Adults rate average faces as more attractive than most of the faces used in the creation of the average. One explanation for this is that average faces appear as both more familiar and more attractive because they resemble internal face prototypes formed from experience. Here we evaluated that explanation by examining the influence of recent experience on participants' subsequent judgments of a...

Following the 1900 congress in Paris, the beginning of the 20th century saw comparative law emerge as a significant discipline. This paper suggests that the early 21st century is seeing the decline, or maybe even the ‘end’, of comparative law. In contrast to other claims which see the 21st century as the ‘era of comparative law’, there are at least four trends which give rise to pessimism: ‘the...

In this letter in the framework of a simple see-saw scenario with two (or three) quasi degenerate Majorana neutrinos we propose that one of these neutrinos can be very weakly coupled, yet there is a mechanism of the generation of the abundance of such ”dark” neutrino in the early universe. The mechanism of production is due to oscillations between ”dark” Majorana neutrino and one of the Majoran...

Evolutionary psychologists have proposed that humans possess cognitive mechanisms for social exchange, but have perhaps focused overmuch on "cheating", because avoiding exploitation in reciprocal exchange could be accomplished either by avoidance of defectors or by attraction to cooperators. Past studies that have claimed to support the existence of a "cheater-detection module" by finding enhan...

Biology and the particular gun culture of the United States come together to explain the persistent and powerful attraction of American boys to both real guns and toy guns. The 1990s saw adults begin to conflate “the gun problem” with “the boy problem,” sparking attempts (largely failed) to banish toy guns from homes and schools. Following the approach of play scholar Gregory Bateson, this arti...

South Africa going to second democratic elections saw two path-breaking works exploring disgraceful crimes and emotional commotions in an intriguing era. One is J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace (1999) and Andre Brink's The Rights of Desire (2000). The Protagonists of both the works are middle-aged caught in the noose of Eros and are seen resisting the change of tides and resigned to the fateful happenin...

Previous research has shown that attention to an object can trigger the retrieval of features of a preceding object. The present study investigates whether such retrieval would occur to a recently inhibited object. In three experiments, participants saw two successively presented stimuli (S1 and S2) that varied in color and orientation. The task was to respond to the color or orientation of S2 ...

Neutrino oscillations give clear evidence for non-vanishing neutrino masses and lepton-flavor violation (LFV) in the neutrino sector. This provides strong motivation to search for signals of LFV also in the charged lepton sector, and to probe the SUSY seesaw mechanism. We compare the sensitivity of rare radiative decays on the right-handed Majorana mass scale MR with the reach in slepton-pair p...

In what has become a classic metamemory paper, Dunlosky and Nelson (1992) had participants study paired associates such as ocean–tree. Later, the experimenters represented the same items and asked participants to judge how likely they would be to remember the second word if shown the first word 10 minutes later (i.e., they were asked to make JOLs in the form of predicting their future recall pe...