Daisybell, Buttercup, Maybelline or even Norma. Giving cows a name increases their milk yield.

This surprising insight into bovine motivational psychology by scientists at Newcastle University has been rewarded with one of this year’s Ig Nobel prizes, an institution that rewards “research that makes you laugh and then makes you think”.

While the concept sounds somewhat farcical, the study was intended as a sincere investigation into cow welfare. “You’re laughing in the face of science!”

Catherine Douglas, who led the study, said. “The whole study was about how stress and fear can have a biological effect on milk yields.”

However, she conceded she was thrilled to be sharing the Ig Nobel award for veterinary medicine with her co-investigator, Peter Rowlinson.

The study involved 516 dairy farmers in the UK and revealed that the average amount of milk produced by a cow over its annual ten-month lactation period is 13,198 pints (7,500 litres). Cows with names had an average higher milk yield of 454 pints.

Nearly two thirds of farmers in the UK said they “knew all the cows in the herd” and 48 per cent agreed that positive human contact was more likely to produce cows with a good milking temperament.

Almost 10 per cent said that a fear of humans resulted in a poor milking temperament.

“The most important thing is for cows to be treated as individuals,” said Dennis Gibb, a dairy farmer who owns Eachwick Red House Farm near Newcastle upon Tyne with his brother Richard.

“We have got more than 300 cows, and they’re all named after flowers or trees.” However, he said there were limits to their originality when it came to naming, admitting that one cow was called “Holly the 15th”.

The Ig Nobel ceremony took place last night at Harvard University.

The seven of the ten winners who attended were handed their awards by Nobel prizewinners, including Professor Rich Roberts, who won for medicine in 1993, and Professor Sheldon Glashow, who won for physics in 1979.

The peace prize went to a group of scientists at the University of Berne for determining, by experiment, whether it is better to be smashed over the head with a full or empty bottle of beer.

The result was that it took more force to break the empty bottle. The bad news, according to the study, is that some parts of your skull will splinter under only 14 joules of force meaning that both are apt weapons in a bar brawl.

Also honoured was Professor Katherine Whitcome, of the University of Cincinnati, for analytically determining why pregnant women do not tip over.

The answer was not as one insightful observer suggested “because their bums get bigger”, but thanks to wedge-shaped vertebrae in the lower back.

Women have three of these vertebrae, compared with only two in men, meaning they can flex their spine more easily. Professor Whitcome described this as an evolutionary adaptation that is unique to women.

The economics prize went to the directors, executives and auditors of four Icelandic banks for demonstrating that tiny banks can be rapidly turned into huge banks and that the same can be true for entire national economies.

Nobel prizes — for medicine, physics, chemistry, peace and economics — will be announced next week.

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