Letters Remain

Tag: psychology

  • 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,…

  • 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…

  • Context and Aesthetic Judgements

    It’s no surprise that perceived context is important in influencing people’s decisions. A recent experiment has shown that people rate pictures as more aesthetically pleasing (and actually experience more pleasure while viewing them) if they believe they come from art galleries. Aesthetic judgments, like most judgments, depend on context. Whether an object or image is…

  • Technology in the Classroom

    Teachers are using technology in the classroom as a crutch, rather than a tool to increase their quality of teaching, proposes José A. Bowen, Dean of the Meadows School of the Arts, and this is why he’s removing computers from his classrooms. Resistance was high, both from teachers and students, but research has linked boredom in…

  • Goal Setting and Affluence

    You’ve heard of the Yale Goal-Setting Study, right? The one that goes like this: In 1953 a team of researchers interviewed Yale’s graduating seniors, asking them whether they had written down the specific goals that they wanted to achieve in life. Twenty years later the researchers tracked down the same cohort and found that the…

  • The Ideal Creative Workspace

    Jonah Lehrer suggests that the ideal creative workplace is “a room with blue walls that feels very far away and is filled with references to foreign countries”. Why would these three conditions be conducive to creativity? Colours can influence how we think (in one experiment, red backgrounds were found to make participants more accurate, while…

  • The Negative Effect of Positive Thinking

    An entire industry has been created and thrives based solely on the theories of positive psychology: self affirmations help to motivate, we are told, and they may even help those with low self-esteem build their confidence. Now research is starting to show the opposite: that self affirmations (or ‘positive self-statements’) have a negative effect on…

  • Epiphanies Through Daydreams

    Research aimed at discovering how ‘Eureka moments’ are triggered and how these moments of clarity and insight differ from typical methodical reasoning has found that not only are epiphanies more likely when we’re daydreaming, but our state of mind before we tackle a problem is also crucial. They materialize without warning, often through an unconscious…