How many therapists does it take to change a lightbulb? Only one, but it takes six months and the bulb has to want to change!

Humour has a potentially valuable place in therapy; a large number of papers argue for the benefits of it in a therapeutic setting. There is also a lot of information about humour styles out there, and what type of humour is appropriate in different settings.

BUT… is there any work on how to teach humour skills to professionals? It’s alright to advise a talk therapist to “use humour,” but humour could potentially have a severely negative effect too, if used ineffectively. So it seems that proper training may be needed.

And also, in a broader sense, humour is useful in sales, business, teaching; even in romance! So what about general humour training? We have comedy improv clubs and what-not, and these might be effective in their own way, but it’s not going to convince the scientists and practitioners to go to a comedy club to help their patients. For that, there would need to be theoretical papers, randomised controlled trials, and so on, which is ironic since these are some of the least amusing things you’re likely to come across. But I decided to see if there was any science in this area. Can humour be learned, or is it just a gift?

The Controlled Trial

“When I first said I wanted to be a comedian, everybody laughed. They’re not laughing now.” – Bob Monkhouse

As I looked through the research, unfortunately, I found very few studies. I managed to found one controlled test of a humour training intervention. Nevo, Aharonson, and Klingman (1) subjected 101 female teachers to a 20-hour humour training program, consisting of 14 individual units. At the end of the test, the treatment group saw greater improvements in measures of ‘humour production’ as rated by peers, compared to pre-test measurements and the control group. And subjectively, the participants felt that the program was moderately effective. So it does seem from this one study, that humour can be learned.

An interesting finding, however, was that ‘trait-level’ measures of humour were less sensitive to changes following the program; which might question how long these benefits last for. Maybe you have to keep practising to keep your game up.

The Uncontrolled Trial

McGhee (2) devised an 8 week humour development program, aimed at the lay audience. Franzini (3) mentions that this program is backed by a self-report follow up, but as yet I have not found it. If anyone knows of it, please let me know.

General skill or scripted sessions?

The local yoga club was in high spirits, despite the horrific Superglue accident. (credit: lululemon athletica)

Here’s another point – do we train professionals in humour production, then let them loose on their clients? Or do we systematically develop a set of lines and comments, a sort of therapists jokebook, that are tested and proven to be funny, appropriate, non-triggering, and so on? By doing so, we might increase the ‘hit-rate’ of the humour, but we may lose a certain authenticity to the interaction’s normal, organic flow. Carl Rogers and others have suggested that an authentic relationship between client and counsellor is an essential part of the therapeutic process – structured humour may get in the way of this. But in other fields this may work well.

Theoretical benefits of studying humour training

As well as looking for practical benefits in applied settings, there might be other uses to studying humour training. One in particular could be in linking the findings with the evolutionary fields. Evolutionary psychologists have been trying to find the adaptive function of humour and laughter for a while, and they’ve focused a lot of attention on attraction.

They suggest that humour evolved, essentially, as a way of attracting a mate by displaying the health of your brain and your immunity to social pressure through your fantastic wit, hence making your genes something of a commodity to members of the opposite sex.

So far, researchers have found certain types of humour to be more attractive than others; self-depricating humour is apparently the best one, as long as you’re already high-status (4). If you’re not already seen as high-status, self-depricating humour has the opposite effect on your perceived attractiveness (these researchers are also to be commended for the use of the word “diss” in the title of a scientific paper). But if humour training can be measured somehow, this would be better way to test these theories too – for example are people viewed as more attractive, so they meet more partners, etc., after a humour training program, all other things being equal?

Overall, there is little research in this area, despite many papers noting the benefits of humour in a range of professional and personal settings, and this could be a fruitful area for future study.

References:

(1) Nevo, O., Aharonson, H., & Klingman, A. (1998). The development and evaluation of a systematic program for improving sense of humor. In W Ruch (Ed.), The sense of humor: Explorations of a personality characteristic (pp.385-404). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

(2) McGhee, P.E. (1994). How to develop your sense of humour: An 8 step humour development training program. Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt.

(3) Franzini, Louis (2001). Humor in Therapy: The Case for Training Therapists in Its Uses and Risks. The journal of General Psychology, 128(2), 170-193.

(4) Greengross, G., & Miller, G.F. (2008). Dissing Oneself versus Dissing Rivals: Effects of Status, Personality, and Sex on the Short-Term and Long-Term Attractiveness of Self-Deprecating and Other-Deprecating Humor. Journal of Evolutionary Psychology, 6(3), 393-408.

