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There are happy dogs that expect a good thing to happen, and then there are others who seem to have a case of the gloomies. Dogs can be classified as optimists or pessimists the same as humans, according to research from a team led by Michael Mendl.
Mendl, who is head of the Animal Welfare and Behavior research group at Bristol University’s School of Clinical Veterinary Science, and his team came to this conclusion after putting 24 male and female dogs, representing different ages, through a few tests.
For the first test, each dog was taken to a room where a researcher interacted with it for 20 minutes. The next day, the researcher did the same thing, but left after just five minutes of interaction. The scientists documented how the dog, when left alone, acted. Some dogs, for example, happily awaited the person’s return, while others barked and became anxious.
Next, the researchers trained the dogs to understand that a bowl on one side of a room was full of yummy food, while a bowl on the other side was empty. The researchers then placed bowls at ambiguous places and observed how quickly the dogs would go to the bowls.
“Dogs that ran fast to these ambiguous locations, as if expecting the positive food reward, were classed as making relatively optimistic decisions,” explained Mendl. “Interestingly, these dogs tended to be the ones who also showed least anxiety-like behavior when left alone for a short time.”
Pessimistic dogs are more likely to be destructive and display other behavior problems. Link -via J-Walk Blog
Here’s a nifty little gadget sure to get you some attention, should you dare to try it on.
Colorsonic is an MP3 player that uses color indication to play music based upon certain moods.
Music is loaded to the Colorsonic like an ordinary MP3 player and converts the songs to color associations chosen by the user. Colors are assigned individual emotional states and playlists correlating to those states can later be accessed by selecting that color on the device.
As an added bonus, the hole in the center of the donut shaped product is used to magnetically store earbuds.
From the Upcoming 
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Image: J Fowler and N Christakis/New England Journal of Medicine/BMJ
Research by medical sociologist Nicholas Christakis and colleague at the Harvard Medical School in Boston revealed how oher people’s happiness, depression, and obesity can affect you:
Recent research shows that our moods are far more strongly influenced by those around us than we tend to think. Not only that, we are also beholden to the moods of friends of friends, and of friends of friends of friends – people three degrees of separation away from us who we have never met, but whose disposition can pass through our social network like a virus.
Indeed, it is becoming clear that a whole range of phenomena are transmitted through networks of friends in ways that are not entirely understood: happiness and depression, obesity, drinking and smoking habits, ill-health, the inclination to turn out and vote in elections, a taste for certain music or food, a preference for online privacy, even the tendency to attempt or think about suicide. They ripple through networks "like pebbles thrown into a pond", says Nicholas Christakis, a medical sociologist at Harvard Medical School in Boston, who has pioneered much of the new work.
At first sight, the idea that we can catch the moods, habits and state of health not only of those around us, but also those we do not even know seems alarming. It implies that rather than being in charge of where we are going in life, we are little more than back-seat drivers, since most social influence operates at a subconscious level.
Previously on Neatorama: 14 Habits That Make You Fat (which also noted the study above)
