This study provides a descriptive account of kissing behavior in a large sample of undergraduate college students and considers kissing in the context of both short-term and long-term mating relationships.
Kissing was examined as a mate assessment device, a means of promoting pair bonds, and a means of inducing sexual arousal and receptivity. A total 1,041 college students completed one of three questionnaires measuring kissing preferences, attitudes, styles, and behaviors.
Results showed that females place more importance on kissing as a mate assessment device and as a means of initiating, maintaining, and monitoring the current status of their relationship with a long-term partner.
In contrast, males place less importance on kissing, especially with short-term partners, and appear to use kissing to increase the likelihood of having sex. The results suggest that kissing may play an important role as an adaptive courtship/mating ritual.
Facebook users can spread emotions to their online connections just by posting a written message, or status update, that’s positive or negative, says a psychologist who works for the wildly successful social network.
This finding challenges the idea that emotions get passed from one person to another via vocal cues, such as rising or falling tone, or by a listener unconsciously imitating a talker’s body language, said Adam Kramer on January 27 at the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology. Kramer works at Facebook’s headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif.
“It’s time to rethink how emotional contagion works, since vocal cues and mimicry aren’t needed,” Kramer said. “Facebook users’ emotion leaks into the emotional worlds of their friends.”
Nurturing a child early in life may help him or her develop a larger hippocampus, the brain region important for learning, memory and stress responses, a new study shows.
Previous animal research showed that early maternal support has a positive effect on a young rat’s hippocampal growth, production of brain cells and ability to deal with stress. Studies in human children, on the other hand, found a connection between early social experiences and the volume of the amygdala, which helps regulate the processing and memory of emotional reactions. Numerous studies also have found that children raised in a nurturing environment typically do better in school and are more emotionally developed than their non-nurtured peers.
Brain images have now revealed that a mother’s love physically affects the volume of her child’s hippocampus. In the study, children of nurturing mothers had hippocampal volumes 10 percent larger than children whose mothers were not as nurturing. Research has suggested a link between a larger hippocampus and better memory.
In fact, it has become pretty clear that deciphering consciousness will definitely be more difficult than describing the dynamics of DNA. Crick himself spent more than two decades attempting to unravel the consciousness riddle, working on it doggedly until his death in 2004. His collaborator, neuroscientist Christof Koch of Caltech, continues their work even today, just as dozens of other scientists pursue a similar agenda — to identify the biological processes that constitute consciousness and to explain how and why those processes produce the subjective sense of persistent identity, the self-awareness and unity of experience, and the “awareness of self-awareness” that scientists and philosophers have long wondered about, debated and sometimes even claimed to explain.
So far, no one has succeeded to anyone else’s satisfaction. Yes, there have been advances: Understanding how the brain processes information. Locating, within various parts of the brain, the neural activity that accompanies certain conscious perceptions. Appreciating the fine distinctions between awareness, attention and subjective impressions. But yet with all this progress, the consciousness problem remains popular on lists of problems that might never be solved.
Perhaps that’s because the consciousness problem is inherently similar to another famous problem that actually has been proved unsolvable: finding a self-consistent set of axioms for deducing all of mathematics. As the Austrian logician Kurt Gödel proved eight decades ago, no such axiomatic system is possible; any system as complicated as arithmetic contains true statements that cannot be proved within the system.
Gödel’s proof emerged from deep insights into the self-referential nature of mathematical statements. He showed how a system referring to itself creates paradoxes that cannot be logically resolved — and so certain questions cannot in principle be answered.
This article examines the possibility that romantic love (with intensity, engagement, and sexual interest) can exist in long-term relationships. A review of taxonomies, theory, and research suggests that romantic love, without the obsession component typical of early stage romantic love, can and does exist in long-term marriages, and is associated with marital satisfaction, well-being, and high self-esteem.
Supporting the separate roles of romantic love and obsession in long-term relationships, an analysis of a moderately large data set of community couples identified independent latent factors for romantic love and obsession and a subsample of individuals reporting very high levels of romantic love (but not obsession) even after controlling for social desirability. Finally, a meta-analysis of 25 relevant studies found that in long- and short-term relationships, romantic love (without obsession) was strongly associated with relationship satisfaction; but obsession was negatively correlated with it in long-term and positively in short-term relationships.
To determine “how public figures realize creative forms of apologetic speech in order to minimize their responsibility for misdeeds,” Kampf examined 354 conditional apologies made by Israeli public figures, organizations, or institutions between 1997 and 2004, breaking them down into specific categories and sub-categories. (…)
After making racist remarks about Ethiopian immigrants, writer Samuel Shnitzer replied with a classic “if” statement: “If someone was hurt by the column I wrote, I am very sorry about that.” Ariel Sharon’s 2002 statement concerning the deaths of Palestinian civilians during a military campaign managed to include both an “if” and a “but”: “The Israeli Defense Force is sorry if civilians were injured, but not for the successful operation.”
