 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
Attorney / Consultant Psychologist. Pioneer of e-Consciousness model of transformation and author of four books, including " Clinical Psychology".
Why ‘Thank You’ Is More Than Just Good Manners
According to positive psychologists, the words ‘thank you‘ are no longer just good manners, they are also beneficial to the self.
To take the best known examples, studies have suggested that being grateful can improve well-being, physical health, can strengthen social relationships, produce positive emotional states and help us cope with stressful times in our lives.
But we also say thank you because we want the other person to know we value what they’ve done for us and, maybe, encourage them to help us again in the future.
It’s this aspect of gratitude that Adam M. Grant and Francesco Gino examine in a series of new studies published recently in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (Grant & Gino, 2010).
Dialogue with Richard Dawkins, Rowan Williams and Anthony Kenny
Sir Anthony Kenny chaired a dialogue at Oxford University between Archbishop Rowan Williams and Professor Richard Dawkins on the subject of “The nature of human beings and the question of their ultimate origin”. The event was held on Thursday 23rd February 2012 in the Sheldonian Theatre, and was hosted by Sophia Europa (Theology Faculty) Oxford.
Changing Your Brain By Changing Your Mind
When it comes to managing stress, the Eastern traditions may be especially effective. The Western health model is based on diagnosing the underlying cause of a problem and then finding an active medical or behavioral intervention to remove it. People with chronic illness are often urged to “stay strong,” or to have “a fighting spirit.” Eastern medicine has a more holistic view of disease as indicating a lack of balance or an energy blockage. The solution is to bring the body and mind back into balance using gentle, noninvasive techniques such as herbs, manipulative techniques, movement, or meditation.
How the Brain Processes Emotion
Our lower brain centers, such as the amygdala or hypothalamus, were made to detect and respond to threats, such as a tiger about to eat us. They generate an immediate “fight ot flight” response to increase the odds of survival, but they can become hypersensitive, interfering with our ability to experience the present moment in an open and relaxed way. Daily meditation practice can help to correct this imbalance and allow us to retrain our minds so we are less likely to overreact with intenseanger or fear to psychological threats, such as rejection. Being less chronically stressed can also help our immune systems function more efficiently to fight off disease.
No Matter What the Problem, There Are Only Four Things You Can Do
When faced with a difficult problem, you might find yourself paralyzed over deciding what to do. Emotionally sensitive people often have difficulty making decisions, tend to ruminate about issues and can become increasing upset as a result of thinking about the issue over and over.
Searching and searching for the right solution, perhaps one that won’t upset others or cause pain or loss, adds to anxiety and upset. How can someone find just the right solution and know what the right solution is?
Marsha Linehan, the creator of Dialectical Behavior Therapy, outlined strategies for any problem that you face. Remembering these options can help decrease the struggle of not knowing what to do. The four options are Solve the Problem, Change Your Perception of the Problem, Radically Accept the Situation, or Stay Miserable.
Choice 1: Solve the Problem.
There are many problem solving strategies but most use the same steps. First, define the problem. Be as specific as possible. Use numbers whenever possible. For example “I’ve been overspending my budget every other month by $315.”
Meditating at Work: A New Approach to Managing Overload
Today’s employees and managers are deluged with an unprecedented amount of information and distraction. If it’s not emails, texts, and instant messaging, then it’s phone calls, coworkers, and constantly changing demands and deadlines. Basex research found that 50 percent of a knowledge worker’s day is spent “managing information” and that an excess of information results in “a loss of ability to make decisions, process information, and prioritize tasks.” In fact, research shows that constant information overload sends the brain into the fight-or-flight stress response, originally designed to protect us from man-eating tigers and other threats.
According to Dr. Edward Hallowell, the prefrontal cortex (the part of the brain responsible for executive functions such as decision making, problem solving, and planning) cannot execute properly when it is in stress mode. Instead, the “lower part” of the brain, which is responsible for dealing with survival, takes over. The prefrontal cortex then waits for a signal from the lower brain that the stressor has disappeared. Until then, the prefrontal cortex still functions, but poorly. Intelligence declines, and flexibility is minimal.1The result of this information and distraction overload is wreaking havoc with both employees’ and managers’ mental and physical health, as well as with productivity. As Jonathan Spira notes in Overload! How Too Much Information Is Hazardous to Your Organization, this problem has been estimated to cost the U.S. economy $900 billion per year in “lowered employee productivity and reduced innovation.”2 This figure also includes recovery time, which can be ten to twenty times greater than the time lost from the interruption itself.
While organizations have addressed these challenges with a variety of stress-management solutions, until recently meditation was not among them. It still had a reputation for being flaky and unfit for corporate consumption. However, scientific studies that have proven the value of meditation in changing the brain point to meditation’s practical application in the workplace. Meditation is now gaining acceptance and being used in established American companies such as General Mills, Google, and Prentice Hall.
