The Essential Read

Doing the right thing for others is also doing the right thing for ourselves.

Thomas Plante, PhD — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 15:16:47 +0000

As we enter the holiday season this week there are often many opportunities to volunteer our time, talents, and money to worthy causes directed to those who may be less fortunate than ourselves. Collecting food for the hungry, toys for children without many resources, or working at a local soup kitchen all help others enjoy a better holiday season than they might otherwise but it makes us feel good too.

Many people report that helping others feels good, often claiming that they get more out of the experience than those with whom they help. However, what you might not know is that there is research that has demonstrated that doing the right thing for others helps us to do the right thing for ourselves.

For example, many colleges and high schools offer students alternative Thanksgiving, Christmas, and spring breaks. At Santa Clara University where I am a psychology professor, these alternative vacations are very popular. Students work with the poor and marginalized of society rather than take a relaxing vacation focused on their own needs and pleasures. Some of these experiences are based in local social service agencies (such as a local homeless shelter) while others occur overseas.

My students and I have conducted and published several studies where we assess compassion, stress management, well being, spiritual fulfillment, and so forth before they leave for a service oriented trip, immediately upon their return, and several months later in a follow up assessment and compare their responses to other students (matched by age and gender) who choose not to go on these alternative community based learning experiences.

After complex statistical analysis, we find that not only are students who help others more compassionate once they return from an immersion service trip and also at follow up, but they also have higher well being and stress management scores too!

We don't know exactly why those who help others obtain these benefits but we believe that it may likely be due to the perspective that they receive while working with those who have much less than they do. They perhaps see that their lives are advantaged relative to others and thus hassles and disappointments don't seem so bad in comparison. How can you be bothered by the size of your dorm room, or the stress of final exams, or by not having the latest iphone when others suffer and struggle? These students developed more gratitude and reasonable expectations for themselves when they compare their lives to those of others.

My colleague, Professor Carl Thoresen, at our Spirituality and Health Institute here at Santa Clara University in fact found that those who volunteer an average of 2 hours per week throughout their lives have a 40% lower mortality rate than those who don't! In his remarkable study with his former student, Dr. Alex Harris now at the Palo Alto VA Hospital, he found that regular volunteering actually was associated with a longer life.

Remarkable!

Doing the right thing for others means helping those in need. Being with them as equals in solidarity is important too rather than behaving in an one-up or superior position. While we perhaps are more likely to volunteer or help others during the holiday season starting with Thanksgiving, we might want to consider doing so year round. It's the right thing to do for others and it's the right thing to do for ourselves as well. A win-win situation!

Party Survival Tactics for Introverts

Sophia Dembling — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 19:11:15 +0000

My husband and threw a small party, a brunch, the other day. An introvert throwing a party? Yep. I'm not antisocial. I like seeing friends and offering hospitality. And in some ways, throwing a party is easier than attending someone else's. For one thing, when I need to check out of the chitchat, I can busy myself with hostess duties--refilling food or drinks, mopping up spills, general tidying. Plus, I usually know everyone at my own parties, which makes mingling less awkward for me.

Still, a party is a party and I anticipated this party with the usual combination of pleasure, high anxiety, and pre-emptive exhaustion. But this time, while I prepared the food, I also prepared myself, thinking about how I could manage my psychic energy.

Because I went into the party conscious of my energy, an interesting thing happened: I was talking to a guest, someone I didn't know well, and suddenly realized that my energy was shooting every which way. Some was going into my conversation, yes. But I also was conscious of other conversations around me. I was aware of my husband manning the barbecue. I was wondering about guests who hadn't arrived yet. Keeping an eye on the dog. Thinking about running back into the house for ... what? I didn't even know.

No wonder social events exhaust me! My poor brain, accustomed to the quiet focus of solitude, wasn't processing my environment efficiently. It was trying to absorb and interpret too much, giving me that familiar my-head-might-explode feeling.

But this time, as soon as I became aware of my scattered energy, I tried to gather it in and focus entirely on the conversation at hand.

Immediately, calm settled over me. I looked at the woman talking to me, who a moment earlier was irritating as a buzzing fly, and became interested in what she was saying. The rest of the party receded to the background and managed to function without me for the ten minutes I permitted myself to focus. And with my psychic energy ratcheted down, I was infinitely more relaxed than I had been a minute earlier.

Hm. That's a good trick: When suffering from sensory overload, focus on something manageable. One conversation. Another weapon in my arsenal of party-survival tactics.

Yeah, I have a few party tricks up my sleeve, don't you? For example, admit it: At some point at a party, you've gone into the bathroom not because nature called, but for a moment of quiet solitude. Closing that bathroom door in that small, silent room ... ahhhhh. It's a whole different kind of relief. I know one woman who admits to shutting herself in the bathroom--at her own parties and others'--and reading.

Actually, I'm currently reading The Introvert Advantage and was tickled to find that author Marti Olsen Laney starts her chapter about socializing with an anecdote about a mid-party retreat to the bathroom.

Speaking of books, snooping in other people's bookcases is a good way to check out of the chitchat. (Snooping in other people's medicine cabinets, however, is not good form, no matter how much time you spend in the bathroom.) Sometimes I even just pretend to look at the books so I can turn my back on the party for a minute and give my brain a break.

If all else fails, I'll step outside for a moment of peace. Actually, in some ways it is my need for party escape that has prevented me from completely and entirely giving up the nasty cigarette habit. I'm still a smoking hobbyist because I like stepping out for a smoke during parties. It's dark and quiet outside there and at most, you might become part of a small (and ever-shrinking) party subset: the smokers/pariahs. I know, I know. Not a good reason to keep smoking but would someone please come up with an alternative?

I also have strategies for extended get-togethers, especially if I'm a house guest or have house guests. For example, one of my Thanksgiving traditions is a long morning walk. I do it not just for the exercise, but for some calm before the social storm. I always pack walking shoes for extended family visits because when I need alone time, I can cite my need for exercise and step out without risk of causing offense. I can buy a full hour of solitude that way and get a little exercise as well.

I've also found, oddly enough, that knitting helps keep some personal space in my brain during those family-just-sittin'-around times. I can remain cognizant of everything happening around me and participate, but the little task engages the wandering part of my mind and somehow approximates solitude in a crowd. I'm not exactly sure why this bit of voodoo works for me, but it does.

What are your party survival tactics? Now's the time to share them, as we careen into the festive season.

Photo by Buster Benson via Flickr (Creative Commons)

The Myths of Intrinsic-Extrinsic Motivation

Steven Reiss, Ph.D. — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 15:22:29 +0000

What happens when a person is offered an incentive to do something the individual would have done anyway, without incentive? Back in 1975 Edward Deci, Mark Lepper, and their colleagues proposed that rewards undermine intrinsic motivation. In contrast, Len Sushinsky and I argued that the effects of rewards depend on how you use them. If you reward a person for just spending time in an activity, the person will become bored with the activity. If you reward a person for learning a new skill, however, the person is likely to show greater interest in the activity. We also asserted the significance of the symbolic effects of the reward. When reward symbolizes success, for example, intrinsic interest should be enhanced. Back in 1975 we were especially critical of the social psychology experiments that used single trial rewards because novel rewards can be distracting.

That was 35 years ago. In the interim many studies were conducted on intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. To prove that rewards undermine intrinsic interest, researchers needed to demonstrate each of the following: construct validity; reliable measures; experimental controls; and favorable experimental results. Let's see what happened.

I believe that intrinsic - extrinsic motivation is an invalid distinction. I would argue that intrinsic-extrinsic motivation is a modern version of mind-body dualism, such that intrinsic motives (e.g., curiosity, self-determination) are those of the mind, while extrinsic motives (e.g., hunger, sex) are those of the body. In any event, I do not think that motives can be divided into just two types. On the contrary, I think there are 16 intrinsic motives (or "needs") and no extrinsic motives. I have no idea how to even state undermining theory when it is appreciated that any of 16 intrinsic needs can motivate interest in an activity, and any of 16 needs can motivate interest in a reward.

I question the reliability of behavioral measures of intrinsic interest. What activities a child chooses while running around a nursery school may vary from day to day for no particular reason. In any event, I do not recall a study demonstrating the test-retest reliability of the behavioral measure of intrinsic motivation. I believe that measures of self-reported interest are reliable, so if I were to review the literature, I would focus only on the results with self report measures.

Further, I think certain interpretations of the behavior measure have led to circularity and self-fulfilling prophecy. Suppose we offer a boy a prize for making a good drawing; the boy draws and gets the prize; and now we observe the boy to see if he still draws on his own. If the boy draws little after having earned the prize, undermining theorists would interpret this as evidence of decreased intrinsic motivation. However, if the boy draws often after having earned the prize, undermining theorists would not interpret this as evidence of increased intrinsic motivation. That is, the boy drawing less supports undermining theory, but the boy drawing more doesn't contradict it. When the boy draws more, undermining theorists assume that the child was looking for a reward and, thus, was extrinsically motivated. When the boy draws less, undermining theorists assume that the child could not have been looking for an incentive and, thus, was intrinsically motivated. This "heads I win, tails you lose" thinking is circular; it biased the publication process by mis-identifying disconfirming studies as invalid. Many studies that did not support undermining theory were never published because of this faulty logic applied in the peer review process.

The undermining studies did not control for the known negative effects of reward. Especially when rewards are novel -- nearly all of the undermining studies used only one trial of reward -- they can be distracting, arouse performance anxiety, or even cause doubt that the experimenter will actually give the reward as promised.

Even after setting aside the above issues, meta-reviewers hoping to demonstrate undermining theory still needed to exclude some unfavorable studies to do so. The mentality of "let's include this study in the meta-review, but not that study" went to what I would regard as extremes. Studies that contradicted undermining theory -- such as a study I published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 1975 -- were not counted in meta-reviews, while the 1977 study by Smith and Pittman was included as supporting undermining even though this study gave multiple trials of a reward that symbolized failure.

Personally, I object to intrinsic-extrinsic motivation because it offers "one size fits all" solutions for educating children and motivating adults. I believe, for example, that some children thrive with cooperative learning, others thrive with competitive learning situations, but intrinsic-extrinsic motivation theory wants all children to grow up with cooperative learning. In the name of self-determination, undermining theory imposes its values on others believing it is for their own good. I think undermining theory could be misused to teach children who are competitive by nature that something is wrong with them for enjoying competition.

Intrinsic-extrinsic motivation has become a dead end. I have seen teachers mope around saying they can't do anything to help students because "the intrinsic motivation has been beaten out of them." Our schools do not need a theory that can function as an excuse for inaction.

Although I disagree with undermining theory, I commend the related social psychological discussion on self-determination. I think the discussion has served to promote policies that helped people with disabilities. I think intrinsic motivation is at its best when used to promote freedom, including the freedom to pursue material rewards. I think undermining theory is at its worst when it implies support for freedom except when people choose materialism, capitalism, or values different from those of undermining theorists.

