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About-Face: Rethinking Emotions
wbur: Nearly a half-century ago, a psychologist named Paul Ekman set out to see if human beings, from Papua New Guinea to Pittsburgh, showed emotions in the same way. He went around the world, showing photographs of faces and asked people to identify the emotions shown: fear, sadness, anger, disgust, surprise. What he found, in short, was that emotions are universal. It became one of the most recognized psychological works in the world. The findings are in the first chapter in most psychology textbooks. They’re the basis for the multimillion-dollar industry built on studying facial expressions, taught to FBI agents, marketing executives, cops and spies. And they might be all wrong.
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When Good Pictures Happen to Bad People: Why We Hate That We Like The Rolling Stone Cover
TIME: His dark eyes stare straight at the lens, his hair tousled so it falls just-so to one side, just as any teen idol or rock star would want to debut on a national magazine cover. He’s called a “monster,” but the Rolling Stone cover image of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev shows anything but such a beast. And that’s why people are so uncomfortable with it. … While seeing an attractive picture of a villainous person isn’t likely to change our opinion of that individual’s egregious acts, as the uproar over the image indicates, it could lead us to feel some emotions that we may not think are appropriate.
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Why College Students Make Better Decisions Than Intelligence Agents
Yahoo: Who would you trust with the lives of hundreds of people: federal intelligence agents or a bunch of college students? At Cornell University, psychologist Valerie Reyna wanted to test whether intelligence agents were susceptible to a type of decision-making bias people accrue as they get older. It's called fuzzy thinking. As our life experience grows more robust, we tend to make decisions off of gists, rather than analytical lines of thought. Read the whole story: Yahoo
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Booze, Binging and the Devil You Don’t Know
Imagine this scenario. You are meeting your boyfriend at a restaurant, intending to break up with him. You know this conversation is going to be tough, but you really don’t know what his reaction will be. He could end up sobbing, or shouting, or he could just sit there in uncomfortable silence. You arrive early and order a whiskey—a double—to steady your nerves. Will the whiskey have its desired effect? Drinkers clearly expect that alcohol will dampen the effects of stress—they often drink for precisely that reason—but in fact this dynamic is poorly understood.
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To Savor the Flavor, Perform a Short Ritual First
Birthday celebrations often follow a formula, including off-key singing, making a birthday wish while blowing out candles, and the ceremonial cutting of the birthday cake. New research suggests that this ritual not only makes the
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Go-carting babies reveal origin of fear of heights
New Scientist: STEPPING out onto the glass platform of the Willis Tower, 412 metres above the streets of Chicago is enough to make most people dizzy. Not so babies, who are born with no fear of heights. Now it seems that this wariness develops as a result of crawling. You might think fear of heights would be innate, since falling from high up can result in injury or death. But babies with little experience of crawling are not afraid of heights.