There is a lot of information out there about the benefits of optimism in numerous areas of life. The research shows that optimists aren’t necessarily blind to the world, seeing it with rose-tinted glasses, which is a common criticism of books and programs aimed at developing optimism in people. In fact, optimism seems to be in many cases a highly desirable decision making or belief strategy. And being optimistic implies a positive anticipation of a desired outcome; sometimes when all the evidence points to a different one occurring.

Rather than writing the “10 steps to optimism”, I want to look into this a little more deeply. Why have we evolved the ability to think this way? Surely the best way to guide behaviour would be to hold beliefs that are as accurate as possible, and making decisions based on them. I would have assumed that these would be the most accurate decisions you could make. So you might argue that natural selection would tend towards accurate thinking, but this doesn’t match up with the evidence base on optimism or other cognitive biases (or simply the experience of being human).

To explain the ultimate origin of optimism, it is necessary to figure out whether having a system in the brain that allows for overly favourable perception or cognition can be beneficial to survival or reproduction, and also to see how the system would relates to other ideas in evolutionary theory.

To give a specific example, consider the tendency of men to overestimate the sexual interest of women (1). This is of course an adaptive strategy, because male reproduction is limited only by the number of partners they can meet, and since it costs little or nothing to ‘try it on’, being optimistic and assuming the best means fewer missed opportunities. Natural selection would therefore favour men who are optimistic about women’s interest in them, as opposed to those with accurate perceptions.

This balance of costs and benefits is how optimism is said to have evolved. In a situation where a caveman or cavewoman has to make a decision, but they are uncertain about the outcome, sometimes they are going to get it wrong. But, is it more costly to make false positive errors, or false negative errors? This problem is called error management theory (1), and it ties in nicely with the idea of positive illusions, which we’ve discussed before in the context of relationships.

Taylor and Brown (2) propose that positive illusions help motivate people to pursue goals with a low objective level of success, such as the terminally ill individual whose positive illusion about the disease leads her to positive health behaviours.

In such a situation (and in others), optimism and pessimism can lead to different negative outcomes – optimism might lead to wasting time and energy in pursuits that are not beneficial, and pessimism might lead to passivity and missing out on potential opportunities.

Reasoning forward we can see a route through which optimism can evolve in a world where the outcomes of decisions are often uncertain – if the cost of trying and failing is low (compared to the benefit of succeeding), then optimism is the best strategy – better, even, than a decision that is made on accurate information (3).

Coming back to increasing chances of survival and reproduction, we find that positive illusions tend to be aimed toward the self, and particularly about characteristics that other people find desirable – when asked about others, the illusions disappear (4) – with the exception of our positive illusions towards our romantic partners; but we’ve seen that these are ultimately self-serving as they help sustain the relationship.

Likewise, pessimism is thought to have evolved by the same pressure of natural selection, but this time acting on a different area of the brain. This allows for variation in the things we can be optimistic and pessimistic about, depending on the particular situation (see reference 3 for more info on this).

Recommended Reading

• Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life

References:

(1)Haselton, M. G. & Buss, D. M. (2000). Error management theory: A new perspective on biases in cross-sex mind reading. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78, 81-91.

(2) Taylor, S. E., & Brown, J. D. (1988). Illusion and well-being: A social psychological perspective on mental health. Psychological Bulletin, 103, 193-201.

(3) Haselton, M., & Nettle, D. (2005). The paranoid optimist: An integrative evolutionary model of cognitive biases. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 10(1), 47-66

(4) Campbell, J. D. (1986). Similarity and uniqueness: The effects of attribute type, relevance and individual differences in self-esteem and depression. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 50, 281-294.

February 25th was a very special day, for it was the day the first article was posted on GenerallyThinking.com! Since then, I’ve made 110 posts to the site including this one, and the majority are in-depth, 1,000 word+ articles rather than single-serving internet distractions.

The blog is now reasonably popular and attracts over 10,000 unique visitors each month. Most visitors come in through search engines, but there is a small contingent who visit Generally Thinking several times per week, and I would like to thank you regular visitors for reading my articles, because without you I’d just be talking to myself (and I do enough of that when I’m not sat at a computer).