Aggressive Athletes: Out of Control and Unapologetic

Jared DeFife, Ph.D. — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 07:01:48 +0000

"It is wise to direct your anger towards problems -- not people; to focus your energies on answers -- not excuses." -William Arthur Ward

Recently, University of New Mexico soccer player Elizabeth Lambert was called out by ESPN for punching, kicking, shoving, and throwing elbows against opponents after her team fell behind in a conference tournament game. In her most blatant attack, she yanked back an opponent's ponytail, ripping her to the ground.

News coverage of these incidents follows a time-worn pattern: the highlight reels run, the sports talk jockeys express outrage, the player makes a media apology, the commissioner steps in to deliver a light sentencing, pundits debate whether the punishment was severe enough, the player eventually returns to business as usual, and the video clip lives on in infamy through endless replays on YouTube.

Tuesday, the New York Times published Elizabeth Lambert's apology and an attempt to put her actions "in context". Not surprisingly, the apology seemed scripted, hollow, insincere, and devoid of genuine remorse. After expressing her deep and lasting regret over the incident, she immediately launches into some very familiar externalization and blame refrains:

She distances herself from the actions: "That is not me"... "That's not the type of player I am". Except for the fact that it WAS her, because who else was it? And it's EXACTLY the type of player she is, because that's how she played. She carried on this conduct throughout an entire half of play. She received a yellow card for aggressive play in each of her prior two games.

She minimizes and writes off the context of the situation: "It's a game. Sports are physical." Sure, sports are physical and aggressive. But there are a ton of games played without inappropriately violent incidents. How many times do you see a player whipped to the ground by her hair?

She blames opposing fans and aggressive opponents. She blames the refs for not throwing more yellow and red cards.

And not surprisingly, she blames the media. "I think the way the video came out, it did make me look like a monster." Really? Did James Cameron come in and drop some CGI effects on the video? She goes on: "I definitely feel because I am a female it did bring about a lot more attention than if a male were to do it. It's more expected for men to go out there and be rough." Really?!?! Last time I checked, male players face similar media scrutiny for similar incidents. Anybody ever heard of Ron Artest? What about Oregon running back LeGarrette Blount, who was suspended for sucker punching linebacker Byron Hout after a loss to Boise State? Or Florida linebacker Brandon Spikes, who was blasted in the media and suspended after attempting to gouge the eyes of a Georgia opponent during a pile-up? And then there's wide receiver Braylon Edwards, who in the hours following a particularly poor performance for the Cleveland Browns was arrested for assault after he sucker punched a 130-lb friend of Cleveland sports superstar LeBron James.

It looks like rage in sports is, well, all the rage. So why is every one so angry? Impulsive acts of rage and aggression often emerge following threats to an overinflated and unstable sense of self-worth. Interestingly, the same people with excessive confidence in their talents and abilities can also be incredibly insecure. This kind of fragile egotism is common in sports, especially on the national stage. While sports promote self-respect, team cooperation, and respectful competition, they also fuel pride, fierce individualism, and aggression. Athletes work hard, are driven to win, and are rewarded with fans and fame. At the same time, their image and respect can turn on a dime. Athletes are often judged to be only as good as their last game. Fans and media can shift loyalties in a heartbeat. A poor performance, a lost game, or a losing season can cause a serious blow to the ego, and some people react to these slights with impulsive and explosive rage.

Psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut defined the phenomenon as narcissistic rage. In his book Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty, social psychologist (and PT blogger) Roy Baumeister describes it as threatened egotism. From both clinical and experimental observations, it becomes apparent that the most hostile and aggressive individuals are ones with high, but unstable, self-esteem. Baumeister writes: "These people think well of themselves in general, but their self-esteem fluctuates. They are especially prone to react defensively to ego threats, and they are also more prone to hostility, anger, and aggression than other people". Clinically, it's an extremely difficult dynamic to treat. Fragile egotists rarely take accountability for their actions, constantly blame others, feel like victimized outsiders or outcasts, and react with aggression at any suggestion that they may have some psychological shortcoming.

If Elizabeth Lambert is to blame anything, it should be her own arrogance and insecurity. Indeed, the New York Times article notes that she has often struggled with low self-confidence and uncertainty about her abilities to play at an elite competitive level. It's hard to lose. It undermines all the hard-work it takes to be successful and the pride we take in our talents and accomplishments. We all do things in the heat of the moment that can be hurtful, disrespectful, and regrettable; let ye among us without sin cast the first stone. But the mark of maturity is revealed in how one responds to and grows from such experiences. Character develops from focusing our energies on answers-not excuses.

Procrastination, guilt, excuses and the road less traveled

Timothy A. Pychyl, Ph.D. — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 01:01:58 +0000

People seldom do what they believe in. They do what is convenient, then repent. (Bob Dylan). I certainly agree with the first part of this Dylan quote, but I'm quite sure that there's more to it than repentance, including: distraction, forgetting, trivialization, self-affirmation and denial of responsibility to name a few.

Since the 1950's with Leon Festinger's (and his students') initial work on cognitive dissonance, psychologists have spent countless hours studying how acting counter-attitudinally leads to a negative emotional state. Why? Well, most people try to maintain a consistent and positive sense of self. Most people want to act competently, morally, and to be able to predict their behavior. When our actions and beliefs or even two beliefs are in conflict, they are dissonant. Dissonance is uncomfortable. We want to relieve ourselves from this negative state.

Traditionally, researchers have studied this relief in the form of attitude change. If my behavior conflicts with my attitude, change my attitude. That's easy, and it's common. It's the road most traveled, as they say. I could also change my behavior. But, even Festinger has argued that this isn't simple or easy (and it's seldom the preferred route; it's the road less traveled). As Dylan has noted above, it's easier to do what's convenient, not necessarily what we believe in, then repent.

I just finished reading a doctoral student's proposal for her research on cognitive dissonance. It was a very good read, and she has proposed some interesting studies. Of course, I read her work through my "filter" of procrastination research, and this took me to different places.

That's what I want to blog about today - cognitive dissonance and procrastination.

Not only do "people seldom do what they believe in" but all too often people don't do what they intend to do. They do what is convenient (what they feel like). Then what?

When we intend to act, when we have a goal to which we've made an intention to act, and we don't act (voluntarily and quite irrationally choosing to delay action despite knowing this may affect us negatively), we experience dissonance. This is one of the costs of procrastination.

Dylan says we "repent" afterwards. We could. I've even conducted some research on this repentance in the form of self-forgiveness. It happens, and it seems to help.

More often, I think we engage in alternative strategies to reduce the dissonance created by procrastination. This dissonance is commonly experienced emotionally as guilt, and we do whatever we can to get rid of this negative emotion.

Here are a few typical reactions that researchers have catalogued as responses to dissonance (and ways that we reduce this dissonance).

Distraction - allows individuals to divert their attention away from their dissonant cognitions and avoid the negative affective state caused by dissonance;
Forgetting - can be in two forms, passive and active. Passive is often the case with unimportant thoughts, while we may have to actively suppress important cognitions that are causing dissonance;
Trivialization - involves changing beliefs to reduce the importance of the dissonance creating thoughts or beliefs;
Self-affirmation - creates a focus on our core values and other qualities that reasserts our sense of self and integrity despite the dissonance;
Denial of responsibility - allows us to distance ourselves as a causal agent in the dissonance;
Adding consonant cognitions - often by seeking out new information that supports our position; and
Changing behavior - to better align with our beliefs and values, although changing one's behaviour requires effort and is often not the most convenient way to reduce dissonance.

This is quite a list, and quite frankly I - as do many researchers - think this is just the tip of the iceberg. We have many strategies available to make ourselves feel good as we minimize feelings of dissonance. And, we're quite expert at employing them to keep buoyant day-to-day. It's part of our coping mechanisms.

That said, not all coping mechanisms are adaptive. Quite consistently, research has demonstrated that techniques like distraction, forgetting, trivialization and denial of responsibility are emotion-focused strategies that are not nearly as effective in the long term as planful-problem-solving strategies. Yes, we have to take care of our emotions, but this can't be where the coping stops. If it is, that's just a case of "giving in to feel good," and we'll pay in the long run if this is our dominant short-term strategy.

What we're doing is making excuses for ourselves to bolster a threatened sense of self. Why is self threatened? In the case of procrastination, it's because we failed to self-regulate and do an intended task in a timely manner. Interestingly, we're the only one to blame as we become our own worst enemy. The sad answer seems to be to entrench a little deeper into self-protection.

I think it's time to live with the tension that cognitive dissonance creates and let it fuel more honesty; perhaps an honest look at strategy number 7 - behavior change.

Want to reduce dissonance about not working on an intended task?
Just get started. Simple strategy. Simple truth.

Ah, I know, some of you will read this and it will create dissonance for you as it conflicts with your beliefs. I know because I get emails from people who say, "if it was that simple wouldn't we all just change?" No, because the easier route is to employ one of the other strategies - distraction, forgetting, denial . . . These are the much more traveled routes. We know this from lived experience. We know it from research.

two roads diverged in a wood, and I -- 
I took the one less traveled by, 
And that has made all the difference.
(Robert Frost, 1915)

It's time for the road less traveled - Just get started.

Progress, even a little, will reduce your dissonance, fuel your motivation and enhance your well-being. As Frost knew, the road less traveled by can make all the difference.

The Secret for People Who Don’t Believe in VooDoo

Robert Wilson — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 15:26:46 +0000

    The latest fad in motivation is the Law of Attraction or more popularly The Secret after the motion picture and book by Rhonda Byrne. The idea being that if you use the power of The Secret you will attract health, wealth and friends to you in abundance.

    The Secret takes an old idea and repackages it for today’s society. The core idea is that your thoughts control the world around you. If you have positive thoughts, good things come your way. If you have negative thoughts then bad things come your way. In other words, if you wish hard enough for the things you want -- you will get them. Simple. Or is it? If it were simple, then countless people throughout history would have figured it out over and over, and it would not be much of a secret. Perhaps it takes a little more effort than suggested – or perhaps it is just a pipe dream.

    We, as modern educated people, need more proof. In order to make it palatable to the skeptic in us, The Secret adds an element of science. We are told that quantum physics has identified that all things at the sub-atomic level exist as both particles and as waves – constantly shifting between being solid matter and being pure energy. It is then proposed that our thoughts create brain waves which in turn influence the sub-atomic waves of the entire universe. The Secret claims that the more intent you are in your wish the faster the universe will act upon it. Is it real, or is it VooDoo science?

    If real, it sounds wonderful! Now, if I understand correctly, if I wish real hard I can become a concert pianist and play to a sold out audience in Carnegie Hall? I only see one hitch: I’ve never had a piano lesson in my life.

    The Secret also presents the Law of Attraction as if it had been intentionally kept hidden for centuries. That it was suppressed and held by a few conspirators so that they could control all the wealth of the world. Unfortunately, that notion is nothing other than a marketing ploy to generate interest in the book. It also contradicts the concept of Law of Attraction. The idea that a select group of people have kept it away from the masses intentionally preys on the destructively negative emotion of envy.

