Tuesday 28 May 2013

Impact of context on pleasure :Paul Bloom - Best Ted Talks

Uploaded on 27 Jul 2011

Goering - "when tld his favourite painting was a forgery, he look like for, the first time, he discovered there is evil in the world"

http://www.ted.com Why do we like an original painting better than a forgery? Psychologist Paul Bloom argues that human beings are essentialists -- that our beliefs about the history of an object change how we experience it, not simply as an illusion, but as a deep feature of what pleasure (and pain) is.

Paul Bloom (psychologist)

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Paul Bloom

Born	December 24, 1963 (age 49) Montreal, Quebec
Residence	New Haven, Connecticut
Citizenship	U.S., Canadian
Fields	Psychology
Institutions	Yale University, University of Arizona
Alma mater	MIT, McGill University
Doctoral advisor	Susan Carey

Paul Bloom (born December 1963) is a Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science at Yale University. His research explores how children and adults understand the physical and social world, with special focus on language, morality, religion, fiction, and art.

Gratitude Journal App - Change Your Thoughts, Change Your Life

47 Awesome Comments

My second app is live in the App store and it’s a potential life changer for you.
It’s called Gratitude 365 (download in the app store)

I wanted to focus on gratitude because of how it can change us. Especially when we’re not feeling so great and generally unhappy.

When life sucks, we tend to focus on only the bad things. The more we think about what we don’t have, what we wish we had, and what we hate, the more that cycle continues.

I know how frustrating that is.

You can begin to stop that cycle of negativity by changing what you give attention to every day.
Last year I wrote about doing a 30 day gratitude experiment. If you’ve never done one and are looking to start changing your life, I highly recommend you to try it.

Gratitude shifts your mind from focusing on what you don’t have, to what you do have. The more you think about what you have, the more you will create abundance, property, well-being, and happiness.
You can begin by starting a gratitude journal.

What is a gratitude journal?

A gratitude journal is a way to consciously call attention to the things for which you are thankful each day.

Why should I keep a gratitude journal?

A group of scientists did a gratitude experiment:

“The first group kept a diary of the events that occurred during the day… the second group recorded their unpleasant experiences, [and] the last group made a daily list of things for which they were grateful.

The results of the study indicated that daily gratitude exercises resulted in higher reported levels of alertness, enthusiasm, determination, optimism and energy. Additionally, the gratitude group experienced less depression and stress, was more likely to help others, exercised more regularly and made more progress toward personal goals. According to the findings, people who feel grateful are also more likely to feel loved.

McCollough and Emmons also noted that gratitude encouraged a positive cycle of reciprocal kindness among people since one act of gratitude encourages another… McCullough suggests that anyone can increase their sense of well-being and create positive social effects just from counting their blessings.”

Let me recap that for you.

less depression and stress
more likely to help others
exercised more regularly
made more progress toward personal goals

Need more reasons why?

-Research has proved that practicing gratitude reduces fear, anxiety, high blood pressure, and heart disease. Bottom line, gratitude can extend your life.

-Your relationships will improve because instead of focusing on the 20 percent of what that person doesn’t fulfill, you’re focusing on the 80 perfect that is wonderful and perfect about that person. Failed marriages can be restored through gratitude. Parents and children can form a closer bond. Your relationships will deepen.

-Focusing on what you do have instead what you don’t will increase your wealth. You will focus your mind on abundance and discover new opportunities. You will see the potential all around you. You will attract people in your life to help you. Gratitude can make you wealthy.

Do I have to write in my journal every day?

No. The important thing is that you make a great effort and not miss too many days.

How long does it take?

You can spend as little as five minutes a day. Of course the more you put in, the more you get out of it.

How to Start the Practice of Gratitude

Start each entry with, “I am grateful for …”

In the morning spend five minutes writing down what you are thankful for. You can focus on things like a good night’s sleep, a comfortable bed, a roof over your head, two good legs for walking, or being able to see the sunshine in the morning. Make it about anything you want.

There is no wrong answer.

Then at night before bed, spend five more minutes writing what you’re grateful for. It could be something that happened during the day. It could be any fond memory.

Sometimes you might not think of something new to write. It’s okay to write something you’ve written before.

If you need more ideas, don’t just think of the obvious things every day. Think of the subtle things like the smell of chocolate, or a great hug you got.

The best part is that doing this is free. All you need is a notebook, journal, or an app to help you.