As Kampf pointed out, this delicate wordplay is important to politicians who want to keep their jobs. But it’s even more crucial to business executives who, if they truly accepted responsibility, might end up in jail. A research team led by the University of Ulster’s Owen Hargie analyzed the testimony of four CEOs of financial institutions before a committee of the British Parliament in 2009 and noted a similar pattern of obfuscation.
“The main type of apology used by the senior bankers fell into the ‘I’m sorry you’re sick’ category, where the person is in effect saying that he or she has no personal responsibility for what happened, but recognizes and expresses sympathy for the person’s predicament,” the researchers write.
There is no consensus about the symptom criteria for psychopathy, and no psychiatric or psychological organization has sanctioned a diagnosis of psychopathy itself. (…)
The Hare Psychopathy Checklist is a standard ratings tool in forensic settings to label people as psychopaths.
A study by Hare and colleague suggested that one to two percent of the US population score high enough on a screening version of the scale to be considered potential psychopaths.
According to some, there is little evidence of a cure or effective treatment for psychopathy; no medications can instill empathy, and psychopaths who undergo traditional talk therapy might become more adept at manipulating others and more likely to commit crime. (…)
According to Hare, psychopathy stems from as yet unconfirmed genetic neurological predispositions and as yet unconfirmed social factors in upbringing. A review published in 2008 indicated multiple causes, and variation in causes between individuals.
Hare also notes that some psychopaths can blend in, undetected, in a variety of surroundings, including corporate environments He has described psychopaths as “intraspecies predators.” (…)
Robert D. Hare’s Psychopathy Checklist, Revised (PCL-R) is the psycho-diagnostic tool most commonly used to assess psychopathy. (…)
▪ Glibness/superficial charm
▪ Grandiose sense of self-worth
▪ Pathological lying
▪ Cunning/manipulative
▪ Lack of remorse or guilt
▪ Shallow affect (genuine emotion is short-lived and egocentric)
▪ Callousness; lack of empathy
▪ Failure to accept responsibility for own actions
▪ Need for stimulation/proneness to boredom
▪ Parasitic lifestyle
▪ Poor behavioral control
▪ Lack of realistic long-term goals
▪ Impulsivity
▪ Irresponsibility
▪ Juvenile delinquency
▪ Early behavior problems
▪ Revocation of conditional release
▪ Promiscuous sexual behavior
▪ Many short-term marital relationships
▪ Criminal versatility
▪ Acquired behavioural sociopathy/sociological conditioning (Item 21: a newly identified trait i.e. a person relying on sociological strategies and tricks to deceive)
Ask a social scientist about the keys to happiness and you’re likely to hear that it’s better to buy experiences than buy possessions. What you’re unlikely to hear is a good explanation for why experiences make people happier.
Two Cornell psychologists, Emily Rosenzweig and Thomas Gilovich, attempted to answer this question by examining regret rather than satisfaction in the aftermath of a purchase. They theorized that with material purchases the strongest regret stems from action (i.e. buying the wrong thing), whereas with experiential purchases the strongest regret comes from inaction (not having the experience.) The result is that those who make a purchase are more likely to feel regret when buying a material good, and therefore buying a material good leads to comparatively less happiness.
Very little research has investigated whether smells really do evoke vivid and emotional memories, more than other sensory cues. What follows is a new, rare attempt. (…)
“It could be argued that a necessary implication of the Proust phenomenon is that odors are more effective triggers of emotional memories than other-modality triggers,” the researchers said. “Under such strong assumptions the results reported here do not confirm the Proust phenomenon. Nonetheless, our findings do extend previous research by demonstrating that odor is a stronger trigger of detailed and arousing memories than music, which has often been held to provide equally powerful triggers as odors.”
The idea that our universe is embedded in a broader multidimensional space has captured the imagination of scientists and the general population alike.
This notion is not entirely science fiction. According to some theories, our cosmos may exist in parallel with other universes in other sets of dimensions. Cosmologists call these universes braneworlds. And among that many prospects that this raises is the idea that things from our Universe might somehow end up in another.
A couple of years ago, Michael Sarrazin at the University of Namur in Belgium and a few others showed how matter might make the leap in the presence of large magnetic potentials. That provided a theoretical basis for real matter swapping.
Today, Sarrazin and a few pals say that our galaxy might produce a magnetic potential large enough to make this happen for real. If so, we ought to be able to observe matter leaping back and forth between universes in the lab. In fact, such observations might already have been made in certain experiments.
Group settings can diminish expressions of intelligence, especially among women
Research led by scientists at the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute found that small-group dynamics — such as jury deliberations, collective bargaining sessions, and cocktail parties — can alter the expression of IQ in some susceptible people. “You may joke about how committee meetings make you feel brain dead, but our findings suggest that they may make you act brain dead as well,” said Read Montague, who led the study.
