Are You Hurting? Think of Someone You Love

In a recent study, women who held their boyfriend's hand while being subjected to "moderately painful heat stimuli" reported feeling less pain. The women were given the stimuli while holding their boyfriend's hand, a ball or a male stranger's hand.

In a second test, women were pained again, but while being shown a picture of a chair, a stranger or their boyfriend. Once again, those who were shown pictures of their boyfriends said they felt less pain.

As the article suggests:

The study was small, however, and more research would be needed to confirm the findings and figure out exactly what's going on. The results are detailed in the November 2009 issue of the journal Psychological Science.

Eisenberger and colleagues say the study suggests practical advice: If you're going through a stressful or painful experience, and you don't have a loved one handy, at least find a photo.

Your Face Is Too Angry

Keeping with the face trend here, research shows a link between facial width-to-height ration (WHR) and aggression.

The WHR measures from the right and left cheeks and the distance from the upper lip to mid-brow bone. The change between the sexes in WHR occurs during puberty, when males develop a greater ratio.

Research has shown people with higher WHR have more aggression than in those with smaller WHR. This has been supported by studies of hockey players--greater WHRs earned more penalty points per game.

Psychologists wanted to know if people can predict aggression based on faces alone. Volunteers rated faces of people who were already assessed for hostile behavior after looking at them for 2000milliseconds or 39milliseconds.

Surprisingly, volunteers were highly correct in guessing the assessed aggressive people and corresponded with those with high WHR.

Put THAT away!: Can Men Control Their Arousal?

As both sexes can know unwelcomed...um...boners are awkward. Super awkward. I know most girls assume that this an uncontrolled response. Sexyness = erection. However, what if men can control it?

Then they'd be liars and or too lazy to bother.

Researchers showed men 16 random clips of which 8 were erotic and 8 were funny featuring comedian Mitch Hedberg (to remove the accidental sexy factor). The participants were then ordered to control their response to certain videos while freely watching others. They then were asked to rate their arousal. Also during the study, there were hooked to machines measuring their erections.

On average, men were able to control their response when asked, resulting in about a 25% decrease in erectile response. One scientist notes that "This is consistent with success rates from previous, well-controlled [measuring-device] faking studies in which success rates range from 26 to 38 percent." Men who were able to control themselves when watching porn videos also able to do so while watching Mitch Hedberg.

“The finding that was most surprising was that some men became more sexually aroused when they tried to regulate their sexual arousal,” Winters says. “In other words, they responded more strongly (both physiologically and self-reported) during trials in which they attempted to regulate their arousal than trials during which they merely watched the stimuli. We attributed this increased response to anxiety — in this case, demand anxiety. It’s sort of like when you tell someone not to think of a white elephant; those [who] are most anxious during the task have the most trouble not thinking about the white elephant.”

It appeared that the factors that DID NOT affect ability to regulate were:

-sexual experience

-sexual compulsivity

-age

However, the following factors DID affect it:

-sexual excitability

-desire

-inhibition

So the next time girls, when they say "I can't help it!" just go "Maybe you aren't trying hard enough!!"

Beat your kids, beat their brains: Spanking lowers IQs

Spare the rod, spoil the child...and keep their IQ?

Proponents of corporal punishments on children are taking hit as a recent study shows that the IQs of 2-4 yr olds that were regularly spanked over 4 years were lowered more than 5 points than the unspanked.

Previous studies have shown that children who have been hit show lesser gray matter in their brains (less neurons) therefore have slower cognitive development.

In 1986 a previous study measured the IQ of 1510 2- to 9-year olds and also noted how often their mothers meted out corporal punishment. The researchers repeated the IQ tests four years later. The figures revealed that 93 per cent of mothers had spanked 2- to 4-year-olds once or more per week, whereas only 58 per cent had turned to physical discipline with the older kids. Nearly half of toddlers' moms had spanked their children three or more times per week, Straus and Paschall found.Four years later, younger children who had never felt their mother's palm had gained an average of 5.5 IQ points compared with kids who had suffered corporal punishment, while older unspanked children had gained 2 IQ points, on average.

Although spanking is related to lowered IQ, the biggest difference in the intelligence of a child is whether or the parents provided adequate cognitive stimulation. The study shows that cognitive stimulation is more important that corporal punishment.

Lost? Then You Probably Are Going In Circles

The Circular Reasoning can be found on ScienceNews.org

From the Max Planck Institute in Germany, scientists have found that people tend to walk in circles in unfamiliar terrain. It is hypothesized this is because when people have no clue to direction, they rely on their own body to tell them which way they are going.

This includes "rotational shifts and joint movements" which tell the person where straight this. Since this isn't accurate at all, error makes the person eventually drift to a side.

“You may think that you’re walking in a straight line, but in fact the direction you’re walking in is drifting more and more away from straight ahead, making you walk in circles,” Souman says.

Researchers have found that people start to lose their sense of straight after walking the length of a football field. In one experiment, 3 men were put in the Sahara desert and were told to walk straight. Two walked during the day and one at night with a full moon. It turned out the day-walkers "veered off course but did not go in circles." However, the night man seemed to make several turns, almost walking backwards when the moon hid the clouds.

In another study, 6 college students walked in a German forest which gave no clues to direction. Four walked on a cloudy day and all 4 walked in circles; only 3 of them realized they were doing so. The remaining two walked on a sunny day and went straight only wavering when the sun was hid by the clouds.

In a third study, 15 students were blindfolded and had to walk straight down a field. All but three walked in circles no more than 20m wide.

However, this new research proves to be useful to someone in a horror movie:

In emergency situations, cinematic monster hunters and others may become so panicked that they disregard external heading cues and unintentionally end up back where they started, Souman suggests.

STOP STARING AT US!

From directly livescience.com

"A British survey finds the average guy stares at 10 different women for a total of 43 minutes of daily ogling. That adds up to nearly a year of time between age 18 and 50, The Telegraph reports.

Women watch, too. In the survey of 3,000 people, women were found to stare at men for more than 20 minutes a day.

A U.S. study last year found — no surprise — that single women will look at a man longer than married women do."

Why Scrooge McDuck Is Never Sad-Money Reduces Pain

Why is Scrooge McDuck and Montgomery Burns never depressed? Because they are rich.

A study published in June 2009 Psychological Science tested the effects of money on physical and emotional pain from social rejection. Participants were unaware of the research's true focus.

Trial 1- Students count money then play a computer game in which they are intentionally snubbed but what they think are other human players. To test physical pain, students counted money then had their fingers dipped in 122F water. In both conditions, students with money had reported lower emotional and physical pain than the control group, who had counted blank paper.

How do you know the participants aren't just distracted by the sight of $800, the most money they will have in their hands during their entire college career??

Trial 2-Instead of counting money, students wrote down their expenses for last month (control group did weather). They then either were put down by the computer game or burned their fingers off. Results? Students who discussed their finances reported increased pain and social distress from the game.

The conclusion is money, either real or symbolic, is the key to our social interactions and therefore our emotional well-being (ie rich=popular). To explain the physical pain:

"The emerging hypothesis is that early in the evolution of social interactions, our brains took a shortcut to handle the new system: instead of laying down new biological hardware to process things like relationships and culture, human brains hacked their older hardware that deals with physical pain and gave it the double duty of handling social interactions."

This basically means our brains were lazy, didn't want to figure out social interactions, and was like f*ck it, we are going to make pain associated with other people.


...I don't know about you, but lack of money AND other people does cause me physical pain.