Eye Contact May Make People More Resistant to Persuasion
October 2, 2013—Making eye contact has long been considered an effective way of drawing a listener in and bringing him or her around to your point of view. But new research shows that eye contact may actually make people more resistant to persuasion, especially when they already disagree. The new findings are published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
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Oxytocin Could Make Us More Accepting of Others
New York; October 1, 2013—Oxytocin, often referred to as the 'love hormone' because of its ability to promote mother-infant attachment and romantic bonding in adults, could also make us more accepting of other people, as found in new research carried out by Neuropsychoanalysis Foundation research grantee Valentina Colonnello Ph.D. and published online in Psychoneuroendocrinology.
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Our Networked Life
Does research suggest social networks are making us lonely?
September 23, 2013—Whenever a new technology becomes an integral part of human life, we may naturally wonder whether it will change our nature in addition to our lifestyle.
When the telephone was introduced, for instance, there were those who mused about its potential effects on social life as well as privacy. Would it make people more lazy? Create a faster-paced society? Would it interfere in family life or keep people from visiting friends face-to-face? Would it foster a sense of loneliness? Some observers concluded that these early social concerns were at least partly justified. The telephone, they suggested, may have connected people in one sense, but it also evoked “a palpable emptiness across which voices seemed uniquely disembodied and remote” (Stephen Kern,The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918).
Today we debate almost identical concerns about the Internet, particularly over the past decade as a wide variety of social network services and other forms of social media have come on the scene. Are online social networks making us lazy? Uncontrollably compromising our privacy? Are they interfering in our relationships and changing the very nature of intimacy in fundamental ways?
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Quitting Facebook: Why Do People Leave Social Networks?
New Rochelle, NY, September 16, 2013—If you are ready to commit "virtual identity suicide," delete your Facebook account, and say good-bye to social networking sites, you are not alone. A social networking counter movement is emerging, and Facebook quitters, who remove their accounts, differ from Facebook users in several key ways [if only slightly], as described in an article in Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, a peer-reviewed journal from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers.
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Nasal Inhalation of Oxytocin Improves Face Blindness
Can you say "prosopagnosia"?
September 6, 2013—Prosopagnosia (face blindness) may be temporarily improved following inhalation of the hormone oxytocin.
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Cultural Mythologies Strongly Influence Women's Expectations about Being Pregnant
NEW YORK CITY; August 10, 2013—Morning sickness, shiny hair, and bizarre and intense cravings for pickles and ice cream—what expectations do pregnant women impose on their bodies, and how are those expectations influenced by cultural perspectives on pregnancy?
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Degree of Extraversion in Early Adulthood Predicts Later Well-Being
July 17, 2013—Research from the University of Southampton has shown that young adults who are more outgoing or more emotionally stable are happier in later life than their more introverted or less emotionally stable peers.
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Parenting with Social Media Can Help Teens Feel Closer to Parents
July 15, 2013—Brigham Young University professors Sarah Coyne and Laura Padilla-Walker found that teenagers who are connected to their parents on social media feel closer to their parents in real life. Further, said researchers, "The more frequently parents used social media to interact with teens, the stronger the connection." The study of nearly 500 families also found that teens that interact with their parents on social media have higher rates of “pro-social” behavior—meaning that they are more generous, kind and helpful to others.
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The Power of Imitation
June 27, 2013—Being mimicked increases pro-social behaviour in adults, yet little is known about its social effect on children. Researchers of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, have now investigated whether the fact of being imitated had an influence on infants’ pro-social behaviour and on young children’s trust in another person.
In one study, eighteen-month-old infants were either mimicked or not by an experimenter. Later, when this experimenter or a different adult needed help, infants who had been imitated were more likely to help spontaneously. In a second study, five- to six-year-olds interacted with one experimenter who mimicked their choices and another experimenter who made independent choices. The researchers found that the children were more likely to trust the preferences and factual claims of the experimenter who had mimicked them before. These results demonstrate that already in infancy mimicry promotes a general pro-social orientation toward others and that in young children imitation is a powerful means of social influence in development.
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Your Child May Be A Dog
June 21, 2013—People have an innate need to establish close relationships with other people. But this natural bonding behaviour is not confined to humans: many animals also seem to need relationships with others of their kind. For domesticated animals the situation is even more complex and pets may enter deep relationships not only with conspecifics but also with their owners.
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Automated ‘Coach’ Could Help with Social Interactions
CAMBRIDGE, MA; June 14, 2013—Social phobias affect about 15 million adults in the United States, according to the National Institute of Mental Health, and surveys show that public speaking is high on the list of such phobias. For some people, these fears of social situations can be especially acute: For example, individuals with Asperger’s syndrome often have difficulty making eye contact and reacting appropriately to social cues. But with appropriate training, such difficulties can often be overcome.
Now, new software developed at MIT can be used to help people practice their interpersonal skills until they feel more comfortable with situations such as a job interview or a first date.
