From Vance Hawkins:

Re: Vindictiveness doesn’t pay, study finds (March 30): When ever people write articles like this, and on other topics such as whether the glass is half full or half empty, or about how important “attitude” is -- eg -- how much better a good attitude is thtn a bad one -- I always cringe.

How do you know which came first -- the chicken or the egg? Perhaps the “positive attitude” came AFTER acceptance. Perhaps the “poor attitude” came after denial of desire, and NOT before.

From a scientific perspective -- “half empty” is EQUAL to “half full”. One is NOT better than the other as they are idensitcal! ATTITUDE of the researcher alone skews and enhances the result in favor of the “half full” container.

Now I do NOT hold a grudge, I do NOT believe in “vengeance”. I move on... But the belief that vengeance holds a person back sounds a lot like “karma” and the “half full” argument. I wonder how the researcher decided that the people bent on vengeance “learned” to be vengeful -- perhaps it DID succeed for them, at some point earlier in their lives? Perhaps those who “just let it pass” learned that attitude earlier in their lives from Christian values of “turn the othr cheek” -- a strategy often used by “losers” to fail to fight back. But you say they win in the end... hmmm...

So many variables come into play I wonder how your conclusions can be drawn without controlling all the many variables that might have first come into play generations ago, that affect the attitudes of the people today who participated in that test.