FYI: Findings

Whoever said the eyes are the windows to the soul should have looked down. According to research by psychology professor Alexander Todorov, BODY ­LANGUAGE more accurately conveys intense emotion than facial expressions. In experiments conducted by Todorov, subjects were better at guessing the emotion conveyed in a photograph of a person based on body language — alone or combined with facial expressions — than on facial context alone. The results were published in Science in November.

When trying to make a GOOD IMPRESSION, people who seek to present themselves as competent downplay their warmth, and those hoping to seem warm downplay their competence. That’s according to research by psychology ­professor Susan Fiske and ­Deborah Holoien GS. They asked study subjects to write introductions about themselves using words pretested to be high or low in warmth and competence, to be included in an email message to people they wanted to impress. The findings were published in the Journal of Experimental Social ­Psychology in January.

If temperatures soar and sea ­levels rise because of GLOBAL WARMING, human populations may move northward and inland in response, causing cities there to grow and older coastal metropolises to become poorer. Some of us might prosper, others suffer economic loss, says professor of economics and international affairs Esteban Rossi-Hansberg in a co-authored National Bureau of Economic Research working paper.