The Mind Maven

How Childhood Family Relationships Impact Health Over Time

2017-09-16T08:13:00.000-07:00

An article in the American Psychologist summarizes various studies that look at childhood family relationships and health. Key findings noted in the article are included here.

Studies suggest that where high levels of family conflict threaten children’s feelings of emotional security, children may develop difficulties regulating their emotions, including the development of hostility and mistrust which manifest behaviorally as aggressive actions. As these childhood interactions recur, children begin to create more pervasive interactional styles or ways of responding that get perpetuated into adulthood, and affect not only how they interact with their parents but also interactions with peers and romantic partners.

Biologically, exposure to negative parenting, family conflict, and parent psychopathology are all associated with short-term changes in the release of the hormone cortisol. Over time, the chronic activation of the stress response and release of cortisol results in allostatic load, the cumulative wear-and tear on the body that puts us at risk for cardiovascular disease and many other diseases and illnesses.

A second model—the biological embedding model—proposes that stress that occurs at specific points during development (such as early in childhood) can calibrate how physiological systems operate going forward in time. Stressors experienced early in life may program how certain cells of the immune system function and respond to threats, and this type of programming of biological systems may remain in place even if the stressor ends. Thus when a child experiences adversity early in life, their monocytes and macrophages (types of white blood cells) become calibrated to respond to future threats with a heightened proinflammatory response.

Over a lifetime, this proinflammatory response results in a persistent state of low-grade inflammation that drives forward both disease mechanisms such as atherosclerosis, eventually contributing to the development of cardiovascular disease and allostatic load.

In addition to inflammatory pathways, early life adversity may have effects on the activity of hormonal systems that regulate organs and tissues in the body. For example, the hormone cortisol (released by the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis) is an important regulator of monocytes and macrophages, and at high doses conveys antiinflammatory signals to these cells. However, upon repeated exposure to stress, these cells become less sensitive to cortisol signaling, which in turn allows chronic inflammatory states to persist. Cortisol also has effects on other biological systems that have implications for health, including the cardiovascular, metabolic, and neural systems.

Similarly, the hormones epinephrine and norepinephrine (released by the sympathetic nervous system as part of the fight-or-flight response to threats) are known to upregulate the expression of proinflammatory genes in monocytes and macrophages. These hormones also have direct effects on cardiovascular, pulmonary, and other systems relevant to health.

Another biological hypothesis is that stressors experienced early in life “weather” individuals’ physiological systems, resulting in a premature aging of cells, and eventually leading to a shortened life expectancy.

Source

Childhood Close Family Relationships and Health
http://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/amp-amp0000067.pdf

Yoga and mindfulness meditation improve brain function and energy levels

2017-09-16T06:36:00.000-07:00

A study from the University of Waterloo found that practicing just 25 minutes of Hatha yoga or mindfulness meditation per day can boost the brain's executive functions, cognitive abilities linked to goal-directed behavior and the ability to control knee-jerk emotional responses, habitual thinking patterns and actions.

"Hatha yoga and mindfulness meditation both focus the brain's conscious processing power on a limited number of targets like breathing and posing, and also reduce processing of nonessential information," said Peter Hall, associate professor in the School of Public Health & Health Systems. "These two functions might have some positive carryover effect in the near- term following the session, such that people are able to focus more easily on what they choose to attend to in everyday life."

Thirty-one study participants completed 25 minutes of Hatha yoga, 25 minutes of mindfulness meditation, and 25 minutes of quiet reading (a control task) in randomized order. Following both the yoga and meditation activities, participants performed significantly better on executive function tasks compared to the reading task. "This finding suggests that there may be something special about meditation -- as opposed to the physical posing -- that carries a lot of the cognitive benefits of yoga," said Kimberley Luu, lead author on the paper. The study also found that mindfulness meditation and Hatha yoga were both effective for improving energy levels, but Hatha yoga had significantly more powerful effects than meditation alone.

