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Does Booze Reduce Anxiety And Fear?
xiety, yes. Fear, no: Recent theory and empirical research have suggested that fear and anxiety are distinct processes with separable neurobiological substrates. Furthermore, a laboratory procedure has been developed to manipulate fear versus anxiety independently via administration of predictable or unpredictable electric shock, respectively. Benzodiazepines appear to selectively reduce anxiety but not fear in this procedure. The primary aim of this experiment was to determine if alcohol produced a similar selective reduction in anxiety. Intoxicated (target blood alcohol concentration of…
1 min read
Will you be remembered by how you lived your entire life?
tually, it's that part at the end that's the most important (Hat tip: The Invisible Gorilla): When evaluating the moral character of others, people show a strong bias to more heavily weigh behaviors at the end of an individual's life, even if those behaviors arise in light of an overwhelmingly longer duration of contradictory behavior. Across four experiments, we find that this "end-of-life" bias uniquely applies to intentional changes in behavior that immediately precede death, and appears to result from…
1 min read
Which Americans are negatively impacted by immigration?
e employment rate of black men, and particularly of low-skilled black men, fell precipitously between 1960 and 2000. At the same time, their incarceration rate rose. This paper examines the relation between immigration and these trends in employment and incarceration. Using data from the 1960–2000 US censuses, we find that a 10% immigration-induced increase in the supply of workers in a particular skill group reduced the black wage of that group by 2.5%, lowered the employment rate by 5.9 percentage…
1 min read
Do female athletes have better sexual function?
troduction. Clitoral blood flow measurements using clitoral color Doppler ultrasound have been performed with increasing frequency either in order to assessment of female sexual function/dysfunction. The trials to evaluate the sexual function in healthy subjects, especially in the subgroup of female elite athletes, are limited. Aim. The aim of the study was to evaluate whether elite female athletes and sedentary healthy females differ in their clitoral blood flow and sexual function as an expression of their physical fitness status. Methods.…
2 minutes
Does “will to live” really make a difference in when you die?
s: Past research suggests that people are more likely to die after rather than before important ceremonial events (a death deferral effect). We replicated this finding in a sample based on more than 30 million decedents. In analyses in which we tracked deaths day by day, we analyzed four major events: Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's Day, and participants' birthdays. People were more likely to die just after rather than just before all four events. In addition, whereas people were less…
1 min read
Does bad word of mouth hurt a movie at the box office?
t really. Looks like P.T. Barnum had it right: "I don't care what the newspapers say about me as long as they spell my name right." This article uses actual word-of-mouth (WOM) information to examine the dynamic patterns of WOM and how it helps explain box office revenue. The WOM data were collected from the Yahoo Movies Web site. The results show that WOM activities are the most active during a movie's prerelease and opening week and that movie audiences…
1 min read
Do the minimum payments on your credit card trick you into paying less than you would otherwise?
e 2005 U.S. Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act and the 2003 United Kingdom Treasury Select Committee's report require lenders to collect a minimum payment of at least the interest accrued each month. Thus, people are protected from the effects of compounding interest. However, including minimum-payment information has an unintended negative effect, because minimum payments act as psychological anchors. In anchoring, arbitrary and irrelevant numbers bias people's judgments (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974) and decisions (Ariely, Lowenstein, & Prelec, 2003),…
1 min read
Is virginity worth less than it used to be?
this paper we have shown how the diffusion of female virginity can be affected by economic variables. Using a very parsimonious mating model of the marriage market, where preserving her virtue helps a girl to improve her odds of gaining a "good" marriage, we have obtained results that are fairly consistent with historical and cross-cultural evidence. In particular, increased female participation on the labour market, decreasing inequality and stronger social stratification might be responsible for the decline of virginity…
1 min read
