social
dmunger | July 18, 2006Is beauty a universal standard? Or is it in the eye of the beholder? Some research on attractiveness, including some we've discussed on CogDaily, suggests that "average" faces are the most attractive, and that most people agree on what makes a pretty face.
But Johannes Hönekopp has recently questioned the statistics behind these studies. Consider a hypothetical study that asks participants to rate the attractiveness of Leonardo DiCaprio and George Clooney on a scale of 1 to 10. From one perspective, nearly all judges might give both faces extremely high marks. Taken from this point of view, a…
dmunger | July 11, 2006For many Americans, the healing process after the attacks of September 11, 2001, began with the publication of a special issue of the satirical newspaper The Onion. Headlines like those in the illustration below meant we could finally start to laugh about the tragedy:
But some have suggested that positive emotions such as happiness and optimism are inappropriate at times of crisis, especially when so many innocent lives have been destroyed. Sure, they might provide temporary relief, but does appealing to the lighter side actually help us deal with the crisis at hand?
A team led by Barbara…
dmunger | July 10, 2006Nearly all prejudicial attitudes are now taboo in America. Sixty years ago, it might have been acceptable to deny someone a job or service in a business because of skin color or gender, but now such overt discrimination is almost universally condemned. Even people with disabilities are accommodated. Yet although obesity is on the rise in America, overweight people continue to face difficulty. They are rated lower on job performance evaluations even when the work they do is qualitatively the same as normal weight individuals.
Why does such discrimination continue even as overt discrimination…
dmunger | June 23, 2006The brain can be a good multitasker, using the same systems for unrelated functions. For example, the sensorimotor system may be used for imagining objects and concepts. What's more, when one part of the brain fails to do is job, another part can sometimes fill in the gaps.
Yet some disorders do cause intractable problems. People with autism, for example, have difficulty recognizing personality traits in others. While the specific neurological cause of autism has yet to be isolated, one hypothesis suggests that the key is an inability to develop episodic memory. If you can't recall the…
dmunger | June 16, 2006Greta and I -- and the kids -- had fun watching the movie Bride and Prejudice, which told the story of Jane Austen's renowned novel Pride and Prejudice, only Bollywood style: the "Elizabeth Bennet" character's angstings about her parent's plans to arrange her marriage with an intolerably dull cousin were punctuated with colorful Indian-pop dance numbers. As in the 1813 novel, her parents wanted her to marry for long-term companionship and security, not flash-in-the pan romantic love. While arranged marriages seem a quaint relic in twenty-first century America, they are still quite common in…
dmunger | May 30, 2006A recent study about violence and sex in TV advertising got a fair amount of press. "Violence and sex don't sell," the headlines proclaimed. If such a claim is true, it flies in the face of conventional wisdom and the blusterings of ad agencies worldwide.
Advertisers have always used the idea that "sex sells" to generate interest in their products, and television networks have argued that they need to offer lots of violence and sex in their programming in order to attract viewers. But what if sex and violence don't really sell products? Doesn't that turn the whole notion of "sex sells" on its…
dmunger | May 19, 2006The Stroop Effect was originally just a language effect: we're slower identifying the color text is printed in when the words themselves name different colors. In the 81 years since the effect was first observed, it's been applied to a variety of very different phenomena. In general, the effect is explained by automatic processing: when a process is automatic, it conflicts with the desired goal and so slows processing. In fact, the Stroop Effect is so robust that researchers now use it to determine if a process is indeed automatic.
Much research has focused on the issue of whether racial…
dmunger | May 18, 2006Take a look at this photo:
What emotion would you say I'm expressing here? Let's make this one a poll (make sure you answer before you read any farther):
In 1872, Charles Darwin argued that facial expressions must have evolved just as surely as eyes or noses (you can read an excerpt from his work on emotional expressions in Greta's book The History of Psychology: Fundamental Questions). Later research has shown that there are several universally understood facial expressions, and that these expressions can be defined and described specifically so that anyone can imitate them and make their…
dmunger | May 10, 2006Recent 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.
I've attempted to reproduce the type of display…
dmunger | May 1, 2006Family lore has it that my uncle was influential in instituting what is now a fixture in college education: student evaluation of college instructors. He was class president at the University of Washington in the 1960s, when tensions between students and the school administrators were high, and he suggested implementing one of the first student course evaluation systems in the nation as a way to address the problem. Needless to say, the idea caught on.
While college faculty complain unceasingly about the fairness of the now nearly universal student course evaluation system (I did it myself,…
dmunger | April 25, 2006A number of studies have found cultural differences in visual cognition. For example, Takahiko Masuda and Richard Nisbett found that when Americans watch a short video clip of an underwater scene, they tend to recall the items in the foreground: the fish. Japanese people watching the same clip recall the items in the background: rocks, plants, and their relationship to one another.