The Neuroscience Of Music
Why does music make us feel? On the one hand, music is a purely abstract art form, devoid of language or explicit ideas. The stories it tells are all subtlety and subtext. And yet, even though music says little, it still manages to touch us deep, to tickle some universal nerves. When listening to our favorite songs, our body betrays all the symptoms of emotional arousal. The pupils in our eyes dilate, our pulse and blood pressure rise, the electrical conductance of our skin is lowered, and the cerebellum, a brain region associated with bodily movement, becomes strangely active. Blood is even re-directed to the muscles in our legs. (Some speculate that this is why we begin tapping our feet.) In other words, sound stirs us at our biological roots. As Schopenhauer wrote, “It is we ourselves who are tortured by the strings.”
We can now begin to understand where these feelings come from, why a mass of vibrating air hurtling through space can trigger such intense states of excitement. A brand newpaper in Nature Neuroscienceby a team of Montreal researchers marks an important step in revealing the precise underpinnings of “the potent pleasurable stimulus” that is music. Although the study involves plenty of fancy technology, including fMRI and ligand-based positron emission tomography (PET) scanning, the experiment itself was rather straightforward. After screening 217 individuals who responded to advertisements requesting people that experience “chills to instrumental music,” the scientists narrowed down the subject pool to ten. (These were the lucky few who most reliably got chills.) The scientists then asked the subjects to bring in their playlist of favorite songs – virtually every genre was represented, from techno to tango – and played them the music while their brain activity was monitored.
Can Passion and Security Coexist? Reflections on Cronenberg’s “A Dangerous Method”
In the new David Cronenberg film, A Dangerous Method, a tortured Carl Jung struggles with these very questions. He has met Sabina Spielrein, a fiercely writhing, twitching, hysterical patient who seems literally possessed by violence, her body stretched so taut that at times you half expect her to pounce. It’s Jung’s job to unearth the forces roiling within her that have her wound so tight, and that he does, with the help of a miraculous new “talking cure,” fashioned by one Sigmund Freud, his elder mentor, who aims to shake the medical community (and the world) out of their complacent view that the human race has evolved as far beyond animal instincts as they’d like to believe.
With Freud’s help, Jung uncovers the source of Sabina’s troubles–traumatic, sexual memories, of course (no spoiler there)–and on she goes, almost completely cured, to become a doctor, herself. But the bond between her and Dr. Jung begins to grow during his visits to her at the University. And Jung’s fascination with Spielrein’s erotic energy–she still loves a good, humiliating spanking–brings the two together in sometimes frightening ways.
Why do some people never get depressed?
Confronted with some of life’s upsetting experiences – marriage breakdown, unemployment, bereavement, failure of any kind – many people become depressed. But others don’t. Why is this?
A person who goes through experiences like that and does not get depressed has a measure of what in the psychiatric trade is known as “resilience”.
According to Manchester University psychologist Dr Rebecca Elliott, we are all situated somewhere on a slidling scale.
“At one end you have people who are very vulnerable. In the face of quite low stress, or none at all, they’ll develop a mental health problem,” she says.
“At the other end, you have people who life has dealt a quite appalling hand with all sorts of stressful experiences, and yet they remain positive and optimistic.” Most of us, she thinks, are somewhere in the middle….
No Matter What the Problem, There Are Only Four Things You Can Do
When faced with a difficult problem, you might find yourself paralyzed over deciding what to do. Emotionally sensitive people often have difficulty making decisions, tend to ruminate about issues and can become increasing upset as a result of thinking about the issue over and over.
Searching and searching for the right solution, perhaps one that won’t upset others or cause pain or loss, adds to anxiety and upset. How can someone find just the right solution and know what the right solution is?
Marsha Linehan, the creator of Dialectical Behavior Therapy, outlined strategies for any problem that you face. Remembering these options can help decrease the struggle of not knowing what to do. The four options are Solve the Problem, Change Your Perception of the Problem, Radically Accept the Situation, or Stay Miserable.
Choice 1: Solve the Problem.
There are many problem solving strategies but most use the same steps. First, define the problem. Be as specific as possible. Use numbers whenever possible. For example “I’ve been overspending my budget every other month by $315.”
The Neuroscience Of Music
Why does music make us feel? On the one hand, music is a purely abstract art form, devoid of language or explicit ideas. The stories it tells are all subtlety and subtext. And yet, even though music says little, it still manages to touch us deep, to tickle some universal nerves. When listening to our favorite songs, our body betrays all the symptoms of emotional arousal. The pupils in our eyes dilate, our pulse and blood pressure rise, the electrical conductance of our skin is lowered, and the cerebellum, a brain region associated with bodily movement, becomes strangely active. Blood is even re-directed to the muscles in our legs. (Some speculate that this is why we begin tapping our feet.) In other words, sound stirs us at our biological roots. As Schopenhauer wrote, “It is we ourselves who are tortured by the strings.”
