Hot or not? Men agree on attractiveness, women don’t

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 and Claudia Brumbaugh of Queens College.

“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.

What you see depends on how you feel

A University of Toronto study provides the first direct evidence that our mood literally changes the way our visual system filters our perceptual experience - suggesting that seeing the world through rose-colored glasses is more biological reality than metaphor.

“Good and bad moods literally change the way our visual cortex operates and how we see,” says Adam Anderson, professor of psychology. “Specifically, our study shows that when in a positive mood, our visual cortex takes in more information, while negative moods result in tunnel vision.”

This can explain why when your mom asks you to get the salt from the cupboard, on the second shelf behind the pepper, and you don’t want to, you can’t find it no matter how hard you look. Then she comes over and says, “Here it is” and it was in front of you the whole time.

The research team used functional magnetic resonance imaging to examine how our visual cortex processes sensory information when in good, bad, and neutral moods. They found that donning the rose-colored glasses of a good mood is less about the color and more about the expansiveness of the view.

The researchers first showed participants a series images designed to generate a good, bad or neutral mood. The participants were then shown a composite image, featuring a face in the center, surrounded by “place” images, such as a house. To focus their attention on the central image, subjects were asked to identify the gender of the person’s face. When in a bad mood, the subjects did not process the images of places in the surrounding background. However, when viewing the same images in a good mood, they actually took in more information — they saw the central image of the face as well as the surrounding pictures of houses. The discovery came from looking at specific parts of the brain — the parahippocampal “place area” — that are known to process places and how this area relates to primary visual cortical responses, the first part of the cortex related to vision.

“Under positive moods, people may process a greater number of objects in their environment, which sounds like a good thing, but it also can result in distraction,” says Taylor Schmitz, a graduate student of Anderson’s and lead author of the study. “Good moods enhance the literal size of the window through which we see the world. The upside of this is that we can see things from a more global, or integrative perspective. The downside is that this can lead to distraction on critical tasks that require narrow focus, such as operating dangerous machinery or airport screening of passenger baggage. Bad moods, on the other hand, may keep us more narrowly focused, preventing us from integrating information outside of our direct attentional focus.”

So the next time you’re looking for your keys or trying to make an informed decision, do it feeling great. You just might come up with some new possibilities that you wouldn’t think of otherwise.

Depressed people have trouble learning “good things in life”

While depression is often linked to negative thoughts and emotions, a new study suggests the real problem may be a failure to appreciate positive experiences.

Researchers at Ohio State University found that depressed and non-depressed people were about equal in their ability to learn negative information that was presented to them.

Laren Conklin

But depressed people weren’t nearly as successful at learning positive information as were their non-depressed counterparts.

“Since depression is characterized by negative thinking, it is easy to assume that depressed people learn the negative lessons of life better than non-depressed people – but that’s not true,” said Laren Conklin, co-author of the study and a graduate student in psychology at Ohio State.

The study appears in the March issue of the Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry.

Researchers tested 34 college students, 17 of whom met criteria for clinical depression and 17 of whom were not depressed.

This study is one of the first to be able to link clinical levels of depression to how people form attitudes when they encounter new events or information, said Daniel Strunk, co-author of the study and assistant professor of psychology at Ohio State.

Strunk said the key to conducting this study was the use of a computer game paradigm co-developed at Ohio State in 2004 by Russell Fazio, a professor of psychology and co-author of this new study. Fazio and his collaborators, Natalie Shook, a PhD graduate of Ohio State now at Virginia Commonwealth University and J. Richard Eiser of the University of Sheffield (England) have used the game in many studies examining differences in the development of positive and negative attitudes.

The developers affectionately call the game “BeanFest.” It involves people encountering images of beans on the computer screen. The beans could be good or bad, depending on their shape and the number of speckles they had.

Good beans earned the players points, while bad beans took points away. The goal was to earn as many points as possible.

While the game may seem trivial to a naive audience, Strunk said it offers a unique and powerful way to measure how people learn new attitudes.

“Before, if researchers wanted to investigate how people formed new attitudes, it was very difficult to do,” Strunk said. If researchers asked about real-life issues, the problem is that prior learning and attitudes may impact how people respond to new information. But in this game, participants don’t have any prior knowledge or attitudes about the beans so researchers could learn how they formed their attitudes in a novel situation, without interference from past experiences.

In the game phase of this study, participants had to choose whether they would accept a bean when it appeared on the screen. If they accepted the bean, the points were added or deducted from their total. If they rejected the bean, they were still told how many points they would have earned or lost if they had accepted it.

Each of the 34 beans was shown three times during the game phase, giving the participants a good opportunity to learn which beans were good and which were bad.

Then, in the test phase, participants had to indicate whether beans they learned about in the game phase were “good” (choosing it would increase points) or “bad” (choosing it would decrease points). The researchers tallied how well participants did in correctly identifying positive and negative beans.

