Category: Social psychology

People felt emotionally closer to strangers who did this.

Smiling is one of the best ways to make people instantly like you, research reveals.

However, a smile needs to be real: what psychologists call a ‘Duchenne smile’.

People are highly tuned to the Duchenne smile, which involves upturned lips and crinkly eyes.

Fake smiles are relatively easy to spot and involve only the mouth and not the eyes.

A genuine smile is a strong sign of cooperation and affiliation.

People are generally more aware of positive emotions in other people than negative.

A smile makes people feel emotionally closer to strangers.

Dr Belinda Campos, who led the research, said:

“Our findings provide new evidence of the significance of positive emotions in social settings and highlight the role that positive emotions display in the development of new social connections.

People are highly attuned to the positive emotions of others and can be more attuned to others’ positive emotions than negative emotions.”

For the study, participants watched a video of people interacting and showing both positive and negative emotions.

The results showed that positive emotions are particularly powerful in drawing strangers together.

People felt emotionally closer to strangers who showed positive emotions.

The positive emotion that was particularly attractive was awe.

The study was published in the journal Motivation and Emotion (Campos et al., 2015).

The effect of hot people on your cognitive abilities, revealed by research.

People become cognitively impaired in the presence of an attractive member of the opposite sex, research finds.

The drop in intelligence is particularly strong for men.

The more attractive the woman, the more men’s test scores plummeted, psychologists found.

It may be because men are so concerned about making a good impression that they have few mental resources left over for anything else.

The study involved people talking to members of the opposite sex before completing cognitive tests.

Both sexes performed worse on the tests when they were trying to make a good impression on the other person.

It made no difference whether or not they were already in a relationship or single.

However, men were more often struggling to make a good impression, so their cognitive powers weakened the most.

Impression management is no easy task for the human brain, as the authors explain:

“…leaving a favorable impression on an opposite-sex partner may not always be easy.

Impression management requires careful monitoring and modifying of one’s own behavior to optimize the overall impression an individual wants make on the interaction partner, making it an effortful and cognitively demanding endeavor.

Research by Vohs and colleagues (2005) suggests that impression management indeed generally requires relatively high levels of cognitive control.”

The study was inspired by an experience of one of the study’s authors:

“Some time ago, one of the male authors was chatting with a very attractive girl he had not met before.

While he was anxious to make a good impression, when she asked him where he lived, he suddenly could not remember his street address.

It seemed as if his impression management concerns had temporarily absorbed most of his cognitive resources.”

The study was published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology (Karremans et al., 2009).

People ranked the most desirable characteristics in a partner for the survey.

The four traits people look for in a partner are kindness, easygoingness, intelligence and physical attractiveness, research finds.

In a twist on these familiar findings, though, people can have too much of some these traits, the psychologists also found.

People who are too intelligent and too easy-going are less attractive.

It may be because intelligence can make other people insecure and being too easy-going might be a bad sign.

Dr Gilles Gignac, the study’s first author, explained:

“Previously published research suggests that elevated levels of intelligence may incite feelings of insecurity in some people, which may reduce desirability.

Correspondingly, exceptional easygoingness may be viewed as an indication of a lack of confidence or ambition.”

The conclusions come from a survey of 383 people in Australia.

They were asked to rank the most desirable characteristics in a partner.

Once a potential partner was in the top 10 percent for IQ or easygoingness, they became less attractive.

However, being in the top 10 percent for physical attractiveness and kindness was not detrimental, although desirability ratings did not increase at this level.

Dr Gignac said:

“So, on average, there doesn’t appear to be any gain to being exceptionally kind or exceptionally physically attractive in the context of attracting a romantic partner.”

A minority of people are especially interested in the highly intelligent, the research showed.

However, the research could not pinpoint what type of people these were.

It certainly wasn’t more intelligent people who preferred other more intelligent people — which is what you would expect.

Dr Gignac said:

“This result is surprising, considering there is assortative mating for intelligence that indicates a correlation between people in a romantic relationship having similar intelligence levels.”

The study was published in the British Journal of Psychology (Gignac & Starbuck, 2018).

Both sexes unconsciously do the same thing when they meet someone they are attracted to.

Both men and women unconsciously lower their voices when they are attracted to someone, research finds.

Men, in particular, keep their voices low to indicate their interest.

Surprisingly, women also lower their voices when speaking to the most attractive men.

For the study, 30 speed daters met in a café, half men, half women.

The researchers monitored voice pitch and asked everyone who they were attracted to.

The study’s authors explain that men lowered their voice when attracted to a woman:

“…men lowered the minimum pitch of their voices when interacting with women who were overall highly desired by other men.

Men also lowered their mean voice pitch on dates with women they selected as potential mates, particularly those who indicated a mutual preference (matches).

Women also lowered their voice when attracted to a man:

“…although women spoke with a higher and more variable voice pitch toward men they selected as potential mates, women lowered both voice pitch parameters toward men who were most desired by other women and whom they also personally preferred.”

Women, though, were more discerning in their choice: only lowering their voice for the most attractive men.

The study was published in the journal The Royal Society Proceedings B (Pisanski et al., 2018).