Want to Spot a Narcissist? Look at a Person’s Eyebrows.

Does the sound of someone chewing irritate you?

If so, it is a newly diagnosed condition, the discovery of which was honored at the 30th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize ceremony, on Thursday, September 17. Nienke Vulink, Damiaan Denys and Arnoud van Loon were awarded the Medicine Prize for diagnosing a long-unrecognized medical condition: Misophonia, the distress at hearing other people make chewing sounds.

Other prizes included:

• Psychology Prize: Miranda Giacomin and Nicholas Rule, for devising a method to identify narcissists by examining their eyebrows. See “Eyebrows cue grandiose narcissism.”
• Peace Prize: The governments of India and Pakistan, for having their diplomats surreptitiously ring each other’s doorbells in the middle of the night, and then run away before anyone had a chance to answer the door.
• Economics Prize: Christopher Watkins, Juan David Leongómez, Jeanne Bovet, Agnieszka Żelaźniewicz, Max Korbmacher, Marco Antônio Corrêa Varella, Ana Maria Fernandez, Danielle Wagstaff, and Samuela Bolgan, for trying to quantify the relationship between different countries’ national income inequality and the average amount of mouth-to-mouth kissing.
• Entomology Prize: Richard Vetter, for collecting evidence that many entomologists (scientists who study insects) are afraid of spiders, which are not insects.
• Materials Science Prize: Metin Eren, Michelle Bebber, James Norris, Alyssa Perrone, Ashley Rutkoski, Michael Wilson, and Mary Ann Raghanti, for showing that knives manufactured from frozen human feces do not work well.

Improbable Research says the Ig Nobel Prizes honor achievements that make people LAUGH, and then THINK. The prizes are intended to celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative—and spur people’s interest in science, medicine, and technology. More about the 2020 winners is here.