Do looks matter in job interviews?
Yes. Science Daily reports on a study showing that people with people with birthmarks, scars and other facial disfigurements are more likely to receive poor ratings in job interviews:
"Discrimination Against Facially Stigmatized Applicants in Interviews: An Eye-Tracking and Face-to-Face Investigation" was published online last month in the Journal of Applied Psychology and is one of the first studies to examine how individuals with facial blemishes fare in job interviews. The findings show that interviewers recalled less information about these candidates, which negatively impacted evaluations of the applicants.
"When evaluating applicants in an interview setting, it's important to remember what they are saying," Rice Professor of Psychology Mikki Hebl said. "Our research shows if you recall less information about competent candidates because you are distracted by characteristics on their face, it decreases your overall evaluations of them."
And:
"The bottom line is that how your face looks can significantly influence the success of an interview," Hebl said. "There have been many studies showing that specific groups of people are discriminated against in the workplace, but this study takes it a step further, showing why it happens. The allocation of attention away from memory for the interview content explains this."
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What's the saddest day of the week?
This paper analyses whether individuals are influenced by the day of the week when reporting subjective well-being. By using a large panel data set and controlling for observed and unobserved individual characteristics, we find a large day-of the-week effect. Overall, we find a ‘blue’ Sunday effect with the lowest level of subjective well-being. The day-of-the-week effect differs with certain socio-economic and demographic factors such as employment, marital status and age. The paper concludes with recommendations for future analyses of subjective well-being data and design of data collections.
Source: "Sundays Are Blue: Aren’t They?" from University of Gothenburg, WORKING PAPERS IN ECONOMICS No 397
Hat tip: Oliver Burkeman's Help! How to be slightly happier and get a bit more done
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At what age do we stop taking so many risks in life?
Were you thinking 20 or 30-something? Try 50 says Science Daily:
In a paper appearing online ahead of publication in the journal Psychology and Aging, the researchers report that the willingness to enter competition to achieve a bigger payoff continues to rise for all adults -- men slightly more than women -- until they get into their 50s. The results were drawn from 543 of the adults in the study who were ages 25 to 75. The 281 men and 262 women were relatively well balanced across age brackets of 25-34, 35-44, 45-54, 55-64 and 66-74.
And:
"We expected to find the competitive risk-taking going down," Harbaugh said. "Seeing it going up to age 50 was surprising."
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Can staring into someone's eyes make them fall in love with you?
It dramatically increases the chances:
In two studies, subjects induced to exchange mutual unbroken gaze for 2 min with a stranger of the opposite sex reported increased feelings of passionate love for each other. In Study I, 96 subjects were run in the four combinations of gazing at the other's hands or eyes, or in a fifth condition in which the subject was asked to count the other's eye blinks. Subjects who were gazing at their partner's eyes, and whose partner was gazing back reported significantly higher feelings of affection than subjects in any other condition. They also reported greater liking than all subjects except those in the eye blink counting condition. In Study II, with 72 subjects, those who engaged in mutual gaze increased significantly their feelings of passionate love, dispositional love, and liking for their partner. This effect occurred only for subjects who were identified on a separate task as more likely to rely on cues from their own behavior in defining their attributes.
Source: "Looking and loving: The effects of mutual gaze on feelings of romantic love" from Journal of research in personality, Vol. 23, No. 2. (June 1989), pp. 145-161.
Hat tip: Oliver Burkeman's Help! How to be slightly happier and get a bit more done
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Does Facebook increase or decrease the amount of real social support you get?
A big increase. From ABC:
Defying some of the stereotypes of the digital age, social scientists say Facebook may actually be healthy for us. Keith Hampton at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania wrote a report for the Pew Research Center in which he found that "Internet users in general, but Facebook users even more so, have more close relationships than other people."
"Facebook users get more overall social support, and in particular they report more emotional support and companionship than other people," wrote Hampton in a blog post. "And, it is not a trivial amount of support. Compared to other things that matter for support -- like being married or living with a partner -- it really matters. Frequent Facebook use is equivalent to about half the boost in support you get from being married."
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How often do most people have sex?
About 6 times a month:
Introduction. Individuals who engage in regular sexual intercourse are more likely to report good overall quality of life. Studies of sexuality in adolescents have focused on high-risk behaviors whereas similar studies in older adults have focused on sexual dysfunction. Given a paucity of data on the sexual behaviors of young adults and the possibility of important relationships between sexuality and overall health, we sought to determine factors that influence the frequency of intercourse in adult men and women in the United States.
Aim. To identify factors related to coital frequency in young and middle-aged adults.
Methods We analyzed data from the male and female sample of the 2002 National Survey of Family Growth to examine frequency of sexual intercourse among Americans aged 25–45 years (men: N = 2,469; women: N = 5,120).
Main Outcome Measures. Multivariable negative binomial regression modeling was used to test for independent associations between the frequency of sexual intercourse and demographic, socioeconomic, and anthropometric variables.
Results. In this study, men and women between the ages of 25 and 45 have sex a mean 5.7 and 6.4 times per month, respectively. Being married significantly increased coital frequency for women but has no effect on male coital frequency. Increased height, less than high school education, and younger age were predictive of increased sexual frequency in men. Pregnancy was associated with significantly lower coital frequency for both men and women. No association was shown between self-reported health status and coital frequency on multivariable analysis.
Conclusions. Among young male adults, coital frequency is associated with specific socioeconomic, demographic, and anthropomorphic characteristics. Sexual frequency in women does not appear to be influenced by such factors. Self-reported health is not predictive of sexual activity in this age group.