"There are a number of theories about why physical exercises like yoga improve energy levels and cognitive test performance," said Luu. "These include the release of endorphins, increased blood flow to the brain, and reduced focus on ruminative thoughts.

Hatha yoga is one of the most common styles of yoga practiced in Western countries. It involves physical postures and breathing exercises combined with meditation. Mindfulness mediation involves observing thoughts, emotions and body sensations with openness and acceptance. "Although the meditative aspect might be even more important than the physical posing for improving executive functions, there are additional benefits to Hatha yoga including improvements in flexibility and strength," said Hall. "These benefits may make Hatha yoga superior to meditation alone, in terms of overall health benefits."

Kimberley Luu, Peter A. Hall. Examining the Acute Effects of Hatha Yoga and Mindfulness Meditation on Executive Function and Mood. Mindfulness, 2016; 8 (4): 873 DOI: 10.1007/s12671-016-0661-2

Quantum Healing

2013-06-11T08:57:00.001-07:00

Gregg Braden narrates Chinese video of real time healing

Understanding fear and how it plays into your day-to-day

2012-11-17T08:44:00.004-08:00

This is an excellent video on how fear develops and how the media feeds it.

How shared physical activity helps you connect and influence

2012-09-29T09:20:00.003-07:00

In this month's Psychology Today, Matt Huston mentions a couple of interesting pieces of research that show how shared physical activity binds us together.

Scott Wiltermuth of the University of Southern California found that students were twice as likely to acquiesce to a confederate's unethical suggestion if they had previously worked together to move plastic cups in a synchronized sequence.

In an earlier study, students who sang "O Canada" in unison before playing an economics game were more likely to make decisions for collective rather than individual gain.

Spouses who commute to work in the same direction are more satisfied with their marriages, regardless of whether they actually travel together, reports a study by Xun Huang in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. Even newly acquainted duos like each other more when they are told to walk to a task in the same direction.

Think of the possibilities. International leaders trying to reach consensus, managers looking to gel and motivate teams, even parents getting children to listen and act appropriately. I think we've just uncovered the reason why golf games work so well as sales tools.

How repetition increases believability

2012-07-10T13:52:00.001-07:00

Turns out the more times you hear something, the more likely you are to believe it. Repetition is the key and it doesn't seem to matter much whether you hear it from multiple people or via multiple media or from one person multiple times. A study by Kimberlee Weaver and colleagues published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that one person in a group expressing the same opinion three times had 90% of the effect of three different people in a group expressing the same opinion. (Weaver et al., 2007).

So how does that play out in our daily lives? Advertisers and influencers repeat the same message over and over. Familiarity doesn't breed contempt, in fact it does exactly the opposite - it breeds attraction. When an opinion is repeatedly broadcast at us by the same organization, not only do we believe it, but we're also likely to believe it represents the general opinion. That's despite the fact it is analogous to the same person repeating themselves over and over again.

Where does this effect come from? The study's authors argue it comes down to memory. Because repetition increases the accessibility of an opinion, we assume it has a high prevalence. In everyday life we are likely to hear the same opinion many times in different places. We then put all these together to judge the general mood of a group. When one person repeats their opinion, we simply over apply the rule.

Improve honesty by moving the signature line to the top of the form

2012-05-10T21:46:00.001-07:00

Research suggests the IRS might be able to improve tax payer's honesty by moving the signature line to the top of the form, such that signers declare that they will tell the truth rather than that they have told the truth. The findings, based on several experiments, are published in a the paper, When to Sign on the Dotted Line? Signing First Makes Ethics Salient and Decreases Dishonest Self-Reports, written by Lisa L. Shu, Francesca Gino, and Max H. Bazerman of Harvard Business School, Nina Mazar of the University of Toronto, and Dan Ariely of Duke University.

"A lot of prior work has focused on the consequences of unethical decision-making and the factors that lead people to be unethical," says Lisa Shu, a doctoral candidate in Organizational Behavior at HBS. "This drove us to want to explore the flip side. We know a lot about when and why people cheat based on our lab and field studies; we thought it was now time to examine how to prevent people from cheating."