    To the contrary, people who have understood the Law of Attraction have made numerous attempts at sharing it with the world at large. The best example is Andrew Carnegie, who was one of the most successful so-called “Robber Barons” of the Industrial Age. Carnegie hired Napoleon Hill to research the most successful people in the world, how they got that way, and then record his findings in a book. The book is Think and Grow Rich and was published in 1937.

    The best thing about Think and Grow Rich is that it takes the mysticism out of the Law of Attraction. So, for those of you who find wishing on a star a bit difficult to swallow as a method for acquiring wealth, here is the real secret:

    Identify your goal. Make a written plan to acquire that goal. Work your plan persistently. Give it your time, attention and energy. The more time and effort you give, the quicker you will achieve it. Visualize it coming to fruition. Draw it, illustrate it, photograph it, then keep it in front of you. Revise your plan as your knowledge grows. Be open-minded to opportunities that arise that may deviate from your plan, but still move you toward your goal.

    The world’s most successful people were extremely focused on achieving one goal. They focused to the exclusion of everything else including family, friends, lovers, recreation, entertainment, vacations and hobbies.

    Next, tell everyone you know about your goal. Spread the word, so that people who can assist you are aware of your intentions. I truly believe that positive minded people attract more opportunities to themselves because they are so pleasant to deal with.

    The formula is simple, but most of us compromise our goals because we want to enjoy a full balanced life. A life filled with friends, family and good times. We focus on our goals when time allows, and in turn, our goals take much longer to achieve. The true secret is staying focused on your goal.

Robert Evans Wilson, Jr. is an author, humorist, and coach. He works with people who want to achieve more without sacrificing life balance. Contact Robert at www.jumpstartyourmeeting.com

The Problem with Dieting

Kelly McGonigal, Ph.D. — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 00:41:57 +0000

A recent study showed just how chronic dieting can turn someone into a food addict.

Bad news for yo-yo dieters this week: according to a recent study, cycles of feast and famine can create fast-food junkies–at least in rodents. The researchers put rats on a cyclic diet of 5 days of standard rat chow, followed by 2 days of the equivalent of rat fast food (high fat, high sugar, highly delicious). In other words, a compressed version of most dieters' swings between self-control and indulgence.

The first thing they observed is that it didn't take long for the rats to develop a clear preference for the unhealthier diet. When put back on a standard diet, they showed signs of anxiety and reduced pleasure from (or even refusal to eat) the standard chow. When the preferred food was available again, their anxiety calmed down, but they overate.

After 7 weeks, the researchers took a look at what this diet had done to the rat's brains. They found increased gene expression for corticotropin releasing factor (CRF) in the rats' amygdalas–that is, the brain was resetting itself for higher levels of stress. This is the same pattern of brain changes observed during withdrawal from alcohol or other addictive substances. Other research has demonstrated that this neural stress response triggers cravings and relapse among the substance-dependent.

In effect, by making the unhealthy food temporarily unavailable, the researchers created food addicts. Food might not be addictive on its own, but prohibiting it can set off a cycle of anxiety, craving, and overconsumption that for all purposes looks like addiction. There's no reason to believe that the food itself was the problem in this study, but the anxiety induced by restricting access to it.

Another study offers hope for ending the cycle. Researchers at Laval University in Québec, Canada have been following the benefits of a unique weight control intervention for over a year. This intervention, called "What about losing weight?" emphasized the possibility of being "healthy at every size."

Rather than making food restriction and weight loss the goal, the intervention emphasized positive things participants could to improve their health: good nutrition (what TO eat, not what NOT to eat), enjoying physical activity, and listening to their bodies. It also taught strategies for appreciating your body as it is now, regardless of size.

Participants in the study were overweight or obese women who had likely entered the study as chronic dieters. By the end of the study, they showed significantly less "food disinhibition," or losing control around food during stress, celebration, or other situations that trigger overeating.

At the 1-year follow-up, two-thirds of participants had lost weight, despite the interventions' explicit focus on positive behaviors, not trying to reduce food intake or lose weight. Compare this to the quick weight loss followed by weight gain that a typical diet leads to. Participants who developed the most "flexible" restraint (as opposed to the rigid restraint of most dieting strategies) were the most likely to maintain a weight loss.

From the first forbidden food (a very tempting apple), prohibition has led to problems. This study shows that focusing on positive steps, not self-denial, can make you less likely to succumb to food-related stress and anxiety. If you want to improve your overall self-control, and regain control around food, you may need give up the ideal of perfect control.

Studies cited:

1. Cottone P, Sabino V, Roberto M, et al. (2009). CRF system recruitment mediates dark side of compulsive eating. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2009 Nov 9. [Epub ahead of print].

2. Provencher V, Bégin C, Tremblay A, et al. (2009). Health-at-every-size and eating behaviors: 1-year follow-up results of a size acceptance intervention. J Am Diet Assoc, 109(11),1854-1861.

You again! The role of significant others in our social interactions

Art Markman, Ph.D. — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 16:56:42 +0000

Some patterns in our lives tend to repeat. You may meet a new person, and suddenly find that you talk as though you were back in college with them. Or, you may meet a new romantic interest, and you speak to them as if they were an old significant other. Or you my have a boss and you find yourself talking to him as if he was your father.

What is going on?

It is hard to have to treat each new person in your life fresh. After all, there must be some value to all of the experience you have had with other people you have met.

Research by Susan Andersen, Serena Chen, and their colleagues suggests that we do use our experience with important people in our lives to help us figure out how to act with new people that we meet.

The basic idea is simple. If you meet a new person, and he has some of the characteristics of your father, then you will engage in behaviors with that person that are similar to the kinds of interactions you have had with your father. You will also assume (unconsciously) that this person will have other characteristics that your father has. So, your interactions with this new person are being shaped unwittingly by your own relationship with your father.

This use of your knowledge of significant others in social settings is a double-edged sword. On the positive side, recycling your social knowledge allows you to decide quickly how to interact with new people. Furthermore, when a person reminds you of a significant other from your past, it allows you to develop a close relationship with him or her fairly quickly.

On the negative side, you are reminded of these significant others unconsciously. You are not deliberately saying, "This man reminds me of my father, so I am going to treat him that way." It happens without your awareness. That can lead to a few potential problems.

First, not every relationship with a significant other from our lives is a healthy and positive relationship. If you had an uncomfortable relationship with a parent, then you may find yourself having uncomfortable dealings with new people who remind you of that parent. You may experience this discomfort without knowing why you feel negatively toward that person.

Second, while a new person in your life may remind you of someone from your past, that person is still unique. The research by Andersen and Chen suggests that once you make a link between some new person and a significant other from your past, you begin to assume that this new person shares other characteristics with this significant other. As a result, you may fail to pick up on subtle differences between this new person and people from your past.

If you find yourself in a new relationship with someone (whether it is a friendship, a work relationship or a romantic relationship) and you find that you are starting to repeat old patterns of behavior, then ask yourself whether there is someone from your life that is like this person. If you do a little digging, you may discover that you are actually treating this new person as if they were someone else. Once you know why you are treating a new person using old patterns of behavior, you can try to be more aware and mindful of creating unique patterns of interaction

CBT = Existentialism?

Matthew Hutson — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 16:03:21 +0000

I've recently come to the conclusion that cognitive behavioral therapy, the empirically-demonstrated gold standard for treating depression and a host of other problems, necessitates a belief in existentialism, a philosophy holding that we live in a meaningless universe.

How can happiness derive from appreciating the fundamental pointlessness of existence?

Existentialism (at least atheistic existentialism) does not argue that meaning does not exist, only that it does not exist out there in the real world. All meaning is human-constructed. You have complete freedom to interpret events however you like (a freedom that some find nauseating.)

CBT similarly places interpretive control in the hands of the individual. The premise is that thoughts lead to emotions (which lead to behaviors), and we can learn to control our thoughts--even if they've become habit. We're not at the mercy of an emotional system automatically placing valuation on experiences.

I suppose my connection between CBT and existentialism comes from a conversation I had several years ago with a girlfriend who was studying philosophy. I'd said that because of my depression I was an existentialist--I had trouble finding meaning in things. On the contrary, she said, I was *too* depressed to an existentialist. I was fatalistic. I instinctively saw everything as bad.

In high school I gave a talk to my school about my battle with depression. Toward the end I said:

"One of the most important tactics I have learned in my fight for control over my life is the power of optimism. Yes, this sounds trite, and even I flinch when I hear the O word, but it's not as much of a joke as I thought. Basically, I've learned that nothing in the world -- nothing that happens around us, no piece of news, no event -- is inherently bad or good. They just are. I have an incredible amount of control over my reactions to the world. As a result of depression, I'm used to judging nearly everything as bad, and it's gonna take a lot of work to change thinking habits that I've been using for my entire life. But now, instead of letting myself become a victim, I fight these habits, and I try to let myself believe that things can go my way."

Looking back, I had stumbled across the grounding for CBT. I was not quite adept at following through, however, judging by my later conversation with my ex. And I'm still not there. I have a hard enough time putting a positive spin on burning my toast. I don't know how I would deal with something much more absurd and tragic like the sudden death of someone close.

But at least I'm past the point of repeating the mantra "If it weren't for bad luck, I'd have no luck at all."

The Red Book: One Man's Turmoil

Guest Blogger — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 18:39:38 +0000

By Dave Levitan

Before I read a single page of Carl G. Jung's newly published Red Book, I admit that I harbored a degree of skepticism. The book had lain dormant for half a century, first in the cupboard of Jung's Zurich home and then in a bank vault. My interpretation of that fact alone? "It was so crazy that even Jung didn't think it should see the light of day." We can call that skepticism, right?

The other aspect to my dubiousness lay in the fact that this text was described by the iconic psychologist himself as that from which "everything else is to be derived." Jungian analysis and theory exists at least to some extent on the fringes of the psychological landscape, with dream analysis and controlled conflict between the conscious and subconscious (known as "individuation") as its central tenets. That there could be a huge, red leather-bound, highly illustrated and calligraphic founding tome to this genre struck me as mildly overblown. And I had seen its actual contents described as a long series of Jung's "active imaginations," or waking dreams that he hoped would help him understand his own mind. My skepticism, I think, was not unreasonable.

Still, though, I was excited to get started. What would it be like to wade through those dreams and visions, trying to make sense of one man's internal turmoil? Would it be like reading a dream diary, or a mythological treatise, or a narrative of insanity? I dove in.

*****
Even the physical act of reading the Red Book is daunting. It is no bedside paperback, measuring 18 inches by 12 inches and tipping the scale at around 10 pounds. The first half of the book has ultra-high-definition scans of every original page, illustrations included, in a largely unreadable German-Latin-Greek calligraphy. The process of bringing those pages into the published version was brilliantly described, along with much of the Red Book's history, in a September New York Times Magazine feature.

The second portion of the book, if you can tear your eyes from multi-limbed dragons devouring things or goat-like humans staring your face off, contains the translation and various introductions and analyses by Jung scholar Shonu Shamdasani. Jung's text is divided into three parts: Liber Primus, Liber Secundus and Scrutinies. The text is littered with hundreds of footnotes from the translator, explaining mythological references and describing differences between various unpublished drafts. It is like reading a giant textbook, only, you know, fucking insane.

