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Face value: the science of first impressions
The Guardian: To explore all this and more, Hannah Devlin speaks with the California Institute of Technology’s Professor Doris Tsao, whose recent mind-reading study on primates challenged a long-held view of the way the brain processes faces. We also hear from Princeton University professor of psychology, Alex Todorov – author of Face Value: The Irresistible Influence of First Impressions – about the first impressions we all form based on the faces the we see. Read the whole story: The Guardian
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A Beginner’s Guide to Calling BS
New York Magazine: It can be hard to know what to do in the face of this onslaught, when truth seems to have lost all currency, and you can no longer distinguish fact from fiction. It’s easy to slip into confused, exhausted apathy, overwhelmed by the task of sorting it all out. .. Also, look for a corroborating source. Daniel Levitin, a neuroscientist and author of Weaponized Lies: How to Think Critically in the Post-Truth Era, said he read two months ago on Twitter that Trump would be impeached within 24 hours, which seemed plausible, until he noticed he didn’t see the same story in the Washington Post or the BBC or CNN.
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The Science of Microaggressions: It’s Complicated
Scientific American: The story of racial prejudice in the U.S. over the past several decades is a tale of good and bad news. On the mostly positive side, surveys of the American public suggest that overt prejudice—biases to which people are willing to admit—has been on the steady decline (although some data suggest an uptick following the presidential election of Barack Obama). On the negative side, prejudice, even in its ugliest forms, is far from eradicated. In the weeks preceding my writing of this column racial slurs surfaced on the gates of the home of basketball superstar LeBron James, and nooses were found hanging at museums in our nation’s capital.
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Looking Leadership in the Face
An emerging body of research on face perception suggests that getting to the top of the corporate ladder may depend, at least in part, on the structure of a person’s face.
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AI May Hold the Key to Stopping Suicide
NBC: Every day in the United States about 120 people commit suicide. At nearly 45,000 suicides annually, it's the 10th-leading cause of death in the U.S. and its rate is increasing year by year, national data shows. Healthcare providers have ways to prevent a suicide attempt, but often they don’t know in advance who needs the intervention most. “We’ve been doing this for 50 years, and our ability is still at chance level,” says Jessica Ribeiro, a psychologist and researcher at Florida State University. ... So far the results are promising.
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Can you write your way to happiness?
The Guardian: The premise that keeping a journal is good for you often comes back to the seminal work of American social psychologist James Pennebaker, based at the University of Texas at Austin. In the 1980s, Pennebaker revealed that, compared with writing about a trivial topic, writing about important emotional events for a set period was linked to study participants being emotionally churned up in the short term but making fewer visits to health professionals in the six months that followed. The practice has since been linked by researchers around the world to myriad health benefits, from improving mental health to helping wounds heal faster. ...
