Improving mood and boosting energy may be as simple as getting flowers. Nancy Etcoff, a psychologist at Harvard Medical School, and her team asked 54 women to note their feelings and activities at certain daily times for two weeks. After a week, the women, who had no idea that the study related to flowers, received a supposed thank-you gift for reaching the halfway point, either a bouquet of flowers with faint overall fragrance (such as gerbera daisies and rhododendrons) or a hurricane lamp with a scented candle. The daily logs showed that the flower receivers in particular felt a quick mood lift, and within a week they reported a rise in compassion and kindness and a drop in sadness and anxiety. The effect extended to the workplace, where these subjects felt more enthusiastic and energetic than the others. Etcoff ascribes the findings to humans' "innate attraction to aspects of nature that have been advantageous in our ancestral past," like lush vegetation, and adds that "there's also the effect of beauty—it inspires and pleases."