Rating Attractiveness: Consensus Among Men, Not Women, Study Finds

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ScienceDaily (June 27, 2009) — Hot or not? Men agree on the answer. Women don't.

There is much more consensus among men about whom they find attractive than there is among women, according to a new study by Wake Forest University psychologist Dustin Wood.
The study, co-authored by Claudia Brumbaugh of Queens College, appears in the June issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
"Men agree a lot more about who they find attractive and unattractive than women agree about who they find attractive and unattractive," says Wood, assistant professor of psychology. "This study shows we can quantify the extent to which men agree about which women are attractive and vice versa."
More than 4,000 participants in the study rated photographs of men and women (ages 18-25) for attractiveness on a 10-point scale ranging from "not at all" to "very." In exchange for their participation, raters were told what characteristics they found attractive compared with the average person. The raters ranged in age from 18 to more than 70.
Before the participants judged the photographs for attractiveness, the members of the research team rated the images for how seductive, confident, thin, sensitive, stylish, curvaceous (women), muscular (men), traditional, masculine/feminine, classy, well-groomed, or upbeat the people looked.
Breaking out these factors helped the researchers figure out what common characteristics appealed most to women and men.
Men's judgments of women's attractiveness were based primarily around physical features and they rated highly those who looked thin and seductive. Most of the men in the study also rated photographs of women who looked confident as more attractive.
As a group, the women rating men showed some preference for thin, muscular subjects, but disagreed on how attractive many men in the study were. Some women gave high attractiveness ratings to the men other women said were not attractive at all.
"As far as we know, this is the first study to investigate whether there are differences in the level of consensus male and female raters have in their attractiveness judgments," Wood says. "These differences have implications for the different experiences and strategies that could be expected for men and women in the dating marketplace."
For example, women may encounter less competition from other women for the men they find attractive, he says. Men may need to invest more time and energy in attracting and then guarding their mates from other potential suitors, given that the mates they judge attractive are likely to be found attractive by many other men.
Wood says the study results have implications for eating disorders and how expectations regarding attractiveness affect behavior.
"The study helps explain why women experience stronger norms than men to obtain or maintain certain physical characteristics," he says. "Women who are trying to impress men are likely to be found much more attractive if they meet certain physical standards, and much less if they don't. Although men are rated as more attractive by women when they meet these physical appearance standards too, their overall judged attractiveness isn't as tightly linked to their physical features."
The age of the participants also played a role in attractiveness ratings. Older participants were more likely to find people attractive if they were smiling.
Adapted from materials provided by Wake Forest University.

Some Video Games Can Make Children Kinder And More Likely To Help

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ScienceDaily (June 18, 2009) — Some video games can make children kinder and more likely to help—not hurt—other people.

That's the conclusion of new research published in the June 2009 issue of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.
The article presents the findings of three separate studies, conducted in different countries with different age groups, and using different scientific approaches. All the studies find that playing games with prosocial content causes players to be more helpful to others after the game is over.
The report is co-authored by a consortium of researchers from the United States, Japan, Singapore and Malaysia.
"Dozens of studies have documented a relationship between violent video games and aggressive behaviors," said lead author Douglas Gentile, an Iowa State University psychologist. "But this is one of the first that has documented the positive effects of playing prosocial games."
Prosocial video games involve characters who help and support each other in nonviolent ways.
"These studies show the same kind of impact on three different age groups from three very different cultures," said Brad Bushman, a University of Michigan co-author of the report. "In addition, the studies use different analytic approaches—correlational, longitudinal and experimental. The resulting triangulation of evidence provides the strongest possible proof that the findings are both valid and generalizable."
"These studies document that children and adolescents learn from practicing behaviors in games," said Rowell Huesmann, a U-M co-author of the report.
One study examined the link between video game habits and prosocial behavior among 727 secondary students in Singapore, with a mean age of 13. Students listed their favorite games and rated how often game characters helped, hurt or killed other characters. They also answered questions about how likely they were to spend time and money helping people in need, to cooperate with others and share their belongings, and to react aggressively in various situations.
As in numerous other studies, the researchers found a strong correlation between playing violent video games and hurting others. But the study also found a strong correlation between playing prosocial games and helping others.
The second study analyzed the long-term connection between video game habits and prosocial behavior in nearly 2,000 Japanese children ages 10 to 16. Participants completed a survey about their exposure to prosocial video games, and rated how often they had helped other people in the last month. Three to four months later, they were surveyed again, and researchers found a significant connection between exposure to prosocial games and helpful behavior months later.
"This suggests there is an upward spiral of prosocial gaming and helpful behavior, in contrast to the downward spiral that occurs with violent video gaming and aggressive behavior," said Bushman, a professor of communications and psychology and a research professor at the U-M Institute for Social Research (ISR).
For the third study, the researchers carried out an experiment with 161 U.S. college students, with a mean age of 19. After playing either a prosocial, violent, or neutral game, participants were asked to assign puzzles to a randomly selected partner. They could choose from puzzles that were easy, medium or hard to complete. Their partner could win $10 if they solved all the puzzles. Those who played a prosocial game were considerably more helpful than others, assigning more easy puzzles to their partners. And those who had played violent games were significantly more likely to assign the hardest puzzles.
"Taken together, these findings make it clear that playing video games is not in itself good or bad for children," Bushman said."The type of content in the game has a bigger impact than the overall amount of time spent playing."
Adapted from materials provided by University of Michigan.

