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Recovering alcoholics are generally counseled to stay away from “people, places and things”—anything, that is, that might be a cue for drinking. Bars are an especially potent trigger for the cravings that can lead to relapse.

Yet sober alcoholics vary greatly in their susceptibility to such social cues. Many appear to have no problem hanging around taverns and parties sipping club soda, and some even work as bartenders. But others—even alcoholics with years of sobriety—get a yearning every time they see even a stranger hoist a glass.

Why do some find these cues so vexing, while others appear free of temptation? Some new research points to genetics—but with a surprising twist. While it’s long been suspected that heredity plays some role in alcoholism, the new work suggests that there may be a specific genetic predisposition for being tempted by others’ drinking. If this finding holds up, it could have important implications for the prevention and treatment of alcohol addiction.

The work comes from the lab of behavioral geneticist Helle Larsen at Radboud University Nijmegen, in the Netherlands. Larsen and her colleagues actually created a fake bar for their study, complete with actors playing teetotalers, light drinkers, and indulgent drinkers. They brought more than a hundred men and women into the bar, one by one, under the pretense that they were taking a half-hour break from a completely unrelated study. These men and women would—seemingly by chance—end up chatting at the bar with one of the actors, who would either drink soda, nurse one beer or glass of wine, or toss back three or four drinks in rapid succession.

There were no teetotalers among the subjects. They typically drank about 14 drinks a week. The idea in this study was to see whether their drinking on this particular occasion was influenced by the drinking they observed in the fake bar—and more to the point, whether their actions were associated with their genetic make-up. The scientists had taken saliva samples earlier, and examined each subject’s DNA for a genetic variation already considered suspect in heavy drinking.

The results were clear and provocative. As reported on-line in the journal Psychological Science, those with the suspect gene did indeed ape the drinking habits of the person on the next bar stool, but only if that person was drinking a lot. Under that condition, the genetic “carriers” drank twice as much as those lacking the genetic variation. In other words, the bar itself didn’t trigger heavy drinking, nor did the tinkling of glasses or even normal social drinking. The only thing that made those with the unfortunate genes drink too much was seeing someone else boozing.

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Behavioral economist Ofer Azar did an intriguing study of premier soccer goalies a few years ago, worth dusting off for the World Cup. Azar, a lecturer at Ben-Gurion University in Israel, studied penalty kicks. A penalty kick is awarded after a foul, and is often used as a tie-breaker in championship games.  A designated player stands 36 feet from the goal, which measures 24 feet side to side. Only the opposing goalie stands between the kicker and the goal, so it’s a high probability shot. In fact, with the typical penalty kick flying at more than 60 miles per hour, the goalie has only a fraction of a second to respond.

Facing such a physical challenge, professional goalies must decide before the actual kick what they will do: go right, go left, or stay put. So Azar decided to study what they actually do—and what they should do to be successful. He collected data on more than 300 of the top keepers in the world in action, and found a clear pattern: Goalies had the best chance of stopping a penalty shot if they just stayed put, smack in the center of the net. If they did this—that is, moved neither left not right–they were able to stop the opponent’s shot 33.3 percent of the time. That’s not great, but it’s a lot better than the other odds: Goalies who made a guess and jumped left stopped only 14.2 percent of the shots, and goalies who dove right stopped a dismal 12.6 percent. That’s one in eight, which means seven of every eight penalty shots flew past for a score. That can’t feel good.

Indeed, it felt lousy. Azar interviewed the goalies about their decisions in the net, and he found that their emotions played a major role in goaltending strategy. Despite the clear statistical advantage of staying put in the center, only about 6 percent of goalies actually choose to do this. Why? Because they feel worse if they fail standing still—worse than they feel if they fail diving. In other words, taking any action—even an action doomed to failure—is better than inaction, because doing nothing and still failing is emotionally unacceptable. That’s the heuristic mind that makes movement an emotional choice, and it takes a lot of effort to alter the impulse.

