November 27, 2012
Are Your Facebook Friends Stressing You Out? (Yes.) The stress comes, Marder theorizes, from the kind of personal versioning that is so common in analog life — the fact that you (probably) behave slightly differently when you’re with your mom than you do when you’re with your boss, or with your boyfriend, or with your dentist. And it comes, even more specifically, from the social nuance of that versioning behavior colliding with the blunt social platform that is The Facebook. Behaviors like swearing and drinking and smoking, the study suggests, are behaviors that you (might) do with friends — but not (probably) with your boss. And, more subtly, language that you might use with your friends — in-jokes, slang, references to Breaking Bad — probably won’t track when you’re not with your friends. The awareness of that discrepancy — Facebook’s tendency to disseminate even highly targeted social interactions — leads to stress. Read more. [Image: Shutterstock]

Are Your Facebook Friends Stressing You Out? (Yes.)

The stress comes, Marder theorizes, from the kind of personal versioning that is so common in analog life — the fact that you (probably) behave slightly differently when you’re with your mom than you do when you’re with your boss, or with your boyfriend, or with your dentist. And it comes, even more specifically, from the social nuance of that versioning behavior colliding with the blunt social platform that is The Facebook. Behaviors like swearing and drinking and smoking, the study suggests, are behaviors that you (might) do with friends — but not (probably) with your boss. And, more subtly, language that you might use with your friends — in-jokes, slang, references to Breaking Bad — probably won’t track when you’re not with your friends. The awareness of that discrepancy — Facebook’s tendency to disseminate even highly targeted social interactions — leads to stress.

Read more. [Image: Shutterstock]

1:45pm
(Notes: 308)
  
Filed under: Social Media Relationships Stress Psychology Facebook 
November 8, 2012

No Flowers on the Psych Ward

Enter the flower shop. After a particularly hard day, I see a glass window reading “New Leaf Flores.” I am greeted with vibrant oranges and twigs. I walk in and the owners offer me a glass of red wine. Their shop quickly becomes my mental health salvation. Every Friday, after walking the white walls of the ward, I walk to their flower shop and spend the evening taking thorns off red roses.

Psychiatric hospitals have no flowers. Visitors do not bring them. They usually bring toothpaste, deodorant and underwear. I ask my supervisor if I can bring leftover flowers from the shop. “Glass vases,” he shakes his head. I find plastic vases and sneak in de-thorned pink roses. A patient asks, “Can I give one to my girl?” The next day, the flowers and plastic vases vanish.

So many items cannot come onto a locked psychiatric ward. Administration looks at everything as a possible weapon of self or mass destruction. No curtains. No jewelry. No art. No glass. And, I learn, no flowers, no plants, no nature.

Read more. [Image: Anna Schuleit, John Gray]

12:33pm
(Notes: 283)
  
Filed under: Psychology Health Mental health Flowers 
August 7, 2012
Pareidolia: A Bizarre Bug of the Human Mind Emerges in Computers This rocky hill in Ebihens, France, is, well, just that — a rocky hill in Ebihens, France. But to pretty much any human observer, the assemblage of meaningless angles takes on a familiar appearance, that of a human face in profile. It has a distinct nose, eyes, lips, and chin, capped off with some foliage as hair. From the perspective pictured above, it’s impossible not to see a man in a mountain. This is an example of a phenomenon known as pareidolia, the human tendency to read significance into random or vague stimuli (both visual and auditory). […] Humans are not alone in their quest to “see” human faces in the sea of visual cues that surrounds them. For decades, scientists have been training computers to do the same. And, like humans, computers display pareidolia.  Though there is something basely human about the tendency to see faces in the non-human shapes around us, to anthropomorphize odd pieces of hardware or rocks on a hillside, that computers see humans where there are none should not be all too surprising. Facial-recognition software is a tough technological feat, and in the process, computers are bound to come up with false positives. Does this make the computers more like us? Have they taken on our most human cognitive errors? In a superficial sense, yes, computers do make errors that are similar to pareidolia, and this seems very human. But as you look into these computer false-positives a bit more, you find a different story. Read more. [Image: Wikimedia Commons]

