Rating Attractiveness: Study Finds Consensus Among Men, Not Women

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.

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Making The Most Of It: Study Reveals Motivating Factor for Enjoying The Present

It is common knowledge that when something becomes scarce, its value goes up. This concept does not just apply to material goods—time can be an extremely valuable commodity, especially when it is in short supply. According to a new study, thinking that people have a limited amount of time remaining to participate in an activity makes us appreciate the activity that much more and motivates us to make the most of it.

Psychologist Jaime Kurtz from Pomona College investigated how behavior and attitude towards an activity change when there is a limited amount of time remaining to engage in it. A group of college seniors participated in this study, which occurred six weeks prior to graduation. Every day for two weeks, the students were to write about their college experiences, including the activities they participated in. The experiment was designed so that some of the students were to think about graduation as a far-off event and some students were told to think about graduation as occurring very soon.

The results, reported in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, reveal that the students' behavior was influenced by how the graduation deadline was framed (that is, whether graduation was occurring shortly or in the future). It turns out, the students who thought of graduation as occurring very soon reported participating in more college-related activities compared to the students who thought of graduation as a far-off event.

Kurtz surmises that when faced with the imminent end of college, students were more motivated to take advantage of the time they had left in school and participate in as many events as possible—the students realized it would be their last chance to engage in college-related activities.

Kurtz notes that although it may seem counterintuitive, these findings support the idea that "thinking about an experience's future ending can enhance one's present experience of it". In addition, Kurtz suggests that "focusing on the fact the experiences like these are fleeting enhances enjoyment by creating a 'now or never' type of motivation."

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Psychology of Face Transplants is Subject of New Book

A timely new book addresses the psychology of face transplants, just as the world is marveling over news of the most extensive such transplant to date.

Someone Else's Face in the Mirror: Identity and the New Science of Face Transplants was written by Carla Bluhm, a developmental psychologist and visiting assistant professor at Allegheny College in Pennsylvania, and Nathan Clendenin, Allegheny class of 2007.

The book begins with the story of Isabelle Dinoire, the recipient of the first face transplant, her surgery and her battles with tissue rejection. But the book's scope widens with a look at how surgical teams --- including three from the U.S. --- are in a global race to perform the first full face transplant. It also explores how medical history has led to this point, with prior successful transplants ranging from body parts as simple as corneas to those as neurologically complex as a heart, a hand or a penis.

"Although, potentially, a face transplant could negatively impact a person's sense of identity, most face transplant recipients are already in the midst of experiencing the psychological problems related to identity," says Bluhm. "Thus face transplants also hold remarkable promise for positively addressing psychological problems related to a person's sense of identity."

Surgeons at Cleveland Clinic have reported that they have completed the most extensive facial transplant to date. The surgery took place in recent weeks on a woman who wishes to remain anonymous but is said to be pleased with the results. That surgery lasted 22 hours. The woman had had no upper jaw, nose, cheeks or lower eyelids -- and was unable to eat, talk, smile, smell or breathe on her own. It has not been disclosed what caused her disfigurement.

Prior to coming to Allegheny, Bluhm taught at Westminster College, University of Washington, Arizona State University, University of Rhode Island and Columbia University. Clendenin is a doctoral candidate in clinical psychology at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh.

Praeger Publishers expects to publish the book in April 2009.

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Look Before You Leap: New Study Examines Self-Control

Reckless decision-making can lead to dire consequences when it comes to food, credit cards, or savings. What’s the key to making good decisions? A new study in the Journal of Consumer Research outlines a novel method for measuring people’s abilities to consider the consequences of their actions. It also provides hope for consumers who want to make more prudent decisions.

Authors Gergana Y. Nenkov (Boston College), J. Jeffrey Inman, and John Hulland (both University of Pittsburgh) developed a 13-question survey that rated participants on a scale called the Elaboration on Potential Outcomes (EPO) scale. The scale proved to be a reliable measure of how much participants considered the consequences of their actions. For example, when undergraduates considered whether to get LASIK surgery or whether to charge an expensive electronics item on an already heavily charged credit card, high EPO scores were associated with more consequence-related thoughts.

In a number of settings, researchers found that consumers who think about the pros and cons before making decisions reported that they were more likely to exercise and consume healthy foods. They had lower rates of alcohol abuse, procrastination, and overspending. They were also more likely to be saving money for retirement.

