Daily Archives: August 8, 2014

Why smiling won’t help if you are feeling miserable: Experts advise letting unhappiness lift before attempting grin to stop brain linking happy act to sadness

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Next time you think about cheering somebody up when they are upset, perhaps it might be best to just leave them alone.

Trying to make somebody smile when they are miserable could actually make them feel worse, a study has found.

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If you force a friend to grin when they are in a bad mood then their brain starts to associate it with sadness instead of joy.

And next time they smile it could bring back miserable memories instead of lifting the bad mood.

It was carried out by Anirban Mukhopadhyay, an associate professor of marketing at Hong Kong University Science and Technology, who said you should wait until your unhappiness lifts before attempting a grin.

The study results showed that if you are faking a smile then it won’t cheer you up and that you are just using it to ‘mask’ your inner sadness.

Obama Authorizes Air Strikes, Humanitarian Aid Mission in Iraq

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President Obama said Thursday he has authorized “targeted” air strikes if necessary to protect American interests in Iraq from insurgent forces that are taking over the country’s northern cities.

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If the terrorist group ISIS reaches Erbil, the president said he will call in U.S. air strikes. The U.S. has an embassy and other staffers in the city. Air strikes have also been authorized to protect families fleeing ISIS in the Sinjar Mountains.

An air drop of food, water and medicine made at the request of the Iraqi government has been completed, the president said in the statement from the White House.

U.S. aircraft, escorted by fighter jets, dropped 5,300 gallons of fresh drinking water and 8,000 meals ready to eat.

The emergency effort is being deployed to help a group of 40,000 Yazidis, a group of ethnic Kurds, who fled villages in northern Iraq under threat from ISIS.

The Yazidis fled to the Sinjar Mountains, in a remote part of northern Iraq near the border of Syria, where they are stuck without food or water while ISIS forces are gathered at the base of the mountains.