Be Your Best Friend If You'll Be Mine: Alliance Hypothesis For Human Friendship

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ScienceDaily (June 5, 2009) — University of Pennsylvania psychologists studying the cognitive mechanisms behind human friendship have determined that how you rank your best friends is closely related to how you think your friends rank you. The results are consistent with a new theory called the Alliance Hypothesis for Human Friendship, distinct from traditional explanations for human friendship that focused on wealth, popularity or similarity.

The study, performed by Penn cognitive psychologists Peter DeScioli and Robert Kurzban, has demonstrated that human friendship is caused, in part, by cognitive mechanisms aimed at creating a ready-made support group for potential conflicts. People call on friends for help in a variety of disputes, ranging from trivial arguments to violent fights. This study suggests that people have specialized decision processes that prioritize those individuals who tend to be most helpful in conflicts, those with fewer stronger commitments to others.
Researchers performed question-and-answer studies in which participants ranked their closest friends in a number of ways, including, for example, the benefits they receive from the friendship, the number of secrets shared and how long the friendship has been ongoing. Each time, whether participants were an online community, random passersby on a metropolitan street or undergraduate students in a laboratory, friendship rankings were most strongly correlated with individuals' own perceived rank among their partners' other friends.
"Historically, the main theory has been that humans build friendships in order to trade in goods and services," DeScioli, lead author, said. "The problem we focused on was that friendship involves more than exchange. People want friends who care about them and do not give just to get something back in return. We thought that theories about alliances might help explain why friends are primarily concerned with each others' needs rather than the benefits they can get in return for helping."
Traditional evolutionary approaches to explain human friendship apply the Theory of Reciprocal Altruism: Friends function as exchange partners; however, a wealth of empirical evidence from social psychology is inconsistent with the theory. For example, in prior studies it was shown that people do not keep regular tabs on the benefits given and received in close relationships. Also, people seem to help friends even when they are unlikely to be capable of repayment. For cognitive psychologists, it is unclear what humans and their complex brains are up to in creating these relationships.
The new Penn theory has origins in models of alliance building between nations, which prepare for conflict in advance but may not expect anything in return immediately.
"Friendships are about alliances," Kurzban, an associate professor, said. "We live in a world where conflict can arise and allies must be in position beforehand. This new hypothesis takes into account how we value those alliances. In a way, one of the main predictors of friendship is the value of the alliance. The value of an ally, or friend, drops with every additional alliance they must make, so the best alliance is one in which your ally ranks you above everyone else as well."
In short, the hypothesis is much more optimistic about the reasons for friendship than existing theories which point toward popularity, wealth and proximity as reasons for friendship.
"In this hypothesis," Kurzban said, "it's not what you can do for me, it's how much you like me. In this manner even the weakest nations, for example, or the least popular kid at the party with nary an alliance in the room is set up to be paired with someone looking for a friend."
More darkly, the new model also serves as an explanation for some petty human behaviors not explained by traditional friendship theories. For example, the Alliance Hypothesis explains why people are extremely concerned with comparisons to others in their social circle. It also explains how jealousies and aggression can erupt among groups of friends as alliances are shifted and maintained.
If the Alliance Hypothesis for Human Friendship is correct, then theories about alliances from game theory and international relations might help us better understand friendship. These theories suggest that people in conflict would benefit strategically from ranking their friends, hiding their friend-rankings and ranking friends according to their own position in partners' rankings. To employ these tactics in their friendships, people need to gather and store information about their friends' other friendships. That is, they have to readily understand the social world not only from their own perspective but also from the perspectives of their friends.
Although friendship is a core element of human social life, its evolved functions have been difficult to understand. Human friendship occurs among individuals who are neither relatives nor mates, so the function of this cooperative behavior is not as clear as when reproduction or genetic relatives are involved. Similar relationships have been observed in non-human species -- hyenas use partners to gain access to carcasses and male dolphins employ "wingmen" to attain females for mating — and considerable progress has been made in understanding these non-human relationships. But the functions of human friendship have been more elusive.
The study, appearing in the current issue of the online journal Public Library of Science One, was conducted by DeScioli and Kurzban of the Department of Psychology in the School of Arts and Sciences at Penn.
It was supported by a fellowship from the International Foundation for Research in Experimental Economics.
Adapted from materials provided by University of Pennsylvania, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

