PsychAntenna

Despite calls for men to be more sensitive and responsive to feelings, a new study suggests society still prefers for men to be bold and dominant.

Corinne A. Moss-Racusin, a doctoral candidate in Rutgers’ Department of Psychology, explored the consequences for men (and women) when they acted modestly in job interviews.

She co-authored, with graduate fellow Julie E. Phelan and Professor Laurie A. Rudman, “When Men Break the Gender Rules: Status Incongruity and Backlash Against Modest Men” in the journal Psychology of Men and Masculinity.

According to Moss-Racusin, the applicants in the staged interviews were judged equally competent, but the “modest” males were less liked, a sign of social backlash.

Modesty was viewed as a sign of weakness, a low-status character trait for males that could adversely affect their employability or earnings potential. Modesty in women, however, was not viewed negatively nor was it linked to status.

“For men and women, there are things they must and must not be,” Moss-Racusin says.

“Women must be communal and other-oriented, but they must not be dominant. Historically and cross-culturally, men have been stereotyped as more agentic, that is, more independent and self-focused than women.”

In the study, 132 female and 100 male student volunteers (who earned partial academic credit for their psychology course) viewed videotaped, 15-minute job interviews of either males or females. All the applicants were paid actors rehearsed to deliver similar, “modest” responses for the gender-neutral position that required strong technical abilities and social skills.

The researchers sought to determine which gender stereotype promote backlash.

“Women are allowed to be weak while this trait is strongly prohibited in men,” Moss-Racusin said.

“By contrast, dominance is reserved for men and prohibited for women. Thus, gender stereotypes are comprised of four sets of rules and expectations for behavior consist of both ‘shoulds’ and ‘should nots’ for each gender.”

The researchers’ prediction that modest male applicants would face hiring discrimination was not supported, however, and she speculates that because men’s status is higher than women’s, meek men are afforded the benefit of the doubt and are less likely to encounter hiring discrimination than dominant women.

Source: Rutgers

An interesting new study suggests people who are extremely active are happier than people who sit idle.

The finding may explain why people confess to being so incredibly busy in today’s society.

“The general phenomenon I’m interested in is why people are so busy doing what they are doing in modern society,” says Christopher K. Hsee, of the University of Chicago. He co-wrote the study with Adelle X. Yang, also of the University of Chicago, and Liangyan Wang, of Shanghai Jiaotong University.

“People are running around, working hard, way beyond the basic level.”

Sure, there are reasons, like making a living, earning money, accruing fame, helping others, and so on. But, Hsee says, “I think there’s something deeper: We have excessive energy and we want to avoid idleness.”

For the study, volunteers completed a survey, then had to wait 15 minutes before the next survey would be ready. They could drop off the completed survey at a nearby location and wait out the remaining time or drop it off at a location farther away, where walking back and forth would keep them busy for the 15 minutes.

Either way, they would receive a candy when they handed in their survey. Volunteers who chose to stay busy by going to the faraway location were found to be happier than those who chose to be idle.

Not everyone chose to go to the faraway location. If the candies offered at the two locations were the same, the subjects were more likely to choose to stay idle. But if the candies offered at the two locations were different, they were more likely to choose the far location—because they could make up a justification for the trip, Hsee and his colleagues say.

The research is published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

Hsee thinks it may be possible to use this principle—people like being busy, and they like being able to justify being busy—to benefit society.

“If we can devise a mechanism for idle people to engage in activity that is at least not harmful, I think it is better than destructive busyness,” he says.

Hsee himself has been known to give a research assistant a useless task when he doesn’t have anything for them to do, so he isn’t sitting around the office getting bored and depressed.

“I know this is not particularly ethical, but he is happy,” says Hsee.

Source: Association for Psychological Science

Are you the type who remembers a face but not the person’s name? Or, perhaps you remember the face but cannot place the context from which you know the individual?

According to researchers, the trouble may be in your neurons. A specific area in our brains is responsible for processing information about human and animal faces, both how we recognize them and how we interpret facial expressions.

Tel Aviv University researchers are exploring what makes this highly specialized part of the brain unique, a first step to finding practical applications for that information.

In her “Face Lab” at Tel Aviv University, Dr. Galit Yovel of TAU’s Department of Psychology is trying to understand the mechanisms at work in the face area of the brain called the “fusiform gyrus” of the brain.

She is combining cognitive psychology with techniques like brain imaging and electrophysiology to study how the brain processes information about faces. Her most recent research on the brain’s face-processing mechanisms was published in the Journal of Neuroscience and Human Brain Mapping.

The study of face recognition does more than provide an explanation for embarrassing memory lapses. For instance, it may help business executives better match names with faces, and more important, can lead to better facial recognition software to identify terrorists or criminals. Similar to faces, bodies are also processed by distinct brain areas.

How we perceive faces is not totally intuitive, she says, and therefore raises the question of how this information is combined in our brain to understand how separate face and body areas generate a whole body-image impression.

