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.

In a series of studies, a team of researchers has shown that our sense of touch may strongly influence our thoughts and interactions with other people—even when what we’re touching and what we’re doing seem unrelated. What’s more, we appear to be unaware that the things we touch—their weight, hardness, and texture—influence the decisions we make.
To test how touch might influence our impressions, the researchers asked volunteers to judge a job candidate by looking at a resume that was on either a light clipboard or a heavy clipboard. Those using a heaving clipboard thought the candidate was more qualified and more serious about the job—had “heavier” interest in it, we might say—than did those who used the light clipboard. People were also more likely to view an interaction between two people as more difficult and harsh if they first handled rough puzzle pieces rather than smooth ones. And the researchers found that people sitting in hard chairs were less flexible and willing to negotiate than those sitting in soft chairs, making much lower second offers on a car after the first had been rejected.
Why would our tactile sensations have these kinds of effects? As infants, we learn about the physical world by touching things—it’s the first of our senses to develop—and as we get older, it becomes “a scaffold for the development of conceptual knowledge,” the researchers say. In other words, we use our sense of touch to form judgments about more abstract things; we touch smooth puzzle pieces and then think a situation is running “smoothly.”
When people do this, Joshua Ackerman, a professor of marketing at the MIT Sloan School of Management, explains in a write-up of the research:

They are taking the easiest route to obtaining information, by drawing on the ideas they already have developed.

We’re coming late to this, but it was too interesting to pass up. Vaughan Bell of the blog Mind Hacks drew our attention to a study by a team of researchers including Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler (who co-wrote the book Connected) who found:

divorce can spread between friends, siblings, and co-workers, and there are clusters of divorcees that extend two degrees of separation in the network. We also find that popular people are less likely to get divorced, divorcees have denser social networks, and they are much more likely to remarry other divorcees. Interestingly, we do not find that the presence of children influences the likelihood of divorce, but we do find that each child reduces the susceptibility to being influenced by peers who get divorced. Overall, the results suggest that attending to the health of one’s friends’ marriages serves to support and enhance the durability of one’s own relationship, and that, from a policy perspective, divorce should be understood as a collective phenomenon that extends far beyond those directly affected.

That image at the top? It shows the clusters of divorce in a connected set of 631 friends and siblings. (Click on image for larger view.)