The non-depressed students correctly identified 61% of the negative beans, which was about the same as the depressed students, who correctly identified 66% of the “bad” beans.

But while the non-depressed students correctly identified 60% of the positive beans, depressed students correctly classified only 49% of these good beans. Non-depressed students identified the good beans better than the depressed students, who failed to identify good beans better than chance.

“The depressed people showed a bias against learning positive information although they had no trouble learning the negative,” Strunk said.

One of measures researchers used in the study classified whether the depressed participants were currently undergoing a mild, moderate or severe episode of depression. In the study, those undergoing a severe depressive episode did more poorly on correctly choosing positive beans than those with mild depression, further strengthening the results.

While more research is needed, Conklin and Strunk said this study suggests possible ways to improve treatment of depressed people.

“Depressed people may have a tendency to remember the negative experiences in a situation, but not remember the good things that happened,” Conklin said. “Therapists need to be aware of that.”

For example, a depressed person who is trying out a new exercise program may mention how it makes him feel sore and tired – but not consider the weight he has lost as a result of the exercise.

“Therapists might focus more on helping their depressed clients recognize and remember the positive aspects of their new experiences,” Strunk said.

Financial security, more than money alone, may be key to happiness

A study of the mental state of the modern American woman by a Princeton University psychologist has found a powerful link between concerns over financial security and satisfaction with one’s life.

In looking toward the future, women who concentrated much of their thinking on financial matters were much less likely to be happy with their lives, according to Talya Miron-Shatz, a postdoctoral research fellow in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton. And, contrary to expectations, many of those with such worries had plenty of money by conventional standards, she said, suggesting that there is more at play in obtaining peace of mind than simply having cash.

“Even if you are making a hundred grand a year, if you are constantly worried that you are going to get fired, that you are going to lose your health insurance or that you are simply not sure you are going to ‘make it,’ you are not going to be happy,” Miron-Shatz said. Such concerns, she found, affected a wide variety of women at all income levels.

Conversely, those who didn’t fixate on finances like retirement savings, tuition for college or simply making ends meet, reported being the happiest of the group.

The study was published Feb. 25 in Judgment and Decision Making, a scholarly journal. Miron-Shatz is hoping the results might guide policy decisions, especially those being devised by President Barack Obama and the U.S. Congress in the wake of today’s financial crisis. Her work would favor a focus on strategies that create social and financial “safety nets” over measures that would directly increase income.

To understand how income and concerns over financial security may relate to a person’s satisfaction with life, Miron-Shatz conducted two separate studies of a representative sample of nearly 1,000 American women of various ages and incomes. In one study, she showed that considerations of financial security were as important to the study subjects as their monetary assets.

She asked subjects in the second study to think about the future in an open-ended manner. Those who did so and mentioned financial concerns - retirement, college tuition, making ends meet, etc. - were less satisfied with their lives, she found, than those who did not raise such concerns. One of her participants said that when thinking of her future she wondered, “Will I be happy and financially stable?” The stability, Miron-Shatz says, is crucial. “It’s not about greed,” she added. “It’s about knowing whatever it is you have, be it your McMansion or your motor home, won’t be taken away from you.”

Discussions about wealth need to be expanded to include this notion of financial security, she said, and though valid and meaningful, this factor is “glaringly missing from economic discussions,” she said.

Psychologists have long sought to understand the connection between money and happiness.

Though the popular conception has been that “money can’t buy happiness,” studies have shown that wealth can play a role in enhancing happiness. Yet, wealth itself has been poorly defined in studies. And, contributing to this complicated relationship is what Princeton Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman has called the “satisfaction treadmill.” In pioneering studies of human happiness, Kahneman, the Eugene Higgins Professor Emeritus of Psychology, has found that satisfaction does not necessarily increase in a corresponding amount with an improved financial status.

Time is what we make of it

Ask anyone working on a project, and the biggest complaint one hears is “There’s not enough time.”

But instead of more time, maybe what they need is a change of perception.

“Research has shown that it’s not necessarily the time pressure, but it’s the perception of that time pressure that affects you,” says Michael DeDonno, a doctoral student in psychology at Case Western Reserve University. “If you feel you don’t have enough time to do something, it’s going to affect you.”

DeDonno recently studied 163 subjects performing the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT), a popular psychological assessment tool, to investigate the effect of perceived time pressure on a learning-based task. His study, the first to look at the relationship between perceived time pressure and IGT performance, was published in the December issue of Judgment and Decision Making.

He divided the study’s participants into two groups: an experimental group that was informed the time allotted to perform the task was insufficient and the control group which was told they had typically sufficient time to complete the task.

In the IGT, participants choose from among four decks of cards with the goal of making as much money as possible. Two of the decks are “good decks”, yielding a positive utility, and two are “bad decks”, with a negative utility.

