Flirtatious Women Score More

Posted on 2012/10/222012/10/23 by Jason Hensel

Jessie States wrote the following for another blog. I’m posting it on here, because I find that it’s a really interesting study. It’s one of those topics that is known to be true, but quietly ignored in the hopes that it will go away. It won’t go away, though, if it’s not discussed.

Flirtation is an effective way for women to gain negotiating mileage, according to a new study by Haas School of Business Professor Laura Kray. And the whole idea that it works kind of makes my stomach turn. But I get it.

“Women are uniquely confronted with a tradeoff in terms of being perceived as strong versus warm. Using feminine charm in negotiation is a technique that combines both,” said Kray, who holds the Warren E. and Carol Spieker Chair in Leadership at the Haas School.

The study, “Feminine Charm: An Experimental Analysis of its Costs and Benefits in Negotiations,” was published in October in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin and co-authored by Haas Ph.D. alumna Connson C. Locke of the London School of Economics and Haas Ph.D. candidate Alex B. Van Zant.

Flirtation that generates positive results, Kray says, is not overt sexual advances but authentic, engaging behavior without serious intent. In fact, the study found female flirtation signals attractive qualities such as confidence, which is considered essential to successful negotiators.

To determine whether women who flirt are more effective in negotiating than men who flirt, the researchers asked 100 participants to evaluate to what extent they use social charm in negotiation on a one-to-seven scale. Earlier that week, the participants evaluated their partners’ negotiating effectiveness. Women who said they used more social charm were rated more effective by their partners. However, men who said they used more social charm were not regarded as more effective.

In the second experiment, the researchers asked subjects to imagine they were selling a car worth US$1,200 and asked for how much would they sell the car. Next, the subjects read one of two scenarios about a potential buyer named Sue.

The first group meets Sue, who shakes hands when she meets the seller, smiles, and says, “It’s a pleasure to meet you,” and then “What’s your best price?” in a serious tone. The second group reads an alternate scenario in which Sue greets the seller by smiling warmly, looking the seller up and down, touching the seller’s arm, and saying, “You’re even more charming than over email,” followed by a playful wink and asking, “What’s your best price?”

The result? Male sellers were willing to give the “playful Sue” more than $100 off the selling price whereas they weren’t as willing to negotiate with the “serious Sue.” Playful Sue’s behavior did not affect female car sellers. Kray says many of her students who are senior women executives admit they love to flirt and describe themselves as “big flirts.” Kray maintains flirting is not unprofessional if it remains playful and friendly.

“The key is to flirt with your own natural personality in mind. Be authentic. Have fun,” Kray said. “That will translate into confidence, which is a strong predictor of negotiation performance.”

Read the full paper here.

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Are Your Meetings Making People Dumb?

Posted on 2012/10/142012/10/17 by Jason Hensel

A person’s decision-making performance indoors can be negatively affected by moderately high concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO₂), according to a recent study from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

“The primary source of indoor CO₂ is humans,” wrote Julie Chao for the Berkeley Lab News Center. “While typical outdoor concentrations are around 380 ppm, indoor concentrations can go up to several thousand ppm. Higher indoor CO₂ concentrations relative to outdoors are due to low rates of ventilation, which are often driven by the need to reduce energy consumption. In the real world, CO₂concentrations in office buildings normally don’t exceed 1,000 ppm, except in meeting rooms, when groups of people gather for extended periods of time.”

Meetings, eh? I can already imagine the sensational headline I will write and use: “Are your meetings making people dumb?”

The researchers suggest that it’s too early, though, to make recommendations, as more tests have to be done, especially on a larger scale.

“Assuming it’s replicated, it has implications for the standards we set for minimum ventilation rates for buildings,” said Berkeley Lab scientist William Fisk, a co-author of the study, as reported by Chao. “People who are employers who want to get the most of their workforce would want to pay attention to this.”

Until then, let’s just have meetings outside when possible. Sound good?

(Image via Flickr: Patrick Lauke / Creative Commons)

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Erasing Fear From Your Brain

Posted on 2012/10/132012/10/15 by Jason Hensel

The emotion of fear can be erased from the brain, according to researchers from Uppsala University in Sweden. Take it away, Uppsala news center:

When a person learns something, a lasting long-term memory is created with the aid of a process of consolidation, which is based on the formation of proteins. When we remember something, the memory becomes unstable for a while and is then restabilized by another consolidation process. In other words, it can be said that we are not remembering what originally happened, but rather what we remembered the last time we thought about what happened. By disrupting the reconsolidation process that follows upon remembering, we can affect the content of memory.

