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If You Don’t Have Anything Nice to Say …What you say about others reveals a lot about youGot a friend who thinks most people are jerks? It is probably no surprise that he is not the nicest person in other contexts, either. But the way you view others may reveal much more about your character than you think, according to a study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Researchers at Wake Forest University, the University of Nebraska and Washington University in St. Louis found that college students who were more inclined to rate their peers positively—as being trustworthy, nice and emotionally stable—reported greater life satisfaction, less depression, and better grades and test scores. In general, women were more likely to rate others positively than men, although the study did not examine why. And a survey of the volunteers’ classmates showed that people who rated others positively were more likely to be well regarded by their peers and to be judged as being agreeable, conscientious and emotionally stable.

On the other hand, those with negative opinions of others were more apt to be disagreeable, antisocial and narcissistic. “You stand to learn a number of very different things about a person from just observing whether the person describes others positively or not,” says lead author Dustin Wood, an assistant psychology professor. Most surprising, Wood says, was how little those perceptions changed a year later. “The stability of these tendencies means that they may consistently act as a lens that darkens your experience of other people or brightens it,” he says. And therefore, Wood says, your perception of others “may be hard to change.”

—Winnie Yu

When we perform an action and get an unexpected reward, we learn to repeat that action. And in the presence of others competing for resources—food, money, and so on—our competitors’ actions offer opportunities to guide our behavior. According to new work from researchers at the University of Bristol in England, it is not our peers’ success-es that stick with us, but their failures.

Volunteers played a simple game, modeled after foraging in the wild, against a computer-controlled com-petitor. Players chose one of four boxes, which paid out varying sums of money. To maximize winnings, a player had to occasionally sample each of the boxes. When players saw their competitors get an unexpectedly high sum, functional MRI scans showed no measurable brain activity in reaction. When the drones got an unexpectedly low payout, however, parts of a player’s brain associated with inhi-bition went bonkers.

Learning from competition, then, “is not learning to act like your competitor,

it is learning not to act like your com-petitor when they fail,” explains Paul Howard-Jones, who co-led the study with Rafal Bogacz.

Howard-Jones notes that while the computer was making its move, which simply consisted of one box changing color, the player’s mirror neuron sys-tem—which is known to respond to the actions of others—was active, as if the

player was making the same choice. When that action led to failure, the inhibitory areas put an immediate stop to the mental simulation. Howard- Jones says this is the first time that researchers have seen people show a mirror neuron response to an action performed by a computer (the players were aware that their opponent was simply software).

Marco Iacoboni, a mirror neuron expert at the University of California, Los Angeles, who was not involved with the study, cautions that fMRI’s resolution is not fine enough to distinguish whether the neurons firing are mirror neurons or just motor cortex neurons, which fire both when we think about an action and when we actually perform an action. Even if the computer is simply recruiting a player’s motor neurons, however, that is still a compelling finding. “It’s really a mechanism for why we anthro po-morphize pretty much everything,” Iacoboni says. “We tend to mentalize even things that we know have no mind.” —Nikhil Swaminathan

>> iMitAtiOn

Monkey See, Monkey Don’tWe learn from our competitors’ failures by not repeating them

When a competitor makes a mistake, our brain halts the process of mentally mirror-ing his or her actions. inhibition regions, including the posterior medial frontal cortex (yellow, above right), kick into gear.

MiQ111News3p.indd 11 11/8/10 2:58:09 PM