It is no accident that body image is often inappropriately younger in a given individual than it appears to others. Thus, many artists painting their own portraits represent themselves as a much younger person than they actually are. This aspect of art was highlighted by MacDonald Critchley when he described the portraits of Beatrice Turner, who at 58 was still painting herself to look like a woman years younger than she actually was. Moreover, this artist painted a nude self-portrait of herself showing a young woman of ample proportions, shortly before she died, thin and emaciated from starvation.

Habituation to occlusive dressings is a halfway house between artefact and organic disease. Liddell & Cotterill (1973)^* described 11 patients who became habituated to occlusive bandages which had been prescribed many years previously for either gravitational ulcers or eczema of the legs. Although the skin in all patients had returned to normal it was impossible to persuade these patients to abandon this occlusive therapy. All attempts at discharging the patient from the clinic failed. Bribes in the form of chocolates, cigars or alcohol were commonly brought to the clinic as inducements for the status quo to continue. The patients were usually lonely, socially isolated and, if male, unemployed. Four male patients in this group had successfully avoided work on account of their alleged skin disease for years.

*Liddell K, Cotterill JA (1973). "Habituation to occlusive dressings." Lancet 1: 1485-1486.

Contagious urination, like other forms of behavioral and emotional state matching, may have important implications in establishing and maintaining social cohesion, in addition to potential roles in preparation for collective departure (i.e. voiding before long-distance travel) and territorial scent-marking (i.e. coordination of chemosensory signals)...

we find that in captive chimpanzees the act of urination is socially contagious. Further, low-dominance individuals had higher rates of contagion.

Why do you think you are nuts?

Are you nuts? Are you nuts? Have you lost your guts?

Why do you think you are nuts?

As a leader of the "qualitative" school of motivational research, [Ernest Dichter] believes that the real reason people buy one product over another is often a deep-seated emotion. Psyche in depth will reveal it, he thinks.

Why do big doorknobs help sell a house? Why do some men become irrationally hostile when their sock drawers are empty? Such are the questions that intrigue researchers like Mr. Dichter...

in the past two or three years Du Pont, Alcoa, General Mills, Procter & Gamble, Colgate-Palmolive, Johnson & Johnson, Schenley Industries and dozens of other well-known companies have commissioned studies from Mr. Dichter's Institute for Motivational Research here. The institute has annual volume of $600,000 and profits of $80,000 to $100,000.

Many people find Dichter's interpretations far-fetched. But people who accept the basic beliefs of modern psychologists find them quite plausible.

The psychologist says he's found that even a commonplace object like a doorknob has a surprising emotional significance to buyers.

"The doorknob offers the only way you can caress a house; you can't caress the walls," he says. "The way a product fills a hand is very important. How a handle does this will make an engineer prefer one technical product over another — and he doesn't even realize it," Mr. Dichter says.

During part of a baby's embryonic development, the thumb fills the palm of the hand, Mr. Dichter says. The new-born infant thus exhibits a strong desire to grasp objects, possibly to fill the palm of the hand again, the psychologist adds.

As he sees it, the same instinct later prompts a sub-conscious tendency to judge a house by its doorknob or a tool by its handle. Mr. Dichter says these findings and theories prompted a California lockmaker to enlarge the doorknobs it manufactured.

Even men's socks can inspire passion, Mr. Dichter asserts. "We find that an empty sock drawer is a symbol of an empty heart," Mr. Dichter said in a study for Du Pont's hosiery section. "When the husband finds that his sock drawer is not overflowing, he interprets his wife's neglect as symptomatic of her lack of consideration, concern and love."