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Are you getting divorced?  Going through a serious illness?  Failing a class? All of these, believe it or not, can push you toward political polarization . A new study says that adverse events can push us to the extreme.  According to newswise.com, unexpected life events ranging from illness to relationship stress can lead to political polarization, pushing moderates toward the spectrum’s extremes, says a recently published study that’s breaking new ground on personally-experienced adversity and its effect on political attitudes. Though a handful of studies have explored the effect of community-wide tragedies on personal beliefs, this current research looks exclusively at self-reported personal experience, a phenomenon that can produce different responses than what happens in the wake of collective events, such as reaction to the 9/11 terrorist attacks.   “We’re talking about people’s experience with adversity broadly construed,” says Michael Poulin, an associate profe

Do you see the glass as half-empty or half-full ? If it's the former, you might want to reconsider.  A new survey has found that those having a positive attitude could be evolutionarily advantageous, according to Cornell researchers who simulated generations of evolution in a computational model, newswise.com reports. The web quotes the researchers as saying that these findings offer scientific support to the ancient philosophical insights from China, Greece and India, which encourage cultivating long-term contentment or life satisfaction rather than grasping at the fleeting joy of instant gratification. Hmm. Guess they've met many millennials. “In an evolutionary sense, you have to evaluate your life on the basis of more than what happened just now,” says Shimon Edelman, professor of psychology and a co-author of the study.  It took having cancer, for me, to learn to live in the moment.  I was very lucky. My cancer was not invasive and here I am, 12 years lat