The key, according to the researchers, lies in increasing ethical salience: inducing people to pay greater attention to their moral standards and examine the integrity of their behavior when it counts the most.

"A signature is a way to highlight the fact that you're about to do something important, and that it's going to be a reflection of the self," says Francesca Gino, an associate professor in the Negotiation, Organizations & Markets Unit at HBS. "Attaching a signature to a pledge of honesty is a way of effectively linking identity to morality."

5 Ways to Boost Cognitive Capacity

2012-03-17T17:25:00.000-07:00

A 2008 study on fluid intelligence and working memory by Jaeggi, Buschkuehl, Jonides, and Perrig showed for the first time, that it might actually be possible to increase intelligence through training. Up until this point it was assumed that intelligence was genetic, remained relatively fixed, and could not be improved in any lasting way. Among the study's findings:

Fluid intelligence is trainable
The training and subsequent gains are dose-dependent - meaning, the more you train, the more you gain.
Anyone can increase their cognitive ability, no matter what your starting point is.
The effect can be gained by training on tasks that don't resemble the test questions (typical intelligence test questions)

Writing about this study in Scientific American, author and Behavioral Therapist Andrea Kuszewski provides us with five ways to increase fluid intelligence and cognitive ability:

Seek Novelty
Challenge Yourself
Think Creatively
Do Things the Hard Way
Network

1. Seek Novelty.
When you seek novelty, you create new synaptic connections with every new activity you engage in. These connections build on each other, increasing your neural activity, creating more connections to build on other connections.

Constantly exposing yourself to new things puts your brain in a primed state for learning. Novelty also triggers dopamine, which not only kicks motivation into high gear, it also stimulates the creation of new neurons—and prepares your brain for learning.

2. Challenge Yourself.
Challenging yourself is about more than keeping your brain active and involves more than mental games and puzzles. Work by scientist Richard Haier shows that intense training on novel mental activities (in this case the video game Tetris) can produce increased brain activity and cognitive growth initially, but that activity drops off. Why the drop? Once the brain figured out how to play the game, and got really good at it, it got lazy. It didn’t need to work as hard in order to play the game well, so the cognitive energy went somewhere else instead.

In order to keep your brain making new connections and keeping them active, you need to keep moving on to another challenging activity as soon as you reach the point of mastery in the one you are engaging in. You want to be in a constant state of slight discomfort, struggling to barely achieve whatever it is you are trying to do. This keeps your brain on its toes, so to speak.

3. Think Creatively.
Creative thinking is about using both sides of your brain, focusing on a diverse range of topics and subjects, making remote associations between ideas, switching back and forth between conventional and unconventional thinking.

4. Do Things the Hard Way.
Your brain needs exercise the same way your body needs exercise. If you stop using your problem-solving skills, spatial skills, logical skills, and cognitive skills, your mental muscles will atrophy much the same way your physical muscles would without use.

We have a variety of modern conveniences and technologies that help make things easy for us. GPS tells us how to navigate the city, auto spellcheck and grammar check keep us from having to remember how a word is spelled or whether to use a common or semicolon. These are great conveniences, but they do little to build brainpower. If you want to increase cognitive capacity, one of the best things you can do is say no to shortcuts and use your brain.

5. Network.
By networking with other people - either through social media such as Facebook or Linked-In, or in face-to-face interactions - you are exposing yourself to the kinds of situations that are going to make items 1-4 much easier to achieve. By exposing yourself to new people, ideas and environments, you are opening yourself up to new opportunities for cognitive growth.

Full article by Kuszewski

The connection between physical sensations and higher cognitive powers

2012-02-16T17:04:00.000-08:00

In Body of Thought, a fascinating article by Siri Carpenter in Scientific American Mind we learn about the connection between physical sensations and higher cognitive powers. In particular, we learn how seemingly trivial sensations and actions like smiling or frowning or holding a smooth or rough object can influence high-level psychological processes such as social judgment, language comprehension, visual perception and even reasoning.

