Keeping Positive Secrets Can Make One Feel Energized [Study]

Some claim that keeping negative secrets can take a toll on one's health. However, keeping positive secrets can have the same results, but it gives one more energy.

Benefits of Keeping Positive Secrets

Many people share every excellent news they receive with others right away. However, a new study learned that keeping it a secret for a while comes with some benefits.

Although decades of studies on secrecy have indicated that it is detrimental to our well-being, previous studies have solely looked at the negative effects of maintaining secrets on our lives.

Does maintaining negative secrets tend to exacerbate the negative impacts of secrecy, or is secrecy intrinsically harmful to our well-being? The Columbia University study's lead author, Michael Slepian, stated in a press release. Based on the survey, they learned that even if happy secrets are considerably less prevalent than negative ones, some of life's greatest joyous moments-like surprise gifts, thrilling news, marriage proposals, and pregnancies-began as secrets.

Slepian and associates investigated why and how people might be impacted by keeping positive secrets through five trials involving over 2,500 participants.

In one experiment, subjects were given a list of almost forty typical forms of good news, such as getting a present for oneself or paying off debt. The participants were then required to tell the researchers which of the positive news items related to them at the time and which they had chosen to withhold.

While some participants considered positive news that they did not keep hidden, others focused on good news that they did. Participants were asked to score how invigorated they felt by the news in both situations and whether or not they planned to tell others about it.

Researchers discovered that, on average, individuals had between 14 and 15 good news items. Five or six, on average, were kept under wraps.

Compared to those who thought about their excellent news that was not a secret, the individuals who thought back on their happy secrets reported feeling more invigorated. Whether or not their news had been kept a secret, those who planned to tell people about it also said they felt more energized.

"Positive secrets that people choose to keep should make them feel good, and positive emotion is a known predictor of feeling energized," Slepian added.

Brain Has Unconscious Awareness

In another study, researchers from Australia learned that our brain has unconscious awareness to distinguish a real face from an AI-generated appearance. They studied the participants' brain activity using electroencephalography (EEG) caps.

The findings of the EEG test showed that whether subjects were staring at real or fake faces, different brain activity occurred. The difference was apparent approximately 170 milliseconds after the faces first appeared on screen.

An electrical signal's identifiable component, N170, is responsive to the placement and alignment of face features. Consequently, one reason would be that individuals noticed minute distinctions between artificial and genuine faces, like the distance between the mouth, nose, and eyes.

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