. Similarly, across the Atlantic, over the past two decades there has been a three-fold increase in the number of Americans who say they have no close confidants. There is reason to believe that people are becoming more socially isolated.
Some experts think that social isolation is bad for human health. They point to a 1988 review of five prospective studies that showed that people with fewer social relationships die earlier on average than those with more social relationships. (…)
The researchers identified 148 prospective studies that provided data on individuals’ mortality as a function of social relationships and extracted an “effect size” from each study. (…)
The findings indicate that the influence of social relationships on the risk of death are comparable with well-established risk factors for mortality such as smoking and alcohol consumption and exceed the influence of other risk factors such as physical inactivity and obesity.
People donate their blood to strangers, travel on humanitarian missions to places such as Haiti and the Sudan, and risk their lives to fight injustice elsewhere. And New Yorkers have grown accustomed to reading about subway heroes – brave souls who leap onto the tracks to rescue fallen commuters and then often slip away, uncomfortable with attention or credit.
As a psychologist, I am fascinated by the origin and consequences of such kindness. Some of our moral sentiments and moral motivations are the product of biological evolution. This accounts for why we are often kind to our own flesh and blood – those who share our genes. It also can explain our moral attachments to those we see as members of our immediate tribe.
There is an adaptive logic to being kind to those with whom we continually interact; we scratch their backs, they scratch ours. But there is no Darwinian payoff to sacrificing our resources to anonymous strangers, particularly those in faraway lands.
The explanation for our expanded morality comes from intelligence, imagination, and culture. One powerful force is the use of language to tell stories. These can motivate us to think of distant people as if they were friends and family.
Do you sleep like a baby? You may have your thalamus to thank, according to research that suggests this brain region helps people sleep through bumps in the night.
To discover why some people can sleep through noise while others awake at the faintest disruption, Jeffrey Ellenbogen and colleagues at Harvard Medical School used electrodes to monitor the brain activity of 12 people while they slept in a pitch-black, soundproof room. They then repeated the experiment, this time playing 14 sounds, such as a toilet flushing and street traffic, at 30-second intervals, increasing the volume until the volunteers’ brainwaves showed signs of arousal.
Sleepers who tolerated louder sounds before waking showed a higher frequency of “sleep spindles” – short bursts of activity of specific wavelength – during non-REM sleep than those who woke more easily.
The spindles arise in the brain’s sensory relay centre in the thalamus.
• If a vast conspiracy were afoot to create an entire civilization of insomniacs, it would operate pretty much the way our society does now.
• Relentless stress in the high-tech workplace of the 21st century is taking an unprecedented toll on our emotional lives and our capacity to wind down at the end of the day.
• Our widespread fear of and disregard for darkness -both literal and figurative- may be the most overlooked factor in the contemporary epidemic of sleep disorders.
Where does moral law come from? What lies behind our sense of right and wrong? For millennia, there have been two available answers. To the devoutly religious, morality is the word of God, handed down to holy men in groves or on mountaintops. To moral philosophers like Kant, it is a set of rules to be worked out by reason, chin on fist like Rodin’s thinker.
But what if neither is correct? What if our moral judgments are driven instead by more visceral human considerations? And what if one of those is not divine commandment or inductive reasoning, but simply whether a situation, in some small way, makes us feel like throwing up?
This is the argument that some behavioral scientists have begun to make: That a significant slice of morality can be explained by our innate feelings of disgust. A growing number of provocative and clever studies appear to show that disgust has the power to shape our moral judgments. Research has shown that people who are more easily disgusted by bugs are more likely to see gay marriage and abortion as wrong. Putting people in a foul-smelling room makes them stricter judges of a controversial film or of a person who doesn’t return a lost wallet. Washing their hands makes people feel less guilty about their own moral transgressions, and hypnotically priming them to feel disgust reliably induces them to see wrongdoing in utterly innocuous stories.
Today, psychologists and philosophers are piecing these findings together into a theory of disgust’s moral role and the evolutionary forces that determined it: Just as our teeth and tongue first evolved to process food, then were enlisted for complex communication, disgust first arose as an emotional response to ensure that our ancestors steered clear of rancid meat and contagion. But over time, that response was co-opted by the social brain to help police the boundaries of acceptable behavior. Today, some psychologists argue, we recoil at the wrong just as we do at the rancid, and when someone says that a politician’s chronic dishonesty makes her sick, she is feeling the same revulsion she might get from a brimming plate of cockroaches.
Desmond Morris, a curator of mammals at the London Zoo, suggested that permanently enlarged breasts in human females resulted from hominid bipedalism. (…)
The link between bipedalism and permanent breast enlargement, according to Morris, has to do with the erotic nature of breasts. He argues that as early humans (hominids) began walking upright, face-to-face encounters between the sexes became the norm, affecting the position used in sexual intercourse: males would no longer mount females from behind as they do among non-human primates. In the non-human primate position, presentation of the female buttocks to the male is an erotic display that stimulates male interest and excitement. with the advent of bipedalism, Morris argues, if females were to be successful in shifting male interest around to the front, evolution would have to do something to make the female frontal region more stimulating to males. This was accomplished, Morris says, through self-mimicry in which female breasts came to look like rounded buttocks: female breasts became mimics of “the ancient genital display of the hemispherical buttocks.”
Szalay and Costello (1991) have continued this line of thinking, but argue that permanently enlarged breasts sexually arouse males not because they look like buttocks, but because they mimic the appearance of female genitalia.
