How important is having a feeling of control over your life?
ry important unless you're a fan of heart attacks: Objective: We examine the prospective relationship between mastery, where limited mastery is defined as the inability to control negative emotions (and perceiving stressful experiences as beyond personal control), and cardiovascular disease (CVD) mortality particularly among individuals at apparently low CVD risk. Design: Prospective population-based study of 19,067 men and women, aged 41–80 years with no previous heart disease or stroke at baseline assessment. Main Outcome Measures: Primary outcome measure CVD mortality.…
1 min read
Does the placebo effect work — even when you know it’s a placebo?
ople were told they were being given “placebo pills made of an inert substance, like sugar pills, that have been shown in clinical studies to produce significant improvement in IBS symptoms through mind-body self-healing processes” and still got the benefits of the placebo effect: Background Placebo treatment can significantly influence subjective symptoms. However, it is widely believed that response to placebo requires concealment or deception. We tested whether open-label placebo (non-deceptive and non-concealed administration) is superior to a no-treatment control with…
2 minutes
What is happiness?
rvard happiness expert Daniel Gilbert explains it here. Most interesting takeaway from the video: "We are happy when we have family, we are happy when we have friends and almost all the other things we think make us happy are actually just ways of getting more family and friends." Daniel Gilbert is the author of the bestseller Stumbling on Happiness. More on his work here. Join over 151,000 readers. Get a free weekly update via email here. Related posts: 6 Hostage Negotiation Techniques…
1 min read
Being Compassionate Reduces Stress
more compassionate: The present study examined the role of compassion for others and social support in physiological stress reactivity. In this experiment, participants who had previously completed an online assessment of compassion experienced a social stress task in front of either two supportive or neutral evaluators, while their blood pressure, cortisol, high frequency heart rate variability (HF-HRV), and liking for the evaluators were monitored. Participants’ compassion for others interacted with social support condition to buffer their physiological reactivity to…
1 min read
Would you feel better if you were walking in nature right now? (Don’t trust your answer.)
u would feel better. But you probably underestimate how much. Modern lifestyles disconnect people from nature, and this may have adverse consequences for the well-being of both humans and the environment. In two experiments, we found that although outdoor walks in nearby nature made participants much happier than indoor walks did, participants made affective forecasting errors, such that they systematically underestimated nature’s hedonic benefit. The pleasant moods experienced on outdoor nature walks facilitated a subjective sense of connection with nature,…
1 min read
Can happiness stop you from getting sick? Can it make sick people better?
happiness good for your health? This common notion is tested in a synthetic analysis of 30 follow-up studies on happiness and longevity. It appears that happiness does not predict longevity in sick populations, but that it does predict longevity among healthy populations. So, happiness does not cure illness but it does protect against becoming ill. The effect of happiness on longevity in healthy populations is remarkably strong. The size of the effect is comparable to that of smoking or…
1 min read
A Simple Trick To Help You Worry Less
ck a specific time to do your worrying every day. Via MSNBC: For those concerned with shedding some of their anxieties, it seems planning a certain time every day to worry may help stop the stress-out cycle. When people with adjustment disorders, burnout or severe work problems used techniques to confine their worrying a single, scheduled 30- minute period each day, they were better able to cope with their problems, a new study by researchers in the Netherlands finds. And:…
1 min read
Is this why it’s so hard to be compassionate?
en when things occur by accident our brains prefer to make them sound deliberate: Three studies tested the idea that our analyses of human behavior are guided by an “intentionality bias,” an implicit bias where all actions are judged to be intentional by default. In Study 1 participants read a series of sentences describing actions that can be done either on purpose or by accident (e.g., “He set the house on fire”) and had to decide which interpretation best characterized…
2 minutes
