The need for closure is an individual’s motivation to find an answer to a question and the degree to which they can tolerate the uncertainty of not knowing an answer to the question. People high in need for closure see the world as black or white, and strive for quick resolutions to problems. They are fearful of not knowing. People low in the need for closure are more tolerant of uncertainty, though all humans have a basic need for certainty and predictability.

One of the major themes to David DiSalvo’s “What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite” is that although our brain craves certainty, oftentimes things are not as they seem. He advocates taking more time and being aware of our evolutionarily hard-wired cognitive processes and their strengths and limitations.

People have the basic need to feel that they are right, or certain, in their evaluation of the environment. This certainty can be accomplished by seeking out information in only a small segment of the environment; this tendency is called the selectivity bias. Rather than considering all the available information, people pick and choose to what they attend. When we selectively attend to information that confirms what we already believe, we fall prey to the confirmation bias. If information that could potentially discredit a belief is ignored, the person can maintain that their beliefs are correct.

[…]

We live in the present. We may think that we are future-oriented but the research on discounting the future tells otherwise. Humans evolved to desire immediate awards and avoid immediate threats, so it can be difficult to place ourselves into the future and determine what our lives will be like then.

{ Evolutionary Psychology | PDF }

photo { Asger Ladefoged }

Botox functions by blocking the neurotransmitter acetylcholine from being released by the axon terminal of a neuron. Typically, acetylcholine binds to receptors on muscle, causing contraction; inhibiting this results in paralysis.

In the 1890s, psychologist William James promoted his facial feedback hypothesis. James believed there was a link between physical facial expressions and emotional states. Indeed, a number of studies in the 1980s and ’90s support this notion.

In the May issue of the Journal of Psychiatric Research, researchers M. Axel Wollmer and colleagues at the University of Basel in Switzerland reported that paralyzing the glabellar frown region—the area between the eyebrows—with Botox significantly improved symptoms in depressed individuals.

{ Gaines, on Brains | Continue reading }

{ Siberian Bear Hunting Armor From The 1800s }

While interviewing the suspect who claims ignorance about an incident, the witness who saw it happen, or the informant who identified the perpetrator, the detective asks a question that will eviscerate the perpetrator’s story. As the suspect prepares to answer, he looks up and to the left, purses his lips, tenses his eyelids, and brings his eyebrows down.

The investigator knows that a suspect displaying shifty eyes and gaze aversion and looking up and to the left when answering uncomfortable questions is exhibiting signs of lying. The suspect is not totally disinterested, but he is reluctant to participate in the interview. Because the suspect’s behavior suggests dishonesty, the detective prepares to drill still deeper in the questioning.

Unfortunately, this investigator likely would be wrong. Twenty-three out of 24 peer-reviewed studies published in scientific journals reporting experiments on eye behavior as an indicator of lying have rejected this hypothesis. No scientific evidence exists to suggest that eye behavior or gaze aversion can gauge truthfulness reliably.

Some people say that gaze aversion is the sure sign of lying, others that fidgety feet or hands are the key indicators. Still others believe that analysis of voice stress or body posture provides benchmarks. Research has tested all of these indicators and found them only weakly associated with deception. […]

Lies can be betrayed in verbal and nonverbal leakage independently. However, the authors have chosen to further examine this area, analyzing the combined contribution of verbal and nonverbal leakage to the prediction of deception or truthfulness.

{ FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin | Continue reading }

You’re on the bus, and one of the only free seats is next to you. How, and why, do you stop another passenger sitting there?

New research reveals the tactics commuters use to avoid each other, a practice the paper describes as ‘nonsocial transient behavior.’ […]

“Avoiding other people actually requires quite a lot of effort and this is especially true in confined spaces like public transport.”

{ EurekAlert | Continue reading }

Woman in sumo wrestler suit assaults ex-girlfriend who waved at man dressed as Snickers bar.

