In most people, emotions are situational. Something in the here and now makes you mad. The emotion itself is tied to the situation in which it originates. As long as you remain in that emotional situation, you're likely to stay angry. If you leave the situation, the opposite is true. The emotion begins to disappear as soon as you move away from the situation. Moving away from the situation prevents it from taking hold of you. Counselors often advise clients to get some emotional distance from whatever is bothering them. One easy way to do that is to geographically separate yourself from the source of your anger.

Democracy in ancient Athens was more extensive than today's version in that individual involvement occurred as citizens took turns holding various offices. There were no elected officials in ancient Athens. Instead, governmental positions, such as those of the councilors, were filled by random drawings in which names were picked from a box. The selected persons served for about a year, and no person could serve twice in their lifetime. Where the knowledge of professionals was needed, there would be permanent positions, but most governmental positions were temporary. Many Athenians felt that the benefits of more experienced politicians and officials would be spoiled by a growth in corruption. Today we sometimes find that long-term positions for career politicians lead to aspirations of power and selfish actions.

If you're tempted to eat food you've dropped on the floor, you may want to think again: A new study disproved the 5-second rule, or the idea that food is safe to eat off the floor if you pick it up fast enough. The study found that bacteria from a surface can move to food very quickly, in less than a second in some cases. In the study, the researchers contaminated four different surfaces- stainless steel, ceramic tile, wood and carpet-with bacteria. Then, they dropped four food types on the surfaces: watermelon, bread, bread and butter, and gummy candy. Results showed that, in general, the longer the food was allowed to sit on the surface, the more bacteria was transferred to the food. But some bacterial infection happened in less than a second. Watermelon picked up the most bacteria, while gummy candies picked up the least.

An often-repeated statistic says that four out of five small businesses will fail within five years. This 80 percent is a frightening prospect for anyone thinking about starting a business. But a study by Bruce A. Kirchhoff of the New Jersey Institute of Technology found the failure rate for small businesses to be only 18 percent during their first eight years. Why the huge gap? It turns out that studies by the U.S. government and others defined business failures much too broadly. Any closing of a business, even if it occurred because someone died, sold the business, or retired, was recorded as a business failure. In fact, only 18 percent of the 814,000 small businesses tracked by Kirchhoff for eight years went out of business with unpaid bills. This should be a comfort to would-be entrepreneurs.

Visualization techniques will help you display pleasure, interest and other emotions in your everyday interactions. If your Impression Management Plan calls for you to smile at a meeting that you dread, think in advance of several happy moments in your life to replay mentally during the meeting. If the occasion calls for full attention, when you find yourself bored silly by someone's presentation, create an interest in him by focusing on the subtle changes in the intonation of his voice as he speaks, or think about the words he chooses to express his ideas. Let your rational brain outwit your emotional brain by injecting images consistent with the emotions you want to project. Remember, the emotional brain doesn't distinguish between realistic visualization and reality!

How much of your food should be cooked? Proponents of the newly popular raw food diets claim that cooking ruins vitamins and enzymes, making food difficult to digest and therefore contributing to disease. But all traditional peoples cooked some or most of their food. Even in the tropics, where people did not have to build fires to keep warm, they built fires every day to cook. In addition to cooking grains, they usually cooked their vegetables, the very foods some recommend that people eat raw. Why cook? Cooking helps neutralize many naturally occurring anti-nutrients and irritants in food, also breaking down indigestible fiber. Many foods, such as beans and potatoes, are indigestible until cooked. While cooking-especially at very high temperatures-does destroy some nutrients, it makes minerals more available.

Long-term climate variations on Earth-ice ages are but one example- are thought to be influenced by such factors as small wobbles in Earth's orbit, and the inclination of its axis, as well as cycles of radiation coming from the Sun. These variations occur in cycles of 10,000 years or even hundreds of thousands of years. An ice core drilled at Lake Vostok in Antarctica reveals that for most of the last 250,000 years, Earth has been considerably colder than it is today. In fact, the relatively warm weather experienced on Earth for the last 10,000 years looks like an unusual period when compared with the previous 200,000 years. Ten thousand years is a short period in geologic terms, but it covers just about the entire span of modern human civilization.

Words can be clues to inner experience, revealing hidden thoughts, feelings, or wants. We can, therefore, use words in much the same way as we use nonverbal messages, such as voice tone, rate and volume of speech, facial expressions, and body positions or movements, to help understand athletes. Words, however, not only express experience, but they also contribute to it, operating as a feedback loop. An example would be athletes who call themselves losers. They not only reveal their dissatisfaction and unhappiness, they also reinforce their sense of impotence and undermine their self-confidence. Words that are not spoken can be as meaningful as those that are. A useful clue to something that is avoided is the unanswered question. Not answering a question may indicate an underlying fear, guilt, embarrassment, shame, or other unpleasant feeling or thought.

Today, studies increasingly show that many non-human beings feel. Elephants appear to feel grief, while dolphins and whales express joy, or something much like it. Parrots can become unhappy, pigs and cows terrified, chickens saddened, monkeys seemingly embarrassed. Experiments have shown that rats become agitated when seeing surgery performed on other rats; when presented with a trapped lab-mate and a piece of chocolate, they will free their caged brethren before eating. There's even evidence that rats take pleasure in being tickled. None of this will come as a surprise to pet owners or anyone who has observed virtually any kind of animal for any length of time. Science is rediscovering what Charles Darwin, in his book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, concluded: that the variations between humans and other species in their capacity to feel and express emotion are differences in degree rather than in kind.