This study finds that women who read sex-related magazine articles from popular women’s magazines like Cosmopolitan are less likely to view premarital sex as a risky behavior. Additionally, the women who are exposed to these articles are more supportive of sexual behavior that both empowers women and prioritizes their own sexual pleasure.
Can you determine a person’s character in a single interaction? Can you judge whether someone you just met can be trusted when you have only a few minutes together? And if you can, how do you do it?
Using a robot named Nexi, psychology professor David DeSteno and collaborators […] have figured out the answer. […]
In the absence of reliable information about a person’s reputation, nonverbal cues can offer a look into a person’s likely actions. This concept has been known for years, but the cues that convey trustworthiness or untrustworthiness have remained a mystery. Collecting data from face-to-face conversations with research participants where money was on the line, DeSteno and his team realized that it’s not one single non-verbal movement or cue that determines a person’s trustworthiness, but rather sets of cues.
photo { Garry Winogrand }
Some consumers are able to exercise great self-control when it comes to their diets while millions of others can’t seem to stop overindulging on unhealthy foods such as cookies and candies. Do the former have more willpower? Or are they simply satisfied more quickly?
In a series of studies, the authors found that consumers who successfully control their diets eat fewer unhealthy foods because they are satisfied sooner. They also found that many consumers with poor self-control were able to establish greater control when they paid close attention to the quantities of unhealthy foods they consumed because simply paying attention made them more quickly satisfied.
{ Alan Gevins and colleagues of San Francisco took electroencephalography (EEG) out of the lab and organized an EEG party - allowing them to record brain electrical activity from 10 people as they chatted and drank vodka martinis. The purpose of the study was to measure the effect of alcohol on brain activity. | Neuroskeptic | full story }
The Heisenberg uncertainty principle is in part an embodiment of the idea that in the quantum world, the mere act of observing an event changes it.
But the idea had never been put to the test, and a team writing in Physical Review Letters says “weak measurements” prove the rule was never quite right. […]
Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, as it came to be known later, started as an assertion that when trying to measure one aspect of a particle precisely, say its position, experimenters would necessarily “blur out” the precision in its speed. That raised the spectre of a physical world whose nature was, beyond some fundamental level, unknowable. […]
They aimed to use so-called weak measurements on pairs of photons. […] What the team found was that the act of measuring did not appreciably “blur out” what could be known about the pairs. It remains true that there is a fundamental limit of knowability, but it appears that, in this case, just trying to look at nature does not add to that unavoidably hidden world.
The tumor that appeared on a second scan. The guy in accounting who was secretly embezzling company funds. The situation may be different each time, but we hear ourselves say it over and over again: “I knew it all along.”
The problem is that too often we actually didn’t know it all along, we only feel as though we did. The phenomenon, which researchers refer to as “hindsight bias,” is one of the most widely studied decision traps and has been documented in various domains, including medical diagnoses, accounting and auditing decisions, athletic competition, and political strategy. […]
Roese and Vohs propose that there are three levels of hindsight bias. […] The first level of hindsight bias, memory distortion, involves misremembering an earlier opinion or judgment (”I said it would happen”). The second level, inevitability, centers on our belief that the event was inevitable (”It had to happen”). And the third level, foreseeability, involves the belief that we personally could have foreseen the event (”I knew it would happen”).
images { 1. Joao Penalva | 2 }
Around 60,000 years ago, modern humans left Africa, the cradle of our species. As we spread across the face of the Earth, we discovered that we weren’t the first or the only humans to make that sojourn. From Central Asia to Europe, we met our distant cousins the Neanderthals, descendants of a 500,000 year old migration; further east were the Denisovans, ranging from Sibera to Southeast Asia. Although these other humans died out around 30,000 years ago, some comfort can be found in the knowledge that a part of them lives on in us. Genetic evidence uncovered in the past few years suggests that our migrating ancestors may have mated with these other humans during their encounters. Not everyone was convinced, though, launching an ongoing debate about whether the genetic similarity might not be due to common ancestry rather than inbreeding.
still { Jean Seberg and Geoffrey Horne in Otto Preminger’s Bonjour Tristesse, 1958 }
To be a ‘success’ in evolutionary terms, women need to have access to resources for raising offspring, and men need to have access to fertile females. Researchers have argued that women tend to prefer partners who have an ability to invest resources in their children (i.e., wealthy men), and men tend to prefer partners who appear fertile (i.e., young women) because evolutionary adaptations have programmed these preferences in our brains.
