NLPhilia Blog

Dave Munger over at Cognitive Daily points to some interesting research:

There’s another factor that has been demonstrated to have a significant effect on whether a face is remembered: the facial expression. In 2004, Arnaud D’Argembeau and Martial Van der Linden found that people who viewed a series of photos of faces were more likely to remember smiling faces compared to angry faces — even when the faces they were later asked to recall had neutral expressions.

Want someone to remember your face? Smile.

A little surfing around led me to the Web page of researcher Sanjay Srivastava on what he calls “The Big Five Personality Factors”. I haven’t finished reading the docs available, but at first blush it seems that he’s found five Meta-Programs that tend to go together somehow in most people:

• Extraversion (sometimes called Surgency). The broad dimension of Extraversion encompasses such more specific traits as talkative, energetic, and assertive.
• Agreeableness. This dimension includes traits like sympathetic, kind, and affectionate.
• Conscientiousness. People high in Conscientiousness tend to be organized, thorough, and planful.
• Neuroticism (sometimes reversed and called Emotional Stability). Neuroticism is characterized by traits like tense, moody, and anxious.
• Openness to Experience (sometimes called Intellect or Intellect/Imagination). This dimension includes having wide interests, and being imaginative and insightful.

I’m going to want to spend some time examining this, as I’m not certain how useful it might be to NLPers.

Link to Measuring the Big Five Personality Factors

(Oh… the word “OCEAN” in the title refers to an acronym of the names of the “Big Five”.)

In a recent BoingBoing post referring to a study of computer-altered celebrity photographs done at the University of Central Lancashire, it was pointed out that we tend to recognize a person from caricature twice as easily as from a photograph.

I wonder how this could be useful in, say, state elicitation, memory recovery, and changework.

Link to article in The Guardian

“Crazy All the Time” was the title of a book I read a long time ago. It was about the psych ward at Bellvue State Hospital in New York. It’s been so long that I don’t remember anything about it, but I still love the title.

A couple of days ago* I was on the psych unit at my hospital (I think of it that way, as my hospital) when a long-time schizophrenic came up to the nurse’s station. This woman is as sweet as she can be, and she’s got tardive dyskenesia thanks to a lifetime of drugs to treat her socially-unaccepted behavior. She can be annoying at times.

Anyway, she looked at the nurse and said, “I been eatin’ chicken feathers. You see me eat all them chicken feathers?”

The nurse heard her but didn’t say anything, as she had her conscious mind on another task.

“I been eatin’ chicken feathers,” she said again.

I said, without really looking at her, “What does it mean that you eat chicken feathers?”

“Oh,” she said, “I just been gettin’ tickled at everything. Just laughin’ at everything.” (Note that “gettin’ tickled” is an idiom around here meaning “finding things extremely amusing”.) Then she walked away.

The nurse looked at me and grinned a little. “It was a metaphor,” she said, with that “Now I get it” look in her eye.

*Originally posted in Usenet on March 3, 2001