At long last, we have scientific guidance regarding that great question of social lubrication: Should you ask someone to meet for a drink or a cup of coffee? We may also have cause to update Ogden Nash’s famously short poem, “Reflections on Ice-Breaking” — and there’s a prize for the Lab reader who can do it in style. Pyschologists report in Science that you’re more likely to think warmly of someone else if you’re holding something warm in your hand like a mug of coffee or tea. The experimenters, Lawrence Williams of the University of Colorado and John Bargh of Yale, gave cups of either hot or iced coffee to people and asked them to rate someone’s personality based on a packet of information. The ones who held the hot cup rated that individual significantly higher for “warmth” than did the subjects holding the iced coffee.
The psychologists, unfortunately, did not try the same test with a cold beer, or with something hot and alcoholic like Irish coffee — clearly, further research is needed to compare the exact social effects of liquor and coffee. (Volunteers?) But the psychologists did confirm the effects of heat in another experiment by offering people a gift certificate that they could keep for themselves or give to a friend. The subjects given a heated therapeutic pad to hold were more likely to give the certificate to a friend than were the ones holding a frozen pad.
The researchers suggest that the connection between heat and emotion — indeed, the fact that we call someone a “warm person” or speak of “breaking the ice” — seems to be the result of early associations in childhood. “Maintaining closeness to caretakers during infancy, a period of relative helplessness, is critical for the survival of many animals,” they write, so “a close mental association should develop between the concepts of physical warmth and psychological warmth.”
“Experiences of physical temperature per se affect one’s impressions of and pro-social behavior toward other people, without one’s awareness of such influences,” Dr. Williams said. “At a board meeting, for instance, being willing to reach out and touch another human being, to shake their hand, those experiences do matter although we may not always be aware of them. In a restaurant, it’s been shown that wait staff who touch customers usually get a better tip. It’s a nice gesture, but it also has a warming effect.” Dr. Bargh points to recent brain imaging studies showing that the experience of hot or cold stimulus triggers activity in the insular cortex, the same area of the brain associated with a personality disorder that makes people uncooperative and distrustful.
“It appears that the effect of physical temperature is not just on how we see others, it affects our own behavior as well,” Dr. Bargh said. “Physical warmth can make us see others as warmer people, but also cause us to be warmer – more generous and trusting – as well.”
Will this news change strategies for business meetings and first dates? Should Starbucks’ stockholders rejoice? Will waiters in search of tips start pushing hot drinks and keep finding excuses to touch you? And is it time to update “Reflections on Ice-Breaking”? Nash wrote:
Candy Is dandy But liquor Is quicker.
Nash is said to have later appended another couplet — “Pot / Is not.” It’s a nice rhyme, although there are those who dispute its scientific accuracy.
Now that we actually data about coffee — or tea, or anything else warm you could hold in your hand — can anyone come up with another couplet? I’m afraid I can’t think of a rhyme for “Irish coffee.” I like the sound of “Java / Is lava,” but it doesn’t make much sense. “Java / Is suaver”? “Mulled wine / Works just fine”? “Hot mugs / Promote hugs?”
I need some help. I’ll offer a prize — the “Best of Ogden Nash’ anthology — to the Lab reader who comes up with the best couplet.
_________________ No matter how dark the storm gets overhead They say someone's watching from the calm at the edge What about us when we're down here in it? We gotta watch our backs
Joined: Sun Oct 17, 2004 12:40 am Posts: 25451 Location: 111 Archer Ave.
I started this article in the library waiting for a computer the other day, and this is the perfect thread for it. I haven't finished it yet, so I'm also posting it to remind myself to finish. Silly, huh?
Accounting for Taste Our choices in books, movies, music, and art go to the core of who we are. What your tastes reveal about you.
