Category: emotions
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100 Things You Should Know About People: #76 — Anticipation Trumps The Actual Experience
You are planning a trip, 7 months away, with your sister to the Cayman Islands. The two of you talk on the phone at least once a week, discuss the snorkeling you plan to do, and talk about the restaurants that are close to the place you are staying. You look forward to the trip…
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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…
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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 heart…
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100 Things You Should Know About People: #70 — People Are Happier Busy And With A Challenge
Consider this scenario: You just landed at an airport and now you have to walk to the baggage claim to pick up your luggage. It takes you 12 minutes to walk there. When you arrive your luggage is coming onto the carousel. How impatient do you feel? Contrast that with this scenario: You just landed…
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100 Things You Should Know About People: #68 — Smells Evoke Emotions and Memories
Do you have a type of food that makes you feel a certain way? When you smell it you have an emotional reaction? For me it is kasha. Kasha is a form of buckwheat. You cook the buckwheat kernals in oil and then boil them (with salt, pepper, onion, and garlic). I’ve never met very…
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100 Things You Should Know About People: #66 — Emotions Are Tied To Muscle Movement
Botox is a popular cosmetic procedure to reduce facial wrinkles. Botox is injected into various muscles, for instance in the face, and it paralyzes the muscles thereby causing the wrinkles to “relax”. It’s been known for a while that one of the side effects of Botox treatments are that people can’t fully express emotions (for…
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100 Things You Should Know About People: #65 — Seven Emotions Are Universal
If you go to the other side of the world and interact with people there, can you recognize the emotions they are feeling by looking at their facial expressions? Paul Ekman says the answer is yes. He has been studying emotions for many years and in different geographies and cultures. He has identified seven emotions…
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Undecided Voters? Not Really.
At dinner the other night my husband said, “How the heck could anyone be undecided two weeks before the election, when this campaign has been going on so long?” “It’s simple”, I responded. “They aren’t undecided at all.” “Explain that one”, was his reply. I’ve been recently reading research on unconscious mental processing (for the…
