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Social Pain Hurts Too
Most doctors don’t recommend Tylenol for a broken heart or a supportive friend for a headache. But an article published by Janet Taylor Spence Award recipient Naomi I. Eisenberger in the February 2012 edition of Current Directions in Psychological Science shows there is a growing body of evidence that social pain shares some of the neural circuitry that underlies physical pain. Eisenberg explains that physical pain has two components — sensory and affective — each of which is associated with different parts of the brain.
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Romantic Jealousy and Self-Esteem
In case you missed it, the cameras were rolling at the 23rd APS Annual Convention in Washington, DC. Watch Jessica L. Bowler from Pitzer College present her poster session research on “Self-Esteem and Components of Romantic Jealousy.” Bowler distributed a survey that described four scenarios designed to induce romantic jealousy. Then she analyzed participants’ responses in relation to self-esteem. She found that participants with high self-esteem were less likely to be jealous after reading the scenarios. Participants with low self-esteem were likely to become more insecure, more anxious, more distressed, and less trusting in response to hypothetical infidelity situations.
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Kids Show How Society Thinks
Psychological scientist Margaret Beale Spencer says that children can teach us a lot about the society in which they’re raised. “Our children are always near us because we are a society, and what we put out there, kids report back. You ask the question, they’ll give you the answer.” In 2010, CNN commissioned Spence to lead a pilot study examining children’s attitudes toward race. The test she designed involved 133 black and white children from different economic and regional backgrounds in the United States. The young students in Spencer’s study saw drawings of five children whose skin color ranged from dark to light.
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Do The Funky…Pigeon
You could read Emma Ware’s PhD thesis to find out how social dynamics influence the behavior of pigeons…or, you could watch her dance. Ware was the Social Science winner of the 2011 Dance Your PhD Contest, sponsored by Science and TEDxBrussels. Her dance shows that when confronted when an unresponsive female pigeon on a prerecorded video, the courtship behavior of male pigeons decreased. Courtship behavior also decreased in response to a nine-second delay in the female’s response. In contrast, the male’s courtship behavior didn’t decrease in response to one-second delays, three-second delays, or spatial manipulations.
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Writing Tip: Better “You” Than “I”
You are a sick man…you are a spiteful man. That’s not the first line of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Notes From Underground; Dostoyevsky used the first person: “I am a sick man…I am a spiteful man.” Do readers respond differently to stories depending upon whether they are narrated from the perspective of ‘‘you’’ or ‘‘I’’? Recent research published in the Journal of Cognitive Psychology offers some tips for writers who want to impact their readers. Tad T. Brunye and coauthors chose eight passages from two novels and created a first- and second-person version of each passage. The researchers asked undergraduate students to read one set of four passages written from either an “I” or “you” perspective.
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Why Relationships End
In case you missed it, the cameras were rolling at the APS 23rd Annual Convention in Washington, DC. Watch Judith Biesen from the University of the Pacific present her poster session research on “Sexual Satisfaction and the Decision to Terminate a Romantic Relationship.” Biesen and her coauthors assessed how two factors — the ascription to certain life roles (i.e. marital role, occupational role, parental role) and topics chosen for a problem-solving discussion) — moderated the relationship between sexual satisfaction and relationship termination.