By: Eriq Gardner
Michaela was a strong, confident woman who loved mainstream contemporary pop. Her boyfriend was a fan of electronic dance music. When the two had been together for a few months, they decided to take a road trip to Philadelphia so he could meet her parents. The problem was that Michaela's boyfriend was driving—and thus controlling the radio. "I hated his taste in music," she recalls. "It was weird and rattled my nerves." Meanwhile, he was bored by her favorite music. Each felt their artistic choices were superior—and both were convinced of the rightness of their own opinion. They couldn't agree, and soon they were in a terrible fight. They never did make it to Philadelphia—and their relationship didn't last much longer, either.
Arguing about taste is as fundamental as having it in the first place. We take for granted that different people enjoy different things—and that others feel as confident in their judgments as we do in ours.
Our choices in books, music, art, and design go to the core of who we are. "Taste can offer us a doorway into people's lives," says Sam Gosling, a psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin and author of Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You. "Taste reveals a lot about what someone values and needs to fill their life with meaning."
We consume books, movies, music, and visual art primarily to fulfill the internal emotional needs that are fundamental to our personalities. But we also make choices about art based on a desire to carve out identities for ourselves—to articulate the stories of our lives. By the same token, we look for those stories in others. We also feel intuitively that we can judge others by their tastes. Unfortunately, those judgments are often wrong—largely because we pay attention to the wrong things. It pays to learn how to spot the real clues.
The taste hunters
Even as a child, John Darnielle's appetite for exploring music was insatiable. He'd spend hours in the garage rooting through jazz records, teaching himself to play the songs on his guitar. Like many who seek out a wide range of art at a young age, Darnielle continued to be artistically open-minded throughout his adulthood. Today, as lead singer in the indie-rock band The Mountain Goats, he still seeks out new music, often listening to five or six genres a day. "The music I'm least interested in is the type I'm capable of making myself," says Darnielle. "I want to be in awe."
Darnielle is high in openness, the characteristic of creative, curious, and imaginative people. Such people tend to be taste hunters—constantly sampling new music, scouring movie reviews for undiscovered gems, and visiting art museums. Their curiosity drives them to explore the world in search of novelty.
The living spaces of highly open people contain more books, CDs, and DVDs—and their collections are more eclectic—than their less open counterparts, Gosling has found. They enjoy discovering new artistic material and influencing the tastes of others. "Individuals who rate high in openness tend to be more adventurous in taste," says Jason Rentfrow, a psychologist at the University of Cambridge. "As they grow older, they will allocate more time and money trying to be as omnivorous as they can."
Highly open people are also far more likely to become artists themselves, according to a BBC survey of 90,000 people. "Openness correlates to a great range of tastes," explains Stephen Dollinger, a psychologist at Southern Illinois University. "These individuals are more cultured and have a greater conception of what makes great and interesting art."
Less open people, meanwhile, may be stuck on the tastes of their youth, watching nostalgic movies on Nick at Night and listening to classic rock.
The thrill seekers
Sarah Angelmar grew up in Fontainebleu, the stuffy Parisian suburb where French kings used to spend their summers. As an extroverted, highly social girl in a historic but boring town, she spent her nights dreaming of going to America and hitting it big as a pop star.
She chose Madonna as her role model, writing out all her lyrics and singing and dancing in homemade versions of her music videos. "Madonna expressed the lust and emotional drama of a young woman's life," recalls Angelmar. Today, as a fashion executive in New York City, Angelmar still looks for sensory pleasure in the art she consumes. "My favorite books, art, music, and everything have always been very colorful, beautiful, and sensual," she observes.
The sensation-seeking style Angelmar embodies is a hallmark of extroverts—lively, active, social people who crave sensory excitement in the art they seek out. You don't have to be a sensation seeker to be an extrovert, but it helps. "They're bored without high levels of stimulation," explains Gosling. "They love the bright lights and hustle and bustle, and they like to take risks and seek thrills."
Extroverts' lust for sensation draws them to action-adventure movies and music videos, but also leaves them bored by game shows and news programs, according to a study at University of Lleida in Spain. They watch less TV than most, preferring the spontaneity and excitement of face-to-face social encounters, but their need for constant sensory or intellectual stimulation means they tend to leave the TV on while engaging in other activities such as reading, eating, or even cuddling.