The good news, according to the authors, is that people who aren’t inclined to consider the consequences of their actions can be aided by simple interventions, like brochures and advertising that encourage them to think about the dangers of obesity or the benefits of saving for retirement. Scare tactics, it seems, were the most effective. “The consideration of negative consequences has a bigger impact than the consideration of positive consequences,” the authors write.

“The importance of studying consumers’ self-control is widely recognized, since being unable to regulate one’s emotions, impulses, actions and thoughts creates problems, not only for individual consumers, but also for society as a whole,” write the authors.

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New Study Finds Why Even Momentary Sadness Increases Spending

How you are feeling has an impact on your routine economic transactions, whether you’re aware of this effect or not.

In a new study that links contemporary science with the classic philosophy of William James, a research team finds that people feeling sad and self-focused spend more money to acquire the same commodities than those in a neutral emotional state. The team’s paper, “Misery is not Miserly: Sad and Self-Focused Individuals Spend More,” will be published in the June edition of Psychological Science and will be presented at the Society for Social and Personality Psychology’s Annual Meeting on Feb. 9.

The new study follows up on earlier research that established a connection between sadness and buying. Researchers Cynthia Cryder (Carnegie Mellon University), Jennifer Lerner (Harvard University), James J. Gross (Stanford University), and Ronald E. Dahl (University of Pittsburgh) have now discovered that heightened self-focus drives the connection -- a finding that expands understanding of consumer behavior and, more broadly, the impact of emotions on decision-making.

In the experiment, participants viewed either a sad video clip or one devoid of human emotion. Afterward, participants could purchase an ordinary commodity, such as a water bottle, at various prices. Participants randomly assigned to the sad condition offered almost 300% more money to buy the product than “neutral” participants. Notably, participants in the sadness condition typically insist, incorrectly, that the emotional content of the film clip did not carry over to affect their spending.

Self-focus helps to explain the spending differences between the two groups. Among participants “primed” to feel sad, those who were highly self-focused paid more than those low in self-focus. Notably, sadness tends to increase self-focus, making the increased spending prompted by sadness difficult to avoid.

Why might a combination of sadness and self-focus lead people to spend more money? First, sadness and self-focus cause one to devalue both one’s sense of self and one’s current possessions. Second, this devaluation increases a person’s willingness to pay more for new material goods, presumably to enhance sense of self.

Notably, the “misery is not miserly” effect may be even more dramatic in real life, as the low-intensity sadness evoked in the experiment likely underestimates the power of intense sadness on spending behavior. The effect could extend to domains beyond purchasing decisions, causing people to engage in increased stock trading, for example, or even to seek new relationships-- without conscious awareness that they are being driven by their emotions.

The study is an early step toward uncovering the hidden impact of different, fluctuating, and what would otherwise seem irrelevant emotions on our day-to-day decisions.

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Examination Reveals Adolescent Reaction to Iraq War

University of Cincinnati researchers are reporting what they call a significant pattern among Iraqi adolescents and their reaction to the war in Iraq – the higher the perceived threat of the war, the higher the teens reported their self-esteem. The findings – from a 2004 survey of 1,000 Iraqi adolescents in 10 neighborhoods in Baghdad – are reported in the current issue of the Journal of Adolescence.

Steve Carlton-Ford, a University of Cincinnati associate professor and co-author of the study, says the findings give a rare look at the impact of war on adolescents, explaining that, in general, sociologists and psychologists are examining how war affects small children. Carlton-Ford adds that in the cases of young children, conflict-related events typically lower a child’s psychological well-being. The survey of Iraqi teens was conducted in 2004 by co-author Morton Ender of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, who supervised field surveys with the U.S. Army in the neighborhoods surrounding Baghdad. The study is also authored by UC doctoral student Ahoo Tabatabai.

The authors found that despite obvious threat to the adolescents’ sense of security, the youth were coping fairly well in 2004, with self-esteem levels comparable to that of Palestinian youth. “In the presence of conflict-related trauma one generally observes lower levels of psychological well-being (e.g., PTSD, grief reactions), and sometimes lower self-esteem,” write the authors. “Our results, however, are consistent with a body of theory and research that predicts self-esteem striving and higher self-esteem among the individuals who face indirect threats to central components of their social identities (rather than directly facing traumatic war-related events). In other words, in a situation where we observe a broad social context involving the presence of foreign forces (a clear violation of Muslim principles) combined with general violence throughout Baghdad and Iraq, we also observe a heightened sense of self, at least to the extent that one’s self is tied to one’s nation.”

