Hard-Wiring Happiness | Brain Pickings »

With a link to the talk at Columbia University by Srikumar Rao (of Are You Ready to Succeed? fame)

No Pattern = No Guilt? A Modern Way to Blame the Victim « Psychology Applied to Life »

No Pattern = No Guilt? A Modern Way To Blame The Victim

Filed under: Legal & Forensic Psychology — Tags: legal, victim, sports, Texas Tech, Mike Leach, ESPN, blame, rape, sexual assault, justice system — psychoflife @ 7:47 pm Edit This

Most of you (or those of you who watch any ESPN at all) have seen the controversy surrounding Mike Leach, formerly of Texas Tech. Basically, Leach has been fired by the school amid allegations (albeit from an ESPN analyst Craig James’s son, wide receiver Adam James) of abuse and mistreatment. The James family claims that after the wide receiver was diagnosed with a concussion, Leach confined him to an electrical closet and an equipment room (on separate occasions). While I don’t know what I think about how Texas Tech handled anything, what the truth is about what really happened, or whether Adam James has a history of whining and acting entitled, as various commentators and news sources allege, some of the reaction from commentators – particularly Lou Holtz, someone I admit I do not particularly like or find reason to respect anymore (we might all dislike Rich Rodriguez, but you just can’t compare him to Hitler, no matter what) – are particularly outrageous….

More from Stumbling on Happiness [Daniel Gilbert]

From Stumbling on Happiness [Daniel Gilbert]

Why Getting Revenge Isn't Worth It | Psychology Today »

Recently, an editor at PT asked me to dig up some good juicy stories about revenge. Most of the ones I found dealt with how the scorned practiced retribution against their (ex) lovers’ bodily appendages à la Lorena Bobbit.

Reading about these unique crimes of passion got me thinking about my own style of revenge, which surprisingly, is NADA. But why? Is it because I’m a Leo—so self absorbed that I’m not willing to invest the energy and finesse required into seeking meticulously planned retribution? Perhaps, it is simply because I’ve never been hurt so badly… no wait, not true either.

I had a cheating boyfriend too. Like these newsworthy women, I was also enraged, but my rage never turned into a breaking news segment on the 6’oclock news. Instead, I locked myself in the bathroom for hours, trying to talk to my best friend, hoping she would tell me why this happened? I was so busy trying to understand the dynamics of the situation, I didn’t know what to do. Was revenge a healthy response?

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According to social psychologist Kevin Carlsmith of Colgate, the reason for revenge is to achieve catharsis. However, his recent study suggests that revenge is, in fact, counterproductive to achieving that goal. The study explains that those who seek to punish continue to think about the perpetrator, keeping the pain and the anger very much alive in their minds, while those who “move on” or “get over it” think less about the perpetrator. Carlsmith’s team tested this theory by staging an interactive game where players could earn money if they all cooperated with one another. However, if a player did not cooperate, he could earn more at the expense of the others. Researchers planted certain “free riders” who would encourage everyone else to cooperate, but would later not cooperate himself. Two groups were tested—one that could punish the “free rider” (and they all did), and one that could not punish.

Interestingly, the results showed that revenge was not as sweet as it sounds. The punishers reported feeling worse than the non-punishers, but also predicted that they would have felt far worse if they hadn’t been able to punish. On the other hand, the non-punishers, the happier group, believed that they would have been happier if they had the opportunity to seek revenge against the “free rider.”

What does this all mean?

Carlsmith says, “Rather than providing closure, it does the opposite: It keeps the wound open and fresh.”

He suggests that when we don’t get revenge, we can trivialize the event. We are able to tell ourselves that because we didn’t go crazy (hacking away our boyfriend’s body parts), it wasn’t the end of the world, after all. That way, it’s easier to move on.

The verdict?

Studies say no to revenge. It only hurts yourself. Still, love, hate or hurt can drive any woman crazy, so men out there, please be on your best behavior.