*****
Liber Primus reads almost like a personalized Bible. "There is no other way, all other ways are false paths," Jung writes. "I found the right way, it led me to you, to my soul. I return, tempered and purified. Do you still know me?"

Much of the first book is a conversation, or a series of interactions, with the author's soul, who appears to be female. He describes visions and voyages into the desert, dreams and his frustration at an inability to interpret them. I search for why this book might be that from which the rest of Jungian thought is derived and find lines like this: "Dreams are the guiding words of the soul. Why should I henceforth not love my dreams and not make their riddling images into objects of my daily consideration?"

There is a rhythm and cadence to his writing that is mesmerizing, but the content is so hard to decipher or interpret that it continually ruins that rhythm. I come to the line: "You will consider yourself mad, and in a certain sense you will in fact be mad," and, for the moment at least, I find it hard to argue.

*****
The stories in Liber Secundus begin to feel like parables. They are followed each time by lengthy ramblings and lessons about the nature of consciousness and the author's own psyche, but I find myself straining to find any particular thread on which to pull. The prophet Elijah and Salome, of John the Baptist's head-on-a-platter fame, are central characters in the story, and like almost every character they seem to come away from their interactions with Jung much worse for the experience.

Shamdasani wrote in the introduction that the book is generally about "the rebirth of a new image of God in his soul." In the context of the time period's intellectual leanings, I suppose this makes sense. Nietzsche had declared "God is dead" only 30 years earlier, and the inherent instability of language and consciousness portrayed by early modernist writers and artists painted an uncertain, almost vacant picture of our inner worlds.

The process Jung describes, though, seems anything but smooth and purifying, hardly a rebirth from that void at all. A section labeled Nox Tertia (third night) is full of terrified self-indictment: "Everything inside me is in utter disarray. Matters are becoming serious and chaos is approaching."

I finish Liber Secundus, and then Scrutinies, more interested, or involved, than when I began, but meaning still isn't exactly jumping off the pages. I call up Dr. Stephen Martin, a Jungian analyst and co-founder and President of the Philemon Foundation (whose goal is simply the publication of all of Jung's works), for some perspective.

"You're not going to buy the book and say ‘oh now I understand everything,'" Martin says. "If you want to have an intelligent discussion about the depth of the psyche, you're now going to have to refer to the Red Book. But it will be one of those longstanding processes of trying to understand something that's immensely complex."

*****
Am I just skimming the surface, then, and shortchanging a deep thinker by wondering about psychotropic gas leaks in his study, or an unruly personal chef mixing in peyote with his evening meal? Shamdasani, who translated the work and is among the foremost Jung scholars in the world, would certainly say so. At the unveiling of the Red Book exhibit at the Rubin Museum in New York in early October, he said: "This was no lurid psychosis, this was no psychedelic trip.... This was a controlled experiment. He knew exactly what he was doing.... This was not someone stripping and running around the lake."

No, stripping and running around the lake would at least be fun. This was a strange and dark encounter with one's subconscious, and reading through it makes me think that one's subconscious is probably "sub" for a reason. But for anyone interested in psychology, Shamdasani insists the Red Book is required reading: "Regardless of whether you are a believer or a detractor, this is an essential text."

In the end, though, I almost feel cheated. "You will consider yourself mad," Jung told me. It feels small, and cheap, and in a sense unworthy and off-base, but I no longer feel mad once the book is closed: I feel confused, intrigued by the book's mythological and literary merit, and maybe a bit dismissive of its supposed importance. Martin, though, cites the imperative that Jung himself used to deliver to his patients as a means to finding meaning in the book's pages: "When Jung says, ‘create your own Red Book...' what he means is, value the material that comes out of your own inner world, and treat it with respect, dignity and objectivity. And if you do that, your life will be different."

In spite of such exhortations to the contrary, I crawl out from under the 10-pound behemoth much as I began: skeptical. So yes, read the Red Book for its aesthetic appeal and for its uniqueness, for its lyricism and its place in a period's canon, but expect no revelations to come. One man's "controlled experiment" is another man's naked run around the lake.

How To Remember Things

Alex Lickerman, M.D. — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 14:48:59 +0000

I once came up with a metaphor I thought perfectly captured the sheer mass of material my classmates and I were expected to memorize in our first two years of medical school: it was like being asked to enter a grocery store and memorize the names of every product in the store, their number and location, every ingredient in every product in the order in which they appear on the food label, and then to do the same thing in every grocery store in the city.

When I look back now I can't imagine how any of us were able to do it. And yet we did. The mind's capacity to store and recall information is truly wondrous. Since I attended medical school we've learned a lot about memory and learning. Though much of what follows are techniques I used to survive my first two years of medical school, much of the science that proves they work is new.

STRATEGIES FOR REMEMBERING

Become interested in what you're learning. We're all better remembering what interests us. Few people, for example, have a difficult time remembering the names of people they find attractive. If you're not intrinsically interested in what you're learning or trying to remember, you must find a way to become so. I have to admit I wasn't so good at this in medical school. The Krebs cycle (I provided the link only to prove how immensely boring it is) just didn't excite me or relate to anything I found even remotely exciting (though I made myself learn it anyway).
Find a way to leverage your visual memory. You'll be astounded by how much more this will enable you to remember. For example, imagine you're at a party and are introduced to five people in quick succession. How can you quickly memorize their names? Pick out a single defining visual characteristic of each person and connect it to a visual representation of their name, preferably through an action of some kind. For example, you can remember Mike who has large ears by creating a mental picture of a microphone (a "mike") clearing those big ears of wax (gross, I know—sorry—but all the more effective because of it). It requires mental effort to do this, but if you practice you'll be surprised how quickly you can come up with creative ways to create these images. Here's another example: how often do you forget where you left your keys, your sunglasses, or your wallet? The next time you put something down somewhere, pause a moment to notice where you've placed it, and then in your mind blow it up. If you visualize the explosion in enough detail, you won't forget where you put it. Remember: memory is predominantly visual (unfortunately, I can't think of a good image to help you remember this fact right at this moment).
Create a mental memory tree. If you're trying to memorize a large number of facts, find a way to relate them in your mind visually with a memory tree. Construct big branches first, then leaves. Branches and leaves should carry labels that are personally meaningful to you in some way, and the organization of the facts ("leaves") should be logical. It's been well recognized since the 1950's we remember "bits" of information better if we chunk them. For example, it's easier to remember 467890 as "467" and "890" than as six individual digits.
Associate what you're trying to learn with what you already know. It seems the more mental connections we have to a piece of information, the more successful we'll be in remembering it. This is why using mnemonics actually improves recall.
Write out items to be memorized over and over and over. Among other things, this is how I learned the names of bacteria, what infections they cause, and what antibiotics treat them. Writing out facts in lists improves recall if you make yourself learn the lists actively instead of passively. In other words, don't just copy the list of facts you're trying to learn but actively recall each item you wish to learn and then write it down again and again and again. In doing this, you are, in effect, teaching yourself what you're trying to learn (and as all teachers know, the best way to ensure you know something is to have to teach it). This method has the added benefit of immediately showing you exactly which facts haven't made it into your long-term memory so you can focus more attention on learning them rather than wasting time reinforcing facts you already know.
When reading for retention, summarize each paragraph in the margin. This requires you to think about what you're reading, recycle it, and teach it to yourself again. Even take the concepts you're learning and reason forward with them; apply them to imagined novel situations, which creates more neural connections to reinforce the memory.
Do most of your studying in the afternoon. Though you may identify yourself as a "morning person" or "evening person" at least one study suggests your ability to memorize isn't influenced as much by what time of day you perceive yourself to be most alert but by the time of day you actually study—afternoon appearing to be the best.
Get adequate sleep to consolidate and retain memories. Not just at night after you've studied but the day before you study as well. Far better to do this than stay up cramming all night for an exam.

WHY MEMORY MALFUNCTIONS

One of the most common complaints I hear in clinical practice is about memory loss. Unfortunately, as a normal part of the aging process, many people start to find they can't bring to mind names, places, and things as easily as they used to be able to do and worry they're facing the beginning of dementia. "Benign forgetfulness" is the name we give to a process that occurs with normal aging in which a memory remains intact but our ability to retrieve it becomes temporarily impaired. Usually we try to describe the name or thing we can't recall and when someone names it for us we instantly remember the word we wanted. As long as this is age-appropriate and doesn't significantly interfere with normal functioning, there is no increased risk for progression to dementia. However, the trick lies in assessing what is and isn't "age-appropriate." Formal testing is sometimes necessary in ambiguous cases. Reassuringly, in one study, patients over the age of 50 who initially presented with what was considered to be benign forgetfulness had only a 9% chance of progressing to dementia. Unfortunately, cognitive impairments other than memory loss are correlated with a higher risk of progression to dementia.

Another reason people often have trouble remembering things is because memory is a function of concentration. Which means when you multi-task you tend to forget more easily. Have you ever entered a room only to forget why you did so? More likely you'd remember if you weren't simultaneously planning your dinner for that night and trying to remember the phone number of the person who just left you a message. This also explains why people who suffer from depression or anxiety have a harder time remembering things: both conditions interfere substantially with the ability to concentrate. The strength of a memory is also determined by the emotional state that accompanied the original event. Emotion, negative or positive, tends to embed events in our memory like a chisel carves lines in stone. A double-edged sword for people suffering from PTSD.

DECREASING THE RISK OF DEMENTIA

Here are three things you can do that have been shown in studies to decrease the risk of mental deterioration as you age:

Exercise your body. Evidence suggests this not only retards normal age-related memory deterioration but reduces the risk of developing dementia. It doesn't even have to be vigorous exercise. Just 150 minutes of walking per week has been shown to be of benefit. Whether more intense exercise results in a greater risk reduction remains unknown.
Exercise your mind. Evidence also suggests that doing things that work the mind may delay or prevent memory loss. This research is just in its infancy, so here's as good a guide as any to figuring out what activities will work: if an activity requires you to take breaks, it probably qualifies. We can watch television, for example, for hours on end without becoming mentally fatigued, but solving math problems, learning to knit, or even reading all require effort that tires the mind.
Take ibuprofen. Though one study suggests a daily dose of ibuprofen decreases the risk of developing dementia, the risk reduction appears too modest to justify the increased risk of stomach bleeding that accompanies ibuprofen's daily use and I do NOT recommend this. However, if you're already taking ibuprofen for some other condition, like arthritis, here might be an added benefit.

If the mind is indeed like a muscle (and research is validating that model more and more) then memory may very well be like muscle tone: the more the mind is used, the more robust memory may become. As I've moved on from my medical school days to reach early (very early) middle age, I've found myself experiencing benign forgetfulness far more than I like. As a result, I find myself comforted that the old adage "use it or lose it" is seeming more and more not just to apply to the body but to the mind as well.

If you enjoyed this post, please feel free to explore Dr. Lickerman's home page, Happiness in this World.