Sensation seekers are also particularly drawn to pornographic and horror films. In one study, subjects viewed a 20-minute segment of Friday the 13th. Sensation-seeking people didn't just enjoy the movie more; they actually salivated more, indicating higher levels of alertness and cognitive processing.
Extroverts are also drawn to art with "sensational elements"—wild colors, forceful action, and themes of sex or violence—such as paintings depicting war, castration, or rapture. Thus, extroverts might be drawn to the aggressive drip paintings of Jackson Pollack or the chaos and suffering depicted in Picasso's Guernica. "Most people have a bias toward the familiar, preferring pleasant, realistic art to abstract or surreal art," explains Jennings Bryant, a psychologist at Indiana University, "but sensation seekers' attraction to novelty and emotionally arousing, even unpleasant, themes make them more ready to accept modern art and unpleasant themes in art and photographs."
Another hallmark of extroversion is the need to connect with others, which drives extroverts to rock concerts, dance clubs, and movie theaters—environments that are both highly social and highly stimulating. That's also why extroverts particularly enjoy music with vocals. "They're drawn to the human voice," explains Gosling. "They want to connect."
Introverts, meanwhile—those reserved, thoughtful, self-reliant types who draw their energy from spending time by themselves—tend to take a contemplative, critical approach to art and music. For them, form is more important than emotional expression, according to research by the late University College London psychologist Cyril Burt. Whereas extroverts enjoy sensational art, introverts prefer more contemplative music with highly developed formal elements, like the mathematical symmetries of Bach fugues or the technical complexity of Debussy or Chopin. And when it comes to film, introverts are suckers for character development—think Taxi Driver, Harold and Maude, and Lost in Translation.
The self-medicators
Jason Ozick's parents divorced when he was 5, and he was an anxious, moody child. When his father picked him up for their weekends together, it was Ozick who chose the music they listened to in the car, playing artists like Portishead and Elliott Smith. "He used to always accuse me of picking 'mood music,' " he recalls.
When he listens to those songs now, he says, he feeds off the raw emotions, imagining himself singing them onstage. "I still listen to a lot of music that's emotional," he says. "I listen to a musician and identify with what he's going through."
People high in neuroticism—less emotionally stable people who are anxious, sensitive, and easily upset—tend to be artistically creative and gravitate toward emotionally turbulent art, including films, songs, and literature often seen as romantic, according to Burt's research. They decorate their living spaces with inspirational posters bearing messages like, "Attitude is a little thing that makes a big difference," or, "Until you spread your wings, you'll never know how far you can fly." These self-affirmations help neurotic people manage their tendency to worry and become blue, explains Gosling. "The posters are a visual form of self-medication."
Neurotics use art to regulate their moods in the same way. When feeling sad, they may be inclined to wallow in their misery by choosing melancholic music, movies, or books. Or, they may choose uplifting art to boost their mood. "Neurotics are more likely to focus on content rather than structure," explains Adrian Furnham, a psychologist at University College London.
Neurotic souls may be onto something. There's reason to believe consuming art is a highly effective strategy for regulating internal states. As Woody Allen put it: "I can't listen to that much Wagner. I start getting the urge to conquer Poland." Viewing art for 40 minutes reduced stress as effectively as 5 hours of postwork decompression, according to a study measuring levels of the stress hormone cortisol among London office workers. And a study of people in 30 countries showed that the most popular method for reducing stress was listening to music—ranking just above watching TV and taking a bath. (Having sex came in sixteenth, and consulting a psychologist placed last.)
The highly neurotic also use art to validate their feelings of sadness, anger, and alienation. Neurotic people are more likely, for instance, to enjoy rap and heavy metal. "Listening to aggressive styles of music… might feel cathartic," explains Rentfrow. "It lets them know there are others out there who feel similarly, and that it's OK to rage."
At the other end of the stability spectrum, even-tempered, easygoing, and optimistic people prefer classical art such as baroque architecture. They respond to art that emphasizes form over feeling and have the emotional stability to appreciate unity and formalistic detail. "I'm liable to feel panicked and I find it easy to lose my cool," says author and philosopher Alain De Botton. "I'm attracted to monastic environments and also minimalism. It's easy to imagine that someone who is the opposite is seduced by ornate detail."
