Archive for the 'Psychology' category

Mind Reading Thru The Eyes

Apr 27 2009 Published by under Psychology

mind-eyes

How accurately can we guess another person’s emotional state from just looking at their eyes? Without looking at the rest of their face, or other parts of their body, can we correctly determine a person’s inner state, desires or intentions?

Why not test yourself online with this test developed by Dr. Simon Cohen-Baron (Ali G/Borat’s real life cousin– I kid you not!).

I found this challenge extremely interesting, and although I struggled on a few of the faces, I did better than expected. See if you can beat my score of 31! In the results section, it’s pretty clear that females score higher than men, especially in the upper range. Maybe I have a less masculine brain? I’d never admit that…

Unfortunately, in the age of text-based communication, these innate and fine tuned skills have become somewhat debased; yet, the popular use of smiley’s and emoticons reveals that we’re still reliant on these signals to correctly decode the intent of others.

Do you ever find that your text-based messages are wrongly interpreted by the other end? Do you often hesitate to use satire or sarcasm online because it might be taken seriously?

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The Big Five: Your Personality Summarized

Aug 29 2008 Published by under Psychology

When people think of psychology, they usually have a short list of terms that they know (or think they know) about the subject, including: relationship counseling, subliminal messages, Sigmund Freud, and personality testing. I was quite the same when I first attended school, so when I had the chance to enroll in a third year personality course, I couldn’t wait to learn about something that was mentioned so often in pop culture and the mainstream media.

Looking back, I don’t remember much from that course, but I do remember the Big Five model, which attempts to describe an individual using just five personality traits. These factors are: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism.

Perhaps I remember the Big Five (which can be remembered by the acronym OCEAN) because it was the easiest theory to recall and seemed to be the least flakey. Unlike a lot of what I learned in that course, the Big Five is backed by empirical research.

You might find it odd that you could describe a person by using just five personality traits and not the many other descriptors that you could easily list off from the top of your head. However, these factors weren’t chosen ambiguously, they were discovered by using factor analysis, which I’ll explain a little bit about.

What the researchers did was start off with a huge list of adjectives, such as: happy, anxious, creative, curious, moody, aggressive, etc. Then, through interviewing tons of people, they began to group terms that appeared to regularly coincided. For instance, a person who was deemed highly sociable had a more than likely chance of also being talkative and assertive. After this grouping had been completed, the researchers had boiled down their giant list of traits to what is now known as the Big Five. So going back to a person who might be described as sociable and talkative, this individual would probably rate high in extraversion.

I should note that a person isn’t categorized, black or white, as an extrovert (the life of a party) or the opposite (an introvert), but that they rate somewhere along the dimension of extraversion, often not at the extremes. Think of the Big Five as five separate point scales that run from positive to negative.

So does it bother you that your unique and brilliant personality can be (or attempt to be) described by just five factors? Or do you like the idea that something so complex and mysterious in nature can be easily summarized by using the Big Five model?

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Chasing Nostalgia

Aug 21 2008 Published by under Psychology

Do you love feeling nostalgic? Perhaps it’s the smell of summer turning into fall, or winter to spring. Or maybe it’s visiting your elementary school or driving past an old residence. There’s something special about experiencing a sensation that’s instantly familiar to you, but one that hasn’t been felt for so long.

I don’t know exactly what nostalgia is, but I imagine it as a pattern of neurons that is firing away after being silent for many months or years. Sort of like an old vacuum tube radio charging up and coming back to life. The mind seems to take pleasure in this, like, “ah-hah! I know this taste – that summer in Italy.” In fact, we seem to feel rewarded when we inadvertently trigger a memory that we assumed no longer existed.

I suppose you can feel nostalgic by just concentrating on past events, but it’s always most breathtaking when you’re blind sighted by the waft of a romantically linked perfume scent, or viewing an old photograph that produces a rush of cherished memories.

What triggers nostalgia for you? Are they smells, sights, people or places? And what is the object of your nostalgia? Past events, people you knew or things you owned? 

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The Science of Guilt

Aug 21 2008 Published by under Psychology

Ever wonder why we feel guilt? What’s the point of this emotion and how did it develop in humans? Using evolutionary psychology we can shed some light on this mystery.

Suppose your group’s hunting party is away catching boar in the jungle, and you begin to eye your vacant neighbor’s hut for items he might not notice missing. After stealing some spearheads and berries, you feel something wrong: a bit of sickness in your stomach, heaviness in the chest, some anxiety and restlessness. This is the feeling of guilt. No one has witnessed your crime and the act will likely go without future reprisal, but internal signals are clearly messaging that you did something wrong.

From an evolutionary standpoint, you might think that those who make good thieves, or routinely break other societal rules, should be the fittest. As in, thieving, cheating and lying tendencies should increase one’s access to all kinds of resources, resulting in increased survivability and the ability to produce more offspring. But clearly, guilt is a very widespread trait in the population today, so somehow those who were not affected or capable of this emotion were mostly wiped out of the gene pool.

The explanation is that our ancestors lived among small groups, in hostile environments and were completely dependent on each other for survival. Those who regularly cheated, lied or stole from other clan members were eventually caught and ostracized, which would of been a death sentence, and those who didn’t have these tendencies likely showed better restraint over their temptations, and thrived.

Guilt is a powerful form of self-punishment, and a valuable trait that increases a person’s fitness by deterring future reoccurrences of a behavior that could be seen as undesirable to the community. Over many generations, individuals who were especially prone to this emotion were more likely to form stronger social bonds, survive to adulthood, and produce offspring, thus creating the population we have today that widely expresses this trait.

Does this explanation seem plausible? Do you know an exception — someone who seemingly lacks the capacity for feeling guilt or shame?

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