An Easy Way To Reduce Stress And Pain
cent research has supported a link between laughter, coping with stress, and psychological and physical well-being. According to this work, people who spontaneously use humor to cope with stress have especially healthy immune systems, are 40 percent less likely to suffer a heart attack or stroke, experience less pain during dental surgery, and live 4.5 years longer than most. And: Participants were shown scenes from films that were likely either to make them feel anxious (such as the opening thirty…
2 minutes
Is there an over the counter drug that successfully treats female sexual dysfunction?
s, placebo: Introduction. In clinical trials of drug treatments for women's sexual dysfunction, placebo responses have often been substantial. However, little is known about the clinical significance, specificity, predictors, and potential mechanisms of placebo response in sexual dysfunction. Aim. We aimed to determine the nature and predictors of sexual function outcomes in women treated with placebo for female sexual arousal disorder (FSAD). Methods. We conducted a secondary analysis of data from the placebo arm of a 12-week, multisite, randomized controlled pharmaceutical trial for…
2 minutes
What is better at promoting happiness: deep conversations or small talk?
oks like deep conversations might help: ...Together, the present findings demonstrate that the happy life is social rather than solitary, and conversationally deep rather than superficial. What makes these findings especially compelling is the lack of method overlap between the wellbeing measures (self- and informant reports) and the interaction measures (direct observation). Also, the replication of findings across measures of well-being and across weekday and weekend behavior is encouraging. Naturally, our correlational findings are causally ambiguous. On the one hand, well-being may be causally antecedent to…
2 minutes
Can being underpaid give you a heart attack?
is paper investigates physiological responses to perceptions of unfair pay. In a simple principal agent experiment agents produce revenue by working on a tedious task. Principals decide how this revenue is allocated between themselves and their agents. In this environment unfairness can arise if an agent’s reward expectation is not met. Throughout the experiment we record agents’ heart rate variability. Our findings provide evidence of a link between perceived unfairness and heart rate variability. The latter is an indicator of stress related impaired cardiac autonomic…
1 min read
Are our snap decisions more ethical?
veral theories, both ancient and recent, suggest that having the time to contemplate a decision should increase moral awareness and the likelihood of ethical choices. Our findings indicated just the opposite: greater time for deliberation led to less ethical decisions. Post-hoc analyses and a followup experiment suggested that decision makers act as if their previous choices have created or lost moral credentials: after an ethical first choice, people acted significantly less ethically in their subsequent choice but after an unethical…
1 min read
Does optimism improve your health?
hese findings suggest that positive expectations do predict better health and this relationship is partially due to the goals people set in their daily lives." Trait optimism is associated with better health, but the reason for this association is unclear. The present investigation focused on specific goals and negative emotions as potential pathways through which optimism can lead to better health. College students (n= 336) in the U.S. reported their mental and physical health at the start of an academic…
1 min read
Why are both exercise and religion so good at increasing happiness?
ey provide frequent, regular boosts to your well-being: Many studies have shown that few events in life have a lasting impact on subjective well-being because of people’s tendency to adapt quickly; worse, those events that do have a lasting impact tend to be negative. We suggest that while major events may not provide lasting increases in well-being, certain seemingly minor events – such as attending religious services or exercising – may do so by providing small but frequent boosts: if…
1 min read
Does literally “washing our hands” make us feel less guilty?
eaning one’s hands removes more than physical contaminants; it also removes residues of the past, from the guilt of past transgressions to doubts about past decisions. We review recent evidence for these and other clean slate effects from the perspectives of neural re-use, grounded cognition, and conceptual metaphor, discuss their implications, and suggest promising future directions. As you use water and soap to remove dirt and contaminants, may you also be removing psychological residues of your past? A growing body of research suggests so. For…
1 min read
