Friday Fun: Are you a good "mind-reader"? Take the test!

Can you read my mind?

Do you think this guy is:
(a) playful
(b) comforting
(c) irritated
(d) bored

Being able to "mind-read" is a unique and important human trait. Being high in emotional intelligence and empathy helps us smoothly navigate our social world and communicate effectively with other people. Not everyone, however, is an emotion-decoding master.

One of the tests that psychologists use to assess people's level of emotional recognition (also called empathy, emotion decoding, theory of mind, or "mind reading") is the "Reading the Mind in the Eyes" task.  During this task, you do exactly what I had you do above - you look at 36 different pairs of eyes and for each you pick one emotion out of four possible choices (though they aren't all actually emotions, unless someone added "joking," "flirtatious," and "decisive" to the emotion dictionary). I thought I'd share this task with you today for a few reasons.

Friday Fun: Are you getting enough sleep?

Do you feel like this guy?

Sleep is one of those basic needs we can't escape. But that doesn't mean we're planning our days to make sure we get our requisite hours of sleep each night. We live in a society where we're expected to burn the candle at both ends, and even our best attempts at sleeping well can fail with early morning meetings, last minute projects, late night social gatherings, children who need night time attention, sleep problems, a snoring roommate, or those trains blowing their horns throughout the night. What happens when we find ourselves suffering from too little or too light of sleep? Given that I seem to be unable to function on less than 9 hours a night, this question has always been of particular interest to me. This month, I'm actually starting to plan some research studies examining the effects of sleep on relationships, and given that all this planning is depriving me of my much-needed sleep (oh the irony), I thought it was a good time to write a series of posts on sleep: what it is, how it works, and how bad sleep affects how we think, feel and act in our daily lives. To kick us off, I'm devoting this Friday Fun to a few sleep scales so we can all figure out just how we're doing on the sleep-o-meter.