Without question, study after study, weather impacts human behavior. From the very slow-and-steady change of genetic expression over generations in particular climates to the individual momentary changes that heat and cold causes, the impact is varied.

But the weather and your genetic adaptation — or lack thereof — may not be the only thing that impacts your ability to deal with or prefer temperatures.

Researchers at the University of Arizona have been particularly interested in this topic, and not only because Arizona has high average temperatures. Among other findings, they’ve discovered that individuals experiencing mental illness tend to have a much lower tolerance for extreme temperatures. They’ve found some success treating those with depression with high temperatures, but those are initial studies.

Of course, these are also very controlled studies– which are scientifically awesome, and also smaller. When you start looking at very large datasets, it becomes a story with more depth.

As weather.com explained, quote:

PhD candidate Patrick Baylis at the University of California, Berkeley has been cataloging a billion tweets across 2014 and 2015, based on whether positive or negative words were used, Baylis linked temperature extremes to lower levels of happiness overall.

Compared with a day when the high temperature is 72.5 degrees, a day with a high temperature of 90 degrees makes the typical person experience a drop in happiness similar to the drop in happiness between Sunday and Monday.

On a larger scale, heat has long been linked with spikes in violence; it’s one reason why violent crime rates in major cities can spike on hot holiday weekends. It’s also why some scientists have predicted a global rise in violence as global temperatures increase due to climate change.

Then again, the weather you experience may or may not be linked at all to the weather in the climate you live. Air conditioning and central heating are becoming increasingly common, after all, and people tend to spend a lot of time indoors — especially in extreme climates.

This script may vary from the actual episode transcript.

According to a 2002 study published in the journal Cognition and Emotion, female-identified individuals cry an average of 3.5 times per month, while male-identified individuals cry an average of 1.9 times a month. Internationally, rates vary even more widely, at least according to the 2011 article “Culture and Crying: Prevalences and Gender Differences” published in the journal Cross-Cultural Research. That study theorized that the fact that Sweden, Chile, and the US have higher rates of female crying than Nepal,, Ghana, and Nigeria may be explained by the fact that women tend to have a greater freedom of expression in developed countries.

No matter how often you cry or not, there’s plenty of questions about exactly what purpose crying may serve, if it helps or not, and if not crying is a sign of some kind of problem.

For example, some argue that a good cry will help you purge negative emotions. When you ask people to recall times in the past they’ve cried due to emotion and how they felt after, they’ll often report that the crying helped them improve their mood in the long term. Put people in research situations where emotional crying is induced with sad movies, however, and crying doesn’t seem to help at all, since moods tend to go downhill, rather than improve, with that cry.

That is, unless you ask people several hours or days after watching the sad movie. In which case, maybe it did help. There is also some research-based evidence that crying releases hormones that help you self-soothe and generally feel better.

But, if you’re hearing all of this and thinking that it’s weird that people cry at all… well, you’re not alone. So-called “‘tearlessness” is also a studied phenomenon, with one estimate saying that 8.6 percent of men and 6.5 percent of women in Dutch households had lost the ability to cry at all. And, to quote directly for the study:

Despite reduced empathy, less connection with others, and a more avoidant/less anxious attachment type, well-being is maintained in tearless people.

This script may vary from the actual episode transcript.

Superstitions are not a purely human phenomena. Almost surprisingly, it’s one of the things I’ve done a lot of research on that nobody argues is a particularly human experience. That’s largely thanks to the research done in the 1940s by B.F. Skinner. Skinner found that when you expose pigeons to situations where they are inconsistently fed, they’ll quickly develop behaviors that look very much like superstition. They’ll bob their heads, turn in circles, or otherwise try and get food to appear based on what they had been doing before food previously appeared.

As Eric Wargo wrote in the Association for American Psychological Science Observer magazine, quote:

post hoc ergo propter hoc — “after this, therefore because of this.” Temporal contiguity does not imply causality, as every good scientist knows, but the brain is a voracious and often indiscriminate pattern detector, always on the lookout for connections among phenomena and between the individual’s own actions and favorable or unfavorable outcomes. Superstition arises from the natural tendency to seek connections that could, even remotely, be useful in controlling the world.

