Marching Band and Other Hazards of High School

"Naw, not really," he said. "But I got good results, so it worked out."

When It's Okay to Lie

When it comes to helping to impress a friend about another friend, people prefer lying liars who lie to truth tellers.

That's what psychology professors Beth Pontari of Furman University and Barry Schlenker of the University of Florida found when they attempted to see whether people think honesty is always the best policy.

Not always, they found. Two separate studies revealed that people thought it was okay to tell white lies to attempt to help friends make a good impression on a loved one or a colleague at work.

Pontari and Schlenker also found those who always told the truth were respected more by these study subjects. But test subjects also reported that they liked those who tweaked the truth more than people who were monotonically honest, the professors report in the June issue of Basic and Applied Social Psychology.

Who Would Have Thought?

Beautiful Women, Stress Relief and the Cookie Cue

"The Siren's Call: Terror Management and the Threat of Men's Sexual Attraction to Women" by Mark J. Landau, et al., Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 90, No. 1. A University of Arizona psychologist and his colleagues conduct experiments with undergraduates and find that men are often scared by attractive women because they remind men they are "an impulsive, animalistic, material and finite piece of biological protoplasm" and will someday die.

"Experimental Comparison of the Psychological Benefits of Aerobic Exercise, Humor and Music" by Attila Szabo, Humor, Vol. 18, No. 3. A British researcher finds that spending 20 minutes watching an episode of the TV show "Friends" or listening to New Age music is just as effective as aerobic exercise in lowering stress and more beneficial than sitting quietly.

"Cues of Parental Investment as a Factor in Attractiveness" by Gary L. Brase, Evolution and Human Behavior, Vol. 27, No. 2. A University of Missouri psychologist found that women report they would be more likely to have sex with a man shown in a photograph giving a cookie to a baby than with a man shown taking a cookie away from a baby.