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The Two Faces of Attractiveness
The Huffington Post: Imagine that you're an early human, trying to make your way in a perilous world. One very useful talent would be reading and reacting to the faces of other early humans -- rapidly categorizing them into good and safe, on the one hand, or bad and threatening on the other. This skill would come in handy for everything from selecting mates to identifying friends and enemies. ... This automatic judgment -- beauty equals average -- is also a powerful cognitive bias, at least as predictable is the cognitive fluency rule. Indeed, according to psychological scientist Jamin Halberstadt, there is not a single study that has failed to show this effect.
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What’s Tylenol Doing to Our Minds?
The Atlantic: The active drug in Tylenol, acetaminophen, is one of the best medications we have for helping people in pain. It's also one the most commonly overdosed substances in the world and puts about 60,000 Americans in the hospital every year. Several hundred people in the U.S. will die in 2013 from liver failure after acetaminophen overdose. Tylenol isn't addictive like narcotics, and the kids don't take it to get high, which lends it an air of benignity and social acceptance not otherwise afforded to many pain medications. When people overdose on pills like Vicodin or Percocet, though, which contain acetaminophen, it's that component that often does the most damage. ...
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Infants’ Sweat Response Predicts Aggressive Behavior as Toddlers
Infants who sweat less in response to scary situations at age 1 show more physical and verbal aggression at age 3, according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. Lower levels of sweat, as measured by skin conductance activity (SCA), have been linked with conduct disorder and aggressive behavior in children and adolescents. Researchers hypothesize that aggressive children may not experience as strong of an emotional response to fearful situations as their less aggressive peers do; because they have a weaker fear response, they are more likely to engage in antisocial behavior.
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Fool yourself out of your fear of public speaking
NBC: You're on a stage, lights hot and glaring, watching the large audience you’ll soon be addressing file in. How is your body reacting? You’re most likely jittery, your heart pounding through your rib cage and your breath quickening. Your legs may very well be able to run a marathon at this moment. And—oh great—your mouth just became super dry. These reactions are not exactly conducive to standing in place and addressing a crowd, right? You’re not alone. Fear of public speaking, or glossophobia, is estimated to affect 75 percent of adults. But such reactions, as it turns out, are the body’s natural way of helping us cope with stressful situations.
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What David Lynch And Tylenol Can Tell You About The Brain
NPR: Even for a hardcore David Lynch fan, the idea that a film of his would be used to weird people out in a psychology experiment is a tad weird. But it gets much stranger than that — fast. Imagine the experiment involved testing whether Tylenol could help people overcome the angst triggered by a four-minute dose of Lynch. A related experiment tested Tylenol's effect on people asked to write about what happens to their bodies after they die. At the University of British Columbia, psychologists went both places. Their findings: Tylenol may relieve more than physical pain; it may just dull existential aches, too. The results were by the journal Psychological Science.
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You’re Lying to Yourself About How Good Your Future Will Be
Smithsonian Magazine: In the long run, we all can look forward to pretty bleak futures. Whether the final ‘game over’ arrives in the form of a car wreck, a terminal illness, a heart attack or just old age in the end we all meet our end. Yet many of us look forward to happy futures, both on the short and long term. According to new research published in the journal Psychological Science, our ability to remain optimistic despite all the bad things that could and likely will happen to us hinges upon our tendency to assume those calamities will befall others, not ourselves. Read the whole story: Smithsonian Magazine