Psychologist Lawrence Barsalou at Emory University talks about how a few brave scientists in the 80s began to challenge the view that the body is just an input-out device for the brain. They suggested instead that higher cognitive processes are grounded in bodily experience and the brains low level sensory and motor circuits don't just feed into cognition; they are cognition.

Though ridiculed at the time, by the late 90s, evidence started trickling in, then later pouring in to support their thesis. Barsalou notes studies that show that:

holding a hot cup of coffee or being in a comfortably heated room warms a person's feelings toward strangers
striking an open expansive "power pose" prompts people to make bolder decisions
wearing a heavy backpack makes hills look steeper
a water bottle looks closer when you are thirsty
moving objects upward versus downward speeds recall for positive memories
sitting on a hard chair turns mild-mannered undergraduates into hard-headed negotiators.

Results of a now classic study by Fritz Strack at the University of Wurzburg in German, shows that smiling (even fake smiling) can affect how we feel and interpret information. Strack and colleagues found that people rated Far Side cartoons as funnier when they were holding a pen between their teeth, without allowing it to touch their lips ( a pose that activates muscles used for smiling). Those findings indicate that the face sends important feedback to the brain, which it then uses to interpret information about the world.

A 2009 study by neurologist Bernard Haslinger at the Munich University found that Botox injections to the forehead not only paralyzed frown muscles, but also jammed the neural circuits needed to fully process negative emotion. It seems if you can't physically make a frown, you're less likely to be sad.

It seems we also project immoral behavior onto body parts. Psychologist Norbert Schwarz at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor found that people rated hand sanitizer more highly after lying via e-mail and mouthwash more highly after lying via voicemail.

How do you persuade people to keep appointments?

2012-01-30T20:57:00.000-08:00

People who fail to show up for appointments cost organizations big bucks. A study in the UK showed that missed GP and hospital appointments costs the National Health Service more than 700 million pounds annually. Research carried out in liaison with the NHS Bedfordshire found that three behavior-change interventions can lead to a dramatic reduction in the numbers of people who fail to turn up for appointments:

Getting patients to confirm their appointment by verbally repeating the details to the receptionist.
Getting patients to write the appointment down themselves (rather than the receptionist doing it for them).
Placing positive messages around the GP practices confirming that attending appointments is the "social norm".

In the case of the Bedfordshire research, the techniques lead to a reduction of 30% in the number of no-shows for NHS appointments. Organizers estimated that if the interventions were replicated nationally, they could deliver savings of up to 250 million pounds annually.

Studies show we're subconsciously drawn to people who look like us

2012-01-22T11:32:00.000-08:00

Next time you find yourself seated in a roomful of strangers, take a look around. What you're likely to find is people who look alike end up sitting beside each other. Sean Mackinnon, Christian Jordan and Anne Wilson did research for the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin where they looked at seating patterns. They found that people tend to sit closer to people who share their physical traits. People with glasses sit closer to other people with glasses. People with long hair sit closer to other people with long hair.

It seems we subconsciously assume people who look like us also think like us, like the same things we do and have similar values and attitudes. We're more comfortable and more likely to open up the more physical characteristics we share.

Same thing happens at a cocktail party. Watch people pick out a stranger to talk to and chances are they'll pick out someone with similar physical attributes. My friend Dr. Karen Stephenson describes it this way:

"In the small talk of cocktail parties, humans are at a random walk, desperately seeking points of similarity through visibility: height, girth, dress, gender, race, accent, hair and eye color, etc. Reading the audience and working a room are ancient skills encoded in us by our forebears who sat cheek by jowl around the campfire; an earlier and more primordial form of cocktail party. I confess to having attended countless cocktail parties and continue to be amazed how, after just a few drinks, I end up with people who like me in some way - same experiences, same clothes, same interest, etc. It's not the alcohol talking, but the ancient drive of seeking similarity: 'You look like me, you think like me, you dress like me...you're one of us'."