As is customary when a blog gets a year older, here are the highlights of the last year:

My top five personal favourites (in this order)

1) Five things everybody needs to know about materialism

My favourite post, mainly because I get to put a picture of Tyler Durden in it. There will be much more to come on this topic as I’m writing my dissertation on it (materialism that is, not Tyler Durden).

2) Positive Priming

A run-down of the various studies looking at priming. Very interesting stuff, particularly the ‘fountain of youth’ section, which still blows me away (the research, that is, not my writing skills). See also practical priming, a follow up which offers some suggestions for applying priming to your benefit.

3) What is Beauty?

I really liked this post, and it took weeks to research and write, revise and find suitable images for.  Unfortunately it didn’t receive the attention I thought it deserved, and despite my best efforts, it only reached about page 20 of Google for some reason, yet it’s better than 95% of the articles that sit in front of it.

4) What’s your motivation?

An overview of intrinsic motivation and self-determination theory, which one commenter referred to as “one of the best posts I’ve seen on motivation on the web.” Also includes practical suggestions.  Two teachers told me they have recommended this article to their students, which I was immensely happy about.

5) Love on the Brain

What is this crazy little thing called love, and why does it have such a maddening effect on us? See if you can spot the titles of love songs that I hid in this article…

Other highlights (in chronological order)

What is Happiness

The vert first post to the site, and I still think it’s a good discussion of this topic.

How to be Happier

I was surprised that this more practical article didn’t take off more, although at 4,500 words its length probably puts some people off. But you’re not supposed to read it all at once, instead, come back and try different things at different times.

How to be Happier

No this isn’t  a mistake.  Noticing that the above post was a little long, I made this little pdf which does about the same thing in about 20% of the words. It’s available for free download, and lets be honest, most people would make you pay for something like this, or you’d at least have to give up your email address! But none of that here. It’s yours for nothing.

“You can do anything you set your mind to” Vs “Stick to your strengths”

A folk-wisdom title fight.

Strengths and Weaknesses

By far the most popular article on this website, owing more to its popularity with search engines more than anything else.

Where to find good information online

Another massively popular post, and pretty useful too even if I do say so myself.

Six Success-Enhancing Behaviours that Good Moods Bring You

The tried and true ‘list’ formula proves its worth again in this popular post looking at happiness from a different angle.

Positive Psychology Resources

If you’re studying or involved in positive psychology in any way, you should bookmark this post!

The Buddhist Brain

A very popular article looking into what happens when you put Tibetan monks with 20,000+ hours of meditation experience into a brain imaging machine…

Differential Susceptibility – are some brains more plastic than others

A look at the work of Michael Pluess and Jay Belsky, who are looking at the Diathesis-Stress model in a new way.

Flowers = Happiness? You bet!

Looking at the emotional impact of flowers, and why we might like them so much.

Thanks again for a good first year!

Psychological ‘resilience’ refers to the differences between people in how they respond to and cope with difficult or stressful experiences. People who are highly resilient would be less affected, recover more quickly, and/or might actually find such events to be growth experiences. For people low in resilience, the opposite would be true.

Now here’s something to think about: many popular books and articles have mentioned the increases in mental disorder such as stress and depression over the last century, at least in the modern world. And if you think about it, there does seem to be a trend in which, as time has gone by, we’ve increased our use of technology to the effect that we physically move around much less.

Could it be that there is a causal relationship here, that our lack of movement has reduced our psychological resilience to stress? And by becoming more active, could we increase our resilience?

Stress

In a sense, everything that we do involves stress. Even just reading this sentence is placing a particular demand on your brain, so what is important here is how we respond a particular stressor. Stress is also important for growth – our bodies are adaptive and generally respond to stress by becoming more able to deal with it; provided that stress is not too high. For example, doing bicep curls with 100kg would probably be too much stress and lead to injury, but 10kg might be enough stress to increase strength.

So you could argue that placing the body under moderate amounts of stress could, over time, lead to lowered stress responses to future events, but the important point is whether resilience to the stress of exercise carries over to stress caused by other events (eg, in the workplace, traffic jams, etc).

Exercise

Two great ways to get some exercise: Walk the invisible dog, and handshake the invisible man. (Credit: mikebaird)

In one study, researchers put one group of participants on a 10-week walking and jogging program, and left another to continue their normal sedentary lifestyle. At the end of the program, the exercise group scored lower on state and trait anxiety, as well as less tension and fatigue. These factors could contribute to lowered stress responses to future events, however this was not tested directly, and additionally only 16 participants per group took part, and you’d typically want a minimum of 30, preferably more, to get a solid finding. (1)

In another study, the effects of aerobic, weight, and no training on responses to a fiendishly stressful situation were compared. Participants had to answer mental arithmetic puzzles, which flashed up on a screen too fast to complete, while listening to distracting conversations involving numbers.

