emotion
dmunger | December 24, 2007Happiness is associated with a lot of good things in life. People who are happier tend to get better job ratings, make more money, be more likely to get married, and be more satisfied with their marriages than people who are less happy, even years after the original happiness assessment.
People around the world rate happiness as more important than intelligence, success, and material wealth. But is it possible to be too happy? An extremely happy person might be less motivated to seek a better job, more education, or better health care. Short-term happiness could conceivably be a route to a…
dmunger | December 17, 2007This past weekend, I went to two different holiday parties. While many of the people at the parties were friends, I was also introduced to a couple dozen new people -- out of town guests of the hosts, friends of friends, or people from our small town that I somehow had never met. If I run into one of these people at the coffee shop tomorrow, how likely will I be to remember that I've met them before? One possibly relevant factor is that I was a designated driver at just one of the two parties.
There's another factor that has been demonstrated to have a significant effect on whether a face is…
dmunger | November 27, 2007Do people ever tell you to "just smile, you'll feel better"? If you're like our daughter Nora, you hear it a lot, and you get annoyed every time you hear it. Telling a teenager to smile is probably one of the best ways to ensure she won't smile for the next several hours. But the notion that "smiling will make you feel better" has actually been confirmed by research. There are several studies demonstrating that people are happier when they smile, at least in certain circumstances.
It's not as easy as you might think to study the effect. For one thing, it's possible that it's not the physical…
dmunger | November 13, 2007Yesterday we discussed several experiments offering converging evidence that exposure to the color red, even for brief periods before taking a test, can result in lower achievement. It's startling research, but as my daughter suggested at breakfast this morning, maybe people are just intimidated by the color red because that's the color that's always used for grading.
Aren't we just conditioned to see red as threatening? That might be part of it, but in nature red also frequently suggests danger. Many poisonous plants and animals are red. Blood is red. Hot coals and lava are red. It's…
dmunger | November 12, 2007One of the things I was taught in English graduate school was never to grade papers using red ink. Students don't respond well to the color red, I was told -- it's intimidating. I always thought this was a little far-fetched, and my instructors couldn't offer a peer-reviewed journal article that definitively answered the question of whether red ink was harmful.
There is some research on the question of whether red is harmful in an academic setting -- but it's inconclusive, with some studies showing harm and others appearing to show a benefit to the color red. For decades, there has been a…
dmunger | November 1, 2007This article was originally posted on May 10, 2006
Recent research suggests that one of the reasons that as many as 97 percent of women and 68 percent of men experience food cravings is because of visual representations of food. When we picture food in our minds, our desire for the food increases. So why not just distract the visual system? One research team attempted just that, tempting volunteers with pictures of chocolate, and then distracting them with either a randomly changing visual image or an auditory task. The participants who watched the visual image experienced fewer food cravings…
dmunger | October 25, 2007Take a look at these schematic faces:
Just a few simple changes to the mouth and eyebrows can create faces depicting a wide array of emotions. Face 1, for example, is clearly quite happy, and face 12 is sad. Face 7 is obviously angry. But what about face 4? Embarrassed? Happy but sleepy?
Perhaps your own emotion at the time you look at the faces might affect your understanding of the emotions the faces convey, especially when the emotional state depicted is unclear. Perhaps people suffering from clinical depression are stuck in a sort of infinite feedback loop: every face they see seems…
dmunger | September 18, 2007Take a look at this video (QuickTime required). The screen will turn white for 1/2 second. Then a word will appear for about 1.5 seconds. Pay attention to the particular shade of gray the word is printed in. Next, a strip of five different grey squares will appear. Which square matches the color of the word?
It's a difficult task, but not impossible (we'll collect answers in a poll at the end of the post). A team led by Brian P. Meier had college student volunteers complete a similar task, and they were able to achieve 30 percent accuracy -- somewhat better than the 20 percent you would…
dmunger | September 3, 2007Note: This article was originally posted on November 14, 2006
If a Brahman child from Nepal is asked what she would do if another child spilled a drink on her homework, her response is different from that of a Tamang child from the same country. The Brahman would become angry, but, unlike a child from the U.S., would not tell her friend that she was angry. Tamang children, rather than being angry, would feel ashamed for having placed the homework where it could be damaged -- but like Brahmans, they would not share this emotion with their friends. So how do children who might grow up just a…
dmunger | August 30, 2007When Greta and I were married, we had to go through a series of interviews with the pastor. For the most part, these were benign, but there was a bit of a moment of tension when he asked these questions:
Pastor: Who's more intelligent?
Greta and Dave: We're the same. [So far, so good]
Pastor: Who's more emotional?
Dave: She is. [Oops!]
The pastor and I chuckled, but Greta gave me a rather icy stare. Was I just confirming the "women are more emotional" stereotype, or was I making a real observation about her behavior? Perhaps more importantly, was I dooming our relationship to failure,…
dmunger | August 15, 2007On our recent trip to Europe, we had a hard time getting the kids to smile for pictures. Most of our pictures of Nora ended up looking something like this (actually this one's a self portrait, but you get the idea):
Here her expression is basically neutral, and if it wasn't such a dramatic shot, it would be a bit boring.
