The Science of Sarcasm (Not That You Care)
By DAN HURLEY
June 3, 2008

According to the above NYT news article, individuals who lose the ability to perceive sacarsm and irony are unable to use the part of the brain that decodes visual and social contexts.

Dr. Rankin,a professor at University of California, San Francisco, had conducted experiments where dialogue on paper is compared to dialogue in face-to-face encounters. Apparently, paralinguistic cues play quite an important part in communicating sarcasm. Additionally,those who have lost the use of the right hemisphere will not be able to appreciate humour, puns and jokes.

However, even normal folks with “intact brains” have strengths and weaknesses in the ability to detect social cues. How do we sharpen our cognitive abilities then? Read more books? Talk to people who like to engage in verbal sparring and language puzzles? Let’s leave such research to the brainier folks to figure out.

There are worries in France that their education system is not preparing enough students for the world of business. A common observation by career offices is that students do not study enough of the “right subjects”.

It is not that France has a shortage of determined students. For example France has 65,000 students studying Psychology, around 1/4 of all of Europe combined. The problem appears to be a lack of “practical qualifications”. In a particularly insightful article comment, a French student said: “Everyone tells you to get a good education but my parents studied much less than I did and yet they didn’t have such problems finding work.”

The problem appears to be partly oversupply, and partly a problem caused by a slashing of jobs in the civil sector by President Nicolas Sarkozy. (Many students wish to work in the public sector). However it also reflects an unfortunate perception faced by many social science students, namely that they lack the hard skills which employers desire.

Read the full article here

You Remind Me of Me
By BENEDICT CAREY
Published: February 12, 2008

“Trying to decode the subtle cues that lead to human rapport, scientists have trained their focus on mimicry. They have found that immediate social bonding between strangers is highly dependent on mimicry, a synchronized and usually unconscious give and take of words and gestures that creates a current of good will between two people.”

An intriguing read from the New York Times. It’s quite amazing what a big role body language and mirroring play in communication. Psychology and communication do mix! New York Times is available on Factiva – a database subscribed by the Library.

The nature versus nurture debate has been a common theme throughout the social sciences for centuries. For example Shakespeare’s 1611 play The Tempest has a character, Caliban, who is regarded by some to be a characterization of the nature versus nurture debate.

Interestingly, a pair of identical twins which were deliberately separated at birth have just been reunited. The women were apparently part of an experiment on the nature versus nature debate, although they were said to have later been dropped from the experiment. The original intent was to assess the impact of family environment on a person’s development, and also to assess the heredity of mental illness.

Both women are 35 years old and look quite different from each other and pictures of the women in their teens also display a striking difference. However both women are said to have the same favourite books and movies. Does this swing the debate towards nurture?

Read the full article here

A recent article published by American Psychological Association “To outline, or not to outline?” reveals that people juggle multiple and often contradictory demands of writing. Contrary to conventional wisdom, some studies suggest that the messier the thought process, the clearer the prose!

Psychologist Sarah Ransdell, a writing-cognition researcher and professor at Nova Southeastern University, noted that rather than following a series of steps — first planning, then writing, then revising — good writers do all three nearly simultaneously. Her research shows that asking students to engage in a stepwise process results in lower-quality writing.

However, a team of researchers in England suggests that a particular subset of students may benefit from outlining, while others may do best with a strategy of revising as they compose.

Students high in self-monitoring, for example, frequently evaluate their own text, perhaps taking the perspective of a potential reader.  When they are taught to revise their writing through multiple drafts, they showed improvements over the course of five weeks. In contrast, the writing of high self-monitors taught to outline deteriorated. Conversely, the students low in self-monitoring improved if they learned to outline. However, they produced poorer essays if they learned to revise through multiple drafts.

Full article available at http://www.apa.org/monitor/julaug06/outline.html

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B.F. Skinner topped the list, followed by Jean Piaget, Sigmund Freud and Albert Bandura. The rankings were based on the frequency of three variables: journal citation, introductory psychology textbook citation and survey response. Surveys were also sent to 1,725 members of the American Psychological Society, asking them to list the top psychologists of the century. In addition, the researchers  took into account whether the psychologists had a National Academy of Sciences membership, were elected as APA president or received the APA Distinguished Scientific Contributions Award, and whether their surname was used as an eponym. The ranking can be downloaded at http://edtech.tph.wku.edu/~shaggblo/eminence.pdf 

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