Main Reference:

Carlsmith, Kevin M., Wilson, Timothy and Gilbert, Daniel, The Paradoxical Consequences of Revenge (September 29, 2008). Journal of Personalityand Social Psychology, Forthcoming. Available at SSRN:http://ssrn.com/abstract=1277905

Jen Kim is a PT intern

Therapy 32 times more cost effective at increasing happiness than money | Eureka! Science News »

Research by the University of Warwick and the University of Manchester finds that psychological therapy could be 32 times more cost effective at making you happy than simply obtaining more money. The research has obvious implications for large compensation awards in law courts but also has wider implications for general public health. Chris Boyce of the University of Warwick and Alex Wood of the University of Manchester compared large data sets where 1000s of people had reported on their well-being. They then looked at how well-being changed due to therapy compared to getting sudden increases in income, such as through lottery wins or pay rises. They found that a 4 month course of psychological therapy had a large effect on well-being. They then showed that the increase in well-being from an £800 course of therapy was so large that it would take a pay rise of over £25,000 to achieve an equivalent increase in well-being. The research therefore demonstrates that psychological therapy could be 32 times more cost effective at making you happy than simply obtaining more money.

Governments pursue economic growth in the belief that it will raise the well-being of its citizens. However, the research suggests that more money only leads to tiny increases in happiness and is an inefficient way to increase the happiness of a population. This research suggests that if policy makers were concerned about improving well-being they would be better off increasing the access and availability of mental health care as opposed to increasing economic growth.

The new research paper, entitled “Money or Mental Health: The Cost of Alleviating Psychological Distress with Monetary Compensation versus Psychological Therapy” is published online this week at: Health Economics, Policy and Law.

This research helps to highlight how relatively ineffective extra income is at raising well-being. The researchers further draw on two striking pieces of independent evidence to illustrate their point - over the last 50 years developed countries have not seen any increases to national happiness in spite of huge economic gains. Mental health on the other hand appears to be deteriorating worldwide. The researchers argue that resources should be directed towards the things that have the best chance of improving the health and happiness of our nations - investment in mental health care by increasing the access and availability of psychological therapy could be a more effective way of improving national well-being than the pursuit of income growth.

The research also has important implications for the way in which “pain and suffering” is compensated in courts of law. Currently the default way in which individuals are compensated is with financial compensation. The research suggests that this is an inefficient way at repairing psychological harm following traumatic life events and that a more effective remedy would be to offer psychological therapy.

University of Warwick researcher Chris Boyce said:

“We have shown that psychological therapy could be much more cost effective than financial compensation at alleviating psychological distress. This is not only important in courts of law, where huge financial awards are the default way in which pain and suffering are compensated, but has wider implications for public health and well-being.”

“Often the importance of money for improving our well-being and bringing greater happiness is vastly over-valued in our societies. The benefits of having good mental health, on the other hand, are often not fully appreciated and people do not realise the powerful effect that psychological therapy, such as non-directive counselling, can have on improving our well-being.”

Source: University of Warwick

Kierkegaard on the Couch - Happy Days Blog - NYTimes.com »

All progress paves over some bit of knowledge or washes away some valuable practice. Within a few years, e-mail and Twitter moved the art of letter writing to the trash bin. And in an age when all psychic life is being understood in terms of neurotransmitters, the art of introspection has become passé. Galileos of the inner world, such as Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), have been packed off to the museum of antiquated ideas. Yet I think that the great and highly quirky Dane could help us to retrieve a distinction that has been effaced.

These days, confide to someone that you are in despair and he or she will likely suggest that you seek out professional help for your depression. While despair used to be classified as one of the seven deadly sins, it has now been medicalized and folded into the concept of clinical depression. If Kierkegaard were on Facebook or could post a You Tube video, he would certainly complain that we, who have listened to Prozac, have become deaf to the ancient distinction between psychological and spiritual disorders, between depression and despair.

