Category: Psychology

time.com

Study of 2,700 college students shows that kindness is the most important trait when choosing long-term partners.
Participants came from traditionally “Eastern” and “Western” countries to see how much culture impacts these choices -- as it turns out, not too much.
Kindness won over physical attractiveness, good financial prospects, humor, chastity, religiosity, the desire for children, and creativity.
The second most important was attractiveness for men, and financial prospects for women.
One theory explains this with evolutionary psychology -- we evolved to see these traits as signs of good partners for reproduction.

Bulleted by Michał Słupski
on September 20, 2019

inverse.com

Reading doesn’t compete for brain space with other activities -- quite the opposite, it strengthens other areas in the brain.
Learning to read makes us better at processing non-language visuals, and the benefits are there regardless of what people read.
Researchers scanned the brains of 90 Indian adults, some of them illiterate and then taught to read over six-months.
After the illiterate adults learned to read, their brains changed, showing activity increase in different parts of the brain.
This shows that while our brains’ reading center (“visual word form area”) develops, it doesn’t take away from other brain functions -- it actually improves them.

Bulleted by Michał Słupski
on September 20, 2019

Two large-scale studies, on 243 and 400 participants, show no evidence that testosterone affects empathy in young men.
This casts doubt on the theory that early exposure to increased levels of testosterone can cause men to lose empathy.
These results do not take into account all possible links between testosterone and empathy.
However, they still provide robust evidence that developmental exposure to testosterone does not impact cognitive empathy.

Bulleted by Michał Słupski
on September 6, 2019

39.15 bits per second -- that is the average rate at which information is transferred across 17 different languages.
This finding is based on a study of recordings from 170 native adults from Europe and Asia, reading a set of 15 texts around 240,000 syllables long.
By taking into account the rate of speech -- not just amount of words -- it was shown that our brains limit the amount of information over time that we can process.
Because of that, informationally-dense languages are spoken slower, and languages that convey less information with more words are spoken faster.
So while all these languages are significantly different, they all have a similar information rate.

Bulleted by Michał Słupski
on September 6, 2019

psypost.org

Existential isolation - not to be confused with loneliness - could weaken our ‘anxiety buffers’, potentially making us think more about death.
This isolation results from a lack of social validation -- in other words, feeling misunderstood by people around us.
While interesting, the study was only done on 1,545 psychology students in one school, so it doesn’t take cultural or age differences into account.
Nonetheless, it’s an interesting step towards understanding the darker side of our daily human experience.

Bulleted by Michał Słupski
on September 3, 2019

Psychology (category filter × )