Persuasion
PsyBlog looks at thinking v. feeling when trying to persuade.
[I]f you want to persuade someone, then it’s useful to know whether they are a thinker or a feeler and target your message accordingly. If you don’t already know then the easiest way to find out is listen for whether they describe the world cognitively or affectively…
All Hands on Deck
Brains, animals, literal-metaphorical confusions–Robert Sapolsky considers, recalling this famous study along the way:
Volunteers would meet one of the experimenters, believing that they would be starting the experiment shortly. In reality, the experiment began when the experimenter, seemingly struggling with an armful of folders, asks the volunteer to briefly hold their coffee. As the key experimental manipulation, the coffee was either hot or iced. Subjects then read a description of some individual, and those who had held the warmer cup tended to rate the individual as having a warmer personality, with no change in ratings of other attributes.
Neuromarketing
Using brain science to make you buy things.
Neuromarketing’s raison d’être derives from the fact that the brain expends only 2 percent of its energy on conscious activity, with the rest devoted largely to unconscious processing…If pitches are to succeed, they need to reach the subconscious level of the brain, the place where consumers develop initial interest in products, inclinations to buy them and brand loyalty…
Living in the Moment
A app-based study supports mindfulness as a route to happiness.
“A human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind,” wrote psychologists Matthew A. Killingsworth and Daniel T. Gilbert of Harvard University who used an iPhone web app to gather 250,000 data points on people’s thoughts, feelings, and actions as they went about their lives.
Age and Happiness
Good news relayed by PsychCentral: Emotional Stability, Happiness Increase with Age
“As people get older, they’re more aware of mortality,” Carstensen said. “So when they see or experience moments of wonderful things, that often comes with the realization that life is fragile and will come to an end. But that’s a good thing. It’s a signal of strong emotional health and balance.”
Seeing Meat v. Aggression
In case you were wondering: Seeing Meat Makes People Significantly Less Aggressive.
“We used imagery of meat that was ready to eat. In terms of behaviour, with the benefit of hindsight, it would make sense that our ancestors would be calm, as they would be surrounded by friends and family at meal time,” Kachanoff explained. “I would like to run this experiment again, using hunting images…”
More Procrastination
This time, a long New Yorker article reviewing The Thief of Time: Philosophical Essays on Procrastination.
This is the perplexing thing about procrastination: although it seems to involve avoiding unpleasant tasks, indulging in it generally doesn’t make people happy. In one study, sixty-five per cent of students surveyed before they started working on a term paper said they would like to avoid procrastinating: they knew both that they wouldn’t do the work on time and that the delay would make them unhappy.
Erasing Trauma
Scientists giving mice electric shocks, tracking fear—
–noticed that an unusual protein appeared in the amygdala, a part of the brain involved in emotions. That molecule remained for only a few days and appeared to strengthen the brain circuit responsible for maintaining the fearful memory. But when the researchers eliminated the protein during this period, mice lost their fearful memory. Forever.
Your Flirting Style
A study says self-awareness about your flirting style helps dating, helps relationships.
“Knowing something about the way you communicate attraction says something about challenges you might have had in your past dating life,” Hall said. “Hopefully, this awareness can help people avoid those mistakes and succeed in courtship.”
The five styles of flirting named: physical, traditional, polite, sincere and playful (all detailed in the article).
Friends with Cognitive Benefits
A study likes conversation.
Talking with other people in a friendly way can make it easier to solve common problems, a new University of Michigan study shows. But conversations that are competitive in tone, rather than cooperative, have no cognitive benefits…