Thinking about wine can help you relax, scientists claim
The Telegraph:
People are so suggestive that simply believing an alcoholic drink will make us feel better or socialise more easily at a party will greatly raise the chance of making it so, researchers said.
This is because of the phenomenon of “response expectancies”, or the way in which we predict how we will behave in different situations.
Because we expect that alcohol will make us more relaxed, for example, we automatically respond by becoming more open and chattier in a subconscious attempt to meet our expectation, psychologists explained.
Although most people would put the effect solely down to the alcohol, some studies suggest that our expectations of how the drink will make us feel also play a key role.
Writing in the Current Directions in Psychological Science journal, researchers from Victoria University in New Zealand said: “the effects of suggestion are wider and often more surprising than many people might otherwise think.”
Read the whole story: The Telegraph
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