In my Science Confirms the Obvious post today, I discussed the first psychological proof (so say the authors) that humans can indeed experience emotions without immediately knowing why. We do this, they say, because we evolved that way. True, scientists love that explanation, but here its quite intriguing.

Say youre walking through the woods and encounter a grizzly bear. You see it and freeze that instant—even before your stomach drops with fear.

Psychologist: How are you feeling?
Patient: I feel like I want to punch the lights out of…out of…this anger management pillow printed with my bosss photo!
Psychologist: So that emotion would be called…
Patient: Annoyance. Anger.
Psychologist: And why do you think that is?
Patient: Because he made me mad.
Psychologist: "And..."
Patient: Because I am insecure about being passed over for that promotion?
Psychologist: Go on…

A fundamental credo of therapy is to first be aware of your emotions, preferably before they hijack your actions. But often we dont immediately recognize that were feeling irritable, fearful, or disgusted, especially when our significant other is there to notice it first. And sometimes it takes a moment to pinpoint why.

The latest breakthrough in the burgeoning field of birth-order research reveals that parents discipline older kids much more severely than the younger ones. My own thoroughly unscientific poll also finds that this experience is common: Four out of five friends felt that hell yeah, younger siblings got away with murder. Well, not murder per se, but other transgressions such as sneaking home at 5 AM, shoplifting car stereos from Caldor, and smearing Vaseline on the family toilet seat.

Ive been thinking about chimps lately. I called them a who and not a which in a recent piece I produced for the American Museum of Natural History. This earned me a virtual slap by my copy editor. As in:

Chimpanzees, who WHICH are not bipedal…

I was just giving a nod to a fellow hominid—the taxonomic group that includes chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans, and humans. Pan troglodytes are 99.8% genetically similar to us, making them our closest living relative.

The last time I made an impulse buy was Saturday night. I was swept into a bidding war with a burly man at a tattoo art auction, and in the end spent $275 on a terribly lovely piece of original flash that features, among other things, a hula-dancing wolf and a cockroach sporting a banner with the word YUMMY. Frivolous? Perhaps. But I was in a good mood and it was for a good cause—to support the chronically ill 9-month-old son of a NYC tattooist.

However, a new psychological study suggests that if I were sad and self-absorbed on Saturday, I may have paid even more.

Sorry fellas, but shes probably just being nice to you.

Many women know that men sometimes mistake friendliness—say, smiling and eye contact—for sexual interest. Psychological research has long backed up their experience. A new study appearing in the April issue of the journal Psychological Science is no exception. It found that college-age heterosexual men who viewed images of women misidentified their body language and facial expressions as sexually suggestive 12 percent of the time. Women made the same mistake only 8.7 percent of the time.

These findings are nothing new, but when the researchers ran the second part of the experiment a curious pattern emerged.