-
Why Faces Don’t Always Tell the Truth About Feelings
Human faces pop up on a screen, hundreds of them, one after another. Some have their eyes stretched wide, others show lips clenched. Some have eyes squeezed shut, cheeks lifted and mouths agape. For each one, you must answer this simple question: is this the face of someone having an orgasm or experiencing sudden pain? ... “The assumption for a long time was that facial expressions were obligatory movements,” says Lisa Feldman Barrett, a psychologist at Northeastern University in Boston who studies emotion. In other words, our faces are powerless to hide our emotions.
-
The Influence You Have: Why We’re Blind To Our Power Over Others
Think about the last time you asked someone for something. Maybe you were nervous or worried about what the person would think of you. Chances are that you didn't stop to think about the pressure you exerted on that person. Psychologists say we are often consumed with our own perspective, and fail to see the signs that others are uncomfortable, anxious or afraid. Vanessa Bohns, a professor of organizational behavior at Cornell University, says researchers refer to this phenomenon as an "egocentric bias." This bias may reveal itself when we put others on the spot, like when we ask a co-worker out on a date or solicit a stranger for money.
-
New Research in Psychological Science
A sample of research on mind-set theory, desire to be moral, subjective well-being around the world and across life span, and gender-equality paradox in STEM, and a replication of social facilitation/inhibition effects with cockroaches.
-
Follow the National Academies’ Ongoing Study of Alzheimer’s Disease
The National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine conducts studies and issues reports on various topics of interest to the science community and broader public. One such study of interest to psychological scientists, titled the “Decadal Survey of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research on Alzheimer’s Disease and Alzheimer’s Disease-Related Dementias” is currently underway
-
Detecting Fake News Takes Time
A few weeks ago, I took part in a free-wheeling annual gathering of social scientists from the academic and tech worlds. The psychologists and political scientists, data analysts and sociologists at Social Science Foo Camp, held in Menlo Park, Calif., were preoccupied with one problem in particular: With an election looming, what can we do about the spread of misinformation and fake news, especially on social media? Fact-checking all the billions of stories on social media is obviously impractical. It may not be effective either.
-
U.Va. Researchers Find Texts Can Be Early Warning For Suicide Prevention
Researchers at the University of Virginia hope to use text messages to help clinicians detect an increased risk of suicide attempts in real-time. With software that gauges a person’s mood according to the frequency of positive or negative words sent in a text — like happy, joyful, hate or mad — lead author Jeff Glenn and others aim to use digital data to move suicide prevention beyond relying on patients to self-report suicidal thoughts that can sometimes be fleeting or concealed. “When the clinician is doing a risk assessment, we’re only getting a really narrow snapshot in time during that face-to-face encounter,” Glenn said in a news release Monday.
