New York Times: Elephants in Mourning Spotted on YouTube by Scientists. “For a paper published Wednesday in the journal Royal Society Open Science, the scientists used YouTube to crowdsource videos of Asian elephants responding to death.”
Goldsmiths University of London: Impact of advert music on subconscious revealed. “Unlike previous studies, which only used a few tracks, the new research used an entire database of ad music tracks. This enabled the team to model and quantify the effect of different tracks on people’s subconscious. Drawing on over 600,000 consumer responses, the study found the right music can increase the emotional response to a video by up to 16.4%.”
Core77: In Russia, a “Social Media Network for the Sad” Instagram Replacement. “With Instagram now banned in Russia, some 80 million users are unable to access the app. Thus Russian app developers Alexandr Tokarev and Ivan Semkin say they’re launching a sad (as in melancholy) alternative to the app this week, called Grustnogram.”
PsyPost: New research shows masks make it more difficult to read emotions from faces. “Masks impair the recognition of six basic facial expressions, according to new research published in the journal Social Psychology. The findings suggests that visual information from lower portions of the face play an important role in understanding facial expressions.”
PsyPost: Mask wearing increases muscle activity around the eye during smiling, study finds. “New research has found that wearing a mask tends to increase eye involvement when smiling. The findings appear in the journal Scientific Reports.”
PsyPost: Face masks impair people’s ability to accurately classify emotional expressions. “The researchers also found evidence that masks buffered the negative effects of expressing negative emotions. Negative emotional expressions such as anger were associated with lower ratings of trustworthiness, likability, and closeness. But masks weakened the effect of negative emotional expressions on these social judgments. In other words, angry masked faces tended to be rated as more trustworthy, likable, and close compared to unmasked angry faces.”
CNN: Little kids can likely read your emotions even when you wear a face mask, study finds. “Little kids can often tell how people are feeling, even if that person is wearing a face mask, a new study published Monday found. There has been some concern that the face masks used at school during the pandemic may be hurting younger children’s development, but this research letter published in JAMA Pediatrics suggests that kids recognize emotions about as well as they could without masks.”
Newswise: Grief and Loss for cancer patients in the Era of COVID . “The COVID-19 pandemic has brought a time period of grief in many forms, even grief unrelated to the loss of life – some caused by the need for isolation measures to slow the spread of the virus. You might grieve for people who have caught the virus, grieve your loss of routine and grieve the loss of feelings of safety and security in the world. As a cancer patient, you may feel grief about not having loved ones present for treatment.”
Mashable: 4 simple ways to manage your Delta variant anger. “The hyper-contagious Delta variant has officially launched the newest phase of pandemic life. This reality, with infections soaring and vaccinated people unexpectedly masking up again, was expertly illustrated on Twitter this week. A viral meme invited people to temporarily turn their shock into laughter by pairing two contrasting images: the future you’d imagined once America reopened and what actually happened when Delta began burning through the country. Underpinning all of this, for many, is fury. They’re angry at the lost hope, the suddenly heightened risk, and the determined resistance displayed by millions of Americans who’ve refused the vaccine.”
Yale News: ‘Likes’ and ‘shares’ teach people to express more outrage online. “Social media platforms like Twitter amplify expressions of moral outrage over time because users learn such language gets rewarded with an increased number of ‘likes’ and ‘shares,’ a new Yale University study shows. And these rewards had the greatest influence on users connected with politically moderate networks.”
BBC: Political trolling twice as popular as positivity, study suggests. “Social media posts are twice as likely to go viral if they are negative about politicians they oppose rather than positive about those they support, a Cambridge University study suggests.”
Lifehacker: How to Filter Spotify Playlists by Genre or Mood. “Odds are good that your ‘Liked Songs’ playlist on Spotify is a mishmash of genres and artists that don’t exactly flow together…. Thankfully, Spotify is adding a new way to filter your Liked Songs playlist via genre and mood tags, meaning you can temporarily pare down your collection to only the songs that fit the vibe you’re after.”
Washington Post: Vaccine envy is real. Here’s how to tame it.. “Who gets vaccinated first varies from state to state, but in most parts of the country, health officials are still focused on vaccinating front-line essential workers, those in long-term care facilities and people ages 75 and over, as well as those with certain preexisting conditions. A potentially long wait — paired with news stories about real and perceived inequities in delivery — has spawned armies of green-eyed monsters.”
The Conversation: Anger is all the rage on Twitter when it’s cold outside (and on Mondays). “The link between hot weather and aggressive crime is well established. But can the same be said for online aggression, such as angry tweets? And is online anger a predictor of assaults? Our study just published suggests the answer is a clear ‘no’. We found angry tweet counts actually increased in cooler weather. And as daily maximum temperatures rose, angry tweet counts decreased. We also found the incidence of angry tweets is highest on Mondays, and perhaps unsurprisingly, angry Twitter posts are most prevalent after big news events such as a leadership spill.”
Penn State News: Emotion expression database new resource for researchers. “The ability to understand facial expressions is an important part of social communication. However, little is known about how complex facial expression signal emotions related to social behavior and inner thoughts. To answer these questions, Penn State researchers developed the Complex Emotion Expression Database (CEED), a digital stimulus set of 243 basic and 237 complex emotional facial expressions.”
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