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To alter consumer behavior, some companies reach out to academics
The Washington Post: At Arlington-based Opower, success is measured by the amount of energy homeowners conserve. But the company’s software, which allows consumers to track their usage, cannot yield that result on its own. The homeowners themselves have to flip the switch. The company has sought to bridge that disconnect between product and intended result with the help of behavioral psychologists, whose research helps break down why people are motivated to make certain decisions. Read the whole story: The Washington Post
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Colorless Food? We Blanch
The New York Times: Without the artificial coloring FD&C Yellow No. 6, Cheetos Crunchy Cheese Flavored Snacks would look like the shriveled larvae of a large insect. Not surprisingly, in taste tests, people derived little pleasure from eating them. Their fingers did not turn orange. And their brains did not register much cheese flavor, even though the Cheetos tasted just as they did with food coloring. “People ranked the taste as bland and said that they weren’t much fun to eat,” said Brian Wansink, a professor at Cornell University and director of the university’s Food and Brand Lab. Read the whole story: The New York Times
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What really makes people laugh at jokes on April Fool’s Day?
Yahoo! News: There may be no better day all year to express humour than April Fool's Day, but what makes something funny? People of all ages and cultures experience humour every day. It affects how we select our friends and mates. It attracts attention and admiration, softens criticism, alleviates conflict and helps people cope with anxiety and physical pain. Professors Peter McGraw and Caleb Warren presented a study last August in the journal Psychological Science that shows what it takes to make something funny. Humour only occurs when three conditions are satisfied.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Hierarchical Encoding in Visual Working Memory: Ensemble Statistics Bias Memory for Individual Items Timothy F. Brady and George A. Alvarez Current models of visual working memory assume that people encode memories of objects individually. Yet, new research has shown that items surrounding an object can influence a person’s recollection of it. When observers were asked to recall the size of a single circle after viewing an image with multiple circles, they tended to report a larger size if the other circles were large and a smaller size if the surrounding circles were small.
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How to spot a fake smile: It’s all in the eyes
MSNBC: We all know that smiling faces sometimes tell lies, even without the Motown song there to remind us. But now there’s proof that those fake smiles may not be worth as much as the genuine article. In a study conducted at Bangor University in Wales, researchers had 36 undergrads play a game in which they won money from four opponents, each of whom would indicate the participants’ wins by displaying either a genuine or a polite smile. In a later phase of the game, participants chose which opponent they wanted to play.
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Women’s depression can erode their intimate relationships
Sify: Israeli researchers have found that a woman's depression can bring her relationship down. A depressed person can be withdrawn, needy, or hostile-and give little back. But there's another way that depression isolates partners from each other. It chips away at the ability to perceive the others' thoughts and feelings. It impairs what psychologists call "empathic accuracy" -and that can exacerbate alienation, depression, and the cycle by which they feed each other. Reuma Gadassi and Nilly Mor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Eshkol Rafaeli at Bar-Ilan University wanted to understand better these dynamics in relationships, particularly the role of gender.
