Psychology Prize
Despite the commonly uttered phrase, we don't really breathe sighs of relief. Neither do we sigh when we're sad, as dictionary definitions would have you believe. In fact, we sigh when we're ready to give up, as was recently discovered by Karl Teigen of the University of Oslo in Norway.
Realizing that no psychologists had ever studied the emotional cause of sighs before, Teigen and his colleagues investigated participants' breathy exhales in a series of experiments. He found that when people saw someone else sigh, they almost always incorrectly assumed that that person was feeling sad. When people sigh themselves, on the other hand, they said it was because they were ready to throw in the towel. In short, regardless of how socially attuned humans are to the thoughts and feelings of others, people completely misinterpret the reason for sighing.
To prove that sighs are tied to frustration and giving up, Teigen did an experiment in which he asked participants to attempt puzzles that were unsolvable. His results? "They tried and they sighed; they tried and they sighed," he told Life's Little Mysteries. The research, published in the Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, earned Teigen the 2011 Ig Nobel Prize.
Realizing that no psychologists had ever studied the emotional cause of sighs before, Teigen and his colleagues investigated participants' breathy exhales in a series of experiments. He found that when people saw someone else sigh, they almost always incorrectly assumed that that person was feeling sad. When people sigh themselves, on the other hand, they said it was because they were ready to throw in the towel. In short, regardless of how socially attuned humans are to the thoughts and feelings of others, people completely misinterpret the reason for sighing.
To prove that sighs are tied to frustration and giving up, Teigen did an experiment in which he asked participants to attempt puzzles that were unsolvable. His results? "They tried and they sighed; they tried and they sighed," he told Life's Little Mysteries. The research, published in the Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, earned Teigen the 2011 Ig Nobel Prize.
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