TresSugar

Curmudgeons, Rejoice: Being Grumpy Might Be Good For You!

TresSugar — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 14:05:00 -0800

Australian psychology professor Joe Forgas has concluded through his research that grumpy people tend to think more clearly, and because of their skepticism, they also make better decisions than their more cheerful and gullible counterparts.

Cheerfulness isn't all bad, though. Forgas says it encourages creativity. Bad moods, however, incite "attentiveness and careful thinking."

How did he figure this out? He asked volunteers to watch films while thinking of either positive or negative events in their lives, in the hopes they'd be put into good or bad moods.

Then, to test their powers of analysis, he had them judge the truth of urban myths and provide eyewitness accounts of events. The results: the grumps made fewer mistakes and were better at communicating.

"Whereas positive mood seems to promote creativity, flexibility, co-operation and reliance on mental shortcuts," said Professor Forgas, "negative moods trigger more attentive, careful thinking, paying greater attention to the external world."

If you see a smile on my usually grumpy face today, it's temporary - I'm just gloating.

Are People With Sensitive Noses More Empathetic?

TresSugar — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 11:00:00 -0700

Are you cursed and blessed with a good sense of smell? Cursed because you smell every ungodly stink no matter how far away, and blessed because lovely smells affect you deeply?

Psychology professor Denise Chen at Rice University thinks you may also be more empathetic than your olfaction-challenged neighbor.

Sense of smell and emotions come from the same area of the brain (the limbic system), and Chen set out to test their connection. In an experiment with 22 pairs of dorm-dwelling women, Chen asked them all to sleep in identical t-shirts. The next morning, she presented each person with three t-shirts: one worn by her roommate, and two others worn by other people in the dorm. The women who were able to identify their roommates' t-shirts by smell alone also scored high in emotional tests.

"The olfactory brain overlaps with the emotional brain," said Chen, "and is believed to have contributed to its evolution." Do you have a good sense of smell or wish you did?

Next Up For Male Contraception: Reversible Hormone Injections

TresSugar — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 10:00:00 -0700

When it comes to birth control options, women have the pill, the patch, the ring, the diaphragm, IUDs . . . the list goes on and on. Men have the condom. Scientist are working on more convenient ways for men to take charge of birth control, and now couples in Europe are being recruited to test a new form of male contraception: reversible hormone injections.

Men would get the injections every two months, causing their sperm count to drop to levels that make conception nearly impossible. The effects would be fully reversible.

Do you think men will get on board with this? Would you still use contraception yourself, even if your partner received these injections?

Love: The Key to Creativity

TresSugar — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 16:00:00 -0700

Love has been the driving theme of artistic creations stretching over generations. Researchers from the University of Amsterdam recently decided to verify that love can change the way we think. The study found that love makes us more creative, while sexual desire makes us more logical.

Subjects who thought about a romantic walk with the person they loved performed better on tasks that required creative thinking. When asked to think about a sexual encounter with someone they didn't love, the subjects performed worse on the creative tasks, but better on logical puzzles. Scientists reasoned that romantic love makes us see things from a long-term perspective (which is good for creativity), while sex makes us think short term (which is good for logical thinking).

So now we know that love makes us creative, while lust might have the opposite effect. I'd like to add heartbreak to the list of creative forces. Without that we wouldn't have Shakespearean tragedies or Kanye's amazing song "Heartless."

Does love make you more creative?

Are You a Fan of the Surreal? It May Make You Smarter

TresSugar — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 15:00:00 -0700

Franz Kafka, David Lynch, and Rene Magritte were my Kevin, Joe and Nick Jonas as a teenager. (Yeah, I was a weirdo.) So imagine my delight when I read a study that claims that surrealism may be good for the brain.

Research psychologists at UC Santa Barbara and the University of British Columbia concluded that exposure to surrealist art, film or literature, because it puts you in worlds whose elements don't make sense, drives you to look for structure and sense elsewhere, hence raising "the cognitive mechanisms that oversee implicit learning functions." Want to hear the details of this study? Then read more.

To reach this finding, they had two groups of people read Kafka. One group was given Kafka's story "The Country Doctor," which in typical Kafkaesque fashion, goes from normal to weird in no time at all. The other group was given a rewritten version so that nothing was odd about the plot or narrative. After they finished their respective Kafkas, they were asked to find patterns hidden in strings of letters. Those who read the original Kafka stories were both more motivated to find patterns and more accurate in their findings than those who read the normalized Kafka.

It's their second experiment that is almost more interesting to me - they divided groups between those who felt alienated by things they'd done in the past and those who didn't. "You get the same pattern of effects whether you're reading Kafka or experiencing a breakdown in your sense of identity," said Travis Proulx, a postdoctoral researcher at UCSB and co-author of the article. "People feel uncomfortable when their expected associations are violated, and that creates an unconscious desire to make sense of their surroundings. That feeling of discomfort may come from a surreal story, or from contemplating their own contradictory behaviors, but either way, people want to get rid of it. So they're motivated to learn new patterns."

