The researchers found that the effects that awe has on decision-making and well-being can be explained by awe’s ability to actually change our subjective experience of time by slowing it down. Experiences of awe help to brings us into the present moment which, in turn, adjusts our perception of time, influences our decisions, and makes life feel more satisfying than it would otherwise.
photo { Steven Siegel | more }
Most people think that even though it is possible that they are dreaming right now, the probability of this is very small, perhaps as small as winning the lottery or being struck by lightning. In fact the probability is quite high. Let’s do the maths.
Advertisers bombard us relentlessly. Fortunately, our brains have an inbuilt BS-detector that shields us from the onslaught - a mental phenomenon that psychologists call simply “resistance.” Ads from dodgy companies, our own pre-existing preferences, and a forewarning of a marketing attack can all marshal greater psychological resistance within us.
However, a new study suggests that funny adverts lower our guard, leaving us vulnerable to aggressive marketing.
Far from processing every word we read or hear, our brains often do not even notice key words that can change the whole meaning of a sentence, according to new research. […]
Semantic illusions provide a strong line of evidence that the way we process language is often shallow and incomplete. […]
Analyses of brain activity revealed that we are more likely to use this type of shallow processing under conditions of higher cognitive load — that is, when the task we are faced with is more difficult or when we are dealing with more than one task at a time.
When we observe other people we attribute their behaviour to their character rather than to their situation – my wife’s carelessness means she loses her keys, your clumsiness means you trip over, his political opinions mean that he got into an argument. When we think about things that happen to us the opposite holds. We downplay our own dispositions and emphasise the role of the situation. Bad luck leads to lost keys, a hidden bump causes trips, or a late train results in an unsuccessful job interview – it’s never anything to do with us.
This pattern is so common that psychologists have called it the fundamental attribution error. […]
We blame individuals for what happens to them because of the general psychological drive to find causes for things. We have an inherent tendency to pick out each other as causes; even from infancy, we pay more attention to things that move under their own steam, that act as if they have a purpose. The mystery is not that people become the focus of our reasoning about causes, but how we manage to identify any single cause in a world of infinite possible causes.
In recent years, we’ve seen an explosion of scientific research revealing precisely how positive feelings like happiness are good for us. We know that they motivate us to pursue important goals and overcome obstacles, protect us from some effects of stress, connect us closely with other people, and even stave off physical and mental ailments. […]
But is happiness always good? Can feeling too good ever be bad? Researchers are just starting to seriously explore these questions. […]
Too much happiness can make you less creative—and less safe.
[…]
Happiness can hurt us in competition. Illuminating studies done by Maya Tamir found that people in a happy mood performed worse than people in an angry mood when playing a competitive computer game.
[…]
A more nuanced analysis of different types of happiness suggests that some forms may actually be a source of dysfunction.
[…]
Pursuing happiness may actually make you unhappy.
photo { Sebastian Reiser }
The fact that the concept Americans refer to as “karma” exists across so many different cultures seems both nonsensical and reasonable at the same time. On one hand, there is no evidence that karma actually exists. On the other hand, the belief that “what goes around comes around” is clearly one that leads to more cooperation, increased altruism, and a better chance a society will thrive. […]
The fact that karma is useful at the community level doesn’t fully explain why it was created and widely accepted. […] Is there something else about karma that makes it appealing to individuals in specific moments of their lives?
A new study suggests that there is.
photo { Andrea Jaeger, Wimbledon, 1983 }
I don’t diagnose people I haven’t met. More importantly, I don’t use the diagnosis of sex addiction. In thirty-one years as a sex therapist, marriage counselor, and psychotherapist, I’ve never seen sex addiction. I’ve heard about virtually every sexual variation, obsession, fantasy, trauma, and involvement with sex workers, but I’ve never seen sex addiction.