In the study, the researchers showed subjects a neutral picture and simultaneously administered an electric shock. In this way the picture came to elicit fear in the subjects which meant a fear memory had been formed. In order to activate this fear memory, the picture was then shown without any accompanying shock. For one experimental group the reconsolidation process was disrupted with the aid of repeated presentations of the picture. For a control group, the reconsolidation process was allowed to complete before the subjects were shown the same repeated presentations of the picture.

In that the experimental group was not allowed to reconsolidate the fear memory, the fear they previously associated with the picture dissipated. In other words, by disrupting the reconsolidation process, the memory was rendered neutral and no longer incited fear. At the same time, using a MR-scanner, the researchers were able to show that the traces of that memory also disappeared from the part of the brain that normally stores fearful memories, the nuclear group of amygdala in the temporal lobe.

‘These findings may be a breakthrough in research on memory and fear. Ultimately the new findings may lead to improved treatment methods for the millions of people in the world who suffer from anxiety issues like phobias, post-traumatic stress, and panic attacks,’ says Thomas Ågren.

Does anyone else think about the movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind upon reading this news?

(Image via Flickr: jj_judes / Creative Commons)

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Why Misinformation Sticks

Posted on 2012/10/022012/10/02 by Jason Hensel

The reason people believe misinformation is because they’re lazy, according to new research from the University of Western Australia. In “Misinformation and its Correction: Continued Influence and Successful Debiasing,” psychological scientist and study co-author Stephan Lewandowsky says that misinformation can cause a lot of damage at a societal level and a global level. As reported by the Association for Psychological Science, though, shedding false beliefs takes work.

Weighing the plausibility and the source of a message is cognitively more difficult than simply accepting that the message is true – it requires additional motivational and cognitive resources. If the topic isn’t very important to you or you have other things on your mind, misinformation is more likely to take hold.

And when we do take the time to thoughtfully evaluate incoming information, there are only a few features that we are likely to pay attention to: Does the information fit with other things I believe in? Does it make a coherent story with what I already know? Does it come from a credible source? Do others believe it?

Misinformation is especially sticky when it conforms to our preexisting political, religious, or social point of view. Because of this, ideology and personal worldviews can be especially difficult obstacles to overcome.

As I mentioned, laziness is the culprit here, and that’s okay. Personally, I’d rather watch The Daily Show than The O’Reilly Factor, because I know I’ll agree with its narrative more than the other. I also know, too, that I should expose myself to other viewpoints more than I do so that I can become better well-rounded and educated. However, I’m lazy. Plus, I find Jon Stewart funnier than Bill O’Reilly. I’m a sucker for comedy.

(Image via Flickr: jimjarmo / Creative Commons)

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Waitresses Wearing Red Get Higher Tips

Posted on 2012/08/03 by Jason Hensel

Red is attractive color. For example, those who drive red cars get pulled over more often than drivers of other car colors. It’s eye catching, and according to a new study published in the Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Research, it’s profitable, too.

“In their study of 272 restaurant customers, researchers Nicolas Guéguen and Céline Jacob found not only that male patrons gave higher tips than female patrons in general, but that men gave between 14.6 percent and 26.1 percent more to waitresses wearing red, while color had no effect on female patrons’ tipping behavior at all,” stated a press release from SAGE Publications. “The researchers explained that previous research has found that red increases the physical and sexual attractiveness of women.”

The researchers had 11 waitresses wear the same T-shirt in different colors in five restaurants on different days over a six-week period. They told all the waitresses to act as they normally would to all customers and to record how much they received as a tip from each customer.

“As red color has no negative effect on women customers, it could be in their interest to wear red clothes at work,” the researchers said.

And now I can’t get the song “The Lady in Red” out of my head.

(Image via Flickr: Tim Dobbelaere / Creative Commons)

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I Was Born This Way

Posted on 2012/04/11 by Jason Hensel

I have trouble being mean. It’s next to impossible to not be nice. Sure, I get in bad moods and can be snippy at times, but overall I’m a nice fellow, you know, finishing last in all. And I’m okay with that most of the time, especially now that I’ve learned I was born this way.