Tips

- Wake up and decide that you’re going to be looking for things to be grateful for. Start the day by being in the right state of mind.
- Really feel how grateful you are for what you’re writing it down. Don’t just write without any emotion.
- If you only write in your journal once a day, do it at the end of the night. It’s best to reflect on the day you had.
- With the Gratitude 365 app, add a photo of something you’re grateful for that day.
- Go back and review your past days. It can help you when you’re feeling down and need a boost.
- Don’t forget to focus on the people in your life. Besides writing why you’re thankful for them, pick up the phone, send an email, or write them a letter. They’ll love the surprise.

Gratitude 365 – The best gratitude journal app in the App store

If you’re like me, the first thing you grab in the morning in your iPhone. It’s the last thing you use before bed as well.

So having a gratitude app can help you get into the habit of writing what you’re thankful for.
Features of Gratitude 365

Create a daily entry and list anything you are thankful for that day
Choose a photo for that day
View your photos a beautiful calendar
Tracks how many days you’ve been thankful
Shows how many total gratitudes you’ve written
Email, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr the photo calendar
Backup and restore your entries
Set a password to protect your journal
Simple and beautiful user interface that let’s you just focus on your gratitudes

Visit the website for screenshots of Gratitude 365.

If you don’t have an iPhone, just get a pen and any notebook. The important part is to just start.

Final reminder

If you use gratitude a little, it’ll change your life a little. If you use it a lot, your life will change even more.

I know I have many readers who are unhappy and feel stuck in life. I highly recommend you start a gratitude journal for at least 30 days.

Thanks to everyone!

Finally, just want to say thanks to all of you. It’s been one year since Photo 365 was released. Thanks to everyone who supported and shared the app. Thanks to you for being a part of the Get Busy Living community as well. I’m very grateful for it!

Please help spread the word about this app. Share this post with your social network. Tell your friends or family about it.

Maybe starting a gratitude journal is what someone needs in their life right now.

Visit the website

Download the app and start your gratitude journal today

Inspiration is for Amateurs | Chuck Close

"Inspiration Is for Amateurs—
The Rest of Us Just Show Up and Get to Work"

The quote above is from painter Chuck Close, who says he's never had "painter's block" in his life. The "just show up and get to work" motto is a great creed to live by, especially if you want to be prolific and creative. Close's attitude reminds me of another inspirational quote from Pablo Picasso:

"Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.

— Chuck Close, an American painter and photographer who achieved fame as a photorealist, through his massive-scale portraits. Though a catastrophic spinal artery collapse in 1988 left him severely paralyzed, he has continued to paint and produce work that remains sought after by museums and collectors. He said:

The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case.

The Key to Getting Motivated: Give Up - 99U

No matter how fulfilling your work, there’ll be days when you just can’t summon any enthusiasm for it. What makes the experience of undermotivation especially frustrating is that the solution seems as if it ought to be obvious: what you need, you tell yourself, is more motivation.

So you scour the web for motivational tips (visualize your goals! reconnect with your ‘core values’!). You remind yourself about the mountain bike you want to buy, or the family you’ve got to feed. Yet it’s rare that any of this works: instead, undermotivation digs in its heels, making progress harder than ever.

There’s a reason for this, though it’s one that a whole industry of motivational gurus has a strong incentive to conceal: trying to “get motivated” can often make matters worse. The real problem isn’t that you don’t feel like taking action. Rather, it’s the underlying assumption that you need to feel like taking action before you can act. Which explains the hidden pitfall of most “motivational” advice: it’s not about how to get things done, but about how to get in the mood for getting things done.

That wouldn’t matter if generating a feeling of enthusiasm were a simple matter of repeating affirmations in front of the mirror, or taping an upbeat Anthony Robbins quotation to your monitor, and glancing at it occasionally. But as research by the Harvard psychologist Daniel Wegner and others has repeatedly demonstrated, our efforts to control our emotions through sheer force of will can end in self-sabotage: resolve to get “psyched” about some unappealing task, and it’s all too easy to end up fixating on the gap between the emotion you feel and the one you wish you were feeling. Visualizing your goals can backfire, as can repeating slogans to yourself. By internalizing the idea that you need to “get motivated”, you’ve inadvertently placed an additional hurdle between where you are and where you want to be. Now you don’t merely have to accomplish certain tasks. You’ve set yourself the much harder task of feeling like doing them, too.

Trying to “get motivated” can often make matters worse.

Fortunately, there’s a powerful alternative, crystallized by the psychology writer Julie Fast in a pithy eight-word phrase: “Don’t wait until you feel like doing something.” When you’re mired in negative emotions about work, resist the urge to try to stamp them out. Instead, get a little distance — step away from your desk, focus on your breath for a few seconds — and then just feel the negativity, without trying to banish it. Then take action alongside the emotion. Usually, the negative feelings will soon dissipate. Even if they don’t, you’ll be a step closer to a meaningful achievement.