Azar doesn’t care all that much about soccer. In fact, he published these results in the Journal of Economic Psychology, because his real interest is how and why people make irrational choices in business and personal finance. And it’s clear that most of us are just as irrationally biased toward action as these world-class goalies. As I describe in my forthcoming book, On Second Thought: Outsmarting Your Mind’s Hard-Wired Habits, we have a powerful urge to “do something” even when the “something” doesn’t make a great deal of sense. This almost certainly derives from an ancient and powerful habit of dealing with threats through action.

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Hollywood film directors were among the first to recognize the downside of Botox. Several years ago, Martin Scorsese, whose works include Raging Bull, Taxi Driver and The Departed, became an early and outspoken critic of the anti-aging treatment. The Academy Award-winning director complained that it was becoming increasingly difficult to find an actress who could use her face to express the range of human emotion, especially anger.

It may be worse than the famed director suspected. New evidence is now suggesting that Botox may harm not only the expression of emotion, but also its comprehension. The facial paralysis that does away with unwanted frown lines may cripple a crucial ability to process emotional language.

That’s the conclusion of David Havas, a psychological scientist at the University of Wisconsin—Madison. Havas and his colleagues did not set out to study the unintended consequences of the controversial cosmetic treatment. Their goal was to study the role of the nervous system in normal language processing, specifically the idea that people comprehend emotional language in part by involuntarily simulating emotions with their facial nerves and muscles. They used injections of the neurotoxin to disable certain facial nerves as a way of testing this theory.

The scientists studied first-time patients who were scheduled for Botox treatment to get rid of their frown lines—a treatment that works by paralyzing a particular set of facial muscles. Since frowns are an important element in anger and sadness, they wanted to see if disabling the frown muscles impaired comprehension of sad and happy sentences—but not happy ones. They had the patients read dozens of sentences of each kind, both before Botox treatment and two weeks later, timing them to see if there was any slowdown in reading speed as a result of the treatment.

The results were unambiguous. As reported on line this week in the journal Psychological Science, the scientists not only verified their theory of language processing, they also showed that getting rid of frowns selectively impairs the ability to understand angry and sad sentences. In other words, it’s normal to frown—undetectably—when we try to process anger and sadness. If we can’t frown, our emotional understanding breaks down.

The popularity of Botox has of course spread far beyond Hollywood since Scorsese first sounded the alarm about those in the acting biz. The director might now be concerned about the emotional depth of his audience as well.

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Soon after Jimmy Carter took office in 1977, the press got whiff of a rumor that the 39^th president was personally handing out court times for the White House tennis court. He soon got a reputation, earned or not, for being a micro-manager who failed to see the big picture. Dan Ackroyd of “Saturday Night Live” was merciless: He parodied the cardigan-wearing executive’s radio chats with the American people, in which he adroitly fielded questions on everything from knotty plumbing problems to bad acid trips.

Nobody wants their president to be a micro-manager. It’s not plausible that any leader of such a complex nation could have all the answers, with Xs and Os. On the other hand, in times of crisis people want a few Xs and Os—not ideals and morals and abstractions. Last night we learned from Obama that his energy chief has a Nobel Prize, and we heard some lofty rhetoric about the importance of alternative energy sources for the future. We heard about how irresponsible BP is, and how a new sheriff at MMS is going to make things right. What we didn’t hear is how a particular Navy submariner is going to dive down and stop the goop from spewing. That’s really all people care about right now.

New York Times columnist David Brooks picked up on this in his commentary after the speech. He compared Obama’s speech to wartime radio broadcasts of FDR, who urged citizens to get out their world maps as he walked them through concrete strategies he had planned for particular locations in the war effort. FDR was very capable of lofty rhetoric when that’s what he needed, but he also knew when to can the rhetoric and unfold the game plan.

Brooks is an intuitive cognitive psychologist. One of the most robust ideas to come out of psychology labs in recent years is what’s called “personal geography.” In broad paraphrase, this means that we see our world not literally but through the lens of our emotions, so that things at a distance are cool abstractions and vague generalities; things that are close have immediacy and power. That’s why a jet airplane crashing in our neighborhood is so much more upsetting than the same jet crashing on the other side of the country. Conversely, talking coolly and abstractly about an event makes it seem not urgent but theoretical and unthreatening.