Those who had undergone the aerobic training had reduced heart-rate and systolic blood-pressure responses relative to the control group (the weight training group only had improvements in systolic blood-pressure). So it seems apparent that exercise builds physical and psychological resilience to other events. (2)

Mechanisms

The mechanism of this effect is not yet fully understood, but Spalding et al (2) suggest it may by primarily due to improvements in general cardiac performance – the cardiovascular system becomes more efficient and doesn’t need to do as much work to mobilise resources in reaction to a stressor. In this way, exercise effectively raises the body’s natural ‘trigger point’ for the stress response.

Additionally, exercise triggers the release of atrial natriuretic peptide (ANP), which has a direct effect on the body’s stress response by reducing the activation of the HPA axis. This is a route through which exercise can reduce immediate levels of stress, but there may be longer-term effects too; exercise may benefit chronic levels of stress by relaxing the resting tension level of the muscles, which can reduce chronic stress by breaking the stress-feedback loop (3).

The body was ‘designed’ with the presumption that it would experience a certain amount of movement, and when this movement doesn’t take place, the body doesn’t perform up to spec. This is one example of many where we see that as humans are taken further from their ‘natural environment’, so to speak, various problems start to arise.

Recommended Reading:

• Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain

References:

(1) Blumenthal, J.A., Williams., R.S., Needels, T.L., & Wallace, A.G. (1982). Psychological changes accompany aerobic exercise in healthy middle-aged adults. Psychosomatic Medicine, 44(6), 529-536.

(2) Spalding, T.W., Lyon, L.A., Steel, D.H., & Hatfield, B.D. (2004). Aerobic exercise training and cardiovascular reactivity to psychological stress in sedentary young normotensive men and women. Psychophysiology, 41, 552-562.

(3) Ratey, J., & Hagerman, E. (2008). Spark. London: Quercus.

Welcome to the seventh edition of the Psychology Articles Carnival!

The Psychology Articles Carnival, predictably enough, is a blog carnival showcasing posts relating to scientific psychology from the previous month. Often they will be articles I’ve come across and want to tell you about, but psychology bloggers are free to submit their own articles for inclusion, using this submission form.

Preferably you’ll cite at least one journal article or book by someone in the field, but as long as it’s thoughtful and not any of that pop-psychology “10 funky steps to a better you” crap, it’ll get in. If your article is on here but you didn’t submit it, it’s because I also put the odd article in just because I like it, they’re the ones that don’t start with “x presents…” Thanks for reading!

© Rolffimage… | Dreamstime.com

Informative

Dan Stelter presents Anxiety and Addiction posted at Anxiety Support Network.

*Recommended* Livia Blackburne presents Current techniques for brain research posted at Livia Blackburne. (Great overview of different methods – Have a look at this one!).

Brent Lesson presents Reality vs. Depression – ItchyFlight.com posted at No More Apologies – Itchyflight.com.

DrAlanSinger presents Helping Others is Rather Self-Serving posted at FamilyThinking.com with Dr. Alan Singer.

Andrew Bernardin presents SIDS, Serotonin and More Serotonin posted at The Evolving Mind.

*Recommended* Miche Heredia presents Is Passion Necessary for a Meaningful Life? posted at Serenity Hacker. Excellent article, very accessible read too!

Academic

Livia Blackburne presents Reading and Word Recognition Research: Color and Object Naming Speed Predicts Future Risk for Dyslexia posted at Reading and Word Recognition Research.

*Recommended* The EPPP Study Guy presents Why You Need To Pass The EPPP Exam posted at How To Pass The EPPP Exam Without Even Trying!. From the author: “This article will be of great interest to graduate psychology students, newly graduated psychologists, and any other psychologists who are studying for the Examination for Professional Practice in Psychology (EPPP). The EPPP is the national examination for psychologists.”

Practical

Tyler Benson presents The power of a Handshake posted at Weekly Psyche.

Jaime Woolley presents Is Your Child Being Bullied? posted at 101parenttips.com.