This approach is one aspect of what’s known in Buddhism as “non-attachment”, and it’s no surprise that one of its foremost practitioners, the Japanese psychiatrist Shoma Morita, was heavily influenced by Zen. As James Hill, a contemporary practitioner of Morita Therapy, points out, many of our most significant achievements get done despite the absence of enthusiasm: “Is it accurate to assume that we must ‘overcome’ fear to jump off the high dive at the pool, or increase our confidence before we ask someone out for a date?” he asks. “If it was, most of us would still be waiting to do these things.”
Morita himself had some startling advice for those afflicted by procrastination and other woes: “Give up on yourself.” He meant that trying to stop being “a procrastinator” or “a lazy person” was a distracting waste of time; what mattered was action. “Go ahead and be the best imperfect person you can be,” he went on, “and get started on those things you want to accomplish before you die.” Don’t worry about getting motivated.

Just get going.
-
How about you?

The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking - Oliver Burkeman

Oliver Burkeman | Journalist and Author | Blog

I'm a writer for The Guardian based in Brooklyn, New York.

My new book The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking explores the upsides of negativity, uncertainty, failure and imperfection. Each week in This Column Will Change Your Life I write about social psychology, self-help culture, productivity and the science of happiness, and make unprovoked attacks on The Secret.

I also blog about things for Guardian US and write a monthly column for Psychologies magazine. Hello.

The Antidote: Happiness for People who can’t Stand Positive Thinking Find out more

References

^ Doverspike, Ph.D., William F. "Gratitude: A Key to Happiness". Georgia Psychological Association. Retrieved 26 August 2011.
^ Emmons, R. A. & McCullough, M. E. (2003). Counting blessings versus burdens: An experimental investigation of gratitude and subjective well-being in daily life. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84, 377-389. (electronic copy)
^ "Gratitude and Well-Being". Emmons Lab at the University of California, Davis. Retrieved 26 August 2011.
^ Campbell, Ph.D., Bruce. "Counting Your Blessings: How Gratitude Improves Your Health". CFS & FM Self Help. Retrieved 26 August 2011.
^ Seligman, M. E. P., Steen, T. A., Park, N.,& Peterson, C. (2005). Positive psychology progress: Empirical validation of interventions. American Psychologist, 60, 410-421.
^ Wikipedia Contributors. "Gratitude". en.wikipedia.org. Wikimedia Foundation. Retrieved 24 February 2012. "Content from "Gratitude"; see that article's history for attribution."

Sunday 19 May 2013

An A Priori Assumption – Construction of Reality | Brain Blogger

An a priori assumption that is non-epistemological, one of the assertion that one knows nothing, does not preclude a circuitous path toward a non-epistemological conclusion that one knows nothing. Similar to an infant, whose task is to shape the world, to shape reality, without a basis of knowledge except for his sensory perceptions, one must meander a path of life toward increasing “knowledge”. This leads to the inevitable conclusion of death, a situation which an individual, at the end of his life, knows nothing about. Perhaps there exists a greater reality, a reality above and beyond realities, or an ultimate reality. However, this is an indeterminable assumption.

Reality remains a construction, a theory, as it has throughout the ages, from Galileo’s insistence on the fact that he could see stars that were not visible to the human eye, these stars that were supposedly placed in the sky by a deity, to light the night sky for human beings.

Any culture’s construction of reality may be valid. Although there are better and worse theories, a cultural construction of reality emphasizes goals and values, and these goals and values are what make such a construction worthwhile to affirm or not to affirm. The goals and values of a theory of reality evolve as a cultural conception of that reality evolves. We know that science values prediction and control, as well as the externally visible as opposed to the internally experienced. It is the norm in our age to discount internal experience, and corresponding to this is a denouncement of religious experience or faith that is subjective. Faith, in a world that proceeds by means of scientific endeavor and its emphasis on externally verifiable experience, is mocked by some and discredited by a greater majority than is assumed by those who discredit it.

It was with these evolving thoughts that I came to discern that hallucinations may represent, as an internal aspect of self and mind that perhaps can not be predicted and controlled, a reality that science alone accounts for poorly, as science attempts to control it through externally administered medications. These do not do a great deal to quell hallucinations in the scheme of things. The intentional mind seems to operate by a circumstance rather like attempting to follow a path of thought while in the same sense creating it. The mind may be fractured by an attempt to control it by means of one’s own mental effort.

There are theories which may apply to or may speak to a psychotic person’s view of things — certainly Buddhism’s and Jung’s theory lead one to this assertion. The ideas of the collective unconscious and Buddhism’s ambiguous reference to “one mind” seem to do so. However, these are only perspectives on reality, theories that, essentially, do little to malign the validity of believing in the personal unconscious or the Christian God.