Obama got elected in large part because of his brilliant rhetoric, his sweeping promises and broad vision. Nobody wants their candidate to talk realistically about the nitty-gritty and day-to-day details of actually enacting such a vision. Obama is no doubt right that we need to think about the Gulf oil spill through the perspective of our overall energy needs—but long-range perspective is not what Americans want from their president right now. This isn’t an energy problem to the shrimpers of Louisiana; it’s a survival problem. And Obama’s challenge is to make it a survival problem for all of us. Now is the time for war maps and concrete strategies and getting down in the muck—anything that makes this distant Gulf oil spill part of every citizen’s personal geography.

“Uh-huh”

“Seven”

(Laughing)

“That’s what she said!”

“No, not that way”

“Yeah”

“So you’ll”

“So you”

“So snacks and”

“All right”

“All right”

“And beer”

That’s a snippet of conversation I overheard on my morning bus ride today. A young woman was chatting on her cell phone, and even though she wasn’t especially loud or animated, I found it very distracting. All I wanted to do was read the sports pages, but the fractured dialogue made it very difficult to concentrate.

That’s not a literal transcript obviously, but you get the idea. You’ve no doubt heard similar bits of chatter recently, now that cell phones are ubiquitous in public places. Nobody expects quiet on a public bus, but for some reason I find such cell phone chatter even more of an intrusion than the usual hubbub of a daily commute.

New research suggests that I may be on to something, and hints at why these cell phone conversations may be especially annoying. Indeed, Cornell University psychologist Lauren Emberson has coined a new word—“halfalogue”—to capture the special nature of overheard cell-phone conversation. Her idea is that it’s not the actual spoken words that are most distracting, but rather the unheard half of the dialogue. The human mind can’t stand not knowing the whole story, and is compelled to fill it in, and that act of imagination depletes the attention needed for reading about last night’s ball game.

That’s the theory in any case, which Emberson and her colleagues* decided to test in the laboratory. They recorded actual conversations between college roommates, and then used this recorded speech to make tapes of both regular two-person chats and one-sided halfalogues. In addition, after the conversation, they had one of the roommates summarize the conversation out loud, creating a monologue. So they ended up with three recordings of different kinds of speech one might hear on a commuter bus.

Then they sat a group of volunteers at computer screens and had them do two difficult cognitive tasks. In one task, they had to track a moving dot with a cursor, as it moved randomly around the screen. In the second task, they had to remember four letters, and respond rapidly if one of those four letters appeared on-screen, ignoring any other letters. So both tasks required concentration, but one tapped more into agility and the other into short-term memory and self-control.

Some did these tasks while listening to a monologue, others while listening to a dialogue, and still others while hearing a halfalogue. The results? As reported in a forthcoming issue of the journal Psychological Science, merely listening to the halfalogue seriously undermined the volunteers’ performance on both cognitive tasks. By contrast, neither the monologue nor the dialogue had this deleterious effect—even though these types of conversation actually contained more potentially distracting sound. The scientists conclude that it is the unpredictability of the halfalogue—the missing half of the story—that makes it so irresistible that it interferes with thinking.

Forget my bus commute. Maybe I’m just being petty. But the researchers chose these two cognitive tasks for a reason—to simulate the real-life demands of driving. The visual task is meant to measure the kind of vigilance needed to stay in a traffic lane, for example, while the reaction-time task taps into the kind of attention required to observe and obey traffic signals. In other words, it’s possible that a driver’s concentration might be impaired by simply overhearing a cell-phone conversation. Maybe even a bus driver’s.

*Michael Goldstein of Cornell, Gary Lupyan of the University of Pennsylvania, and Michael Spivey of the University of California at Merced

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Charles Dickens’ 1838 novel Oliver Twist has been called a textbook case of child abuse. The young hero is beaten again and again, locked up in the dark, and starved—for both food and affection. His world is a world of cruelty and alcoholism and crime and domestic violence, and he shows many predictable consequences of such harshness: passivity, fragile self-esteem, depression, delinquency.

