Male Gaze
Women, if a man's gaze keeps wandering conspicuously southward while he's talking to you, don't be insulted: He probably does the same thing to his bros. According to a study conducted by the Nielsen/Norman Group, reported in the Online Journalism Review, when women examine a photo of a person, they concentrate on the face, but when men view the same photo, they fixate on both the face and more private regions. 255 New Yorkers participated in an eyetracking test evaluating the effectiveness of news sites. At one point, subjects looked an image of baseball player George Brett and were told to gather information about his sport and position. Eyetracking equipment showed that women looked almost entirely at Brett's head, fixating for just a little while on his shoulder and the surrounding area. Men, too, spend most of the time on and around Brett's head, but also spent a long while focusing on his crotch. When both sexes explored the website of the American Kennel Club, they exhibited the same behavior: Women couldn't escape those big puppy eyes, but men drifted toward the pooches' personal areas. The researchers say these results could help web editors pick photographs that best suit their audience.
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Seeing is Believing
According to a study published in the March issue of the journal Psychological Science, video confessions that only show the suspect can bias judges and law enforcement officials into believing the confession was voluntary. False confessions are not uncommon in the criminal justice system; more than a quarter of the wrongful convictions that are overturned by DNA evidence at some point include an admission of guilt, lead author Daniel Lassiter said. In the study, 21 judges and 24 law-enforcement officers viewed tapes of a (staged) confession. Subjects who saw a tape that focused exclusively on the confessor rated the confession as more voluntary than those who saw tapes that focused on the detective or on both parties equally. Lassiter has been researching videotape interrogation for 20 years, and his studies have contributed to pushes for policy change in Wisconsin, Virginia, and New Zealand.
Stouthearted Men
Real men aren't defeated illness and injury. A study recently published in the journal Psychology of Men & Masculinity concludes that men with brain or spinal cord injuries who conform to masculine roles display greater improvement one year after leaving the hospital. Researchers evaluated patients on 17 masculinity-related indicators. While many of them correlated negatively with psychological help-seeking, some, including a desire for status and success, were associated with physical independence following hospitalization. "It has long been assumed that men are not as concerned and don't take as good of care of their health," said lead author and University of Missouri-Columbia psychologist Glenn Good, "but what we're seeing here is that the same ideas that led to their injuries may actually encourage their recovery."