Having a romantic crush can influence your shopping trend

Ancient Iraq board game is making a comeback

Raniye, Iraq: After rolling pyramid- shaped dice, Iraqi Kurdish artisan Hoshmand Muwafaq shifted his pebble around an ornate board, his handmade recreation of one of the Middle East’s oldest and most popular games.

Originating nearly 5,000 years ago in what would become Iraq, the Royal Game of Ur mysteriously died out — until Muwafaq resurrected it by making his own decorated wooden board.

“It is a nice feeling when you rebuild and recreate a game which is not played by people anymore, and you try to show your generation and your people what we used to have before,” he told AFP.

“So you introduce the board again to the people. It’s just really something, somehow amazing.” Singapore: Having a romantic crush on some can increase the urge to seek variety in your purchases in a bid to reassert a sense of control over your life, scientists suggest.

Crushes often evoke a sense of uncertainty because it is unclear whether an individual’s romantic feelings for another will be reciprocated. This compels people to switch from their favourite foods or brands and seek variety as a symbolic means of reasserting control.

The researchers discovered this trend in a series of studies, including one when they asked participants to imagine that they were planning to buy yogurt at a local grocery store. They could either purchase a variety pack that included five different flavours or a pack that contained five servings of one flavour. Then the participants answered demographic questions, including one about whether they currently had a romantic crush.

The results showed that people who had a romantic crush were more interested in purchasing the variety pack of yogurt than people who did not have a crush.

“Having a variety of choices can create a sense of mastery over one’s environment and serves as a source of personal control,” said Irene Huang, a professor at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.

In another experiment, participants were told that the researchers were collaborating with a writers’ workshop to generate articles related to the daily lives of different people.