Pareidolia: A Bizarre Bug of the Human Mind Emerges in Computers

This rocky hill in Ebihens, France, is, well, just that — a rocky hill in Ebihens, France. But to pretty much any human observer, the assemblage of meaningless angles takes on a familiar appearance, that of a human face in profile. It has a distinct nose, eyes, lips, and chin, capped off with some foliage as hair. From the perspective pictured above, it’s impossible not to see a man in a mountain.

This is an example of a phenomenon known as pareidolia, the human tendency to read significance into random or vague stimuli (both visual and auditory). […]

Humans are not alone in their quest to “see” human faces in the sea of visual cues that surrounds them. For decades, scientists have been training computers to do the same. And, like humans, computers display pareidolia. 

Though there is something basely human about the tendency to see faces in the non-human shapes around us, to anthropomorphize odd pieces of hardware or rocks on a hillside, that computers see humans where there are none should not be all too surprising. Facial-recognition software is a tough technological feat, and in the process, computers are bound to come up with false positives. Does this make the computers more like us? Have they taken on our most human cognitive errors? In a superficial sense, yes, computers do make errors that are similar to pareidolia, and this seems very human. But as you look into these computer false-positives a bit more, you find a different story.

Read more. [Image: Wikimedia Commons]

10:52am
(Notes: 436)
  
Filed under: Science Tech Psychology Pareidolia 
April 26, 2012
Wikipedia and the Shifting Definition of ‘Expert’ Part of the beauty of Wikipedia is the hope that through its openness and its anonymity it could democratize the process of how knowledge gets built and organized. Last year The Awl published an essay “Wikipedia and the Death of the Expert,” in which Maria Bustillos argued, “Wikipedia, along with other crowd-sourced resources, is wreaking a certain amount of McLuhanesque havoc on conventional notions of ‘authority,’ ‘authorship,’ and even ‘knowledge.’ ” Online, the crowd was knocking the individual off its throne as the arbiter of information. As Bustillos quoted Clay Shirky, “On Wikipedia ‘the author’ is distributed, and this fact is indigestible to current models of thinking.” But, of course, this kind of collaboration doesn’t itself imply the absence of expertise. Experts can, after all, collaborate together. And Wikipedia certainly benefits from academics with specialized knowledge developing and patrolling articles they care about. (This is particularly true when measured in terms of Wikipedia’s breadth — it’s hard to imagine many of the extremely technical scientific articles existing at all without the input of scientists who made it their business to fill out the encyclopedia’s periphery.) So “experts” in the traditional sense (e.g. academic pedigrees) do still matter in this collaborative environment. But a new study from researchers at Stanford University and Yahoo Research points to a complementary phenomenon: The definition of what makes someone an expert is changing. They search for expertise in Wikipedia’s pages, and they find it, but what they’re looking for — what they call expertise — uses different signals to project itself. Expertise, to these researchers, isn’t who a writer is but what a writer knows, as measured by what they read online. Read more. [Image: Wikimedia Commons]

Wikipedia and the Shifting Definition of ‘Expert’

Part of the beauty of Wikipedia is the hope that through its openness and its anonymity it could democratize the process of how knowledge gets built and organized. Last year The Awl published an essay “Wikipedia and the Death of the Expert,” in which Maria Bustillos argued, “Wikipedia, along with other crowd-sourced resources, is wreaking a certain amount of McLuhanesque havoc on conventional notions of ‘authority,’ ‘authorship,’ and even ‘knowledge.’ ” Online, the crowd was knocking the individual off its throne as the arbiter of information. As Bustillos quoted Clay Shirky, “On Wikipedia ‘the author’ is distributed, and this fact is indigestible to current models of thinking.”