We can now begin to understand where these feelings come from, why a mass of vibrating air hurtling through space can trigger such intense states of excitement. A brand new paper in Nature Neuroscienceby a team of Montreal researchers marks an important step in revealing the precise underpinnings of “the potent pleasurable stimulus” that is music. Although the study involves plenty of fancy technology, including fMRI and ligand-based positron emission tomography (PET) scanning, the experiment itself was rather straightforward. After screening 217 individuals who responded to advertisements requesting people that experience “chills to instrumental music,” the scientists narrowed down the subject pool to ten. (These were the lucky few who most reliably got chills.) The scientists then asked the subjects to bring in their playlist of favorite songs – virtually every genre was represented, from techno to tango – and played them the music while their brain activity was monitored.
Can Passion and Security Coexist? Reflections on Cronenberg’s “A Dangerous Method”
In the new David Cronenberg film, A Dangerous Method, a tortured Carl Jung struggles with these very questions. He has met Sabina Spielrein, a fiercely writhing, twitching, hysterical patient who seems literally possessed by violence, her body stretched so taut that at times you half expect her to pounce. It’s Jung’s job to unearth the forces roiling within her that have her wound so tight, and that he does, with the help of a miraculous new “talking cure,” fashioned by one Sigmund Freud, his elder mentor, who aims to shake the medical community (and the world) out of their complacent view that the human race has evolved as far beyond animal instincts as they’d like to believe.
With Freud’s help, Jung uncovers the source of Sabina’s troubles–traumatic, sexual memories, of course (no spoiler there)–and on she goes, almost completely cured, to become a doctor, herself. But the bond between her and Dr. Jung begins to grow during his visits to her at the University. And Jung’s fascination with Spielrein’s erotic energy–she still loves a good, humiliating spanking–brings the two together in sometimes frightening ways.
Self-Compassion: The Key to Psychological Well-Being
Basically, self-compassion involves treating yourself with kindness, caring, nurturance, and concern, rather than being harshly judgmental or indifferent to your suffering. What distinguishes self-compassion from self-love or self-acceptance is that you frame your failures, your inadequacies, or the suffering in your life that’s not your fault in light of common humanity. Instead of feeling Oh, poor me, which is like self-pity, we understand that the human condition is tough. Humans aren’t perfect, and things go wrong. That’s the way it is for all of us. Also, people feel isolated, separated, and cutoff when they notice things about themselves that they don’t like or when something goes wrong. Another aspect of self-compassion is mindfulness. To have self-compassion, you have to be able to notice and become aware of your pain. A lot of people say, “Of course I’m aware of my pain,” but actually, in our culture’s stiff-upper-lip tradition, we’re often so busy solving the problem we don’t notice that the situation is really hard, especially when our pain comes from criticizing ourselves or seeing something about ourselves we don’t like. So we need to be mindful of the fact that we’re suffering; at the same time, we don’t want to get carried away in a personal drama that exaggerates the extent of our suffering. Self-compassion is seeing things as they are—no more, no less. That’s kind of a long-winded answer, but it’s necessary to think about all these facets of self-compassion to understand it in a more rich way..
Applications of Positive Psychology
Positive psychology studies happiness and how that relates to love and gratitude. What faith offers, such as community, gratitude, forgiveness, purpose, acceptance, altruism, and eternity, increases well-being. Marriage is the hope for happiness. We choose a career, or fly believing, hoping, or having faith. The chance for error in faith makes humans humble and open to hope that feeds love and joy.
Positive psychology also studies meaning and motivation and how these relate to happiness. Life purpose is the meaning and direction of one’s reality or experience and goal creation and pursuit. Quality relations and quality life are achieved through negotiation of adversities. To understand whether a political action is good or bad, it is possible to look at motivation or the motive, such as the general group/public good purposive and committed principle, versus a personal self- need.
Developing Creativity With Visual Thinking
“I may think in pictures, but first I write everything out in words.” Brian Selznick
Brian Selznick’s 2007 novel “The Invention of Hugo Cabret” is the basis for the new Martin Scorsese movie “Hugo” – the story of an orphan, living in a Paris train station at the dawn of the 1930s.
An article quotes the author:
“When I first presented ‘Hugo’ to [publisher] Scholastic, it was going to have one drawing per chapter and be about 100 pages. But the more I thought about the book, the more I thought it might be interesting to try to tell the story like a movie.” ///
Linda Kreger Silverman, Ph.D. of the Gifted Development Center explains, “Visual-spatial learners are individuals who think in pictures rather than in words. They have a different brain organization than auditory-sequential learners.”
Faculty of Law and Philosophy 