The question is not of truth but of functionality of belief systems.

In some ways unfortunately, the values and worth of a belief system may be determined only after the fact of implications and extrapolations of that belief system are realized within a culture. To an extent, this process involves a dialectical pattern of the emergence of a thesis, a perspectival theory, followed by an antithesis, a contrary perspectival theory, concluding with the assimilation and playing out of a synthesis that supposedly represents some kind of progress.

The values of a scientific perspective are heralded as producing a refined “truth”, the introduction of indisputable “fact”. This led to a antithetical attack on objectivity, the basis of science, which culminated in a synthetic announcement of a non-epistemological premise. The process of intellectual history and attempts to control evolving “truths” through intentionality in some ways mimics the dubious possibilities of the intentional mind seeking to control its own intellectual perspective.

Mentally ill psychotic individuals contort their minds and themselves through intentional efforts to change their minds and their thoughts. This is the crux of a psychotic person’s dilemma in trying not to be psychotic. The mentally ill try to restrain their own perspectives on reality, interfering with a natural course of thought that might lead to an acceptable perspective on reality, and, in doing this, they become embroiled and entrenched in their own views.

William James postulated the “will to believe”. If willing belief actually produced its intended results there would not be such dysfunction as psychotic phenomena. The best one can do to combat psychotic experience is to respect it as process-related rather than content-related phenomena. This is to say, allow oneself to experience it without attempting to make a judgment about it. Nevertheless, psychotic experience is and will remain dysfunctional. One can logically limit a creation of a believe system about one’s psychotic experience, but this will not interrupt the experience of psychotic symptoms, particularly as these are reflected by the experience of hallucinations.

Why is a psychotic’s belief system dysfunctional? Perhaps because psychotics jump to conclusions, called delusions, based upon experience that does and does not violate Newton’s law of parsimony. Psychotics have voices talking in their heads, self-mind sounds that they think simplistically are people or deities or creatures or Martians talking to them through thought-insertion and thought broadcasting, and so on. In terms of Newton’s law of parsimony, this may be a realistic conclusion, however, we may ask these questions: If I see light and light illuminates my room, is the reality of Einstein’s a theory regarding light any more clear and apparent to me? And are these theories regarding light more realistic than my own magical perception of light entering my room on a sunny day?

Psychotic people should be criticized less for their simplistic, albeit understandable conclusions. The fact that we can not and do not understand what hallucinations are, except in a biochemical way, in some ways parallels the fact that seeing the sun emitting light does not explain to us anything about particle and wave theories, or beyond. Perception is not knowledge. What we call knowledge is always an interpretation of perception. If such were not the case, then a newborn infant could be said to possess the purest form of knowledge, and perhaps an infant does so, but again, this is a theory, an interpretation of perceived reality.

Ann Reitan, PsyD

Ann Reitan, PsyD, is a clinical psychologist and well published essayist of fiction and creative nonfiction. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology from University of Washington, Master of Arts in Psychology from Pepperdine University, and Doctorate of Clinical Psychology from Alliant International University. Her post-doctoral research at Washington University in St. Louis, MO, involved personality theory, idiodynamics and creativity in literature.

Ketogenic Diet for Alzheimer’s disease and Other Neurological Disorders | Brain Blogger

Ketogenic Diet for Epilepsy and Other Neurological Disorders | Brain Blogger

In Alzheimer’s disease, for example, results from clinical studies have been inconclusive but promising. In one randomized double-blind study, Alzheimer’s patients on a ketogenic diet showed significant cognitive improvement compared to patients not following the diet.

In cell cultures, ketone bodies have been shown to be effective against the toxic effects of beta-amyloid, a key pathological feature of the disease. The diet may also help reduce oxidative stress and enhance mitochondrial function.

White Bears – The Paradox of Mental Suppression | Brain Blogger

Whatever you do, don’t think of a white bear. Go on, close your eyes, relax, but don’t think of a white bear… So, what happened? Most likely, you were overwhelmed by thoughts of a white bear. This mini-experiment highlights the fascinating paradox of thought suppression. That is, once we explicitly try not to think of something, we find that we think about it all the time. Indeed, in its worse forms, the failure of thought suppression mars the minds of those suffering from various psychological disorders, such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), and even depression.