What can make camping even more enjoyable? Self-cleaning clothes. And I don’t mean jumping into the river with your clothes on, but simply just leaving them out in the sun. At least, that’s what we may be able to do one day with the self-cleaning cotton developed by Chinese researchers. (…)
The team evaluated the self-cleaning properties of the new cotton fibres based on the removal of methyl orange, a dye commonly used in textiles. The dye breaks down with exposure to visible light by a process known as photocatalytic degradation. With just two hours of exposure to visible light, about 70% of the dye was removed from the cotton fibres.
When things are bad, and I mean really bad, horribly you-are-in-the-jaws-of-death bad, sometimes you have to let go of something. Like a tail.
The leopard gecko can, when hassled, have its tail fall off. Losing a limb (autotomy) is not a particularly unusual trick for this species. Lots of animals can drop legs and tails if necessary. But this one is noteworthy because if it does so, the tail doesn’t just come off, but it will continue to twist and writhe for up to several minutes after the tail has been separated from the rest of the body. (…)
Higham and Russell show that that the tail is doing at least two things. One is a slow, rhythmic swinging, and occasionally, much faster contortions that made the tail flip or jump around. The flips tend to fade out faster than the slower swinging, though.
What occurred to Newton was that there was a force of gravity, which of course everybody knew about, it’s not like he actually discovered gravity– everybody knew there was such a thing as gravity. But if you go back into antiquity, the way that the celestial objects, the moon, the sun, and the planets, were treated by astronomy had nothing to do with the way things on earth were treated. These were entirely different realms, and what Newton realized was that there had to be a force holding the moon in orbit around the earth. This is not something that Aristotle or his predecessors thought, because they were treating the planets and the moon as though they just naturally went around in circles. Newton realized there had to be some force holding the moon in its orbit around the earth, to keep it from wandering off, and he knew also there was a force that was pulling the apple down to the earth. And so what suddenly struck him was that those could be one and the same thing, the same force.
(…)
I’m not sure it’s accurate to say that physicists want to hand time over to philosophers. Some physicists are very adamant about wanting to say things about it; Sean Carroll for example is very adamant about saying that time is real. You have others saying that time is just an illusion, that there isn’t really a direction of time, and so forth. I myself think that all of the reasons that lead people to say things like that have very little merit, and that people have just been misled, largely by mistaking the mathematics they use to describe reality for reality itself. If you think that mathematical objects are not in time, and mathematical objects don’t change — which is perfectly true — and then you’re always using mathematical objects to describe the world, you could easily fall into the idea that the world itself doesn’t change, because your representations of it don’t.
There are other, technical reasons that people have thought that you don’t need a direction of time, or that physics doesn’t postulate a direction of time. My own view is that none of those arguments are very good. To the question as to why a physicist would want to hand time over to philosophers, the answer would be that physicists for almost a hundred years have been dissuaded from trying to think about fundamental questions. I think most physicists would quite rightly say “I don’t have the tools to answer a question like ‘what is time?’ - I have the tools to solve a differential equation.” The asking of fundamental physical questions is just not part of the training of a physicist anymore.
(…)
On earth, of all the billions of species that have evolved, only one has developed intelligence to the level of producing technology. Which means that kind of intelligence is really not very useful. It’s not actually, in the general case, of much evolutionary value. We tend to think, because we love to think of ourselves, human beings, as the top of the evolutionary ladder, that the intelligence we have, that makes us human beings, is the thing that all of evolution is striving toward. But what we know is that that’s not true. Obviously it doesn’t matter that much if you’re a beetle, that you be really smart. If it were, evolution would have produced much more intelligent beetles. We have no empirical data to suggest that there’s a high probability that evolution on another planet would lead to technological intelligence. There is just too much we don’t know.
Many of us cling to the notion that memory is a reliable record and trawling through it can be similar to flipping through an old photo album. But what about the memories - sometimes vivid in nature - of things that never were?
Examining the false stories that we can create for ourselves is the aim of a new initiative led by artist Alasdair Hopwood. As part of a residency at the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit led by Chris French at Goldsmiths College, University of London, Hopwood aims to explore what false memories reveal about our sense of identity.
To do this, he has created the False Memory Archive, a collection of people’s fabricated recollections either jotted down after talks he has given or submitted online at the project’s website. (…)
For Hopwood, examining the ways we deceive ourselves through memory is perhaps a natural progression. He has worked with fellow artists as part of the WITH Collective on projects that expose and poke fun at the many ways we style our public selves. “Identity is not fixed,” he says. Instead, it shifts depending on the company we are in, and even the format of the interaction - be it social media or in person. We’re extraordinarily preoccupied with sculpting our identities, as the glut of self-help books and pseudoscientific methods for personal development demonstrates.
