-
Online dating secrets, as revealed by math majors
Los Angeles Times: The reasoning: Compared with women looking away from the camera, those who smiled or made what OkCupid analysts called a "flirty-face" tended to get about 1.5 additional new messages a month. But men who tried an aloof, no-eye-contact strategy got a better response to their emails — about 90% success compared with 60% if they made eye contact in their photos. From the blog: "Maybe women want a little mystery. What is he looking at?" Our scientists say: "We and other researchers have documented that men interpret a woman's smile as a signal of sexual interest," Buss says.
-
UBC study finds happy smiling men least sexually attractive to women
The Vancouver Sun: Happy smiling men are consistently rated least attractive by women when compared to proud or brooding men, according to a new study from the University of British Columbia. The finding, published today (Tuesday) in the journal Emotion, goes a long way toward explaining the sexual allure of dark characters such as the brooding Twilight vampire Edward Cullen or the tortured and shamed Jim Stark in James Dean’s Rebel Without a Cause. The finding lends credence to the idea that women "shop" for genes for their offspring from the most successful males they can find. Read more: The Vancouver Sun
-
Researchers ignore evolutionary purpose of memory: Psychologist
Newstrack India: Cognitive psychologist Douglas L. Hintzman has urged memory researchers and theorists to consider the wide variety of things that memory does for us and not to oversimplify them. "Cognitive psychologists are trying to be like physicists and chemists, which means doing controlled laboratory experiments, getting numbers out of them and explaining the numbers," says Hintzman, now retired from the University of Oregon. "Researchers often completely forget that they have memories and they can see how their memories work from the inside," he continues, "-and that this may be very relevant to the theory they are developing." Read more: Newstrack India
-
The Twitter Trap
The New York Times Magazine: Last week my wife and I told our 13-year-old daughter she could join Facebook. Within a few hours she had accumulated 171 friends, and I felt a little as if I had passed my child a pipe of crystal meth. I don’t mean to be a spoilsport, and I don’t think I’m a Luddite. I edit a newspaper that has embraced new media with creative, prizewinning gusto. I get that the Web reaches and engages a vast, global audience, that it invites participation and facilitates — up to a point — newsgathering. But before we succumb to digital idolatry, we should consider that innovation often comes at a price. And sometimes I wonder if the price is a piece of ourselves.
-
New study sheds light on ‘dark side of happiness’
The Boston Globe: The “pursuit of happiness’’ has been something Americans have valued ever since the Founding Fathers inserted it into the Declaration of Independence. Yet some psychologists now question whether happiness is, indeed, a worthwhile goal, since new findings suggest the pursuit could actually make us more unhappy. In a review paper published last week in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science, researchers define what they call the “dark side of happiness’’: feeling happy all the time can destroy relationships and careers, while avidly pursuing happiness is bound to lead to disappointment. Read the whole story: The Boston Globe
-
Your Culture May Influence Your Perception of Death
Contemplating mortality can be terrifying. But not everyone responds to that terror in the same way. Now, a new study which will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds cultural differences in how people respond to mortality. European-Americans get worried and try to protect their sense of self, while Asian-Americans are more likely to reach out to others. Much of the research on what psychologists call “mortality salience” – thinking about death – has been done on people of European descent, and has found that it makes people act in dramatic ways.