The study suggests future surveys of adolescents under conditions of armed conflict to track their self-concept as they become young adults.

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Public Policy Fails to Address the Effects of Media Violence on Children

Highly publicized events such as school shootings arouse public interest in the effects of media violence exposure on children, yet there is still considerable public debate about whether to take this issue seriously. A recent article in Social Issues and Policy Review summarizes the research on the effects of media violence and convincingly demonstrates the profound influence that media violence is having in society.

The many studies that have been compiled on the effects of viewing media violence show that there are at least 14 scientifically documented effects on children’s physiological and psychological well-being, both in the short and long term. Although many different types of studies have been conducted, they converge on the same conclusion: Violent media exposure increases the likelihood of aggressive behavior. Video games are of special concern because their effects may be particularly pronounced.

Despite the abundant research documenting the harmful effects of media violence, few people seem to get the message. For example, over half of American parents believe that violence makes children more aggressive, yet only a small percentage establish rules regarding content for their households. In addition, little has been done in the public policy arena in the United States. Because of First Amendment concerns, the courts are less concerned tolerant of government restrictions on media violence than on other public health risk factors. Furthermore, some courts have failed to glean the true strength of the scientific evidence from expert testimony by opposing sides.

The authors outline clear policy options. They recommend a moratorium on access-restriction legislation. Instead, they suggest that parents should be more actively involved in their child’s media habits and that creating a universal rating system for all media, in combination with a major education campaign, might be the most effective policy. In addition, they propose that physicians, medical schools, and state and city governments could also undertake policy initiatives that might be effective. Media violence effects “are likely to become greater over time, as different media converge, become more interactive, become more global, and colonize more spaces in our lives,” the authors note.

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Light Humor in the Workplace is Good Thing, Says MU business Professor

It is commonly believed that kidding around at work isn’t a good thing. Well, it is, says a University of Missouri-Columbia researcher, who has examined how workplace humor affects the working environment.

Chris Robert, assistant professor of management in MU’s Robert J. Trulaske, Sr. College of Business, says that humor – particularly joking around about things associated with the job – actually has a positive impact in the workplace. Occasional humor among colleagues, he says, enhances creativity, department cohesiveness and overall performance. The conclusion was made by examining theories on humor and integrating literature from a wide variety of disciplines that touch on the subject. Several hundred sources were analyzed by Robert and collaborator Wan Yan, a business doctoral student, who have attempted to bring together literature from numerous disciplines to make the case that humor is serious business.

“Humor has a significant impact in organizations,” says Robert, who also teaches psychology in MU’s College of Arts and Science. “Humor isn’t incompatible with goals of the workplace. It’s not incompatible with the organization’s desire to be competitive. In fact, we argue that humor is pretty important. It’s not just clowning around and having fun; it has meaningful impact on cohesiveness in the workplace and communication quality among workers. The ability to appreciate humor, the ability to laugh and make other people laugh actually has physiological effects on the body that cause people to become more bonded.”

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Online Education More Than Business, Tech

Often times it seems people associate online education with business and/or IT programs -- that it is really most for professionals in those fields get ahead in their careers.


Meet Jeffrey Baker, a 2005 PhD graduate from capella university, and leave those misconceptions behind today.

While it is true that Capella offers undergraduate, graduate, PhD, and certificate programs in business and IT fields, the accredited online university offers so much more.


Baker presented his dissertation research at the 2006 American Psychological Association (APA) Convention in New Orleans. His paper, "Extended Testing Time and GPA for College Students with LD," was part of a session titled "Issues Related to Adults with Developmental Disabilities."


Baker holds a PhD in psychology with a specialization in educational psychology from Capella, which serves more than 19,000 students in all 50 states and 56 countries. Aside from its IT and business programs, Capella provides learning in education, human services, and psychology. In all, Capella offers 82 graduate and undergraduate specializations and 16 certificate programs.


