Science Confirms the Obvious: Emotions Can Be Evoked Unconsciously
13 May 2008 Author: Bilig In: Science & Technology
Psychologist: “How are you feeling?”
Patient: “I feel like I want to punch the lights out of…out of…this anger management pillow printed with my boss’s photo!”
Psychologist: “So that emotion would be called…”
Patient: “Annoyance. Anger.”
Psychologist: “And why do you think that is?”
Patient: “Because he made me mad.”
Psychologist: “And…”
Patient: “Because I am insecure about being passed over for that promotion?”
Psychologist: “Go on…”
A fundamental credo of therapy is to first be aware of your emotions, preferably before they hijack your actions. But often we don’t immediately recognize that we’re feeling irritable, fearful, or disgusted, especially when our significant other is there to notice it first. And sometimes it takes a moment to pinpoint why.
A study in this month’s issue of the journal Psychological Science offers the first empirical evidence that humans don’t need to be aware of what triggered their mood in order to be affected by it. In fact, the authors—Kirsten Ruys and Diederik Stapel of Tilburg University in The Netherlands—mention in the paper that “most researchers deny the existence of unconscious emotions.” Who knew this phenomenon wasn’t common knowledge among psychologists?
Ruys and Stapel used a neat trick to prove their dissenting theory. They subjected study participants to 120-millisecond flashes on either the right of left side of a computer screen and asked them to quickly indicate the position. The “flashes” were actually fleeting images of growling dogs or unflushed toilets, which, the researchers discovered, unconsciously elicited feelings of fear or disgust.
It may seem strange we’ve developed a mind that can be unaware of its own feelings, but there is an evolutionary advantage of the ability. Read on to today’s post of Future Human—my online column on the continued evolution of humankind.
Science Confirms the Obvious: Shopping While Sad Increases Spending
13 May 2008 Author: Bilig In: Science & Technology
Researchers prove gloomy shoppers are less likely to keep it in check
The last time I made an impulse buy was Saturday night. I was swept into a bidding war with a burly man at a tattoo art auction, and in the end spent $275 on a terribly lovely piece of original flash that features, among other things, a hula-dancing wolf and a cockroach sporting a banner with the word “YUMMY.” Frivolous? Perhaps. But I was in a good mood and it was for a good cause—to support the chronically ill 9-month-old son of a NYC tattooist.
However, a new psychological study suggests that if I were sad and self-absorbed on Saturday, I may have paid even more. “The tendency to focus on oneself when sad drives this effect,” said lead author Cynthia E. Cryder, a doctoral student at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University. “Our studies revealed the more self-focused people were in the sad condition, the more money they spent.” The work, which was presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, has proven what we all know to be true—you’re more vulnerable to devil-may-care shopping when blue.
The researchers showed half of their test subjects a tear-jerker scene from the 1979 boxer-comeback movie The Champ. The other half watched a coral reef documentary. Then, all participants were asked to make an offer on ordinary goods, such as bottles of water. Those who saw the sad movie clip were willing to pony up almost three times as much as the documentary watchers on the same product.
What Cryder’s team hasn’t proved yet, however, is why sad people tend to do this. Says study co-author, Harvard social psychologist Jennifer Lerner, “More research is needed to determine whether participants are deliberately trying to improve their sense of self by acquiring goods.”
I’d put my money on yes.
Science Confirms the Obvious: Men Mistake Female Friendliness for Sexual Interest
13 May 2008 Author: Bilig In: Science & Technology
A study tests the theory that men over-sexualize social situations and finds a surprising exception to the rule
Sorry fellas, but she’s probably just being nice to you.
Many women know that men sometimes mistake friendliness—say, smiling and eye contact—for sexual interest. Psychological research has long backed up their experience. A new study appearing in the April issue of the journal Psychological Science is no exception. It found that college-age heterosexual men who viewed images of women misidentified their body language and facial expressions as sexually suggestive 12 percent of the time. Women made the same mistake only 8.7 percent of the time.
These findings are nothing new, but when the researchers ran the second part of the experiment a curious pattern emerged. It turns out the men weren’t simply over-sexualizing their social environments, as is popularly thought, but they were interpreting facial expressions and body language wrong altogether.
If men are truly over-sexualizing, say the authors, then they would be extra-adept at reading a sexual innuendo as such. But what men in fact did was frequently undersexualize women in that context—they read an expression that was intended to be a come-on as simply a friendly gesture.
The results could be useful for sexual-assault prevention programs. The thinking is that men who are at a higher risk of sexually coercing women would benefit from training on how to discern nonverbal cues more accurately. Mistakes could lead to feelings of frustration and rejection—potentially dangerous feelings for this subset of men.
