First impressions are important, and they usually contain a healthy dose both of accuracy and misperception. But do people know when their first impressions are correct? They do reasonably well, according to a recent study.

Sometimes after meeting a person for the first time, there is a strong sense that you really understand him or her—you immediately feel as if you could predict his or her behavior in a variety of situations, and you feel that even your first impression would agree with those of others who know that person well. That is, your impression feels realistically accurate (Funder, 1995, 1999). Other times, you leave an interaction feeling somewhat unsure about how accurate your impression is—it is not clear how that individual would behave in different situations or what his or her close friends and family members would say about him or her. Are such intuitions about the realistic accuracy of one’s impressions valid? That is, do people know when they know? The current studies address this question by examining the extent to which people have accuracy awareness—an understanding of whether their first impressions of others’ personalities are realistically accurate.

{ Social Psychological and Personality Science | Continue reading }

photo { Harry Callahan }

Each culture has its agreed-upon list of taboo words and it doesn’t matter how many times these words are repeated, they still seem to retain their power to shock. Scan a human brain, swear at it, and you’ll see its emotional centres jangle away.

Recent research has shown that this emotional impact can have an analgesic effect, and there’s other evidence that strategically deployed swear words can make a speech more memorable. But it’s not all positive. A new study suggests that swear words have a dark side. Megan Robbins and her team recorded snippets of speech from middle-aged women with rheumatoid arthritis, and others with breast cancer, and found those who swore more in the company of other people also experienced increased depression and a perceived loss of social support.

{ BPS | Continue reading }

photo { Calvin Sawer }

Where does psychological health end and mental illness begin? (…)

We are in the midst of a mental illness epidemic. Office visits by children and adolescents treated for the condition jumped forty-fold from 1994 to 2003. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, nearly half of all Americans have suffered from mental illness—depression, anxiety, even psychosis—at some time in their lives. Is one out of every two Americans mentally ill, or could it be that the system of psychiatric diagnosis too often mistakes the emotional problems of everyday life for psychopathology?

This system is codified in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the official handbook of the American Psychiatric Association. Now in its fourth edition, the psychiatric bible, as it is sometimes called, spells out the criteria for over 360 different diagnoses. The DSM serves as the basic text for training practitioners, for insurance companies who rely on it to determine coverage, for social service agencies who use it to assess disabilities, and for the courts, which turn to it to resolve questions of criminal culpability, competence to stand trial, and insanity.

Despite the vast influence of DSM and the best efforts of its architects, the manual has failed to clear up the murky border between health and sickness.

{ The New Republic | Continue reading }

What Makes a Team Smarter? More Women.

There’s little correlation between a group’s collective intelligence and the IQs of its individual members. But if a group includes more women, its collective intelligence rises. (…)

The standard argument is that diversity is good and you should have both men and women in a group. But so far, the data show, the more women, the better. (…)

Many studies have shown that women tend to score higher on tests of social sensitivity than men do. So what is really important is to have people who are high in social sensitivity, whether they are men or women.

{ Harvard Business Review | Continue reading }

Are Fast Talkers More Persuasive?

When psychologists first began examining the effect of speech rate on persuasion, they thought the answer was cut-and-dried. In 1976 Norman Miller and colleagues tried to convince participants that caffeine was bad for them (Miller et al., 1976). The results suggested people were most persuaded when the message was delivered at a fully-caffeinated 195 words per minute rather than at a decaffeinated 102 words per minute.

At 195 words per minute, about the fastest that people speak in normal conversation, the message became more credible to those listening, and therefore more persuasive. Talking fast seemed to signal confidence, intelligence, objectivity and superior knowledge. Going at about 100 words per minute, the usual lower limit of normal conversation, was associated with all the reverse attributes. (…)

By the 1980s, though, other researchers had begun to wonder if these results could really be correct. They pointed to studies suggesting that while talking faster seemed to boost credibility, it didn’t always boost persuasion.

{ PsyBlog | Continue reading }

While it is recognized that Barbie dolls are perceived as feminine and Action figures as masculine, less is considered about the gender associations related to everyday items like the food we choose to eat. A series of studies reveal for instance that sour dairy products tend to be perceived as relatively feminine, whereas meat tends to be perceived as relatively masculine. Men are inclined to forgo their intrinsic preferences to conform to a masculine gender identity. Women, on the other hand, appear to be less concerned with making gender-congruent choices.

{ SAGE | Continue reading }

Social hierarchies are quite complicated. In the animal world hierarchies are wildly different based on social contexts, species, and environmental factors. For some animals, such as bull elephant seals, hierarchies are unstable—individuals spend a relatively short times at the top of the food chain—and what these alpha males get in terms of mating preferences, they pay dearly for in terms of physical fighting, aggressive confrontation, and threats from other male rivals. In unstable hierarchies, it’s hard to be at the top.

