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Les mathématiques des sites de rencontre
Agence Science-Presse: Incroyable, mais vrai: il se glisserait des erreurs dans les sites web de rencontre. Cinq psychologues américains ont voulu creuser scientifiquement une épineuse question: quelle est l’efficacité d’un site de rencontre? Car ces sites ont beau se compter par milliers, de la grande multinationale jusqu’à la petite entreprise locale, ils n’en sont pas moins sur la même longueur d’onde: tous affirment que leur méthode pour trouver un partenaire est supérieure aux méthodes «traditionnelles» —celles du lointain 20e siècle. Qu’en est-il réellement?
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Can You Learn to Play an Instrument at 40? Q&A with Psychologist Gary Marcus
TIME: Can someone with no musical talent learn to play guitar as an adult? That’s what New York University psychology professor Gary Marcus wanted to find out when he turned 40. Along the way, he discovered that the struggle to learn was as rewarding as playing music itself. In honor of national Wanna Play Music Week, Healthland spoke with Marcus, author of Guitar Zero: The New Musician and the Science of Learning. Why did you start this project? I always wanted to make music but at the same time, thought it was completely out of my reach. I had several very disappointing experiences as a child trying to learn.
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Sexy women’s bodies in ads seen as objects
United Press International: Both men and women see images of sexy women's bodies in advertisements as objects, but they see sexy-looking men as people, Belgian researchers found. "What's unclear is, we don't actually know whether people at a basic level recognize sexualized females or sexualized males as objects," Philippe Bernard of Universite libre de Bruxelles in Belgium said in a statement. Study co-authors Bernard, Sarah Gervais, Jill Allen, Sophie Campomizzi and Olivier Klein said one way psychologists found to test whether something is seen as an object is by turning it upside down.
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Do Talkative Women Leaders Have Less Power Than Talkative Men?
Forbes: Victoria Brescoll, a professor of organizational behavior at the Yale School of Management, probes the impact of stereotypes on people’s status inside organizations. She’s especially interested in the way women and men get treated at work, when they exhibit the same behavior. Back in 2007, Brescoll made headlines for her study, “Can an Angry Woman Get Ahead? Gender, Status Conferral, and Workplace Emotion Expression,” published in the journal Psychological Science. She found that while men score points when they express anger in a professional context, angry women invite the opposite response. They’re seen as out of control and they lose stature.
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Parents Are Happier Than Non-Parents
LiveScience: Parents may not be the overtired, overworked and all-around miserable individuals they are sometimes made out to be, suggests new research finding Mom and Dad (particularly fathers) experience greater levels of happiness and meaning from life than non-parents. "This series of studies suggest that parents are not nearly the 'miserable creatures' we might expect from recent studies and popular representations," study researcher Elizabeth Dunn, of the University of British Columbia, in Canada, said in a statement.
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Replication studies: Bad copy
Nature: For many psychologists, the clearest sign that their field was in trouble came, ironically, from a study about premonition. Daryl Bem, a social psychologist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, showed student volunteers 48 words and then abruptly asked them to write down as many as they could remember. Next came a practice session: students were given a random subset of the test words and were asked to type them out. Bem found that some students were more likely to remember words in the test if they had later practised them. Effect preceded cause.
