Tag Archive for manipulate

Beware those Doggy Eyebrows

Come on, now, dog-lovers. We all know that our furry friends manipulate us. Now science has proven it. It seems that dogs can move their eyebrows whenever they want to, making their eyes bigger and reaching into our hearts (really a hormonal reaction). In fact, they move their eyebrows more often when making eye contact with humans than they do when engaging in their all-time favorite activity–eating. They know it gets to us, and they have a deep need for eye contact with humans, a need that wolves, their relatives, don’t have.

Read about the study done by a team at University of Portsmouth’s Dog Cognition Centre, published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, titled The Science of Puppy Dog Eyes.

Escape into an Elevator

I’m not a fan of elevator music, but I may become one. I thought it was my imagination that the car next to me, stations being shuffled, or just wandering by people with headphones screaming were all tuned into the same music somehow, even though it was many different genres. Nope, according to the Journal of Popular Music. They studied the lyrics of over 6000 songs from the Billboard Top 100 (500 songs) for the last 60 years, through 2016. What they found was that lyrics have become less happy and joyful and increasingly more filled with disgust, anger, sadness, and fear.

Most of us listen to music for entertainment, not to produce ill feelings.

In our current world, where politicians lie and call each other names, where leaders manipulate our beliefs, where brother is purposely turned against brother–show me to the nearest elevator!