Dickens was ahead of his time in sounding the alarm about the mistreatment of children. Indeed, the word “Dickensian” is used today to describe the crushing poverty and social dysfunction that can damage the mental health of the young. But Oliver may have paid a toll even worse than the Victorian scribe imagined. His chaotic world most likely scarred him at the most basic molecular level, damaging him severely enough to trigger chronic disease and early death.

That’s the conclusion from two University of British Columbia psychological scientists, who have been studying how harsh childhood experiences get “under the skin”—with medical consequences coming sometimes decades later. Gregory Miller and Edith Chen suspected that abuse and neglect might actually compromise children’s immune systems in lasting ways. Specifically, they wondered if emotional stresses in early life might lead to exaggerated inflammatory response to germs. Inflammatory response is a normal and essential part of the immune response to microbial threat, but chronically elevated inflammation has been linked to disease. They tested their idea in the laboratory.

The scientists recruited 135 young women—between 15 and 19 years old—and explored their family histories up to age 14. Most came from well-educated families, but some had experienced significant violence, threats, insults and more; others had not experienced such harshness. The researchers wanted to compare the immune function of the more and less fortunate young women. So, on three separate occasions over the next 18 months, the psychologists took blood samples from the teenagers, which they tested for two known indicators of heightened inflammatory response.

When they crunched all the data together, the results were clear and disturbing. As reported on-line in the journal Psychological Science, the teenagers who had been reared in difficult circumstances showed not only a greater inflammatory reaction—but also one that increased over time. If sustained, the scientists say, this upward trend could put young people on an irreversible path toward chronic diseases of aging. Perhaps most alarming, even teenagers from moderately harsh families showed these danger signs. In other words, it doesn’t take a Dickensian childhood to trigger unhealthy molecular changes with lifelong consequences.

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It’s easy right now to think that the world is coming undone. The BP oil company has singlehandedly devastated the Louisiana coast. Iceland’s Eyjafjallajokull volcano continues to blacken our skies and ground our jets. Terrorists are planting bombs in Times Square. Lacrosse stars are killing other lacrosse stars. Who could blame us for asking: What’s the world coming to?

In times like these, I turn to the mapmaker heuristic. That’s just a clever name for the brain’s deep-wired sense of psychological distance. The way we see events in our world depends a lot on how near or far away they are—actually and emotionally. That’s why it’s much more upsetting to have a 747 crash in our own neighborhood—right around the corner on Rodman Street—than in, say, Liverpool, England. This is an example of the mapmaker heuristic distorting our thinking. It tricks us into feeling that 300 people perishing on Rodman Street is more important and sad than 300 people perishing in Liverpool.

We are capable of talking ourselves out of such misguided heuristic thinking, but it does take effort. We are also capable of using hard-wired heuristic habits to our advantage. Consider the BP oil spill, for example. TV has brought that ecological disaster right into our living rooms, 24-7 if we allow it. That gooey muck is close, and we feel for all those shrimpers and other watermen and Katrina survivors. But try to view the Gulf coast from a different perspective, a much more distant one—say from the Hubble Space Station. The oil spill doesn’t go away, but you see it from afar, as one event among thousands of events taking place on the planet. Some of the events are bad—some really really bad—but a lot of other events are benign, some even celebratory. Kids are graduating from college and patients are surviving cancer and families are living in warm, well-lighted homes. I’m not saying we shouldn’t have empathy for Gulf coasters; we should. But getting some distance and perspective on bad events helps us defuse their emotional power in a helpful way.

The mapmaker heuristic also entwines our emotions and our sense of time. Say you are reading a history book, a history of prehistoric America, and you read a passage about a dramatic climatic event that did severe damage to the Gulf coast. It won’t be more than a couple sentences, because it’s not all that important in the scheme of things—and you’re unlikely to shed a tear over it. Or here’s an exercise for your heuristic brain:  imagine writing a history of the southern U.S. a couple hundred years from now: How many sentences will you devote to the BP oil spill?

I’m anticipating some indignant reaction to this, and indeed there is risk in “de-biasing” our heuristic thinking in this way. Aren’t we just tricking our minds into Pollyanna-like optimism? Sticking our heuristic heads in the sand when we should be using our anger to inspire action? There is some truth to this, but it’s also true that we can be too close to events; and when we are too close—geographically, historically, emotionally—our judgments and decisions become pure emotion. Pure emotion does not make for reasoned judgment.  Each of us has a mapmaker heuristic at work in our mind. Why not channel its power to achieve a balance of emotion and deliberation when we contemplate our world?

