159 news posts in Psychology

Psychology

14 Jul 2016

Opposites attract – unless you’re in a relationship

by Alice Rolandini Jensen, Frontiersin.org If we are in a relationship we are more likely to be attracted to faces resembling our own, but for single people, opposites attract. Relationship status affects who and what we find attractive, found a study published in Frontiers in Psychology. Dr Jitka Lindová of Charles University in the Czech Republic and her team showed a series of photographs of faces to university students and asked them to rate their attractiveness. The photographs were digitally manipulated so that the resemblance to the student was modified. Images were of an individual of the opposite sex, whose face had been manipulated to look either more or less similar to the student. They were also presented with images of a same-sex individual manipulated in the same way. “We found that single participants, those not in relationships, rate dissimilar faces as more attractive and sexy than self-resembling faces;” stated Lindová. This was observed when participants rated both same-sex and opposite-sex faces. “For the first time, we have observed how our partnership status affects who we find attractive;” she added. “Our interpretation is that attractiveness perception mechanisms that give us a preference for a genetically suitable partner may be suppressed […]

Psychology

30 Jun 2016

Thinking ‘I can do better’ really can improve performance

by Susan Haas, Frontiersin.org Online training really can help to improve performance, a study published in Frontiers in Psychology has found. Over 44,000 people took part in an experiment to discover what motivational techniques really worked. In conjunction with BBC Lab UK, Professor Andrew Lane and his colleagues tested which physiological skills would help people improve their scores in an online game. This complex study examined if one motivational method would be more effective for any specific aspect of a task. The methods tested were self-talk, imagery, and if-then planning. Each of these psychological skills was applied to one of four parts of a competitive task: process, outcome, arousal-control, and instruction. People using self-talk, for example telling yourself “I can do better next time” – performed better than the control group in every portion of the task. The greatest improvements were seen in self-talk-outcome (telling yourself, “I can beat my best score”), self-talk-process (telling yourself, “I can react quicker this time”), imagery-outcome (imagining yourself playing the game and beating your best score), and imagery-process (imagining yourself playing and reacting quicker than last time). They also found a short motivational video could improve performance. Participants watched a short video before playing the […]

Psychology

13 Jun 2016

Children less likely to trust ugly people

A new study shows that children judge us on our looks – and beauty wins out on trustworthiness ratings by Abigail Pattenden, Frontiersin.org Is beauty only skin deep? Children don’t seem to think so, like adults and babies, children think the uglier you are, the less trustworthy you are. In a study recently published in Frontiers in Psychology, researchers have found that as children, how we perceive someone’s trustworthiness is linked to how attractive we find them. Our ability to make this trustworthiness judgement develops as we grow, becoming more consistent as we approach adulthood, and, girls are better at it than boys. Many psychology studies have proven the existence of the so-called “beauty stereotype”. This describes the phenomenon whereby more attractive people are also considered to be smarter, more sociable and more successful. To be attractive is to be treated better by your peers, and preferred by new-born babies, than uglier people. People use facial cues to make judgements on a person’s character – and this ability to infer social traits is a crucial part of social functioning and development. Although well researched in babies and adults, the development of this ability in children was not previously known. Understanding […]

Psychology

09 Jun 2016

Witnesses can identify criminals by smell

Human nose-witnesses identify criminals in a lineup of body odor By Alice Rolandini Jensen, Frontiers science writer Move over sniffer dogs, people who witnessed a crime are able to identify criminals by their smell. Police lineups normally rely on sight, but nose-witnesses can be just as reliable as eye-witnesses, new research published in Frontiers in Psychology has found. “Police often use human eye-witnesses, and even ear-witnesses, in lineups but, to date, there have not been any human nose-witnesses;” explained Professor Mats Olsson, experimental psychologist at the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden; “We wanted to see if humans can identify criminals by their body odor.” Dogs have been used to identify criminals through body odor identification in court, but it is commonly thought that the human sense of smell is inferior to that of other mammals. However, research shows that humans have the ability to distinguish individuals by their unique body odor. Our olfactory sense is often associated with emotional processing and is directly linked to the areas of the brain associated with emotion and memory; the hippocampus and the amygdala. To find out more about human odor memory following stressful events, Olsson and his team investigated how well we identify body odor […]