In positive psychology, most theories of positive emotion have focused on discovering their relative costs and benefits to humans. These theories, to a greater and lesser degree, see positive emotions as being evolved adaptations to our environment. Greater mood brings wider though-action repertoires, allowing us to build our resources (1), they regulate our motivation to work towards goals (2), and when in the right balance with negative emotions, provide optimal conditions for mental health (3).

But all life on Earth is intertwined; could it be that our positive emotions exist not only for our own benefit, but to the benefit of other species, too? Researchers Haviland-Jones, Rosario, Wilson and McGuire (4) argue that they do. What species could be manipulating our positive emotions to their advantage? Could it be the intelligent dolphin? Man’s best friend, the dog? Or perhaps our closest cousin, the chimpanzee?

Nope. It’s the simple flower!

Do these flowers cheer you up?(Credit: Per Ola Wiberg)

The logic behind this argument is that there is an evolutionary ‘niche’ open for species that can elicit emotional rewards in mammals. The first step towards testing this idea, is to establish an emotional connection between humans and flowering plants; something romantics have known for centuries!

In a series of studies, Haviland-Jones et al report that:

• When women were given flowers, they always responded with a ‘real’ duchenne smile, and reported more positive moods three days later.
• When men or women were given a flower, they responded with a duchenne smile and engaged in more prosocial activities (compared to control conditions of being given a pen or nothing).
• Flowers given to elderly people resulted in more positive mood and improved episodic memory!

The researchers also reported other “unusual emotional displays that they were unprepared to measure,” (4, p122), including:

• Hugs and kisses.
• Invitations to participants’ homes for refreshments.
• ‘Thank you’ cards and letters – some with photographic evidence of the continuing beauty of the bouquet.

As they sum up – “In many years of studying emotions, we have never received hugs and kisses, thank you notes or photographs, not even for candy, doghnuts, hats, gift certificates, or direct monetary payment; flowers are different.”

What about this one? (Credit: Flowery *L*u*z*a*)

These findings are difficult to account for using the theories under the positive psychology umbrella. The emotion does not seem to be relevant to a goal process, or related generally to receiving a gift. And why would the presentation of flowers bring a broadened thought-action repertoire? Perhaps something to do with Fredrickson’s cognitive maps; as flowering plants were part of our ancenstral environment, could their presence trigger a positive emotion to allow greater awareness and therefore knowledge of the environment?

Haviland-Jones et al suggest three better explanations:

1) Learned associations between flowers and happiness from positive social events

Possibly true, but typically the socialisation of positive emotions and flowers is specific to women, and the studies also found effects in men. Additionally, learned associations do not account for the prevalence and meaning given to flowers cross-culturally. Still, this can’t be ruled out without studies in cultures that place little or no significance on flowers – if there are any.

2) Evolutionary food association

Rather than a positive social event, perhaps flowers are associated with potential foraging success – as they signal the current or future availability of nuts and fruits; nutritionally dense foods.

3) Flowers evolved as human mood enhancers

Perhaps the sensory aspects of flowers directly influence positive human moods. This reaction to flowers would be expected without learning an association between flowers and happiness, but would make learning such an association easier.

How could this all be working? Emotional processing occurs in a specific part of the brain, based on certain ‘rules’ applied to the input to this area. Over vast periods of time, and where it is in their interest, organisms attempt to access the ‘rules’ of other organisms and adapt to them. It’s a kind of evolutionary cold war, all happening through the trial and error of natural selection, without any conscious or deliberate direction (an important point).

Flowers have adapted to our preferences in a number of ways, it seems. We have a preference for symmetry, we have a preference for certain colours, and we may also have a preference for certain smells. These preferences all evolved for specific purposes (pattern recognition, to distinguish between high- and low-protein leaves, etc), but because they are general preferences, we would not necessarily need to be exposed to a flower to be attracted to it – it is configured in a way that our brain ‘likes’, which triggers the release of chemicals that result in our positive emotions.

I’m kind of limited in the range of pictures I can provide you with in this article. Here are some more flowers. (Credit: o b s k u r a)

This may be serendipitous though, because the smells, colours and shapes of flowers may have evolved to attract the birds and insects with which their cross-species pollination efforts are usually associated. Either way, this configuration appears to be beneficial to the plants; for many species of plants, humans are the main agents of seed dispersal, even those that have no nutritious or medicinal value. They have discovered the secrets of our positive emotional response mechanisms, and have adapted themselves to exploit it. We’re being manipulated!

