Watching your favorite NFL Team Lose and Resulting Family Violence

Interesting item:

The National Institutes of Health spent $314,613 over two years on a study that determined that family violence increases about three times as much on the Fourth of July as it does after the local NFL team suffers an “upset” loss.

“Taken together our findings suggest that emotional cues based on the outcomes of professional football games exert a relatively strong effect on the occurrence of family violence,” the authors of the study concluded. “The estimated impact of an upset loss, for example, is about one-third as large as the jump in violence on a major holiday like the Fourth of July.”

The researchers also determined that an “upset” loss by the local NFL home team was not linked to nearly as great an increase in family violence as were Christmas Day, Thanksgiving Day, Memorial Day, New Year’s Day, and New Year’s Eve.

The study is titled Family Violence and Football: The Effect of Unexpected Emotional Cues on Violence Behavior and is authored by two economists -- Professors David Card (UC Berkeley) and Gordon Dahl (UC San Diego).