Psychology

24 May 2016

Money really does matter in relationships

By Fernando Bolaños, Frontiersin.org Our romantic choices are not just based on feelings and emotions, but how rich we feel compared to others, a new study published in Frontiers in Psychology has found. “We wanted a better understanding of the psychological importance of money in the development of romantic relationships because very little is known about this subject. That way people would have a better perspective of the relationships they are in,” explained Prof. Darius Chan from the Department of Psychology, at the University of Hong Kong. Two experiments were performed on groups of Chinese college students already involved in heterosexual long term relationships. The couples were made to think they were either wealthy or poor to examine their mating behaviour. In the first study they found the wealthy men were less satisfied with their current partners’ physical attractiveness and were more interested in short-term relationships than those who were made to feel that they had less money. However, women who felt wealthy did not make higher demands regarding the men’s physical appearance. All of the wealthy participants in the second study found it easier to interact with an attractive member of the opposite sex than those belonging to a […]

Psychology

11 May 2016

Swedes or Italians: Who is more likely to cheat on their taxes?

By Tania FitzGeorge-Balfour, Frontiers science writer Wide variations can be seen in how far citizens from different countries evade tax. While this can be attributed to how well institutions deter tax avoidance through audits and fines, cultural differences may also play a part. New research, reported in the open-access journal Frontiers in Psychology, suggests that two countries, with contrasting reputations for trustworthiness, can show subtle differences in their compliance for paying taxes. “Our experiments demonstrate that Italians on average are just as honest as Swedes. Interestingly, however, Italians are more likely to ‘fudge’ (cheat a little), whereas if a Swede decides to cheat, he is more likely to go all the way,” says Sven Steinmo, Professor at the Robert Schuman Center for Advanced Study in Florence, Italy, co-author of this study. Participants for this research were recruited from Italy and Sweden. Swedes think that honesty is a typical national trait, whereas the trustworthiness of Italians is ranked as low, not only by other EU countries, but by Italians themselves. The subjects were asked to perform an experimental task that mirrored features of tax systems used by many countries. Currency units earned at the start of the test were reported voluntarily, […]

Psychology

10 May 2016

Study shows where you are is who you are

A recent study suggests that who we are might be more integrated with where we are than previously thought. Demonstrating how architects and urban planners might take guidance from disciplines like neuroscience, philosophy and psychology, a paper published in Frontiers in Psychology, reveals that a good built environment might promote well-being and effect our decisions. Contrary to the idea that we are separate from what we experience, the study claims that we ought to think about how the environment we create might, in turn, be used to create us. With this in mind, the scientists investigated how the way we interact with space defines how we identify ourselves and our capabilities. “The built environment can restrict or promote spatial cognition, which can influence one’s self-hood,” the researchers explain. “Our spatial coordinates and our ‘selves’ are intertwined.” According to the researchers, we understand our environment differently depending on our experience of it. For example, learning your way through a space using a map gives a different understanding than through learning your own route. In a mapped environment, the tendency is to think of objects in relation to one another, whereas finding your own way might lead to thinking about the space […]

Psychology

08 Apr 2016

Children’s interactions more complex than predicted

By Fernando Bolaños, science writer While sharing toys and fighting with each other, kindergarten children helped researchers understand the patterns and qualities of interactions in social groups. The results were much more complex than the scientists originally predicted. “We rightfully realize that social networks are important for many aspects of our lives. Yet when asked to define networks, we normally define them as ‘any interaction’, or only a specific type of interaction. We thought this does not reflect the richness of our social behaviors or the relative relationships between types of behaviors. We wanted to begin to address this,” said Jonathan Schneider, researcher from the Department of Biology at the University of Toronto. To better understand the dynamics of these social interactions, the researchers carried out an investigation using a layered social network analysis. Their research was recently published in Frontiers in Psychology. The researchers analyzed the structure of social interactions of 338 children between 4 to 6 years of age. All the children were kindergarteners attending public schools in Berkeley, California. The social exchanges took place in 29 classrooms. “We noticed previous analyses presumed the hierarchical relationships between kids and we wanted to investigate this assumption. So we developed […]