In a classic psychology book, White Bears and Other Unwanted Thoughts, Professor Daniel Wegner reviews research on the uniquely human ability to control our thoughts, as well as why our attempts to do so often fail. Drawing from one of Tolstoy’s short stories in which he describes a peer’s challenge to stand in a corner and not think of a white bear, Wegner used a white-bear task in a Harvard psychology laboratory to test the effectiveness of intentional thought suppression. Participants were randomly assigned to one of two conditions. In both conditions, participants were instructed to verbalize their stream of consciousness for five minutes. In one condition, participants were told that during their articulation, they could think about a white bear. In the other condition, participants were told that they were not allowed to think of a white bear during articulation. All participants were to press a button if they thought of a white bear, and their verbalizations were recorded, and the number of white bear acknowledgments were counted. While participants in the suppression condition mentioned the white bear less than people in the express condition, all participants pressed the button at about equal rates, indicating that the goal to suppress the thought was hardly effective.

Perhaps most interesting though, was what happened when subjects in the suppression condition subsequently performed another stream of consciousness session, however this time were told that they were allowed to think of a white bear. Now, these participants who originally attempted to suppress the white bear thought spent an overwhelming amount of time discussing white bears and pressing the button, significantly more so than the group that was allowed to think of a white bear without any previous suppression. It appeared that suppression of a thought led to its subsequent overindulgence.
This rebound effect has interesting implications for various situations in which we try to control our thoughts and behaviors via suppression. For example, imagine a dieter who swears off sweats, constantly reminding herself, “don’t eat that.” B

ased on Wegner’s study, it seems that if she later allows herself a small cheat, like maybe some candy on Halloween, she may spiral into an over-indulgence in pro-sweet thoughts and behaviors, thwarting her original goal to lose weight. Or, perhaps for an individual with OCD, reminding oneself not to think about an obtrusive thought may backfire. According to Wegner, a better tactic may be to engage in focused distraction, as opposed to obsessing over what one should not do. Indeed, Edgar Allen’s short story, The Telltale Heart, highlights this principle rather nicely: Don’t drive yourself mad with ruminations regarding what you seek to avoid addressing; doing so may simply lead to its manifestation.

References

Wegner, D. M. (1994). White Bears and Other Unwanted Thoughts: Suppression, Obsession, and the Psychology of Mental Control. The Guilford Press: NY, New York.
Wegner, D., Schneider, D., Carter, S., & White, T. (1987). Paradoxical effects of thought suppression. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 53 (1), 5-13 DOI: 10.1037/0022-3514.53.1.5

Social Emotions: Don't don't think of a white bear

Thursday, 18 June 2009

Mental effort as a finite resource is a fascinatingly useful idea in psychology and a great deal of my work relies on the depletion model. We have a limited amount of mental energy that is used up when we perform mental tasks and after a while our focus wanes, with that our performance decreases. What's more, it appears to take a long while to replenish this energy. There is a near perfect analogy with physical effort and fatigue: after an intensive football game I'm a sweaty and exhausted mess in dire need of a nice sit down. After a rest though, I'm right as rain.

Self-regulation, such as suppressing emotions, resisting an impulse, or trying not to think of a white bear, is a resource intensive mental activity. There's a wealth of literature to suggest that self-regulation results in physical changes in the body (increased blood pressure, faster pulse, general arousal increases) suggesting that it may even be physically demanding.

Once that resource dries up, what happens? Surely we can't indefinitely self-regulate any more than we can indefinitely exercise?

Muraven et al. hypothesise that 'after self-regulation in one sphere, self-regulation in other domains may not be as effective, because regulatory capacity is reduced.''

Their four studies in the paper support this:

1. Higher effort spent regulating emotions during an upsetting film predicted poorer handgrip duration (a physical self-regulation task)

2. People engaging in thought suppression (don't think of a white bear) give up in a following task of solving impossible anagrams quicker than those who haven't suppressed thoughts.

3. A check for study 2 to make sure that thought suppressors didn't give up because they found the anagrams harder due to interrupting thoughts of white bears (rebound effect). Thought suppressors couldn't hide expression enjoyment of SNL as effectively as another group having done maths problems. The rebound effect would suggest that thought suppressors would be distracted and so better perform on the task.

4. In autobiographical stories participants report regulation failure is more likely to occur when other regulation demands exist or while drunk. Expending high effort was associated with regulation success. There's no indication that any story about successful regulation involved alcohol...

They generally conclude that the results support the depletion model and further suggest that many different capacities; emotion control, thought suppression, physical endurance, and task persistence all draw from the same pool. Further to this, this pool is very limited as even quick experiments are enough to significantly deplete resources for a temporary time period. This is a real problem as Muraven et al. state:

'Many of the problems facing both individuals and society today, ranging from unprotected sexual behaviour to addiction to school underachievement, involve regulatory behaviour.'

