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In the Brain, Broken Hearts Hurt Like Broken Bones
TIME: Sticks and stones may break your bones, but names can hurt just as much. Indeed, according to converging evidence reported in a new review in Current Directions in Psychological Science, physical and social pain are processed in some of the same regions of the brain. Naomi Eisenberger, co-director of the Social Cognitive Neuroscience Lab at UCLA, published the first brain-imaging paper revealing the overlap in 2003. She had been studying participants’ reactions to being rejected by other players (actually just a computer opponent) in a video game.
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Think Fast! Take Risks! New Study Finds a Link Between Fast Thinking and Risk Taking
New experiments show that the experience of thinking fast makes people more likely to take risks. This discovery suggests that some of the innovations of the modern world—fast-paced movies, social media sites with a constant
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Q & A With Eli Finkel – The Science Behind Online Dating (Part 1)
Eli Finkel, a social psychologist at Northwestern University, is one of five authors on a new study published in the February issue of Psychological Science in the Public Interest. The study, 'Online Dating: A Critical Analysis from the Perspective of Psychological Science' is co-authored by Paul Eastwick of Texas A & M University, Benjamin Karney of UCLA, Harry Reis of the University of Rochester and Susan Sprecher of Illinois State University. We invited our Facebook and Twitter followers to submit their questions on love, relationships and online dating to Finkel. Here is the first part of his response. Stay tuned for Part 2 later this week!
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Negative Nancy? Your Facebook friends might hate you for it: Study
Toronto Sun: Stop complaining on Facebook. Your "friends" are starting to hate you for it, a study from Ontario's University of Waterloo suggests. "People with low self-esteem seem to behave counterproductively, bombarding their friends with negative tidbits about their lives and making themselves less likeable," according to a new study to be published in the journal Psychological Science. Co-writers Amanda Forest and Joanne Wood took the last 10 status updates of students and had people rate how positive or negative they are. Participants then rated how much they liked the person who wrote them.
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Traumatic experience, silence linked
Yahoo! India: People who suffer a traumatic experience often don't talk about it, and many forget it over time. "There's this idea, with silence, that if we don't talk about something, it starts fading," says Charles B. Stone of Belgium's Universite Catholique de Louvain, the co-author of a study on the subject. But that belief isn't necessarily backed up by psychological research-a lot of it comes from a Freudian belief that everyone has deep-seated issues we're repressing and ought to talk about, the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science reports. The real relationship between silence and memory is much more complicated, Stone says, according to a university statement.
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How Do Romney’s and Gingrich’s Looks Affect Their Chances?
Forbes: How do Mitt Romney’s and Newt Gingrich’s looks affect their chances of being elected president? How do all politicians’ looks affect their careers? Researchers have been doing some illuminating work on that question. A good article at at Slate.com sums up some of the best of the research. In 2005 a Princeton psychologist named Alexander Todorov found that, contrary to earlier assumptions, "beauty didn’t tell the whole story. Rather, voters appeared primarily drawn to faces that suggested competence—so much so that the effect could actually be seen in election results. In the lab, subjects glanced for a single second at the faces of congressional candidates. . . .