According to psychologists at the University at Buffalo (UB) and the University of California, Irvine, a reason some people are nice is because of their genes. The study “The Neurogenics of Niceness,” appearsthis month in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

The researchers studied the behavior of subjects who have versions of receptor genes for two hormones (oxytocin and vasopressin) that are associated with niceness and to find out if these chemicals nudge other forms of pro-social behavior in us.

Subjects were surveyed as to their attitudes toward civic duty, other people and the world in general, and about their charitable activities. Study subjects took part in an Internet survey with questions about civic duty, such as whether people have a duty to report a crime or pay taxes; how they feel about the world, such as whether people are basically good or whether the world is more good than bad; and about their own charitable activities, like giving blood, working for charity or going to PTA meetings.

Of those surveyed, 711 subjects provided a sample of saliva for DNA analysis, which showed what form they had of the oxytocin and vasopressin receptors.

“The study found that these genes combined with people’s perceptions of the world as a more or less threatening place to predict generosity,” said Michel Poulin, PhD, assistant professor of psychology at UB. “Specifically, study participants who found the world threatening were less likely to help others–unless they had versions of the receptor genes that are generally associated with niceness.”

These “nicer” versions of the genes, Poulin says, “allow you to overcome feelings of the world being threatening and help other people in spite of those fears.”

“So if one of your neighbors seems really generous, caring, civic-minded kind of person, while another seems more selfish, tight-fisted and not as interested in pitching in, their DNA may help explain why one of them is nicer than the other,” he said. “We aren’t saying we’ve found the niceness gene. But we have found a gene that makes a contribution. What I find so interesting is the fact that it only makes a contribution in the presence of certain feelings people have about the world around them.”

(Story materials provided by the University at Buffalo.)

(Image via Flickr: Jason Liebig / Creative Commons)

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Fantasy Films Increase Child Creativity

Posted on 2012/03/282012/03/28 by Jason Hensel

Children who watch fantasy films, such as Harry Potter, have better imagination and creativity skills, according to research out of Lancaster University in the United Kingdom. The study is the first of its kind to link magical thinking and creativity in preschool children.

Researchers studied two groups of four- to six-year-old children, showing them two 15-minute clips from Harry Potter And The Philosopher’s Stone.

The findings show that, after watching the clips, the group who watched the magical scenes scored “significantly better” in creativity tests than children in the other group who watched scenes without magic in them. The creativity tests included the children being asked to pretend they were rabbits or driving a car and quizzed on different ways of putting plastic cups in a bin and alternative uses for the cups.

“Magical thinking [believing in supernatural events] enables children to create fantastic imaginary worlds, and in this way enhances children’s capacity to view the world and act upon it from multiple perspectives,” the researchers said. “The results suggested that books and videos about magic might serve to expand children’s imagination and help them to think more creatively.”

I’m curious if this research extends to adults. Do grown-ups who prefer to watch Game of Thrones or True Blood exhibit increased imagination more so than those who enjoy Mad Men or Breaking Bad? Also, how does magical thinking as a child shape your adult life when you have to live in the “real world”?

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Exercise Can Lead to Female Orgasm

Posted on 2012/03/21 by Jason Hensel

Exercising doesn’t thrill me. I tried running four miles one time, and I was in a terrible mood afterwards. The exercise high just eludes me. But not for women.

According to a recent study out of Indiana University, exercise (not including sex or fantasies) can lead to female orgasm.

“The most common exercises associated with exercise-induced orgasm were abdominal exercises, climbing poles or ropes, biking/spinning and weight lifting,” said Debby Herbenick, co-director of the Center for Sexual Health Promotion in IU’s School of Health, Physical Education and Recreation. “These data are interesting because they suggest that orgasm is not necessarily a sexual event, and they may also teach us more about the bodily processes underlying women’s experiences of orgasm.”

Key study findings include:

About 40 percent of women who had experienced exercise-induced orgasms (EIO) and exercise-induced sexual pleasure (EISP) had done so on more than 10 occasions.
Most of the women in the EIO group reported feeling some degree of self-consciousness when exercising in public places, with about 20 percent reporting they could not control their experience.
Most women reporting EIO said they were not fantasizing sexually or thinking about anyone they were attracted to during their experiences.
Diverse types of physical exercise were associated with EIO and EISP. Of the EIO group, 51.4 percent reported experiencing an orgasm in connection with abdominal exercises within the previous 90 days. Others reported experiencing orgasm in connection to such exercises as weight lifting (26.5 percent), yoga (20 percent), bicycling (15.8), running (13.2 percent), and walking/hiking (9.6 percent).