The controversial billionaire is rumored to be planning to clone a dinosaur from DNA so he can set it free in a Jurassic Park-style area at his new Palmer Resort in Coolum.

How did dinosaurs have sex?

Why India Just Suffered the World’s Biggest Blackout.

Indian police still using truth serum.

What truths does “truth serum” sodium pentothal actually reveal?

The Secret Online Weapons Store That’ll Sell Anyone Anything.

The ‘plasticity of disgust’ report concluded that ‘mothers rated their own baby’s soiled diaper as less disgusting than someone else’s baby’s diaper’.

What will we be eating in 20 years’ time?

A handful of people — only 33 confirmed to date — can remember almost every moment of their lives after about age 10 in near-perfect detail. The researchers note that people with the condition did not score high on routine memory tests and have a different kind of super memory than people who can remember long lists of facts and numbers.

Australian bottlenose dolphins that use marine sponges to forage for food have been found to socialise in cliques, in the first definitive example of subculture in animals.

Did Bill Gates Steal the Heart of DOS? The mystery of the rumored theft of CP/M by a little company called Microsoft can finally be investigated—using software forensic tools.

How Germans changed their minds about Jews, 1890-2006.

Inside L.A.’s Bizarre Human Hair Business.

Is Barefoot Running Really Better?

Three Fun Ways To Have Three Hands – For You At Home.

Six Things Men Can Learn From Getting Hit On By Men.

In a new study published in the journal Vision Research, researchers at the University of Southern California show that the eyes and attention of men and women meander in distinctly different ways. […]

Men, when focused on the person being interviewed, parked their eyes on the speaker’s mouth. They tended to be most distracted by distinctive movement behind the interview subjects.

By contrast, women shift their focus between the interview subject’s eyes and body. When they were distracted, it was typically by other people entering the video frame.

{ EurekAlert | Continue reading }

photo { Henry Wessel }

The electronic “pistol” of this summer’s Games was designed to overcome an astonishing problem: The speed of sound is too slow for Olympic athletes. That is to say, athletes far away from the starting pistol were delayed by the time it took for the sound to travel to them, and differences so tiny can matter in races in which the margins are so small.

{ The Atlantic | Continue reading }

related { Statisticians Predict The Number Of Olympic Records That Will Fall at London 2012 }

If you’re a lawyer in New York, there’s no sweeter deal than getting assigned to an estate case in Surrogate’s Court.

The work is often routine — selling assets, paying bills, contacting heirs — but the pay can reach into the millions.

Landing such a gig requires currying favor with one of the city’s seven surrogate judges, who handle wills and estates. They have the power to appoint lawyers and approve their sometimes jaw-dropping invoices.

The jobs often go to the judges’ friends, associates or campaign contributors, court authorities admit. Looting of the estates can sometimes result.

The most recent example involves Bronx Judge Lee Holzman, who last week faced removal from the surrogate bench after he signed off on legal work that was never done.

The bills, according to the Bronx District Attorney’s Office, totaled $300,000 and went to the judge’s associate, lawyer Michael Lippman, a Democratic Party crony who ran Holzman’s campaign financing, raising $125,000, a court watchdog claims.

Lippman then got into money trouble himself, racking up $1 million in gambling debts and allegedly faking bills to cover his losses.

Prosecutors say they uncovered the cooked books and charged him with fraud.

Another alleged thief preyed on a lucrative and largely unsupervised part of the system — cases in which there is no will.

Such cases go to public administrators, who work with Surrogate’s Court judges in handling their finances.

In May, Richard Paul, the bookkeeper for the Brooklyn public administrator, was indicted for stealing $2.6 million from these estates, allegedly manipulating the check-writing process to get at the cash.

{ NY Post | Continue reading }

photo { Dina Goldstein }

Scientists have worked out that modern pop music really is louder and does all sound the same.