For more insights into the heuristic mind, pre-order Wray Herbert’s new book, On Second Thought: Outsmarting Your Mind’s Hard-Wired Habits, which will be published by Crown in September. 

Even so, a lot of people still believe in catharsis. They believe that pummeling punching bags and watching Fight Club and cursing at the universe is cleansing. Scientists wonder if this unshakeable belief—even if it’s misguided—might be shaping behavior in important ways. A team of psychological scientists at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research decided recently to explore this idea in a very modern domain: the world of video games.

Brad Bushman and Jodi Whitaker wondered if distorted beliefs about catharsis might be playing a role in the popularity of violent video games. Specifically, they wanted to see if believing in catharsis might influence angry people to vent their anger by playing these unsavory games. To test this, they recruited a large group of college students and instructed them to read two different newspaper articles on the science behind catharsis. Both articles were bogus, but some volunteers read an article extolling the value of catharsis, while others read an article refuting the concept. The purpose was to spark either belief or disbelief about the idea of catharsis.

Then the scientists used a well-known lab technique to anger only some of the volunteers. After writing an essay about an incident in their lives that had made them angry, these students received a cruel and insulting handwritten comment from another student: “This is one of the worst essays I’ve read!” The other students received lavish praise for their essays.

So at this point, half the volunteers believed in catharsis and the other half did not. And half of each group—believers and nonbelievers—was steaming with resentment. The next step was to give all the volunteers a choice of fictional video games, some violent and some not. The students rated how much they wanted to play each game, and they also named the actual commercial video games they preferred to play at home.

The results were unambiguous. As reported on-line this week in the journal Psychological Science, the fuming volunteers were much more likely to opt for the violent video games—but only if they believed in catharsis as a valid tool for channeling rage. Interestingly, the angry volunteers who did not believe in catharsis were the least likely to pick the violent games—even less likely, that is, than the upbeat volunteers.

The psychologists reran this experiment, but instead of using the fake science articles to prime beliefs, they measure the volunteers’ natural tendencies to vent their angry feelings. They got identical results. It appears that belief in catharsis increased the appeal of violent games in angry people.

Do these findings help explain why people are attracted to violent entertainment in general—and violent video games in particular? It’s not entirely clear, but it’s at least possible that the interplay of anger and belief plays a part. A worthwhile public health strategy might disabuse people of the belief that these games are a healthy outlet for life’s inevitable frustrations. One volunteer’s statement, which the scientists include in their report, captures this dynamic in a telling and disturbing way: “How could I squelch the urge to set my manager on fire,” the student asked, “if I couldn’t set people on fire in video games?”

The white Chicagoans were obviously being influenced by the stereotype of the dangerous young black man. But the more sinister effects of the stereotype were on Staples himself. At first he played with this new-found power, deliberately using it to “scatter the pigeons.” But he also felt guilty about discomfiting innocent strangers, and ultimately he figured out a way to defuse his own potent symbolism. He did this simply by whistling—whistling Vivaldi. Somehow, whistling the sweet refrains of the Venetian composer’s Four Seasons was enough to trump the stereotype and put the neighbors at ease.

But Staples wasn’t at ease. Whether he was exploiting the stereotype or resenting it or actively countering it, it was on his mind, distracting him from other matters. Social psychologist Claude Steele borrows from Staples’s experience for the title and central metaphor of his new book, Whistling Vivaldi (W.W. Norton), an illuminating summary of many years work on stereotypes and “stereotype threat.” Stereotypes are rampant in society, Steele argues, but his purpose here is not to whine about the unfairness of these caricatured views. Instead, he takes us inside his and others’ labs to show precisely how stereotypes commandeer the mind and do their psychological damage.