New patients tell me all the time how they can’t keep from doing self-destructive sexual things; still, I see no sex addiction. Instead, I see people regretting the sexual choices they make, often denying that these are decisions. I see people wanting to change, but not wanting to give up what makes them feel alive or young or loved or adequate; wanting the advantages of changing, but not wanting to give up what makes them feel they’re better or sexier or naughtier than other people. Most importantly, I see people wanting to stop doing what makes them feel powerful, attractive, or loved, but since they don’t want to stop feeling powerful, attractive or loved, they can’t seem to stop the repetitive sex clumsily designed to create those feelings.
photo { David Armstrong }
…a bizarre affliction that has been widely reported in the media to affect around a dozen of the approximately one million Japanese tourists who visit Paris each year. Paris Syndrome is said to occur when a combination of factors leave tourists with a particularly severe case of culture shock.
Symptoms are purported to include:
acute delusional states, hallucinations, feelings of persecution (perceptions of being a victim of prejudice, aggression, or hostility from others), derealization, depersonalization, anxiety, and also psychosomatic manifestations such as dizziness, tachycardia (and) sweating
photo { Iiu Susiraja }
When a romantic relationship isn’t going well it seems like it influences everything in life. This brings up a slew of interesting questions. What is the exact nature of a relationship’s influence on unrelated decisions? How might different kinds of relationship troubles influence people in different ways? For example, in what ways do you behave differently when you’re considering breaking up your significant other as opposed to when you feel like they’re considering breaking up with you? […]
The researchers found that feeling as though your partner was the reason for incompatibility led people to become “promotion focused” – a psychological orientation where the tendency is to be motivated by gains, growth, and not missing out on positive outcomes. On other hand, when people felt that they were the reason for the incompatibility, it led to a “prevention focus” — an orientation where the tendency to is to be motivated by the need to maintain responsibilities and avoid negative outcomes.
photo { Isabel Martinez }
Psychiatrists used to say that personality never changes. […] Recent years have revealed a more liberating picture. Rather than being set in stone, qualities and traits evolve (often subtly) over time. Research shows that you aren’t likely to be the same person at 90 as you were at 19.
Although we are all different some general patterns occur. Typically, we become more introverted and more emotionally stable when progressing into older age (from 65+). Crucially, an average retired person is more ‘agreeable’ than either a young or middle-aged adult: they are more likely to be empathetic, considerate, friendly, generous, and helpful. […]
A large ‘quality of life’ survey performed in the UK and USA looked at the mental and physical well-being of 10,000 men and women. Comparing the differences between younger and older adults – physical health is worse after the age of 60 (no surprises there), but, mental wellbeing actually improves.
images { Julianna Brion | Hudson Hayden }
Are human beings intrinsically good but corruptible by the forces of evil, or the reverse, innately sinful yet redeemable by the forces of good? […]
Until about three million years ago the ancestors of Homo sapiens were mostly vegetarians, and they most likely wandered in groups from site to site where fruit, tubers, and other vegetable food could be harvested. Their brains were only slightly larger than those of modern chimpanzees. By no later than half a million years ago, however, groups of the ancestral species Homo erectus were maintaining campsites with controlled fire — the equivalent of nests — from which they foraged and returned with food, including a substantial portion of meat. Their brain size had increased to midsize, between that of chimpanzees and modern Homo sapiens. The trend appears to have begun one to two million years previously, when the earlier prehuman ancestor Homo habilis turned increasingly to meat in its diet. With groups crowded together at a single site, and an advantage added by cooperative nest building and hunting, social intelligence grew, along with the centers of memory and reasoning in the prefrontal cortex.
Probably at this point, during the habiline period, a conflict ensued between individual-level selection, with individuals competing with other individuals in the same group, versus group-level selection, with competition among groups. The latter force promoted altruism and cooperation among all the group members. It led to group-wide morality and a sense of conscience and honor. The competitor between the two forces can be succinctly expressed as follows: within groups selfish individuals beat altruistic individuals, but groups of altruists beat groups of selfish individuals. Or, risking oversimplification, individual selection promoted sin, while group selection promoted virtue.
His view was that 1% of people would never steal, another 1% would always try to steal, and the rest of us are honest as long as we’re not easily tempted. Locks remove temptation for most people. And that’s good, because in our research over many years, we’ve found that everybody has the capacity to be dishonest and almost everybody is at some point or another. […]
People are able to cheat more when they cheat for other people. In some experiments, people cheated the most when they didn’t benefit at all. […]
Small dishonesties matter because they can lead to larger ones. Once you behave badly, at some point, you stop thinking of yourself as a good person at that level and you say, What the hell. […]
We think if we make the punishments harsh enough, people will cheat less. But there is no evidence that this approach works. Think of the death penalty.
