Bearing in mind that the number of medical injections might soon be increasing, and that some find them painful, a question can arise – ‘What are the options for minimizing the pain of a medical injection?’ Have you considered holding a chopstick in your mouth (to induce a fake smile) or maybe grimacing? Sarah Pressman, […]
Tag: smile
Smiling intensity among scientists is related to greater scientific achievements (new study)
“Using a sample of 440 scientists from a social networking site for researchers, multiple raters coded smile intensity (full smile, partial smile, or no smile) in publicly available photographs. We found that scientists who presented a full smile had the same quantity of publications yet of higher quality” See: Lukasz D. Kaczmarek, Maciej Behnke, Todd […]
New take on old research on smiling might make people smile, then think
Renowned research about smiling is, suddenly, making some scientists smirk. The British Psychological Society’s Research Digest explains: No reason to smile – Another modern psychology classic has failed to replicate By Christian Jarrett The great American psychologist William James proposed that bodily sensations – a thumping heart, a sweaty palm – aren’t merely a consequence […]
Robot Infants Time Their Smiles to Make (Their?) Moms Smile
Robots can smile, and human mothers can react to that. This study tuned up the timing of this dance: “Infants Time Their Smiles to Make Their Moms Smile,” Paul Ruvolo, Daniel Messinger, Javier Movellan, PLoS ONE 10(9), 2015, e0136492. The authors, at Olin College of Engineering, the University of Miami, and the University of California San […]
The cost of a phone agent’s smile
Humans who answer the phones in call centers are, in many organizations, requested or even required to smile, smile, smile. A team of researchers at Goethe-University Frankfurt in Germany and the University of Denver ran an experiment to see what this forced smiling does to the forced smilers…. —so begins today’s Improbable Innovation nugget, which appears in its entirety on […]
Smirkness in Economics
Those who follow developments in the derivatives market, and particularly in its sub-section, the options market, may be aware of the concept of Smirkness. It was first proposed at the 2005 China International Conference in Finance, where professors Jin Zhang and Yi Xiang presented their paper ‘Implied Volatility Smirk’ “In this paper, we propose a new […]
Further pinpointing Mona Lisa’s elusiveness
…although peripherally perceived facial expressions affect the appreciation of faces, Mona Lisa’s smile seems to constitute only part of her enigma. She keeps her mystery, even when one catches her smile. Concludes the latest research into the elusiveness of the Mona Lisa smile, which has recently been published in the online version of the journal […]