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Study Sheds Light on Whether the Sun, Wind, Rain Sway Our Emotions

Emoji use is on the rise, but so is GIF use. GIF's allow users to quickly express complex emotion more completely than a a handful of emojis could. One user says "I'm not that great with words, but if I find the perfect GIF, it nails it." GIF's may be the next frontier of electronic communication.

There comes a uniquely emotional moment for American Hispanics who register for a freshman year of college: Is it a good idea to sign up for the formal study of Spanish?

Just seeing a list of negative words for a few seconds will make a highly anxious or depressed person feel worse, and the more you ruminate on them, the more you can actually damage key structures that regulate your memory, feelings, and emotions.But negative words, spoken with anger, do even more damage. They send alarm messages through the brain, interfering with the decision making centers in the frontal lobe, and this increases a person's propensity to act irrationally. Fear-provoking words-like poverty, illness, and death-also stimulate the brain in negative ways. And even if these fearful thoughts are not real, other parts of your brain (like the thalamus and amygdala) react to negative fantasies as though they were actual threats occurring in the outside world. Curiously, we seem to be hardwired to worry-perhaps an artifact of old memories carried over from ancestral times when there were countless threats to our survival.

This article explores how dogs perceive human language and whether tone of voice matters. Through this experiment, it was discovered that dogs respond positively to a positive tone of voice and neutrally to a neutral tone of voice. However, if the dog was reprimanded in a positive tone of voice, the dog would perceive that as a praise. In terms of language evolution, it suggests that the ability to "process meaning and emotion in different parts of the brain and tie them together is not uniquely human."

A photographer conducted a social experiment to see what happens when you tell someone they are beautiful. The 18-year-old student from Chicago, Shea Glover, asked random people to pose for her and said to them, "I'm taking pictures of things I find beautiful."

Like a human's brain, a dog's brain responds to the meaning of a word and how the word is said. And like with a human's brain, the dog's left hemisphere reacts to meaning and the right hemisphere reacts to intonation. In the study, words were said to dogs in positive and neutral tones, but only positive words spoken in a positive tone prompted strong activity in the brain's reward center. This study suggested that non-primates could process meaning and emotion long before humans could talk.

The face is the easiest way to tell someones emotions. A Scientist studied blind people and noticed that even they make facial expressions when they feel a certainn way. There are 7 different micro expressions: surprise, fear, disgust, anger, happiness, sadness, and hate.

Whether a child understands its mother or not, they can understand what their mother is saying based on her emotions. This is a study pursuing this phenomenon and deciphering what impacts anger has on the child's development.

Dr Tim Lomas, lecturer and author in positive psychology, has collected words expressing positive states from around the world. You can explore by theme or language.

This article is about how a second language may help in your critical thinking process. Because of the unfamiliarity of the language, it may take away taboos or emotions associated with words that may influence our decision.

"...scientists found that different toddler sounds - or "vocalizations" - emerge and fade in a definite rhythm in the course of a tantrum. "We have the most quantitative theory of tantrums that has ever been developed in the history of humankind" ... where one age-old theory of tantrums might suggest that meltdowns begin in anger (yells and screams) and end in sadness (cries and whimpers), Potegal found that the two emotions were more deeply intertwined. ... The trick in getting a tantrum to end as soon as possible, Potegal said, was to get the child past the peaks of anger. Once the child was past being angry, what was left was sadness, and sad children reach out for comfort. The quickest way past the anger, the scientists said, was to do nothing."

