ABSTRACT
Potential threats to our children come at us from all angles, and it feels impossible to keep up, let alone protect them. The opposite of the failure effect is called the Winner Effect, a phenomenon studied by biologists for years. The science boils down to this: winning heightens and losing diminishes the likelihood of a positive outcome of a later contest. Interestingly, most of the items on the instrument assessed how participants interpreted how others felt about them and their “failures,” not how they personally felt about them. A group of researchers at the university of Michigan medical school ran an experiment to see if our brains respond to emotional pain in the same way (i.e., releasing these opioids into our systems). They recruited participants, hooked them up to a brain scanner, and asked them to look through some fake dating profiles and point out the ones they were interested in.
