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What's that great expression? You never get a second chance to make a first impression? Now a new study says, when judging other people, first impressions last. Vivian Zayas, professor of psychology at Cornell University, and her colleagues found that people continue to be influenced by another person’s appearance even after interacting with them face-to-face. First impressions formed simply from looking at a photograph predicted how people felt and thought about the person after a live interaction that took place one month to six months later, newswise.com reports. “Facial appearance colors how we feel about someone, and even how we think about who they are,” says Zayas, an expert in the cognitive and affective processes that regulate close relationships. “These facial cues are very powerful in shaping interactions, even in the presence of other information.” The researchers ran experiments in which 55 participants looked at photographs of four women who were s...

Well, I lost some friends.  They didn't abandon me, I abandoned them.  How could they possibly have voted for Trump? Seems a lot of friendships have been riven, or at least changed, by this most divisive election.  But a new study says there are ways to repair the rift.  If you want. And where did I see it played out the most?  On Facebook.  During the presidential election of 2016, it was easy to avoid misinterpretation, escalation, damaged relationships and offending Facebook friends with differing opinions. Just never be on Facebook. Only about half a dozen Americans heeded that advice. The rest of the country is left on the day after the contentious election wondering how awkward Thanksgiving will be knowing exactly how Grandma felt about Hillary Clinton, Aunt Jane’s thoughts on Donald Trump and 18-year-old Susie’s impression of the entire electoral process, according to newswise.com. People who study abusive and controlling relationshi...

Who doesn't remember the Stanford swimmer who got off very lightly after raping an unconscious co-ed?  Or, if you're old enough, the preppy killer, Robert Chambers, who strangled his girlfriend and used "rough sex" as his defense.  He's now in jail for 19 years on a drug charge. So what's up with all these people who feel so entitled ?  (And the people who grant it to them, like judge Aaron Persky, who faced recall after his decision.) Says Joshua Grubbs, the primary author of a new paper on entitlement and a recent PhD graduate in psychology from Case Western Reserve, “At extreme levels, entitlement is a toxic narcissistic trait, repeatedly exposing people to the risk of feeling frustrated, unhappy and disappointed with life." Entitlement—a personality trait driven by exaggerated feelings of deservingness and superiority—may lead to chronic disappointment, unmet expectations and a habitual, self-reinforcing cycle of behavior with dire psycho...

We're screwed. A new study says says good communication does not lead to marital satisfaction. Say what? It's not quite so grim.  What the study found was that it takes more than good communication (duh) to make a marriage successful.  "Although communication and satisfaction were correlated, communication wasn’t a good guide for determining partners’ satisfaction with their relationships over time,” says the study’s lead author Justin Lavner, an assistant professor in UGA’s clinical psychology program in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences. Although communication practices could predict satisfaction to some extent for some couples, the lack of a definitive causal relationship calls for additional attention to other factors that influence marital satisfaction, such as environmental stressors, what activities and interactions a couple has, and the personality traits of the individual partners. "It’s absolutely right to say more satisfied c...

Think you understand someone?  It doesn't really help unless you feel it, too. That's the conclusion of some new research is that , in the absence of caring, understanding alone doesn't cut it when stressful situations arise. When stress sets in, many of us turn to a partner to help us manage by being a sounding board or shoulder to cry on. Your odds of actually feeling better are much improved if they're both those things. My partner isn't very good at listening, or understanding.  He just wants to solve it.  I understand that that's men's way of reacting to a crisis.  They want action.  But it would be so much more helpful if they let us feel it, then felt it, too.   New research by psychologists at UC Santa Barbara reveals that simply understanding your partner's suffering isn't sufficient to be helpful in a stressful situation; you've got to actually care that they're suffering in the first place. Now that doesn't mea...

Admit it.  Who isn't a little sick of all the selfies? People eating in restaurants.  Pouring wine. Throwing a snowball (that's just in the Northeast).  A Real Housewife who claims she has Lyme disease posting IVs and other medical appliances plugged into her pasty body. Now a new study is finding that too many can plug up your romantic life, too. Researchers have found that too many Instagram selfies may create romantic conflict, according to newswise.com.  Florida State University researchers have discovered the more selfies an individual posts on the social media site Instagram, the greater the likelihood he or she might experience romantic relationship conflict and dissolution.   “Although we cannot directly assume cause and effect due to the correlational nature of this study, the results here show that body image satisfaction can be detrimental to Instagram users’ romantic relationships, especially when users’ body image satisfaction is prom...