There is abundant chatter today about “being spiritual” but scarcely anyone believes that a person can be of troubled mind and healthy spirit. Nor can we fathom the idea that the happy wanderer, who is all smiles and has accomplished everything on his or her self-fulfillment list, is, in fact, a case of despair. But while Kierkegaard would have agreed that happiness and melancholy are mutually exclusive, he warns, “Happiness is the greatest hiding place for despair.”

Despair is marked by a desire to get rid of the self, an unwillingness to become who you fundamentally are.

Kierkegaard was called “the Fork” as a child because of his uncanny ability to find people’s weaknesses and stick it to them. His lapidary “Sickness Unto Death” is a study of despair, which in the Danish derives from the notion of intensified doubt. Almost as a challenge to keep out the less than earnest reader, Kierkegaard begins “Sickness” with this famous albeit slightly ironic bit of word play:

A human being is a spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is the self? The self is a relation that relates itself to itself or is the relation relating itself to itself in the relation.

For those who do not immediately pitch the book across the room, the magister continues, “A human being is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity.” Despair occurs when there is an imbalance in this synthesis. From there Kierkegaard goes on to present a veritable portrait gallery of the forms that despair can take. Too much of the expansive factor, of infinitude, and you have the dreamer who cannot make anything concrete. Too much of the limiting element, and you have the narrow minded individual who cannot imagine anything more serious in life than bottom lines and spread sheets.

Though it will make the Bill Mahers of the world wince, despair according to Kierkegaard is a lack of awareness of being a self or spirit. A Freud with religious categories up his sleeves, the lyrical philosopher emphasized that the self is a slice of eternity. While depression involves heavy burdensome feelings, despair is not correlated with any particular set of emotions but is instead marked by a desire to get rid of the self, or put another way, by an unwillingness to become who you fundamentally are. This unwillingness often takes the form of flat out wanting to be someone else. Kierkegaard writes:

An individual in despair despairs over something. So it seems for a moment, but only for a moment; in the same moment the true despair or despair in its true form shows itself. In despairing over something, he really despaired over himself, and now he wants to be rid of himself. For example, when the ambitious man whose slogan is “Either Caesar or nothing” does not get to be Caesar, he despairs over it … precisely because he did not get to be Caesar, he cannot bear to be himself.

In America, there is endless talk of the importance of having a dream — that is, a dreamed-up self that you will to become: a millionaire, a surgeon, or maybe the next Dylan or George Clooney. But master of suspicion that Kierkegaard was, he goes on to note that while the man who has failed to become Caesar would have been in seventh heaven if he had realized his dream, that state would have been just as despairing in another way — because in that giddy self-satisfied condition, he would never have come to grasp his true self.

On the issue of depression of which Kierkegaard and his entire family were very well acquainted, Kierkegaard could have been a reductionist. He seems to have recognized that we could be born into the blues. In 1846, he sighed:

I am in the profoundest sense an unhappy individuality, riveted from the beginning to one or another suffering bordering on madness, a suffering which must have its basis in a mis-relation between my mind and body, for (and this is the remarkable thing as well as my infinite encouragement) it has no relation to my spirit, which on the contrary, because of the tension between my mind and body, has gained an uncommon resiliency.

The spirit is one thing, the psyche another: The blues one thing, despair another.

How might Kierkegaard have parsed the distinction for the Doubting Thomas who will only believe what he can glean on an M.R.I.? Perhaps he would describe it this way.

Each of us is subject to the weather of our own moods. Clearly, Kierkegaard thought that the darkling sky of his inner life was very much due to his father’s morbidity. But the issue of spiritual health looms up with regard to the way that we relate to our emotional lives. Again, for Kierkegaard, despair is not a feeling, but an attitude, a posture towards ourselves. The man who did not become Caesar, the applicant refused by medical school, all experience profound disappointment. But the spiritual travails only begin when that chagrin consumes the awareness that we are something more than our emotions and projects. Does the depressive identify himself completely with his melancholy? Has the never ending blizzard of inexplicable sad thoughts caused him to give up on himself, and to see his suffering as a kind of fever without significance?