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Video: Fighting China's Internet Addiction

Electric shock therapy, real life war games and psychology are just a few of the tools China is using to curb widespread addiction among that nation's 31 million Internet gamers. Watch this video of a report from a special treatment center in Beijing.

A communist dictatorship, China has long clamped down not only on democracy but on Internet use among its population.

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Researchers Find Older Folks Don't Get The Joke

It's no laughing matter that older adults have a tougher time understanding basic jokes than do younger adults.

It's partially due to a cognitive decline associated with age, according to Washington University in St. Louis researchers Wingyun Mak, a graduate student in psychology in Arts & Sciences, and Brian Carpenter, Washington University associate professor of psychology.

Humor comprehension in older adults functions in a different fashion than humor comprehension in younger adults. The researchers studied older adults from a university subject pool as well as undergraduate students. The subjects participated in tests that indicated their ability to complete jokes accurately as well as tests that indicated their cognitive capabilities in areas of abstract reasoning, short-term memory, and cognitive flexibility. Overall, older adults demonstrated lower performance on both tests of cognitive ability as well as tests of humor comprehension than did younger adults.

"However, just because you're an older adult does not mean that you can't understand humor. All hope is not lost," says Mak. "This is just the first step in understanding how humor comprehension functions in older adults." There are likely a multitude of factors, like previous experiences, preferences, and personality that also contribute to how well someone understands different types of humor.

The hope would be that this study and future research would allow researchers to gain a greater understanding of the relationship between cognition and humor comprehension. Perhaps down the line, this knowledge may inform the way humor is integrated into programs targeted at improving the quality of life for older adults.

The paper, published in the Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society, was based on the theory that humor comprehension is a result of resolving incongruities—resolving the conflict between the expected and the actual, which requires a combination of cognitive skills. As older adults age, they experience cognitive declines that the researchers indicate affect their ability to comprehend humor.

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Capella Researcher's Book Aims For Next Level

A capella university adjunct faculty member has co-written a book aimed at helping people take their lives to the next level.

Co-written by Sara Orem, Appreciative Coaching: A Positive Process for Change uses positive questions, mindfulness, and other tools to acknowledge the strengths of individuals and create change.

Orem has a coaching firm and teaches in Capella's School of Business and Technology.

“Rather than focusing on individuals in limited or problem-oriented ways, Appreciative Coaching guides readers through four stages -- discovery, dream, design and destiny -- that inspire them to an appreciative and empowering view of themselves and their future,” Orem says. “What we have presented is really a new application of appreciative inquiry.”

It's just another way Capella and its faculty work to help improve people's lives.

An online university accredited by The Higher Learning Commission and is a member of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools, Capella offers graduate degree programs in education, human services, and psychology as well as other fields.

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How Do Newcomers Make Changes in Long-Standing Groups?

Virtually everyone who joins a new group is sensitive to the fact that, as a newcomer, he or she must tread carefully for a while, keeping a low profile until becoming sufficiently integrated into the group. When they do offer their ideas, criticisms, and suggestions, existing group members typically resist their contributions. Why does that happen and what can be done to overcome that resistance" Research published in the July issue of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin (PSPB), from SAGE, explores those questions.

The studies, authored in PSPB by Matthew Hornsey, Tim Grice, Jolanda Jetten, Neil Paulsen, and Victor Callan (all at University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia), examine how groups responded to identical criticisms of the group presented by both newcomers and old-timers. In every instance, the newcomers’ statements aroused less agreement and more negativity than the same comments delivered by long-term members. As a result, old-timers were more influential in persuading others than the newcomers were.

The authors conclude that the resistance to newcomers occurred because they were perceived as being less attached to their group member identity than long-term members, leading others to question whether they had the group’s best interests at heart. “Newcomers should have greater influence to the extent that they show commitment to their identity as a group member,” write the authors. “Newcomers who seemed to relinquish their attachment to a community to which they formerly belonged were more influential in their new group.”
Newcomers face an uphill battle to have their criticisms and recommendations for change accepted and this research can help them bring about positive change in the groups they join.





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Is Television Traumatic?

Dream journals being kept by students in a college psychology class have provided researchers with a unique look at how people experienced the events of 9/11, including the influence that television coverage of the World Trade Center attacks had on people's levels of stress.

