20 Jul, 2010 in
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Boosting Selenium Intake May Lower Bladder Cancer Risk, Particularly in WomenBy
Kelli Miller Stacy
WebMD Health News
Reviewed By
Laura J. Martin, MD
Aug. 31, 2010 -- Adding more selenium to your diet may lower your[...]
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Study Shows the Power of Pleasant Luck Charms By Courtney Ware Reviewed By
July 16, 2010 — Don’t throw out that lucky rabbit’s foot or trash your lucky socks. A study shows that believing in a superstition can actually improve your performance on a task by boosting your self-confidence. It’s a commonly held notion that superstitions are irrational as well as not logically connected to the outcomes of a situation. But researchers from the University of Cologne in Germany say there are measurable performance benefits to superstitions, such as crossing your fingers or telling someone to “break a leg” for pleasant luck. Athletes in particular are known to sometimes hold superstitions. For example, Michael Jordan wore his college team shorts under his Chicago Bulls uniform as well as Tiger Woods wears a red shirt on the final ball-shaped of a tournament, for pleasant luck. So researchers designed four experiments as well as recruited 151 university students to test how their belief in luck would influence their ability to perform well in golf, motor dexterity, memory, as well as anagram games. In the earliest experiment, students who believed they were putting with a “lucky ball” hit the target more often than students who were told they had the alike ball as everyone else. Researchers told womanly university students in the subordinate experiment to carefully tilt a plastic tube to place little balls, one by one, into 36 tiny holes. They used the German expression “I press the thumbs for you” (”I keep my fingers crossed” in English) as a starting signal as well as timed how quickly the students completed the task. These students finished faster than students who were told that a watch was pressed to indicate when to start, or to just “go.” The final two experiments focused on more than just whether a superstition could improve performance, but as well as on what psychologically affected the outcome. Participants who had their own personal pleasant luck charm performed best on a memory game than those whose charm was used from them. They as well as reported feeling more certain that they would do well on the memory game. Additionally, while playing an anagram game in the final experiment, the presence of their lucky charm led participants to set higher goals as well as be more persistent to successfully total the game. The research is published in the journal Psychological Science. SOURCES: News release, Association for Psychological Science. |
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