So, basically, feeling alienated and consuming alienating art and literature drives you to make sense of things, giving your brain a workout. That would finally explain my motivation to find meaning in the world after watching The Hills, a surrealist masterpiece if I ever saw one!

Source

News Flash: Men Are Bigger Liars

TresSugar — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 13:00:00 -0700

After scrutinizing 2,000 Britons, researchers found that in general, men lie twice as much as women. On average, they lie six times a day and women lie "just" three times a day.

The most common lie told by both men and women is, "Nothing's wrong. I'm fine." Men, however, tend to lie about how much they've had to drink, and women lie about how much they spent shopping.

Although 83 percent of adults said they can tell if their significant other is lying, body language expert Richard Newman thinks most people can't tell what signs to look for. "They assume that if someone is hiding the truth," he says, "they would hide their face and avoid eye contact. In fact, the opposite is true. Liars usually do everything they can to convince you of the truth, sitting still and looking at you to watch your reaction."

Now I'm trying to think if I've lied yet today . . .

Men Get Dumber Speaking to Attractive Women

TresSugar — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 02:00:00 -0700

In news that will surprise absolutely no one, researchers have found that men get so flummoxed when speaking to attractive women - using up most of their cognitive abilities trying to impress them - that they sometimes forget basic personal information like their own addresses!

Research showed that if (presumably straight) men spent even a few minutes with an attractive woman, they didn’t perform as well on tests that measure brain function than they did after speaking to someone they didn’t find attractive. Women didn’t seem to have this reaction in the presence of men they considered handsome.

Although psychologist Dr. George Fieldman of the British Psychological Society had a genetic/evolutionary explanation for this reaction, that men are “programmed to think about ways to pass on their genes,” I wonder how the study would have worked if they had gay men talking to men they found attractive. Would they be so flustered by their attraction they performed poorly on cognitive tests, too? Would researchers be able to argue that their distraction was “reproductively focused”?

Maybe men are just horndogs? (That's my unscientific conclusion.) What do you think?

Are You Afraid of Spiders?

TresSugar — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 01:00:00 -0700

About four percent of the adult, American population has arachnaphobia - a fear of spiders - and of that percentage, women are four times as likely to be afraid.

Researchers concluded that girls have a genetic predisposition to be afraid of dangerous animals like spiders. Coded into our DNA, apparently, is the desire to stay away from dangerous things and protect our children, where men are supposed to be risk-takers and generally less likely to be afraid of spiders. You know - they're the hunters.

The researchers' conclusion seems to be a huge leap to me, but then again, a lot of these studies feel that way! I happen to love spiders and think they're beautiful. If I see one - I consider it good luck and try not to accidentally squish it. Maybe I'm just Goth that way. What about you?

It's Complicated: How Women Determine Facial Attractiveness

TresSugar — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 14:00:00 -0700

It's no surprise that how women determine facial attractiveness is complicated. Unlike many men who may give a woman's body a once-over, and then look at her face, deeming her attractive or unattractive, women, when checking out a man's face, tend to evaluate it on two levels, according to a study that was just published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

The first level women use to evaluate men's faces is sexual: they zero in on features like the jawbone, cheekbones, and lips. Then, they look at the entire face for how pleasing the overall aesthetics of the face are.

Researchers set out to prove this dual-process theory by asking two groups of 50 heterosexual women to look at pictures of men's and women's faces.

The first group was given pictures of men and women and told that some of them would be hypothetical dates (sexual) and others hypothetical lab partners (aesthetic). They rated them as attractive accordingly.

For the second group of straight women, they were given the same images, but the faces were split in two with the upper and lower halves shifted in opposite directions. Even with the opportunity to view female faces sexually (that is, feature by feature), the women still rated the attractiveness of female faces aesthetically, and their ratings correlated with the hypothetical lab partner ratings of the first group. When images of men's faces were split in two, however, their rating's correlated with the hypothetical date of the first group, that is, sexually.

The next stop for researchers? Figuring out how cultural differences and hormones play a role in the mechanics of female sexual attraction.

Source

Calling All Neurotics! Another Thing to Worry About

TresSugar — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 09:00:00 -0700

As a self-described neurotic, news that my neurosis may lead me to an early grave did not surprise me in the least. Unlike many neurotics who may read this story, however, I will not be adding "fear of premature death" to my list of things I like to worry about. There are too many things there as it is!

So who, exactly, is neurotic? Anyone who is constantly worried, anxious, or prone to depression, according to these researchers. (According to Freud? Neurotics are the normal people, if by "normal" you mean average!) But it’s not anxiety or depression that will necessarily do them in - it’s that they tend to drink and smoke more than “normal” folks do - with smoking being the worst thing they can do to themselves. (25 to 40 percent of the link between being neurotic and an early death was related to smoking - not drinking.)

Participants were asked questions like "Do you usually worry a long time after a distressing incident?” and "Are you sometimes sad without any particular reason?" to determine how neurotic they were.

Neurosis, I think, gives people an interesting edge, so as long as they cut down on the boozing and the cigarettes - worry away! I'm kidding. Kind of.

Source