Most hierarchies are much more stable than the example of the bull elephant seal. For instance, in human social life, social hierarchies are typically stable within a specific context. For example, you and your boss aren’t likely to switch roles halfway through the year. And there is good reason for that. If people were allowed to switch willy-nilly between high and low status roles, it would be hard to know who to turn to for advice or guidance, whose directions should be followed, and who should take responsibility for the group’s failures. (…)

Hierarchies, in this case, are an essential way in which people can organize their social lives around others. So in some instances, having some people with low status and some people with high status is good. (…)

There are, of course, some important caveats to this reasoning. (…) A large history of research on socioeconomic status suggests that being low in socioeconomic status is bad for your health. In short, you die sooner when you are lower in socioeconomic status relative to others.

{ Psych Your Mind | Continue reading }

The potentially lasting implications of day-to-day couple conflict on physical and mental well-being are revealed in a study published today in the journal Personal Relationships. (…)

The study found that all participants across the sample as a whole experienced sleep disruption after conflict. There was however the greatest degree of sleep disruption amongst individuals who were highly anxious in their relationship. The lowest degree of sleep disruption was found amongst individuals who strongly avoided emotional attachment.

Conflict was also found to have repercussions for next-day mood. However, some participants found their mood negatively affected more than others. Individuals more at ease with emotional attachment found their mood was affected more than did individuals less comfortable being intimate with others.

{ EurekAlert | Continue reading }

Happiness can kill, claim scientists, after discovering that people who are too full of joy die younger than their more downbeat peers.

The study by a variety of universities analysed the details of children from the 1920s to old age.

They found people whose school reports rated them “highly cheerful” died younger than their more reserved classmates. This is because they are likely to lead more carefree lives full of danger and unhealthy lifestyle choices, it is believed. (…)

Researchers also discovered that trying too hard to be happy often ended up leaving people feeling more depressed than before. (…)

Results of the study revealed that the key to true happiness was simple: meaningful relationships with friends and family members.

“The strongest predictor of happiness is not money, or external recognition through success or fame. It’s having meaningful social relationships.”

{ The Telegraph | Continue reading }

photo { William Klein }

We are prejudiced against all kinds of other people, based on superficial physical features: We react negatively to facial disfigurement; we avoid sitting next to people who are obese, or old, or in a wheelchair; we favor familiar folks over folks that are foreign. (…)

It makes immediate sense that people would develop aversions against people who actually have infectious diseases. But why does it also lead to these aversions to perfectly healthy people? Because it’s impossible to directly detect the presence of bacteria and viruses and other microscopic parasites; and so we’re forced to use crude superficial cues. Consequently, we make mistakes. Some of those mistakes lead to the irrational avoidance of things (including people) that pose no infection risk at all.

Here’s an example: Animal feces is loaded with parasites that can make you ill. So if something looks like a pile of dog poop, you probably won’t eat it. That’s smart. But what if I took some delicious chocolate fudge and molded it into the shape of poop? Research by Paul Rozin and his colleagues shows that a lot of people still won’t eat it – even though they know it’s fudge! These people aren’t responding to any rational appraisal of infection risk; they are responding – automatically and aversively – to appearances.

The same principle applies in our interactions with other people.

{ Scientific American | Continue reading }

photo { Nicolas Silberfaden }

Why is it that men so often self-destruct? (…) We men just make bad decisions. We can’t help it. We’re men.

Women, on the other hand, do almost everything better. We’ve known this intuitively for a long time. If you didn’t, just ask your wife or your mother. But now there’s a raft of evidence that suggests women are better at everything — including investing.

A new study by Barclays Capital and Ledbury Research found that women were more likely to make money in the market, mostly because they didn’t take as many risks. They bought and held. Women trade this way because they aren’t as confident — or perhaps as overconfident — as men, the study found.

{ MarketWatch | Continue reading }

photo { Katy Grannan }

Dear Men Who Send Dick Shots to Women,

Women do not want to see your dick. (…)

You know what women masturbate to? The color orange. Or maybe a sunset. Or a nonexistent man in a suit taking her future children to the park. (…)

The secret to seducing a woman is to distract her instincts and convince her you’re not there for sex. You give her a back rub or massage her feet.

{ Gavin McInnes/Taki’s Magazine | Continue reading }

Close relationships, and romantic relationships in particular, are characterized by the small acts of kindness we do for each other. Today you will be doing the dishes, paying for dinner, or taking out the trash, and tomorrow he will be taking you to the airport, putting gas in the car, or buying the groceries. Many of these small acts become so commonplace in relationships that they go unnoticed (how often do you thank your partner for taking out the trash, washing your dishes, or picking up the groceries, especially if it’s become their “job”?). However, when you do notice those small acts, and feel grateful for your partner’s thoughtful behaviors, research shows that both you and your partner benefit.