Art as decoration
Hillary Nagy grew up the oldest child in her family, graduated from the prestigious U.S. Naval Academy, and went on to a career as a high-powered marketing executive in New York City. She's equally achievement-oriented at home, working hard to make sure all the elements of her decor work in concert. "I'm always thinking about how I can tie together one of our bedrooms," she says. "I go through countless iterations of what would be best."
She tends toward figurative art that realistically depicts the things she enjoys in real life, such as beaches and palm trees. To her, the purpose of art is to decorate her living spaces and keep things looking "aesthetically nice." But she doesn't seek out, explore, or engage art. "This sounds sad, but I'm not really passionate about anything right now," she admits. "I innately look to others for their reactions as I'm looking to discover my opinion."
Nagy clearly fits the profile of a highly conscientious person—dependable, focused, task-oriented people who enjoy order and rules. These people don't enjoy art for emotional regulation or intellectual engagement. Instead, they view art as an external commodity, useful for improving the aesthetics of their living spaces or for relating to people who are truly interested in it. "Those high in conscientiousness may see art as an extrinsic element in their lives rather than an intrinsic one to explore," explains Dollinger.
The conscientious tend to prefer conventional art to modern paintings or other abstract art, and often approach music from an aesthetic distance, with a cold, logical point of view. They tend to focus on the technical proficiency of the artist or the market value of the work rather than on their own emotional reactions. "Conscientious individuals to some extent are the opposite of artistic, intuitive, and imaginative people and may therefore be more likely to experience art in rational ways," explains Furnham.
There is no gene for jazz
One of the most surprising findings in the field of taste research is that artistic preferences have a strong genetic component. A study of 3,000 twins, for instance, revealed that whether we like jazz or not is partially heritable. Other artistic tastes may also be influenced by genetics.
That is not to say that there is a gene for liking jazz music the way there are genes for eye color or sickle cell anemia. What may be inherited, though, are particulars of personality and aspects of intelligence that influence enjoyment of certain forms of art.
That differences in taste attitudes are heritable stands to reason, given that personality itself is partly genetically determined. The difference between someone who loves torture movies like Saw and someone who loves Pablo Neruda poems may come down to a difference in inherited brain chemistry. The former may be driven to sensation-seeking; the latter may have a more introverted mind that delights in contemplative thought.
Cognitive ability, another factor that influences taste, is also partly genetic. We inherit such capacities as attentional focus, memory, and speed and depth of associative thinking. These skills may help a person understand—and therefore appreciate—the complex and spontaneous nature of jazz, free verse, improv comedy, and other art forms that require mental flexibility.
Intelligence may play yet another role. Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist at the London School of Economics, proposes that intelligent people may be more likely to acquire evolutionarily novel tastes—that is, a predilection for things that did not exist 10,000 years ago, such as instrumental music. Intelligence, however, may make no difference in the acquisition of evolutionarily familiar tastes, such as vocal music. In addition, Kanazawa suggests, less intelligent people may be less cognizant that people in TV and movies are not real. Since seeing realistic images of people may, for them, seem almost like being with people, they're more likely to enjoy these art forms and spend time consuming them.
Taste is a social act
Today, Giovanni Escalera is the composer and guitarist for the electronic-rock band Sweet Electra. But growing up in Guadalajara, Mexico, he was, he says, a "chubby, weird teenager." When he was 13, he undertook a transformation, turning himself into someone others would notice. He began sporting black eye makeup and a fake ear-piercing—emblems of the bands he loved—and boning up on the hottest punk, new wave, and electronic music at the local record store.
"My friends' mothers would ask me, 'Why are you wearing earrings? Those are for girls!'" he recalls. But Escalera wanted to demonstrate his allegiance to the aesthetic he identified with. By advertising his love for foreign bands whose new sound spoke to him, he hoped to convey his open-minded personality, taking a trait he was proud of and amplifying it so that it was visible to others. Steering his friends to new music they otherwise would not have been aware of reinforced his sense of being cool and ahead of the curve.
