What is this thing called love?

Страницыпредыдущаяследующая

123

(o_I_)

According to a 1991 survey, at any one time about one in ten of us describe ourselves as 'madly in love'. Love is remarkably common; in the survey only one in five of the 1,000 people interviewed said they were 'not really in love', with most of the rest admitting to some kind of romantic involvement. So what is this feeling called love? To many researchers the classic symptoms of butterflies in the tummy, rapid pulse rate and legs turning to jelly are far from mysterious. Many believe it can all be explained by our biochemistry.

(1 )

Scientists believe the excitement of that fatal attraction is created by adrenaline - the same hormone that is produced when we are under stress. When stimulated, the adrenal glands also produce a hormone called cortisone, whose side-effects include feelings of great happiness.

(2 )

Eyes give away the fact that you are in love, or at least very much attracted to someone because adrenaline enlarges or 'dilates' your pupils. Having large pupils also means that we are more appealing to others. Desmond Morris, a scientist who studies human behaviour, proved this point by showing a picture of a woman to a large number of men. He then told them that she had a twin sister, but presented the same woman with her pupils dilated. When the men were asked which of the twins they'd like to take out for the evening, most chose the one with larger pupils.

(3 )

In another study, scientists used two bridges over the Capilano River in British Columbia. One was a very dangerous-looking bridge which was 70 metres above the river, while the other was a solid concrete bridge. An attractive female researcher stopped men coming off each bridge. She managed to give them her phone number while she pretended to get them to fill out a questionnaire. Many more of the men who had crossed the dangerous bridge later phoned the researcher to ask her out than those who had crossed the safe bridge. This made researchers think that love is much like any other emotional state. Because their adrenaline is flowing and their hearts are beating fast, people believe they are in love even if they are actually only a bit frightened.

(4 )

But how do we select our partners from all the thousands of possible people? People are often attracted to others who have a lot in common with them - even if they don't always realise that they have anything in common. We give out unspoken messages about ourselves every day from the way we walk, talk and hold ourselves. It's not just the way we dress, but our posture, facial expressions, movements, tone of voice, accent and so on. If you put a group of people who don't know each other in a room together and ask them to pair up, they will naturally choose partners who are of similar family background, social class and upbringing. We are all looking for something familiar though we may not be aware of exactly what it is.

(5 )

Facial attractiveness is a big influence on our choice of partners, too. People have long-lasting relationships with others of a similar level of attractiveness. In a recent study, researchers took a selection of wedding photos and cut them up to separate the bride and groom. They then showed them to people who were asked to rate how attractive each person's face was. When the researchers put the photos back into pairs, they found most of the couples had been rated at similar levels.

(6 )

Aside from our ability to rate others, each of us carries a rough estimate in our heads of how facially attractive we might be. We realise subconsciously that if we approach someone who is much better looking than we are, we run the risk of being rejected.

(7 )

Whatever the explanation for how and why we fall in love, one thing is clear: Nature has made the whole process as wonderful and as addictive as possible. Perhaps that's why so many of us are at least a little bit 'in love' most of the time.

A. Two magic substances.

B. Finding someone who matches us physically.

C. Two feelings that are easily confused.

D. We don’t want to get hurt.

E. A silly experiment.

F. It’s hard to resist.

G. We like what we know.

H. Spot the difference.

I. Most of us feel it.

Text 5.

INSIGHTS

WHY WOULD AN INNOCENT PERSON PROFESS GUILT?

In criminal trials, a defendant's admission of guilt can trump even the proverbial smoking gun. A confession is the ideal civic solution: The perpetrator takes responsibility, and the public sleeps soundly. But it's not always the end of the story. In December, the convictions of five men who confessed to the 1989 rape and beating of a jogger in New York's Central Park were reversed after an imprisoned rapist took sole responsibility for the assault. And in January, Governor George Ryan commuted the sentences of Illinois' 150 death-row inmates to life in prison, due in part to concern about the role of false confessions in securing wrongful convictions.

Although it is difficult, if not impossible, to estimate the number of false confessions nationwide, a recent review of one decade's worth of murder cases in a single Illinois county found 247 instances in which the defendants' self-incriminating statements were thrown out by the court or found by a jury to be insufficiently convincing for conviction. (The Chicago Tribune conducted the investigation.)

Suspects with low IQs are particularly vulnerable to the pressures of police interrogation: They are less likely to understand the charges against them and the consequences of professing guilt. One of the suspects in the Central Park attack had an IQ of 87; another was aged 16 with a second-grade reading level.

But intelligence is by no means the decisive factor. Suspects with compliant or suggestible personalities and anxiety disorders may be hard-pressed to withstand an interrogation, according to Gisli Gudjonsson, Ph.D., a professor of forensic psychology at the Institute of Psychiatry in London. Gudjonsson's suggestibility scale is used by courts around the world to evaluate self-incriminating statements. But he cautions against seeking only personality-driven explanations for confessions: "A drug addict may not be particularly suggestible but may have a strong desire to get back out on the street."

Self-incriminating statements are often the result of a kind of cost-benefit analysis. "False confession is an escape hatch. It becomes rational under the circumstances," says Saul Kassin, Ph.D., a professor of psychology at Williams College in Massachusetts. The most common explanation given after the fact is that suspects "just wanted to go home."

This often indicates an inability to appreciate the consequences of a confession, a situation that police cultivate by communicating that a confession will be rewarded with lenient sentencing. Police may also offer mitigating factors— the crime was unintentional; the suspect was provoked.

The circumstances of interrogation are crucial."Everybody has a breaking point. Nobody confesses falsely in an hour," says Kassin. The suspects in the Central Park case each spent between 14 and 30 hours under interrogation.

