This research examined the relative sexual attractiveness of individuals showing emotion expressions of happiness, pride, and shame compared with a neutral control. (…)

A large gender difference emerged in the sexual attractiveness of happy displays: happiness was the most attractive female emotion expression, and one of the least attractive in males. In contrast, pride showed the reverse pattern; it was the most attractive male expression, and one of the least attractive in women.

{ The Impact of Emotion Expressions on Sexual Attraction | PDF | via Overcoming Bias }

Recent studies have noted positive effects of red clothing on success in competitive sports, perhaps arising from an evolutionary predisposition to associate the color red with dominance status. Red may also enhance judgments of women’s attractiveness by men, perhaps through a similar association with fertility.

Here we extend these studies by investigating attractiveness judgments of both sexes and by contrasting attributions based on six different colors. Furthermore, by photographing targets repeatedly in different colors, we could investigate whether color effects are due to influences on raters or clothing wearers, by either withholding from raters information about clothing color or holding it constant via digital manipulation, while retaining color-associated variation in wearer’s expression and posture.

When color cues were available, we found color-attractiveness associations when males were judged by either sex, or when males judged females, but not when females judged female images.

Both red and black were associated with higher attractiveness judgments and had approximately equivalent effects.

Importantly, we also detected significant clothing color-attractiveness associations even when clothing color was obscured from raters and when color was held constant by digital manipulation.

These results suggest that clothing color has a psychological influence on wearers at least as much as on raters, and that this ultimately influences attractiveness judgments by others.

{ Evolutionary Psychology | Continue reading }

Biologists had long known that DNA was built out of four molecules: adenine, guanine, thymine and cytosine. They assumed that these molecules occurred in equal quantity and dismissed any measurements that hinted otherwise as experimental errors.

Chargaff showed through careful measurement that this assumption was wrong. He found that the amount of adenine equalled that of thymine and the amount of guanine equalled that of cytosine but these were not equal to each other. (…)

Chargaff went on to discover that an approximate version of his rule also holds for most (but not all) single-stranded DNA. (…) Chargaff’s rules are important because they point to a kind of “grammar of biology,” a set of hidden rules that govern the structure of DNA. (…)

But in the 60 years since Chargaff discovered his invariant patterns, no others have emerged. Until now.

{ The Physics arXiv Blog | Continue reading }

artwork { Robin Williams }

Brian Witcombe and Dan Meyer won an Ig Nobel prize for their extensive medical survey of sword swallowing injuries. Nearly half of the interviewed sword swallowers complained of sore throats, but more serious injuries included perforation of the gullet and intestinal bleeding. (…)

Toast has a tendency to land butter-side down because it rotates as it falls off the edge of the table. If the table was higher (three meters high, for example), the problem would disappear because the toast would be able to make a full rotation before hitting the floor.

{ The Soft Anonymous | Continue reading }

One of the great conundrums of daily life is whether to be upfront about your weaknesses, and while it may be unwise to begin revealing all the times in your life that you’ve soiled yourself, a new study finds that when it comes to groups, descriptions that include positive and negative terms reduce prejudice more effectively than descriptions that include only positive terms.

{ peer-reviewed by my neurons | Continue reading }

screenshot { Michael Crowe }

Out-of-body experiences are just part of Ehrsson’s repertoire. He has convinced people that they have swapped bodies with another person, gained a third arm, shrunk to the size of a doll or grown to giant proportions. The storeroom in his lab is stuffed with mannequins of various sizes, disembodied dolls’ heads, fake hands, cameras, knives and hammers. It looks like a serial killer’s basement. “The other neuroscientists think we’re a little crazy,” Ehrsson admits.

But Ehrsson’s unorthodox apparatus amount to more than cheap trickery. They are part of his quest to understand how people come to experience a sense of self, located within their own bodies. The feeling of body ownership is so ingrained that few people ever think about it — and those scientists and philosophers who do have assumed that it was unassailable.

“Descartes said that if there’s something you can be certain of in this world, it’s that your hand is your hand,” says Ehrsson. Yet Ehrsson’s illusions have shown that such certainties, built on a lifetime of experience, can be disrupted with just ten seconds of visual and tactile deception. This surprising malleability suggests that the brain continuously constructs its feeling of body ownership using information from the senses — a finding that has earned Ehrsson publications in Science and other top journals, along with the attention of other neuroscientists.