Although this idea is far from confirmed, and there are a lot of unanswered questions, the theory does provide an interesting angle on positive emotions that we maybe don’t consider in positive psychology. When we think of the purpose of positive emotions, we immediately think “How do they benefit us?” But for a fuller picture of the role of positive emotions, we might have to think about how they benefit other species, too.

References:

(1) Fredrickson, B. (2001). The role of positive emotions in positive psychology: The broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions. American Psychologist, 56(3), 218-226.

(2) Carver, C., & Scheier, M. (1990). Origins and functions of positive and negative affect: A control-process view. Psychological Review, 97(1), 19-35.

(3) Fredrickson, B., & Losada, M. (2005). Positive Affect and the Complex Dynamics of Human Flourishing. American Psychologist, 60(7), 678-686.

(4) Haviland-Jones, J., Rosario, H. H., Wilson, P., & McGuire, T. R. (2005). An Environmental Approach to Positive Emotion: Flowers. Journal of Evolutionary Psychology, 3, 104-132.

One of the more interesting of our (many) cognitive biases are positive illusions – a tendency to be view ourselves more positively than others, be optimistic about the future, and exaggerate our perceptions of control.  Positive illusions are typically self-enhancing, but if you’ve ever seen a madly in love couple, or been a part of one, you might have the idea that maybe we project positive illusions onto other people.  And it’s true.  People in romantic relationships really do drench their partners in a wave of idealised qualities, and downplay their more annoying aspects. (1)

A number of studies have found that people tend to rate their partners attractiveness as greater than their own (2), but there was one study in particular which was particularly ingenious. (3)  Photos were taken of couples, which were manipulated in a computer to create an array of seven faces – the real photo, three that were more attractive, and three that were less attractive (see ‘What is beauty?‘ for more on standards of attractiveness).  Participants had to identify their partners real face from the fake ones.  Couples who were satisfied with their current relationship tended to pick a more attractive face, couples who were dissatisfied tended to pick a less attractive face!

If you look at your partner and see this, that’s an example of a positive illusion. Or an LSD high. (Credit: NaiM eL NoVaTO)

Why does this happen though?  We’ve already seen that love can have a very powerful effect on us, perhaps these illusions help us to justify staying with a partner, just like a junkie justifies “one more hit.”  That’s an unromantic way of saying that this may just be a normal, healthy way of keeping a relationship going.  And likewise, when a relationship is going badly, the illusions disappear which again could be a way of helping us to make the right relationship choices.

So, our mind may be responding to the amount of satisfaction in the relationship by altering our perceptions slightly, as a safeguard towards helping us stay in beneficial relationships, and against wasting time in bad relationships (when we could be looking for someone new).  And it does seem to be an effective system – one study followed couples over a 13-year period, and found that positive illusions predicted greater satisfaction with the relationship in the early stages of dating and marriage.

So is love blind?  Perhaps not blind, but certainly partially-sighted.  However, this is not a phenomenon that is unique to love.  Our perception of reality is far from objective, particularly social reality, and positive illusions in relationships are just another illustration of the idea that we are specialised organisms rather than rational beings.  Natural selection has ‘designed’ our minds to cut the corners of logic wherever this helps us to solve our problems of survival and reproduction in a more efficient or effective way.  Well, there’s either that explanation, or the ‘love-is-magic’ Disney explanation.  Take your pick.

References:

(1) Murray, S., Holmes, J., & Griffin, D. (1996). The benefits of positive illusions: Idealization and the construction of satisfaction in close relationships. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 70(1), 79-98

(2) Swami, V., Furnham, A., Georgiades, C., & Pang, L. (2007). Evaluating self and partner physical attractiveness. Body Image, 4, 97-101.

(3) Penton-Voak, I.S., Rowe, A.C., & Williams, J. (2007). Through rose tinted glasses: Relationship satisfaction and representations of partners facial attractiveness.  Journal of Evolutionary Psychology, 5, 169-181.

A lot of people get the idea that they’d like to study psychology. Usually they have a curiosity about people combined with something they saw on TV, maybe a documentary that piqued their interest, or maybe something like Wire in the Blood. But many of these people have jobs and other commitments, and don’t have the flexibility to be at a specific place at a specific time each week.

If this sounds like you, but you still really want to study psychology, then distance learning might be the answer.