Source: "Socioeconomic, Anthropomorphic, and Demographic Predictors of Adult Sexual Activity in the United States: Data from the National Survey of Family Growth" from The Journal of Sexual Medicine, Volume 7, Issue 1pt1, pages 50–58, January 2010
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Does eating slowly make you eat less?
Yes. Slower eating gives more time for the "fullness" feeling to kick in.
From Eurekalert:
While the link between eating rate and obesity is still being studied, Melanson said that her research has demonstrated that eating slowly results in significantly fewer average calories being consumed.
"It takes time for your body to process fullness signals," she concluded, "so slower eating may allow time for fullness to register in the brain before you've eaten too much."
The latest research follows up on a landmark 2007 study conducted by Melanson that was the first to confirm the popular dietary belief that eating slowly reduces food intake. That study found that women who were told to eat quickly consumed 646 calories in nine minutes, but the same women consumed just 579 calories in 29 minutes when encouraged to pause between bites and chew each mouthful 15 to 20 times before swallowing.
If this interests you definitely check out Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think. It's by Brian Wansink, director of the Food and Brand Lab at Cornell University and has many similar insights and tips.
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Does more money make some people more miserable?
Yes. 2% of people get more unhappy as they make more money.
Why? Two reasons might be 1) Divorce and 2) they're more likely to have friends who have even more money than they do, so they still feel low on the totem pole.
From Harvard Business Review:
While 98% of people get a bit more satisfaction out of life (but not a lot) when their incomes rise, the remaining 2% are known as "frustrated achievers"—more money only makes them more unhappy, according to a team led by Leonardo Becchetti of the University of Rome Tor Vergata in Italy. Studying data on UK households, the researchers found that 70% of the frustrated achievers are female, and divorce is more common among this group than among the rest of the population.
The study abstract gives a little more insight:
We investigate the relationship between money and happiness across the waves of the British Household Panel Study by using a latent class approach which accounts for slope heterogeneity. Our findings reveal the presence of a vast majority of “Easterlin-type” individuals with positive but very weak relationship between changes in income and changes in happiness and a small minority (2 percent) of “frustrated achievers” with negative relationship. Such share is much below descriptive evidence on frustrated achievement (17.5 percent). The probability of belonging to such group is shown to be positively related with divorced status and negatively related to education and relative (personal to reference group) income. Our interpretation of these results is that the standard concave money-happiness relationship provides a partial and incomplete picture of the complex nexus between happiness and income as it does not take into account two important phenomena: the role of peers and of reference group income and that of the dynamics between realisations and expectations.
Source: "The Heterogeneous Effects of Income Changes on Happiness" from Social Indicators Research, Volume 104, Number 3, 387-406
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Does carbon monoxide actually help us survive city life?
From Eurekalert:
According to scientists, carbon monoxide (CO), a tasteless, colorless and odorless gas, is not only a danger to the environment but also highly toxic to human beings. Found in the exhaust of vehicles and generators, CO has been dubbed the "silent killer" because excessive inhalation is lethal, poisoning the nervous system and heart.
Now, in a surprising twist, Prof. Itzhak Schnell of Tel Aviv University's Department of Geography and the Human Environment has discovered that low levels of the poisonous gas can have a narcotic effect that helps citydwellers cope with other harmful environmental factors of an urban environment, such as off-the-chart noise levels. This finding indicates that CO, in small doses, is a boon to the well-being of urbanites, better equipping them to deal with environmental stress.
And:
The results showed that living in a major city might not have as negative a health impact as the researchers were expecting. Though participants exhibited rising stress levels throughout the day, CO had a mitigating influence, and extended exposure to the chemical had no lasting effects.
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Do women and men have different moral values?
From a very interesting piece by Jesse Prinz:
By the late 1980s, the evidence for gender differences in morality was regarded as weak, but now the tide is changing. A number of intriguing findings have been reported in the literature. Here are some highlights:
• Some studies show that women are more empathetic then men, and that this difference increases over child development (for example, there's a nice study showing this trend in Spain by María Mestre and collaborators).
• When looking at pictures of immoral acts, women's judgments of severity correlate with higher levels of activation in emotion centers of the brain, suggesting concern for victims, whereas men show higher activation in areas that might involve the deployment of principles (Carla Harenski and collaborators).
• When men watch wrongdoers getting punished, there is activation in reward centers of their brains, whereas women's brains show activation in pain centers, suggesting that they feel empathy for suffering even when it is deserve (Tania Singer and collaborators).
• Women are more likely to factor personal cost into decisions about whether to punish an unfair stranger, which suggests that women are more context-sensitive, and men adhere to principles (Catherine Eckel and Philip Grossman).
• Women were twice as generous in a game that involved dividing $10 with a stranger (Eckel and Grossman, again).
• Numerous studies have found that women are more likely than men to reciprocate acts of kindness (reviewed by Rachel Croson and Uri Gneezy).
• Women tend to be more egalitarian then men, and men are more likely to be either completely selfless of selfish (James Andreoni and Lise Vesterlund).
• Women are more likely than men to think it is okay to imprison a person on trumped up changes in order to stop violent rioting in the streets (Fiery Cushman and Liane Young). But women are also less likely to endorse diverting a runaway trolley down an alternate track where it will kill one person instead of five (John Mikhail).
• Women are more likely than men to blame a shipwreck survivor for pushing another survivor off a small plank of driftwood in order to survive (Stephen Stich and Wesley Buckwalter).
• Women are less likely than men to be politically conservative (Karen Kaufman; Terri Givens), though the reverse pattern was true in the 1950s (Felicia Pratto).
This range of findings resists an easy summary, but, on the whole, women seem to be more empathetic and more focused on the collective good. This is broadly consistent with Gilligan's suggestion that women are more likely than men to base moral decision an a care orientation, whereas men gravitate more towards principles.
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