The idea is to figure out which decks are good decks in the quickest amount of time to maximize profit over the course of the task.

Both groups were actually given sufficient time to complete the task, which involved 100 trials for each participant. However, each of the two groups was further broken down into subgroups, with one subgroup being given less time between card selections to think about the task.

But results show that participants who were advised the time was insufficient performed worse than those who were told they had enough time, regardless of the actual time allotted.

“If I told you that you didn’t have enough time, your performance was low regardless if you had ample time or not,” DeDonno says. “If you were told you had enough time, in both scenarios, they out performed those who were told they didn’t. ”

DeDonno says there are plenty of real-world benefits to understanding the effects of perceived time pressure on decision-making performance. He cited project team members who perceived a high degree of time pressure had lower job satisfaction. He also noted standardized tests, like the ACT or LSAT, have a high rate of test anxiety by test takers due mostly to time constraints.

He also wants to further the study to examine time perception with HMO physicians in relation to time spent with patients and diagnostic accuracy. Will a perception of time being insufficient by HMO physicians lead to inappropriate medications or an increase in diagnostic error?

While it remains to be determined why perceived time pressure can impair performance, DeDonno says that there are ways to combat it.

“Decision-making can be emotion based, keep your emotions in check. Have confidence in the amount of time you do have to do things. Try to focus on the task and not the time. We don’t control time, but we can control our perception. It’s amazing what you can do with a limited amount of time.

“Time is relevant. Just have the confidence with the time you’re given. I tell my students ‘Do the best you can in the time allotted. When it ends, it ends.’”

Buying experiences, not possessions, leads to greater happiness

Can money make us happy if we spend it on the right purchases? A new psychology study suggests that buying life experiences rather than material possessions leads to greater happiness for both the consumer and those around them. The study demonstrates that experiential purchases, such as a meal out or theater tickets, result in increased well-being because they satisfy higher order needs, specifically the need for social connectedness and vitality — a feeling of being alive.

“These findings support an extension of basic need theory, where purchases that increase psychological need satisfaction will produce the greatest well-being,” said Ryan Howell, assistant professor of psychology at San Francisco State University.

Participants in the study were asked to write reflections and answer questions about their recent purchases. Participants indicated that experiential purchases represented money better spent and greater happiness for both themselves and others. The results also indicate that experiences produce more happiness regardless of the amount spent or the income of the consumer.

Experiences also lead to longer-term satisfaction. “Purchased experiences provide memory capital,” Howell said. “We don’t tend to get bored of happy memories like we do with a material object.

“People still believe that more money will make them happy, even though 35 years of research has suggested the opposite,” Howell said. “Maybe this belief has held because money is making some people happy some of the time, at least when they spend it on life experiences.”

Physically fit kids do better in school

A new study in the Journal of School Health found that physically fit kids scored better on standardized math and English tests than their less fit peers.

Researchers examined the relationship between physical fitness and academic achievement in a racially and economically diverse urban public school district of children enrolled in grades 4 – 8 during the 2004 – 2005 academic year.

Results of their study show that there is a significant relationship between students’ academic achievement and physical fitness. The odds of passing both standardized math and english tests increased as the number of fitness tests passed increased, even when controlling for gender, race/ethnicity, and socio-economic status.

School time and resources are often diverted from Physical Education and opportunities for physical activity such as recess. However, this study shows that students who do well on fitness tests also do well on math and English standardized tests.

“For families and schools, these results suggest investments of time and resources in physical activity and fitness training may not detract from academic achievement in core subjects, and, may even be beneficial,” the authors conclude.

Use physical activity to improve your mood

A new study from Indiana University suggests that even meager levels of physical activity can improve the mood of people with serious mental illnesses (SMI) such as bipolar disorder, major depression and schizophrenia.

This reinforces earlier findings that people with SMI demonstrate low levels of physical activity and supports the consideration of physical activity as a regular part of psychiatric rehabilitation.

“We found a positive association between physical activity level and positive mood when low to moderate levels of physical activity are considered,” said study author Bryan McCormick, associate professor in IU’s Department of Recreation, Park and Tourism Studies. “Physical activity interventions that require lower levels of exertion might be more conducive to improving transitory mood, or the ups and downs people with SMI experience throughout the day.”

McCormick said physical activity often is advocated in addition to psychiatric treatment for people with SMI because of the significant health concerns common to this population. However, low levels of physical activity are also common to this population and pose a major hurdle. For this study, physical activity is considered most forms of sustained movement, such as house cleaning, gardening, walking for transportation or formal exercise.

“The challenge is how to use naturally motivating activities that people have in their everyday lives to get them out and engaged,” McCormick said.

The least active experiences captured in the study correlated with less positive moods. The study also notes that walking is one of the most frequently advocated forms of physical activity in psychiatric rehabilitation programs. Such programs appear to afford both physiological and psychological benefits.