In a sense, Escalera was using his taste-hunting abilities to forge an identity. This is the inmost layer of taste formation—using our artistic choices to articulate the story of our lives for ourselves and others. Identity comprises not just the traits that describe us, but also stories about how we became that way, and how we present ourselves to others, explains Dan McAdams, a psychologist at Northwestern University. Tastes are among the primary ingredients in these personal stories. "Tastes come up in people's narratives as a way of signaling who they are," says McAdams.
Taste provides an objective, common reference point. Expressing artistic preferences allows us to signal elements of our personalities, and these cues help us manage others' impressions of us. When you meet a stranger, you don't know much about her personality, but if you both agree a certain song is sad and she then tells you she loves it, you've learned something about her. "People largely agree on the emotional qualities of taste objects," explains Rentfrow.
Deciphering the taste code
If our taste preferences reflect our personalities, does this mean we can accurately judge others based on their tastes? We all form impressions based on people's artistic choices, confident that we can judge their personalities based on the things they love. But decoding people based on taste is not an exact science.
Personality types are not mutually exclusive—most of us are a complex combination of many traits. An open-minded taste hunter, for instance, may also have an extrovert's need to seek sensation. No one trait wholly determines our tastes—various overlapping personality traits each exert an influence, as do cognitive abilities like language mastery and overall intelligence. Combined with experiences and exposure, the result is the infinite variety of preferences we see.
We make judgments about others' tastes based on stereotypes, explains Gosling; we assume fans of mainstream popular artists are uncreative and conventional, for instance, or that fans of energetic vocal music are gregarious and sociable.
Some stereotypes are correct. When Gosling asks his students to list their top 10 favorite songs, other students are able to match lists to students with impressive accuracy. Rock fans truly are less friendly, conservative, and religious, and more artistic and anxious than fans of religious music. We assume classical music fans are friendly, conscientious, and emotionally stable—and for the most part, we're right.
People judging others based on Facebook profiles, which typically include catalogues of favorite books, music, and movies—are able to accurately predict openness and extroversion, but not emotional stability, Gosling has found. And our stereotypes about fans of heavy metal, electronic, pop, rap, and soul are considerably less accurate, perhaps because inaccurate racial assumptions cloud our judgment.
Another reason our judgments falter is that we focus on the wrong cues. We wrongly assume, for instance, that people with highly decorated and cluttered rooms are more extroverted. We also assume such people are more open—when really we should be looking for variety in books and music, for books on art and poetry, and for art supplies. We assume that rooms with stale air belong to emotionally unstable people—when really we should be scanning for inspirational posters.
In the end, then, perhaps we should view the differences in tastes between us and others not as grounds for disagreement, but as opportunities for interpersonal revelation. Perhaps the Romans were right when they proclaimed, "De gustibus non est disputandum." About matters of taste, there can be no argument.
Joined: Wed May 09, 2007 5:58 pm Posts: 1259 Location: Western Masshole Gender: Male
"Maybe we could go out for coffee sometime?" "Great, or maybe we could go somewhere and just eat a bunch of caramels." "What?" "When you think about it, it's just as arbitrary as drinking coffee."
_________________ Paul McCartney told me to never drop names.
Joined: Sat Oct 16, 2004 11:54 pm Posts: 12287 Location: Manguetown Gender: Male
Thats why i think about some people when i have my warm sexual organ in my hand.
_________________ There's just no mercy in your eyes There ain't no time to set things right And I'm afraid I've lost the fight I'm just a painful reminder Another day you leave behind
Joined: Sun Oct 17, 2004 4:01 am Posts: 19477 Location: Brooklyn NY
Human Bass wrote:
Thats why i think about some people when i have my warm sexual organ in my hand.
_________________
LittleWing sometime in July 2007 wrote:
Unfortunately, it's so elementary, and the big time investors behind the drive in the stock market aren't so stupid. This isn't the false economy of 2000.