Here's an interesting aside. Take a look at the picture on the right. That's Dr. Karen (on the left) around the time she made that comment (late 90s) and me during the same time period when I first starting doing research in this area which later became part of the book Axis of Influence - How Credibility and Likability Intersect to Drive Success.

Re-wiring the brain to save for the future

2011-11-07T08:05:00.000-08:00

Two recent articles provide interesting insight into how the brain works - why most of us tend to opt for instant gratification over future rewards, what that means for our financial futures and how we might re-wire those neural pathways.

Sharon Begley's article in Newsweek - Stop You Can't Afford It - How science unveils how your brain is hard-wired when it comes to spending - and how you can reboot it provides a fascinating journey through neuroscience brain mapping. It turns out the brains of those who naturally default to save or delay gratification are different from those who opt for immediate rewards. What's more, scientists are looking at ways to amp up the save circuits and amp down the spends.

Even though brain scans suggests hard-wiring, brains can learn. How do they learn? Through practice, researchers say. Scientists also found that a squirt of the hormone oxytocin - known as the "love hormone" because of the role it plays in bonding - makes people more patient and likely to opt for future rewards over instant gratification.

One of the keys to changing the brain circuitry is the ability to project yourself into the future and see the future you. It seems we can't get excited about saving for something we can't see or feel connected to.

The second article Face Reality With Aged-Morphed Photos (Wired - Nov 1) references work by Jeremy Bailenson, head of Stanford’s virtual reality lab and coauthor of the book Infinite Reality. Bailenson discovered that avatars or virtual versions of our selves can help us make positive changes, including saving for retirement.

Most people view their future selves as strangers, which makes them reluctant to put away money for a later date. But Bailenson and his team discovered that if people view a virtual version of themselves digitally aged by several decades, that hesitation disappears instantly. In one study, contributions to hypothetical retirement accounts went up by 30 percent.

Worthwhile Law of Attraction SlideShare

2011-06-21T10:08:00.000-07:00

A bit long, but nice....

The Law Of Attraction

View more presentations from RANSON

Stocks with easy-to-pronounce names outperform those with hard-to-pronounce names

2010-10-10T10:57:00.000-07:00

Small percentage differences account for big money when it comes to the stock market. As a psychology writer and part-time trader, I was delighted to discover work by Psychologists Adam Alter and Daniel Oppenheimer that suggested there was a natural inclination to overvalue companies with easy-to-pronounce names and undervalue those with difficult-to-pronounce names. Logical? Absolutely not, but relevant just the same.

Recognizing that people tended to respond positively to words that are easy-to-pronounce and process, Alter and Oppenheimer decided to see if this preference lent it self to picking stocks - i.e. would people prefer stocks with simpler names over those with complex names?

In their first study they presented groups of volunteers with a series of made-up company names - some difficult to get your tongue around - like Xagibdan and Beaulieaux and some easy-to pronounce, like Barnings and Tanley. They asked the group to estimate the future performance of these stocks. They found that participants tended to overvalue companies with easy names and undervalue companies with difficult names.

In a separate study, the researchers tracked ten stocks with easy-to-pronounce names and ten stocks with hard-to-pronounce names on the New York Stock Exchange. These 20 stocks were new to the NYSE and performance was tracked the first day on the Exchange, then after 1 week, after six months and after 1 year. They found that companies with easy-to-pronounce names outperformed companies with hard-to-pronounce names by 11.2 percent on their first day of trading. After six months, the difference was more than 27 percent. After a year, it was more than 33 percent!

In a third study, Alter and Oppenheimer looked at ticker symbols and found the same thing there, although over the longer term the payoff was less. Companies with easy -to-pronounce symbols (such as KAR) outperformed companies with hard-to-pronounce symbols (such as RDO) by 8.5% on their first day of trading and 2 percent after one year of trading. 2 percent may not sound significant, but in the world of trading, 2 percent is big money.

