Cities or the country

Choosing where your going to live is a major decision. New studies show that factors other than the nearest grocery store or mall may need to be taken into consideration when picking the place your going to live. Scientists have recently conducted a study, that was rather mean (understandably so), asking people to complete a series of math problems on a computer. The kick, the math problems were designed in such a way that the average participant should only get about 1/3 of the questions right. Scientist would come in and ask the participants to do better, the computer would show them a poor score essentially showing them to be the worst scoring person to take the experiment. The researchers found that city dwellers had higher blood pressure, and higher release of stress hormones as well as lighting up in the area of the brain linked to stress.
Another study showed that city dwellers had a higher amount of brain activity in the amygdala, the area of the brain linked to stress, depression, anxiety, and mental disorders. Further studies are going to be conducted to find-out what exactly it is in the cities that makes people so prone to anxiety, stress, etc.
My thoughts, the first experiment wasn't really a measure of how people interpreted the math problems it was how well they handled criticism. It makes sense that those that are constantly interacting with other, even strangers (such as are found in a city) would be more sensitive to the reactions of other individuals. I'm not saying city people are push overs compared to country folk, but let's face people who live in the country have more of an independent streak than those of us who live in cities.
As to the second study, that some part of cities triggers higher flight reaction rates (from the fight or flight reaction) in people could be because cities are a fake environment. Consider Plato's Allegory of a Cave. The difference, our bodies know there's a true environment, they are urging us to get of the floor and walk out of the cave but for some reason our eyes aren't adjusting the light.
Here's a link to Allegory of a Cave if your interested in reading it. I would highly recommend doing so.
http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/platoscave.html
Also here's the link to the website I got my original story from:
http://news.discovery.com/human/city-stress-brain-110622.html