Reported in the April 2007 issue of the journal Psychological Science, the study data finds that for every hour of television viewed on Sept. 11 – with some students reporting in excess of 13 hours watched – levels of stress, as indicated by dream content, increased significantly. In addition, the study found that time spent talking with family and friends helped individuals to better process the day's horrific events.

"We had not set out to conduct a scientific study of TV viewing and trauma," says lead author Ruth Propper, an associate professor of psychology at Merrimack College in North Andover, Mass. "But it so happened that students enrolled in one of my courses during the fall 2001 semester were already in the process of keeping dream journals on a nightly basis. As the events of 9/11 were unfolding, I realized there was a valuable opportunity to find out what impact both media coverage and social interactions were having on individuals throughout the course of this tragedy."

So, on Sept. 12, Propper distributed a questionnaire to her students asking them to report on their activities of the day before, including the amount of TV they had watched, the amount of radio they had listened to, and the amount of time they had spent talking about the experience with family and friends.

"What distinguishes these findings is that they occurred in 'real-time,'" adds coauthor Robert Stickgold, a sleep researcher in the Division of Psychiatry at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. "Because we have the students' pre-9/11 dreams with which to compare, we can draw more reliable conclusions about our post-9/11 findings."

Dreams are a reflection of the way the mind is processing and sorting the day's events, and depending on a person's state of mind, will contain different images. For the purposes of this study, the authors separated dream content into four categories: dreams containing specific references to 9/11 (smoke, explosions, police, box cutters, etc.); dreams with generalized threatening content (which made people fearful even though they didn't contain specific references to 9/11); dreams containing broadly related themes related to 9/11 (for example, disasters in general, rather than the 9/11 disaster specifically); and, dreams with strong negative emotional content (which elicited general feelings of anger, fear, or sadness).

"People's dreams can function as a measure of how much distress they are feeling and how well or poorly they are coping," says Stickgold. "If, in your dreams, you are still seeing specific traumatic images – buildings collapsing, fire burning, people jumping – then it means that these stressful events are not being adequately processed. But, if you're seeing tangential events in your dreams – for example, a hurricane rather than the specific 9/11 images – it indicates that your brain is trying to make sense of the trauma and that you are coping successfully."

Not surprisingly, the researchers found that in the days and weeks following the attacks the students' dreams were twice as likely to contain at least one of the four "content features" as they had prior to 9/11. But, says Propper, "Our next question was, 'Is there an explanation for why some individuals' dreams contained specific images of 9/11 and others didn't?'"
So, the authors turned to the questionnaires.

The questionnaire responses showed that throughout the day of Sept. 11, students spent between 0 and 2.5 hours listening to the radio. They spent between one and 12 hours – an average of 5.9 hours – talking about the events with family and friends. And they spent between 1.5 and 13 hours watching television news coverage of the attacks, an average of 6.5 hours.

"When we compared these responses with the dream journal entries, we discovered that for each hour of TV viewing a subject reported, there was a statistically significant six percent increase in the proportion of the dreams containing a specific reference to the attacks," says Propper. Among the individuals who watched less than three hours of television there were no specific references at all.

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Online University Advances Research

Universities historically conduct research and advance the state-of-the-art. Online universities and distance learning programs also contribute to innovation and making things better.

For instance, Sara Orem is an adjunct faculty member at Capella University, the well-known accredited online university, and has co-written a new book titled Appreciative Coaching: A Positive Process for Change. Recent developments in psychology and organizational development suggest that people and organizations flourish when they focus on human ideals, achievements, and best practices.

Appreciative Coaching, published by Jossey-Bass, uses positive questions, mindfulness, and other tools to acknowledge the strengths of individuals and effect change. Orem’s co-authors are Jacqueline Binkert and Ann Clancy.

“Rather than focusing on individuals in limited or problem-oriented ways, Appreciative Coaching guides the reader through four stages – Discovery, Dream, Design and Destiny – that inspire them to an appreciative and empowering view of themselves and their future,” Orem says. “What we have presented is really a new application of appreciative inquiry.”

Orem adds that the book is written for individual coaches of managers, executives, and “those who do one-on-one work with people who can influence and create change in their organizations.”

In addition to serving as a faculty member and coach in Capella University’s School of Business and Technology, Orem is the principal of her own coaching firm. She has presented programs in Appreciative Inquiry at the National Organization Development Network, and International Coach Federation annual conferences.

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