'Bedroom eyes' make guys look sketchy

By Stephanie Pappas

LiveScience

Beware the bedroom eyes, guys — new research suggests that a heavy-lidded, seductive gaze makes you seem less trustworthy to both men and women.

The study finds that guys with an open, normal gaze are preferred for a long-term relationship by women and as a business partner or neighbor by men. Women and men alike perceived the eyes-half-closed look as an attempt to secure a fling rather than a long-term relationship.

"A lot is conveyed in a glance," study researcher Daniel Kruger, a psychology professor at the University of Michigan, told LiveScience.

Large eyes convey childlike qualities such as naivety, sincerity and vulnerability. Gaze and pupil size also convey personality traits and mood, including extroversion and sexual arousal. With eyes conveying so much, Kruger and his colleagues wondered: What about eyelids?

Kruger and his co-author Jory Piglowski, also of the University of Michigan, took photographs of two men, both white and in their early 20s, with eyes open and half-open. They used computer-editing software to overlay the photographs so that they were identical in all aspects except for eye openness.

In two studies, the first with 239 undergraduate men and women and the second with 161 undergraduate participants, the researchers showed volunteers the photographs and asked the female participants to rate them on attractiveness for a short-term relationship, long-term relationship and brief affair (or fling). Women were also asked whether they'd like each man to be the father of her child or whether they'd trust him to accompany her sister on a long trip. Men were asked if they'd like the man as a son-in-law or whether they'd be okay with him traveling with their girlfriend on a long trip. They were also asked if they'd like the man as a business partner or neighbor.

The results showed that the squinty-eyed guy was less appealing as a long-term relationship prospect than the guy with the open gaze. The heavy-lidded man was seen as pursuing a short-term mating strategy — in other words, a fling rather than a relationship, the participants indicated. Unfortunately, the look didn't give him much of an edge: Men with a wider-eyed look were ranked as more attractive even for a brief affair. [ The Sex Quiz: Myths, Taboos & Bizarre Facts ]

Men were less likely to want the seductive gazer as a neighbor or business partner, and women were less likely to say they'd want to marry him, with 71 percent picking the open-eyed guy instead. Open-eyed guys were also seen as more trustworthy when accompanying a woman on a trip.

The researchers also picked two literary descriptions from British Romantic literature, one of a cad or dark hero (George Staunton from Walter Scott's 1818 book "The Heart of Midlothian) and one of an upstanding hero (Waverley, from the book "Waverley" by the same author). When they asked the participants to match the man to the description, they matched the squinter to the cad and the open-eyed guy to the knight-in-shining-armor type.

The seductive gaze may well convey a sense of maturity and sexual readiness, given that larger eyes are associated with youth, Kruger said. But the study, published in the April issue of the journal Personality and Individual Differences, suggests that an all-around seductive look "can come back to bite you," Kruger said. He and his colleagues have since conducted a similar study using female facesand shown the same results.

"You don't gain so much of an advantage by doing this [expression] unless you're already engaged with someone who is interested in you, or who you have a chancewith," Kruger said. "So don't overuse it."

Michigan Museum Showcases Racist Artifacts That Will Make You Cringe.

• In a March 14, 2012 photo, David …
  
• In a March 14, 2012 photo, the …
  
• In a March 14, 2012 photo, David …

BIG RAPIDS, Mich. (AP) — The objects displayed in Michigan's newest museum range from the ordinary, such as simple ashtrays and fishing lures, to the grotesque — a full-size replica of a lynching tree. But all are united by a common theme: They are steeped in racism so intense that it makes visitors cringe.

That's the idea behind the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia, which says it has amassed the nation's largest public collection of artifacts spanning the segregation era, from Reconstruction until the civil rights movement, and beyond.

The museum in a gleaming new exhibit hall at Ferris State University "is all about teaching, not a shrine to racism," said David Pilgrim, the founder and curator who started building the collection as a teenager.

Pilgrim, who is black, makes no apologies for the provocative exhibits. The goal of the $1.3 million gallery, he explained, is "to get people to think deeply."

The displays are startling. The n-word is prevalent throughout, and many items portray black men as lazy, violent or inarticulate. Black women are shown as kerchief-wearing mammies, sexually charged Jezebels or other stereotypes.

The shocking images exact an emotional cost.

"There's parts in that room — the main room — where it's quite gut-wrenching," said Nancy Mettlach, a student conduct specialist at Ferris. "And the thought that was going through my mind was: 'How can one human being do this to another human being?'"

Pilgrim, a former sociology professor at Ferris State, started the collection in the 1970s in Alabama. Along the way, he "spent more time in antique and flea markets than the people who work there." His quest for more examples was boundless.
"At some point, the collecting becomes the thing," he said. "It became the way I relaxed." He spent most of his free time and money on acquisitions.
In 1996, Pilgrim donated his 2,000-piece collection to the school after concluding that it "needed a real home."
The collection spent the next 15 years housed in a single room and could be seen only by appointment. Thanks to the financial support of the university and donors — notably from the charitable arm of Detroit utility DTE Energy — Pilgrim's collection now has a permanent home, which will have a grand opening ceremony April 26. Admission is free.
Today, the school has 9,000 pieces that depict African-Americans in stereotypical ways and, in some cases, glorify violence against them.

Not all of the museum's holdings are on display, but the 3,500-square-foot space in the lower level of the university library is packed with items that demonstrate how racist ideas and anti-black images dominated American culture for decades.

Visitors can forget about touring the exhibits and retiring untroubled to a cafe or gift shop. Some leave angry or offended. Most feel a kind of "reflective sadness," Pilgrim said.

But that's not enough. If the museum "stayed at that, then we failed," he said. "The only real value of the museum has ever been to really engage people in a dialogue."
So Pilgrim designed the tour to give visitors a last stop in a "room of dialogue," where they're encouraged to discuss what they've seen and how the objects might be used to promote tolerance and social justice.
Some of the objects in the museum are a century old. Others were made as recently as this year.

Ferris State sophomore Nehemiah Israel was particularly troubled by a series of items about President Barack Obama.

One T-shirt on display reads: "Any White Guy 2012." Another shirt that says "Obama '08" is accompanied by a cartoon monkey holding a banana. A mouse pad shows robe-wearing Ku Klux Klan members chasing an Obama caricature above the words, "Run Obama Run."
"I was like, 'Wow. People still think this. This is crazy,'" Israel said.
One of the first rooms in the museum features a full-size replica of a tree with a lynching noose hanging from it. Several feet away, a television screen shows a video of racist images through the years.

The location of the museum — in the shadow of university founder Woodbridge Ferris' statue — also catches some by surprise. The mostly white college town of Big Rapids is 150 miles from Detroit, the state's largest predominantly black city.

Ferris, who later served as Michigan governor and as a U.S. senator, founded the school more than a century ago. He once said Americans should work to provide an "education for all children, all men and all women."

Pilgrim, who is also Ferris State's vice president for diversity and inclusion, initially considered giving his collection to a historically black college, but he wanted to be "near it enough to make sure it was taken care of."

Most of the objects "are anti-black caricatures, everyday objects or they are segregationist memorabilia," he said. Because they represent a cruel, inflammatory past, they "should either be in a garbage can or a museum."

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If You Go...

JIM CROW MUSEUM OF RACIST MEMORABILIA: Located in Ferris Library for Information, Technology and Education, 1010 Campus Drive, Big Rapids, Mich.; http://www.ferris.edu/jimcrow or 231-591-3500. Monday-Friday, noon-5 p.m. or by appointment. Free admission.