Fair Play

David Rock — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 21:20:22 +0000

Recently, while finishing up delivering a talk in Silicon Valley, I found myself struck by a deep sense of dread. I hadn't brought enough copies of hand out materials for the unexpectedly large group. This meant that at any moment a small mob of otherwise friendly people might turn against me, driven to expressing mild rage from a sense of unfairness. It was enough to put me on edge for some time until I labeled what was going on.

Fairness is the fifth and final domain of threat or reward I have written up in a series of posts, the others being Status, Certainty, Autonomy and Relatedness. These five ideas together make up the 'SCARF' model that has become a popular way of thinking about what happens in the brain during social situations. In later posts I will go further into the implications of the whole model, and how it relates to management, creating change, bringing up kids and other issues.

Fairness is a primary reward or threat
The fact that being treated unfairly can generate a strong threat response is unlikely to be a surprise to anyone. However what may be a surprise is that a sense of fairness can also be rewarding, in and of itself, and significantly so. Fairness, it turns out, is another primary threat or reward: the experience activates the same network that monitors real pain and pleasure.

Prime your brain to look out for fairness issues and they start to appear everywhere. Political clashes, both verbal and violent, tend to be driven by fairness issues. I recently turned on the television to see a villager in Africa shouting that she was willing to die to right the injustice of an unfairly rigged election. Fairness-generated emotions can run high in more mundane situations too: the feeling of being "taken advantage of" by a taxi driver taking a longer route can wreck an otherwise great day, despite the relatively insignificant money involved. It's the principle that counts. The legal system is deeply about fairness. Think of people who spend enormous sums of money to "right wrongs" in court, with no obvious economic win other than "justice". (In the UK the department that looks after the courts is called the ‘Ministry of Justice'. It could be called the ‘Ministry of Fairness' in some ways.) We crave fairness, and some people risk their life savings and even their lives to get it.

Fairness can be more rewarding than money
Golnaz Tabibnia, an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University, studies fairness and the way people make judgments about it. "The tendency to prefer equity and resist unfair outcomes is deeply rooted in people," Tabibnia explains. One of Tabibnia's studies, in collaboration with Matt Lieberman, uses an exercise called the "Ultimatum Game." In the Ultimatum Game, there are two people, who receive a pot of money to split between themselves and the other person. One person makes a proposal and the other person has to decide whether to accept the proposal or not. If they don't accept the proposal, neither of them gets a reward. "'Inequity aversion' is so strong", Tabibnia explains, "that people are willing to sacrifice personal gain in order to prevent another person from receiving an inequitably better outcome."

Surprisingly, when people receive five dollars out of ten dollars, their reward center lights up more than when they receive, say, five dollars out of twenty. ‘In other words, the reward circuitry is activated more when an offer is fair than when it's unfair, even when there is no additional money to be gained,' Tabibnia explains. Fairness, it seems, can be more important than money.

Fairness doesn't intuitively feel like it is of the same importance as say food or sex. Because of this, many people don't tend to value fairness highly enough, and can be blindsided by the intensity of a fairness response. This is another example of Maslow perhaps being wrong. Society values survival needs such as food, well before social issues like fairness. As a result, someone planning a day-long team meeting might pay attention to ensuring everyone has a good lunch break, but forget all about people's perception of fairness around how the day is organized. More and more research points to the idea that distractions from a sense of unfairness could be harder to handle than an empty stomach.

Fair play
Neuroscientist Stephen Pinker has a theory about where this intense response to fairness comes from, outlined in his book How the Mind Works. Pinker thinks that the fairness response has emerged as a by-product of the need to trade efficiently. In your evolutionary past, when you couldn't store food in the refrigerator, the best place to store resources would have been by giving "favors" to others. Resources were stored in other people's brains, as potential reciprocal snacks down the road. This mental exchange was especially important in hunter-gatherer days, when protein sources arrived intermittently: a bison felled by one person would be too much meat just for his family. To be good at this kind of trading you need the ability to detect "cheaters," people who promise but don't deliver. In this way, people with strong fairness-detectors would have evolutionary advantages.

These days, with fridges and bank accounts, you don't need to trust other people in such a primal way. Your fairness detecting circuits are still there, but now they tend to get more of a work out in the form of leisure activities, such as the game of "cheat" played by kids, or Texas Hold-Em poker, played by millions of adults the world over. These games provide an opportunity to flex your cheating and cheater-detecting muscles. While fairness in real life can generate a threat or a reward, detecting unfairness can be fun for the whole family.

When it's just not fair
Perceiving unfairness generates intense arousal of the limbic system, with all the attendant challenges this brings. As one example, because of the generalizing effect, accidental connections become easier: if you think one person is being unfair, everyone else may seem to be acting unfairly too. Many arguments between people, especially those close to us, involve incorrect perceptions of unfairness, triggering events that activate an even deeper sense of unfairness in all parties. This often starts by someone misreading one person's intent, being slightly mind-blind for a moment. The result can be an intense downward spiral, driven by accidental connections and one's expectations then altering perception.

Since unfairness packs a hefty punch, it's easy to get upset by small injustices when you're tired, or when your limbic system already has a strong base load of arousal. One study showed that the amount of seratonin in the blood, which is involved in feeling content, determined how people reacted to unfair situations. When you feel low contentment, you can have a strong response to unfairness. You have to be extra careful in these situations. If you are kept awake by young children, it's easy to get cranky with a partner asking you for help. If you've had a big day at the office, it's easier to get unnecessarily annoyed with a supplier who you think might be ripping you off, even though it might only be for pennies.

Fairness comes up a lot when dealing with children. "Do as I say, not as I do" is a statement parents wish they could use, but kids are finely attuned to fairness from an early age.

Justice is it's own reward
On the plus side, fairness is hedonically rewarding, activating dopamine cells deep in the brain, like a good meal or an unexpected bonus at work. The feeling you get from a sense of fairness is one of connecting safely with others, so it's linked to relatedness. When you feel someone is being fair, there is a feeling of increased trust. Studies show that a self-rated sense of trust and cooperation increase when people experience fair offers. Oxytocin levels increase in fair exchanges too, and oxytocin increases levels of reported trust in people.

When you experience fairness, the increasing levels of dopamine and oxytocin help generates an overall 'toward' emotional state. As a result you become more open to new ideas and more willing to connect with other people. This is a great state for collaboration with others. Yet so many structures inside organizations, especially large organizations, work against employees feeling a sense of fairness. Think of the all too common complaints about pay, performance, and transparency. In the big downsizings of 2009, one firm's executives agreed to a pay cut of 15%, making a big deal that this was three times more than the 5% cut all staff were being asked to undergo, to help reduce layoffs. While a 15% cut meant thousands of dollars a year less pay for an executive, this didn't affect their bonuses, which were worth millions of dollars. You can imagine how employees felt about that when word got around.

One interesting implication of fairness research is the idea that workplaces that truly allow employees to experience an increasing perception of fairness might be intrinsically rewarding. This may explain why people perform better in certain workplace cultures. I asked one executive I shared a can ride with why he had stayed at the same company for 22 years. ‘I don't know' he replied. ‘I guess it's because they always seem to do their best to do the right thing by everyone'. Organizations trying to increase a sense of engagement could do well to recognize that people experiencing a sense of unfairness may get as upset (and therefore distracted). as being told they wont get to eat for a day.

There is research on corporate restructuring showing that when people understood that downsizing decisions were made fairly, the impact of the downsizing was dramatically less. On the other hand, people who feel themselves to be treated unfairly by an organization can generate no end of complaints. Living in a world that appears unfair impacts people's cortisol levels, their well-being, and even their longevity. No wonder so many people won't stay in corporate jobs when they think that their company isn't doing the "fair thing" for its workers, customers or for the community at large.

There is one place you can go to experience a regular increase in the sense of fairness, and that's to work for social-justice organizations that distribute food to the poor or generally serve under-privileged communities. When you right perceived wrongs, like people being hungry when there's food being wasted two blocks away, you increase your sense of fairness. Organizations that allow people to take time on community projects are letting their employees feel rewarded by increasing their sense of fairness.

In summary, a sense of fairness is not just a nice to have if you want to be able to think clearly, collaborate, learn or influence others. Without a sense of fairness, people experience a degree of distraction from a threat response, that inhibits their ability to focus. Ignore fairness issues at your peril.

Why Do We Have Emotions?

Ilana Simons, Ph.D. — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 23:31:57 +0000

Mental illness often results from excess emotion. The overflow of emotion doesn't just drive mood disorders like Major Depression but fuels most psychological problems: phobias, anxiety, trauma, hoarding, obsessiveness, borderline personality disorder, and drug and alcohol abuse.

Why (oh why) were we made to feel so much? It's as if our wiring (which, when given the options of emotion and reason, gravitates to the former), were out to screw us.

The popular answer is the evolutionary one--that emotions have helped us survive. When we lived in the wild--with monkeys and mastodons and tigers--we needed emotions in order to react quickly to dangerous stimuli. If faced with a tiger, it's better to be rocked with a fear so strong it triggers a rush of blood than to sit around and theorize about the threat. We developed an emotional system because it could induce quick responses to danger (for theorists on emotion and evolution, see Antonio Damasio, Joseph LeDoux, and Robert Trivers).

But the claim that emotions keep things alive is too simple. After all, you can name a lot of efficient, enduring response systems that don't include emotion. Rivers are one--they skirt serious barriers and survive through history. Or consider an ivy plant. It has a very good sensory system and no love, fear, or drama to weigh it down. It winds itself up from the ground, over rocks, through the locks of gates, finding places to cling. It can endure weather changes, feed itself, and grow new cells. That's a solid response system not driven by emotion. So, again, why were we built to carry the burden of so much sentiment?

An evolutionary answer with a bit more detail is that we're animals: more aggressive and self-conscious than rivers and plants are. Aggression and the desire to survive that comes with selfhood helped scoot animals up the food chain. If you want to create a system that works hard to survive, make it consciousness and emotional. It will want to keep itself around.

On top of that, human beings are the most self-conscious animals. This makes us increasingly invested and crafty in our need for survival. We developed basic emotions (fear, joy) like the other animals. But then we developed a more complex rational system too, in which we could imagine our own past and future selves. It was the ability to reason about old and future selves (to set traps, and not just run from tigers) that allowed us to dominate the food chain. Rational thought helped us shape the world for our future: rerouting rivers, breeding plants, caging tigers.

We now have two highly developed systems: reason and the emotional core still sitting there, like the primitive animal inside us. As said above, mental illnesses often result from an imbalance in those two. And emotions kick us in the ass these days for a number of reasons. For one, even though emotions like fear used to be helpful in the wild, they're less efficient helpmates in modern civilized life. Of course we still have plenty to fear, but our threats are not usually immediate, like a tiger, but rather distant, like money and war and homelessness. The old fight-or-flight system is inadequate to the modern threats. You can fight a tiger; but you have to work hard, for a long time, to fight a financial crisis or the threat of terrorism. So, a lot of us suffer from a more generalized fear, or anxiety. There's a sense of danger without a practical opportunity to respond to it quickly. Perhaps emotions get out of whack today because they bubble without an effective outlet.

