Research on smiling started as far back as the mid-1800’s. A French doctor named Duchenne used electrical currents with research subjects. He would stimulate certain facial muscles and then take pictures of the expressions that people made. This was painful and many of the pictures look like the people are in pain. Real or…
Category Archives: psychology
100 Things You Should Know About People: #87 — Speaker and Listener Brains Sync
When you listen to someone talking your brain starts working in sync with the speaker. Greg Stephens (2010) put participants in his research study in an fMRI machine and had them record or listen to recordings of other people talking. What he found is that as someone is listening to someone else talk, the brains…
100 Things You Should You Know About People: #82 — People Are Motivated By Progress And Mastery
Why do people donate their time and creative thought process to Wikipedia? Or the open source movement? When you stop and think about it you realize that there are many activities that people engage in, even over a long period of time, that require high expertise, and yet are of no monetary or even career…
100 Things You Should Know About People: #81 — Intrinsic Rewards Trump Extrinsic Rewards
Let’s say you are an art teacher, and you want to encourage your students to spend more time practicing their drawing. You create a “Good Drawing Certificate” to give to your students. If your goal is to have them draw more, and for them to stick with it, how should you give them the certificate?…
100 Things You Should Know About People: #80 — Behavior Can Be Shaped
If you studied psychology years ago, you may remember BF Skinner and his work during the 20th century on operant conditioning. Skinner studied whether behavior increased or decreased based on how often, and in what manner, you provide a “reinforcement” (reward). What the casinos know — Let’s say you put a rat in a cage…
100 Things You Should Know About People: #78 — People Use A Schema To Encode And Remember
If I ask you to describe what a “head” is, you might talk about the brain, hair, eyes, nose, ears, skin, neck, etc. A head is made up of many things, but you’ve gathered all that information together and called it “head”. Similarly I could talk about the concept “eye”. And you would think about…
100 Things You Should Know About People: #75 — The More Difficult Something Is To Attain, The More People Like It
You’ve heard about fraternities that have difficult initiation rituals to get in. The idea is that if an organization is hard to get into, then the people in it like it even more than if entry was not so difficult. More difficult = more like — The first research on this initiation effect was done…
100 Things You Should Know About People: #74 — Listening To Music Releases Dopamine In The Brain
Have you ever been listening to a piece of music and experienced intense pleasure, even chills? Valorie Salimpoor and team (2010) conducted research that shows that listening to music can release the neurotransmitter dopamine. A wide range of music — The researchers used PET (positron emission tomography) scans, fMRI, and psychophysiological measures such as…
100 Things You Should Know About People: #72 — Trust Is The Best Predictor Of Happiness
If you want to know who is happiest, then figure out who feels the most trust.Which country has the happiest people? – Eric Weiner traveled all over the world in search of answers to the questions: Which countries have the happiest people and why? His answers surprised him and they surprised me too. Based…
100 Things You Should Know About People: #71 — People Like Pastoral Scenes
Walk into any hotel, house, office building, museum, art gallery, or any place where there are paintings or photographs hanging on the wall, and chances are that you will see a pastoral landscape. Looking for protection, food, and water – According to Denis Dutton, a philosopher and the author of The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure,…