{ Nature | Continue reading }

photo { Jesse Marlow }

First impressions have a profound effect on our everyday lives. We use them to determine who we should approach and who we should avoid. They can be a deciding factor in mate choice, trustworthiness judgments, and hiring deci- sions. Moreover, there is evidence that they may influence court decisions, election results, and professional evaluations. A growing number of studies are examining the way in which we quickly and automatically make trait impressions of others and use that knowledge, but few have examined the conditions under which we remember these impressions. This is surprising, because the memory of these impressions has the capacity to influence our future actions. Though current research suggests that we are experts at forming quick, automatic impressions, little is known about the processes that support retaining these impressions in long-term memory. (…)

The present study used a subsequent-memory paradigm to test the conditions under which the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC), is implicated in the encoding of first impressions. We found that intentionally forming impressions engages the dmPFC more than does incidentally forming impressions, and that this engagement supports the encoding of remembered impressions. In addition, we found that diagnostic information, which more readily lends itself to forming trait impressions, engages the dmPFC more than does neutral information. These results indicate that the neural system subserving memory for impressions is sensitive to consciously formed impressions. The results also suggest a distinction between a social memory system and other explicit memory systems governed by the medial temporal lobes.

{ The Psychonomic Society/Springer | Continue reading | PDF }

photo { Larry Sultan }

{ Distant world looks ripe for life | Distant world looks too ripe for life }

For example, people who are induced to nod their heads while listening to a message (ostensibly to test the headphones they are wearing for comfort and staying-power) express greater confidence in the message thereafter than those who have been induced to shake their heads while listening. This is just what we would think when observing other people: if they nod while they listen we assume they agree, and if they shake their heads while they listen we assume they disagree. Likewise, right-handed people who are induced to write statements with their left hands express lower confidence afterwards in the statements that they have written than people who write with their right hands. This is because the shaky writing makes the thoughts look hesitant. (And people who look at the written statements of others will make just the same judgments about the writers’ states of confidence.)

People are completely unaware that they are always interpreting themselves in just the same way that they interpret others.

{ Interview with Peter Carruthers | Continue reading }

photo { William Klein, Dance in Brooklyn, NY, 1955 }

Depressed people aside, the rest of us underestimate the likelihood that bad things will happen to us and overestimate the likelihood of good outcomes. Asked to imagine positive scenarios, we do so with greater vividness and more immediacy than when asked to picture negative occurrences - our images of those are hazy and distant.

Now Tali Sharot and her colleagues have investigated the brain mechanisms underlying this rosy outlook. (…)

One key finding is that the participants showed a bias in the way that they updated their estimates, being much more likely to revise an original estimate that was overly pessimistic than to revise an original estimate that was unduly optimistic. (…)

“Our findings offer a mechanistic account of how unrealistic optimism persists in the face of challenging information,” said Sharot and her team. “We found that optimism was related to diminished coding of undesirable information about the future in a region of the frontal cortex (right inferior frontal gyrus) that has been identified as being sensitive to negative estimation errors.”

{ BPS | Continue reading }

One of the better-known psychology factoids is that 80% of people tend to think they are above average (if you don’t know this, you’re clearly in the “below-average” 20%).

A new study explains this tendency by finding evidence for what the researchers call the “better-than-my-average-effect.”

Essentially, we evaluate how we really are by looking at our best performances, but when we evaluate others we tend to focus on their average performance.

{ peer-reviewed by my neurons | Continue reading }

Imagine a scientist gently swabs your left nostril with a Q-tip and finds that your nose contains hundreds of species of bacteria. That in itself is no surprise; each of us is home to some 100 trillion microbes. But then she makes an interesting discovery: in your nose is a previously unknown species that produces a powerful new antibiotic. Her university licenses it to a pharmaceutical company; it hits the market and earns hundreds of millions of dollars. Do you deserve a cut of the profits? (…)

In recent years, scientists have discovered remarkable complexity and power in the microbes that live inside us. We depend on this so-called microbiome for our well-being: it helps break down our food, synthesize vitamins and shield against disease-causing germs. (…)

Someday we may get important clues to people’s health from a survey of their microbes. Professor Rhodes argues that this sort of information will deserve the same protection as information about our own genes. (…)

But that is only one side of the issue. As scientists get to know the microbiome better, they are also looking for new medical treatments: after all, most antibiotics were first discovered in bacteria and fungi.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

photo { Roy DeCarava, Cab 173, New York, 1962 }

Human faces show marked sexual shape dimorphism, and this affects their attractiveness. Humans also show marked height dimorphism, which means that men typically view women’s faces from slightly above and women typically view men’s faces from slightly below.

We tested the idea that this perspective difference may be the evolutionary origin of the face shape dimorphism by having males and females rate the masculinity/femininity and attractiveness of male and female faces that had been manipulated in pitch (forward or backward tilt), simulating viewing the face from slightly above or below.

As predicted, tilting female faces upwards decreased their perceived femininity and attractiveness, whereas tilting them downwards increased their perceived femininity and attractiveness.