In turn, therapy these days often focuses on keeping our systems in balance--balancing our emotion and reason. One nice concept along this line comes from Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT). DBT has established the concept of the "wise mind," which is a useful integration of the emotional and rational selves. We get to "wise mind" when we're able to step back from emotion and reason with it. The wise mind puts emotion and reason in conversation, or uses reason to calm emotion down.

We likely have emotions because they help us survive. But they also tend to drive us crazy when given too much reign. Of course what I'm saying barely scratches the surface. After all, the other reason why we developed emotion is that emotion helps build relationships and bind communities. We would not be able to coordinate our goals so well if we did not love and fear and trust and feel a sense of pride. In this light, here's post #2, which focuses on the social use of emotions.

How Saying No to Sex Can Help You Learn to Love It Again

Debby Herbenick, Ph.D., M.P.H. — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 18:28:10 +0000

People often ask me to tell them one single thing they can do that will change their sex life for the better. My often surprising response? Say no to sex. That’s right: I firmly believe that the occasional, well-delivered "no" can make for more loving, pleasurable, mindful sex – a topic I spent a good amount of ink writing about in my book, Because It Feels Good: A Woman’s Guide to Sexual Pleasure and Satisfaction, and an idea that has resonated with many women and men I speak with at book clubs, parties, conferences and events. So how does this work?

We know from research studies that both women and men – but most often women – have sex that they don’t want to have. They may feel obligated to have sex, as if it’s their duty to their husband or partner or that if they don’t have sex with their partner then they may lose them. Many women have resigned themselves to believe that it’s easier to lie there and have sex, even to feign enjoyment, than to deal with their feelings of guilt, conflict or worries about being somehow sexually inadequate.

Sometimes having sex when you don’t want to turns out well. A few minutes into kissing or touching you may think “Hey, this feels good! How come we don’t do this more often?”

Other times, sex feels the opposite of good. It feels sad. It feels disconnecting or empty. You wonder why your partner can’t tell that you don’t want to be there doing what you’re doing. And soon you enter what I call a Cycle of Dread where bad sex begets dread which begs more bad sex which begets more dread: On the way home from work, you start thinking about how your partner is going to try to have sex with you or you go to sleep early, or fall asleep in your toddler’s bed after story time, hoping to avoid another attempt at sex.

This is where the “no” comes in.

You may shy away from saying “no” to sex because you worry – or have seen first hand – that your partner will feel rejected, unloved, or unwanted. He may have asked if you still find him attractive or if you’re in love with someone else. Trying to explain and deal with your different desires can be overwhelming or just plain annoying.

But what if you learned to say “no” in a way that didn’t hurt the relationship but actually enhanced it? What if it could free you of the Cycle of Dread and bring back pleasurable sex?

In Because It Feels Good – my attempt to turn science-backed information about sex into concrete tips that women and men can apply to their everyday lives – I wrote in depth about the concept of the enhancing “no”. To deliver an effective, enhancing, better-sex-no, you need to:

1) Be personally aware of, and honest with yourself, about the true reason you don’t want to have sex (Too tired? Stressed? Angry at your partner? Feeling sick? Different sex drives?)

2) Communicate the true reason to your partner.

3) Offer something else that is relationship-enhancing.

What does this look like? Consider something like this:

“As much as I love you and want you and need you, I’ve got to tell you: I am utterly exhausted after chasing the kids around today and it’s easier for me to get into sex, and to enjoy it, when I’m relaxed and rested. I’d love to take a rain check for another night or for the weekend, when your parents have the kids.”

Or this:

“I want to be sexual with you tonight but for some reason, the idea of sex the way we normally do it isn’t where my mind’s at tonight. What do you think about making out for a while and then maybe masturbating together or having oral sex? It’s been a while since we did that.”

As I say in Because It Feels Good, there’s no way around it: a “no” is still a “no.” But a “no, not tonight” feels a lot like rejection to many of us whereas a “no, but can we do this other thing?” helps us to feel closer and stay in the game. It also opens the door to opportunities for making out, oral sex, or sex on another night that feels deliciously pleasurable and, most of all, wanted. Which, over time, helps get women (or men) out of a Cycle of Dread and back into the real of desire.

Debby Herbenick, PhD, MPH is a research scientist at Indiana University, a sexual health educator at The Kinsey Institute, and the author ofBecause It Feels Good: A Woman's Guide to Sexual Pleasure and Satisfaction. Her personal blog can be found at MySexProfessor.com

Can't Control Your Eating?

Alan Fogel — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 18:13:54 +0000

A study published in the September 2009 issue of Qualitative Health Research claims that some women's tendency to binge eat is "not about the food." The team of authors from Melbourne, Australia, led by Shane McIver, analyzed the personal journal writings of 25 women who were enrolled in a 12-week yoga treatment program. The authors of the study reported that, "Women's comments suggested that the program appeared to encourage a healthy reconnection to food, as well as the development of physical self-empowerment, through cultivating present moment awareness. Specifically, women perceived an overall reduction in the quantity of food they consumed, decreased eating speed, and an improvement in food choices throughout the program. The women also reported feeling more connected to and positive about their physical well-being."

Here's the stunner about this study: "There was a deliberate effort to not offer any information regarding the selection of foods, nor dietary advice, nor any discussion concerning weight loss." No special diet? No harping about weight loss? So, this must have been one of those sweaty, heart pounding intense yoga workouts? Wrong.

The women received weekly hatha yoga sessions. "The primary aim of the yoga program was to encourage the women to develop a daily yoga practice in three distinct, yet overlapping domains: physical awareness through movement and stillness (asana), breath awareness (pranayama), and concentrative meditation (dharana and dhyana). This latter domain included meditation instructions for eating mindfully, which were given at the program's commencement. Instructions involved four main steps to be followed at each meal: (a) to begin by removing all distraction (such as television or reading), (b) to notice how much food was placed in the mouth, (c) to notice the taste, and (d) to not take another mouthful prior to swallowing the last."

This yoga program was all about cultivating the body sense, our ability to stay connected to our inner physical sensations and emotional states without intervening thoughts or judgments. With respect to food, this means slowing down to actually feel the smell, look, and taste of food. Body sense means being in the present moment with the feeling of food moving down the esophagus and feelings of hunger and satiety, empty or full. No matter what is on your plate or who is around you, body sense is the cultivation of an inner knowing of when to eat, how to enjoy it, and when to stop eating.

How would one know when it is time to stop eating? Feeling full is one way, but this is not always easy to sense, especially when there is more food available or if others around you are eating. I, personally, am more likely to notice that eating becomes effortful long before I notice that I am full. At the start of a meal, if I'm hungry, I am tuned in to selecting foods that enhance pleasurable sensations of taste and smell and texture. I notice if foods are soft or chewy, warm or cool, spicy or bland. At some point in the meal, these pleasures begin to diminish. I become aware of the effort of lifting the food to my mouth, chewing, and swallowing. That effort probably was there from the start of the meal, but I did not notice it because I was enjoying the food. So, when the effort is the most salient body sense, I stop eating. My body sense of effort is confirmed because when I stand up and walk around, I begin to notice the heavy fullness of my belly.

There are other forms of effortful (as opposed to sensual) eating to which women are especially vulnerable. Women, on average, are more likely to feel like they have to make an effort to fit in to social pressures. Women prone to overeating compared to those who were not, for example, were more likely to order dessert at a restaurant following a filling meal if other people in the group were planning to order dessert. Some forms of binge eating reflect subversive and unconscious urges to eat while attempting to diet in order to please others. Not only has the individual suppressed normal nutritional needs but they also have suppressed negative emotions surrounding the stressful demands from others. The effort to please others outweighs the body sense of whether the food feels good and is good for you.

As if that is not enough, women spend most of their lives making an effort to look good in order to please others. Girls as young as 5 years were more likely to endorse statements showing dissatisfaction with their own bodies after experimental exposure to thin Barbie dolls and to thin female images in the media. As girls reach adolescence, body dissatisfaction can be exacerbated or lessened, depending upon whether the peer group and family is focused on external ideals and criticism or supporting an embodied awareness sense of personal well-being.

You would think that the effort to look good would have salutary effects on a woman's relationship to food. To look good, eat a balanced diet that agrees with the body sense of food, right? In your dreams, maybe. The reality is that a woman's attention is directed outward to what others think about her body and away from what her body feels like and what her body needs to be healthy. In the early phases of the yoga study, one of the participants put it this way: "How is it possible to be so unconscious of the way you appear, yet be so obsessed with it? I think I disassociate from my body 90% of the time." Another said, "I hate what I'm doing to myself. I recognize it as self-punishment/mutilation but my intellect and emotions aren't communicating with each other. The urge to overeat is overriding all other considerations, even vanity. . . . Body feels awful. Aches + pains all over, bloated, constipated, flatulent, headaches, nausea, puffy ankles."

This inability to connect with the body sense, and a fear of focusing inward on one's own body, led to another paradoxical research finding. When women exercise in environments with mirrors, for example, they actually feel less positive about themselves, offsetting any mood improvement benefits of exercise per se. Why? Negative body image has a direct impact on self-esteem. Women who feel less satisfied with their breast size, their facial attractiveness, and their sex appeal are less likely to express their opinion (on any topic) in public. They are less confident in their ability to succeed, feel more self-conscious and more ashamed of their bodies. They are also less likely to feel satisfied in their sexual relationships and show less assertiveness regarding their own sexual needs. These effects, by the way, are not related to how the woman looks to others, nor to her age, but entirely based on how she feels about herself.

That's the bad news. The good news is that by the end of the 12 week yoga program focused on developing body sense, most of the women noted dramatic and surprising results. How about this statement: "I feel peaceful and hopeful. I'm eating like a normal person, enjoying what I eat and not obsessing like usual. I'm really enjoying eating fresh fruit + vegies, grainy bread, soy products. I'm cooking regularly and am not currently afraid of feeling hungry. Sometimes I enjoy the feeling of hunger as my body digests the lovely healthy food I've just fed it." Overall, women reported being more in control of their bodies, they showed less fear of being around food, they often left food on the plate (a totally new experience for many of the participants), and expressed a greater sense of well being.

This research study -- and others cited in this blog post and in the previous post on embodied eating in this blog series on body sense - show the importance of cultivating the body sense for health. In another post on embodied exercise, I showed that body awareness during exercise enhances its overall benefits. The yoga study suggests that the key factor in many forms of human health improvement may be the body sense. Why is body sense so important? The psychophysiology of the body sense is intimately tied to neural circuits that regulate all the major functions of the body including digestion, respiration, immune function, and mental health. When we are sensually and emotionally in touch with ourselves, our natural systems of self-regulation can perform without the interference of expectations and judgments.

