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In Reading Facial Emotion, Context Is Everything
In a close-up headshot, Serena Williams’ eyes are pressed tensely closed; her mouth is wide open, teeth bared. Her face looks enraged. Now zoom out: The tennis star is on the court, racket in hand, fist clenched in victory. She’s not angry. She’s ecstatic, having just beaten her sister Venus at the 2008 U.S. Open. “Humans are exquisitely sensitive to context, and that can very dramatically shape what is seen in a face,” says psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett of Northeastern University and Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard School of Medicine.
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Do Baboons Monkey With Metaphors?
The Wall Street Journal: Monkeys can reason by using analogy, it seems. In an experiment recently reported in the journal Psychological Science, baboons in a lab proved capable of realizing that a pair of oval shapes is "like" a pair of square shapes and "unlike" a pair made of two different shapes. This finding suggests that you can have analogy without language.
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‘Self-compassion’ can help divorced people heal
USA Today: Self-compassion can help the newly divorced get through one of the most difficult periods of their lives, researchers suggest. They explained that self-compassion -- a combination of kindness toward oneself, recognition of common humanity, and the ability to let painful emotions pass -- "can promote resilience and positive outcomes in the face of divorce." University of Arizona researchers studied 38 men and 67 women with an average age of 40 who had been married for more than 13 years and were divorced an average of three to four months. Those who had higher levels of kindness to themselves were able to recover faster from the emotional effects of divorce.
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Being Easily Embarrassed Could Make You More Trustworthy
The Huffington Post: Easily embarrassed? That could make you more trustworthy, a new study suggests. People who are easily embarrassed -- not to be confused with people with social anxiety or constant feelings of shame -- were shown in several experiments to be more generous, trustworthy and desirable in social situations, according to a study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. "Moderate levels of embarrassment are signs of virtue," study researcher Matthew Feinberg, a doctoral student in psychology at University of California, Berkeley, said in a statement.
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Learning from your mistakes is all in the mind
The Telegraph: How people react to their mistakes depends on their mindset, and whether people believe it is not worth trying harder if they fail a test, psychologists said. The study, to be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds that people who think they can learn from their mistakes have a different brain reaction to mistakes than people who think intelligence is fixed. "One big difference between people who think intelligence is malleable and those who think intelligence is fixed is how they respond to mistakes," says Jason S. Moser, of Michigan State University in the US.
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When the future looks cold and scary, you can always wrap yourself in the Canadian flag
The Globe & Mail: This week Conservative MP John Carmichael and Heritage Minister James Moore stood in the lobby of the House of Commons flanked by Canadian flags, in the manner of car salesmen surrounded by banners saying, “Your buck goes farther here” and “Check under the hood and see!” They were publicizing Mr. Carmichael’s private member’s bill, an Act Respecting the National Flag of Canada, which would defend the country from the sadly underreported scourge of flag-hating. If Bill C-288 makes it into law, all Canadians will have the right to fly our national flag – and woe betide those who try to prevent them.