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When Friends Create Enemies: Potential Risks in Facebook's "Mutual Friends" Feature
PITTSBURGH; May 30, 2013 —The mutual-friends feature on social networks such as Facebook, which displays users’ shared friendships, might not be so “friendly.”
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Nobody Likes a 'Fat-Talker,' Notre Dame Study Shows
Notre Dame, IN; May 9, 2013—Women who engage in "fat talk"—the self-disparaging remarks girls and women make in relation to eating, exercise or their bodies—are less liked by their peers, a new study from the University of Notre Dame finds.
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Humor Styles and Bullying in School: No Laughing Matter
Staffordshire, UK; May 1, 2013—There is a clear link between children’s use of humor and their susceptibility to being bullied by their peers, according to a major new study released today by Keele University.
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Social Media Can Support Senior Health
April 16, 2013—The use of social media by older people can offer valuable additional support in cases of sickness and diseases, new research from the University of Luxembourg has shown.
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Low on Self-Control? Surrounding Yourself With Strong-Willed Friends May Help
APS, April 9, 2013—We all desire self-control—the resolve to skip happy hour and go to the gym instead, to finish a report before checking Facebook, to say no to the last piece of chocolate cake. Though many struggle to resist those temptations, new research suggests that people with low self-control prefer and depend on people with high self-control, possibly as a way to make up for the skills they themselves lack.
This research, conducted by psychological scientists Catherine Shea, Gráinne Fitzsimons, and Erin Davisson of Duke University, is published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
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Social Networking: Gen Xers Connect Online As Often As They Socialize in Person
ANN ARBOR; January 31, 2013—Young adults in Generation X are as likely to connect with friends, family and co-workers online as they are in person, according to a University of Michigan study.
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Never forget a Face(book): Memory for Online Posts Beats Faces and Books
January 15, 2013—People's memory for Facebook posts is strikingly stronger than their memory for human faces or sentences from books, according to a new study.
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Social Networks Sometimes Inflate Self-Esteem, Reduce Self-Control
PITTSBURGH/NEW YORK; January 14, 2013— Users of Facebook and other social networks should beware of allowing their self-esteem—boosted by "likes" or positive comments from close friends—to influence their behavior: It could reduce their self-control both on and offline, according to an academic paper by researchers at the University of Pittsburgh and Columbia Business School that has recently been published online in the Journal of Consumer Research.
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Loneliness, Like Chronic Stress, Taxes the Immune System
COLUMBUS, OH; January 13, 2013 —New research links loneliness to a number of dysfunctional immune responses, suggesting that being lonely has the potential to harm overall health. “It is clear from previous research that poor-quality relationships are linked to a number of health problems, including premature mortality and all sorts of other very serious health conditions. And people who are lonely clearly feel like they are in poor-quality relationships,” said Lisa Jaremka, postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Behavioral Medicine Research at Ohio State University and lead author of the research.
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Surprising Connections Between Well-Being and Giving, Getting, and Gratitude
NEW ORLEANS; January 19, 2013—We all know that getting a good night's sleep is good for our general health and well-being. But new research is highlighting a more surprising benefit of good sleep: more feelings of gratitude for relationships.
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Greed, Not Generosity, More Likely to Be 'Paid Forward'
With money or work, people are more likely to look out for themselves
WASHINGTON; December 18, 2012—Paying it forward—a popular expression for extending generosity to others after someone has been generous to you—is a heartwarming concept, but it is less common than repaying greed with greed, according to new research published by the American Psychological Association (APA).
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Growing Up Grateful Gives Teens Multiple Mental Health Benefits
More grateful teens less likely to be depressed, delinquent, study finds
ORLANDO, FL; August 5, 2012—Grateful teens are more likely than their less grateful peers to be happy, less likely to abuse drugs and alcohol and less likely to have behavior problems at school, according to research presented at the American Psychological Association's 120th Annual Convention.
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Facebook Gets a Psychological Review
June 12, 2012—Anyone as used and abused as Facebook has been since its 2004 creation would certainly qualify as a candidate for therapy; so it’s no surprise to find three psychologists checking out the online social network (hereafter to be referred to as an OSN) in the May 2012 issue of Perspectives on Psychological Science. These psychologists came to one important conclusion: We’ve already learned quite a bit about human behavior from Facebook, but there’s no doubt it can probably tell us a whole lot more.
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Number of Facebook Friends Linked to Size of Brain Regions
October 18, 2011—Scientists funded by the Wellcome Trust have found a direct link between the number of 'Facebook friends' a person has and the size of particular brain regions. In a study published today, researchers at University College London (UCL) also showed that the more Facebook friends a person has, the more 'real-world' friends they are likely to have.
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People: Who Needs Them?
September 21, 2011—It's not exactly breaking news that people are social beings. Even before the human need for social bonds was taken up for study by various sciences, it had long been recognized as a fundamental truth by writers and other observers of human nature. And yet the implications of this truth may sometimes pass unappreciated.
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