Why the Emotion of Anger may be a Good Thing

What would the world be like if anger never existed? It may not be quite what you’d expect. To find out why humans need the emotion of anger, HuffPost Science’s Jacqueline Howard reached out to evolutionary psychologist Dr. Leda Cosmides who claims that the same neuro networks that drive anger also help us fine tune cooperative…

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Lyrical Emotion

For most people, listening to music often times triggers strong emotional reactions, whether positive or negative.  But what if this weren’t the case for everyone? A recent study featured in Science World Report  and conducted by researchers at the University of Barcelona and Catalonia’s Bellvitge Institute of Biological Investigation, set out to investigate why some people just can’t…

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Past Blog: Facial Expressions not Universal? The study and its flaws…

There have been several recent news articles that suggest facial expressions of emotion are not universal. In a past blog, Dr. Matsumoto sites his retort to a study entitled Cultural Confusions Show Facial Expressions Are Not Universal where researcher Rachael Jack and her colleagues challenged 100s of studies documenting the universality of facial expressions. The conclusions of this…

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Our Game Face Is Really A Call for Help

Can the face of determination really be a subconscious call for help? LiveScience reports on a study led by evolutionary psychologist Bridget Waller from the University of Portsmouth (UK).  Waller and her colleagues tested both chimps and children to determine if humans, the more social and cooperative species, evolved to subconsciously signal a request for…

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