{ Evolutionary Psychology | Continue reading }

photo { Billy Kid }

If someone asked you to describe the psychological aspects of personhood, what would you say? Chances are, you’d describe things like thought, memory, problem-solving, reasoning, maybe emotion. In other words, you probably list the major headings of a cognitive psychology text-book. In cognitive psychology, we seem to take it for granted that these are, objectively, the primary components of “the mind.” (…)

In fact, this conception of the mind is heavily influenced by a particular (Western) cultural background. Other cultures assign different characteristics and abilities to the psychological aspects of personhood. (…)

Cross-linguistic research shows that, generally speaking, every culture has a folk model of a person consisting of visible and invisible (psychological) aspects. While there is agreement that the visible part of the person refers to the body, there is considerable variation in how different cultures think about the invisible (psychological) part. In the West, and, specifically, in the English-speaking West, the psychological aspect of personhood is closely related to the concept of “the mind” and the modern view of cognition. (…)

In Korean, the concept “maum” replaces the concept “mind.” “Maum” has no English counterpart, but is sometimes translated as “heart”. Apparently, “maum” is the “seat of emotions, motivation, and “goodness” in a human being.” (…)

The Japanese have yet another concept for the invisible part of the person — “kokoro.” “Kokoro” is a “seat of emotion, and also, a source of culturally valued attention to, and empathy with, other people.”

{ Notes from Two Scientific Psychologists | Continue reading }

painting { Eugène Delacroix, Orphan Girl at the Cemetery, 1824 }

Walker and his team tried to measure how sleeping can help us to process bad experiences. (…)

The results show that during the REM sleep the part of the brain that processes the emotions (the amygdala) decreased its activity, so that the prefrontal cortex, linked to rational actions, probably weakened the impact of a bad experience. Also, they noticed a drop in the levels of brain chemicals that are linked to stress.

“Somewhere between the initial event and the later point of recollecting, the brain has performed an elegant trick of divorcing emotions from memory, so it’s no longer itself emotional,” Walker said.

{ United Academics | Continue reading }

New research shows that Internet users often do not make the conscious decision to read news online, but they come across news when they are searching for other information or doing non-news related activities online, such as shopping or visiting social networking sites. (…)

“Many people don’t realize how their news reading behavior is shifting to more serendipitous discovery.”

{ University of Missouri | Continue reading }

In daily life, we recognize faces both holistically and also “analytically”—that is, picking out individual parts, such as eyes or nose. But while the brain uses analytical processing for all kinds of objects—cars, houses, animals—“holistic processing is thought to be especially critical to face recognition,” says Liu. (…)

“Individuals who process faces more holistically are better at face recognition.” (…) “Our findings partly explains why some never forget faces, while others misrecognize their friends and relatives frequently.”

There was no link between facial recognition and general intelligence, which is made up of various cognitive processes—a suggestion that face processing is unique. (…)

The research holds promise for therapies for that second category of people, who may suffer disorders such as prosopagnosia (face blindness) and autism.

{ APS | Continue reading }

Empathy divides into at least two components: “cognitive” and “affective.”

Cognitive empathy is the drive to identify someone else’s thoughts and feelings, being able to put yourself into their shoes to imagine what is in their mind. Affective empathy, in contrast, is the drive to respond to someone else’s thoughts and feelings with an appropriate emotion. People with autism typically have difficulties with the cognitive component (they have trouble inferring what other people might think or feel), but have intact affective empathy (it upsets them to hear of others suffering). So Breivik is unlikely to have autism.

In contrast, those with antisocial personality disorder (including psychopaths) typically have the opposite profile: they have no trouble reading other people’s thoughts and feelings (intact cognitive empathy) but other people’s suffering is of no concern to them.

{ The Guardian | Continue reading }

related { Weaker brain links found in psychopaths. Decreased communication between emotional and executive centers may contribute to the mental disorder. }

In every pirate movie there’s always at least one crew member who wears an eye patch, usually due to some hideous disfigurement. (…)

Actually, it looks like the only reason pirates wore eye patches was to keep one eye adjusted to darkness while boarding another ship. That’s right: If this theory is correct, they only wore the patch before and during a raid. (…)

It takes the human eye several minutes to adjust to darkness — however, this way, pirates could simply swap the eye patch and immediately be prepared to fight in the lower decks without constantly running into walls, which is something you’d probably want to avoid if you’re carrying a cutlass.

{ Cracked | Continue reading }

Over 50% of women report having faked an orgasm at least once in their life, usually to satisfy their partner. Why should a pretend orgasm be pleasing for the man? The current belief about the female orgasm is that it evolved as a way for women to separate the men from the boys. Men with good genes – who were more attractive in other words – give more orgasms. Muscle contractions that take place during the orgasm help move sperm around to where it can more easily fertilise the waiting egg. This idea has become delightfully known as  the ‘upsuck hypothesis.’ (…)

Women who thought their partner were likely to cheat on them were much more likely to admit to faking orgasms.

{ Charles Harvey | Continue reading }