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Study: Mental conditioning with cute animal pictures can rekindle your relationship
James K. McNulty of Florida State University and his team of psychological scientists were not expecting this. They’d wondered if they could use conditioning to warm the hearts of married couples gone a little cold from numbing day to day life by building associations between spouses’ faces and pictures of adorable puppies and bunnies. “I was actually a little surprised that it worked,” McNulty tells APS, a publication of the Association of Psychological Science.
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Why our facial expressions don’t reflect our feelings
While conducting research on emotions and facial expressions in Papua New Guinea in 2015, psychologist Carlos Crivelli discovered something startling. He showed Trobriand Islanders photographs of the standard Western face of fear – wide-eyed, mouth agape – and asked them to identify what they saw. The Trobrianders didn’t see a frightened face. Instead, they saw an indication of threat and aggression. In other words, what we think of as a universal expression of fear isn’t universal at all. But if Trobrianders have a different interpretation of facial expressions, what does that mean? One emerging – and increasingly supported – theory is that facial expressions don’t reflect our feelings.
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From ‘Dr. Evil’ to hero maker: Philip Zimbardo
After decades of notoriety for demonstrating one of social psychology’s fundamental tenets — how morally pliable most people are — Philip Zimbardo is understandably tired of being associated with the darker sides of human behavior. “I really don’t want to be permanently labeled ‘Dr. Evil,’” Zimbardo said. Yet the 85-year-old San Francisco psychologist, who taught at Stanford for 50 years and remains a go-to authority on topics such as shyness and the paradox of time as well as social coercion, knows that history has a way of flattening careers into one landmark accomplishment. For Zimbardo, that would be the 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment.
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Republicans Vote for Candidates Who Look Republican
As they choose candidates for the upcoming election, Democrats are looking for many qualities, including competence, character, and charisma. But new research suggests if they're looking for crossover votes, they might also want to consider another, less-obvious trait: whether the nominees look like Republicans. "Having a deceptively Republican-looking face may help Democrats 'steal' Republican votes, without compromising their support among left-leaning voters," writes a research team led by Christopher Olivola of Carnegie Mellon University.
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A Berkeley professor explains why society needs more troublemakers
It’s sweet to be agreeable—but what a vibrant, healthy society really needs is principled troublemakers. Those who dare to say “no” when it appears that everyone else is in agreement are rare and brave—and they make the world a better place, according to University of California, Berkeley psychology professor Charlan Nemeth. Her new book, In Defense of Troublemakers: The Power of Dissent in Life and Business,shows how everyone benefits when someone presents a thoughtful contrarian view. Nemeth’s research in social psychology and cognition has shown that disagreement improves group thinking. “It’s a benefit regardless of whether or not [dissenters] hold the truth,” she argues.
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How Income Affects the Brain
We often attribute financial problems to bad life decisions: Why didn’t that person stay in college? Why didn’t they pick a more lucrative career? Why did they have so many kids? But several recent studies suggest that having less money can actually affect thinking and memory for the worse. In the most recent of these papers, scientists found a link between being lower on the socioeconomic ladder and changes in the brain. For this study, published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers at the Center for Vital Longevity at the University of Texas at Dallas scanned the brains of 304 people aged 20 to 89.
