See that hair

Lisa Wade chose these images — one you may find beautiful, the other disgusting — to illustrate a psychological notion. She writes: “Hair in the drain, like dirt in the house, is out-of-place.  It doesn’t belong there.  In both cases, our reaction is disgust.  Hair on the head, in contrast, is beautiful and becoming.”

McGraw & Warren, humor zeroing

Marketing researchers zero in, ever further, on understanding how people react to theoretically humorous stimuli. Investigator Dan Goldstein alerts us to a new study which says: [In one experiment] participants read one of two versions of a scenario adapted from Haidt et al. (1993) as part of an ostensibly unrelated experiment. Participants either read about […]

Ha Ha Yecchhhh Ha Ha

“Despite the possibility of mixed feelings of disgust and amusement hardly anything is known about the relationship between these emotions.” Prompting researchers from Western Illinois University and the University of Toronto to investigate  – and in so doing constructing what maybe the only formal psychology study to have centred around the work of transgressive cult […]