If so, Kierkegaard would bid him to consider a spiritual consultation on his despair, to go along with his trip to the mental health clinic.
Update: Gordon Marino responds to readers on the classification of despair as a “deadly sin.”

Gordon Marino is professor of philosophy and director of the Hong/Kierkegaard Library at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minn. He is author of “Kierkegaard in the Present Age,” and co-editor of “The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard.” His new book, “Ethics: The Essential Writings” will be published by Random House this summer. An active boxing trainer, Gordon covers boxing for the Wall Street Journal and is working on a book on boxing and philosophy.

Much like a recent article in Psychology Today that questioned why others would not let the author grieve or be depressed, Marino points to a distinction between the emotion or mood of sadness and the clinically diagnosable depression… a distinction that seems to be increasingly lost these days (at least in the everyday use of the words).

How to Keep Your Temper at Work (And Everywhere Else) - Marshall Goldsmith - HarvardBusiness.org »

This week’s question for Ask the Coach:

It’s hard for me to keep my temper, even more so now with the global economic meltdown! Do you have any suggestions on how I can stop from getting angry, especially in the workplace?

MG: Anger can distort our self-perceptions and do harm to the relationships with people important to us, both inside and outside of work. Handling our emotions is a tricky process if we don’t have the proper self-management skills. I’ve asked Mark Maraia, a relationship development coach and trainer who works with people, specifically partners in large law firms, on just such issues as yours. Here’s his response:

MM: I’m often asked, “How do I stop from getting angry?” And the answer I give is, “You don’t. What you need to learn is a process for releasing the emotion.”

Most people are trying to control or manage their anger. It never occurs to them that they can release it—completely! Stifling our feelings or our urges to act out in anger doesn’t work. People can read us… sometimes better than we can ourselves. Stifling our feelings will work against us because when we deny or suppress anger, we end up projecting it. Either we turn it inward, which leads to depression or disease, or we turn it outward, which leads to many of the annoying habits Marshall discusses in his book, What Got You Here Won’t Get You There.

My own path of self-discovery led me to a startling conclusion: We don’t get angry at facts; we get angry at our interpretation of facts. This means, that we have a choice about how we respond to an event or person that triggers our anger. We’re going to get angry - this is a perfectly natural emotion. The problem isn’t our anger; it’s our attempt to justify it rather than release it. Let’s be clear: if you put energy into justifying your anger you CAN’T release it. However, most people find anger or intense rage unpleasant and are highly motivated to rid themselves of it.

When people are hijacked by their anger, I ask them: What process do you have (in the moment) for dealing with negative emotions like anger? Most people don’t have an answer. Some have coping mechanisms, such as stifling or projecting; some use physical exercise, which is useful, but not so much in the moment.

I’ve learned a thought process for dealing with negative emotions that I have practiced for more than 20 years. Anyone can use this tool to deal with negative emotions “in the moment” and later if the negative feeling resurfaces. This is a process of rejecting the negative emotion and it actually interrupts this “doom loop.” Rejecting negative emotions can be used in many situations, both personal and business, in the moment — without anyone knowing you’re doing it!

Here’s how it works. The next time you are overcome with a negative emotion, ask yourself this question: “What am I feeling at this moment?” Get in touch with the feeling or emotion first. Once you’ve done that, make a silent declaration to yourself that you don’t want it anymore! For instance, when someone dangerously cuts you off on the freeway, your thought might be: “I do not want this anger” (or “rage,” if it’s that bad).

Then, replace the feeling with a constructive thought. In this way you make a conscious choice to have a positive state of mind. Your thought might be: “I do not want this anger. I choose to be at peace instead.”

This new skill will take practice. It will probably feel awkward at first. But with enough practice it will become a habit and you will find yourself working through negative emotions in minutes or hours rather than obsessing for days, weeks, or years!