Chris French from University of London, in an interview with Ella Rhodes  of the British Psychological Society, put it this way:

There is also evidence to suggest that superstitious thinking might provide a psychological defense against learned helplessness. In an apparently hopeless situation, a superstitious person is more likely to keep trying to achieve success than a non-superstitious person. If the situation changes in such a way that efforts to succeed suddenly become effective, the superstitious person is more likely to take advantage of this change. We are all, to a greater or lesser extent, influenced by irrational tendencies that probably have their roots in our evolutionary history – such as the idea that good or evil influences can somehow be transmitted by mere physical contact. Many smart, even sceptical, people might find it uncomfortable to wear the jacket of a mass murderer even though they know on an intellectual level that this is irrational. Similarly, many of us would be thrilled to own something that once belonged to one of our heroes.’

That doesn’t mean that superstitions are always a bad thing. There are some situations, where a superstition isn’t damaging or potentially damaging, that it can be useful because it allows someone to express a modicum of perceived control over something that would otherwise be anxiety-producing. But – sometimes superstitions can create a higher cognitive load. As two researchers at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University found, quote:

The results showed that people in the high-cognitive-load group ​“behave exactly the way people in superstitious tasks groups behave, This finding jibed with the results of the previous experiments: when people devote fewer cognitive resources to a risky choice, they don’t pl

It’s a fairly commonly stated piece of “conventional wisdom” that in the United States, 50 percent of all marriages end in divorce. You can take that particular piece of quote-unquote common knowledge with whatever moral panic you think it deserves, or more likely doesn’t deserve. Either way, it’s important to note that this so-called statistic is rather incorrect, at least, depending on how you want to measure divorce.

Here’s the thing about this particular statistic – there’s a lot of ways to slice the numbers. For example, there’s the crude divorce rate, which is the pure number of divorces per 1,000 people in the population, including everyone. There’s also the crude percentage, which is the number of divorces per 1,000 compared to the number of marriages per 1,000. Both of these numbers, though, take a look at the number of marriages and divorces in a particular year, and not at the average length of a marriage.

In the USA, the crude divorce percentage reported in 2014 was 46 percent. That’s far from the highest rate in the world, though. The Maldives currently holds the world record for the highest divorce rate, with 11 divorces per 1,000 people. As Ozy put it:

“According to the U.N., the average 30-year-old Maldivian woman has been divorced. Not once. Not twice. But three times. Three divorces before the age of 30 — and that’s just the average. “

If you’ve experienced divorce as a married individual or not, there’s plenty of debate over the impact divorce may have on the rest of the family. One article in Scientific American argued that while divorce does have a stressful short-term impact on children, in the long term, as long as parents work on ensuring that they maintain focus on being healthy individuals who are focused on parenting well, most children bounce back without too many battle scars.

This script may vary from the actual episode transcript.

In America, sometime between the 1890s and 1920s, the idea of giving children allowances became not only more common, but suggested by some child-rearing experts. As one research article explained, quote:

Statistics suggest that parents increasingly used allowances to allocate family resources. According to a 1936 survey, nearly 50 percent of children from professional families received allowances–an impressive increase over the single-digit percentages that typically prevailed at the turn of the twentieth century–while 28 percent of “semi-skilled” workers and 12 percent of “slightly skilled” workers gave their children allowances. The rising standard of living in postwar America made children’s allowances both more common and more generous. Allowance rates climbed substantially after 1960, when a Seventeen magazine survey indicated that the average teenage girl had a weekly income of $9.53. A 1999 Rand Youth Poll found that the typical weekly allowance for thirteen to fifteen year olds ranged from $30.50 to $34.25.

Today, allowances are pretty much a normal part of growing up for many middle and upper class children. But that experience isn’t an equally distributed one. As Quartz reported in a 2018 article:

According to one year of data from 10,000 families who use the BusyKid app, parents give girls an average $6.71 per week, about half the $13.80 boys received. To be sure, the study results—which the company published on its blog—are not scientific. In 2015, researchers from the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research did find that boys earn more for fewer tasks, but the gap they found in pay for chores wasn’t nearly as large. And, oddly, the allowance gap is the only dramatic split in the BusyKids report. Apparently boys and girls save equal amounts (about $24-$25 per week) and tend to spend comparable sums, too.

This isn’t the case in just the US, though. As one 2001 article in the Journal of Economic Psychology reported about UK parents:

Results indicated that most parents (88.4%) were in favour of pocket-money schemes; they should begin around 6 years-old (6.65 yrs); there is a near-linear relationship between child’s age and amount received; that saving should be encouraged but that borrowing and lending from other children discouraged.

A 2013 research study from China also found that children in China usually receive allowances as well, with average amounts varying based on the area of the country they live in and the number of siblings they have.

