Teenagers can ‘catch’ moods, study reveals

And other stories from the stranger side of life

Senior schoolchildren hug outside their school
(Image credit: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)

A study by Oxford and Birmingham universities has found that teenagers can “catch” moods from their friends. Researchers investigated “emotional contagion” among teens, to see the impact of individuals’ moods within a shared social network and found that moods become similar to those of the people they spend time with. Dr Per Block, of Oxford’s Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science, said: “Mood is contagious, and though both positive and negative moods are ‘caught’, bad moods are more potent.”

Shoppers caught in glue prank

A group of teenage boys have put superglue in a hand sanitiser bottle and offered free squirts to shoppers in Bradford. According to reports, the boys stood outside a Morrison’s supermarket approaching shoppers. A woman said she almost accepted but she stopped when one of the boys laughed and said the bottle contained “fucking superglue”.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Couple ‘had sex on Ferris wheel’

A couple in the US who allegedly had sex on a 200-foot-tall Ferris wheel are facing public lewdness charges after footage of the encounter was uploaded to a porn site. Police in South Carolina say Eric and Lori Harmon had sex in a glass chamber on the Myrtle Beach SkyWheel landmark, in plain view of the public.

Explore More

 
Chas Newkey-Burden has been part of The Week Digital team for more than a decade and a journalist for 25 years, starting out on the irreverent football weekly 90 Minutes, before moving to lifestyle magazines Loaded and Attitude. He was a columnist for The Big Issue and landed a world exclusive with David Beckham that became the weekly magazine’s bestselling issue. He now writes regularly for The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Independent, Metro, FourFourTwo and the i new site. He is also the author of a number of non-fiction books.