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Women Find Sexually Explicit Ads Unappealing — Unless the Price Is Right
Sexual imagery is often used in magazine and TV ads, presumably to help entice buyers to purchase a new product. But new research suggests that women tend to find ads with sexual imagery off-putting, unless the advertised item is priced high enough. The findings, published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, reveal that women’s otherwise negative attitudes about sexual imagery can be softened when the images are paired with a product that connotes high worth.
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Q&A: Christopher Chabris, psychology professor, on everyday illusions
SmartPlanet: When a politician tells a personal story that turns out to be false, does that make him a liar? When an employee exudes confidence, does that make her the smartest person in the room? Depite our intuition about the way our minds work, the answers might turn out to be no, according to Christopher Chabris, a psychology professor at Union College.
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Is Your Teen a Night Owl? That Could Explain His Poor Grades
TIME: Staying up late is almost a rite of passage for teens, but night owl students could be paying the price with lower grades years after high school. There’s plenty of research showing that the sleep-wake cycle of adolescents is about two hours behind that of pre-pubescent children, which means they are more likely to wake up later in the morning and go to bed later at night. And that also means they’re not well-timed with the school clock, either. But newly published research reveals that this mismatch may have lasting implications that dog high schoolers into their college years.
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Our Pupils Adjust as We Imagine Bright and Dark Scenes
Conjuring up a visual image in the mind -- like a sunny day or a night sky -- has a corresponding effect on the size of our pupils, as if we were actually seeing the image, according to new research. These findings, published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, suggest that the size of our pupils is not simply a mechanistic response, but one that also adjusts to a subjective sense of brightness. “Visual imagery is a private and subjective experience which is not accompanied by strongly felt or visible physiological changes,” explains psychological scientist and lead researcher Bruno Laeng of the University of Oslo.
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Why Countries Invest Differently In Environmental Issues
NPR: Across the world, countries make very different investments in the environment. We're not just talking about measures to combat global climate change. We're talking about investments in clean water, forests, biodiversity. NPR's social science correspondent Shankar Vedantam joins us regularly to share interesting new research, and he's here to tell us about an unexpected factor that seems to influence environmental stewardships. Shankar, welcome back. SHANKAR VEDANTAM, BYLINE: Hi, David. GREENE: So, what's the unexpected factor that surprises you, here? VEDANTAM: Well, the X factor appears to be the age of the country, David.
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Apathetic Boredom, Fifth Type Of Boredom, Identified By Researchers
The Huffington Post: Not all boredom is the same, according to a new study. A team of researchers from Canada, the United States and Europe have identified a type of boredom, called apathetic boredom, that involves the unpleasant feelings of learned helplessness and bears similarities to depression. Apathetic boredom is now the fifth type of boredom identified by researchers, who had detailed four other types of boredom in past studies. The types of boredom are differentiated both by a person's level of mental arousal -- ranging from fidgety to calm -- and by the positivity or negativity associated with that boredom.