Source: http://web.princeton.edu/sites/opplab/papers/Adam%20PNAS_paper_Stock_Fluctuations_and_Fluency.pdf

Change your dataset - change your mindset

2010-08-24T20:57:00.000-07:00

David McCandless turns complex data sets (like worldwide military spending, media buzz, Facebook status updates) into beautiful, simple diagrams that tease out unseen patterns and connections. Good design, he suggests, is the best way to navigate information glut -- and it may just change the way we see the world.

Is his smile real or simulated?

2010-06-25T07:37:00.000-07:00

For years psychologists believed that a real smile was signaled by upturned lips and crinkly eyes. This genuine smile is named after the French physician Duchenne, who passed electrical currents through live subjects and took photos of their weirdly contorted faces.

Researchers suggested that 80% of us are unable to conjure up a fake smile that will trick others because we don't have voluntary control over the muscles around our eyes which signal the Duchenne smile.

Writing in a recent issue of the journal Emotion, Krumhuber and Manstead question whether this 80% estimate is anywhere near the mark. In the first of a series of experiments they found that 83% of the people in their study produce fake smiles that others mistook for the real thing in photographs.

The researchers also explored how people perceived genuine and fake smiles when they saw videos rather than just static pictures. Then it emerged that fake smiles were easier to spot, but the supposedly crucial crinkling around the eyes didn't help much. Instead, telling a real from fake smile relied more on dynamic processes such as how long people hold it, the symmetry of the expression and whether conflicting emotions are communicated by other facial areas.

So the Duchenne smile has taken a bit of bashing in this research, which suggests that most people can fake crinkly eyes. Not only that but the crinkly eyes aren't as crucial for us in judging the sincerity of a smile as other factors. Rather than just the crinkly eyes, it's the whole movement of the face which tells a tale either of deception or of genuine, felt emotion.

How you speak and write provides clues to your identity and character

2010-05-04T22:09:00.000-07:00

The way we write and speak can reveal a great deal about our identity and character. Here is a sampling of the variables that can be detected in our use of style-related words such as pronouns and articles.

Sex. In general, women tend to use more pronouns and references to other people; men are more likely to use articles, prepositions, and big words.
Age. As people get older, they tend to refer to themselves less, use more positive emotion and fewer negative emotion words. Older people also use more future tense and fewer past tense verbs.
Social class. The higher the social class, the less likely one uses 1st person singular pronouns and the less one uses emotion words.
Honesty. When people tell the truth, they are more like to use 1st person singular pronouns. They also use more exclusive words like except, but, without, excluding. Words such as this indicate that a person is making a distinction between what they did do and what they didn’t do. Liars have a problem with such complex ideas.
Dominance in a conversation. Analyze the relative use of the word “I” between two speakers in an interaction. Usually, the higher status speaker will use fewer “I” words.
Social bonding after a trauma. In the days and weeks after a cultural upheaval, people become more self-less (less use of “I”) and more oriented towards others (increased use of “we”).
Depression and suicide-proneness. Public figures speaking in press conferenecs and published poets in their poetry use more 1st person singular when they are depressed or prone to suicide.
Testosterone levels. In two case studies, it was found that when people’s testosterone levels increased rapidly, they dropped in their use of references to other people.

Adapted from work by James Pennebaker at the University of Texas. http://homepage.psy.utexas.edu/homepage/Faculty/Pennebaker/Home2000/Words.html

Why smart people forward stupid emails

2010-04-10T09:33:00.000-07:00

I receive weekly, sometimes daily emails from friends or family telling me about yet another computer virus, missing child, or lie about our President. Today, I was revisited by the granddaddy of hoax emails - that Microsoft and AOL were going to pay me big bucks for forwarding this email to all my friends. Yes, the person mentioned in the email had already received $24,800!

This email has been circulating since 1997. 13 years folks!!! and a gazillion of tracks back and forth across the airwaves. In fact I'm pretty sure I have received it from the same people 4 or 5 times.