This script may vary from the actual episode transcript.

Etymology is usually an interesting insight into the history and usage of a word, but occasionally it is so demonstrative that almost nothing could top it. The word, and the action of, mentorship is one of those situations.

The action of mentorship is a eponym from The Odyssey, when Athena herself makes an appearance in the life of a directionless young man, in the form of their old family friend named Mentor. In the person of that family friend, Athena makes an effort to instill a heroic mentality, or a strength of mind, in the younger man. She connects him to his history and the strengths he has available to him.

In short, she becomes his Mentor – both literally and figuratively. In doing so, she sets him up for success.

Today, mentorship can be a much more formalized process, though absent a formal process through your employer, educational institution, or networking group, identifying and developing a mentorship relationship can feel intimidating.

Kathy Caprino, in Forbes, explained it this way:

Sheryl Sandberg, in her book Lean In, likens asking strangers to be mentors to the behavior of the main character in the favorite children’s book Are You My Mother? The book is about a baby bird that emerges from its shell in an empty nest, and goes in search of its mother.  The little bird asks everything it sees (a kitten, hen, dog, cow, steam shovel), “Are you my mother?” The answer is always the same. “No!” This is just like a professional asking a stranger, “Will you be my mentor?”

Sandberg says: “If someone has to ask the question, the answer is probably no. When someone finds the right mentor, it is obvious.  The question becomes a statement. Chasing or forcing that connection rarely works.”

This script may vary from the actual episode transcript.

This particular episode is going to focus on the United States, just due to a time limitation, but I am very curious how individuals in other cultures experience this.

In 2018, Katie Hurley wrote in US News and World Report:

I was running an assembly on empathy and compassion for upper elementary school students when a question from a fifth-grade girl gave me pause. “What do you do when your grownups are always yelling at you from the sideline and telling you what you’re doing wrong and what you should be doing to do better?” she asked. The room fell silent as one hundred sets of eyes stared at me, waiting for my response. I asked if other kids experienced the same thing. Hands went up as they nodded in agreement. “Parents are terrible at losing,” remarked one boy.

This is a theme carried out through a number of surveys and studies about how children and families deal with sports. A survey of 1,000 Americans found some statistics that seem rather scary in that vein. Only 24% of those surveyed said that they had never been punished due to poor performance in youth sports.

There’s a whole host of research out there about how unhealthy the levels of pressure and stress can be for kids, especially given that burnout can be a particularly big issue.

But not all competition can be bad. As KQED published, quote:

Po Bronson presented a very different picture of competition when he spoke with Michael Krasny on KQED’s Forum about Top Dog: The Science of Winning and Losing, his latest book written with co-author Ashley Merryman.

The book examines competition from all angles – physiological, psychological, historical. Their main point: competition, if done right, is a good thing. In fact, competition and team activities can drive learning and performance better than solo endeavors.

“In academic settings, things like chess competitions, math competitions, and science fairs seem to be really great for kids,” Bronson said.

“Very quickly [the students] are learning in a couple of weeks, more advanced math than they would learn in an entire semester in a regular class,” he said. “They’re there because they like their friends, they’re there because they like to learn a lot of stuff.”

For Bronson, that seems to be part of why clubs and teams are “healthy competition” – they have elements like camaraderie that “buffer the stress.” As opposed to say, the SAT exams.

“No one ever walks out of an SAT saying ‘Well, I bombed, but I met a lot of good friends at the Kaplan center,’” he said.

This script may vary from the actual episode transcript.

When you think about going away for a weekend- down the street or across the globe – what gets packed up to go with you probably varies a lot, but is likely to stick pretty closely to at least the 40 or 50 pound weight limit of an airline bag. But the way we pack — and the way we lug around what we do pack – is something that has shifted and changed very significantly as the way we travel has changed. Around 1153, a wheeled case was created to carry weaponry was created for those fighting in the Crusades. But that was largely the biggest development in the history off how we pack until 1596, when the term “luggage” was added to the Oxford English Dictionary, defined as inconveniently heavy baggage.

And there’s a great reason why it got that definition. Quoting from a 2018 article in the Telegraph:

It was standard therefore common for first-class passengers on 19th century cruise ships to bring 20 pieces of luggage each, according to  professor Susan Harlan, containing four changes of clothing per day. For practicality, trunks that stayed in the cabin folded out to resemble portable wardrobes with hangers and drawers.