Basket Weaving May Have Taught Humans To Count

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ScienceDaily (June 3, 2009) — Did animals teach us one of the oldest forms of human technology? Did this technology contribute to our ability to count? These are just two of the themes due to be explored at a conference on basketry at the University of East Anglia.

The event, which takes place today and tomorrow (June 5-6), is part of Beyond the Basket, a major new research project led by the university exploring the development and use of basketry in human culture over 10,000 years.
Basketry has been practised for millennia and ranges from mats for sitting on, containers and traps for hunting, to fencing and barriers for animals or land, partitions and walls - all of which have been central to culture.
Beyond the Basket is a two-and-a-half year project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council as part of its Beyond Text programme. The research will explore the role of basketry in human culture and focus on various parts of the world, both in the past and present, from Europe to Amazonia, central Africa and Papua New Guinea.
The aim is to identify the mechanical traditions of making and the ways in which basketry is implicated in wider patterns of understanding, for example the order of society or the design of the universe. It will also show the impact of woven forms on other media, such as pottery, painting, and stone sculpture and architecture, and look at the future of basketry and the solutions it could offer to current issues, whether technical or social.
Project leader Sandy Heslop, of the School of World Art and Museology at UEA, said: “Basketry is a worldwide technology and is the interaction between human ingenuity and the environment. It tends to make use of, and therefore has to be adapted to, local conditions in terms of resources and environment.
“Without basketry there would be no civilisations. You can’t bring thousands of people together unless you can supply them, you can’t bring in supplies to feed populations without containers. In the early days of civilisations these containers were basketry.
“We may think of baskets as humble, but other people and cultures don’t. They have been used for storage, for important religious and ceremonial processes, even for bodies in the form of coffins.”
It is about 10,000 years ago that evidence for basketry starts to appear in North America, Asia, Europe and the Middle East. Today its uses and influences are still seen, from the bamboo scaffolding often used in Asia, to contemporary architecture, for example the ‘Boiler Suit’ - the name given to the ‘woven’ steel tiles encasing the boiler room at Guy’s Hospital in London.
Mr Heslop said: “Beyond its practical uses, basketry has arguably been even more influential on our lives, since it relies on the relationship of number, pattern and structure. It therefore provides a model for disciplines such as mathematics and engineering and for the organisation of social and political life.
“Given the range of uses of basketry the associations of the technology are very varied. Some are aggressive, others protective, some help create social hierarchies others are recreational.”
The conference, Beyond the Basket: Construction, Order and Understanding, will look at various themes including: design and production, environmental issues, commercial and historical perspectives, weaving in architecture, and the mathematics of basketry, as well as more anthropological and archaeological topics. Among the speakers will be experts from North and South America, as well as the UK.
Beyond the Basket will culminate in an exhibition and accompanying book in 2011. The exhibition will include ancient material recovered by excavation as well as more recent examples of basketry from around the world and will enable people to experience basketry directly.
For further information about Beyond the Basket and to view images visit http://projects.beyondtext.ac.uk/beyondthebasket
Adapted from materials provided by University of East Anglia, via AlphaGalileo.

Why Emotionally Charged Events Are So Memorable

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http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/10/071004121045.htm

Science Daily — Both extensive psychological research and personal experiences confirm that events that happen during heightened states of emotion such as fear, anger and joy are far more memorable than less dramatic occurrences.