Muraven, M., Tice, D.M., & Baumeister, R.F. (1998) Self control as a limited resource: Regulatory Depeltion Patterns. J. personality & social psychology 74(3), p774-789
Photo links to original

Don't Think About It | Psychology Today

Published on September 10, 2010 by Ira Hyman in Mental Mishaps

"the paradoxical effect of thought suppression is that it produces a preoccupation with the suppressed thought."

Just don't think about it. Trying to stop smoking? Avoid eating sweets? Get over a relationship? Stop thinking about it. This is surprisingly bad advice. Suppressing thoughts may actually be counter-productive.

Don't think about white bears. While reading the rest of this blog post, do not think about white bears. Daniel Wegner and his colleagues have frequently investigated the effects of asking people to not think about white bears (and other things). They've made two primary findings. First, people experience difficulty suppressing thoughts. Trying to suppress is not 100% effective - that white bear continues to inhabit your thoughts instead of the polar icecap. When suppressing, most people keep other thoughts in mind and keep in mind the idea that they are not thinking about something. Every now and then you think about what you are not thinking about just to make sure you are not thinking about it and there it is: The white bear, or chocolate bars, or cigarettes, or that old flame.

The second, and more important finding, is that people experience a rebound effect after trying to suppress a thought - they think about the white bear more following suppression attempts. Compared to people encouraged to simply think about the bear, people who first tried to suppress thoughts of the white bear have many more occurrences of the white bear thought. Wegner and his colleagues wrote that "the paradoxical effect of thought suppression is that it produces a preoccupation with the suppressed thought."

Wegner has often suggested that rebounds following thought suppression may contribute to obsessions, dieting failures, and difficulties stopping behaviors like smoking. In new research published this year, James Erskine and his colleagues have experimentally shown that thought suppression has counter-productive effects on behaviors.

Erskine and Georgiou conducted an experiment in which they looked at the effects of suppressing thoughts of chocolate (something with which I have some personal experience). First, participants engaged in a task of recording their thoughts. One-third were asked to think about chocolate, one-third to suppress thoughts of chocolate, and one-third to simply record their thoughts with no suggestions about content. Later all participants were asked to rate some chocolate on several qualities related to taste. The issue was not their ratings, but rather how much chocolate they ate. People who had tried to suppress thoughts about chocolate ate more chocolate! S

uppression not only led to a rebound in chocolate thoughts, but also to a rebound in eating chocolate. Trying to not think about that candy bar may make consumption of that candy bar (and its friends in the vending machine) even more likely. The effect was most noticeable in restrained eaters - that is, people already trying to limit food intake.

In a related study, Erskine, Georgiou, and Kvavilashvili tried thought suppression with smokers. In this case, they undertook a much more extensive study. Smokers recorded the number of cigarettes they smoked for three weeks (they also recorded lots of other information such as stress, smoking attitudes, etc.). The first week served as the baseline for cigarette consumption. In week 2, some smokers attempted to suppress thoughts of smoking, some were encouraged to think about smoking as frequently as they could, and a control group simply continued to record cigarette consumption. The good news? Suppressions led to a decrease in smoking during the week when the smokers were suppressing thoughts of smoking. The bad news? A major rebound effect occurred. In the next week, those who had previously tried to suppress thoughts of smoking smoked more cigarettes. When they stopped suppressing, they increased smoking.
Don't think about it is bad advice. Although people can have limited success suppressing thoughts for a while, the thought will rebound. The cool finding in Erskine and colleagues' research is that rebounding thoughts led to rebounding behaviors - more chocolate consumed and cigarettes smoked. Perhaps we should suppress thoughts about suppression.

Try not to think about Freud - or polar bears - The National

Don't think about these polar bears, and still, polar bear thoughts will pop up from your subconsciousNikita Ovsyanikov / IFAW / Reuters

Jan 1, 2010

Here is a task for you. While reading this article, on no account think of your mother-in-law. If you do not have a mother-in-law, or actually enjoy thinking of your mother-in-law, substitute an object of disaffection: your boss, perhaps. The main thing is, whoever you choose, exclude them from your mind. Totally. Just do not think about them. Pretend they do not exist. Chances are you will fail, and that persona non grata will pop up on your mental doorstep. Suppressing unwanted thoughts is a strangely difficult thing to do, as Fyodor Dostoevsky trenchantly observed in his Winter Notes on Summer Impressions. "Try not to think of a polar bear," he challenged his readers, "and you will see that the cursed thing will come to mind every minute."