This is a decent blog that summarizes lots of the upcoming papers in Association for Psychological Science journals (most notably Psychological Science): http://www.psychologicalscience.org/onlyhuman
During my first book tour 15 years ago, an interviewer noted that the paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould had dedicated his first book to his father, who took him to see the dinosaurs when he was 5. What was the event that made me become a cognitive psychologist who studies language? I was dumbstruck. The only thing that came to mind was that the human mind is uniquely interesting and that as soon as I learned you could study it for a living, I knew that that was what I wanted to do. But that response would not just have been charmless; it would also have failed to answer the question. Millions of people are exposed to cognitive psychology in college but have no interest in making a career of it. What made it so attractive to me?
As I stared blankly, the interviewer suggested that perhaps it was because I grew up in Quebec in the 1970s when language, our pre-eminent cognitive capacity, figured so prominently in debates about the future of the province. I quickly agreed — and silently vowed to come up with something better for the next time. Now I say that my formative years were a time of raging debates about the political implications of human nature, or that my parents subscribed to a Time-Life series of science books, and my eye was caught by the one called “The Mind,” or that one day a friend took me to hear a lecture by the great Canadian psychologist D. O. Hebb, and I was hooked. But it is all humbug. The very fact that I had to think so hard brought home what scholars of autobiography and memoir have long recognized. None of us know what made us what we are, and when we have to say something, we make up a good story.
_________________ No matter how dark the storm gets overhead They say someone's watching from the calm at the edge What about us when we're down here in it? We gotta watch our backs
No offense Mr. Blazer, this ^ is where I stopped reading. I do have a question though, is your brain perpetually active or something? No 'off' switch on that bad mamma jamma?
_________________ "A waffle is like a pancake with a syrup trap." - Mitch Hedberg
At long last, we have scientific guidance regarding that great question of social lubrication: Should you ask someone to meet for a drink or a cup of coffee? We may also have cause to update Ogden Nash’s famously short poem, “Reflections on Ice-Breaking” — and there’s a prize for the Lab reader who can do it in style. Pyschologists report in Science that you’re more likely to think warmly of someone else if you’re holding something warm in your hand like a mug of coffee or tea. The experimenters, Lawrence Williams of the University of Colorado and John Bargh of Yale, gave cups of either hot or iced coffee to people and asked them to rate someone’s personality based on a packet of information. The ones who held the hot cup rated that individual significantly higher for “warmth” than did the subjects holding the iced coffee.
The psychologists, unfortunately, did not try the same test with a cold beer, or with something hot and alcoholic like Irish coffee — clearly, further research is needed to compare the exact social effects of liquor and coffee. (Volunteers?) But the psychologists did confirm the effects of heat in another experiment by offering people a gift certificate that they could keep for themselves or give to a friend. The subjects given a heated therapeutic pad to hold were more likely to give the certificate to a friend than were the ones holding a frozen pad.
The researchers suggest that the connection between heat and emotion — indeed, the fact that we call someone a “warm person” or speak of “breaking the ice” — seems to be the result of early associations in childhood. “Maintaining closeness to caretakers during infancy, a period of relative helplessness, is critical for the survival of many animals,” they write, so “a close mental association should develop between the concepts of physical warmth and psychological warmth.”
“Experiences of physical temperature per se affect one’s impressions of and pro-social behavior toward other people, without one’s awareness of such influences,” Dr. Williams said. “At a board meeting, for instance, being willing to reach out and touch another human being, to shake their hand, those experiences do matter although we may not always be aware of them. In a restaurant, it’s been shown that wait staff who touch customers usually get a better tip. It’s a nice gesture, but it also has a warming effect.” Dr. Bargh points to recent brain imaging studies showing that the experience of hot or cold stimulus triggers activity in the insular cortex, the same area of the brain associated with a personality disorder that makes people uncooperative and distrustful.
“It appears that the effect of physical temperature is not just on how we see others, it affects our own behavior as well,” Dr. Bargh said. “Physical warmth can make us see others as warmer people, but also cause us to be warmer – more generous and trusting – as well.”
