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The Fake Laugh
The New York Times: Eavesdrop on any conversation or pay close attention to your own and you’ll hear laughter. From explosive bursts to muffled snorts, some form of laughter punctuates almost all verbal communication. Electronic communication, too, LOL. You’ll probably also notice that, more often than not, the laughter is in response to something that wasn’t very funny — or wasn’t funny at all. Observational studies suggest this is the case 80 percent to 90 percent of the time. Take Hillary Clinton’s strategic laughter during heated exchanges with Donald J. Trump during the presidential debates.
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Is There an Ideal Time of Day for Decision-Making?
New research uses a massive database of thousands of online chess games to examine how time of day influences decision-making abilities.
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When Saying Something Nice Is the Only Way to Change Someone’s Mind
Harvard Business Review: Dan Kahan, who runs the Cultural Cognition Project at Yale, also studies this phenomenon and suggests that the only way forward is a kind of “disentanglement.” Cultural Cognition is a way of mapping humans on a big grid of beliefs and worldviews. When some outsider point of view challenges your worldview, you reject it immediately. It is only when you can disentangle the evidence from the identity you may make headway. Read the whole story: Harvard Business Review
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Effect of Facial Expression on Emotional State Not Replicated in Multilab Study
A coordinated replication effort conducted across 17 labs found no evidence that surreptitiously inducing people to smile or frown affects their emotional state. The findings of the replication project are published as part of a
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Men with Happier Childhoods Have Stronger Relationships in Old Age
Scientific American: Between 1938 and 1942, while the U.S. was preoccupied with the end of the Great Depression and its entry into World War II, researchers in Boston were busy embarking on a study of adolescent boys and their family relationships. Some 60 years later, different researchers followed up with the participants and found that those raised in warmer family environments were more securely attached to their partners in the later years of life—a testament to the enduring influence of early childhood experiences.
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Do We Need Scientific Idioms For Everyday Experience?
NPR: With the advent of Fall, my 2-year-old has been eager to comment on the fading light as we drive home on weeknights. "It getting dark?" she asks. And I answer: "Yes, the sun is going down." Only it isn't. Not really. The earth is rotating on its axis, our perch on its surface moving away from the sun. Talk of the sun going down may be harmless: an intuitive way to describe an experience in a pretty complex world. Yet research suggests that it will be years before my toddler approaches an accurate understanding of the day/night cycle. And research also suggests that the way we talk about our experiences matters. Read the whole story: NPR