My fascination with this subject is with the instant believability factor. It only takes a minute or two to do a quick Google search to check the validity of the email, but few people ever do that. Why? I think there are three reasons: One, because they want to believe its true - whatever "it" is matches their values. They want to believe Obama is a radical Muslim, or that computer viruses are rampant or there's a chance of winning cash and prizes for doing nothing more than forwarding an email.

The second reason is a combination of mental laziness and an urge to genuinely help people. The act of passing the email on to friends and family in order to help them ranks higher in most people's values food chain than the requirement for validity or fact checking.

The third reason, which is kind of tied to the second reason, is that we don't feel like we have to question it because the email came from someone we know and trust. I trust my friend Paul who trusted his friend John who trusted his sister Kathy who trusted her friend Pam and so on.

So what's the harm in passing these innocent emails along or simply ignoring them when they come in? Maybe nothing in the short term, but after awhile don't we run the risk of becoming sheep, able to be easily herded, cajoled or sold a bill of goods because we're not smart enough or motivated enough to do some homework, check the facts or think for ourselves.

Want to feel happier or less pain during a procedure? Smile!

2010-03-21T10:02:00.000-07:00

It's true - smiling can actually make you feel better. Recent studies suggest that our emotions are reinforced, maybe even driven, by facial expressions.

It was actually Darwin who first suggested the link between facial expressions and emotions. In 1872 he said "The free expression by outward signs of an emotion intensifies it." In other words, smiles will make you feel happier, frowns will pull you back the other way.

Psychologists at the University of Cardiff in Wales found that people whose ability to frown is compromised by botox injections are happier, on average, then people who can frown. Dr Michael Lewis, a senior lecturer at the university’s school of psychology, said “We know from research in the past that if you make someone smile they feel happier. More on this study here

It appears facial expressions also have a relationship to pain. The May 2008 Journal of Pain reported that people who frown during an unpleasant procedure report feeling more pain than those who do not.

For more on this topic, see Scientific American Mind's Smile! It Could Make You Happier

Your brain wants you to be successful

2010-02-15T20:43:00.000-08:00

Research by Massachusetts Institute of Technology neuroscientist Earl Miller suggests that our brains are inherently wired toward success. Miller's research shows that not only does the brain learn more from success than from failure, but it seeks out success.

The pleasurable feeling that comes with successes is brought about by a surge in the neurotransmitter dopamine. By telling brain cells when they have struck gold, the chemical apparently signals them to keep doing whatever they did that lead to success. In other words success leads to more and more success.

"We have shown that brain cells keep track of whether recent behaviors were successful or not," Miller said. Furthermore, when a behavior was successful, cells became more finely tuned to what the animal was learning. After a failure, there was little or no change in the brain - nor was there any improvement in behavior.

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/successes-0729.html

Understanding How Other People See You

2009-11-15T11:08:00.000-08:00

Interesting article in October's Psychology Today on research by Sam Gosling. Mixed Signals: You likely see yourself very differently from the way others see you. A little self-awareness can prevent a lot of misunderstanding.

Worth getting actual print copy for the pictures. I highly encourage you to capture your first impression before looking at the author's results. Michael and I had very different results. I love Gosling's work but my research is more around understanding what it is we are actually seeing in the face or demeanor.

First Impressions

2009-11-15T10:10:00.000-08:00

We (co-author Michael Lovas and I) have written quite a lot about first impressions. In particular the series of subconscious assessments that go on when we first meet someone. We know that the first thing that goes on is the "am I in danger?" assessment.

Every time a stranger looks at you, he or she makes a split-second determination as to whether you are friend or foe. Also among those split second assessments is an analysis of your attractiveness, likeability and credibility.

According to Princeton researcher and professor Alex Todorov, we are "hard wired" to quickly draw these inferences.

“The link between facial features and character may be tenuous at best, but that doesn’t stop our minds from sizing other people up at a glance. We decide very quickly whether a person possesses many of the traits we feel are important, such as likeability and competence, even though we have not exchanged a single word with them. It appears that we are hard-wired to draw these inferences in a fast, unreflective way.”