Having completed the 12 week program, will the participants remain connected to their bodies and maintain their newfound positive self-image? Maybe, but only if they continue to practice cultivating the body sense: mindfulness around eating and other body functions. Sorry folks, but there is no pill or easy one-time cure. Body sense practice, contrary to the old maxim, does not make perfect. Practice, however, is more likely to help us stay in balance and connected to our bodies most of the time. Practice yoga. Practice meditation. Practice tai chi. Practice moving with awareness. Practice exercising with awareness. Practice eating with awareness. Practice anything that helps you stay aware and keeps you coming back after you (inevitably but hopefully only temporarily) lose yourself. Practice, practice, practice.

Eleven Myths of De-Cluttering.

Gretchen Rubin — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 23:10:44 +0000

Today: Eleven myths of de-cluttering.

One of my great realizations about happiness (and a point oddly under-emphasized by positive psychologists) is that outer order contributes to inner calm.

But as much as most of us want to keep our home, office, car, etc. in reasonable order, it’s tough. Here’s a list of some myths of de-cluttering that make it harder to get rid of stuff.

Myths of Cluttering:
1. "I need to get organized." No! Don't get organized is your first step.

2. "I need to be hyper-organized." I fully appreciate the pleasure of having a place for everything, and perhaps counter-intuitively, I believe it’s easier to put things away in an exact place, rather than a general place (“the third shelf of the coat closet,” not “a closet.”) However, this impulse can become destructive: if you’re spending a lot of time alphabetizing your spices, organizing your shoes according to heel height, creating eighty categories for your home files, etc., consider whether you need to be quite so precisely organized. I find this particularly true with toys – I’ve spent hours sorting pretend food, Polly Pockets pieces, and tea sets, only to find everything a jumble the next day.

3. "I need some more inventive storage containers." See #1. If you get rid of everything you don’t need, you may not need any fancy containers.

4. "I need to find the perfect recipient for everything I’m getting rid of." It’s easier to get rid of things when you know that you’ll be giving them to someone who can use them, but don’t let this kind intention become a source of clutter, itself. I have a friend who has multiple piles all over her house, each lovingly destined for a particular recipient. This is generous and thoughtful, but it contributes mightily to clutter. Try to find one or two good recipients, or if you really want to move your ex-stuff in multiple directions, create some kind of rigid system for moving it along quickly.

5. "I can’t get rid of anything that I might possibly need one day." How terrible would it be if you needed a glass jar and didn’t have one? Do you have gigantic stores of things like rubber bands or ketchup packets? How many coffee mugs does one family use?

6. "I might get that gizmo fixed." Face it. If you’ve had something for more than six months, and it’s still not repaired, it’s clutter.

7. "I might learn how to use that gizmo." Again, face it. If you’ve had a gizmo on the shelf for a year, and you’ve never used it to make gelato or label a sugar jar, it’s clutter.

8. "I might lose a ton of weight and then I’d fit into these clothes again." If you lose a bunch of weight, you’ll want to buy a new pair of jeans, not a pair you bought seven years ago.

9. "I need to keep this as a memento of a happy time." I’m a huge believer in mementos; remembering happy times in the past gives you a big happiness boost in the present. But ask yourself: do I need to keep all these t-shirts to remind me of college, or can I keep a few? Do I need to keep an enormous desk to remind me of my grandfather, or can I use a photograph? Do I need fifty finger-painted pictures by my toddler, or is one enough to capture this time of life? Mementos work best when they’re carefully chosen – and when they don’t take up much room!

10. "I need to keep this, because the person who gave it to me might visit my house and be hurt when it’s not on display." Is that person really likely to visit? Is that person really likely to remember the gift? Will the person really be upset by the lack of viewing of the gift?

11. "If I have any available space, I should fill it up with something." No! One of my Secrets of Adulthood is Somewhere, keep an empty shelf. I know where my empty shelf is, and I treasure it.

* Today I had coffee with the fabulous Pamela Redmond Satran, author of many books, including the recent New York Times bestseller How Not To Act Old and the absolutely hilarious blog of the same name. Enter at your own risk -- dangerously addictive, book and blog both.

*Today is the day when I gently encourage (or, you might think, pester) you to spread the word about the Happiness Project. You might: -- Forward the link to someone you think would be interested
-- Link to a post on Twitter
-- Pre-order the book for a friend
-- Put a link to the blog in your Facebook status update
Thanks! I really appreciate any help. Word of mouth is the BEST.

Deep Rationality

Douglas Kenrick — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 18:32:42 +0000

Charles Darwin and Daniel Kahneman: Radical changes are in store when these two men are properly introduced to one another.

Behavioral economics has become an increasingly popular topic over the last few years, as demonstrated by the success of a string of books like Predictably Irrational, Nudge, and Sway. Challenging the classical model of rational man -- which depicts people as well-informed decision-makers - behavioral economists have incorporated the insights of cognitive and social psychology - fields where researchers have done a rich business demonstrating people's tendencies to use simplistic and irrational biases. A classic example is Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky's demonstration of loss aversion - the finding that people are more psychologically moved by a loss of $100 than by a gain of an identical amount. To a rational economic mind, $100 is worth exactly $100. But Kahneman won a Nobel Prize for a body of work illustrating that this seemingly simple and rational equation ain't necessarily so.

Just down the aisle in the bookstore, the last few years have also witnessed a bustling business in the various volumes on evolutionary psychology, with Steven Pinker's How the Mind Works and Blank Slate as definitive examples of the genre. The evolutionary approach begins with the presumption that we can better understand everything about human behavior, from altruism to xenophobia, by considering our species in light of what biologists have learned about other animals (even those who don't invest in stock portfolios). With regard to decision-making, a central message of evolutionary psychology is that the human mind is best conceived not as a massive information-crunching computer, but as a multitude of mini-minds -- a collection of independent mental adaptations specifically designed to solve particular adaptive problems by crunching different kinds of information in very different ways.

Just as the infusion of cognitive psychology had a jolting impact on how we think about economics, the infusion of evolutionary psychology is likely to produce yet another seismic uplift in the terrain. On the evolutionary view, what seems irrational at the surface level may be, on closer examination, deeply rational.

The implications of the evolutionary multiple-mind viewpoint for everyday economic decision-making are thus far largely unexplored. But there is already evidence that the decision-rules a woman uses when thinking about how to negotiate with a stranger in the marketplace do not follow the same math as the mental rules she'd use in deciding how to exchange resources with her son --who shares half her genes, and is dependent on her generosity if he is himself to survive to reproductive age. Besides the different mental rules for dealing with strangers and close kin, everyday people need yet another set of decision-biases for interacting with friends -- to whom they are linked not by shared genes, but by trust-based reciprocal exchanges. And romantic partners do business according to still another set of decision-rules. In a series of studies I've conducted with a team of colleagues including Vlad Griskevicius, Jill Sundie, Bob Cialdini, we've found that a person's decisions -- about whether to conspicuously and wastefully throw around his or her wealth, to display his or her benevolence and nurturance, to risk a fight, or to go against group opinion -- will ebb and flow in predictable ways depending on whether that person is a she or a he, and on whether he or she is in a mating frame of mind, as opposed to thinking about status or worrying about life and limb.

Three of my former graduate students -- Jill Sundie, Norm Li, and Vlad Griskevicius -- had studied economics before shifting their interests to evolutionary psychology. Sundie and Griskevicius are now professors of business (at University of Texas and Minnesota, respectively). Norm Li is a professor of social psychology with joint appointments at the University of Texas and Singapore Management University. In a paper titled "Deep rationality: The evolutionary economics of decision-making," Griskevicius, Sundie, and Li join forces with me and with Arizona State's Steve Neuberg and Jessica Li to reconsider the intersection of evolutionary psychology and behavioral economics. The paper was just released this month as part of a special issue of the journal Social Cognition focusing on the "rationality debate."

It has been very useful for economists to use a common coin of "utility" to compare the psychological value of desirable outcomes as different as a tasty meal with friends, a romantic vacation, and a Porsche Carrera GT. But it's now the 21st century, and high time to seriously consider the differences between different forms of utility. Our evolutionary approach to decision-making assumes that the human mind keeps the distinct forms of currency separate, and evaluates different commodities very differently depending on whether that human mind is located in a man or a woman, and whether that man or woman is at the stage of life when they are seeking a mate, caring for a child, or helping take care of his or her children.

Besides the decision-making variations arising from a person's sex and life history stage, our model suggests that each individual decision-maker has several different economic subselves, and that the subself in charge right now depends on which adaptive threats and opportunities are currently prominent in the environment. What looks like irrationality to one subself may be deeply rational to another. Your marketplace subself, which is dominated by the question: "What's in it for moi?" would be aghast at the exorbitant bill your parental subself has run up sending junior through college, for example.

The logic of Deep Rationality suggests that fundamental biological motives such as mating and self protection should drastically change all the traditional behavioral economic biases, such as temporal discounting (the tendency to take a loss for an immediate payoff rather than wait for a larger one), and probability discounting (the tendency to prefer a certain payoff over a chance at a larger one). The same motives should also move around what a person regards as a luxury versus as a necessity, and should do so very differently for men and women. A series of experiments by Norm Li and his colleagues has already begun to demonstrate the profound importance of distinguishing between luxuries and necessities in different aspects of social decision-making.

Let's reconsider the classic case of "loss aversion" in this light. Evolutionary theorists including E.O. Wilson have suggested that ancestral humans might have been generally inclined to worry more about avoiding losses than acquiring gains, given that they frequently lived close to the margin of survival (extra food would be nice, but insufficient food could mean death). This provides a possible adaptationist hypothesis about past conditions, but does not fully exploit the scientific strengths of the modern evolutionary approach, which can be used to generate specific new hypotheses about when and how loss aversion should ebb and flow with functionally important motivations. For example, the usual inclination toward loss aversion should be erased or even reversed when a mating motive is activated. Furthermore, this erasure should occur only for males, and not for females. Why? As evolutionary biologists have noted, female mammals (including Homo sapiens) have an intrinsically high minimum investment in their young, and this inspires them to be relatively more selective in choosing mates. As a consequence, males must compete to be chosen by the more discriminating females. There are various ways for a male to say: "Pick me! Pick me!" One is to display a noticeable wasteful display (such as a peacock's feathers or a Porsche Carrera); another is to directly outcompete the other males (butting them with antlers or winning a fight for a well-appointed executive office). To beat out the competition, it helps to take risks, and indeed male mammals become especially risky during the mating season. It follows that men primed to think about mating should act like big-horned sheep during the rutting season - when too great an aversion to losses would prevent the kind of risky competition that will beat out the other males.

If our logic is correct, then the standard Kahneman and Tversky loss aversion curves (now reprinted widely in modern economics textbooks) will change in predictable ways for men under the influence of a mating motive. As part of a series of ongoing experiments funded by the National Science Foundation, Jessica Li, Vlad Griskevicius, Steve Neuberg and I have been testing this particular hypothesis. Stay tuned and I'll fill you in on our specific results. But for now, let me close with a suggestion: We are on the verge of a totally new way of thinking about economic rationality. To say that we are "predictably irrational" only captures half of the truth. As we begin to update behavioral economics with an understanding of the evolved modular mind, our seeming irrationalities will be found to be not only predictable, but at a more important level, deeply rational.

