Why Facial Disfigurements Creep Us Out

Whether we realize it or not, most of us have a knee-jerk reaction when we see someone with a facial disfigurement, such as psoriasis, a cleft lip, or a birthmark. We may sit away from them on the bus, hesitate to shake their hand, or even give a barely masked look of revulsion. A new study suggests these disgust reactions stem from an ancient disease-avoidance system that normally prevents us from catching illnesses. Essentially, we treat facial disfigurements like infectious diseases.

Psychologists have recently begun to uncover where disgust comes from, with some researchers believing the emotion is similar to fear. Fear evolved to keep you away from large animals that want to eat you from the outside. Disgust evolved to keep you away from smaller animals that kill you from the inside. Our subconscious minds constantly scan the environment for signs of potential diseases. If we see one, disgust kicks in and we avoid that object or person like the plague.

But it seems our disease-avoidance system sometimes gets it wrong. Previous studies suggested these mistakes underlie the aversion people have to various disfigurements. Learn more here.

Why Do We Have Personal Space?

We begin to develop our individual sense of personal space around age 3 or 4, and the sizes of our bubbles cement themselves by adolescence. Scientists have determined that the bubbles are constructed and monitored by the amygdala, the brain region involved in fear.

The amygdala is activated when you invade people’s personal space. This probably reflects the strong emotional response when somebody gets too close to us. Scientists confirmed this in a rare patient with lesions to her amygdala: she felt entirely comfortable no matter how close somebody got to her, and had no apparent personal space.

Futhermore, abnormal development of the amygdala may also explain why people with autism have difficulties maintaining a normal social distance to other people. Learn more here.

Education improves longevity

Shortly after the Second World War, the Swedish government conducted a vast social experiment to decide whether to implement educational reform. An examination of data from people who took part in the study has revealed that those lucky enough to have experienced the reformed system have been more likely than their contemporaries to live a long life.

The Swedish government decided to undertake a controlled study of its proposed new school system — so, from 1949 to 1962, all 1.2 million children in the Swedish state education system were set on one of two paths. In a slowly increasing proportion of the school districts across the country, it became compulsory for children to attend a comprehensive school for 9 years. The rest of Sweden provided a control group, in which children stuck to the existing system: mandatory schooling for 8 years.

The results … a longer period of education correlated with significant educational benefits as well as extended live span!

Repeating the Swedish experiment on a similar scale would be almost impossible now. No one could advocate deliberately withholding education from a group of children. It would be entirely unethical. Learn more here.

Opposites Don’t Actually Attract

Despite of what you may have heard, opposites actually don’t attract. Despite what most people say about seeking a wider circle of friendship (say, in a large college setting, where there are a lot of different types of people available), they typically befriend only those most similar to themselves.

In an ideal world, being able to meet lots of different people at college would lead to a diversity of friends; we’d take advantage of the human variety on display.

Instead of learning from people who were extremely different – who disagreed with their stance on abortion, or didn’t like ultimate frisbee, or never attended football games – students obey the similarity-attraction effect, sifting through the vast population to find the most homologous possible circle of friends. As the researchers put it, “the larger social contexts afford better opportunity for finegrained assortment.” Learn more here or here.

It’s only four degrees of separation

Six degrees of separation refers to the idea that everyone is on average approximately six steps away, by way of introduction, from any other person on Earth, so that a chain of, “a friend of a friend” statements can be made, on average, to connect any two people in six steps or fewer.

Now Facebook researchers have pored through the records of their 721 million active users, who collectively have designated 69 billion “friendships” among them. The number of friends differs widely. Some users have designated only a single friend, probably the person who persuaded them to join Facebook. Others have accumulated thousands. The median is about 100.

To test the six degrees theory, the Facebook researchers systematically tested how many friend connections they needed to link any two users. Globally, they found a sharp peak at five hops, meaning that most pairs of Facebook users could be connected through four intermediate people also on Facebook (92 per cent). Paths were even shorter within a single country, typically involving only three other people, even in large countries such as the US. Learn more here.

The World of 100

If the world were a village of 100 people, what characteristics would they have? Well, only 1 of them would have a college education, see:

Heaps more posters like this here.

Nearly 7 Billion: Are you typical?

Read more here.

Our changing world

See how the entire human population is slowly getting rich and healthier:

Happiness and sadness are contagious

A new study on the spread of emotions shows that these feelings circulate in patterns similar to what’s seen from models of the spread of disease.

Unfortunately, happiness proved less social than sadness. Each happy friend increased an individual’s chances of personal happiness by 11 percent, while just one sad friend was needed to double an individual’s chance of becoming unhappy.

The pattern also fit disease models in another way. The more friends with flu that you have, the more likely you are to get it. But once you have the flu, how long it takes you to get better doesn’t depend on your contacts. The same thing is true of happiness and sadness.

Importantly, don’t withdraw from friends who are having a hard time. The better solution is to make your sad friends happy. Read more here. An older, similar study is here.

Strong Voice = Strong Man

You can tell a lot about a man by his handshake, but his voice may give away even more. Both men and women can accurately assess a man’s upper body strength based on his voice alone, suggesting that the male voice may have evolved as an indicator of fighting ability.

When people listened to recordings of men, they could accurately predicted their strength, based on a seven-point scale from “weak” to “strong”. The voice analysis provided just as much information about a speaker’s strength as photographs. Read more here or here.