"This phenomenon is something everyone can identify with," said Roberto Malinow of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York. "You can probably remember where you were when you heard about 9/11, but you probably don't know where you were on 9/10. We've identified one mechanism that may underlie this effect."
The parts of the brain where memories are stored need to distinguish between significant experiences and those that carry less importance, giving priority to the transformation of the former into long-term memory, the researchers explained.
One factor that scientists believe to be critical in that process is the emotional load of an event. Indeed, studies have shown that heightened states of emotion can facilitate learning and memory. In some situations, this process can even become pathological, Malinow said, as occurs in posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a condition characterized by persistent vivid memories of traumatic events.
In a report in Cell, Johns Hopkins researchers and their collaborators at Cold Spring Harbor and New York University have identified the likely biological basis for this: a hormone released during emotional arousal "primes" nerve cells to remember events by increasing their chemical sensitivity at sites where nerves rewire to form new memory circuits.
Describing the brain as a big circuit board in which each new experience creates a new circuit, Hopkins neuroscience professor Richard Huganir, Ph.D. says that he and his team found that during emotional peaks, the hormone norepinephrine dramatically sensitizes synapses -- the site where nerve cells make an electro-chemical connection -- to enhance the sculpting of a memory into the big board.
Norepinephrine, more widely known as a "fight or flight" hormone, energizes the process by adding phosphate molecules to a nerve cell receptor called GluR1. The phosphates help guide the receptors to insert themselves adjacent to a synapse. "Now when the brain needs to form a memory, the nerves have plenty of available receptors to quickly adjust the strength of the connection and lock that memory into place," Huganir says.
Huganir and his team suspected that GluR1might be a target of norepinephrine since disruptions in this receptor cause spatial memory defects in mice. They tested the idea by either injecting healthy mice with adrenaline or exposing them to fox urine, both of which increase norepinephrine levels in brain. Analyzing brain slices of the mice, the researchers saw increased phosphates on the GluR1 receptors and an increased ability of these receptors to be recruited to synapses.
When the researchers put mice in a cage, gave a mild shock, took them out of that cage and put them back in it the next day, mice who had received adrenaline or fox urine tended to "freeze" in fear -- an indicator they associated the cage as the site of a shock -- more frequently, suggestive of enhanced memory.
However, in a similar experiment with mice genetically engineered to have a defective GluR1 receptor that phosphates cannot attach to, adrenaline injections had no effect on mouse memory, further evidence of the "priming" effect of the receptor in response to norepinephrine.
The researchers plan on continuing their work by going in the opposite direction and engineering another mouse strain that has a permanently phosphorylated or "primed" receptor. "We're curious to see how these mice will behave," Huganir says. "We suspect that they'll be pretty smart, but at the same time constantly anxious."
Reference: Hu et al.: "Emotion Enhances Learning via Norepinephrine Regulation of AMPA-Receptor Trafficking." Publishing in Cell 131, 160--173, October 5, 2007. DOI 10.1016/j.cell.2007.09.017
Authors on the paper are Hailan Hu, Eleonore Real, and Roberto Malinow of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory; Joe LeDoux of New York University; and Kogo Takamiya, Myoung-Goo Kang, and Huganir of Johns Hopkins.
The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health, Damon Runyon Postdoctoral Fellowship, NARSAD, and the Ale Davis and Maxine Harrison Foundation
Note: This story has been adapted from material provided by Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions.

Fausto Intilla

www.oloscience.com

Genes May Hold The Keys To How Humans Learn

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http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/10/071001172835.htm

Science Daily — New research is giving scientists fresh insights into how genetics are a prime factor in how we learn.
Michael Frank, an assistant professor of psychology and director of the Laboratory for Neural Computation and Cognition at The University of Arizona, headed a team whose results are reported in the Oct. 1 issue of Early Edition, an online site hosted by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Frank and his colleagues found links to learning behaviors in three separate genes associated with dopamine. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter, a chemical in the brain that is often associated with pleasure, learning and other behaviors. Several neurological disorders, such as Parkinson's disease, are also linked to abnormal levels of dopamine.
Frank's study points to fundamental genetic differences between "positive" and "negative" learners.
"All three genes affect brain dopamine functioning, but in different ways, and in different parts of the brain" Frank said. "The genes predicted people's ability to learn from both the positive and negative outcomes of their decisions."
Two of the genes - DARPP-32 and DRD2 - predicted learning about the average, long-term probability of rewards and punishments, not unlike your personal preference for why, for example, you might choose steak over salmon.
"When making these kinds of choices, you do not explicitly recall each individual positive and negative outcome of all of your previous such choices. Instead, you often go with your 'gut,' which may involve a more implicit representation of the probability of rewarding outcomes based on past experience," Frank said.
The DARPP-32 and DRD2 genes control dopamine function in a region of the brain called the striatum, thought to be necessary for this kind of implicit reward learning. A third gene, COMT, did not predict long-term reward or punishment learning, but instead predicted a person's tendencies to change choice strategies after a single instance of negative feedback. Frank said this gene affects dopamine function in the prefrontal cortex of the brain, the area associated with conscious processing and working memory. This would be akin to switching from steak to salmon upon remembering your last experience with overdone steak.
The overall research program was designed to test a computer model that simulates the key roles of dopamine in reinforcement learning in different parts of the brain, as motivated by a body of biological research.
"The reason we looked at these three individual genes in the first place, out of a huge number of possible genes, is that we have a computer model that examines how dopamine mediates these kinds of reinforcement processes in the striatum and prefrontal cortex," Frank said. "The model makes specific predictions on how subtle changes in different aspects of dopamine function can affect behavior, and one way to get at this question is to test individual genes."
Among the evidence incorporated in the model and motivating the genetic study is research showing that bursts of dopamine production follow in the wake of unexpected rewards. Conversely, dopamine production declines when rewards are expected but not received.
To test their hypothesis, the researchers collected DNA from 69 healthy individuals who were asked to perform a computerized learning program. The volunteers were asked to pick one of two Japanese characters that appeared on a screen and were "rewarded" for a "correct" response, and "punished" for an "incorrect" one.
Frank said more research is needed to confirm that genetic effects are accompanied by brain-related changes in behavior. But, he said, the research offers insights into the genetic basis for learning differences and insights into improving human cognition and learning, both normal and abnormal.
"Understanding how dopaminergic variations affects learning and decision-making processes may have substantial implications for patient populations, such as (those with) Parkinson's disease, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and schizophrenia," Frank said. "The genetics might also help us identify individuals who might gain from different types of learning environments in the classroom."
Note: This story has been adapted from material provided by University of Arizona.

