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 Out of
Context
What’s happening in the world
today—
from the practical to the ridiculous
Women Smile More Than Men, Except When They
are in Similar Roles
Women do smile more than men, but when occupying
similar work and social roles, the gender differences
in the rate of smiling disappear, a Yale researcher
has found. Also, there are large differences in the
degree to which men smile less than women, depending
on a person’s culture, ethnicity, age, or when
people think they are being observed, according to
the study funded by the National Science
Foundation.
“It would be interesting for social
psychologists and anthropologists to look at these
data because the wide cultural, ethnic, and other
differences suggest that the sex difference is not
something that is hard-wired,” said Marianne
LaFrance, professor of psychology at Yale and senior
author of the study published in the journal
Psychological Bulletin. “This is not a
function of being male or female. Each culture
overlays men and women with rules about appropriate
behavior for men and women.”
LaFrance and her co-authors, Elizabeth Paluck of
Yale and Marvin Hecht, a graduate student at the
time, set out to examine every available study
conducted on gender differences in smiling. They
found that women do smile more than men, but the
difference is modest. “The difference is there,
but it’s not whopping,” LaFrance said.
“Indeed, there are studies that find just the
opposite.”
Also, the rate at which men and women differ in
how much they smile is greater in the United States
and Canada than in other parts of the world, like
England and Australia. In the United States, there is
a greater gender difference among Caucasians in
smiling, but this difference virtually disappears
among African-Americans.
In terms of age differences, teens show the
largest gender difference in smiling. After that, the
genders converge on their smile rates. “We
don’t know why it maxes out among young
adults,” LaFrance said.
The researchers also found that the largest gender
differences in smiling occurred when men and women
thought they were being observed. They smiled more
similarly when they thought no one was looking.
“The logic here is when people know their
behavior is being monitored, they more closely adhere
to the norms for appropriate behavior for their
gender,” LaFrance said. “People are at
their gendered best when people are
looking.”
Men and women also smile about the same amount
when they are in the same position in terms of power,
occupation, or social role. LaFrance surmises that
the gender differences are overridden by smile norms
for the role one is in, rather than with the gender
one is; however, when there is tension in the air,
women try to diffuse it with a smile more often than
men. “Women do what we call ‘emotion
work’ and one of the best ways to do this is to
smile to soothe hurt feelings, to restore
harmony,” LaFrance said.
Why do babies smile at their mothers? Love,
affection, or to diffuse tension they sense? How will
research like this affect our behavior? Will it
change our natural tendencies? Will we stop to ask,
“Should I smile at you? How will you interpret
my smile?” before we smile? Probably not! Most
of us will say, “I’ll smile when I want
to—without worrying about its impact on
business relationships.”
Pheromones in Male Perspiration Reduce
Women’s Tension, Alter Hormone
Response
Scientists at the University of Pennsylvania and
the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia
have found that exposure to male perspiration has
marked psychological and physiological effects on
women: It can brighten women’s moods, reducing
tension and increasing relaxation. These results will
be published in June in the journal Biology of
Reproduction, and they currently appear on the
journal’s Web site at www.biolreprod.org
.
“It has long been recognized that female
pheromones can affect the menstrual cycles of other
women,” said George Preti, a member of the
Monell Center and adjunct professor of dermatology in
Penn’s School of Medicine. “These
findings are the first to document mood and
neuroendocrine effects of male pheromones on
females.”
In a study led by Preti and colleague Charles J.
Wysocki, extracts from the underarms of male
volunteers were applied to the upper lip of 18 women
ages 25 to 45. During the six hours of exposure to
the compound, the women were asked to rate their mood
using a fixed scale. “Much to our surprise, the
women reported feeling less tense and more relaxed
during exposure to the male extract,” said
Wysocki, a member of the Monell Center and adjunct
professor of animal biology in Penn’s School of
Veterinary Medicine. “This suggests that there
may be much more going on in social settings like
singles bars than meets the eye.”
Imagine that you’ve just completed an
aerobic workout, and your whole body is drenched in
sweat. We know that perspiration is your body’s
way of cooling itself, whether that extra heat comes
from hardworking muscles or over-stimulated nerves,
such as when you are about to do something really
big—maybe a job interview, a presentation, a
first date, or your wedding—when you notice
that your palms and underarms are sweating.
Now it seems that perspiration may have greater
functionality than cooling our bodies; it may be a
way of cooling our minds, too. If that’s the
case, we may see perspiration-based over-the-counter
drugs in the near future that can be used to relieve
stress on a short-term basis—without becoming
addictive.
Psychology Professor Maps Choice-Making in
the Brain
The next time you are frustrated by someone who
says, “I’m of two minds about
this,” at least now you will know why. The
latest research conducted by Kip Smith, an assistant
professor of psychology at Kansas State University,
may explain why people often can’t make up
their minds. Smith’s current study focuses on
which parts of the brain are used in the
decision-making process.
“We’re of at least two minds,”
Smith said. “This research shows the brain is
not a single entity. There is not a single executive
decision-making mechanism there.” Smith’s
research has resulted in neuroimages of the parts of
the brain used in different types of choices. Smith
said there are two systems for making decisions in
the brain: deliberative and emotional. Deliberative
systems, also referred to as calculation areas,
utilize parts of the brain related to mathematics and
rational decisions. Emotional systems utilize older,
more primal parts of the brain.
According to Smith, individual behavior is
affected by attitudes about payoffs, such as gains
and losses, in addition to beliefs about outcomes,
such as risk and ambiguity. During the experiments,
the brain activity of participants was measured by
positron emission tomography. The research
demonstrates the relationship between brain activity
and observed choices. Smith’s results allowed
him to create images of the parts of the brain used
for risk, ambiguity, gains, and losses with decision
making in the experiment.
Smith said some of the results were surprising.
“We thought that risky losses would be
processed by the part of the brain that responds to
fear, but they were dealt with in a fairly rational
manner,” he said. Also, the deliberative areas
of the brain did not show high usage with decisions
relating to risky gains. “It could be that the
emotional areas overwhelm the calculation
areas.”
Risk is defined as the probability of an unwanted
event occurring, but the severity of the potential
loss is a factor, too. Combining these two
considerations in an objective fashion is difficult,
causing even systematic risk assessments to contain
an element of subjectivity and ambiguity.
Additionally, it often is a challenge to estimate the
mathematical values needed to quantify the risk in
terms of statistical probabilities.
This study seems to confirm that our reactions to
risk and our decisions made in regard to risky
situations are more on social choices (tied to the
“emotional” centers of the brain) rather
than technical issues (tied to the brain’s
calculation areas).
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