10 Psychological Effects of Nonsexual Touch A simple (nonsexual) touch can increase compliance, helping behaviour, attraction, and signal power. To get around in the world, we mainly rely on our eyes and ears. Touch is a sense that’s often forgotten. But touch is also vital in the way we understand and experience the world. Even the lightest touch on the upper arm can influence the way we think. To prove it, here are 10 psychological effects which show just how powerful nonsexual touch can be. 1. A well-timed touch can encourage other people to return a lost item. In one experiment, users of a phone booth who were touched were more likely to return a lost dime to an experimenter (Kleinke, 1977). The action was no more than a light touch on the arm. People will do more than that though; people will give a bigger tip to a waitress who has touched them (Crusco & Wetzel, 1984). (Stop giggling at the back there!) 2. People are also more likely to provide help when touched. The percentage of people who helped went up from 63% to 90%. 3. 4. 5. 6.
Color Psychology & Infoplease.com by David Johnson Like death and taxes, there is no escaping color. It is ubiquitous. Colors often have different meanings in various cultures. Black Black is the color of authority and power. White Brides wear white to symbolize innocence and purity. Red The most emotionally intense color, red stimulates a faster heartbeat and breathing. The most romantic color, pink, is more tranquilizing. Blue The color of the sky and the ocean, blue is one of the most popular colors. Green Currently the most popular decorating color, green symbolizes nature. Yellow Cheerful sunny yellow is an attention getter. Purple The color of royalty, purple connotes luxury, wealth, and sophistication. Brown Solid, reliable brown is the color of earth and is abundant in nature. Colors of the Flag In the U.S. flag, white stands for purity and innocence. Food for Thought While blue is one of the most popular colors it is one of the least appetizing. Green, brown, and red are the most popular food colors.
Procrastination: Ten Things To Know Is your procrastination hindering you? Ten things you should know. There are many ways to avoid success in life, but the most sure-fire just might be procrastination . Procrastinators sabotage themselves. They put obstacles in their own path. Why would people do that? Twenty percent of people identify themselves as chronic procrastinators. It's not trivial, although as a culture we don't take it seriously as a problem. Procrastination is not a problem of time management or of planning. Procrastinators are made not born. Procrastination predicts higher levels of consumption of alcohol among those people who drink. Procrastinators tell lies to themselves. Procrastinators actively look for distractions, particularly ones that don't take a lot of commitment on their part. There's more than one flavor of procrastination. arousal types, or thrill-seekers, who wait to the last minute for the euphoric rush. decisional procrastinators, who cannot make a decision.
Ten Politically Incorrect Truths About Human Nature Human nature is one of those things that everybody talks about but no one can define precisely. Every time we fall in love, fight with our spouse, get upset about the influx of immigrants into our country, or go to church, we are, in part, behaving as a human animal with our own unique evolved nature—human nature. This means two things. First, our thoughts, feelings, and behavior are produced not only by our individual experiences and environment in our own lifetime but also by what happened to our ancestors millions of years ago. Human behavior is a product both of our innate human nature and of our individual experience and environment. The implications of some of the ideas in this article may seem immoral, contrary to our ideals, or offensive. Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters, Long before TV—in 15th- and 16th- century Italy, and possibly two millennia ago—women were dying their hair blond. Men prefer young women in part because they tend to be healthier than older women.
How the Brain Stops Time One of the strangest side-effects of intense fear is time dilation, the apparent slowing-down of time. It's a common trope in movies and TV shows, like the memorable scene from The Matrix in which time slows down so dramatically that bullets fired at the hero seem to move at a walking pace. In real life, our perceptions aren't keyed up quite that dramatically, but survivors of life-and-death situations often report that things seem to take longer to happen, objects fall more slowly, and they're capable of complex thoughts in what would normally be the blink of an eye. Now a research team from Israel reports that not only does time slow down, but that it slows down more for some than for others. An intriguing result, and one that raises a more fundamental question: how, exactly, does the brain carry out this remarkable feat? Researcher David Eagleman has tackled his very issue in a very clever way . Was it scary enough to generate a sense of time dilation?
How We Shoot Ourselves in the Foot in Committed Relationships Falling in love is as natural as death. Staying in love is as natural as good diet and healthy exercise. We can eat, exercise, and love well in the short run, but over the long haul of everyday modern living, we tend to shoot ourselves in the foot. That's because, like toddlers, we try to do these things in the wrong part of our brains. Below are two of the major ways we shoot ourselves in the foot when it comes to love. The biggest mistake we make in love is assuming that our partners' experience is the same as ours and that events and behaviors should mean the same to them as they do to us. The illusion of sameness allows us to create some measure of safety in the face of the awful vulnerability that new intimate connections evoke. "Our hearts beat as one." "We're soul mates." "We're so close that we complete each other's sentences." "She really believes in me." "He really me." A severe limitation of empathy in intimate relationships is its susceptibility to the illusion of sameness.
