It’s Facebook week on NCBI ROFL! All this week we’ll be featuring papers about everyone’s favorite social networking site. Enjoy!

“Are We Facebook Official?” Implications of Dating Partners’ Facebook Use and Profiles for Intimate Relationship Satisfaction.

“Extending previous research on positive and negative correlates of Facebook use for individuals’ outcomes, this study examined male and female dating partners’ (n=58 couples) Facebook use and portrayals of their intimate relationship on the Facebook profile. Confirming hypotheses from compatibility theories of mate selection, partners demonstrated similar Facebook intensity (e.g., usage, connection to Facebook), and were highly likely to portray their relationship on their Facebook profiles in similar ways (i.e., display partnered status and show their partner in profile picture). (more…)

It’s Facebook week on NCBI ROFL! All this week we’ll be featuring papers about everyone’s favorite social networking site. Enjoy!

Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus? Examining Gender Differences in Self-Presentation on Social Networking Sites.

“Psychological research on gender differences in self-presentation has already revealed that women place higher priority on creating a positive self-presentation, while men are less concerned about the image they present in face-to-face (ftf) communication. Nowadays, with the extensive use of new media, self-presentation is no longer so closely tied to ftf situations, but can also take place in the online world. (more…)

The sickening rug: a repeating static pattern that leads to motion-sickness-like symptoms.

“The nauseogenic properties of a patterned rug that reputedly caused motion-sickness-like symptoms in those who viewed it was the topic of this study. Naive observers viewed a 1:1 scale image of the black-and-white patterned rug and a homogeneous gray region of equivalent luminance in a counterbalanced within-subjects design. (more…)

“We advance a new account of why people endorse conspiracy theories, arguing that individuals use the social-cognitive tool of projection when making social judgements about others. In two studies, we found that individuals were more likely to endorse conspiracy theories if they thought they would be willing, personally, to participate in the alleged conspiracies. (more…)

You must have been a beautiful baby: ratings of infant facial attractiveness fail to predict ratings of adult attractiveness.

“Facial attractiveness has been studied extensively, but little research has examined the stability of facial attractiveness of individuals across different stages of development. We conducted a study examining the relationship between facial attractiveness in infants (age 24 months and under) and the same individuals as young adults (age 16-18 years)using infant and adult photographs from high school yearbooks. (more…)

Effects of loading on maximum vertical jumps: Selective effects of weight and inertia.

“A novel loading method was applied to explore selective effects of externally added weight (W), weight and inertia (W+I), and inertia (I) on maximum counter-movement jumps (CMJ) performed with arm swing. Externally applied extended rubber bands and/or loaded vest added W, W+I, and I corresponding to 10-40% of subjects’ body mass. As expected, an increase in magnitude of all types of load was associated with an increase in ground reaction forces (GRF), as well as with a decrease in both the jumping performance and power output. (more…)

Doing better by getting worse: posthypnotic amnesia improves random number generation.

“Although forgetting is often regarded as a deficit that we need to control to optimize cognitive functioning, it can have beneficial effects in a number of contexts. We examined whether disrupting memory for previous numerical responses would attenuate repetition avoidance (the tendency to avoid repeating the same number) during random number generation and thereby improve the randomness of responses. (more…)

Disambiguating the “guilty look”: salient prompts to a familiar dog behaviour.

“Anthropomorphisms are regularly used by owners in describing their dogs. Of interest is whether attributions of understanding and emotions to dogs are sound, or are unwarranted applications of human psychological terms to non-humans. One attribution commonly made to dogs is that the “guilty look” shows that dogs feel guilt at doing a disallowed action. In the current study, this anthropomorphism is empirically tested. (more…)

The effect of humor on memory: constrained by the pun.

“In a series of experiments, we investigated the effect of pun humor on memory. In all experiments, the participants were exposed to knock-knock jokes in either the original form retaining the pun or in a modified form that removed the pun. (more…)

Possibilities to improve the aircraft interior comfort experience.

“Comfort plays an increasingly important role in the interior design of airplanes. Although ample research has been conducted on airplane design technology, only a small amount of public scientific information is available addressing the passenger’s opinion. In this study, more than 10,000 internet trip reports and 153 passenger interviews were used to gather opinions about aspects which need to be improved in order to design a more comfortable aircraft interior. (more…)