More alarmingly, the same goes for actions. Remind yourself not to tell the widow at the wake that you are dying for a drink, and as like as not, you will. Try not to spill the longed-for glass of camel's milk on that nice carpet: oops, there it goes. The harder you try to stop making a fool of yourself, the more likely it is that you will. It is as if a mischievous inner demon were constantly whispering to us to fulfil our worst desires - an imp dubbed "the counter will" by Sigmund Freud.

Spurred on by the observations of Dostoevsky and others, the Harvard psychologist Dan Wegner has spent considerable time investigating such "ironic" mental processes. "It was the kind of literary observation that turns into very good psychology," he says. He has a theory as to how ironic slips arise: they are the result of occasional errors in our sophisticated systems of mental control. It works like this. Say we have given up chocolate or cigarettes, and want to block all thoughts of them. We do this by filling our conscious mind with distracting thoughts - anything but chocolate or cigarettes. At the same time, though, our unconscious mind remains alert for any signs of the unwanted thought, the better to help us chase it away. "Some part of the mind has to know what it is we don't want to think about and to monitor for that," says Dr Wegner.

But the monitoring process also stores those unwanted thoughts as references in our unconscious, and that can come back to haunt us when our mind is under strain. That is because the conscious search for distractions involves a lot more mental effort than the unconscious monitoring process, making it much more prone to disruption by an extra mental load - when we are asked to multitask, for example, or when we simply try too hard to suppress an irksome thought (incidentally, you are really trying not to think of your mother-in-law, are you not?) That gives the unconscious thought the space to pop into our awareness with a vengeance. It is almost as if we have set a trigger for them, says Dr Wegner. "They become hyperaccessible."

A neat idea, but is there any evidence for it? In experiments in the 1990s, with Ralph Erber of DePaul University in Chicago, Dr Wegner tested the interplay of mental load and thought suppression. They found that undergraduates asked not to blurt out the word "house" while playing a word-association game involving related words, such as "home", performed significantly worse under time pressure. Think of the word "aunt" for a moment. You now have 10 seconds to name me 10 other sorts of familial relationship. Go!

The idea ties in, too, with the results of research by Thomas Pyszczynski of the University of Colorado and others into how we block out the most unwanted thought of all: death. Various suppression strategies - for example, clinging more strongly to things that seem to give life meaning, such as children or religious beliefs - seem to work well as long as our minds are not under stress. Add an extra mental load, however, and the naked fact of our own mortality starts to creep back in.

So what lessons can we take into the holiday season from this research? First, that it is a mental war zone. As the density of fraught social interactions increases, so does our mental load and our propensity for the social faux pas. Try thinking of one embarrassing thing you really ought not to say when visiting family and see how long it takes before it just slips out. The worst of it is that the more taboo a thought is, the more store we set by suppressing it and the more difficult it consequently becomes to contain. No surprise, then, that things get really messy when we are batting down our carnal desires. You might want to experiment with this on a friend - wait for an inappropriate moment, instruct them to keep their thoughts virtuous, then sit back and wait for their blushes, or a slap. * New Scientist

Ironic process theory - Wikipedia,

Ironic process theory - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Ironic processing is the psychological process whereby an individual's deliberate attempts to suppress or avoid certain thoughts (thought suppression) render those thoughts more persistent.

Mechanisms

Ironic process theory (Wegner, 1992, 1994) has two opposing mechanisms (dual process theory as pertaining to social cognition): The first unconsciously and automatically monitors for occurrences (monitoring processes) of the unwanted thought, calling upon the second (conscious operating processes) should the thought begin to intrude.

This theory explains the effects of increased cognitive load by emphasizing that where there is cognitive effort, the monitoring process may supplant the conscious process, also suggesting that in order for thought suppression to be effective, a balance between the two processes must exist, with the cognitive demand not being so great as to let the monitoring process interrupt the conscious processes.

As recent research suggests^{[date missing]}, there may be an important role of individual differences that may be able to account for this.^[1] Although in certain domains, such as memorization, it appears that ironic effects of attempting to remember vary with the level of mental control over mnemonic processing and may be due simply to implementation of ineffective mental strategies.^[2]

The phenomenon has been identified through thought suppression studies in experimental psychology. Social psychologist Daniel Wegner and his colleagues first studied thought suppression in a laboratory setting in 1987 by instructing participants to avoid all thoughts of a white bear. The typical finding in such experiments is that suppressing thoughts of a white bear causes the frequent return of such thoughts, sometimes even yielding a tendency to obsess about the very thought that is being suppressed. The implications for these findings have since been applied in clinical settings where thought suppression is quite common (e.g., trying not to think of one's problems or other anxiety-producing or depressing thoughts).

