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How our expressions help others locate threat
Asian News International: Wide-eyed expressions, which typically signals fear, may enlarge our visual field and mutually enhance others' ability to locate threats, a new research has claimed. The research - conducted by psychology graduate student Daniel Lee of the University of Toronto with advisor Adam Anderson - suggests that wide-eyed expressions of fear are functional in ways that directly benefit both the person who makes the expression and the person who observes it. The findings of the research show that widened eyes provide a wider visual field that can help us locate potential threats in our environment.
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The Biology of Kindness: How It Makes Us Happier & Healthier
TIME: There’s a reason why being kind to others is good for you— and it can now be traced to a specific nerve. When it comes to staying healthy, both physically and mentally, studies consistently show that strong relationships are at least as important as avoiding smoking and obesity. But how does social support translate into physical benefits such as lower blood pressure, healthier weights and other physiological measures of sound health? A new study published in Psychological Science, suggests that the link may follow the twisting path of the vagus nerve, which connects social contact to the positive emotions that can flow from interactions.
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Cognitive Earthquake: Who’s Really in Need?
The Huffington Post: In January 2000, an earthquake shook China's mountainous Yunnan province. It was a moderate earthquake and killed only seven, but it leveled more than 40,000 homes and injured thousands of residents. According to the World Health Organization, as many as 1.8 million were affected by the disaster, and in need of shelter, medical attention or other aid. The scientists have a theory, which is that we respond to deaths more decisively than we respond to other, undefined suffering -- even though it is obviously not the dead who need help. They set out to test this idea, and also to see if there might be a way to increase sensitivity to those left behind.
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Bouncing Back May Be Tough, but So Are We
The Chronicle of Higher Education: In 2005 the National Science Foundation brought together some unlikely collaborators—ecologists and psychologists among them—to talk about resilience. It turns out they had a lot in common. For decades researchers in each field had been studying the ways in which external events and stresses could transform complex systems. Their conclusions were strikingly similar: Resilience is often the result of a period of stress and change. Just as ecosystems can absorb serious shock and transform into different, but stable versions of themselves, so can people. Resilience, it seems, is hard-wired into us. Read the whole story: The Chronicle of Higher Education
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Study: Babies Like Watching Puppets Who Are Different From Them Get Hurt
The Atlantic: People are not always good to each other. We do know that babies prefer faces similar to their own and are better at processing emotional cues and distinguishing between people of their own ethnicity. I'm not saying you're racist, babies, but it does seem like you could be cooler. Researchers at University of British Columbia, Temple University, University of Chicago, and Yale University led by Kiley Hamlin worked with 64 nine-month-olds and 64 fourteen-month-olds. They first established whether each baby preferred graham crackers or green beans.
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Memory, Aging, and Distraction
The Huffington Post: The population in the United States is aging. That has created a lot of anxiety about the cognitive effects of getting older. Lots of research suggests that older adults are worse than younger adults on a variety of different thinking tasks. They remember fewer words from lists they see. They are slower to respond in many situations. They have more trouble ignoring distracting information.
