Psychology

§ 1 Anxiety, emotional state in which people feel uneasy, apprehensive, or fearful. People usually experience anxiety about events they cannot control or predict, or about events that seem threatening or dangerous. For example, students taking an important test may feel anxious because they cannot predict the test questions or feel certain of a good grade. People often use the words fear and anxiety to describe the same thing. Fear also describes a reaction to immediate danger characterized by a strong desire to escape the situation. The physical symptoms of anxiety reflect a chronic “readiness” to deal with some future threat. These symptoms may include fidgeting, muscle tension, sleeping problems, and headaches. Higher levels of anxiety may produce such symptoms as rapid heartbeat, sweating, increased blood pressure, nausea, and dizziness.

§ 2 All people experience anxiety to some degree. Most people feel anxious when faced with a new situation, such as a first date, or when trying to do something well, such as give a public speech. A mild to moderate amount of anxiety in these situations is normal and even beneficial. Anxiety can motivate people to prepare for an upcoming event and can help keep them focused on the task at hand. However, too little anxiety or too much anxiety can cause problems. Individuals who feel no anxiety when faced with an important situation may lack alertness and focus. On the other hand, individuals who experience an abnormally high amount of anxiety often feel overwhelmed, immobilized, and unable to accomplish the task at hand. People with too much anxiety often suffer from one of the anxiety disorders, a group of mental illnesses. In fact, more people experience anxiety disorders than any other type of mental illness. A survey of people aged 15 to 54 in the United States found that about 17 percent of this population suffers from an anxiety disorder during any given year.

§ 3 Mary Rawsthorne may be the unluckiest woman in the country. In an 18-month period her house caught fire twice and, just before she got married, the church burned down. She has had so many car accidents that she has lost count.

§ 4. Her daily life is like a long list of annoying incidents: the car won't start, she loses her keys, she gets stuck in traffic jams. When she visits friends she breaks mirrors or knocks pictures off the walls. Electrical equipment fails for no reason when she tries to operate it, and everything she buys goes wrong. "These things don't seem so extraordinary to me any more. They're just part of everyday life".

§ 5. Mary, who is 29, is one of the subjects taking part in a two-year study of the psychology of luck. Richard Wiseman, who is directing the research, is trying to find out whether some people do have better luck than others or whether "lucky" people are simply those who only remember the good things that happen to them.

§ 6. Many people believe that luck or chance is a strong force that can give people things or take them away as it likes. Lucky people are given good fortune at birth; unlucky people are marked by the hand of fate, and we avoid them in case some of their bad luck rubs off on us. This, of course, is illogical, but it does seem strange that there are people as unlucky as Marie whereas others are at the other end of the scale.

§ 7. Successful people often say that "you make your own luck", and the first results from Wiseman's study suggest that this is true. If people believe that they are lucky, then they are more likely to continue trying until they succeed at something. Those who think they are unlucky, on the other hand, do the opposite. They don't buy lottery tickets because they "know" they will not win, and therefore they can never succeed. Luck is also a matter of interpretation. When one of Wiseman's other subjects fell down the stairs and broke his arm, he did not think that this was unlucky. On the contrary, he was actually extremely fortunate — if he had fallen differently, he might have broken his neck.

§ 8. Wiseman is carrying out a number of different tests on his subjects. He starts with a questionnaire which helps to show whether or not people think they are lucky. He then tests this against random events: for instance, how often they can predict the result of tossing a coin. In another test, his subjects have to guess the shape of a drawing hidden in an envelope, and the earliest results seem to show that lucky people do better at this.