When we could get her to smile, often the smile was inauthentic -- posed, or even sarcastic, like in this shot:
Here she's expressing mock excitement over her parents' excitement about the figure depicted in the statue: Leonardo Fibonacci, the great mathematician (click…
dmunger | August 3, 2007Like most parents, Greta and I were very excited about having our first baby (Greta, I imagine, might be somewhat less enthusiastic about me putting this vintage photo of her online...). We weren't naive, though -- we had heard from friends and family about the sleepless nights, the juggling of jobs and child care, the constant requirements for feeding, and the endless stacks of diapers. We knew it wouldn't be an easy task, but we felt we were up to it, and we were overjoyed to be having a child.
But at what point does this optimism become a burden? If you're unrealistically hopeful about the…
dmunger | May 8, 2007Take a look at these two pictures. Who is more dangerous?
It's not hard to decide, although I wouldn't hurt a fly, and Nora, even at age three, could be brutal with her sarcasm. Now, what's the most dangerous situation?
Again, an easy decision. While Carhenge is certainly an awe-inspiring monument (and perhaps Jim could scratch himself on one of those cars), Nora's descent of this rock spire gives me shivers.
You might think that there aren't many differences in how adults judge threats in examples such as this, but there is some reason to believe that older adults may have a different…
dmunger | March 22, 2007The Kuleshov Effect, discovered nearly a century ago by Soviet filmmaker Lev Kuleshov, posits that the context in which we see an image of an actor's face will determine the emotion the face portrays. For example, take a look at this short little clip I made (QuickTime required). First you'll see a gray screen, then a photo, then a second gray screen, and another photo of a face, taken just after that person looked at the first photo:
What emotion would you say characterizes the second face? Is it neutral, subtly happy, or subtly sad?
Kuleshov's work suggests that most viewers will see that…
dmunger | March 20, 2007On the opening episode of the Colbert Report, faux conservative Stephen Colbert expressed his preference for "guts" over facts:
That's where truth comes from -- the gut. Facts come from the brain -- and some people think that makes facts better. But did you know you have more nerve endings in your stomach than in your brain? You can look it up....
Anyone can tell the news to you. I'm going to feel the news at you.
In Colbert's signature parodic style, he appeals to the "common-sense" notion that "guts" matter more than "brains." Even his dubious claim about nerve endings has some merit --…
dmunger | March 8, 2007Two days ago, we discussed research suggesting that the emotional qualities of images affect short-term memory for those images. When you watch a movie depicting a rapid sequence of images, you're more likely to remember images that have strong emotional content -- especially images that are arousing, whether they depict positive or negative things. Most fascinating of all: when we see images for a very short time, we're more likely to remember positive images, but when we view them for a longer period, we're more likely to remember negative ones.
But our discussion didn't address some of the…
dmunger | March 6, 2007What types of images are you more likely to remember over the short-term? Pleasant? Bright? Arousing? Disturbing? One method of testing short-term visual memory is to flash a rapid series of pictures, then ask viewers which ones they saw. The pictures are shown so quickly that it's impossible to remember them all. Click on the image below to view a movie (Quicktime required). Wait for the entire movie to load, then watch it. You'll see 12 photos rapidly flash by. Play it twice, but no more.
Other than the first and the last one, did you remember any? I'll put a quick test below (fair warning…
neurontic | January 11, 2007A couple of months ago a friend of mine recommended I pick up Richard Power's new novel The Echo Maker. "It's right up your alley," he said, "It's all about a man suffering from a bizarre brain condition." I added it to my Amazon shopping cart within the hour.
In The Echo Maker, Powers' character Mark flips his truck on an icy stretch of road in Nebraska and ends up in the hospital in a near-vegetative state. His sole-remaining family member, his sister Karin, immediately rushes to his bedside to nurse him back to health. Mark remains comatose for long enough that the doctors begin to lose…
dmunger | January 4, 2007This year's collegiate national football championship will be held in Phoenix, Arizona, at the usual home of the Arizona Cardinals. Neither competitor, Florida or Ohio State, is playing on its home field, so in principle the game should be an even match. Indeed, neither team has lost a home game this year, with Florida's lone loss coming at an away game in Auburn.
How big is the home field advantage? In the English Premier Football League (the other football), the home team wins 66 percent of the time. The home field advantage has been attributed to everything from understanding the local…
dmunger | December 19, 2006As parents of a 15-year-old, Greta and I are very interested in what causes people to behave aggressively. We know a lot about specific causes of aggression -- violent media, testosterone, guns, and personal insults can all lead to aggressive behavior in certain circumstances. But kids and others exposed to one or more of these things don't necessarily become violent. Sometimes it seems that just the presence of his sister in the room can cause Jim to act more aggressively than he would otherwise.
That's one reason we were intrigued by a recent study by Jennifer Klinesmith, Tim Kasser, and…