Headlines of the day
Principal denies report that farting is banned in school (The Obscure Store)
Man stabs wife with fork, returns utensil to drawer, police say (The IslandPacket.com)
Music cannot change the world, says Neil Young (Breitbart)
He should know.
This just in. Humans Buy Things So They Won’t Feel Bad. Film at 11:00
Sadness May Encourage More Extravagance
By Mark Jewell, AP Business Writer
BOSTON (AP) -- If you're sad and shopping, watch your wallet: A new study shows people's spending judgment goes out the window when they're down, especially if they're a bit self-absorbed.
Study participants who watched a sadness-inducing video clip offered to pay nearly four times as much money to buy a water bottle than a group that watched an emotionally neutral clip.
The so-called "misery is not miserly" phenomenon is well-known to psychologists, advertisers and personal shoppers alike, and has been documented in a similar study in 2004.
The new study released Friday by researchers from four universities goes further, trying to answer whether temporary sadness alone can trigger spendthrift tendencies.
The study found a willingness to spend freely by sad people occurs mainly when their sadness triggers greater "self-focus." That response was measured by counting how frequently study participants used references to "I," "me," "my" and "myself" in writing an essay about how a sad situation such as the one portrayed in the video would affect them personally.
The brief video was about the death of a boy's mentor. Another group watched an emotionally neutral clip about the Great Barrier Reef, the vast coral reef system off Australia's coast.
On average, the group watching the sad video offered to pay nearly four times as much for a sporty-looking, insulated water bottle than the group watching the nature video, according to the study by researchers from Harvard, Carnegie Mellon, Stanford and Pittsburgh universities.
Thirty-three study subjects -- young adults who responded to an advertisement offering $10 for participation -- were offered the chance to trade some of the $10 to buy the bottle. The sad group offered to trade an average of $2.11, compared with 56 cents for the neutral group.
Despite the big difference, participants in the sad group typically insisted that the video's emotional content didn't affect their willingness to spend more -- an incorrect assumption, said one of the study's co-authors.
"This is a phenomenon that occurs without awareness," Jennifer Lerner, a Harvard professor who studies emotion and decision making, said in a phone interview. "This is really different from the idea of retail therapy, where people are feeling negative and want to cheer themselves up by shopping. People have no idea this is going on."
The researchers concluded sadness can trigger a chain of emotions leading to extravagant tendencies. Sadness leads people to become more focused on themselves, causing the person to feel that they and their possessions are worth little. That feeling increases willingness to pay more -- presumably to feel better about themselves.
"Because the study used real commodities and real money, results hold implications for everyday decisions," according to the authors of the study, to be published in the journal Psychological Science, and presented Saturday at a meeting of the Society for Social and Personality Psychology.
Edward Charlesworth, a Houston-based clinical psychologist who was not involved in the study, suggested the misery-is-not-miserly phenomenon is rooted in a culture that encourages people to buy to feel better.
"Certainly, the advertising industry knows that," Charlesworth, citing as an example a 1970s McDonald's fast-food jingle, "You deserve a break today."
Charlesworth frequently sees clients in his clinical practice who overspend to deal with difficulties.
"It's not necessarily that you go to the mall and go on a shopping spree," said Charlesworth, author of a book on stress management. "It's often more subtle -- you spend a bit more on something than you normally would. But if you magnify that over the course of a year, or a lifetime, those little things add up."
Personal shoppers, who make a business of prowling the aisles for others, say they frequently see clients stray from their budgets when they're feeling blue.
"At that point, cost isn't usually a factor," said Kalyn Johnson, of New York City-based Style by Kalyn Johnson. "They say, 'If I can have these wonderful shoes, I'll look better, and feel better.'
"But on the back end, I've seen buyer's remorse. This kicks in after they realize that new pair of shoes, or iPod, or whatever, didn't make them feel better, and then there's that sense of, 'Oh my God, why did I spend money on this?'"
The study released Friday was funded by grants from the National Science Foundation and National Institute of Health. Besides Lerner, the other study authors were Carnegie Mellon's Cynthia Cryder, Stanford's James Gross, and the University of Pittsburgh's Ronald Dahl.
So Modigliani turns to the model and says, “Why the long face?”
Pygmy dinosaur? It’s right next to the jumbo shrimp.
Pygmy Dinosaur Inhabited Tropical Islands In Britain's Prehistoric Past
ScienceDaily (Feb. 8, 2008) — The celebrated Bristol Dinosaur, Thecodontosaurus, has now been shown to live on subtropical islands around Bristol, instead of in a desert on the mainland as previously thought.