Wouldn't you just know? When women are scarce , men will do just anything to get one.  That's according to a new study of, of all things, the Makushi people in Guyana, which showed that men are more likely to seek long-term relationships when women are in short supply, as reported by newswise.com. In my experience, it's the woman who's always looking for the commitment, while the man, looking over his shoulder to make sure he hasn't missed someone cuter. “Commitment to a relationship is influenced by the availability of partners. So we can think of the number of men and women in a population as a potential mating market where the principles of supply and demand hold sway,” says University of Utah anthropologist Ryan Schacht, first author of the study published online Wednesday, Jan. 14 in the journal Royal Society Open Science .  I suppose that's true.  I haven't been on the dating scene for quite a while but I seem to remember that the more la...

How's this for a shock? A new study has found that your spouse's personality -- not yours -- influences your career success. Now, I love my husband but he is absent-minded (maybe only with me) and sometimes helpless (he'll kill me when he reads this) and forget about details.  He once asked me how to turn on the oven (you press a button). I realize that a lot of this is just men stuff -- you know, pretend you don't know how to do it so she'll do it, and I know we, at least I, am not very good at reinforcing when he does it right.  I can't stand the way he unloads the dishes from the dishwasher (usually in the wrong cabinet so I can never find them), or vacuum the family room (how can he keep missing that corner)?  And, I admit, I pick on him for it, so why should he want to help out?   At least he does his own laundry! But the study found that as people spend more and more time in the workplace (and these days it feels like we live there), it’s natural f...

I used to have a hard time with this.  Then I realized it was hurting me more than anyone else.  I'm talking about forgiveness. I've had a lot of experience in life at trying to practice it. Close relatives who cut me off.  Family dysfunction and abuse.  Cancer. Yes.  You can be mad at God. There were some I thought I never could forgive.  But over time the weight of anger and sadness and hate just got to be too heavy.   I've thought a lot about forgiveness. Then, when I was assigned a magazine article on it, I started digging into it.  The further I got, the more fascinating it was.  Then it became healing. The  essay  turned out to win first place in a statewide writing contest.   At first I couldn't forgive because I thought I was doing it for the person who hurt me.  Why let him off the hook?  That took a lot to get around.  But then, over time, I began to stop being mad at me for letting people hurt ...

I found this pretty discouraging.   A new study has found that almost three-quarters of us did not marry "the one."  I can safely say that I did -- though, over the years, he's gone from the one to the zero (just kidding, sort of).  Like any marriage, we've had our ups and downs but the tall, skinny guy in the blue jeans I smiled at across a crowded room 30 years ago has morphed into the cranky, sleep-deprived man who refused to help me load a nice wooden bureau by the side of the road, clearly there for the taking, for our son's room, into my car, because he was too embarrassed.  We were out on our nightly walk (something new we now do because our 12-year-old wants nothing to do with us).  And when I went back with my son to get it, who's coming down the road but my husband in his car, asking, "Do you need help?" We wound up not taking the thing (Phillip didn't like it), but the friend I'd stopped to talk to on the way home said, "...

I remember my aunt -- married 40 years at the time -- saying, when her husband retired, "I married you for better or worse.  Not for lunch." I didn't see the humor in it until I began living with my boyfriend (later my husband), and having to think first if he'd mind if I went out with a friend after work and he'd have to get his own dinner.  When it was just me, hey, a bowl of cereal and a handful of M&Ms and right into bed to get ready for the next day, when I got home. Certainly, living with someone changes your life.  But I got a kick out of Frank Bruni's column Sunday in The New York Times about LATs, or Living Alone Togethers.  He and his boyfriend each have an apartment and they stay with each other several times a week.  But the rest of the time, they can curl up on the couch with a pint of Heath Bar crunch, and watch "Sister Wives" all night long without anyone complaining I'm hogging the TV and let's watch Bill O'Reilly ...

A recent story in The New York Times noted that eHarmony's much-vaunted algorithms for matching people may just not be doing the job, after all. According to the story,  eHarmony’s senior research scientist, Dr. Gian C. Gonzaga, was criticized by Dr. Harry T. Reis of of the University of Rochester, one of the authors of last year’s critique of the company's matching formula, saying eHarmony's results  could simply "merely reflect the well-known 'person effect;' an agreeable, non-neurotic, optimistic person will tend to fare better in any relationship." But the research, reporter John Tierney writes, "also showed that it’s hard to make predictions based on what’s called a dyadic effect — how similar the partners are to each other," one of the main ways eHarmony matches people with their "soul mate." On the other side, I recently read that one out of six marriages now come from online matches.  So, who's to say?  I met my husban...

Why do we lie?  Is it from that little jab of guilty pleasure, when we follow all the other rules? But you might want to think about it, next time.  Honesty improves both mental health and physical health. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/09/why-we-lie-time-factor-truth_n_1862384.html

It's a fact.  Men are dumber around women.  At least, that's what a recent study found. And not just my opinion! http://www.scienceofrelationships.com/home/2012/7/24/hot-women-make-men-dumb-and-dumber.html