Distance Learning in Psychology

From A-level and equivalents, degree courses, and masters, the option is there to study psychology from home. Most institutions offer distance learning options, and often with distance learning courses, you find that the entry requirements are slightly looser, as they know that this from of study will appeal to mature students, people returning to study after a break, and so on. Some institutions, such as the open university, do not have any formal entry requirements.

Is Distance Learning Right for you?

If this is your computer, distance learning may not be for you… (credit: blakespot)

If you’ve been away from education for a while, then take this decision seriously. It will be a bigger commitment that you are probably expecting, in terms of time spent, but also the physical and mental energy you’ll need. And you won’t have regular face-to-face contact with your tutors, so you’ll have to be fairly self-regulated to do well, and study even during those times you might not feel like it, because the external pressure won’t be as hard.

On the plus side, you enjoy greater flexibility, you can study to your own schedule and work how, when and where you want. You’ll still have phone, email and sometimes conferencing contact with your tutors, and you may be able to locate other students in your area to buddy up with.

Tips for distance learning success

I don’t see the strategy for success in learning to be much different than on-campus study. Once the lectures are over, ‘normal’ students are in exactly the same position as you are. So your only difference would be in making sure you take advantage of any opportunity you can for actual contact with tutors to answer your questions and queries. On top of that:

1) Make sure you’re completely comfortable with the course materials, and in particular, the electronic resources you’ll be given access to.
2) Make sure you have reliable internet access that doesn’t cause any headaches.
3) Create a study schedule (buy an academic diary), and make sure you stick to it.
4) Never leave any assignments or reading until the last minute – make sure you stay on top of your work, and if you get behind, catch up.
5) Stay in regular contact with your tutors and teachers. Make sure they know who you are.
6) Form a study group in your local area if you can
7) Get access to other universities’ libraries. In the UK, you can use the SCONUL scheme for that. If your institution is far from where you live, this is absolutely essential.

Personally, I like distance learning. My course is a little of both, we have lectures once per month and are left to our own devices the rest of the month. I like the flexibility of being able to set my own schedule. If you’re similarly minded, then look into starting a distance learning psychology course. Browse the websites of a few universities to get a feel for what’s available, and of course, subscribe to this blog too!

Around February, we get suddenly bombarded by the Valentine’s day promotional activities. Conversation topics move to relationships, Valentine’s cards, and potential secret admirers. You might make the prediction, that all this in-your-face love might make the average single person more likely to step up their efforts to find that special someone, perhaps even as a kind of priming effect. Out of curiosity, I did a very unscientific test by looking up traffic stats for online dating sites, to see if there had been a boost over the last week or so.

Online Dating around Valentines Day

I went to Alexa to look up the stats, and stuck to UK sites so as to minimise traffic from countries that don’t celebrate St Valentines or celebrate it at a different time of the year.

Here are a few graphs:

eHarmony.co.uk

eHarmony did experience a little boost around Valentine’s, but as you can see, it’s part of a typical pattern and there isn’t anything about the last week that sets the traffic boost apart from the rest.

Flirtbox.co.uk

We have a flatliner! No results here, a slight decrease if anything.

Datetheuk

Datetheuk did indeed have a little traffic surge, and they seemed to be on a downward trend at the time, so maybe this was a Valentine’s day effect?

Results

It doesn’t seem from this quick test that Valentine’s had an effect on online dating website traffic. Of course, this is nothing like a real study, and there are loads of confounding variables. Even if there was a nice spike for each website, it might have been due to increased promotion and marketing by the companies.

What are your experiences with this? Have you made an extra effort to meet someone recently? Do you found people more receptive to your advances at this time of year? Or then again, does all the love in the air simply remind you of what you don’t have, and lead you to the couch with a box of chocolates and a Jennifer Aniston movie?

I had to write a piece on love as part of my positive psychology course, and as a die-hard bachelor, I wasn’t particularly looking forward to it. But, as I looked into the research on love, I found it to be a fascinating area of research. Maybe, deep down, I’m just an old romantic at heart. Love is a topic that scientists have shied away from – perhaps in the same way as studying humour, they worry that they will take the magic out of it. But as Helen Fisher, one of the foremost researchers of love says, you can know all the ingredients of chocolate cake and it will still taste delicious.

One of the more popular early theories was Sternberg’s triangular theory of love. This theory has immediate appeal because it points out three aspects of loving relationships that we can instantly recognise – intimacy, passion, and commitment. A relationship can have any two or all three of these, and in the theory, each combination has its own name (see this article for more on that).