MG: Thank you, Mark, for this constructive approach to releasing negative emotions!

Study: Feeling grumpy 'is good for you' »

(via andetc)

The Psychological Immune System | PsyBlog »

We get over bad moods much sooner than we predict, thanks to the covert work of the psychological immune system.

One of the most incredible things about the human mind is its resilience. Let’s face it, life can be pretty depressing at times, and yet people generally push on much the same as they always have, sometimes even with a spring in their step and a smile on their face.

How come one day it seems like the world is going to end and the next there’s hope? And how come our bad moods lift so unexpectedly, like a brick sprouting wings and disappearing into the clear blue sky?

The reason is that we all have a secret weapon against bad moods: a psychological immune system. When we experience events that send us into an emotional tailspin it kicks in to try and protect us from the worst of it.

The difference between our physical and psychological immune systems is that we know all about the physical. When we get a cold, we can see and feel our body’s defence systems activating. Not so for the psychological immune system. Strangely we seem not to notice it working away to reduce our negative emotions, our secret weapon is also a secret from ourselves.

How bad will rejection make you feel?

Daniel T. Gilbert of Harvard University and colleagues explored this surprising phenomenon in a series of classic social psychology studies (Gilbert et al., 1998). They set up a situation almost all of us would be familiar with: going for a job interview and getting rejected.

First they led participants to believe they were going for a job interview but, beforehand, in amongst a load of other irrelevant questions, asked them how they would feel if they didn’t get it. Of course there was no job to get and they were duly told they didn’t get it, then asked, again subtly, how they felt now.

What Gilbert and colleagues were interested in was the difference between how people predicted they’d feel and how they actually did feel. In other words: do people understand they have a psychological immune system and that it will do its best to improve their emotional state after the rejection?

There was also a little twist in the tail: half the participants were told they were being evaluated for the job by one person and the other half that they were being evaluated by three people. This meant that for the half that were evaluated by one person it was easier to rationalise a rejection since when there’s only one person deciding it’s easier to imagine the decision had more to do with that person’s individual preferences. Being rejected by three people, though, feels like a more considered judgement for the candidate.

Not as bad as you think

Here’s what the experimenters found. People predicted that if they were rejected they would feel about 2 points worse on a scale of 1 to 10 compared with their mood when they started the experiment. Immediately after rejection those for whom the rejection was easy to rationalise only felt 0.4 of a point worse on the scale, not 2 points worse. And after 10 minutes they felt just as happy as when they started the experiment. The immune system had done its work and people’s predictions were way off.

The news wasn’t quite so good for the participants in the difficult to rationalise condition, but it still wasn’t as bad as they expected. Instead of a 2 point drops on the scale of 1 to 10, they experienced a 0.68 drop immediately and 1.25  point drop after 10 minutes, once the rejection had really sunk in. The strain was much greater for the psychological immune system in this condition and it didn’t do so well.

Still, neither groups felt as bad as they thought they would. And this pattern is repeated again and again across other psychology studies. When we’re hit by one of life’s frequent kicks to a tender zone, the psychological immune system starts its work, rationalising what has happened and, over time, stopping it hurting as much as we expected.

In the same paper Gilbert and colleagues report studies on people getting dumped by their partners, told their personalities are deficient and academics failing to get tenure. The pattern repeats: people think it’s going to feel bad, but generally it’s not as bad as they expect, and people recover quicker than they predict.

The merciful unconscious

The very fact that we don’t seem to notice our psychological immune system is probably the only reason it works at all. After all, in order to feel better we have to conveniently forget some important facts, such as how much we wanted the job we didn’t get, loved the partner who walked out or were enjoying the ice cream we just dropped.

But the good news is when life deals out its cruellest blows, our unconscious will be working overtime to find the upside. That’s why life often doesn’t turn out to feel as bad as we think. Soon enough most of us are on our merry way again with a bounce in our step, all thanks to the merciful but covert work of the psychological immune system.