Dr Paola Bressan

Only attractive women reap the benefits of sexual imprinting

• Scientific Reports
• April 2020

• The preference for certain mates over others can be learned early in life. Here I report that men's preferences for a conspicuous trait, colourful eyes, are affected by the eye colour of mothers. F...

Confounds in “failed” replications

• Frontiers in Psychology
• September 2019

• Reproducibility is essential to science, yet a distressingly large number of research findings do not seem to replicate. Here I discuss one underappreciated reason for this state of affairs. I make...

Mitochondria inspire a lifestyle

• January 2019

• Tucked inside our cells, we animals (and plants, and fungi) carry mitochondria, minuscule descendants of bacteria that invaded our common ancestor 2 billion years ago. This unplanned breakthrough e...

Systemisers are better at maths

• Scientific Reports
• August 2018

• People with superior mathematical abilities turn out to have an autism spectrum disorder more often than others do. The empathising-systemising theory proposes that this link is mediated by these i...

Daughters of blue-eyed fathers prefer blue-eyed men

• Scientific Reports
• April 2018

• In this paper we report that daughters’ preference for partners with light or dark eyes is affected by the eye colour of fathers. We asked over 1,000 women to judge the attractiveness of men as pot...

Our (mother’s) mitochondria and our mind

• Perspectives on Psychological Science
• September 2017

• Most of the energy we get to spend is furnished by mitochondria, minuscule living structures sitting inside our cells or dispatched back and forth within them to where they are needed. Mitochondria...

Humans as superorganisms: How microbes, viruses, and other selfish entities shape our b...

• Perspectives on Psychological Science
• July 2015

• Psychologists and psychiatrists tend to be little aware that (a) microbes in our brains and guts are capable of altering our behavior; (b) viral DNA that was incorporated into our DNA millions of y...

How we recognize kin

• Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews Cognitive Science
• March 2015

• Natural selection has favored the evolution of behaviors that benefit not only one's genes, but also their copies in genetically related individuals. These behaviors include optimal outbreeding (ch...

Human kin recognition is self- rather than family-referential

• Biology Letters
• February 2009

The place of white in a world of grays: A double-anchoring theory of lightness perception.

• Psychological Review
• January 2006

Antigravity hills are visual illusions

• Psychological Science
• September 2003

• Antigravity hills, also known as spook hills or magnetic hills, are natural places where cars put into neutral are seen to move uphill on a slightly sloping road, apparently defying the law of grav...

Why people who believe in the paranormal come across more coincidences

• Applied Cognitive Psychology
• January 2002

• It has been claimed that people interpret weird coincidences as paranormal because they underestimate the probability of their occurring by sheer chance. In two studies, we found that believers did...

Strangers look sicker

• BioEssays
• November 2020

• We have evolved a variety of psychological mechanisms to avoid people who might be infected. Here I show that this “behavioral" immune system uses a face's unfamiliarity (how different it looks fro...

Mental health, mitochondria, and the battle of the sexes

• Biomedicines
• January 2021

• Whether we’ll be likely to develop a mental disorder in the autism spectrum (autism, Asperger syndrome, ADHD) or the psychosis one (schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, major depression) is determined ...