Cognitive overload inhibits successful activation of operating processes within the mind. Such overload has been shown to occur experimentally, when individuals attempt to aggressively suppress intrusive thoughts by distracting themselves---either by focusing on different environmental objects, or thinking of anything but the thought in question. (Overload is also believed to occur in daily life as a result of mental pressures, anxieties, stresses and so forth). The monitoring process, serving to alert the individual of an unwanted thought about to become salient and intrude on his or her consciousness, continues to find instances of the unwanted thought creating a state of hyperaccessibility unchecked by controlled cognitive processes.^[3]

Research has also shown that individuals do have a capacity to successfully suppress thoughts by focusing on specifically prepared distractions or objects---a process in thought suppression experiments sometimes referred to as "focused distraction" (Wegner, 1987).

"According to Wegner & Pennebaker (1993, p. 1), 'Mental control occurs when people suppress a thought, concentrate on a sensation, inhibit an emotion, maintain a mood, stir up a desire, squelch a craving, or otherwise exert influence on their own mental states.' Thus, intentional memory processes and their associated mneumonic strategies can be viewed as one form of mental control (Kihlstrom & Barnhardt, 1993). Mental control, in the form of mnemonic strategies, is exercised when we attempt to exert influence over our faculties of memory."^[4]

Popular culture

Similar ideas appear throughout popular culture and sayings, often with variations on animal and color, such as "It's as hard as trying not to think of a pink rhinoceros." George Lakoff tells his cognitive science students, "Don't think of a pink elephant," resulting in his students thinking of exactly this.^[5]
Ironic process theory is also the basis for the mind game known simply as "The Game" which constitutes trying not to think about the Game.

The theory is also used by the characters played by Leonardo DiCaprio and Joseph Gordon-Levitt to explain the ideas of "inception" to the character played by Ken Watanabe in the 2010 film Inception.
At the end of Ghostbusters, the characters are asked to think of a form for the coming of Gozer. They instruct each other not to think of anything, which sees one of the team, Ray, thinking of what he considers to be an innocuous thought of the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, who then terrorizes them.

References

^ e.g. Geraerts, E.; Merckelbach, H.; Jelicic, M. & Smeets, E. (2006), "Long term consequences of suppression of intrusive anxious thoughts and repressive coping", Behaviour Research and Therapy 44 (10): 1451–1460, doi:10.1016/j.brat.2005.11.001.
^ Griffith, J. D.; Hart, C. L. & Randell, J. A. (2007), "Ironic Effects of Attempting to Remember", North American Journal of Psychology (1-2), ISSN 1527-7143.
^ Aronson, Elliot; Wilson, Timothy D.; Akert, Robin M. (2007), Social Psychology (6th ed.), Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education, ISBN 0-13-233487-9.
^ Wegner, D. M. (1994), "Ironic Processes of Mental Control", Psychological Review 101 (1): 34–52, doi:10.1037/0033-295X.101.1.34, PMID 8121959.
^ Sutton, Jill (9 March 2009). "A fascination with fire is elementary". WAtoday.com. Retrieved 2009-03-26.

Abstract

Two traits – warmth and competence – govern social judgments of individuals and groups, and these judgments shape people's emotions and behaviors. The present chapter describes the causes and consequences of warmth and competence judgments; how, when and why they determine significant professional and organizational outcomes, such as hiring, employee evaluation, and allocation of tasks and resources.

Warmth and competence represent the central dimensions of group stereotypes, the majority of which are ambivalent – characterizing groups as warm but incompetent (e.g., older people, working mothers) or competent but cold (e.g., “model minorities,” female leaders), in turn eliciting ambivalent feelings (i.e., pity and envy, respectively) and actions toward members of those groups. However, through nonverbal behaviors that subtly communicate warmth and competence information, people can manage the impressions they make on colleagues, potential employers, and possible investors.

Finally, we discuss important directions for future research, such as investigating the causes and consequences of how organizations and industries are evaluated on warmth and competence.

Figures and tables from this article:

: Fig. 1. Stereotype content model predictions for emotions and BIAS map predictions for behaviors in the warmth by competence space. Stereotype content (high or low warmth and high or low competence) is represented by the horizontal and vertical axes. Emotions are represented by the lighter arrows and behavioral orientations by the lighter arrows within the figure.
Adapted from Cuddy et al. (2007).

Pages

Tuesday 28 May 2013

Contents

What is a gratitude journal?

Why should I keep a gratitude journal?

Do I have to write in my journal every day?

How long does it take?

How to Start the Practice of Gratitude

Tips

Gratitude 365 – The best gratitude journal app in the App store

Final reminder

Thanks to everyone!

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Sunday 19 May 2013

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Abstract