Learn about how having hope for the future could protect you from risky behaviors like drinking and gambling; how your dog’s personality can change over time; and “limnic eruptions” — or, deadly exploding lakes.
Learn about how having hope for the future could protect you from risky behaviors like drinking and gambling; how your dog’s personality can change over time; and “limnic eruptions” — or, deadly exploding lakes.
Having hope for the future could protect you from risky behaviors like drinking and gambling by Kelsey Donk
Your Dog's Personality Can Change Over Time by Mae Rice
These Exploding Lakes Killed Thousands of People in an Instant by Reuben Westmaas
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Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/your-dogs-personality-can-change-over-time
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 you can change your outlook to protect yourself from risky behaviors like drinking and gambling; how your dog’s personality can change over time; and deadly exploding lakes.
CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.
According to new research, there’s a surprising trick that can protect us from risky behaviors like excessive drinking and gambling. It’s hope. Having hope for the future can reduce risk-taking behavior and help people stay in control. And if this sounds too simplistic, stick around: we’ve got some science-backed ways to boost hope, too.
In three studies, researchers took a look at what makes people take excessive risks. It all starts with something called relative deprivation, or a belief that you’re in a worse position than other people. Past research has found a link between relative deprivation and a whole slew of unhealthy behaviors, and one of them is excessive risk-taking: we’re talking drinking, doing drugs, gambling, or even overeating.
But not everyone who experiences relative deprivation also ends up taking excessive risks.The researchers wondered if having hope for the future could reduce the negative effects of relative deprivation.
First, they did two laboratory experiments using a risk-taking task. To start, researchers quizzed volunteers on how deprived they felt they were compared to their peers, and how much hope they had for the future. Then, the volunteers played gambling games where they could win real money. As it turns out, the people who scored high in the hope category were less likely to take big risks in the gambling game. People who felt less hopeful took lots more risks.
A third study brought hope and relative deprivation to the real world. The researchers found 122 people who had gambled at least once in the past year. The volunteers completed the same deprivation and hope questionnaires and also indicated whether gambling was a problem for them. The gamblers with high levels of hope were less likely to have problems with gambling.
The researchers said this may be one way to help people who are unhappy with their lives. To help them avoid risky behaviors, we could try to nurture their hope for the future.
That’s all well and good, but how exactly are you supposed to feel hopeful when it seems like everyone else is doing better than you are? Well, there’s no single fix that will work for everyone, but here are a few tips. Keep a list of things that make you feel gratitude, which has been shown to increase hope. Look for role models who started where you were and found success to help inspire hope for your own situation. And finally, give support and hope to others who need it. That can make you more hopeful for the future, too.
Most people’s personalities change over time — I mean, you’re probably more conscientious as a grownup than you were as a 16 year old. Any dog owner knows that dogs have their own unique personalities, too. So do dog personalities change over time? In 2019, researchers at Michigan State University investigated that question. And the answer was surprising.
In order to measure dogs’ personalities, the team started with a Buzzfeed quiz. Just kidding. They used what’s called the Dog Personality Questionnaire, which measures a dog’s personality in five dimensions: fearfulness in new situations; aggression toward people; activity-slash-excitability, which is a rough measure of playfulness; responsiveness to training; and aggression toward other animals.
The team asked more than 1600 dog owners to fill out the questionnaire for their dog — along with a questionnaire about their own personality, just to see if there was any connection. The canine participants were diverse, with a wide range of ages and breeds and about a 50-50 split of male and female animals.
As the researchers sifted through the data, they were surprised to discover that dogs’ personalities change a lot over time.
Age, or maturity, was one factor in this change. Dogs were most aggressive toward people and other animals at around age 6 to 8, although that was also the sweet-spot for teaching them to behave: they were most responsive to training at this age. Dogs were also less excitable as they got older — no surprise there. Fearfulness was the only trait that didn't vary with dogs' age.
Interestingly, the owners' personalities also played a role. Extroverted people rated their dogs as more excitable, while neurotic people rated their dogs as more fearful. This might sound like a fishy finding — what if owners just project their personalities onto their dogs? — but the researchers think it may be less about projection than about the situations owners put their dogs in. Extroverted people put their dogs in more social situations, which can train them to be sociable; neurotic people probably take their dogs to fewer new places, which makes the rare foreign situation feel more dangerous.
The exact mechanism isn't clear yet. But this theory fits with previous research about the bond between dogs and humans, so it’s no surprise: we change our dogs just as much as they change us.
If you live near a fault line or a volcano, you know there’s some risk of a natural disaster upending your life. That’s not usually the case for people who live by a lake. That is, most lakes. It turns out that sometimes, lakes can explode and kill thousands of people in an instant.
The two most recent of these natural disasters occurred really close together. The first, in 1984, was Lake Monoun [muh-NOON] in Cameroon, where a giant bubble of carbon dioxide rose up from the bottom of the lake. It created a massive tsunami, which flattened the entire eastern shore of the lake and suffocated 37 people in the bubble of toxic gas.
Just two years later, another bubble of carbon dioxide exploded at a lake close by. This was Lake Nyos [NYE-ohs], and the disaster was like a scene from a horror movie. See, because carbon dioxide is heavier than air, it rolled down the mountains into low-lying villages, where it killed 1,700 people and 3,000 animals.
These explosions of deadly gas are called limnic eruptions, and they happen because carbon dioxide has dissolved into the water, just like in a carbonated beverage. If you look at the liquid in an unopened bottle, it appears perfectly still, but when you remove the cap, the bubbles appear out of nowhere. The pressure held in by the cap prevented the bubbles from escaping.
Now imagine that region of dormant bubbles is massive, and lies deep at the bottom of a lake. The "cap" is the pressure of the water above, maybe helped by an outcropping of rock. But if something happens to shift that water, crumble that rock, or just disturb the carbon dioxide enough, the bubbles will erupt, sending a massive wave and a giant cloud of carbon dioxide out over the land.
The good news is that there aren’t many lakes this can happen to. In addition to Lake Nyos and Lake Monoun in Cameroon, there’s also Lake Kivu [KEE-voo] in Rwanda. These lakes are all located near a chain of volcanoes, which seep carbon dioxide into the water. Fortunately, the tragedies of decades past have given us insight into how to prevent such a disaster from happening again. Using vent pipes to bring the deep, CO2-enriched water to the surface allows for controlled releases of the gas. So visiting these lakes should be safe — or so we hope.
Let’s do a quick recap of what we learned today
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CODY: Today’s stories were written by Kelsey Donk, Mae Rice, and Reuben Westmaas, and edited by Ashley Hamer, who’s the managing editor for Curiosity Daily.
ASHLEY: Scriptwriting was by Cody Gough and Sonja Hodgen. 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!