It’s a nice, tidy model. But one problem I first had with it, is that maybe it only has intuitive appeal because I recognise it in Hollywood movies, rather than in people. Is this love?

(Credit: Catlovers)

It may be: Sternberg’s model matches up nicely with some work in neuroscience and animal behaviour. It seems that there are discrete but interrelated emotional systems common to most if not all mammals and birds, which solve the ‘problem’ of mating. These are lust, attraction, and attachment, and they correspond roughly to Sternberg’s passion, intimacy and commitment. Example behaviours are:

• Lust / passion – craving for sexual gratification, associated with elevated levels of estrogens and androgens.
• Attraction / intimacy – increased energy spent on the preferred mating partner, in humans this also includes ‘intrusive thinking’ about the love interest. Associated with increased dopamine and norepinephrine, and decreased serotonin.
• Attachment / commitment – Characterised by mutual territory/resource defence, nest building, close proximity, separation anxiety. Associated with the neuropeptides oxytocin and vasopressin. (see references 1 and 2 for a review of this evidence)

These are powerful chemicals, and the power of love should not be underestimated; in one study, evidence of romantic attraction was found in 147 of 166 societies (3). People elope together because of love, they sing songs because of love, and they kill themselves – and others – because of love. Clearly, it is more than a feeling. What is actually going in this attraction / intimacy part of Fisher/Sternberg’s models that has such a maddening effect on us?

To find out, Helen Fisher stuck a bunch of madly-in-love people in fMRI scanners, while showing them pictures of their loved one. The results? It appears that romantic love is located primarily in the ventral tegmental area of the brain. This is part of the dopaminergic system, involved in reward, want, and craving. It’s the same area of the brain that fires up when addictive drugs are taken, particularly cocaine and the amphetamine derivatives. In other words, love is addictive – literally.

But of course, every rose has its thorn, and love does not always end well. In another interesting study, Fisher and colleagues stuck people who had recently been dumped into an fMRI (4). Where is this experience located in the brain? The same place! But additionally, there was also activation in the nucleus accumbens, an area associated with judgements of gain and loss; the area that lights up when we’re willing to take great risks to achieve a high perceived gain – the same area involved in gambling. This is why we get people going to great lengths to get their love back – they are simultaneously focused on what they have lost and at the same time more likely to take high risks.

So what is love? It is an addiction. It meets the criteria necessary for something to be classed as an addiction (tolerance, withdrawal, relapse). The implications of the above findings are massive – if love is associated with the above neuotransmitters, peptides and hormones, then our experience of love could be influence by anything that interferes with these chemicals – recreational drugs and anti-depressants in particular. In addition to this, the brain areas involved in love seem to suggest that, rather than being an emotion per ce, it is a goal-oriented state.

(Credit: txd)

But, at the risk of leaving on a low note, I’ll finish by mentioning a recent study by the same research team (5). So fond of sticking people into fMRI scanners, this time they scanned couples who had been married for 25+ years, and still report feeling in love with their partners. What was the brain activity in these couples? As Sternberg would predict, they showed greater activity in areas associated with long-term pair bonding in animals. But what about attraction / intimacy? Well, they found just the same activity as they did in the earlier experiments. Perhaps true love can last forever.

PS. The titles of five love songs are hidden in this article. See if you can find them!

Recommended Reading:

• Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love
• Why Him? Why Her?: Finding Real Love By Understanding Your Personality Type

References:

(1) Fisher, H. (1998). Lust, attraction, and attachment in mammalian reproduction. Human Nature, 9(1), 23-52.

(2) Fisher, H., Aron, A., Mashek, D., Li, H., & Brown, L. (2002). Defining the brain systems of lust, romantic attraction, and attachment. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 31(5), 413-419.

(3) Jankowiak, W., & Fischer, E. (1998). A cross-cultural perspective on romantic love. Human emotions: A reader (pp. 55-62). Malden: Blackwell Publishing

(4) Fisher,H, A Aron, G Strong, DJ Mashek, H Li, LL Brown. (2005). Motivation and emotion systems associated with romantic love following rejection: an fMRI study.

(5) Aceveda, B., Aron, A., Fisher, H., Brown, L. L. (2008). Neural correlates of long-term pair-bonding in a sample of intensely in-love humans. Poster Session#297, Society for Neuroscience, annual meeting