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What Are Emotion Expressions For?
That cartoon scary face – wide eyes, ready to run – may have helped our primate ancestors survive in a dangerous wild, according to the authors of an article published in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The authors present a way that fear and other facial expressions might have evolved and then come to signal a person’s feelings to the people around him. The basic idea, according to Azim F. Shariff of the University of Oregon, is that the specific facial expressions associated with each particular emotion evolved for some reason. Shariff cowrote the paper with Jessica L. Tracy of the University of British Columbia.
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Women Perform Better At Spacial Tasks When More Confident, Study Shows
Huffington Post: Two new studies out last week show that the brain is mightier than the baggage -- especially when it comes to those stereotypes we women carry around in our backpacks. Parallel parking: Good at it? And speaking of driving: Get lost much? Stereotypes tell us that if you're a woman, your answer to the first question is probably a "nope." And to the second, often a "yes." But guess what? A new study published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior tells us that it's often garden-variety confidence at play when it comes to spatial tasks like parking the car or reading a road map -- rather than gender-related abilities (or lack of same.) Read the whole story: Huffington Post
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Grumpy old gorilla apes aging human males
The Globe and Mail: “For the past 100 years or so, psychologists have supported the notion that all humans have the same set of basic biological emotions,” says Psych Central News. “But a new paper in Current Directions in Psychological Science challenges this belief and holds that some of our established security procedures may be misguided. In her article, clinical psychologist Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett of Northeastern University said a current method to train security workers to recognize ‘basic’ emotions from expressions might be ill-advised, potentially placing individuals at risk.
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Seksuele hints vaak overschat
MSN Nederland: Seksueel getinte hints worden vaak verkeerd geïnterpreteerd, blijkt uit Amerikaans onderzoek. Er zijn twee manieren waarop je als man een fout kunt maken: of je denkt 'Wow die vrouw ziet mij wel zitten', en dat blijkt niet zo te zijn. Of de dame in kwestie is werkelijk geïnteresseerd, maar dat ontgaat de man compleet. Beide gevallen komen vaak voor, beweren onderzoekers van de Universiteit van Texas in Austin. Voor hun onderzoek werden 96 mannen en 103 vrouwen, drie minuten lang in een speeddate sessie tegenover vijf potentiële kandidaten van het andere geslacht gezet.
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Liar, liar, pants on fire? Your baby will be the judge
msnbc: Babies may be a lot more savvy than we think. A new study has found that babies little more than a year old can tell whether we’re trustworthy enough to listen to, according to a report published in Infant Behavior and Development. “Even at a young age, children do not blindly swallow information,” said the study’s lead author Diane Poulin-Dubois, a professor of psychology at the Centre for Research in Human Development at the University of Concordia. “Doubtful or contradictory information is automatically screened by their cognitive system.
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In the Game of Love, Self-Deception May Be Key
LiveScience: Hot guys tend to underestimate women's interest in them, while other men, particularly those looking for a one-night stand, are more likely to think a woman is much more into them than she actually is, a new study says. Women, however, showed the opposite bias — they routinely underestimated men's interest in them. This sort of self-deception may help both men and women play the mating game successfully, suggest the researchers, a team of psychologists from the University of Texas, Austin. The findings also fits with past research showing that guys are clueless on the subtleties of nonverbal cues from women, taking a subtle smile as a sexual come-on, for instance.
