If You’re Feeling Stressed, You Can Calm Down by . . . Smelling Your Partner’s Shirt?
You THINK that when your husband or boyfriend leaves his dirty clothes all over the house it’s adding to your stress . . . but really, it turns out he’s just trying to HELP you relax. Yeah. That’s totally why he does it.
According to a new study out of the University of British Columbia, when women are feeling anxious or stressed, they will immediately feel calmer if they smell their significant other’s shirt.
The researchers found that when women smelled their partner’s shirt, they had a drop in their cortisol levels, which are connected to stress. Women who didn’t smell a shirt had higher cortisol levels.
They didn’t test whether men would get the same benefits from smelling their partner’s clothes.
3% of Woman Say Eating McDonald’s Fries After Sex Will Help You Get Pregnant, Plus More Strange Tricks
When you’re trying really hard to get pregnant, you’ll try a LOT of different tricks to make it happen. Even if they seem INSANE, like some of these.
A new survey found some of the strangest fertility tricks couples use to try to increase their chances of makin’ a baby. Check ’em out . . .
1. The woman bicycles her legs in the air for at least three minutes after sex. 58% of women have tried it.
2. Using reverse psychology and saying, “I don’t want a baby” before having sex, 39%.
3. Eating dark chocolate every day, 37%.
4. Drinking pineapple juice, 32%.
5. Wearing socks during sex, 10%.
6. Wearing green and using green sheets, because green is connected to fertility, 5%.
7. Avoiding climaxing for a week after having sex, 6%.
8. Eating McDonald’s fries right after sex, 3%.
9. The man wearing frozen underwear, 1%.
10. Getting your nose pierced on the left side, 0.5%. An Eastern medicine technique says this can make a woman more fertile.
The CSI effect—viewing TV crime shows does not make better criminals
CSI: Crime Scene Investigation is a popular U.S. TV series that debuted in 2000. It focuses on the characters and the work of a team of forensic crime scene investigators. The effect named for this series was soon applied to any repercussions that it was held such widely viewed crime shows had with regard to the general public—including criminals, the police and potential students of forensic medicine. “Over many years, it was presumed that certain links in this regard exist, although there were no appropriate studies to prove this,” said Dr. Andreas Baranowski. He and his colleagues at Mainz University have now undertaken four separate investigations of related claims with the aim of obtaining the most reliable possible findings.
As a first step, the psychologists took a look at statistics from the databases of the FBI and its German equivalent, the Bundeskriminalamt (BKA), and compared the crime detection rates during the years preceding the launch of the CSI series with the subsequent rates. Then they asked 24 convicted criminals in prison for their opinions on series such as CSI and whether they thought such shows could help when it came to escaping prosecution. Thirdly, the researchers put together a complex experimental design to find out whether viewers of TV shows like CSI would, as trial subjects, actually be better equipped to erase the traces of an, in this case, mock crime. Baranowski and his colleagues completed their series of trials in the form of a fourth test, in which a crime was re-enacted with the help of a doll’s house.
No CSI learning effect for criminals
On the whole, the researchers did not find any connection between watching forensic dramas and the ability to successfully avoid detection after committing a crime. However, the male subjects in the fourth part of the experiment performed better than female subjects, and younger subjects better than older subjects while more highly educated subjects did better than less well educated study subjects. Study subjects working in technical professions, primarily men, appear to have certain advantages when it comes to concealing crimes.
Baranowski pointed out it had already been postulated in the past that something like the CSI effect could exist. Starting with Sherlock Holmes and continuing as police procedurals, such as Quincy and Law & Order appeared on TV, critics wondered if the wrong kind of people could benefit from the insights provided. “Every time something new emerges there are people who focus in one aspect and without a full and proper consideration sense possible risks and thus call for bans.” The findings in this context can be said to pour cold water on attitudes like this. “We can now dispel certain of the myths that have been coursing through the media and other publications for the past 20 years because we are able to state with relative certainty that people who watch CSI are no better at covering their tracks than other people.”