Fausto Intilla
www.oloscience.com

Native Language Governs The Way Toddlers Interpret Speech Sounds

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http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/10/071001172817.htm

Science Daily — Toddlers are learning language skills earlier than expected and by the age of 18 months understand enough of the lexicon of their own language to recognize how speakers use sounds to convey meaning.
They also ignore sounds that don't play a significant role in speaking their native tongue, according to a study by a University of Pennsylvania psychologist.
The study shows how important the child's first year is in acquiring language. By listening to their parents and learning words, children discover how speech in their language works, a process that is vital for gaining command of vocabulary and grammar.
This is the first time scientists have shown that children as young as 18 months actively interpret the phonetic characteristics of their particular language when they learn words. Previously, scientists had speculated that this ability would emerge much later in life, once children had already amassed large vocabularies.
Previous research showed that at birth infants can distinguish most of the phonetic contrasts used by all the world's languages. This ''universal'' capacity shifts over the first year to a language-specific pattern in which infants retain or improve categorization of native-language sounds but fail to discriminate many non-native sounds. Eventually, they learn to ignore subtle speech distinctions that their language does not use.
This is why Japanese toddlers, like Japanese adults, cannot tell apart the English "r" and "l" sounds and why English speakers have trouble with certain French vowels because they all sound the same to non-native speakers due to language learning in infancy. The Penn study shows that even when two words sound very different, toddlers know whether to take this difference seriously or to chalk it up to random variation depending on how their language works.
"The results demonstrate that at 18 months children have a rudimentary understanding of the 'sound system' of their language and that knowledge guides their interpretation of the sounds they encounter," said Daniel Swingley, assistant professor in the Department of Psychology at Penn who worked with colleagues from the University of British Columbia and the Max-Planck-Institute for Psycholinguistics.
"Children can easily hear how the same word can be pronounced in different ways. We might say, 'Is that your kiiiiiitty"' or, 'Show me the kitty.' In English, we're still talking about the same cat. But children have to figure this out. In other languages, like Japanese or Finnish, those two versions of "kitty" could mean completely different things. Our study showed that 18-month-olds have already learned this and apply that knowledge when learning new words."
Psychologists tested vowel duration ("kitty" versus "kiiiitty") in three experiments comparing Dutch- and English-learning 18-month-olds. Children were shown two different toys. With one toy, researchers repeated a word dozens of times, naming it a "tam." The other toy was named too, with the same label only with the vowel acoustically longer in duration ("taam").
Dutch children, learning a language that includes words differentiated by how long the vowel is pronounced, interpret the variations as meaningful and learn which word goes with each object. English speakers ignored the elongation of vowel sounds.
English learners did not somehow lack the cognitive power to learn both words. They can hear the difference between the words, and they succeed on words that really are different in English ("tam" vs. "tem"). The difference arose from the phonological generalizations children had already made from their brief experience with English: "tam" and "taam", like "kitty" and "kiiiitty", mean the same thing. Dutch children, on the other hand, interpreted vowel duration as lexically contrastive in keeping with the properties of their language.
The study, to appear in the Oct. 1 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, was funded by the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, the Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek's Spinoza Prize, the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health and the Canadian Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council.
The study was performed by Swingley, Christiane Dietrich of the Max-Planck-Institute for Psycholinguistics and Janet F. Werker of the University of British Columbia.
Note: This story has been adapted from material provided by University of Pennsylvania.

Fausto Intilla
www.oloscience.com