Should you wear red if you’re an athlete?
ve posted before about whether the color red has magic powers. Of course, I don't really believe it has magic powers but it does seem to have interesting effects in a number of areas, including sports. Almost universally, red means stop. Red means danger. Red means hot. And analyzing the results in the 2004 Olympics, researchers have found that red also means dominance. Athletes wearing red prevailed more often than those wearing blue, especially in hand-to-hand sports like wrestling. Source…
2 minutes
Can you tell if someone is rich by a quick glance?
s. They're the ones who don't seem to be paying attention: Socioeconomic status (SES) is a primary determinant of health vulnerabilities and social affiliations. To ascertain if SES is signaled in brief patterns of nonverbal behavior, we had participants of varying SES backgrounds engage in a brief interaction with a stranger. Videos of 60-s slices of these interactions were coded for nonverbal cues of disengagement and engagement, and estimates of participants' SES were provided by naive observers who viewed these…
1 min read
How To Quickly Increase Confidence And Self-Esteem:
what mom told you and sit up straight: Building on the notion of embodied attitudes, we examined how body postures can influence self-evaluations by affecting thought confidence, a meta-cognitive process. Specifically, participants were asked to think about and write down their best or worse qualities while they were sitting down with their back erect and pushing their chest out (confident posture) or slouched forward with their back curved (doubtful posture). Then, participants completed a number of measures and reported…
1 min read
Is stupidity contagious?
tching movies and TV shows about stupid people may temporarily make you stupider: Media priming refers to the residual, often unintended consequences of media use on subsequent perceptions, judgments, and behavior. Previous research showed that the media can prime behavior that is in line with the primed traits or concepts (assimilation). However, assimilation is expected to be less likely and priming may even yield reverse effects (contrast) when recipients have a dissimilarity testing mindset. Based on previous research on narrative…
1 min read
Masculine Men Give Women More Orgasms
has been hypothesized that female orgasm evolved to facilitate recruitment of high-quality genes for offspring. Supporting evidence indicates that female orgasm promotes conception, although this may be mediated by the timing of female orgasm in relation to male ejaculation. This hypothesis also predicts that women will achieve orgasm more frequently when copulating with high-quality males, but limited data exist to support this prediction. We therefore explored relationships between the timing and frequency of women's orgasms and putative markers of…
1 min read
Is there an easy way to increase your pain tolerance?
cent research (Carney, Cuddy & Yap, 2010) has shown that adopting a powerful pose changes people's hormonal levels and increases their propensity to take risks in the same ways that possessing actual power does. In the current research, we explore whether adopting physical postures associated with power, or simply interacting with others who adopt these postures, can similarly influence sensitivity to pain. We conducted two experiments. In Experiment 1, participants who adopted dominant poses displayed higher pain thresholds than those who adopted…
2 minutes
What does your handshake say about you?
a NYT: People with high grip-strength scores are usually healthier than those with weak grips. “They live longer and recover faster from injury,” Gallup says. “They have reduced disability, higher bone density and greater fat-free body mass.” And in a study published this year, Gallup and his son Andrew — at the time an undergraduate psychology major — found that males with high grip-strength scores reported being more aggressive and dominant and had more masculine body types (broader shoulders, narrower…
1 min read
Should we study to take tests or should we take tests to study?
king a test is not just a passive mechanism for assessing how much people know, according to new research. It actually helps people learn, and it works better than a number of other studying techniques. The research, published online Thursday in the journal Science, found that students who read a passage, then took a test asking them to recall what they had read, retained about 50 percent more of the information a week later than students who used two other…
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