Quirky Science

Eye movements reveal difference between love and lust

Soul singer Betty Everett once proclaimed, "If you want to know if he loves you so, it's in his kiss." But a new study by University of Chicago researchers suggests the difference between love and lust might be in the eyes after all.
Specifically, where your date looks at you could indicate whether love or lust is in the cards. The new study found that eye patterns concentrate on a stranger's face if the viewer sees that person as a potential partner in romantic love, but the viewer gazes more at the other person's body if he or she is feeling sexual desire. That automatic judgment can occur in as little as half a second, producing different gaze patterns.
The report was published online in the journal Psychological Science, with colleagues from UChicago's Departments of Psychiatry and Psychology, and the University of Geneva.

Do women talk more than men? It's all about context

We’ve all heard the stereo­-type: Women like to talk. We bounce ideas off each other about every­thing from career moves to dinner plans. We hash out big deci­sions through our con­ver­sa­tions with one another and work through our emo­tions with discussion.
A new study from North­eastern pro­fessor David Lazer, who researches social net­works and holds joint appoint­ments in the Depart­ment of Polit­ical Sci­ence and the Col­lege of Com­puter and Infor­ma­tion Sci­ences found  that women were only slightly more likely than men to engage in con­ver­sa­tions in the lunch-break set­ting, both in terms of long- and short-duration talks. In the aca­d­emic set­ting, in which con­ver­sa­tions likely indi­cated col­lab­o­ra­tion around the task, women were much more likely to engage in long con­ver­sa­tions than men. That effect was true for shorter con­ver­sa­tions, too, but to a lesser degree. These find­ings were lim­ited to small groups of talkers. When the groups con­sisted of six or more par­tic­i­pants, it was men who did the most talking.
The research was pub­lished in the journal Sci­en­tific Reports.

70-foot-long, 52-ton concrete bridge
survives series of simulated earthquakes

A 70-foot-long, 52-ton concrete bridge survived a series of earthquakes in the first multiple-shake-table experiment in the University of Nevada, Reno's new Earthquake Engineering Lab.
"It was a complete success. The bridge withstood the design standard very well and today went over and above 2.2 times the design standard," John Stanton, civil and environmental engineering professor and researcher from the University of Washington, noted. Stanton collaborated with Foundation Professor David Sanders of the University of Nevada, Reno in the novel experiment.
The 52-ton, 70-foot-long concrete bridge, built atop three 14- by 14-foot, 50-ton-capacity hydraulically driven shake tables at the University of Nevada, Reno, was shaken in a series of simulated earthquakes, culminating in the large ground motions recorded in the deadly and damaging 1995 magnitude 6.9 earthquake in Kobe, Japan.

Emotional expression in music and
speech share similar tonal properties

Music is a very strong emotional communicator, and different cultures have different emotional associations for different musical "modes." Now, a new cross-cultural study shows that tonal trends used to express feelings in music are consistent in different cultures and are similar to those used in speech.
The full report was published in the journal PLoS ONE.
In Western music, the major mode is generally associated with excited happy emotions, while the minor mode is generally associated with more subdued or sad emotions. Carnatic music, the classical music of South India, has similar associations between "ragas" and emotions.
The authors, led by Dale Purves of Duke University, conclude that their results support the hypothesis that the tonality of a piece of music expresses emotion because it imitates the tonal characteristics of emotion in the voice.