You see a shopper trip over in a busy street. Someone else can help. That’s what you tell your conscience. This is the Bystander Effect in action - the dilution of our sense of responsibility in the presence of other people - and it’s been demonstrated in numerous studies over many years.
But life is complicated and psychologists have begun looking at the circumstances that can nullify or even reverse the effect.
photo { Lee Friedlander, New York City, 1963 }
{ In a study of more than a thousand compliments, women accepted compliments from other women 22% of the time. When they came from men? 68%. | The Beheld | full story }
photo { Bill Sullivan }
Applied Cognitive Psychology recently published a study on […] walking while texting (WwT). […]
The researchers looked at how walking while texting alters an individual’s own walking behavior. The researchers found that, on average, people who engaged in WwT where much more cautious than walkers who weren’t texting. Despite this excess in caution, “texters” did not avoid obstacles with more ease than “non-texters.” The scientists concluded that being overly cautious while texting does not decrease the chances of being involved in an accident. […]
In 2010, The Pew Research Center reported that 17% of adult Americans admit to having bumped into objects while texting.
photo { Andy Reynolds }
Recent world tragedies have led to an increased emphasis on the importance of deception training - especially at security checkpoints in airports, bus terminals, and train stations – that is designed to avert potential terrorist attacks. Past research on deception has identified the physiological and behavioral cues that can expose the individual liar, but most major terrorist acts involve two or more coconspirators. […]
“Deception has been studied as an almost exclusively individual-level phenomenon,” said Tripp Driskell. “You have a hard-nosed detective on one side of a desk and a suspect on the other. But there are many situations today, especially in security settings, in which the opportunity exists to question two or more suspects. The bottom line is that there are many occasions in which people conspire to lie or to deceive. In fact, many terrorist acts are carried out jointly by multiple participants or conspirators, and initial encounters with these suspects are likely to be in a group setting.” “We believe that the key to distinguishing truthful dyads from deceptive dyads is the concept of transactive memory,” he continued. “Two people describe an event differently if they had actually performed that event together versus if they did not but are fabricating a story about an event that did not take place. When we are questioned about the event, we recall it also in a joint manner - you recall some information and I recall some information. This is not as evident when two people recall a story that is fabricated or that did not take place.”
If liars betray their true emotions in early, rapid, automatic facial expressions, as some experts have claimed, it would make sense that people who are particularly adept at recognising and processing emotions (one of the hall-marks of emotional intelligence) would therefore have an advantage at spotting deception. […]
The participants performed no better than chance at identifying which clips featured a liar - consistent with past research showing the difficulty of accurate lie detection. However, there was a further paradoxical finding: participants who scored highly on the “emotionality” component of emotional intelligence (pertaining to emotional expression, perception and empathy) were significantly less accurate than average at judging which of the anxious relatives was being genuine.
photo { Jim Goldberg }
An experiment that Sigmund Freud could never have imagined 100 years ago may help lend scientific support for one of his key theories, and help connect it with current neuroscience. […] new data supporting a causal link between the psychoanalytic concept known as unconscious conflict, and the conscious symptoms experienced by people with anxiety disorders such as phobias.
{ EurekAlert | Continue reading }
Freudian psychoanalysis refers to a specific type of treatment in which the patient verbalizes thoughts, including free associations, fantasies, and dreams, from which the analyst induces the unconscious conflicts causing the patient’s symptoms and character problems, and interprets them for the patient to create insight for resolution of the problems.
The specifics of the analyst’s interventions typically include confronting and clarifying the patient’s pathological defenses, wishes and guilt. Through the analysis of conflicts, including those contributing to resistance and those involving transference onto the analyst of distorted reactions, psychoanalytic treatment can hypothesize how patients unconsciously are their own worst enemies: how unconscious, symbolic reactions that have been stimulated by experience are causing symptoms. Its theories have been criticised on numerous fronts including the view that they constitute pseudo-science, but psychoanalysis still has many practitioners of various schools.
photo { Fan Ho, Approaching Shadow, 1954 }
