Could the language that bilingual people use influence how they see other people? A team of researchers decided to test this idea by studying a group of Israeli Arabs who speak both Arabic and Hebrew fluently. They asked the volunteers to take a psychology test that would show how they responded to different words, designed to get at their attitudes and beliefs about Arabs and Israelis.
Specifically, they wanted to see whether the volunteers would find it easier to link Arab names or Jewish names with positive or negative traits—and whether the results depended on which language they were tested in. In one case, for example, the volunteers were asked to press one key on the keyboard whenever they saw a positive word or an Arab name and another key when they saw a negative word or a Jewish name. If the volunteers generally associated “good” with Arabs and “bad” with Jews, they would hit the keys faster than those who didn’t have these “implicit associations.”
So did it matter which language the volunteers were tested in? Turns out it did. Overall, the Arab Israelis showed more negative bias toward Jewish names than Arabic names—they were quicker to associate Jewish names with negative words and Arab names with positive words than they were at making the reverse associations—and this effect was much stronger when the words were presented in Arabic.
Shai Danziger, who worked on the study, isn’t surprised:

I am a bilingual and I believe that I actually respond differently in Hebrew than I do in English. I think in English I’m more polite than I am in Hebrew. People can exhibit different types of selves in different environments. This suggests that language can serve as a cue to bring forward different selves.

A series of studies by researchers at York University shows that it can. The researchers put volunteers in either neutral or anxiety-provoking situations and then asked them to rate the strength of their religious convictions, including whether they would die for their faith or support a war to defend it. When people were put in anxiety-producing situations (like working on a complex math problem), they became more extreme in their religious convictions. The reaction was strongest in people with “bold” personalities (eager and tenacious, with high self-esteem) who were already vulnerable to anxiety and didn’t feel empowered to achieve their daily goals.
We shouldn’t be too surprised. Past research has shown that anxiety and insecurity can turn people to religion—and that religious conviction can act as a “buffer” against anxiety. And earlier studies by the researchers at York have shown that strong religious beliefs are linked to low activity in the anterior cingulate cortex, an area of the brain that becomes active when a person makes errors or experiences uncertainty. Psychologist Ian McGregor, who worked on those studies and the new one, notes in a write-up of the research that:

Taken together, the results of this research program suggest that bold but vulnerable people gravitate to idealistic and religious extremes for relief from anxiety.

Think you’re good at determining when someone of the opposite sex is looking at you? It turns out how easy it is may depend more on the other person than you—specifically, how masculine or feminine the other person’s face looks.
A team of researchers led by Ben Jones of the Face Research Lab at the University of Aberdeen asked volunteers to look at images of faces that had been altered to look more or less masculine or feminine and then indicate as quickly as possible whether the face was looking at or away from them. The researchers found the exaggerated features resulted in faster response times: Women could more quickly determine whether a man was looking at her when his face was “hunky,” while men could tell the direction of a woman’s gaze faster when her features were feminine and “pretty.” In other words, we’re quicker to notice when a “high quality potential mate” is paying attention to us.
As Jones explains in a write-up of the study:

There’s likely to be quite a big advantage to detecting when a particularly good potential mate’s looking at you. If I’m in a bar and there’s a pretty woman looking at me—if I wasn’t married—I would want to catch her eye before someone else did.

Will hundreds of Facebook friends make you feel less lonely? Not likely, say researchers from The University of Arizona. It’s close family and friends that help us stave off feelings of detachment, their studies show.
The point is, relationships that don’t have a strong connection don’t help with loneliness—and lonely people tend to have fewer close connections. In fact, having close family and friends appears to be more important than romantic relationships when it comes to making us feel less lonely. But living away from close family and friends didn’t seem to make people more lonely, and relationships over the phone or email weren’t necessarily weaker than those in which the people got to see each other (though the strongest ones were those that were well-established in person).
There’s another interesting finding here: Personal perception matters most when it comes to feeling lonely. As Chris Segrin, head of the communication department at The University of Arizona, explains in a write-up of the studies:

Loneliness is the discrepancy between your achieved and desired level of social contact, and that has important implications. The portrait of a lonely person is very difficult to paint because what is really important is what is in your head.