As you read these words, try paying attention to something you usually never notice: the movements of your eyes. While you scan these lines of text, or glance at that ad over there or look up from the screen at the room beyond, your eyes are making tiny movements, called saccades, and brief pauses, called fixations. Scientists are discovering that eye movement patterns — where we look, and for how long — reveals important information about how we read, how we learn and even what kind of people we are.
Researchers are able to identify these patterns thanks to the development of eye-tracking technology: video cameras that record every minuscule movement of the eyes. Such equipment, originally developed to study the changes in vision experienced by astronauts in zero-gravity conditions, allows scientists to capture and analyze that always-elusive entity, attention. The way we move our eyes, it turns out, is a reliable indicator of what seizes our interest and of what distracts us. (…)
Eye movements are so closely tied to the way we think and act that they can even reveal information about our personalities. In a study published this month in the journal Cognition, researcher Evan Risko and his coauthors asked experimental subjects to complete a questionnaire gauging their levels of curiosity, defined as a desire for new knowledge and new experiences. The scientists then used eye-tracking equipment to record the eye movements of participants as they viewed a series of scenes. People who tested as highly curious, Risko reported, looked at many more elements of the pictures, restlessly moving their eyes around the scenes. “Who a person is,” he concluded, “relates to how they move their eyes.”
Benford’s Law, also known as the rule of first-digits, is a rule that says in data sets borne from real-life (perhaps sales of coffee or payments to a vendor), the number 1 should be the first digit in a series approximately 30% of the time, instead of 11% as would happen had a random number between one and nine been generated.
The rule was first developed by Simon Newcomb, who noticed that in his logarithm books the first pages showed much greater signs of use than those pages at the end. Later the physicist Frank Benford collected some 20,000 observations to test the theory, which he too stumbled upon.
Benford found that the first-digits of a variety of things in nature, like elemental atomic weights, the areas of rivers, and the numbers that appeared on front pages of newspapers, started with a one more often than any other digit.
The reason for that proof is the percentage difference between consecutive single-digit numbers. Say a firm is valued at $1 billion. For the first digit to become a two (or to reach a market cap of $2 billion), the value of the firm will need to increase by 100%. However, once it reaches that $2 billion mark, it only needs to increase by 50% to get to $3 billion. That difference continues to decline as the value increases.
I’ve covered these highly counter-intuitive findings before and the title of that article sums it up: Weather Has Little Effect on Mood.
Most of us intuitively think the weather has quite a strong effect on our mood. Many assume that the rain and cold weather depresses us and sun and warmth perks us up.
So why don’t we see this effect in the research?
That’s the question a new study by Klimstra et al. (2011) tries to answer.
And it turns out this is true. In fact Klimstra et al. found four distinct groups:
In the Cayman Islands, genetically modified mosquitoes are on the prowl. The insects are all male, and they’ve been engineered so that all their offspring die before reaching adulthood. By having sex with local females, they could father a new generation that perishes prematurely, before it gets the chance to spread diseases like dengue fever.
These GM insects, engineered by Luke Alphey at the University of Oxford, are part of a growing number of initiatives designed to fight disease by pitting mosquitoes against mosquitoes. Alphey’s tactic of breeding mosquitoes that beget unfit larvae is just one approach. Some groups are trying to make the insects more resistant to the disease-causing parasites they carry. Others have loaded them with life-shortening bacteria that outcompete those parasites. (…)
But all of these recent attempts to turn mosquitoes into malaria- and dengue-killing machines have something in common: The modified mosquitoes need to have lots of sex to spread their altered genes through the wild population. They must live long enough to become sexually active, and they have to compete successfully for mates with their wild peers. And that is a problem, because we still know surprisingly little about the behavior and ecology of mosquitoes, especially the males. How far do they travel? What separates the Casanovas from the sexual failures. What affects their odds of survival in the wild? How should you breed the growing mosquitoes to make them sexier?
[Princess Marie Bonaparte] suffered from what many women today still do – the inability to reach orgasm solely through vaginal intercourse. Defying the social mores of her era, she discovered she could reach orgasm through masturbation. (…)
She first examined and interviewed 243 women. One by one she measured the distance between their clitorises and the vaginas, then compared the distance to their frequency and ease of orgasm. What she discovered was a direct correlation between the ability to orgasm through vaginal sex and the measurement of space between the vagina and the external part of the clitoris. She categorized the findings from her subjects in three ways: paraclitoridiennes (para meaning “alongside”), mesoclitoriennes (meso meaning “in the middle”), and téléclitoridiennes (télé meaning “far”).
Paraclitoridiennes were the fortunate ones. The space between their vaginas and clitorises measured less than one inch. For the 69% of her test subjects that fell into this category, vaginal orgasm was easier than ever to reach. However, similar studies conducted in modern times prove this statistic extremely high.