Researchers in Spain used a huge archive known as the Million Song Dataset, which breaks down audio and lyrical content into data that can be crunched, to study pop songs from 1955 to 2010. A team led by artificial intelligence specialist Joan Serra at the Spanish National Research Council ran music from the last 50 years through some complex algorithms and found that pop songs have become intrinsically louder and more bland in terms of the chords, melodies and types of sound used.

{ Reuters | Continue reading }

A decade ago a study made an extraordinarily bold claim: that semen has antidepressant properties in women. Although widely-reported, there seems to have been a lack of critical response to this study and apparently no follow up studies have been done to test whether this claim is actually valid […] A well-known research principle is that correlation does not imply causation, and there are plausible alternative explanations that the authors of the study did not take into consideration.

What the study actually found was that women who did not use condoms during sex had lower levels of depressive symptoms compared to women who usually or always used them, and to women who abstained from sex altogether. The authors argued that vaginal exposure to semen was the causal mechanism underlying this effect, arguing that semen has components including various hormones, particularly prostaglandins, that are readily absorbed into the woman’s bloodstream and that these have an antidepressant effect. […]

Subsequent research has found that frequency of intercourse is positively correlated with both satisfaction with mental health and satisfaction with life in general, but this would not explain why condom use would seem to be related to depression. Brody (2010) has argued that sex with condoms is not real intercourse but something ‘akin to mutual masturbation’. I confess to finding this statement rather baffling but it is possible that for some women at least, sex with a condom may be less satisfying than without. One survey found that 40% of women reported decreased sensation associated with condom use and that some women associate condoms with a number of ‘turn-offs’ such as discomfort. Therefore, it seems possible that sexual enjoyment has an antidepressant effect that may be reduced by condom usage. […]

Another possibility, although it may sound strange, is that it is depression itself that leads to condom usage.

{ Eye on Psych | Continue reading }

illustration { Adrian Tomine }

The Rorschach is what psychologists call a projective test. The basic idea of this is that when a person is shown an ambiguous, meaningless image (ie an inkblot) the mind will work hard at imposing meaning on the image. That meaning is generated by the mind.

By asking the person to tell you what they see in the inkblot, they are actually telling you about themselves, and how they project meaning on to the real world.

But the inventor of the test, Hermann Rorschach, never intended it to be a test of personality.

{ BBC | Continue reading }

Psychopaths often exude charm and charisma, making them compelling, likeable, and believable during interviews. They can display a sense of humor and be pleasant to talk with. Their charm allows them to feign concern and emotion, even crying while they profess their innocence. Because it is in their best interest, throughout their lives they have convinced people that they have normal emotions. If they perceive that their charm is not working, it quickly will vanish, being replaced by a more aggressive or abrasive approach. Interviewers are inclined to lecture or scold the psychopath; however, these strategies likely will not work.

Psychopaths often appear at ease during interviews that most people would find stressful or overwhelming. Several explanations exist for their apparent lack of concern, including an absence of social anxiety. They seek or create exciting or risky situations that put them on the edge.

Interviewers often are nervous or anxious. During the first 5 minutes of the interview, when impressions are being formed, engaging in small talk, fidgeting with cell phones or notepads, or showing uncertainty regarding seating arrangements can communicate to psychopaths that interrogators are nervous or unsure of themselves. Psychopathic individuals view this as a weakness.

{ FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin | Continue reading }

Research on speech acoustics indicated that psychopaths do not differentiate in voice emphasis between neutral and emotional words. Other analysis suggested that the speech narratives of these individuals are organized poorly and incoherent. This is surprising because psychopaths are excellent storytellers who successfully con others.

This finding leads to the interesting question of how psychopaths can have such manipulative prowess. In addition to their skilled use of body language, recent research indicated that they are skilled at faking emotional expressions, approaching the skill level of emotionally intelligent individuals, despite being largely devoid of emotion. They are capable of adopting various masks, appearing empathetic and remorseful to the extent that they can talk and cry their way out of parole hearings at a higher rate than their less dangerous counterparts.

{ FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin | Continue reading }

Gay app Grindr crashes as Olympic athletes arrive in London.

North Carolina Man Arrested for Refusing to Leave Jail.

Smoking Banned Inside Santa Monica Residences.

New coating technology promises self-cleaning cars.

Alec Baldwin continues to be freaked out by a female stalker, and now Manhattan prosecutors have hit the perky blond fanatic with 20 new harassment counts.

The feds have raided dozens of synthetic-pot and bath-salt operations in more than 90 cities. They also seized $36 million in cash from dozens of manufacturers and sellers.

Numerous Top Bankers Call for Break Up of Giant Banks.

The two Chinatown women executed two weeks ago may have ripped off nearly $100,000 from Chinese thugs, law-enforcement sources believe. Police sources believe the victims were part of a “key club” — a sort of underground banking system.

Worldwide, there are about 6,000 mammal species, each with its own unique milk, but Americans get at least 97 percent of all our dairy products from one animal. (That would be the cow.)

Study finds fastest growing cities not the most prosperous.

The rise in women seeking a perfect vagina.

Men’s friendships with women ‘driven by sexual attraction.’

Two Myths and Three Facts About the Differences in Men and Women’s Brains.

Why Thinking of Others Improves Our Creativity.

Are we really at our most miserable at the start of the week, as the Blue Monday myth suggests? A new study conducted in the US claims not.

City’s drug patterns written in sewage. Drug testers sifting through raw sewage in 19 European cities found the highest cocaine use in Antwerp, a Nordic preference for methamphetamines and Amsterdam unsurprisingly leading in cannabis use.

Study shows the reasons why people find logic in magical rituals.

Hepatitis C can now be totally cured by new nanoparticle.

The Rabies Virus Remains a Medical Mystery.

Termites explode to defend their colonies.

Ice is an enigmatic, complex substance that continues to puzzle researchers.

Just days after a poacher’s snare had killed one of their own, two young mountain gorillas worked together Tuesday to find and destroy traps in their Rwandan forest home.

A new measure of arrogance, developed by researchers at the University of Akron and Michigan State University, can help organizations identify arrogant managers before they have a costly and damaging impact.

Psychology of Corruption.

Are we creating the future by predicting it?

Tween texting may lead to poor grammar skills.

The story of Microsoft’s lost decade could serve as a business-school case study on the pitfalls of success.

Why Computers Still Can’t Translate Languages Automatically.

How to Make Your Password So Secret, Even *You* Don’t Know It.

The success of the Avengers is only a small part of a broader phenomenon: the rise of “geek culture” as the single most powerful force, commercial and cultural, in the art and media landscape. At what point is the triumph of comic-book culture sufficient?

The first issue came out in February 1992. Its appearance prompted Julie Burchill to congratulate Ingrams on “producing the most pathetic magazine ever published.”

As Nietzsche’s ideas were being adapted to various and contrary ends by avant-garde artists, psychoanalysts, and racial ideologues, his death provoked a battle over his legacy. Kessler, a prominent patron of culture and a well-connected operator on the European art scene, took part in the fight.

Roland Barthes: It seems to me that, for a writer, the issue isn’t how to be “eternal” but how to be desirable after death.’

List of Authors Whose Copyrights Have Expired. [Thanks Fette]

Shakespeare insult kit.

Why is the letter Z associated with sleep?

The world’s first 3D-printed gun.

iPad painting App for cats invented by US company.

1980: Should we boycott the Olympics?

Tweak of Proximity by Joshua Davis.

In this episode of Skinema, Chris drives out to the world famous Al’s Diamond Caberet in Reading, Pennsylvania, to catch tattooed starlet Joanna Angel’s act and stick some fingers in her butt.

Unboxing the Statue of Liberty, 1885.

The fucking weather.

Fucking Homepage.

London Olympics. Gov. Romney and Mrs. Ann Romney cheer on Michael Phelps.

