Eyespy

Are you a guy who spends hours at the gym trying to bulge your biceps and build a perfect abdomen? Well, you may want to give it a rest, as women apparently care more about your face than your body. A dozen men and a dozen women took part in a trial to assess the attractiveness of people in photographs, rating them on a scale of 1 to 7 (Animal Behaviour 2007; doi: 10.1016/j.anbehav.2006.07.012). Some could see the entire person, others just the faces, and still others just bodies. They found that faces count more than bodies, particularly for women, for whom 52% of attractiveness was made up by the face rating while that for bodies stood at 24%. The respective rates for men, who rated women, stood at 47% and 32%. The explanation-a clichéd one-is that this might have to do with picking up emotional cues from the faces of the prospective partners.

You could become a better loser as you get older. A study of people over 65 indicates that they experience fewer negative emotions than younger people when anticipating losses (Nature Neuroscience 2007; doi: 10.1038/nn1894). The control group for this study consisted of people who were between …