“Magazines and blogs have long highlighted cases of what they sometimes call ‘coregasms,'” Herbenick said. “But aside from early reports by Kinsey and colleagues, this is an area of women’s sexual health research that has been largely ignored over the past six decades.”

Yeah, she just said coregasms. Feel free to use that in your daily conversations.

(Image via Flickr: Dan Machold / Creative Commons)

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Jeans for When You’re Feeling Blue

Posted on 2012/03/14 by Jason Hensel

There are a lot of depressed women in the world. I can tell, because they’re wearing jeans.

According to a study conduced by Professor Karen Pine at the University of Hertfordshire in the U.K., women choose to wear clothes based on their emotional states. When surveyed, more than 50 percent of surveyed women said they wore jeans when depressed. One third of them only wore jeans when they were happy.

Match those jeans with a baggy top–57 percent of women said they wore those when depressed–and you have one really sad female.

If you want to change your mood, though, change your clothes. Yes, it’s really that simple. Science wouldn’t lie to you.

“This finding shows that clothing doesn’t just influence others, it reflects and influences the wearer’s mood too,” Pine said. “Many of the women in this study felt they could alter their mood by changing what they wore. This demonstrates the psychological power of clothing and how the right choices could influence a person’s happiness.”

Your happy clothes should enhance your figure, be well cut and made from bright and beautiful fabrics, says Pine, who obviously doesn’t know about Rocky Mountain jeans from the 1990s.

“Jeans don’t look great on everyone,” Pine said. “They are often poorly cut and badly fitting. Jeans can signal that the wearer hasn’t bothered with their appearance. People who are depressed often lose interest in how they look and don’t wish to stand out, so the correlation between depression and wearing jeans is understandable. Most importantly, this research suggests that we can dress for happiness, but that might mean ditching the jeans.”

While you’re ditching those jeans, you might want to watch your typing, too. New research shows that “words spelled with more letters on the right of the keyboard are associated with more positive emotions than words spelled with more letters on the left.” (Beautiful Mind moment: Jeans, the word, has more letters on a keyboard’s left side.)

Cognitive scientists Kyle Jasmin of University College London and Daniel Casasanto of The New School for Social Research, New York showed that there is a link between a word’s meaning and how it’s typed.

Why should the positions of the keys matter? The authors suggest that because there are more letters on the left of the keyboard midline than on the right, letters on the right might be easier to type, which could lead to positive feelings. In other words, when people type words composed of more right-side letters, they have more positive feelings, and when they type words composed of more left-side letters, they have more negative feelings.

Well, then, that explains the seesaw of emotions I’ve experienced writing this entry.

(Photo via Flickr: Kshitij Dewan / Creative Commons)

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The Dark Side of the Mobile Phone

Posted on 2012/02/27 by Jason Hensel

For every good aspect of mobile phones, there’s a dark side attributed to them. Most prominently, it’s been the debate about if they’re contributing to brain cancer. There’s been no decision on that one yet. However, there are two new studies about other dark sides to mobile phone use that you may find interesting.

The first is a study from researchers at University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business that shows mobile phones make users less socially minded.

The researchers found that after a short period of cellphone use the subjects were less inclined to volunteer for a community service activity when asked, compared to the control-group counterparts. The cell phone users were also less persistent in solving word problems–even though they knew their answers would translate to a monetary donation to charity.

College students, men and women in their early 20s, took part in the study. The researchers say, though, that they expect similar findings in people in other age groups due to the ubiquitous nature of mobile phones.

The authors cited previous research in explaining a root cause of their findings: “The cellphone directly evokes feelings of connectivity to others, thereby fulfilling the basic human need to belong.” This results in reducing one’s desire to connect with others or to engage in empathic and prosocial behavior.

In a second study, it appears that mobile phones also contribute negatively on users’ linguistic abilities. According to research from the University of Calgary, people who text more are less accepting of new words.

The study, conducted by Joan Lee for her master’s thesis in linguistics, revealed … those who read more traditional print media such as books, magazines, and newspapers were more accepting of the same words.

Lee says that we assume that text messaging encourages unconstrained language. However, this is not true.

“The people who accepted more words did so because they were better able to interpret the meaning of the word, or tolerate the word, even if they didn’t recognize the word. Students who reported texting more rejected more words instead of acknowledging them as possible words.”

People who read traditional print media expose themselves to variety and creativity in language, Lee says. These traits aren’t normally found in colloquial text messaging among young people.