When travel became more accessible, the trunks started to give way to suitcases, which were lighter and more portable. Quoting from a Smithsonian article:

As trunks went out of style, suitcases took on not just practical but also cultural significance. By the 1920s, suitcases featured in books such as The Hardy Boys and such films as The Woman in the Suitcase, as a literary symbol for both mobility and mystery—perhaps filled with gold, photographs, or simply a stranger’s possessions. During the Great Depression, farmers who worked fields away from home were called “suitcase farmers.”

It was in 1938 that exact weight of luggage became a much more important consideration, when the first baggage rules were put into place by the Civil Aeronautics Board. Those rules restricted coach passengers to 40 pounds for domestic flights and 44 for international. It wasn’t until 1981 that a budget airline decided to start trying to charge passengers for luggage, with a $3 charge on PeopleXpress airlines.

Today, there’s a huge variety of not only luggage available, but approaches to what is charged for on various methods of travel. So how do you deal with the question of what to bring along?

This script may vary from the actual episode transcript.

Up until the time effective and reliable anesthetics were discovered around the 1800s surgery existed but definitely was not considered a solution of first resort for, well, just about anything. While researching the history of surgery, what was particularly illustrative, for me, of how surgery was approached was this quote from the UK Science Museum:

Women could not become physicians [during the middle ages], but surgery, considered a lesser profession, was open to them. Surgeons did not go to university to study, but were apprenticed to practising surgeons to learn through observation. Women continued to train as surgeons throughout the 1500s and 1600s, often treating the poor. In fact they were not pushed out of surgical practice until the 1700s, when surgical training moved to the universities – from which they were banned.

Once speed was no longer the most important skill for a surgeon to possess and anesthetic was in more common usage, surgery became more essential for treating a wide number of conditions — and became more popular for elective reasons, too.

But how common is surgery? That’s a surprisingly difficult question to answer. To quote extensively from a 2016 World Health Organization paper:

Surgical care is essential for managing diverse health conditions – such as injuries, obstructed labour, malignancy, infections and cardiovascular disease – and an indispensable component of a functioning health system. International organizations, including the World Health Organization (WHO) and the World Bank, have highlighted surgery as an important component for global health development. However, surgical care requires coordination of skilled human resources, specialized supplies and infrastructure.

As low- and middle-income countries expand their economies and basic public health improves, noncommunicable diseases and injuries comprise a growing proportion of the disease burden. Investments in health-care systems have increased in the last decade, but the effect on surgical capacity is mostly unknown.

Based on modelling of available data, it was estimated that 234.2 million operations were performed worldwide in 2004. The majority of these procedures took place in high-income countries (58.9%; 138.0 million), despite their relative lower share of the global population.

We estimate 266.2 to 359.5 million operations were performed in 2012. This represents an increase of 38% over the previous eight years. The proportion of caesarean delivery were higher in Member States with lower surgical volume.

This script may vary from the actual episode transcript.

In the 1920s, in America, about 5 percent of people lived alone. By the 1950s, that number had gone up, but only barely. In Canada in the 1950s, about 7 percent of households were occupied by just one person.

Today, those numbers have gone up very dramatically. 28.2 percent of Canadian households were individuals living alone, according to a 2016 census report. In that same year, Finland reported 21 percent of people were living alone, and Australia reported “nearly one in four households” were one-person households.  A 2012 Census report stated that 27 percent of American households were similarly singletons. The UK clocks in with 12.3 percent of households in 2014.

In other words, living alone is increasingly common across a wide swath of first-world, developed countries — though not in all economically advantaged countries. The UN has a great two-page chart in a 2017 report that shows the distribution of household sizes across dozens of countries if there’s a specific one you want to look up.

Even in places where living alone still isn’t the norm, average household size has been going down. Quote:  

“In France, for example, the average household size fell from 3.1 persons per household in 1968 to 2.3 in 2011. In Kenya, it declined from 5.3 persons per household in 1969 to 4.0 in 2014.”

What none of these statistics address is if living alone is a choice… but from what I could find, for a large swath of these single-person households, it is. As one Princeton University paper put it, quote:

Two major themes that are repeated within the literature that explores the reasons for the increase in one-person households are the idea that Americans prefer “privacy” in living arrangements, and that increasing economic resources are often used to “purchase” this privacy in the form of living alone. Beresford and Rivlin (1966) interpreted the increase in older adults living alone to be part of the same trend as for younger people; both groups prefer privacy if they can afford it.

If it’s a choice or not, there is always the risk of loneliness when living alo