But in the modern world, ‘success’ is not necessarily tied to offspring, so researchers […] hypothesized that the influence of evolutionary biases on mate choice would decline proportionally with nations’ gender parity, or the equality between men and women. […] They found that the gender difference in mate preferences predicted by evolutionary psychology models “is highest in gender-unequal societies, and smallest in the most gender-equal societies,” according to Zentner.
I often have to cut into the brain and it is something I hate doing. With a pair of short-wave diathermy forceps I coagulate a few millimetres of the brain’s surface, turning the living, glittering pia arachnoid – the transparent membrane that covers the brain – along with its minute and elegant blood vessels, into an ugly scab. With a pair of microscopic scissors I then cut the blood vessels and dig downwards with a fine sucker. I look down the operating microscope, feeling my way through the soft white substance of the brain, trying to find the tumour.
photo { Helmut Newton }
As noted in a previous posting, a number of studies have found that males outperform females on tests of general knowledge. The reasons for this are not yet clear. Women’s poorer test performance could be because they actually have acquired less knowledge than men, or it could be that they are not accessing all the knowledge they have. […]
Sex differences in general knowledge favouring males that were identified in a number of studies have been attributed to differing interests between men and women rather than differences in ability.
Another possibility that has not been explored in the research literature is that stereotype threat could have a detrimental effect on the performance of females in tests. […] For example, women who are reminded of their female identity perform more poorly on maths tests compared to a control group.
{ Eye on Psych | Continue reading }
The way that the visual centers of men and women’s brains works is different, finds new research published in BioMed Central’s open access journal Biology of Sex Differences. Men have greater sensitivity to fine detail and rapidly moving stimuli, but women are better at discriminating between colors.
When Wallace Craig dissected the feeding behavior of doves, his experimental animal of choice, he discovered the existence of two distinct phases - an appetitive and a consummatory phase. He defined appetite as “a state of agitation”, which continues until food is presented, whereupon phase 2 begins. That’s the phase you and I call eating. It’s followed by a third phase of relative rest, which Craig called the state of satisfaction. You are forgiven if you now ask “what science nugget could possibly be hidden in this platitude.” But the best-hidden gems are often those, which are in plain sight. […]
When Craig published his paper in 1917 he described the behaviors of his doves as instinctive. In other words, being driven by some innate processes which require no conscious decision making nor any degree of intellect. Today we know a lot more about those “innate processes”, particularly that they are the result of a complex conversation between neurons and hormones playing out in the recesses of the animal brain. Not only do we know the chains of command running from brain centre to periphery we also know the hormones (at least some of them) by names, such as Neuropeptide Y (NPY) or Leptin. You don’t need to remember them. What you need to remember is that “instinctive” has matured from a black box stage to the stage of neurohormonal mechanisms, which can be tested quantitatively in the lab with experimental animals. […]
NPY is the most potent “orexigenic” peptide currently known. That’s science speak for appetite stimulating peptide. Now you also know what it means when I tell you that leptin’s effect is just the opposite, that is, anorexigenic, or appetite suppressant. Inject NPY into the right places of a rat’s brain and it will turn into a voracious eater. Give obese rats leptin, and they slim down.
The death of an autoerotic asphyxiation fan ended up providing science with some valuable observations of what happens during choking.
On Twitter recently, I’ve been highlighting some really bad ideas courtesy of the medical literature. From injecting vaseline into your own penis, to pumping compressed air up your rectum for a joke, people have tried it and they’ve ended up on PubMed as a result.