But, of course, this kind of collaboration doesn’t itself imply the absence of expertise. Experts can, after all, collaborate together. And Wikipedia certainly benefits from academics with specialized knowledge developing and patrolling articles they care about. (This is particularly true when measured in terms of Wikipedia’s breadth — it’s hard to imagine many of the extremely technical scientific articles existing at all without the input of scientists who made it their business to fill out the encyclopedia’s periphery.)

So “experts” in the traditional sense (e.g. academic pedigrees) do still matter in this collaborative environment. But a new study from researchers at Stanford University and Yahoo Research points to a complementary phenomenon: The definition of what makes someone an expert is changing. They search for expertise in Wikipedia’s pages, and they find it, but what they’re looking for — what they call expertise — uses different signals to project itself. Expertise, to these researchers, isn’t who a writer is but what a writer knows, as measured by what they read online.

Read more. [Image: Wikimedia Commons]

4:49pm
(Notes: 62)
  
Filed under: Wikipedia Expertise Knowledge Psychology Tech Internet 
April 23, 2012
Why Men Love Guns: Holding One Makes Them Look Taller and More Muscular University of California, Los Angeles, anthropologists led by Daniel Fessler asked 628 online respondents to guess the height of four men based solely on photographs of their hands holding either a caulk, electric drill, large saw, or handgun. They also showed photos of progressively taller and pictures of increasingly more muscular men, and asked the subjects to estimate which images came closest to the probable size and strength of the hand model. […] The participants judged the men who were holding a gun to be taller and more muscular than the men with the other objects, even though the hands of the models were all the same size. On average, they judged pistol-packers to be 17 percent bigger and stronger than the ones holding the sealant, who were considered the wimpiest of the bunch. […] We may have an unconscious mental mechanism that projects our assessment of a potential threat in terms of the size and strength of our adversary. “There’s nothing about the knowledge that gun powder makes lead bullets fly through the air at damage-causing speeds that should make you think that a gun-bearer is bigger or stronger, yet you do,” says Fessler in a statement. “Danger really does loom large — in our minds.” Read more. [Image: Shutterstock]

Why Men Love Guns: Holding One Makes Them Look Taller and More Muscular

University of California, Los Angeles, anthropologists led by Daniel Fessler asked 628 online respondents to guess the height of four men based solely on photographs of their hands holding either a caulk, electric drill, large saw, or handgun. They also showed photos of progressively taller and pictures of increasingly more muscular men, and asked the subjects to estimate which images came closest to the probable size and strength of the hand model. […]

The participants judged the men who were holding a gun to be taller and more muscular than the men with the other objects, even though the hands of the models were all the same size. On average, they judged pistol-packers to be 17 percent bigger and stronger than the ones holding the sealant, who were considered the wimpiest of the bunch. […]

We may have an unconscious mental mechanism that projects our assessment of a potential threat in terms of the size and strength of our adversary. “There’s nothing about the knowledge that gun powder makes lead bullets fly through the air at damage-causing speeds that should make you think that a gun-bearer is bigger or stronger, yet you do,” says Fessler in a statement. “Danger really does loom large — in our minds.”

Read more. [Image: Shutterstock]

11:03am
(Notes: 78)
  
Filed under: Guns Science Psychology 
April 16, 2012
Did Humans Invent Music?

curiositycounts:

Food for thought: Is music a deep biological adaptation in its own right, or is it a cultural invention based mostly on our other capacities for language, learning, and emotion? And if music is an adaptation, did it really evolve to promote mating success as Darwin thought, or other for benefits such as group cooperation or mother-infant bonding?

The debaters: NYU professor Gary Marcus, who says that music is best seen as a cultural invention, and University of New Mexico professor Geoffrey Miller, who thinks that it’s the product of sexual selection and an adaptation that’s been with humans for millennia. Let’s get it on!