Will this news change strategies for business meetings and first dates? Should Starbucks’ stockholders rejoice? Will waiters in search of tips start pushing hot drinks and keep finding excuses to touch you? And is it time to update “Reflections on Ice-Breaking”? Nash wrote:
Candy Is dandy But liquor Is quicker.
Nash is said to have later appended another couplet — “Pot / Is not.” It’s a nice rhyme, although there are those who dispute its scientific accuracy.
Now that we actually data about coffee — or tea, or anything else warm you could hold in your hand — can anyone come up with another couplet? I’m afraid I can’t think of a rhyme for “Irish coffee.” I like the sound of “Java / Is lava,” but it doesn’t make much sense. “Java / Is suaver”? “Mulled wine / Works just fine”? “Hot mugs / Promote hugs?”
I need some help. I’ll offer a prize — the “Best of Ogden Nash’ anthology — to the Lab reader who comes up with the best couplet.
why isn't caffeine factored into this?
_________________ "No matter how hard you kill Jesus, he would always just come back and hit you twice as hard."
Joined: Thu Apr 13, 2006 3:51 am Posts: 43609 Location: My city smells like Cheerios Gender: Male
thegreatdestroyer wrote:
They only held the drinks, never drank them -- thus no caffeine to be worried about.
mecca2687 wrote:
why isn't caffeine factored into this?
well i didnt see anything that said they didn't drink them, occam's razor says i should take that as just holding, but why would it matter if they had something hot with liquor in it if they are not drinking it?
_________________ "No matter how hard you kill Jesus, he would always just come back and hit you twice as hard."
They only held the drinks, never drank them -- thus no caffeine to be worried about.
mecca2687 wrote:
why isn't caffeine factored into this?
well i didnt see anything that said they didn't drink them, occam's razor says i should take that as just holding, but why would it matter if they had something hot with liquor in it if they are not drinking it?
They actually report 2 experiments in the paper. In the 1st, participants held either iced or hot coffee, and in the 2nd they held either hot or cold therapeutic patches. So, these weren't always even consumable products that were used -- just random stuff that varied in temperature. The dependent measure was different in each study as well.
People in Love Are Blind to Pretty Faces A built-in aversion to attractive members of the opposite sex may help cement monogamous relationships
If your loved one claims to “only have eyes for you” this Valentine’s Day, it might be truer than you think. Research shows that people in a committed relationship who have been thinking about their partner actually avert their eyes from attractive members of the opposite sex without even being aware they are doing it.
Psychologist Jon Maner of Florida State University and his colleagues flashed pictures of faces on a computer screen for half a second, following it immediately with a square or circle, which participants had to identify by pushing the correct button. Earlier research using this method has found that it takes longer for viewers to shift their attention away from attractive faces of the opposite sex.
Maner, however, took subjects who were married or living together monogamously and asked half of them to write about feelings of love for their partner and the other half to write about a happy experience. Those who wrote about love actually turned their attention away from attractive members of the opposite sex even more quickly than they looked away from average-looking people. Subjects who wrote about being happy, however, remained as distracted by a pretty face as ever.
This unconscious attentional bias probably evolved to help men and women stay in monogamous relationships, which in humans tend to have a reproductive advantage, Maner explains: “This whole research area is guided largely by an evolutionary perspective. These biases have been built into our psychology to enhance people’s reproductive success.”
_________________ No matter how dark the storm gets overhead They say someone's watching from the calm at the edge What about us when we're down here in it? We gotta watch our backs
I started this article in the library waiting for a computer the other day, and this is the perfect thread for it. I haven't finished it yet, so I'm also posting it to remind myself to finish. Silly, huh?
Joined: Thu Apr 13, 2006 3:51 am Posts: 43609 Location: My city smells like Cheerios Gender: Male
rafa_garcia18 wrote:
washing machine wrote:
I started this article in the library waiting for a computer the other day, and this is the perfect thread for it. I haven't finished it yet, so I'm also posting it to remind myself to finish. Silly, huh?
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guys chill and 
