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Eyes have power to make us feel connected
Journal and Courier: As a student at Purdue University, Olivia Maple spends about 40 minutes a day walking back and forth to class on campus. Although she sees passersby, she tries not to make eye contact. "It's kind of awkward," said the 21-year-old senior. "I don't want them to think I was staring at them for no reason. I just kind of stare off, not looking at anyone in particular." In our busy, tech-saturated world, making eye contact can seem like an uncomfortable task, but new research from Purdue shows that even the slightest glance from a stranger can make a person feel more connected. However, being looked through -- even by a stranger -- makes someone feel more disconnected.
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Why Online Dating Doesn’t Work
Scientific American: Online dating might give you something, but it's probably not a soul mate. Most sites rely on what’s called an "exclusive process"—they use an algorithm to find romantic matches based variables, from interests to fetishes. But now a team of psychologists from five universities has performed a systematic review. And they say that most claims for the power of the "exclusive process" don’t pan out. Their report is in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest. Listen to the podcast here: Scientific American
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The search engine for love
The Sydney Morning Herald: It's easy to play Cupid when both parties are motivated to find love, writes Nicky Phillips. In the winter of 1959, two Stanford University students used the institution's room-size IBM 650 to build a computer program that paired 49 young men, mainly classmates, with 49 local women. Prospective couples answered 30 questions including their age, religion, hobbies and number of children wished for in marriage. The results were fed into the computer which, after nine hours of processing, selected pairs based on the similarity of the responses. The first attempt at computer dating was launched.
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How to Get the Rich to Share the Marbles
The New York Times: Suppose scientists discovered a clump of neurons in the brain that, when stimulated, turned people into egalitarians. This would be good news for Democratic strategists and speechwriters, who could now get to work framing arguments about wealth and taxation in ways that might activate the relevant section of cerebral cortex. This “share-the-spoils” button has been discovered, in a sense, but it may turn out to be harder to press than Democrats might think. Pretend you’re a three-year-old, exploring an exciting new room full of toys.
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Brain scans in infants shed light on autism onset
CNN: New research provides evidence that wiring in the brains of children with autism differs from typically developing children as early as six months of age, according to a study published in the American Journal of Psychiatry on Friday. "This is the earliest study of brain development using neuro-imaging," says Geraldine Dawson, Ph.D.
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Girls’ Verbal Skills Make Them Better At Arithmetic
While boys generally do better than girls in science and math, some studies have found that girls do better in arithmetic. A new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds that the advantage comes from girls’ superior verbal skills. “People have always thought that males’ advantage is in math and spatial skills, and girls’ advantage is in language,” says Xinlin Zhou of Beijing Normal University, who cowrote the study with Wei Wei, Hao Lu, Hui Zhao, and Qi Dong of Beijing Normal University and Chuansheng Chen of the University of California-Irvine.