Identifying “face blindness”

In her research, Dr. Yovel has found that we are better able to recognize faces when we regularly see and interact with them in meaningful settings. It’s as though the face-processing sections of the brain — the fusiform face area being the most distinct — recognizes faces holistically.

Additions to your face, such as a beard or glasses, are assimilated into or incorporated into the face recognition gestalt of the brain, unlike other elements that are irrelevant to facial recognition, such as the chair you’re sitting on. This may be why fashions in hairstyle and eyewear have become so important to personal appearance, she theorizes.

The inability to recognize faces is more common than most people think.

Dr. Yovel says that two percent of all people are born with “face blindness,” scientifically known as prosopagnosia. She hopes her research will enable these people to train themselves, via software and other methods, to better differentiate one face from another — especially when the face is that of a loved one.

Recognizing the faces you meet

“Faces are important,” says Dr. Yovel, who first began to study the neurological basis of face recognition as a post-doctoral student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“We meet so many people every day, on the street or at work, and should know whether or not each face is important to us. In principle, faces are very similar to one another. That’s probably why we’ve evolved these complex and specialized face areas in the brain — so that we can more accurately discriminate among the countless faces we encounter throughout our lives.”

Dr. Yovel hopes her studies will lead to new algorithms that can help computers do a better job of recognizing faces, as well as help people who somehow lack this critical social skill. She is currently collaborating with computer scientists at Tel Aviv University to explore new computational algorithms for facial recognition.

Source: American Friends of Tel Aviv University

A recent study demonstrates positive results from using an interactive weight management website. In fact, the more often people accessed the site, the more weight loss they maintained.

The National Institutes of Health-funded study evaluated an Internet-based weight maintenance intervention involving 348 participants.

Consistent website users who logged on and recorded their weight at least once a month for two and a half years maintained the most weight loss, the study found.

The Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Research study is published online in the open access Journal of Medical Internet Research.

“Consistency and accountability are essential in any weight maintenance program. The unique part of this intervention was that it was available on the Internet, whenever and wherever people wanted to use it,” said study lead author Kristine L. Funk, MS, RD, a researcher at the Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Research in Portland, Ore.

“This study shows that if people use quality weight management websites consistently, and if they stick with their program, they are more likely to keep their weight off,” said study co-author Victor J. Stevens, PhD, co-author and senior investigator at the Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Research.

“Keeping weight off is even more difficult than losing it in the first place, so the fact that so many people (in the study) were able to maintain a good portion of their weight loss is very encouraging to us.”

This Internet-based weight maintenance intervention was part of the Weight Loss Maintenance Trial, one of the largest and longest weight maintenance trials ever conducted — lasting three years and including more than 1,600 people at four study sites across the United States.

To enroll in the trial, participants had to be overweight or obese based on their Body Mass Index and taking medication for high blood pressure or high cholesterol. For the first six months, participants tried to lose weight by attending weekly group meetings at which they were weighed, encouraged to keep food diaries, and given extensive information about exercise and healthy eating.

Participants had to lose at least nine pounds to remain in the trial for the weight loss maintenance phase, which lasted an additional two and a half years and included three groups of randomized participants: one with no intervention, one that had monthly contact with a personal health coach, and one that was given unlimited access to a weight-maintenance website created specifically for the trial.

The Internet group included 348 participants who were encouraged to log in at least once a week. If they didn’t, they received e-mail reminders and followup automated phone messages.

Once on the website, participants were prompted to record their weight, their minutes of exercise, and the number of days they kept food diaries. If they went longer than seven days without recording a weight, the other parts of the website were disabled until they did record their weight.

The website included an interactive bulletin board on which participants could talk with others involved in the study and pose questions to nutrition and exercise experts.

During the first six months of the trial, while they were attending group sessions and before they had access to the website, participants who ended up in the Internet group had lost an average of 19 pounds. Once they were given website access, their objective was to keep off as much of that weight as possible.

Consistent users who logged in and recorded their weight at least once a month for 24 months maintained the greatest weight loss—keeping off an average of nine of the 19 pounds they’d lost during the initial weight loss phase of the trial.

Those who logged on less consistently—at least once a month for 14 months—kept off an average of five pounds. Those who logged on less than that kept off an average of only three pounds of their original weight loss.

At the end of the study, 65 percent of the participants were still logging on to the website. The study authors say they are encouraged by this level of participation because they say it is rare to see that kind of commitment – even in shorter-term weight maintenance studies that use the Internet.

While the study website is no longer available, there are many useful weight management websites that people can access. The study authors advise consumers to look for these important elements:

• Sites that encourage accountability by asking users to consistently record weight, exercise, and calories consumed
• Sites that include tailored or personalized information
• Sites with interactive features that allow users to communicate with each other and with nutrition and exercise experts
• Sites with accurate health information.

Source: Kaiser Permanente

John Moloney T.D., Minister of State with responsibility for Disability and Mental Health announced the first round of grants, totalling over 2.6m euros, awarded by the Genio Trust to support transition from institutional to personalised models of care in disability and mental health services...