For the sake of your relationships, be careful where you sit

A recent study out of the University of Waterloo, in Canada, confirms our suspicions that our emotional states are strongly influenced by our surroundings. Sure as awe-inducing vistas can inspire creative thought, so too can environments that are less peachy provoke similar feelings. In this particular experiment, individuals who sat at a wobbly chair and table predicted that celebrity couples were more likely to dissolve than people evaluating the same relationships but using stable furniture. When asked to describe what values they admire in a relationship, those individuals that sat at wobbly furniture prioritized stability-promoting traits, like reliability, over instability-promoting traits, like spontaneity, to a greater extent than those sat at stable furniture.

You may be wondering, what does this study say for those living upon wobbly earth? Are notoriously short-lived Hollywood relationships the very product of being born of a land prone to seismic instability?

Doubtful. But it would be a nice excuse.

Photo: The lobby of Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas, NV. (Wikimedia Commons)