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Future Seems Closer than the Past
Inside Science: Sometimes the day seems to drag on and time can’t move fast enough. Other days, time seems to fly by and time gets away from us. In general, people experience time as moving toward the future and away from the past. In a new study, social psychologists found that people see the distance of past or future events very differently and that difference, speculates one of the authors, could affect their overall happiness. “So, a week from now people reported that they felt psychologically closer than a week ago even though it was the same objective amount of time in either direction,” said Eugene Caruso, social psychologist at the University of Chicago.
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You Lookin’ At Me?
Newsweek: Be careful using eye contact: It can backfire. Sure, you've always heard that steadily meeting the gaze of the person across the table shows that you're confident and trustworthy, and that you might even know what you're talking about. But a newly released study suggests that locking eyes with your opponent isn't always a good way to win an argument. On the contrary, it can convince the other person that you're merely being obstinate. And what do you do then? Eyeball-to-eyeball communication between humans appears to be more complicated than previously thought.
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NIH Funding Opportunity: Modeling Social Behavior
See full announcement for deadlines. The National Institutes of Health have announced a research project grant on Modeling Social Behavior, issued by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) and the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH): This Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) encourages applications for developing and testing innovative theories and computational, mathematical, or engineering approaches to deepen our understanding of complex social behavior. This research will examine phenomena at multiple scales to address the emergence of collective behaviors that arise from individual elements or parts of a system working together.
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Talking Directly to Toddlers Strengthens Their Language Skills
Just as young children need nourishing food to build physical strength, they also need linguistic nutrition for optimal development of language and cognitive abilities. New research from psychology researchers at Stanford University shows that by talking more to their toddler, parents help the child learn to process language more quickly, which accelerates vocabulary growth. The research is published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. It is well-known that socioeconomic status (SES) plays a role in language development.
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It’s Good to Be Kaiser
Pacific Standard: As the political philosopher Mel Brooks once noted, it’s good to be king. But according to a new study, it’s also good to simply have the name King. At least, that’s true in Germany. Researchers report Germans with “noble-sounding surnames” such as Kaiser (emperor), Fürst (prince) or König (king) were more likely to hold managerial positions than countrymen with names denoting more common occupations. Apparently, having a name that denotes authority is a good way to get promoted.
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Eye Contact Makes You Less Persuasive, Say Researchers
Slate: I’ve often wondered why eye contact—which is supposed to make you feel good, because your conversational partner is paying attention to you and not her phone!—can actually feel like an attempt to vacuum out your soul through your eyeballs. Unless the circumstances are exactly right, the midair meeting of two gazes can be awkward and unsettling. Better to examine a shoe. Better to only speak from within a cave, engulfed in fumes, like the oracle at Delphi. We’re told that eye contact is a powerful thing. Hypnotists (and vampires) use it to get inside your head; public speakers use it to create an emotional connection.
