Chloé Sharrocks

One of my dogs - does she look guilty?

New research has suggested that the “guilty look” on a dog’s face is purely the imagination of the human owner.

Researchers at Barnard College in New York believe their new research shows that dog-owners wrongly claim they can read the tell-tale guilty look on their pet’s face when it has done something wrong.

The scientists  found that they were able to trick owners into thinking their innocent pets has misbehaved and then the owners would claim to see this guilty look.  They also discovered that pet owners are not able to read their dogs’ body language as well as they themselves might have thought.

The study, led by Alexandra Horowitz’s, assistant professor at Barnard College, looked at how dog owners interpreted their pets’ expressions when they were led to believe that the dog had stolen and eaten a forbidden treat.  The researchers found that owners projected human values onto their pets and their perception of this ‘guilty look’ had to link with whether the dog had really stolen the treat.  If the owners were informed their dog had stolen the treat, even when they had not done anything wrong, they claimed to see this guilty expression.

When there was any change in the dogs’ expression it was seen to be a subsequent reflection of changes to the human’s emotions and if the dog was told of (despite being innocent) then some dogs seemed to show an “admonished” look which their owners mistakenly took as an admission of guilt.

Courtesy of Wikipedia

A University student has created a pillow which is able to record people’s worries when they cannot fall asleep.

Nekani Guezala, 23, is a student at Edinburgh Napier University, and created the specially designed pillow as part of her master’s project.

As people are trying to get to sleep, they can say their worries out loud, while the pillow records their rambling using its built in voice recognition software.  The following morning, the machine prints out all of the problems worrying the person just before the fell asleep.

Ms Guezala was inspired after lying awake at night worrying about things and did a survey in which she found out that on average people spend 40 minutes each night worrying before falling asleep.  She told the BBC News Website: “I also spoke to a psychologist who said that when his patients come to him complaining about sleep problems then he recommends they write down at the time what they are worrying about, whereas now they could just talk out loud and the sleep microphone would pick it up and print it all out in the morning.”

The pillow recording device was unveiled at a special exhibition in Edinburgh showcasing work by design students.

I’ve never understood why people dislike the appearance of wind farms so much.  Maybe it’s just I’m a bit of a fan of modern architecture anyways, but to me there is nothing obtrusive about the view of turbines over the British countryside (although I can understand concerns with noise etc if built too close to people’s homes) and I often wonder if they looked a bit more like windmills, if they wouldn’t be more welcomed.

Thankfully, however, developments in wind turbine technology have allowed the very first world’s floating wind turbine to be created out at sea.  ‘Hywind’ is the name of the floating turbine which is shortly to be towed out to sea just off the coast of Norway.  Like other future floating wind turbines, it will be connected to mainland grids via cables run along the sea bed.  However, this can be expensive – the longer the cable, the more costly – and is likely to be a restrictive factor.  But, wind turbines out of sea offer a wealth of advantages – stronger and more consistent wind, no problems for bird life and tourism and benefits for military radar operations and the shipping industry.  What’s more, the offshore wind farms will be out-of-sight for those people who feel they are a blight on the landscape.

A more traditional static off-shore wind turbine

The Hywind is capable of generating 2.3 megawatts (enough to power approximately 1600 homes for a year) and will be tested for 2 years.  Like an iceberg, it is partly hidden below the sea – with a 100 metre draft anchored to the sea bed with cables as long as 700 metres.  Although, such floating turbines are currently more expensive than static offshore installations, it is hoped that over time as the technology becomes more common-place the price will fall in-line with the static turbines.

It is hoped that floating wind farms can later be established off the coasts of North America, the Iberian peninsula and the UK as well as further developments of the coasts of Norway.

‘Seeing the world through rose-coloured glasses’ has finally been proved to be more than just a metaphor.  Now scientists at the University of Toronto have found evidence that our mood can change the way in which we see the world around us.

Their study suggests that the way we feel, can affect the way our visual system filters our perceptual experience, although they found that wearing the rose-tinted glasses of a good mood is more about how much we see, rather than the colour.

Image courtesy of Jersyko from Wikipedia

Adam Anderson, professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, found that when people are feeling happy and positive about life then their visual cortex absorbs more information, whilst being in a negative frame of mind can make us blinkered or have tunnel-vision.

Their results were achieved by firstly showing images to their subjects which were designed to first generate a good, neutral or bad mood.  Their testers were then shown a composite image featuring a face in the centre surrounded by “place” images such as a house.  By asking their testers to specify the gender of the face, they focused their tests attention on the faces in front of them.

The scientists then removed the images from view and asked the testers if they could remember what else was shown in the image other than the face.  Those subjects in a good mood took in more information and remembered the surrounding pictures of houses , whereas those in a bad mood failed to recall these.

Taylor Schmitz, a graduate student of Prof Anderson and lead author of the study, said: “Under positive moods, people may process a greater number of objects in their environment which sounds like a good thing, but it can also result in distraction”.  It thus seems like being in a positive frame of mind literally expands the window upon which we look at the world.  But this in itself can lead to problems, especially when we need to concentrate on critical tasks requiring a narrow focus such as operating dangerous machinery or in the airport screening of passenger luggage.

So bad moods might not always be such a bad thing – they can keep us narrowly focused on the task at hand and prevent us from absorbing useless outside information.