For further reading:

Kenrick, D.T., Griskevicius, V., Sundie, J.M., Li, N.P., Li. Y.J., & Neuberg, S.L. (2009). Deep rationality: The evolutionary economics of decision making. Social Cognition, 27, 764-785 (special issue on the rationality debate).

Li, N.P., Bailey, J.M., Kenrick, D.T., & Linsenmeier, J.A. (2002). The necessities and luxuries of mate preference: Testing the trade-offs. Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, 82, 947-985.

Kenrick, D.T., Sundie, J.M., Nicastle, L.D., & Stone, G.O. (2001). Can one every be too wealthy or too chaste? Searching for nonlinearities in mate judgment. Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, 80, 462-471.

Griskevicius, V., Tybur, J.M., Sundie, J.M., Cialdini, R.B., Miller, G.F., & Kenrick, D.T. (2007). Blatant benevolence and conspicuous consumption: When romantic motives elicit strategic costly signals. Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, 93, 85-102.

The Lips Don't Lie

Joe Navarro, M.A. — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 14:21:14 +0000

When it comes to feelings and emotions, the lips can be invaluable; they can even help us to detect deception. Ever notice when people are stressed, their lips disappear or get smaller. You often see this at the airport as flights are being cancelled or while watching a movie that is very tense. We certainly see it on the faces of those testifying before congress, in politicians making painful declarations, and even in peoples' reactions to what others have said.

Lips convey a lot of information that is often ignored or not even observed. Rich with nerves and highly vascular, the lips react in real time to the world around us. So when people receive bad news or witness a horrific event their lips begin to disappear, becoming very thin as vaso constriction takes place. Under extreme stress they disappear completely or are compressed together.

In relationships, couples will immediately notice when their partner has issues because they notice the tightening or compressing of the lips. Even kisses will seem different under stress as blood flow is restricted which affects their fullness, warmth, and pliability. Our lips react to the reality of the moment and communicate accurately our feelings and sentiments to others.

Because disappearing or compressed lips are universal behaviors, controlled by the limbic system, these are behaviors that can be relied upon and are authentic. We don’t realize how our lips look and feel, but others will notice.

Lip biting, like lip compression, is one of the ways that we pacify ourselves when we are stressed. It helps to relieve tension that may be minor and transitory. However, when something more significant is bothering us, our limbic system, in reaction to events, will compel the lips to narrow and disappear if the stress is significant enough.

We can use these behaviors to assess the level of comfort and discomfort noticeable on those we are observing. Students getting ready to take tests will demonstrate their stress level with these behaviors as will individuals who are suddenly confronted with disagreeable circumstances. As an FBI special agent, I used these behaviors (lip compression, disappearing lips) to determine what specific subjects stressed the interviewee suggesting there might be “guilty knowledge."

One of the things I noticed early on in my career was that once people settled down, their lips would compress or disappear when they heard a specific question they did not like or while they were answering that question. I also found that the level of lip compression or disappearing lips varied with the level of stress caused by the topic.

For example, when I would ask someone, “Do you own a gun?” They would say “yes,” and then I would notice the lips would disappear or be compressed slightly. Then I would ask, “Do you own a “Smith and Wesson revolver?” their lips would not react all that much. However, when I asked, “Do you own a “Glock pistol?” knowing that this was the weapon found at the crime scene and unknown to the public, I noticed that the lips became really narrow and compressed and that the corners of the mouth would also turn downward . This to me was extremely significant in verifying that this individual was severely stressed by the question and most likely by his guilty knowledge.

In a forensic setting you quickly realize that not all words we hear have the same weight. If you killed someone with an ice pick, you will not react to the question, “Did you kill her with a machete?” as you would if you were asked, “Did you kill her with an ice pick?” In polygraphy, this is called the “hidden key.” By asking specific questions you can elicit very precise information as to what bothers an individual or, in some cases, that they have specific guilty knowledge.

Once more, as I have explained in previous articles and in my book (What Every Body is Saying), these behaviors (lip compression and disappearing lips) in and of themselves are not indicative of deception; they are, however, indicative of distress and tension. I use them to guide me in the investigation so that I can determine what information to pursue that is causing such distress. I can also use them to assess for comfort and discomfort in others.

So next time you are in a meeting, with a colleague, with your loved ones, or conducting a serious interview, watch those lips. They say so much and not just with words. For additional information including my free nonverbal communications bibliography please visit http://www.jnforensics.com/. You can also follow me on Twitter at: navarrotells.

Is humor ever not funny?

Elana Premack Sandler, L.C.S.W., M.P.H. — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 16:22:00 +0000

"The Office" has gotten a lot of attention over the past week or so for its Halloween episode, which showed boss Michael Scott in a noose, sharing a particularly poorly worded suicide prevention message. I was struck by how a similar image, also in the public sphere this past week, generated a different kind of response. Ireland's "Sunday World" newspaper published an image of a man in a noose as a way of drawing public attention to police delay in removing the man's body.

I wonder if because "The Office" is a comedy, we are prepared to laugh at whatever comes across the screen. But, in the case of the photo published in the newspaper in Ireland, the image of a man hanging was not at all humorous. Similar image, very different contexts.

What's different?

1. The death of the man in Ireland really happened. He was someone's real family member, someone's real colleague, someone's real friend.
2. The newspaper felt it had a duty to cover the "story" of because the body was not taken down immediately after having been discovered.

Michael Scott, love him or hate him, is not a real person. There is humor that possibly results from showing a hanging man sharing a suicide prevention message - there must have been a reason that I laughed along with everyone else. But, to those who have defended "The Office" in its choice to include this scene because the show is intended for adults and airs during the evening, I want to point out that actual children were involved in the filming of the scene. Real people watching this scene have lost loved ones to suicide by hanging. Vulnerable individuals watch funny TV too, and I have no doubt that some were watching this episode, laughing along with their families, co-workers, and friends. What message was sent to those people - those children, survivors, vulnerable people - about suicide? That it's something to mock? Laugh off? Not take seriously?

The response to the "Sunday World" photo was swift - people felt that, even with a duty to report the news, the newspaper did not have to publish a photo of the man. Publication of such a photo was triggering to those who have lost someone to suicide and, in general, voyeuristic.

The response to "The Office" episode was very interesting to observe. I've included some of the comments posted on the "Entertainment Weekly" website below:

"Let me say, I'm a huge Office fan and would usually ridicule the PC police with everyone else. Unfortunately one of my 19 year old son's best friends had killed himself with a shotgun just a week earlier. After this scene he left the room very shaken and didn't return. It just brought all the pain back, especially since it was played for laughs. So I guess it all depends on your circumstances, experiences and timing. One person's joke is another person's nightmare..."

"No, it wasn't in poor taste, but it wasn't particular[l]y funny either. They could have come up with something better."

"I[t] didn't offend me, but I didn't find it funny. Some of you just don't, or can't understand. Suicide is one of those things you never really appreciate until you've lost someone important to you. My sister took her life this past May. It's not something to joke about, sorry. I'm not thin skinned at all, I just think the lack of compassion for others is pathetic."

"The Office" does not have a duty to include information about suicide, or any means of death, in its show as a public service. If anything, it has a responsibility, if it chooses to include this kind of information, to do so thoughtfully and safely. Humor can be an opening for a real conversation about a difficult issue, so I'm not suggesting that the office avoid tough topics. Many have said that Michael Scott's is offensive in an equal-opportunity kind of way - no one and no group is off limits, and that this isn't the first time the show has touched on suicide ("Safety Training" episode). So, talk about - or even make jokes about - suicide. Don't demonstrate suicide on the show.

Is sport a religion?

Nigel Barber, Ph.D. — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 13:41:54 +0000

Psychologists are closing in on the conclusion that sport has many of the same effects on spectators as religion does. Here is Daniel Wann [2001], a leading sport psychologist at Murray State University, and his co-authors:

The similarities between sport fandom and organized religion are striking. Consider the vocabulary associated with both: faith, devotion, worship, ritual, dedication, sacrifice, commitment, spirit, prayer, suffering, festival, and celebration. p. 198

It may seem odd, to equate religion with sport entertainment but it must be understood that prior to mass communications, religious ceremonies were a source of entertainment for ordinary people who rarely attended a theater or traveled to a sporting event. Sports and religion may get categorized separately but their intersection is difficult to miss.

As Wann and collaborators note, various scholars discuss sport in terms of "natural religion," "humanistic religion," and "primitive polytheism" pointing out that "spectators worship other human beings, their achievements, and the groups to which they belong." And that sports stadia and arenas resemble "cathedrals where followers gather to worship their heroes and pray for their successes." [Wann, et al., 2001, p. 200]

If ritual may be entertaining, then entertainment, as experienced in a sports stadium, may be ritualistic. Fans wear the team colors and carry its flags, icons, and mascots. Then there is repetitive chanting of team encouragement, hand-clapping, booing the other team, doing the wave, and so forth. The singing of an anthem at a sporting event likely has similar psychological effects as the singing of a hymn in church.

Given that sports entertainment has obvious similarities to religious rituals, it is reasonable to ask whether the connection between fans and their preferred sport has psychological effects that are comparable to religious experiences - effects that account for religion as a worldwide human adaptation.

Sports as a substitute for religion
As a group, sports fans are fairly religious, according to research. It is also curious that as religious attendance rates have dropped off in recent decades, interest in sport spectatorship has soared. Moreover, research has debunked several stereotypes about sports fans that seem incompatible with religiosity. Fans are not lazy, Nor are they particularly prone to violence. Male fans do not have bad marriages.

Some scholars believe that fans are highly committed to their favored stars and teams in a way that gives focus and meaning to their daily lives. In addition, sports spectatorship is a transformative experience through which fans escape their humdrum lives, just as religious experiences help the faithful to transcend their everyday existence.

From that perspective, the face painting, hair tinting, and distinctive costumes are thought to satisfy specific religious goals including identification with the team, escape from everyday limitations and disappointments, and establishing a community of fans.

So far, the transformative aspects of fandom are quite close to those associated with religion. Lest the fans become too smug, here is a socialist critique:

Shaped by the needs of capitalist systems, spectator sports serve vested interests as a type of "cultural anesthesia," a form of "spiritual masturbation," or "opiate" that distracts, diverts, and deflects attention from the pressing social problems and issues of the day [Wann, pp 201-202].

Of course, Karl Marx famously declared that religion is the opium of the people, Not all religions numb people to their social and moral responsibilities, however. On thinks of liberation theology in Latin America, for instance. No one ever claimed that sports had such redeeming qualities, however. According to one critic (Harris, 1981), "it has turned into a passion, a mania, a drug far more potent and widespread than any mere chemical substance." It is the new opium of the people.

Harris, S. J. (1981, November 3). Sport is new opium of the people. Democrat and Chronicle, p. 3B.
Wann, D. L., Melznick, M. J., Russell, G. W., & Pease, D. G. (2001). Sport fans: The psychology and social impact of spectators .New York: Routledge.