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The Power of Names
The New Yorker: The German poet Christian Morgenstern once said that “all seagulls look as though their name were Emma.” Though Morgenstern was known for his nonsense poetry, there was truth in his suggestion that some linguistic labels are perfectly suited to the concepts they denote. “Dawdle” and “meander” sound as unhurried as the walking speeds they describe, and “awkward” and “gawky” sound as ungainly as the bodies they represent. When the Gestalt psychologist and fellow German Wolfgang Köhler read Morgenstern’s poem, in the nineteen-twenties, he was moved to suggest that words convey symbolic ideas beyond their meaning.
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Wrinkles Make Faces Appear More Sad, Angry
LiveScience: Creases and furrows on someone's face may put a wrinkle in our ability to properly judge his or her emotions, a new study suggests. In the study, participants viewed photographs of 64 faces, and were asked to rate the faces based on the level of emotion they showed. People in the study rated the faces of older adults as much more sad and angry than faces of younger adults, despite the fact that all the faces had neutral expressions, according to the researchers. Read the whole story: LiveScience
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‘Fat Talk’ Compels but Carries a Cost
The New York Times: Over winter break, Carolyn Bates, a college senior, and a friend each picked out five pairs of jeans at a Gap store in Indianapolis and eagerly tried them on. But the growing silence in their separate fitting rooms was telling. At last, one friend called out, “Dang it, these fit everywhere but my thighs! I wish my legs weren’t so huge.” The response: “My pair is way too long. I need to be taller or skinnier!” ... Renee Engeln, who directs the Body and Media Lab at Northwestern University, cautioned that “we have complicated reactions to confident women in general, and particularly to women who are confident about their bodies.
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No, Having Bigger Biceps Does Not Make You More Conservative
Business Insider: A study by a group of researchers about biceps and politics that has made waves over the past couple of days following its publication in Psychological Science has been widely misinterpreted by several news outlets. The study looked at correlations between a man's socioeconomic status, his upper body strength, and his political views. What it found was this: Specifically, men with greater upper-body strength should more strongly favor redistribution if they are poor but oppose it if they are wealthy.
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Stress Kills The Mind, One Day At A Time
Forbes: Stress is hard on the mind — this much we intuitively know. But what we may not realize is how much our daily reactions to stress take a cumulative toll on our minds. Most psychological research on the effects of stress has focused on relatively short-term outcomes. A new study in the journal Psychological Science took the analysis further by attempting to find out what daily stress reactions do to us 10 years later. Read the whole story: Forbes
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Never Forget a Face? Women May Remember Faces Better Because They Scan More
Women may remember faces better than men in part because they spend more time studying features without even knowing it, suggests a new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. According to the researchers, teaching people to increase feature scanning may be one way to help improve their memory for faces. The findings may help to shed light on long-standing questions about why some people can remember faces easily while others quickly forget the face of someone they’ve just met.