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This new research could explain the dinosaur's small size (2 m) in relation to its giant (10 m) mainland equivalent, Plateosaurus. Like many species trapped on small islands, such as the 'hobbit' Homo floresiensis of Flores and pygmy elephants on Malta, the Bristol Dinosaur may have been subjected to island dwarfing.
Geological mapping indicates that the islands were quite small in size and, judging by abundant remains of fossil charcoal, were often swept by fires. Thus the pygmy Bristol Dinosaur may have met its death in a wildfire.
Thecodontosaurus is one of the earliest named dinosaurs. Its bones were originally found near what is now Bristol Zoo in 1834 - some time before dinosaurs were recognised as a group. In 1975, the remains of at least 11 other individual dinosaurs were uncovered in a quarry at Tytherington, north of Bristol.
Now, a collaboration between two palaeontologists, Professor John Marshall, a University of Southampton expert on fossil pollen, based at the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton and Bristol University's Dr David Whiteside, an authority on extinct reptiles, has revealed that Thecodontosaurus lived more recently than was previously thought.
Dr Whiteside emphasises that this is 'a unique equal collaboration between a palaeontologist specialising in pollen which are microfossils and a vertebrate palaeontologist working on Triassic reptiles.' He says: 'I can't think of any other scientific paper where the two specialisms were combined to produce a complete paleoenvironmental model which includes the whole community of land animals showing the time and habitat they lived in and how they died.'
Microscopic study of marine algae and fossil pollen shows that, rather than inhabiting the arid uplands of the late Triassic Period, the dinosaurs lived just before the Jurassic Period in a series of lushly vegetated islands around Bristol, the outlines of which can still be seen today in the shape of the land.
Professor John Marshall comments: 'The cave deposits with dinosaurs have been known for over 150 years and are world famous. You would think there would be nothing new to find. But by looking at new deposits with a fresh mind we have been able to radically change the environmental interpretation. The big surprise was discovering that these reptiles did not live on arid uplands but rather on small well-vegetated tropical islands around Bristol around 200 million years ago. It is only the microfossil pollen and algae that can tell us this. The outlines of the islands can still be seen today in the shape of the land.'
Professor Marshall and Dr Whiteside add that the deposits that contain the dinosaurs and other reptiles are very unusual. The bones are found in fossil caves, formed by Triassic rain and seawater dissolving the 350 million-year-old Carboniferous Limestone. The caves then filled with sediments including the dinosaur bones as sea levels rose at the very end of the Triassic Period.
Thecodontosaurus bones have been discovered on both Cromhall Island, north of Bristol and Failand Island, part of which is in the city of Bristol and a short distance inland from the present coast. Geological mapping indicates that the islands the dinosaurs lived on were quite small in size.
The discovery that the Bristol dinosaur lived on very small islands is very important as most researchers have believed that it was a primitive member of the prosauropods, which included some very large animals and existed before the huge sauropods such as Diplodocus of the Jurassic.
'This changes the context which we should view Thecodontosaurus,' says Dr Whiteside. 'It has many similarities to the giant Plateosaurus that lived at the same time and other researchers have not taken into account the rapid changes that take place when large animals are isolated on islands of decreasing size. We believe that the Bristol dinosaur is probably a dwarfed species that derived from the giant Plateosaurus or a very similar animal.'
The study The age, fauna and palaeoenvironment of the Late Triassic fissure deposits of Tytherington, South Gloucestershire, UK is published in Geologi
How you doin’? Want to come over and see my rock?
Barnacles Go To Great Lengths To Mate
ScienceDaily (Feb. 7, 2008) — Compelled to mate, yet firmly attached to the rock, barnacles have evolved the longest penis of any animal for their size - up to 8 times their body length - so they can find and fertilize distant neighbours.
Graduate student Christopher Neufeld and Dr. Richard Palmer from the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Alberta have shown that barnacles appear to have acquired the capacity to change the size and shape of their penises to closely match local wave conditions.
When wave action is light, a longer (thinner) penis can reach more mates, but at times of higher wave action, a shorter (stouter) penis is more manoeuvrable in flow and therefore can reach more mates.
The research, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, suggests that sexual selection - competition with other males, female choice, sexual conflict between males and females - is not required to explain variation in genital form.
In barnacles, this variation appears to be driven largely by the hydrodynamic conditions experienced under breaking waves.
Adapted from materials provided by University of Alberta.
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