PowerPoint is an application designed to help the speaker or lecturer assemble professional looking slides to be used in oral presentations. The result sadly is often an unending stream of slides with bullet lists, animations that obscure rather than clarify the point and cartoons that distract from rather than convey the message. This paper examines what the speaker can do to avoid 'death by P...

This study explored the differences between 35 child-focused and 52 adult-focused food advertisements sampled from 45 hrs of British television. More child-focused advertisements contained claims of health benefits; scientific information; were shot in 'Leisure' settings; with male characters; had cartoons; and were often fantasy-based. Conversely, significantly more adult-focused advertisement...

People empathize with fictional displays of behaviour, including those of cartoons and computer animations, even though the stimuli are obviously artificial. However, the extent to which other animals also may respond empathetically to animations has yet to be determined. Animations provide a potentially useful tool for exploring non-human behaviour, cognition and empathy because computer-gener...

Communication is a major problem in the management of patients. Miscommunication occurs frequently in populations with low reading skills, illiteracy does not completely account for the observed low rates of recall of communicated information. Transmission of the message also plays an important role. Successful strategies to improve communication with patients include the use of videotapes, vid...

Article history: Received 17 December 2010 Received in revised form 30 March 2011 Accepted 31 March 2011 Available online 22 April 2011 A good sense of humor is sexually attractive, perhaps because it reveals intelligence, creativity, and other ‘good genes’ or ‘good parent’ traits. If so, intelligence should predict humor production ability, which in turn should predict mating success. In this ...