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Left-leaning estimations
The Globe and Mail: “If something has gone down in your estimation, check your stance,” says the New Scientist. “Leaning to the left encourages people to underestimate everything from the height of buildings to the number of Michael Jackson chart-toppers. To find out whether body positions influence value estimation, Anita Eerland and her colleagues at Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands asked 33 people to guess the numerical answer to questions while [standing] on a Wii-console balance board.
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Does having more potential mates make us focus on deep qualities or shallow ones?
Business Insider: A study published in Psychological Science found that volunteers who have the choice of many potential mates pay less attention to important characteristics that take more time to elicit and pay more attention to trivial characteristics that are quickly and easily assessed. ...Results found that in small speed-dating sessions, people made choices based primarily on important characteristics that take more time to evaluate while those in large speed-dating sessions made choices based on quick and easy-to-assess characteristics. Read the whole story: Business Insider
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The Unreal World: ‘Homeland’ and bipolar disorder
Los Angeles Times: Sgt. Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis) returns as a hero to the U.S. after spending eight years as a prisoner of war in Afghanistan. Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) is a mentally unstable CIA officer who is convinced that Brody is an agent of Al Qaeda. She gets antipsychotic medication and lithium from her sister, psychiatrist Maggie Mathison (Amy Hargreaves), but she fears she'll lose her job if she gets medical treatment through normal channels. In this episode, Carrie is hospitalized after being burned and bruised in a briefcase bomb explosion. She hasn't taken her medication in several days and is becoming increasingly manic.
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Families cling to hope of autism ‘recovery’
Los Angeles Times: In 1987, Ivar Lovaas, a charismatic UCLA psychology professor, published what remains the most famous study on the treatment of autism. Lovaas had broken down the basic skills of life into thousands of drills, such as pointing, identifying colors and reading facial expressions. For 40 hours a week on average, the therapists he trained used rewards and punishments, ranging from food treats to slaps on the thigh, to instill those abilities in 19 autistic youngsters under the age of 4. When the study began, most of the children didn't speak and were considered mentally retarded.
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Men Think They’re Hot — And It Works
Discovery News: It's a classic tale of unrequited love: Boy meets Girl. Boy likes Girl. Girl is not really that into Boy. Totally failing to take the hint, Boy pursues Girl anyway. The storyline is common, and not just in Hollywood romance films. A new study found that men tend to overestimate how attractive they are to women, while women most often underestimate how much men want them. While the outcome of these scenarios can go either way, researchers suspect that there may be deeply rooted reasons why signals get crossed when men and women check each other out.
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What Are Emotion Expressions For?
That cartoon scary face – wide eyes, ready to run – may have helped our primate ancestors survive in a dangerous wild, according to the authors of an article published in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The authors present a way that fear and other facial expressions might have evolved and then come to signal a person’s feelings to the people around him. The basic idea, according to Azim F. Shariff of the University of Oregon, is that the specific facial expressions associated with each particular emotion evolved for some reason. Shariff cowrote the paper with Jessica L. Tracy of the University of British Columbia.