A low-calorie diet boosts health but does not prolong life, at least not in rhesus monkeys, scientists found in a new study into a long-held link between food restriction and longevity.
Spanning 23 years, the research found monkeys that ate fewer calories than non-dieting counterparts were healthier but did not live any longer.
Rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta) are a preferred choice for lab study, as they are long-lived primates like humans – their average lifespan in captivity is 27 years and the usual maximum is 40 years.
The exceptionally long study, launched at the U.S. National Institute on Ageing (NIA) in Maryland in 1987, saw monkeys of different ages fed a diet 30% lower in calories than others that followed a ‘normal’, nutritious diet.
photo { Krass Clement }
Emotion recognition, a core component of emotional intelligence, is the general ability to recognize emotions. […]
For decades, researchers have known that skill in emotion recognition predicts positive outcomes in a wide range of contexts. From business executives to foreign service officers to elementary school principals, studies have shown a positive association between skill in emotion recognition and success in a wide variety of educational, workplace, or organizational contexts. Sensitivity to the internal states of colleagues, note the authors, can assist in coordinating activities and working independently. Emotion recognition, however, is a complex skill.
A person can express emotion by voice tones, facial expressions, body movements, or a combination of these “channels.” Each channel or combination can communicate a number of different emotions. […] Our facial expressions are, according to published research, highly controllable, express the information we choose to communicate, and as a result, “this information is more subject to impression management.” Emotion information conveyed through body movement or voice channels, however, may provide, according to the authors, a truer window into a person’s feelings. The ability to control the expression of emotion through these channels is more difficult, and requires more effort. […]
Emotion recognition is about reading social cues. The researchers label this skill “nonverbal eavesdropping.” […] Some people have problems when they lack the ability to read social cues around them. The study authors noted that some people have a different kind of problem with emotion recognition: They have the potential to “read too much” in a particular situation. […]
Sadness was the easiest emotion to recognize and fear the most difficult;
Accuracy did not differ across positive versus negative emotions;
Accuracy varied by channel, with emotions easier to recognize through facial photographs than vocal tone;
Anger and fear were more easier to recognize in the voice;
Happiness and sadness were relatively easier to recognize in the face;
Emotional eavesdropping ability varied significantly across emotions, with anger and fear were more easily eavesdropped than happiness or sadness;
artwork { Pablo Picasso, Femme étendue lisant, 1952 }
Grigori Perelman is one of the greatest mathematicians of our time, a Russian genius who solved the Poincaré Conjecture, which plagued the brightest minds for a century. At the height of his fame, he refused a million-dollar award for his work. Then he disappeared. Our writer hunts him down on the streets of St. Petersburg. […]
Word was that someone had solved an unsolvable math problem. The Poincaré conjecture concerns three-dimensional spheres, and it has broad implications for spatial relations and quantum physics, even helping to explain the shape of the universe. For nearly 100 years the conjecture had confused the sharpest minds in math, many of whom claimed to have proven it, only to have their work discarded upon scrutiny. The problem had broken spirits, wasted lives. By the time Perelman defeated the conjecture, after many years of concentrated exertion, the Poincaré had affected him so profoundly that he appeared broken too.
Perelman, now 46, had a certain flair. When he completed his proof, over a number of months in 2002 and 2003, he did not publish his findings in a peer-reviewed journal, as protocol would suggest. Nor did he vet his conclusions with the mathematicians he knew in Russia, Europe and the U.S. He simply posted his solution online in three parts—the first was named “The Entropy Formula for the Ricci Flow and Its Geometric Applications”—and then e-mailed an abstract to several former associates, many of whom he had not contacted in nearly a decade.
If one day is not exactly 24hrs and is in fact 23hr 56 mins, shouldn’t the error add up, and shouldn’t we see 12AM becoming noon at some point in time?
You’re right that a “sidereal” day is about 23 hours, 56 minutes, 4 seconds. But this is not a day in the everyday sense.
A sidereal day is how long it takes the earth (on average) to make one rotation relative to the faraway stars and other galaxies in the sky.
