Learn about how your romantic attachment style affects your finances; the surprising reason why some amphibians glow; and why laughter might really be the best medicine.
Learn about how your romantic attachment style affects your finances; the surprising reason why some amphibians glow; and why laughter might really be the best medicine.
How Your Romantic Style Affects Your Finances by Kelsey Donk
Why Some Amphibians Glow by Cameron Duke
Laughter Might Really Be The Best Medicine by Ashley Hamer
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Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/laughter-might-be-the-best-medicine-how-your-romantic-style-affects-your-finances-and-why-some-amphibians-glow
CODY: Hi! You’re about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from curiosity-dot-com. I’m Cody Gough.
ASHLEY: And I’m Ashley Hamer. Today, you’ll learn about how your romantic attachment style affects your finances; the surprising reason why some amphibians glow; and why laughter might really be the best medicine.
CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.
When it comes to your romantic relationships, are you a free spirit or more on the clingy side? Your answer might not just say something about your dating life; it might say something about your wallet. Because a new University of Arizona study says that your romantic tendencies could actually impact your finances.
By “romantic tendencies,” I mean something researchers call “attachment orientation.” That has two dimensions: the first is “attachment anxiety” — that’s the tendency to avoid self-reliance in favor of a close attachment with others. People with a lot of attachment anxiety are what you might call “clingy.” The second is “attachment avoidance,” or the tendency to rely solely on yourself and push others away.
If neither of these dimensions sounds great, you might be onto something. The new study analyzed data from 635 college-educated folks in relationships and found that people who are high in either one of these dimensions are less happy and have more financial problems. What’s more, the researchers think the financial problems are a reason for at least some of the unhappiness.
That might sound weird — I mean, what do your relationships have to do with your finances? — but there’s a logic to it. The researchers looked at two types of well-being: satisfaction in the relationship, and satisfaction with life in general. For people high in attachment anxiety, low life satisfaction was associated with how they dealt with money. I mean, think about it: if you’re consumed by the need to make people love you, you might buy them gifts and take them out to dinner at the detriment of your own bank account. And if you’re deep in debt, you’re probably gonna be less happy in general.
But for both people high in attachment anxiety and those high in attachment avoidance, dissatisfaction in their relationship, specifically, had a different explanation. It didn’t come down to their own money habits, but their perception of their partner’s irresponsible money habits. People high in attachment anxiety are pretty insecure, which the researchers think could extend to distrust of how their partner is spending their money. People high in attachment avoidance, on the other hand, believe that others can’t be trusted, so they’ll assume their partners can’t be trusted with money either. And since money is one of the biggest causes of conflict in relationships, both of these scenarios could lead to dissatisfaction in a person’s love life.
If either version sounds like you, never fear: there are plenty of therapists who can help people build healthier approaches to relationships. Learning to be more secure in yourself and your partner is good for more than just the relationship: it’s good for your wallet, too.
Salamanders glow under a blacklight. Cool, right? But I’m not just talking about a one-off species here. Researchers recently discovered more than two dozen amphibian species that glow when exposed to certain types of invisible light. This phenomenon is called biofluorescence, and we now know it’s actually pretty common in the amphibian world. And there’s a really good reason for it, too.
Biofluorescence is when an animal or plant absorbs a certain wavelength of light and radiates out a different wavelength of light. There are a lot of species that do this in some capacity — from corals to penguins. If you ever had a blacklight poster in your bedroom, then you’ve seen this type of thing before. Blacklights shine in the ultraviolet, or UV range of the light spectrum. When UV light shines on the poster, suddenly you see colors and patterns that weren’t there before. As it turns out, a similar thing happens when you shine UV light on a frog.
Researchers at St. Cloud State University in Minnesota shined both blue and UV light on 32 species of frogs and salamanders to see which ones glowed under the light. Previously, biofluorescence had only been described in a handful of amphibian species, and the researchers were curious to see if there were any more. So they shined these lights on all 32 species. What they found exceeded their wildest expectations: every single one of them lit up like a glow stick at a rave. They didn’t all glow the same way, either. A green glow emanated from the tiger salamander’s orange spots and the three-lined salamander’s brown stripes, while some frogs luminesced from their entire bodies. But in every single species, some part of them would glow under the right kind of light.
The researchers haven’t figured out exactly what compounds in their skin allow these amphibians to glow in the dark, but scientists have a pretty good hunch as to why it happens. They think it may help frogs and salamanders see each other in low light. Amphibians are nocturnal, meaning much of their activity happens at dusk when the environment is dimly lit with blue light. Their eyes are also especially sensitive to blue and green light. Bioflorescence combined with a sensitivity to the colors they glow in means that where humans and other mammalian predators see darkness, frogs see their friends. Aww.
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It's easy to roll your eyes when someone tells you that laughter is the best medicine. I mean, it depends on what ails you, but I’m pretty sure MEDICINE is the best medicine. But according to research, laughter is pretty close. Studies find that it can help everything from pain tolerance to heart health.
Like, take this study from 2011. The researchers divided people into several groups and had some watch comedy clips: episodes of South Park, Friends, The Simpsons, or stand-up comedy. Another groups watched pleasing nature documentaries, which were designed to make them feel good without laughing, and the last group watched a science show that wasn’t intended to cause any specific reaction. All of participants were then exposed to pain: something like a tight blood-pressure cuff, a cold wine sleeve on the arm, or a wall sit, where you put your back up against a wall with your knees at a 90-degree angle to make your legs really, really burn.
When the researchers tested how well they handled the pain pre- and post-laughter, the group that laughed had a much higher pain tolerance than the other two. This research confirmed that laughter’s magic didn’t just lie in the good feeling of watching something funny — it’s the physical act of laughing. It releases endorphins, which play a critical role in the body’s ability to handle pain.
Other studies have found even more benefits. The evidence suggests that a good laugh can reduce levels of the stress hormone cortisol and boost the feel-good neurotransmitter serotonin. It’s also been shown to improve heart health by dilating your blood vessels and boosting blood flow, and it may give your immune system a leg up by creating more antibody-producing cells.
So, could you laugh yourself to good health? One increasingly popular way to weave laughter into your fitness regimen is laughter yoga, which involves breathing and laughing exercises. There are now thousands of laughter clubs in roughly 100 countries.
And, if you can't join a laughter club near you, you can at least start up Netflix or replay your favorite viral video. Feeling good might be just a chuckle away.
Let’s recap what we learned today to wrap up. Starting with
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CODY: Today’s stories were written by Ashley Hamer, Cameron Duke, and Kelsey Donk, and edited by Ashley Hamer, who’s the managing editor for Curiosity Daily.
ASHLEY: Scriptwriting was by Cody Gough and Sonja Hodgen. Curiosity Daily is produced and edited by Cody Gough.
ASHLEY: Today’s episode was produced and edited by Cody Gough.
CODY: Join us again tomorrow to learn something new in just a few minutes.
ASHLEY: And until then, stay curious!