A team led by Shinobu Kitayama showed people a frame with a line drawn inside. When asked to duplicate the line in a different-sized frame, Americans were better at drawing it the same size, despite the frame,…
dmunger | April 19, 2006The average 3- to 10-year-old girl in the U.S. owns eight Barbies. Only one percent of this group owns no Barbies. And every girl seems to go through similar stages with her Barbies -- first, adoration, next, ambivalence, and finally, rejection. By the time they're in middle school, most girls have either thrown out their Barbies or cut off their hair and amputated multiple limbs. These aren't just casual observations -- a 2004 study observed that while young girls identify with Barbie, 10- to 14-year-olds have distanced themselves from Barbie.
But what of the recent media hype suggesting…
dmunger | April 18, 2006Take a look at these two faces.
One of these women can't recognize that the other is afraid, but when asked to express fear, is still able to produce a fearful expression. Can you tell which is which?
We know the amygdala is associated with identifying scary music; we know the amygdala helps us generate a fear response, but what about producing a fear response?
S.P. are the initials of a 54-year-old woman who had surgery to remove her right amygdala to alleviate the symptoms of epilepsy. During the surgery, it was found that her left amygdala was damaged as well, and so she effectively lost…
dmunger | April 13, 2006If you have normal hearing and an amygdala, you can probably tell which of these two songs is "happy," and which is "scary."
Song 1
Song 2
However, for extreme cases of epilepsy, one treatment is to surgically remove the amygdala, the area of the brain which processes, among other things, the sensation of fear. People who have had this surgery fail to recognize fearful facial expressions. A 1978 study in which experimenters stimulated patients' amygdalas directly with electrodes caused them to behave as if they were afraid.
But other efforts to induce fear reactions in patients whose…
dmunger | April 11, 2006Yesterday's post brings up an interesting question: How can you be unaware of having even seen an image, and yet be able to make reliable judgments about that image? That article is just one example of a variety of situations in which people can be unaware of seeing something, even immediately after being given a quick glimpse of it, yet behave as if they have seen it.
We discussed how visual images can be "masked" -- flashed quickly and then followed by another image which is displayed for a longer period. Though observers had no conscious recollection of seeing faces, they still could make…
dmunger | April 10, 2006How long does it take to decide if someone's attractive? It might be before you even know you looked.
Researchers can use a masking technique to show an image of a human face subliminally -- without the observer being aware of seeing it. To do it, they first show a scrambled face (39 milliseconds). Next, the face itself (13 milliseconds), a blank screen (13 milliseconds), and a cartoon face (39 milliseconds). I've tried to duplicate the technique using an animated GIF file, but I think it's beyond the capability of an ordinary web browser.
Click here to see it
Did you see a human face? I had…
dmunger | April 6, 2006Standup comics have long made vice president Dick Cheney the butt of their jokes, suggesting that he's never seen in public with the President because he inhabits some fortified underground bunker so as to avoid terrorists or some other unidentified threat, or that he's actually a cyborg, secretly controlling the government from his dark, hidden lair. But recent research in visual attention suggests that there might be another reason Cheney wouldn't want to be seen near the President. It may be that by standing next to a more famous person, your own appeal is diminished.
I'm actually only…
dmunger | April 3, 2006Babies as young as three months old will follow the eyes of an adult to look at the same thing the adult is looking at. This behavior makes sense from an evolutionary perspective: if a predator or other danger looms, we can learn from the actions of others (though it's unclear exactly what a three-month old would do to escape a ravenous bear).
But if the gaze-following behavior is really a survival adaptation, wouldn't we be more likely to follow someone's gaze if they also had a fearful facial expression? After all, if someone's glancing to the side with a cheerful smile, we don't expect…
dmunger | March 30, 2006The TV show Extreme Makeover: Home Edition is a bit of a guilty pleasure for our family. I've never been quite sure why we like it: the plot of the show is always the same. We're introduced to a family which has undergone some terrible tragedy through no fault of their own: the father has been blinded by the gunshot of a thief while he was working overtime at a convenience store, or the daughter is undergoing treatment for chemotherapy, or the grandmother has adopted six troubled teenagers. Despite (and sometimes because of) their best efforts, the family's home has fallen into extreme…
dmunger | March 27, 2006Take a look at these two shapes. Which appears more "joyful"? Which appears fearful?
How about these shapes? Which is angrier? Which appears to be suffering more?
If you're like most people, the shapes that appear to be less stable (number 2 in the figures above) are also more fearful. Those that are rotated more from the vertical position (again, number 2 in the figures) are more suffering and less angry.
Assigning emotions to shapes is nothing new. In experiments as early as the 1940s, individuals have been found to consistently apply the same emotions to shapes in schematic cartoons: "…