"...a desire in Hollywood to infuse fantasy and science-fiction movies, television series and video games with a sense of believability is driving demand for constructed languages, complete with grammatical rules, a written alphabet (hieroglyphics are acceptable) and enough vocabulary for basic conversations. ... "The days of aliens spouting gibberish with no grammatical structure are over," said Paul R. Frommer ... who created Na'vi, the language spoken by the giant blue inhabitants of Pandora in "Avatar." ... fans rewatched Dothraki scenes to study the language in a workshop-like setting. ... There have been many attempts to create languages, often for specific political effect. In the 1870s, a Polish doctor invented Esperanto ... The motivation to learn an auxiliary language is not so different from why people pick up French or Italian, she said. "Learning a language, even a natural language, is more of an emotional decision than a practical one. It's about belonging to a group," she said. ... The watershed moment for invented languages was the creation of a Klingon language ... But as with any language, there is a certain snob appeal built in. Among Dothraki, Na'vi and Klingon speakers, a divide has grown between fans who master the language as a linguistic challenge, and those who pick up a few phrases because they love the mythology." Reaction on Language Log: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3628 - "there's an attitude among some linguists - and also plenty of non-linguists, as is evident from many of the comments on the NYT piece - that engaging in conlang activity is a waste of time, perhaps even detrimental to the real subject matter of linguistics."

"If the word of the year is supposed to be an item that has actually shaped the perception of important events, I can't see going with anything but occupy. ... The word itself can take credit for a lot of its success - this isn't an item like "debt ceiling," that just happened to be hitched to a big story. But give props to the magic of metonymy ... And talking about "the one percent" has its advantages. It seems to put things on an objective basis and strips away the vagueness and the emotional overtones that go with talking about "the rich.""

"More than many nations, China is a place where names are imbued with deep significance. Western companies looking to bring their products to China face a problem not unlike that of Chinese parents naming a baby boy... And so the art of picking a brand name that resonates with Chinese consumers is no longer an art. It has become a sort of science, with consultants, computer programs and linguistic analyses to ensure that what tickles a Mandarin ear does not grate on a Cantonese one. ... Precisely why some Chinese words are so freighted with emotion is anyone's guess. But Denise Sabet, the vice general manager at Labbrand, suggests the reasons include cultural differences and the Chinese reliance on characters for words, rather than a phonetic alphabet. "

A recent scientific study suggests reading literary fiction can boost empathy.

Long-term language change is inevitable. People need to convey a wide range of emotions or objects, and they will always need to find the words to do so. Technology may help to speed up this process, and it also allows people of all ages to be inventive and experimental, perhaps more than ever before. Only dead languages never change.

I was surprised by this article and by the fact that sometimes, our seemingly boring moments in life has the potential to transform into a great college essay. This article made me change my views of college essays and reexamine what topics I want to write about.

I liked the ideas this essay shared because I realized that if I were to have written my college essay prior to reading this article, my essay would've been similar to the majority of students who submit college essays. This site stresses the importance of being different and that having humility, humor, and personal stories in college essays are attractive. But the article did imply that there are limits and that some things such as torturing animals and showing inconsideration to other people, are inappropriate.

It seems more common now for counselors and advisors to recommend writing about everyday things, but with our own personal "flair." So it was helpful to read in this article about how there are some negative everyday experiences that are important to leave out.

This article examines Nadine Gaab's 2014 study which established a connection - in both children and adults - between learning to play an instrument and improved executive functioning, like problem-solving, switching between tasks and focus. The article also cites the research of neuropsychologist Ani Patel, who advances the OPERA theory of music's benefits for learning. Patel notes "music is not an island in the brain cut off from other things, that there's overlap, that's the 'O' of OPERA, between the networks that process music and the networks that are involved in other day-to-day cognitive functions such as language, memory, attention and so forth," he says. "The 'P' in OPERA is precision. Think about how sensitive we are to the tuning of an instrument, whether the pitch is in key or not, and it can be painful if it's just slightly out of tune." That level of precision in processing music, Patel says, is much higher than the level of precision used in processing speech. This means, he says, that developing our brains' musical networks may very well enhance our ability to process speech. "And the last three components of OPERA, the 'E-R-A,' are emotion, repetition and attention," he says. "These are factors that are known to promote what's called brain plasticity, the changing of the brain's structure as a function of experience."