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Hugs Help Protect Against Colds by Boosting Social Support
We're told to wash our hands, get plenty of rest, and avoid public coughers and sneezers in order to keep the common cold at bay, but new research suggests another line of defense: hugs. A team of researchers, led by Sheldon Cohen, the Robert E. Doherty University Professor of Psychology in the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University, tested whether hugs act as a form of social support, protecting stressed people from getting sick. They found that greater social support and more frequent hugs protected people from the increased susceptibility to infection associated with being stressed and resulted in less severe illness symptoms.
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People Trust Typical-Looking Faces Most
Being “average” is often considered a bad thing, but research suggests that averageness wins when people assess the trustworthiness of a face.
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Political Extremists Are Less Susceptible to Common Cognitive Bias
People who occupy the extreme ends of the political spectrum may be less influenced by outside information on a simple estimation task than political moderates.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: Do Men Overperceive Women's Sexual Interest? Carin Perilloux and Robert Kurzban Research has shown that men interpret women's levels of sexual interest as being higher than what women themselves report. In a series of surveys, women reported their sexual intentions, and men estimated the sexual intentions of women, on the basis of engagement in 15 different behaviors (e.g., cooked dinner, stared deeply into eyes, etc.). Men's estimations of women's sexual intentions were stronger than women's own ratings.
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Saving Old Information Can Boost Memory for New Information
The simple act of saving something, such as a computer file, may improve our memory for the information we encounter next.
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Consistent Distraction May Not Hinder Learning
Distraction may not always impair our ability to learn, according to new research in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The research shows that people who are distracted in a similar way when learning a motor task and when trying to recall it later show no impairment in their ability to learn the task. Many of the motor tasks we learn to carry out on a daily basis -- such as driving, playing sports or musical instruments, even walking again after injury -- don't happen in a vacuum, they're performed while other things are going on.