Mating can be dangerous. At least 100 years ago, biologists began to speculate that sex in the animal kingdom could be a very risky business. The noises can attract predators, the male is distracted and he has less energy to fight off an attacker or to run away. Perhaps that is why males almost always attempt to finish so quickly. Surprisingly, however, there has been little evidence to support this hypothesis until recently. Two lab studies and one in the field have shown that mating increases the risk of predation in freshwater amphipods, water striders and locusts.

Now a new study shows very strong evidence of the effect in flies.

{ LA Times | Continue reading }

images { 1. Sanne Sannes | 2. Ciler }

related { Women in love less likely to initiate sex, finds study }

Although real ‘clock measured’ time is passing at a constant rate, experience tells us that our subjective sense of the amount of time that has occurred, or the speed at which time is passing, can vary, leading to distortions in the passage of time. When we feel like less time has occurred than actually has, time feels like it has speeded up. When we feel like more has occurred than actually has, time feels like it has slowed down.

Despite being commonly experienced, the mechanisms behind distortions of the passage of time are underresearched and, as a result, poorly understood. Anecdotal accounts imply that our experience of time is influenced by our emotions and the activities we engage in: ‘time flies when you’re having fun’, but not when an car is hurtling towards you.

It is not only enjoyment and fear that affect how quickly time appears to be passing: other alterations in subjective consciousness have similar effects. The consumption of drugs and alcohol has long been known to warp time experiences. […]

Having experienced distortions in the passage of time whilst under the influence of drugs and alcohol, there is some concern amongst users about whether any effects could be permanent. Heavy drug and alcohol use can result in long-term neurological damage (Harper, 2009) and impaired cognitive function (Fisk & Montgomery, 2009), both of which may alter timing ability even when drug use has ceased. Chronic cocaine and amphetamine use reduces dopamine D2 receptor availability (Volkow et al., 2001), and, because animal studies have demonstrated that dopamine levels influence duration perception, it is possible that chronic users of cocaine or methamphetamine may show impaired timing even after drug use has stopped.

{ The Psychologist | Continue reading }

photo { Janine Gordon }

Arousal, the researchers contend, actually affects our perception of time. […]

The researchers presented 116 males with images from an online Victoria’s Secret catalog and gauged their response to receiving one of two fictitious Amazon.com promotions: a gift certificate available that day or one available three months from now. They asked the subjects the dollar value that would compensate for having to wait. Those exposed to sexually charged imagery (versus those in a control group exposed to nature images) were found to be more impatient and expressed that future discounts would have to be steeper to compensate for the time delay.

{ EurekAlert | Continue reading }

painting { Willem Drost }

He concocted an astroturf outrage campaign to publicize the screen adaptation of his client Tucker Max’s book I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell. He bought billboards and defaced them with stickers saying Max “deserved to have his dick caught in a trap with sharp metal hooks. Or something like that.”; he used fake email accounts to send angry emails about the movie to college progressive organizations; he started a boycott group on Facebook; he started fake blogs reporting false stories about his client’s “outrageous behavior.”

{ Das Krapital | Continue reading }

previously { On ABC News, he was one of a new breed of long-suffering insomniacs }

artwork { Ellsworth Kelly, Black Relief II, 2010 }

Rates are at historic lows of 3.53% for 30-year mortgages. Rents are at record levels all over the country, hitting highs in 74 markets tracked by real-estate-data provider Reis Inc. And housing prices appear to have finally begun increasing, with gains posted for three months in a row according to the index put out by the Federal Housing Finance Agency. So why aren’t more Americans buying houses?

The answer to that is rather complex, but one major factor is that trade-up buyers — folks who upgrade from smaller, cheaper “starter homes” to pricier properties, and who classically are a pumping piston in the engine that drives the housing market — are finding it difficult, if not impossible, to trade up right now. This key segment of the market is especially likely to be “equity poor.”

{ Time | Continue reading }

photo { Robert Adams }