If you find a star that is directly above you at midnight one night, the same star will be directly above you again at 11:56:04 p.m. the next evening.
Similarly, if you were sitting on the star Proxima Centauri looking through a powerful telescope at earth, you would see Toledo, Ohio, go by every 23 hours, 56 minutes, and 4 seconds.
However, we don’t keep time by the faraway stars — we measure time by a much closer star, the sun! And we are actually in orbit around the sun, orbiting in the same direction that the earth is spinning on its own axis. From our perspective, the sun goes a little slower in the sky because we are also orbiting around it.
How fast are we orbiting around the sun? We make one full orbit every year, or roughly 366.25 sidereal days.
So after a year, the faraway stars will have done 366.25 rotations around the earth, but the sun will only have done 365.25 rotations. We “lose” a sunset because of the complete orbit. (The extra quarter day is why we need a leap year every four years.)
So there are 365.25 “mean solar days” in 366.25 “sidereal” days. How long is a “mean solar day”? Let’s do the math: One sidereal day is 23 hours, 56 minutes, 4 seconds, or 86164 seconds. Multiply this by 366.25 sidereal days in a year, and you get 31557565 seconds. Divide by 365.25 solar days, and we get that a solar day is…. 86,400 seconds. That’s 24 hours exactly!
Two traits that set humans apart from other primates—big brains and the ability to walk upright—could be at odds when it comes to childbirth. Big brains and the big heads that encase them are hard to push through the human birth canal, but a wider pelvis might compromise bipedal walking. Scientists have long posited that nature’s solution to this problem, which is known as the “obstetric dilemma,” was to shorten the duration of gestation so that babies are born before their heads get too big. As a result, human babies are relatively helpless and seemingly underdeveloped in terms of motor and cognitive ability compared to other primates.
“All these fascinating phenomena in human evolution—bipedalism, difficult childbirth, wide female hips, big brains, relatively helpless babies—have traditionally been tied together with the obstetric dilemma,” said Holly Dunsworth, an anthropologist at the University of Rhode Island and lead author of the research. “It’s been taught in anthropology courses for decades, but when I looked for hard evidence that it’s actually true, I struck out.” The first problem with the theory is that there is no evidence that hips wide enough to deliver a more developed baby would be a detriment to walking, Dunsworth said. Anna Warrener, a post-doctoral researcher at Harvard University and one of the paper’s co-authors, has studied how hip breadth affects locomotion with women on treadmills. She found that there is no correlation between wider hips and a diminished locomotor economy.
Then Dunsworth looked for evidence that human pregnancy is shortened compared to other primates and mammals. She found well-established research to the contrary. “Controlling for mother’s body size, human gestation is a bit longer than expected compared to other primates, not shorter,” she said. “And babies are a bit larger than expected, not smaller. Although babies behave like it, they’re not born early.”
For mammals in general, including humans, gestation length and offspring size are predicted by mother’s body size. Because body size is a good proxy for an animal’s metabolic rate and function, Dunsworth started to wonder if metabolism might offer a better explanation for the timing of human birth than the pelvis.
photo { Steve McCurry }
Researchers have confirmed what many suspected - pop music over the last five decades has grown progressively more sad-sounding and emotionally ambiguous. They analyzed the tempo (fast or slow) and mode (major or minor) of the most popular 1,010 pop songs identified using year-end lists published by Billboard magazine in the USA from 1965 to 2009. Tempo was determined using the beats per minute of a song, and where this was ambiguous the researchers used the rate at which you’d clap along. The mode of the song was identified from its tonic chord - the three notes played together at the outset, in either minor or major. Happy sounding songs are typically of fast tempo in major mode, whilst sad songs are slow and in minor. Songs can also be emotionally ambiguous, having a tempo that’s fast in minor, or vice versa.
The researchers found that the proportion of songs recorded in minor-mode has increased, doubling over the last fifty years. The proportion of slow tempo hits has also increased linearly, reaching a peak in the 90s. There’s also been a decrease in unambiguously happy-sounding songs and an increase in emotionally ambiguous songs.