The use of false evidence (including statements such as, "Your fingerprints are on the gun") in interrogation is implicated in almost every false-confession case, but American courts have upheld the practice. This is not to say that police intentionally ensnare the innocent. Kassin notes that detectives are trained to believe they can make accurate judgments about a suspect's truthfulness, though "there's a level of overconfidence in the initial judgment, and they begin the interrogation with a presumption of guilt." Gudjonsson agrees: "Police officers need to know that they can elicit a false confession even if they don't intend to."

A particularly vulnerable defendant may begin to doubt his or her own memory when presented with false evidence. Children and the mentally handicapped, or people whose recollections are clouded by drugs or alcohol, are particularly susceptible. Interrogators may suggest that a suspect has repressed the memory. They then offer false evidence to fill in the gaps. After intense interrogation, these suspects become sufficiently convinced of their own guilt and accept an "internalized" false confession.

False confessions are generated in cell blocks as well as interrogation rooms, a fact not lost on detectives under fire for the Central Park jogger case. One month after those convictions were vacated, a chagrined New York City Police Department issued its own revisionist theory: The inmate who claims he alone attacked the jogger may have falsely confessed due to threats from other inmates or the desire to transfer to another prison.

Text 5.Read the text and define the three techniques used to control people’s behavior.

Mind manipulating

We all know that people can and do influence each other. But the disturbing question is how far people’s minds can be influenced against their own wills. There are three techniques that have been used in attempts to control other people’s behaviour.

One technique, sublimal perception, is referred to as subception. This technique is based on the observation that people notice a great more than they consciously realize. This is not a new observation, but it has been given special attention since the results of an experiment in a New York movie theater were reported. In the experiment, an advertisement for ice cream was flashed onto the screen during the feature film. The ad was shown for such a brief period that no one consciously saw the instruction, yet ice-cream sales soared for the period of time the experiment continued.

Hypnosis is another technique that can be used for controlling people’s minds. While in a deep trance, people can be told something at a specific time or at a certain signal. They can be told that they won’t remember what has been said once out of trance. This is called a post-hypnotic suggestion. It is still uncertain whether a subject can be made to carry out an action that otherwise would be unacceptable in that person’s mind.

Yet another technique is called brainwashing. Brainwashing entails forcing people to believe something, usually something false, by continually telling them evidence that is supposedly true and preventing them from thinking about it properly or considering other evidence. Brainwashing can take extreme forms. For example, brainwashing can be done by first causing a complete breakdown of individuals through acts such a starving them, preventing them from sleeping, intimidating them and keeping them in a state of constant fear. When the individuals lose their sense of reality, new ideas can be planted in their minds.

Subliminal perception = subception – подпороговое восприятие

Subliminal – below the threshold of consciousness; ~ advertising, as when an advertisement is projected to a cinema or TV screen for a fraction of a second and is noted only by the subconscious mind.

Text 6.

Subliminal Perception.

Research on subliminal perception investigates whether subjects can unconsciously perceive stimuli that do not extend the absolute threshold. In a study that demonstrated the emotional impact of subliminal stimulations a device called a tachistoscope was used to flash the slides of strangers to subjects too briefly (only a tiny fraction of a second) to exceed the absolute threshold. Because previous research had shown that we prefer stimuli with which we are familiar, the experimenters predicted that if subliminal perception exists, the subjects would later express more positive feeling toward people whose photographs had been presented subliminally.

Given that we may be able to perceive subliminal stimuli and that we prefer stimuli with which we are familiar, could manufacturers make us like their products more by repeatedly presenting us subliminal messages about them? This is a heart of a controversy that has lasted since the late 1950s: Can subliminal advertising make people buy particular products? The controversy began after a marketing firm repeatedly flashed the words Eat Popcorn and Drink Coca-Cola during movies shown at a theatre in Fort Lee, New Jersey. Though those watching the movies could not detect the advertisements, after several weeks, popcorn sales had increased 50% and Coke sales had increased 18%. However, psychologists pointed out that the uncontrolled conditions of the study made it impossible to determine the actual reason for the increase in sales. Perhaps sales increased because better movies, hotter weather, or more appealing counter displays attracted more customers during the period when subliminal advertising was used.

More recently, parents of teenagers have expressed concerns about the alleged subliminal messages in rock music recording, such as Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven”, that supposedly can be heard clearly when the recording is played backward. Despite the lack of evidence that such messages exist, fear that they might cause crime, Satanism, and sexual promiscouty led California and other states to pass laws requiring warnings on recordings that contained subliminal messages. Yet even if recording (or movies) contain subliminal messages, there is no evidence that listeners will obey them like zombies anymore that they will obey messages of which they are aware.

But what of the popular subliminal self-help audiotapes that supposedly help you to do everything from increase your grades to decrease your weight? They, too, have been evaluated scientifically. In a study of university students, one group listened to sounds of ocean waves that masked subliminal messages promoting good study habits. A second group listened to a placebo audiotape of ocean waves with no subliminal messages. And a control group listened to neither. At the end of the study, the groups didn’t differ in their final-exam grades or in their grade point averages. studies like this on indicate that you would be wise to spend less money on self-help tapes and more time on studying.

СОДЕРЖАНИЕ

Введение

Unit 1. Present Simple and Present Continuous

Unit 2. Past Simple and Past Continuous

Unit 3.Present Perfect and Past Perfect

Unit 4.Present Perfect Continuous and Past Perfect Continuous

Unit 5. Future Tenses

Unit 6.Sequence of Tenses

Unit 7.The Passive voice

Texts for additional reading

Содержание