4:30pm
(Notes: 238)
  
Filed under: Music History Psychology Evolution Biology Science 
March 29, 2012
Is Wall Street Full of Psychopaths? While the common perception of a psychopath is an axe-wielding serial killer, that is not usually the case. Psychopaths are not all violent criminals (though some are). Psychopathy is a psychological condition based on well-established diagnostic criteria, including superficial charm, conning, and manipulative behavior, lack of empathy and remorse, and a willingness to take risks. Determining whether a person is a psychopath is usually done by using a test like the Psychopathy Checklist - Revised (PCL-R), developed by Robert Hare and his colleagues. People are rated on a scale of 0 to 40 points; presumably, everyone scores a few points, and true psychopaths score in the top 25 percent of the scale. Using such formal diagnostic criteria, researchers have estimated that about three million Americans (one percent of the population) are psychopaths. Based on this statistic alone, there are psychopaths on Wall Street. And, it would make sense that a disproportionate number might work on Wall Street. Certain maladaptive personality traits (a lack of empathy, an increased willingness to take risks) might be considered desirable in some settings (a cautious person overly concerned with the feelings of others might not be the best fit at an investment firm). Read more. [Image: Wikimedia Commons]

Is Wall Street Full of Psychopaths?

While the common perception of a psychopath is an axe-wielding serial killer, that is not usually the case. Psychopaths are not all violent criminals (though some are). Psychopathy is a psychological condition based on well-established diagnostic criteria, including superficial charm, conning, and manipulative behavior, lack of empathy and remorse, and a willingness to take risks.

Determining whether a person is a psychopath is usually done by using a test like the Psychopathy Checklist - Revised (PCL-R), developed by Robert Hare and his colleagues. People are rated on a scale of 0 to 40 points; presumably, everyone scores a few points, and true psychopaths score in the top 25 percent of the scale. Using such formal diagnostic criteria, researchers have estimated that about three million Americans (one percent of the population) are psychopaths. Based on this statistic alone, there are psychopaths on Wall Street.

And, it would make sense that a disproportionate number might work on Wall Street. Certain maladaptive personality traits (a lack of empathy, an increased willingness to take risks) might be considered desirable in some settings (a cautious person overly concerned with the feelings of others might not be the best fit at an investment firm).

Read more. [Image: Wikimedia Commons]

10:30am
(Notes: 178)
  
Filed under: Wall Street Business Psychopathy Psychology Science Health 
September 21, 2011
"When we engage with people who have different assumptions about what is right, wrong, good, bad, beautiful, ugly – whose fundamental beliefs and values are different – it challenges our thinking. People stop and think, ‘If they can be right, how can I be right?’ People don’t like that imbalance, so they have to reconcile those differences and those thoughts. It leads to more complex minds, and makes people more cognitively complex."

— Why demographic diversity is key to the fight for the creative class (via curiositycounts)

(via curiositycounts)

9:00am
(Notes: 210)
  
Filed under: cities psychology behavior 
August 17, 2011
Maslow 2.0: A New and Improved Recipe for Happiness What are the ingredients for happiness? It’s a question that has been addressed time and again, and now a study based on the first-ever globally representative poll on well-being has some answers about whether or not a pioneering theory is actually correct. Read more at The Atlantic

Maslow 2.0: A New and Improved Recipe for Happiness

What are the ingredients for happiness? It’s a question that has been addressed time and again, and now a study based on the first-ever globally representative poll on well-being has some answers about whether or not a pioneering theory is actually correct.

Read more at The Atlantic

10:24am
(Notes: 1,052)
  
Filed under: science psychology 
June 20, 2011
High Wired: Does Addictive Internet Use Restructure the Brain?

infoneer-pulse:

Kids spend an increasing fraction of their formative years online, and it is a habit they dutifully carry into adulthood. Under the right circumstances, however, a love affair with the Internet may spiral out of control and even become an addiction.

Whereas descriptions of online addiction are controversial at best among researchers, a new study cuts through much of the debate and hints that excessive time online can physically rewire a brain.

» via Scientific American

10:20am
(Notes: 134)
  
Filed under: tech technology internet psychology brain science addiction information 
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