BODILY HEALTHparticipants to name a colour word – for example “blue” – while ignoring
the distraction of the ink colour it is written in. The lesson from these
studies is to watch out for those moments – perhaps after a particularly
testing day at work – when self-control levels are likely to be running low.
This may well be easier said than done. Research by Northwestern
University psychologist Loran Nordgren shows how poor we are at
predicting our future levels of impulse control – a phenomenon he’s
called the restraint bias. In one scenario, Nordgren and his colleagues
offered students arriving at or leaving a cafeteria a choice of snack bar to
take away, with the promise that they could keep the bar and get a cash
reward if they returned it uneaten a week later. The key finding was that
students who had already eaten at the cafeteria, were more likely to over-
estimate their future self-restraint. They tended to choose their favourite
snack bar rather than a less tempting option, and to eat the bar before the
week was up, thus failing to earn the cash reward.
The message from this experiment and others like it was that when
we’re in a “cool” state – that is when satiated – we tend to overestimate
our ability to control our visceral drives when we’re in a hot state
(hungry, tired or lustful). For example, the person who goes shopping
Man’s best friend?
There’s a long history of research showing the health benefits of
owning a dog. One typical study published in 1995 found that dog
owners were 8.6 times more likely to still be alive one year after a heart
attack than non-owners. One possible explanation is that the benefits
arise from the amelioration of depression and loneliness: dogs can
provide companionship and they also act as a talking point. A study
comparing walkers with and without a dog found that canine accom-
paniment prompted far more chance conversational encounters. Dogs
have also been shown to have some specific health uses, as in the
recent case of a dog that continually sniffed a mole on its owner’s skin
which turned out to be malignant.
Other investigations suggest that dogs can be trained to use
human facial expressions and postures to help predict the imminent
onset of an epileptic fit, and that their keen sense of smell can detect
hypoglycaemia in diabetics. Dogs have also been used in “pet therapy”
to improve outcomes for elderly inpatients. An Italian study published
in 2010, for example, found that ten elderly inpatients (with condi-
tions including dementia and psychosis) showed larger reductions in
depression after six weeks of dog visits than did a control group. Most
of them also said that their quality of life had improved.