Month: April 2019

April 19, 2019 at 03:00PM by CWC Need tips for how to catch a cheater? Well, new research notes that literally looking right in front of you could be a better method than, say, snooping through DMs. That is, only if the person in question is a man. For a recent study published in Royal Society Open Science, researchers asked 1516 heterosexual adults (592 men and 924 women) to gaze at pictures of well, other men and women and then judge whether the person in front of them appeared unfaithful. Both men and women were able to tell, with above-average accuracy, which men, but not women, had been unfaithful just by looking at them. Is this just because dudes are trash? Or because they have god-awful poker faces? Something else? While the study posits that makeup may help women alter their appearances (and thus lie as convincingly as an under-oath politician), please eye roll with me at the idea that gals can pencil in their “suspicious” eyebrows in order to get away with cheating. Regardless of gender and orientation though, Tammy Nelson, PhD, sex therapist and author of When You’re the One Who Cheats, says there is a facial expression that helps identify cheating behavior. “Notice their eye movement when you ask them simple, basic questions like, ‘where were you?’ or ‘who were you just talking to on the phone?’ If they can’t make direct eye contact with you, they’re most likely lying or covering up something that they imagine

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April 19, 2019 at 12:34PM by CWC When it comes from the boring chore of blow drying my hair in the morning, I want to get the job done as fast as possible. If I were a better person, maybe I would use this time standing wet in front of my bathroom mirror to recite positive mantras or pray, but instead, I spend it flipping my hair around and trying to think of ways to cut the time down as much as humanely possible. It’s probably why the cool air button on my blow dryer goes virtually unused. To me, heat means the whole experience will be done faster. But it got me thinking (hey, I am just standing there), what exactly is that cold air good for anyway? (Besides a cool blast of blessed relief after a sweaty SoulCycle class.) To find out, I reached out to hairstylist extraordinaire Ashley Rubell. “Hot air is used to alter the hair,” she explains. “Hot tools change our texture from straight to curly, or curly to straight.” This, she says, extends beyond straighteners and curlers; it includes blowdryers too. “Temperature should really vary according to your hair type,” she adds. “If you have thicker, coarser hair you’ll need a higher temperature to work your strands, but with finer hair, or damaged hair, you want to keep your heat on a lower temp.” Celebrity hairstylist Bridget Brager adds that while blow drying your hair with hot hair may be faster, the heat can be

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April 19, 2019 at 12:11PM by CWC How many times have I’ve chatted up strangers and coworkers about the day’s weather report in an effort to make small talk? Mastering the art of going on and on about nothing is a gift some people posses in spades. Personally, I agree with Oprah—we should all be making our words a bit larger. To learn how to transform knee-jerk conversation starters (“How are you!?” and “Gee golly, wasn’t traffic terrible this morning?”) into more meaningful conversation, I asked How to Be Yourself author Ellen Hendriksen, PhD, for a few pointers to avoid canned opening lines. “We all know how small talk works,” she says. “It’s about the weather, traffic, or—if we’re a college student—it’s about finals coming up. It’s a way of connecting in a way that is known and safe.” Conversation offers a strong foundation for you to feel secure in your identity and emotions. If you’re simply sharing a 20-second elevator ride with a colleague, there’s no need to veer away from your tried-and-true topics. But if you find yourself out to coffee or lunch with someone you don’t know all that well, the improvisation technique of “yes, and” can help break the ice. In case you haven’t improvised since high school drama class, the “yes, and” rule means you should never just give a flat “yes” or “no” answer. The idea is to tack something onto your response that allows the banter to continue. Same goes with small talk. “That

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April 19, 2019 at 10:03AM by CWC There’s a scene in the *ahem* Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Fifty Shades Freed where the protagonist, Ana, is cooking and her husband, Christian, makes some comment about how he likes to see her in the kitchen. “Barefoot and pregnant?” she jokes. (I’m sure there’s a different pop culture moment I could reference to open up this discussion, but none are as embarrassing as one that admits to the entire internet that I’ve read all three Fifty Shades novels.) I remember reading that part and thinking, LOL if any man ever said that to me, I would not be down. “I could get used to you in the kitchen.” Blah. Invoking my safe word. My gut reaction to this scene is so strong because it immediately conjures images of the Mad Men era, during which time picture-perfect Betty Drapers, wearing waist-cinching aprons and pumps, were expected to make pot roasts and watch the kids while their husbands went off to work. Heck, even the Joan Holloways (women who had jobs) were forced to prepare the meals after spending all day at work. Because, for much of history, the kitchen has been considered “the woman’s domain.” To understand why this is, we have to back up a couple hundred years. Prior to the 19th century, there wasn’t this split between domestic spaces and public spaces (often called spheres), says Catherine Allgor, president of the Massachusetts Historical Society, who’s also on the board of directors for the National

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April 19, 2019 at 09:28AM by CWC The rules of society say I’m an “adult” now. My hopscotch and jump rope days are long gone, but I still find myself reciting an adolescent rhyme as I walk the streets of New York City: “Don’t step on a crack or you’ll break your mama’s back.” Superstitions tend to latch on to our belief system early in life. And new scientific research might explain why distrust of black cats, broken mirrors, twitching eyes, and the number 13 tends to spread like wildfire. In an analysis published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a pair of theoretical biologists created a model based on game theory (a branch of mathematics that attempts to predict people’s actions and interactions) that answered the vital question: What are superstitions, and how do they become normalized in culture? They found that groups of individual that start with very different principals can mingle their way toward a shared belief system. “What’s interesting here is that we show that, beginning in a system where no one has any particular belief system, a set of beliefs can emerge, and from those, a set of coordinated behaviors,” Erol Akçay, PhD, an assistant professor of biology at the University of Pennsylvania. Someone tells us that walking under a ladder is a recipe for disaster, and before we know it, we’re not just believing their warning. We’re actively dodging ladders. “What’s interesting here is that we show that, beginning in a system

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