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Reading Pain in a Human Face
The New York Times: How well can computers interact with humans? Certainly computers play a mean game of chess, which requires strategy and logic, and “Jeopardy!,” in which they must process language to understand the clues read by Alex Trebek (and buzz in with the correct question). But in recent years, scientists have striven for an even more complex goal: programming computers to read human facial expressions. ...
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Why Many Workers are Playing It Safe — Unhappily
The US economic recovery remains on a slow trajectory, as evidenced by the latest Commerce Department report. Due in part to a brutal winter throughout the country, growth in the first quarter of this year practically stopped. And while employers are hiring aggressively after the winter cold snap, the Labor Department says job growth still lags behind the millions of people just now entering the workforce or looking to get off unemployment rolls. The shaky economy and rocky job market have left many people underemployed—working in part-time jobs or occupations that are simply far below their capabilities and credentials.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: Don't Do It Again: Directed Forgetting of Habits Gesine Dreisbach and Karl-Heinz T. Bäuml Can directed forgetting be used to eliminate habits? Participants completed a directed-forgetting task where they associated words with either a left or a right button press. Participants were told to remember or to forget the original associations before being reshown the words. In the new presentation, half of the word/button-press associations were compatible with those in the original presentation and half were not.
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How to Tell When Someone Is Lying
The New Yorker: On January 27, 2008, Penny Boudreau’s twelve-year-old daughter, Karissa, went missing in her hometown of Bridgewater, Canada. That afternoon, mother and daughter had had a fight in a grocery-store parking lot. They’d been having a “heart-to-heart” about “typical teen-age things,” Boudreau said. At 7:30 P.M., Boudreau, worried, called a few friends and teachers—none had heard a thing—and notified the police. By the following day, Karissa was still unaccounted for and the Bridgewater police began notifying other precincts. They issued a media alert and began a full search effort. On January 29th, the police station held a press conference.
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This is why your brain wants to swear
The Guardian: Most of the time, words behave themselves. They're just a useful arrangement of sounds in our mouths, or letters on a page. They have no intrinsic power to offend. If I told you that skloop was a vile swearword in some foreign language, with the power to empty rooms and force ministerial resignations, you might laugh. How could an arbitrary combination of sounds have such force? But then think of the worst swearwords in your own language and you quickly understand that something else is at play here. Our reaction to them is instant and emotional.
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A face doesn’t speak for itself
Aljazeera: It is common sense — espoused by “Sesame Street” and psychology textbooks alike — that humans have distinct emotions, each with characteristic expressions. When you’re angry, you furrow your brow and yell. When you’re sad, you frown and cry. Charles Darwin hypothesized that human emotions have evolved just as physical features have, and the psychologist Paul Ekman, known for his work on microexpressions, has traveled the world showing that people everywhere recognize the same facial movements as expressing the same emotions — anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness and surprise. A few psychologists, including Lisa Barrett of Northeastern University, are upending this view.
