-
Nodding Off First May Leave Your Partner Wanting
MSNBC: WASHINGTON — Falling asleep first after having sex may leave your partner longing for attention and more bonding time, new research finds. "The time the couple spends together after sex is prime time for bonding and the commitment conversation," said Daniel Kruger of the University of Michigan School of Public Health. " Your oxytocin and the hormones related to affective relationships are raging, so it's prime time for bonding." This after-sex bonding period could be evolutionarily derived, since in the case of a pregnancy, the female would desire a commitment from her sexual partner. Spending this time bonding could be an important way to secure that commitment.
-
Reason Seen More as Weapon Than Path to Truth
The New York Times: For centuries thinkers have assumed that the uniquely human capacity for reasoning has existed to let people reach beyond mere perception and reflex in the search for truth. Rationality allowed a solitary thinker to blaze a path to philosophical, moral and scientific enlightenment. Now some researchers are suggesting that reason evolved for a completely different purpose: to win arguments. Rationality, by this yardstick (and irrationality too, but we’ll get to that) is nothing more or less than a servant of the hard-wired compulsion to triumph in the debating arena.
-
Ambition + Desire = Trouble
The New York Times: “I DON’T know what I was thinking.” So said Anthony D. Weiner in a news conference moments after finally admitting that he had sent naughty photos of himself to women he had met on the Internet. The married former congressman, who resigned on Thursday, 10 days after that confessional press conference, might not know what he had been thinking — but scientists have an idea or two. Read more: The New York Times
-
Income Inequality Costing Americans Their Happiness
LiveScience: Americans are happier in times when the gap between rich and poor is smaller, a new study finds. The reason, according to research to be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Psychological Science, is that when the income gap is large, lower- and middle-income people feel less trusting of others and expect people to treat them less fairly. The study also provides a potential explanation for why American happiness hasn't risen along with national wealth in the last 50 years. Read more: LiveScience
-
When Power Levels Are Equal Women Are Just As Unfaithful As Men, Says New Study
The Huffington Post: Women cheat just as much as men -- at least if they are playing on the same power level. A new study in that will appear in Psychological Science found that infidelity is associated with power, rather than with gender. Researchers in the Netherlands surveyed 1,561 men and women from a range of different professions and compared the sexual infidelities of those who identified themselves as having similar jobs and similar amounts of power.
-
New Research From Psychological Science
Telling Things Apart: The Distance Between Response Keys Influences Categorization Times Daniël Lakens, Iris K. Schneider, Nils B. Jostmann, and Thomas W. Schubert Making gestures can help people organize their thoughts. To test whether space (e.g., the distance between two response keys) would affect how people categorized stimuli, researchers asked volunteers to perform a task in which they pressed one of two response keys to indicate the color of a word. If the keys were far apart, they responded faster on the incongruent trials in which the word did not match the color (e.g., the word “blue” printed in red ink).
