Exploring Enriching Environments
Don’t worry if you’re feeling sort of lonely during this time of year; even bacteria feel alone sometimes, and there’s trillions of them.
But, if you’re really feeling blue, you can always move to Florida; states that get the most sun also tend to have the happiest residents.
Westerners traveling to Asia may expect some language barriers. Perhaps enthusiastic facial expressions will help them be understood. Well, not so fast. According to research published August 13th in the journal Current Biology, Easterners and Westerners might not speak the same facial language.
University of Glasgow researchers enlisted 13 Western Caucasians and 13 East Asians. They had everyone examine pictures of expressive faces that were labeled according to a recognized western system called the Facial Action Coding System. The faces were purported to be happy, sad, surprised, fearful, disgusted, angry or neutral, and the participants categorized them as such. Turns out the East Asians were less likely to categorize the faces by Western standards.
By tracking the subject’s eye movements, researchers concluded that Westerners look at whole faces. But Easterners kept their focus mainly on the eye region. So while Westerners may use their whole faces to show that they’re elated, Easterners may express that feeling mainly around their eyes. Which means that facial expressions are not a universal language. That’s a fact that international travelers are sooner or later forced to face.
—Cynthia Graber, Scientific American Podcast
From MSNBC:
We humans often imitate the body postures or mannerisms of people we meet, usually without either person realizing it.
Previous studies have shown that this imitation promotes affection and empathy for the imitator in the people who are being imitated, suggesting thiscommon human behavior evolved to help us get along and thrive in social groupings. In short, it might help strangers become friends.
But whether or not the same was true for other primates wasn’t known. A new study, detailed in the Aug. 14 issue of the journal Science, suggests the effect works in capuchin monkeys, a very social species of New World monkey that lives in tight-knit groups.
A new study found it’s not survival of the fittest that promotes humans to the next generation, but survival of the kindest.
Woot! Kind people rule!
Mental Flowers 