Heh, your little article about the brain parasite sets off all kinds of alarm bells in my scientist head. 'Correlations' when it comes to human behaviour are pretty notoriously unreliable. Maybe neurotic people have characteristics which predispose them to seeking out and benefiting from animal companionship. If a certain subpopulation proceed to get cats, they're susceptible to infection. Thefore, it's not infection and then neutocism but the reverse.
For example: one of my favourite correlations was a nineteen-nineties study that showed a correlation between ice cream sales and violent crime in the US. As ice cream sales increased, violent crime increased. Of course, the authors concluded that ice cream was in no way causal - people didn't go out and rob/rape/murder more people because of ice cream! The ice cream trend was masking the fact that violent crime tends to increase with mean outdoor temperature. It's been argued that a small part of the reason why Canada has a lower violent crime rate than the US is that for 4-6 months of the year here it's bloody cold! Nobody goes out and about when it's 40 below, thieves and thugs included. When you look at mean crime rates between the months, the summer is always the 'hot bed' for crime. Of course, that's not just true in Canada but any part of the world with a really strong difference in temperature between the seasons.
Yay, science.
For example: one of my favourite correlations was a nineteen-nineties study that showed a correlation between ice cream sales and violent crime in the US. As ice cream sales increased, violent crime increased. Of course, the authors concluded that ice cream was in no way causal - people didn't go out and rob/rape/murder more people because of ice cream! The ice cream trend was masking the fact that violent crime tends to increase with mean outdoor temperature. It's been argued that a small part of the reason why Canada has a lower violent crime rate than the US is that for 4-6 months of the year here it's bloody cold! Nobody goes out and about when it's 40 below, thieves and thugs included. When you look at mean crime rates between the months, the summer is always the 'hot bed' for crime. Of course, that's not just true in Canada but any part of the world with a really strong difference in temperature between the seasons.
Statistics are fun. ^^
-T. pirate