Two people can develop an emotional bond if they pretend to find each other attractive, a study has shown.

The research involved experimental speed-dating sessions in which participants played psychological games designed to encourage attraction, including looking into each other’s eyes, sharing secrets and giving small gifts.

Study leader psychologist Prof. Richard Wiseman,from the University of Hertfordshire, said: “Just as people feel happier when they force their face into a smile, so pairs of people behaving as if they find one another attractive became emotionally close.”

Pencil horror

A two-year-old girl escaped a potentially fatal injury after a pencil pierced her eye socket and came within a millimetre of puncturing a major blood vessel in her brain.

Wren Bowell was getting ready for bed when she fell and landed on the pencil she was holding, which penetrated her right eye socket, narrowly missing her eyeball, before lodging 3.8 cm into her front lobe.

The little girl, from Peasedown St John, near Bath, was rushed to hospital in Bristol where the consultant neurosurgeon who operated on her said she had been “extremely lucky” to have made “such an excellent recovery”.

‘Net’ catch

A local government worker in the Philippines has been sacked after being spotted on Facebook attending a school reunion when he should have been at work.

He closed his office for four days without permission and did not answer calls or texts. Staff tried contacting him through his Facebook account and instead saw pictures of him at the reunion.