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What really makes people laugh at jokes on April Fool’s Day?
Yahoo! News: There may be no better day all year to express humour than April Fool's Day, but what makes something funny? People of all ages and cultures experience humour every day. It affects how we select our friends and mates. It attracts attention and admiration, softens criticism, alleviates conflict and helps people cope with anxiety and physical pain. Professors Peter McGraw and Caleb Warren presented a study last August in the journal Psychological Science that shows what it takes to make something funny. Humour only occurs when three conditions are satisfied.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Hierarchical Encoding in Visual Working Memory: Ensemble Statistics Bias Memory for Individual Items Timothy F. Brady and George A. Alvarez Current models of visual working memory assume that people encode memories of objects individually. Yet, new research has shown that items surrounding an object can influence a person’s recollection of it. When observers were asked to recall the size of a single circle after viewing an image with multiple circles, they tended to report a larger size if the other circles were large and a smaller size if the surrounding circles were small.
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Scales of Justice: Guilt and Pain
If guilt is tearing you up inside, try inflicting some pain on yourself. It sounds weird, but research suggests it’ll make you feel better. A study published in Psychological Science found that people’s feelings of guilt are reduced after they experience pain. Volunteers were either asked to write about a time they had ostracized someone, to prime their feelings of guilt, or a routine event in their lives. They were then asked to stick their hand in a bucket of water and to keep it there as long as they could; the bucket contained ice water for some and soothing warm water for others. Afterwards, all volunteers rated their experienced pain and feelings of guilt.
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How to spot a fake smile: It’s all in the eyes
MSNBC: We all know that smiling faces sometimes tell lies, even without the Motown song there to remind us. But now there’s proof that those fake smiles may not be worth as much as the genuine article. In a study conducted at Bangor University in Wales, researchers had 36 undergrads play a game in which they won money from four opponents, each of whom would indicate the participants’ wins by displaying either a genuine or a polite smile. In a later phase of the game, participants chose which opponent they wanted to play.
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Women’s depression can erode their intimate relationships
Sify: Israeli researchers have found that a woman's depression can bring her relationship down. A depressed person can be withdrawn, needy, or hostile-and give little back. But there's another way that depression isolates partners from each other. It chips away at the ability to perceive the others' thoughts and feelings. It impairs what psychologists call "empathic accuracy" -and that can exacerbate alienation, depression, and the cycle by which they feed each other. Reuma Gadassi and Nilly Mor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Eshkol Rafaeli at Bar-Ilan University wanted to understand better these dynamics in relationships, particularly the role of gender.
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Watch Your Language! Of Course–But How Do We Actually Do That?
Nothing seems more automatic than speech. We produce an estimated 150 words a minute, and make a mistake only about once every 1,000 words. We stay on track, saying what we intend to, even when other words distract us—from the radio, say, or a road sign we pass while driving. An upcoming study in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, shows for the first time why we so rarely speak those irrelevant words: We have a “verbal self-monitor” between the mental production of speech and the actual uttering of words that catches any irrelevant items coming from outside of the speaker.
