In the midst of holiday season, it is easy to get caught up in the festivities and ignore something fundamental: your emotions. As Dr. Catherine Franssen writes in the Huffington Post, the anticipation and receipt of gifts are both deeply tied with neural pathways that make us feel pleasure. This can be great, making us…
Read MoreThe Case for Musical Emotions
For many people, listening to music is a deeply emotional experience, but does that tap into universal emotions? In a 2016 study, psychologist Heike Argstatter sought to determine whether universal basic emotions are recognizable in music across cultures. This built on her previous research which found that, within one Western culture, both trained musicians and…
Read MoreWhat Makes a Good People Reader?
Humintell is here to train you as a people reader, but is there anything that could make you naturally good at this skill? It was this question which a team of researchers, including Humintell’s Dr. David Matsumoto, sought to answer in a 2014 study. This undertaking consisted of two experiments, one on college students with…
Read MoreUnderstanding through Gesture
Language has a huge influence in determining how we interact with the world, but what about nonverbal behavior? When we speak and conceptualize the world in certain ways, we also structure our experience in order to make sense of and interact with it. In a novel 2017 study, Dr. Elizabeth Kirk and Dr. Carine Lewis…
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