{ Psych Your Mind | Continue reading }

…the Dunning-Kruger Effect — our incompetence masks our ability to recognize our incompetence.  But just how prevalent is this effect? In search of more details, I called David Dunning at his offices at Cornell:

DAVID DUNNING:  Well, my specialty is decision-making. How well do people make the decisions they have to make in life? And I became very interested in judgments about the self, simply because, well, people tend to say things, whether it be in everyday life or in the lab, that just couldn’t possibly be true. And I became fascinated with that. Not just that people said these positive things about themselves, but they really, really believed them. Which led to my observation: if you’re incompetent, you can’t know you’re incompetent.

{ Errol Morris/NY Times | Continue reading }

photo { Roger Ballen }

In his book, Schwartz uses the terms “maximizer” and “satisficer” to describe how people make decisions. Maximizers will settle for nothing but the best. They endlessly research options and often second-guess the choices they make. Satisificers are content with selecting the good-enough option. Though they may research their options like maximizers, they eventually make a decision without worrying excessively about what better options might have been right around the corner. The problem with being a maximizer is that there is always a potentially better option that exists, and thinking about these other possibilities can be frustrating and nonproductive.

{ Mind Meditations | Continue reading | Thanks Tim }

This study investigated experiences with partners during the time interval immediately following sexual intercourse. (…)

We believe that the Post-Coital Time Interval (PCTI), the time in which couples spend together after sexual intercourse before one partner leaves or falls asleep, is an important component of sexual relationships. Specifically, we argue that sex differences in PCTI experiences reflect divergence in the evolved reproductive strategies of men and women. We also predict that individual variation in PCTI experiences within each sex is related to other psychological aspects of variation in life history strategy, particularly tendencies towards engaging in committed long-term monogamous relationships. (…)

Halpern and Sherman (1979) believe that the potential for bonding and sharing may be at its peak in the post-coital period, and satisfaction with this experience is the most important aspect of a sexual relationship. Despite women’s efforts in screening and selecting partners prior to first sexual intercourse, women’s feelings of uncertainty in the future of the relationship are likely due to the differential costs and benefits for commitment described above. Women’s desires for expressions or signals of relationship bonding and commitment by one’s partner may be particularly salient in the PCTI.

{ Journal of Social, Evolutionary, and Cultural Psychology | Continue reading | PDF }

photo { Robert Whitman }

People who had the most positive relationship feelings and who were most motivated to be responsive to the partner’s needs made bigger promises than did other people but were not any better at keeping them.

{ Only because I love you: Why people make and why they break promises in romantic relationships | abstract | via Overcoming bias | Continue reading }

photo { Hannah Modigh }

Paying attention to something and being aware of it seem like the same thing -they both involve somehow knowing the thing is there. However, a new study, which will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds that these are actually separate; your brain can pay attention to something without you being aware that it’s there. (…)

Hsieh suggests that this could have evolved as a survival mechanism. It might have been useful for an early human to be able to notice and process something unusual on the savanna without even being aware of it, for example. “We need to be able to direct attention to objects of potential interest even before we have become aware of those objects,” he says.

{ APS | Continue reading }

photos { Jane Fulton Alt }

Perfectionism can be positive or negative, depending upon whether you’re striving to live up to your own high standards or straining to meet the expectations of others.

{ Miller-McCune | Continue reading }

Can you imagine getting off a roller coaster ride and falling in love with the first attractive person you see as you leave the ride? Likely not.

But in fact, classic social psychology experiments have shown that sometimes people do misattribute feelings of fear and anxiety to sexual attraction.

More generally, researchers have found that when people feel physiologically aroused (think racing heart, sweaty palms), they use environmental cues to help them determine why they are feeling that way.

{ Psych Your Mind | Continue reading }

If art is a kind of lying, then lying is a form of art, albeit of a lower order—as Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain have observed. Both liars and artists refuse to accept the tyranny of reality. Both carefully craft stories that are worthy of belief—a skill requiring intellectual sophistication, emotional sensitivity and physical self-control (liars are writers and performers of their own work). Such parallels are hardly coincidental, as I discovered while researching my book on lying. Indeed, lying and artistic storytelling spring from a common neurological root—one that is exposed in the cases of psychiatric patients who suffer from a particular kind of impairment.

A case study published in 1985 by Antonio Damasio, a neurologist, tells the story of a middle-aged woman with brain damage caused by a series of strokes. She retained cognitive abilities, including coherent speech, but what she actually said was rather unpredictable. Checking her knowledge of contemporary events, Damasio asked her about the Falklands War. This patient spontaneously described a blissful holiday she had taken in the islands, involving long strolls with her husband and the purchase of local trinkets from a shop. Asked what language was spoken there, she replied, “Falklandese. What else?”

In the language of psychiatry, this woman was ‘confabulating’. Chronic confabulation is a rare type of memory problem that affects a small proportion of brain-damaged people. In the literature it is defined as “the production of fabricated, distorted or misinterpreted memories about oneself or the world, without the conscious intention to deceive”. Whereas amnesiacs make errors of omission—there are gaps in their recollections they find impossible to fill—confabulators make errors of commission: they make things up. Rather than forgetting, they are inventing.

{ The Economist | Continue reading }