Letters Remain

Category: psychology

  • All About Placebo

    Wired has published what must be one of the most comprehensive articles looking at the phenomenon of the placebo effect. From its humble beginnings in WWII with anesthetist Henry Beecher to the placebo’s transition from being treated as a purely psychological trait to a physiological one; there’s some great material here. Two comprehensive analyses of…

  • Art and the Brain

    Jonah Lehrer, a neuroscientist and writer I’ve mentioned many times, has a wonderful article in Psychology Today that looks at the field of neuroaesthetics and how the brain interprets art. All the adjectives we use to describe art-vague words like “beauty” and “elegance”-should, in theory, have neural correlates. According to these scientists, there is nothing…

  • Moral Psychology and Innate Lying/Honesty

    We have based our society on the assumption that deciding to lie or to tell the truth is within our conscious control. But […] this assumption may be flawed and […] honesty may instead be the result of controlling a desire to lie (a conscious process) or of not feeling the temptation to lie in…

  • Social Ignorance and Surrogacy

    A vibrant social life and close friendships are an important part of staying healthy, many recent studies have shown, but what is strange about this is why this is the case, considering that we’re surpisingly bad at judging the beliefs, opinions and values of our friends and partners. A growing body of experimental evidence suggests…

  • On-Hold Music and Time Perception

    With the correct choice of music and by giving the perception of progress customers on-hold in a telephone queue underestimate the time they have been kept waiting and will stay on the line longer before hanging up. Newsweek summarises a number of research studies that have looked at the psychology behind telephone queues and on-hold…

  • The Universality of Facial Expressions

    Or not. It’s not just happiness that’s perceived differently across cultures: facial expressions are too. Recent research questioning the assumption that face processing and facial expression recognition is invariant has found that Western Caucasians and East Asians differ in how they process facial expressions. It is a widely held belief that many basic visual processes…

  • Privacy Salience and Social Networking Sites

    Privacy could become a competitive feature of social networking sites, suggests Bruce Schneier in an article that looks at the interesting topic of privacy salience: the suggestion that privacy reassurances make people more, not less, concerned. Privacy salience does a lot to explain social networking sites and their attitudes towards privacy. From a business perspective,…

  • The Problem with Happiness Research

    Talking of happiness, University of California philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel discusses the problem with the self-reporting of happiness for research purposes. If the intervention is obviously intended to increase happiness, participants may well report more happiness post-intervention simply to conform to their own expectations, or because they endorse a theory on which the intervention should increase happiness,…

  • The Universality of Happiness

    Or not. Research looking at how different cultures (specifically, Americans and Japanese) perceive the concept of happiness has shown that it’s not a universal constant, at least in terms of how we define it. [The researchers] systematically analyzed American and Japanese participants’ spontaneously produced descriptions of [happiness and unhappiness] and observed, as predicted, that whereas Americans…

  • Determination, Long-Terms Goals, Success

    Determination and long-term goal-setting may be more contributory to success than intelligence, suggests research being conducted by Angela Duckworth and her contemporaries. These two traits (perseverance and keeping long-term goals in mind) are affectionately called ‘grit’ by researchers in the field and—according to a 2007 paper on the subject (pdf)—play an important role in many…