For more on first impressions, and in particular what people are "reading" to make these assessments, check out our book Axis of Influence - How Credibility and Likeability Intersect to Drive Success.

For more on Alex Todorov, check out All Things Considered, June 9, 2005 - Scientists Search for Winning Look. Forget political polls. Scientists usually can tell whether political candidates will win or lose by testing voters’ reactions to the contestants’ faces. A study in the journal Science shows that voters chose the face that looks more “competent.”

Professor Todorov’s Princeton Website

Visual Representation of Left Brain Right Brain

2009-10-23T12:09:00.000-07:00

What a great representation of the two sides of the brain and how they see the world and relate to each other.

It came from Wired Magazine via this blog: http://informl.com/2005/01/29/random-learning/

Are You a Liar?

2009-10-23T10:52:00.000-07:00

Do people really lie 3 times within 10 minutes of meeting someone new? Find out here.

Are You a Liar?

How Managers Sabotage Performance by Triggering the Threat Response

2009-10-21T11:44:00.000-07:00

A recent article called "Managing with Brain in Mind" in the Autumn 2009 edition of Strategy+Business provides interesting insight into the social nature of performance. We researched the threat response for our book Axis of Influence and found that the first stop on the road to credibility and likeability is trust, which means dealing with the automatic "am I in danger?" threat response.

Research available since that time shows us that our friends in the fight or flight department of the brain are alive and well and influenced or triggered by more than just safety. Recent research by UCLA's Naomi Eisenberger and Matthew Lieberman suggests that the same neural responses that drive us toward food or away from predators are triggered by the way we are treated by other people.

Apparently Maslow had it wrong. Maslow in his "hierarchy of needs" suggested that humans satisfy their needs in sequence, starting with physical survival and moving up the ladder toward self-actualization at the top. In this hierarchy, social needs sit in the middle. But many studies now show that the brain equates social needs with survival; for example, being hungry and being ostracized activate similar neural responses.

Being in this threat response state for any length of time is damaging to both individual productivity and organizational performance. It uses up vital oxygen and glucose from the blood making it no longer available to other functions of the brain such as working memory which processes new information and ideas. This impairs analytical thinking, creative insight and problem solving.

The impact of this dynamic is often visible in organizations. For example, an autocratic manager operating in a carrot and stick mentality triggers a threat response in employees and reduces efficiency, creativity and innovation.

So what can managers do to minimize the threat response and enable the reward response? Here are 3 of the 5 things mentioned in the article:

1. Understand "status" stress and look for creative ways to enable status boosts.
As humans, we are constantly assessing how our status compares to others around us. Research by Hidehiko Takahashi in 2009 shows that when people realize that they might compare unfavourably to someone else, the threat response kicks in releasing cortisol and other stress-related hormones.

As a manager, limit stressful comparisons like forced ranking and 360 degree reviews as well as negative "feedback." Provide praise and opportunities to learn new skills, two critically important status boosters.

2. Be transparent, open and clear about what's going on.
When a person encounters a familiar situation, his or her brain conserves it's own energy by shifting into a kind of automatic pilot. The pattern has been established and minimal energy is taken up. The opposite is true when the brain registers ambiguity or confusion. Uncertainty registers as an error, gap or tension and draws energy away from other functions.

Not knowing what will happen next can be debilitating because it requires extra neural energy. This diminishes memory, undermines performance and disengages people from the present.
Leaders and managers can help create a perception of certainty by sharing business plans, rationale for changes, and by breaking large projects into smaller more manageable chunks.

3. Stop micro managing and let people make their own decisions
A perception of reduced autonomy - for example of being micromanaged - can easily generate a threat response. Presenting people with options, or allowing them to organize their own work and set their own hours, provokes a much less stressed response.

Full article here -http://www.strategy-business.com/article/09306?gko=5df7f