“In contrast, texting is associated with rigid linguistic constraints which caused students to reject many of the words in the study,” says Lee. “This was surprising because there are many unusual spellings or ‘textisms’ such as ‘LOL’ in text messaging language.”

Lee suggests that frequency plays a large part in the acceptance of words by people who text a lot.

“Textisms represent real words which are commonly known among people who text,” she says. “Many of the words presented in the study are not commonly known and were not acceptable to the participants in the study who texted more or read less traditional print media.”

It’s beginning to look like if people really want to be anti-social and dumb, they should choose to use their mobile phones more.

(Photo via Flickr: Anders Adermark / Creative Commons)

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Cake For Breakfast Is Good For You

Posted on 2012/02/08 by Jason Hensel

There’s a great part in Bill Cosby: Himself when he tells a story about cooking breakfast for his kids at 6 a.m. Instead of serving standard breakfast fare, he gives his children chocolate cake. It’s a funny story, because of the absurdity of serving cake for breakfast. However, Cosby may have been on to something.

Researchers at Tel Aviv University have discovered that dessert can help dieters lose more weight–and keep it off in the long run–if they make it a part of their breakfasts.

You should focus on indulging in the morning. That’s when your body’s metabolism is its most active, and when you’re better able to work off the extra calories throughout the day, the researchers say.

Attempting to avoid sweets entirely can create a psychological addiction to these same foods in the long-term, explains Professor Daniela Jakubowicz. Adding dessert items to breakfast can control cravings throughout the rest of the day. Over the course of a 32 week-long study, detailed in the journal Steroids, participants who added dessert to their breakfast–cookies, cake, or chocolate–lost an average of 40 pounds more than a group that avoided such foods. What’s more, they kept off the pounds longer.

It seems pretty common sense that eating more calories in the morning would help curb cravings later in the day.

Highly restrictive diets that forbid desserts and carbohydrates are initially effective, but often cause dieters to stray from their food plans as a result of withdrawal-like symptoms. They wind up regaining much of the weight they lost during the diet proper.

The study’s participants consumed the same daily amount of calories, but “the participants in the low carbohydrate diet group had less satisfaction, and felt that they were not full.”

Their sugar and carb cravings were more intense and they chose to cheat on their diets plans.

“But the group that consumed a bigger breakfast, including dessert, experienced few if any cravings for these foods later in the day,” Jakubowicz said.

It looks like I’ll be eating fewer eggs and more cake for breakfast now. Come to think of it, bacon cake sounds delicious.

Bonus: The cake story in Bill Cosby: Himself

(Photo via Flickr: Slice of Chic / Creative Commons)

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Study Finds Little Advantage to Getting Married

Posted on 2012/01/272012/01/27 by Jason Hensel

I know this is my second post in a row about marriage. This one, though, is ammunition for those who favor cohabitation more than getting married.

According a new study in the Journal of Marriage and Family, married coupled are no better off than unmarried couples who live together. In fact, cohabitation is better for a couple in the long run.

“Marriage has long been an important social institution, but in recent decades western societies have experienced increases in cohabitation, before or instead of marriage, and increases in children born outside of marriage,” said Dr Kelly Musick, associate professor of policy analysis and management at Cornell University’s College of Human Ecology. “These changes have blurred the boundaries of marriage, leading to questions about what difference marriage makes in comparison to alternatives.”

Musick’s study focused on issues of happiness, depression, health, and social ties. The findings show that feelings of well-being and happiness were high after a honeymoon period for married and cohabitation couples alike. But that good feeling does last long.

“We found that differences between marriage and cohabitation tend to be small and dissipate after a honeymoon period. Also while married couples experienced health gains – likely linked to the formal benefits of marriage such as shared healthcare plans – cohabiting couples experienced greater gains in happiness and self-esteem. For some, cohabitation may come with fewer unwanted obligations than marriage and allow for more flexibility, autonomy, and personal growth” Musick said. “Compared to most industrial countries, America continues to value marriage above other family forms. However, our research shows that marriage is by no means unique in promoting well-being and that other forms of romantic relationships can provide many of the same benefits.”

I’ve always heard that marriage really doesn’t change anything if you’re already living together. Now we have a study proving that saying. However, this raises the question: Why then get married? Are you doing it for tax purposes? Child raising purposes? Or do you feel more committed because you’re married?

(Photo via Flickr: Rodrigo Müller / Creative Commons)

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