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Control Freaks: You’re Perfect Just The Way You Are
Forbes: Are women too controlling? A Google search returns over 20 million hits on the subject, many from men who feel that the answer is a resounding yes. But men aren’t the only ones pointing fingers. Here at ForbesWoman we’ve published pieces with titles like “Tame Your Inner Control Freak,” and a week doesn’t go by when I get self-help pitches meant to help women “learn to finally let go.” Read the whole story: Forbes
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Facial Attraction
What makes a man or a woman attractive? We all have our individual preferences, but research has found a trend. A study published in Psychological Science found that there’s more to “masculinity” in men and “femininity” in women that makes them attractive to the opposite gender. Researchers created a computer program that analyzed thousands of male and female faces and the ratings they received from various opposite-gender volunteers. They looked at 50 different dimensions of attractiveness and divided them into two categories – “shape” (e.g. plumpness of lips) and “reflectance” (e.g. lightness or darkness of face).
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Obama, lost in thought
The Washington Post: When I covered George W. Bush’s White House, my job was made easier by the simplicity of the subject. The president had a few defining mantras — Cut taxes! Rally the base! Terrorists hate freedom! With us or against us! — and most of his decisions could be understood, even predicted, by applying one of the overarching philosophies. With President Obama, there is no such luxury. The political right is befuddled as it tries to explain him: First, Obama was a tyrant and a socialist; now he’s a weakling who refuses to lead. Read the Whole Story: The Washington Post
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The Yin and Yang of Emotional Intelligence
It’s hard to believe it, but Princess Diana and Charles Manson have something in common: they’re both emotionally intelligent. They are good at identifying and regulating their own and others’ emotions. Although people often associate having emotional intelligence with having a good moral character, a study published in Psychological Science found that emotional intelligence can be used for good or for evil. In the first experiment, volunteers were measured on their moral identity and took part of a game that directly assessed their moral kindness behaviors.
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What makes a face appealing to the opposite sex?
USA Today: While it may be true that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, a new computer model helps reveal what's behind peoples' ideas of facial attractiveness. Many studies have concluded that people are drawn to "average" faces and those who fit the conventional notion of attractiveness for a person's gender — "masculinity" in men and "femininity" in women. But psychologists Christopher P. Said of New York University and Alexander Todorov of Princeton University believe attractiveness is more complex than that, so they created a computer model to identify and measure those complexities. Read the whole story: USA Today
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Want to Ace That Test? Cheer Up!
Studying for a stressful exam can sometimes put us in a bad mood. The last thing we want to do is put on a happy face, but research suggests cheerfulness may help us perform better. A study published in Psychological Science found that being in a positive mood can improve performance on certain cognitive tasks. Volunteers were asked to watch a YouTube video that was found to elicit either a positive, neutral, or negative mood; then they completed learning tasks on a computer. Volunteers who were in a positive mood performed better at tasks that involved selecting rules and testing hypotheses than the volunteers who were put in a neutral or negative mood.
