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If you want to know if he loves you so, it’s in his gaze
Salon: I’m no songwriter, but I think most would agree it’s sexier to say that love is “in his kiss” as opposed to “in his automatic gaze patterns.” But, unfortunately for soul singer Betty Everett and lovers of “The Shoop Shoop Song,” the latter phrasing is actually more accurate when it comes to telling the difference between love and lust. According to the authors of a new study from the University of Chicago, where a person looks first at a romantic interest — the face, the body — provides a clear indication of that person’s immediate romantic judgements.
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The Best Way to Make Up After Any Argument
The Wall Street Journal: You had an argument with someone you love. Now what? There is a definite wrong way to make up and go forward after a fight, therapists and psychologists say: Apologize quickly and move on. Instead, it is crucial when repairing a personal rift to address the underlying issue. Fail to reach a resolution on the argument itself—not just the hurt feelings it caused—and you will end up fighting again in the future about the same thing. Even worse: You'll likely end up arguing about the argument. ... In contrast, women "find it more difficult to isolate themselves from the relational context while having sex," says Gurit E.
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Knowledgeable Consumers Are More Likely to Buy When Given Fewer Options
The degree to which consumers perceive themselves to be knowledgeable about a product influences the likelihood that they will buy a particular product, researchers find in a series of studies published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. “Together, our findings suggest that subjective knowledge may play an important role in determining ideal size for choice sets,” explains researcher Liat Hadar of the Arison School of Business at the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya in Israel.
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The Handiest Tool in the World
Long before we had inches and centimeters, we had hands. The breadth of a man’s hand was the metric of choice at least as far back as ancient Egypt, and the bodily ruler is still used in a few countries, primarily to measure the height of horses. This makes sense. As tools go, this one is, well, handy. You’re not going to misplace it, and it’s familiar enough that everyone knows what hand-sized means, at least roughly. And it’s easier to use than, say, a foot. But that’s not enough to explain why the hand became such an enduring and popular ruler. For the hand to be reliable as a metric, our perception of it must be constant.
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Why Psychotherapy Appears to Work (Even When It Doesn’t)
The Huffington Post: One of the classic papers in the history of psychology is Hans Eysenck’s “The Effects of Psychotherapy: An Evaluation,” published in 1952. The London-based psychologist examined 19 studies of treatment effectiveness, dealing with both psychoanalytic and eclectic types of therapy in more than 7000 cases. His overall conclusion was damning: The studies, he wrote, “fail to prove that psychotherapy, Freudian or otherwise, facilitates the recovery of neurotic patients.
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That’s So Random: Why We Persist in Seeing Streaks
The New York Times: From time to time, athletes get on a streak. Suddenly, the basketball goes through the net every time, or a batter gets a hit in every game. This blissful condition is often known as the hot hand, and players have come to believe it is real — so much so that they have made it a part of their strategy for winning games. “On offense, if someone else has a hot hand, I constantly lay the ball on him,”wrote the N.B.A. legend Walt Frazier in his 1974 memoir, “Rockin’ Steady: A Guide to Basketball & Cool.” In the 1980s, Thomas Gilovich, a psychologist at Cornell University, and his colleagues did a study of the hot hand.