Want to Know If Someone Likes You? | Psychology Today - StumbleUpon Ever wondered if someone you're attracted to likes you or not, whether someone is your friend or foe, or whether your employees respect you? There's an easy way to find out... try to make them laugh . If the laughter comes easy, the answer is likely yes. In my bachelor days, I spent many years slowly learning about the ins and outs of the mating market. In my first corporate job, I was working on a project team for a few months where I didn't really like my two supervisors all that much. Many years later in grad school (my advisor was Prof. When we meet new people, it may take a while to figure out whether a relationship (of any kind) is desirable. Humor may serve many functions, but the "interest indicator" theory says that an important one is to indicate relationship interest, whether among potential or ongoing mates, friends, and allies, or among family members.
Freuds *The Interpretation of Dreams* Chapter 1, Section D Back to Psych Web Home Page Back to The Interpretation of Dreams Table of Contents D. Why Dreams Are Forgotten After Waking That a dream fades away in the morning is proverbial. The forgetting of dreams is treated in the most detailed manner by Strumpell. In the first place, all those factors which induce forgetfulness in the waking state determine also the forgetting of dreams. * Periodically recurrent dreams have been observed repeatedly. According to Strumpell, other factors, deriving from the relation of the dream to the waking state, are even more effective in causing us to forget our dreams. Finally, we should remember that the fact that most people take but little interest in their dreams is conducive to the forgetting of dreams. It is therefore all the more remarkable, as Strumpell himself observes, that, in spite of all these reasons for forgetting the dream, so many dreams are retained in the memory. Jessen (p. 547) expresses himself in very decided terms: The observations of V.
Restoring happiness in people with depression Practicing positive activities may serve as an effective, low-cost treatment for people suffering from depression, according to researchers at the University of California, Riverside and Duke University Medical Center. In "Delivering Happiness: Translating Positive Psychology Intervention Research for Treating Major and Minor Depressive Disorders," a paper that appears in the August 2011 issue of the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, the team of UCR and Duke psychology, neuroscience and psychopharmacology researchers proposed a new approach for treating depression -- Positive Activity Interventions (PAI). PAIs are intentional activities such as performing acts of kindness, practicing optimism, and counting one's blessing gleaned from decades of research into how happy and unhappy people are different. More than 16 million U.S. adults -- about 8 percent of the population -- suffer from either major or chronic depression.
A Day in the Life of a Mental Hospital Patient 6:05 am: You lie awake in your tiny bed, underneath the salmon covers, your neck sore from sleeping on one pillow (you asked for another but you’ll need a doctor’s order to have more than one.) Your sleep medicine has worn off and you are now once again a prisoner to your insomnia. All there is to do now is listen to your roommate snore and mutter to herself in her sleep and the sounds of the nurses talking and phones ringing at the nurses station. You remember a Seroquel-induced nightmare you had previously in the night in which you were trapped in a house that was filling with water, drowning and gasping for air. You make a mental note to mention the dream to your doctor later on. 7:00 am: Morning checks. 7:10 am: Brush your teeth, brush your hair, make your bed, and put on a sweatshirt. 7:15 am: You drag your exhausted body out of bed and grab a cup of the weakest, wateriest coffee you have ever ingested from the nurses station. 7:30 am: Breakfast time. 8:30 am: Community group.
Why Men and Women Can't Be &Just Friends& Is the idea of a pure, platonic relationship between non-related, heterosexual men and women a myth? For the most part, it would seem the answer is "yes" and the reason is deeply rooted in the evolutionary soil of our species. Thanks to the writings of John Gray, many of us now know some of the "Mars/Venus" generalizations such as men typically use language as a tool for solving problems while women use it as a way to promote intimacy. Indeed, while other gender stereotypes might be valid, such as it's easier for women to define intimate relationships with men as non-sexual than vice-versa, individual differences among people will always provide exceptional cases. Thus, some women might have a more "masculine" approach to heterosexual friendship than average and some men might relate to friends in a more stereotypically "feminine" manner than most. The reasons for these phenomena are inextricably linked to our species' evolution. Remember: Think well, act well, feel well, be well!