Steele, who is also African-American, is especially interested in performance—in school, sports and the workplace—and indeed his work began with his curiosity about the sub-par performance of even the best African-American university students. He had a theory, which basically goes like this: Even in the absence of overt racism, stereotypes about unintelligent African-Americans are always “in the air.” That is, African-American students are aware of these common caricatures, and this awareness makes them anxious—anxious about reinforcing the group stereotype, contributing to its legitimacy. This anxiety, through a variety of physiological pathways, actually depletes the students’ cognitive reserves—leading, ironically, to exactly the poor academic performance that the stereotype predicts.

Steele marshals study after study to demonstrate the power of such stereotype threat. In a typical experiment, for example, he had both white and African-American students take a rigorous test, but beforehand he told only some of the students that it was a test of intelligence; the others believed it was a test of no particular importance. The African-American students who thought their intelligence was being assessed, and compared to white intelligence, did much worse on the exam—worse than the whites and worse than the African-Americans who were under no stereotype threat.

And it’s not just African-Americans who suffer under stereotype threat. If women believe they are being compared to men in math, they indeed perform worse on math tests. If white men are told that their natural athletic ability is being measured, they choke in a golf contest, losing to African-American golfers; but if they’re told that their golf acumen is being tested, they outperform African-Americans. Indeed, fifteen years of such studies has demonstrated the effects of stereotype threat in Latinos, third-grade schoolgirls, Asian American students, U.S. soldiers, female business students, older Americans, German and French students, aspiring psychologists. The list goes on.

Steele’s unique contribution is taking us inside the mind of the stereotype victim, and it’s not a pretty sight. When we’re unnerved by an unsavory caricature, our minds race: We’re vigilant; we’re arguing internally against the stereotype; denying its relevance; disparaging anyone who would use such a stereotype; pitying ourselves; trying to be stoic. In short, we’re doing everything except high level thinking—the kind that leads to academic excellence. We’ve channeled our limited cognitive power into dealing with the threatening caricature.

Steele ends Whistling Vivaldi with prescriptions for countering the effects of stereotype threat—creating self-affirming narratives, for example, and mind-sets that emphasize growth and change rather than fixed abilities. These are proven strategies for creating “identity safety,” but they need to begin early in children’s lives. Ignoring the perils of stereotypes is just another way of whistling in the dark.

One of these tools is based on the so-called “scarcity and value heuristic.” Heuristics are the mind’s automatic, hard-wired habits. They are ancient and powerful and, for the most part, unrecognized. The scarcity heuristic is the brain saying, if something is rare, it much be good. The value heuristic says, if I really desire something, it must be scarce. These closely entwined heuristics reinforce each other in a kind of cycle, shaping all sorts of judgments and life decisions.

Sometimes heuristics are irrational traps, and other times they are indispensable short-cuts. The trick is to recognize them and use them in the right way. So, for example, when I really feel like dogging it at spinning class, I engage in some self-talk that goes something like this: This is 45 minutes out of the entire day, and 45 minutes is all you get. In an hour you will be at your desk, where you’ll stay for most of your waking hours. You’ll be envious of the joggers outside in the middle of the day.  It’s very unlikely that you’ll get more gym time once this 45-minute opportunity has ended, so treat it like gold.

Or some variation on that. Gold is a good example of the scarcity heuristic, because we value it entirely based on its rarity. You can’t build a skyscraper with it, or stay healthy by inhaling it. We need to think of exercise in the same way: The “supply” of spinning time is severely limited by our busy schedules, so we should be hoarding the little we have and really enjoying it.

Notice that all I need to do to make the scarcity heuristic work to my advantage is talk to myself. Heuristics may be hard-wired into our neurons, but that doesn’t mean we are powerless in their sway. Self-talk about the scarcity heuristic makes it relevant—and gives it power in our everyday choices.

Sometimes we have to trump the power of our heuristic mind, or channel it. Consider the “default heuristic.” This heuristic basically says: It takes a lot more energy to make a decision than not to make one, so unless there is a compelling reason to change, punt. Stick with the status quo; don’t change horses. It’s a very powerful cognitive mechanism, but even so you can change your default position, with a little insight and effort.

 I use this heuristic in my wellness routine as well. Woody Allen once said that 80 percent of the business of life is just showing up. So some years ago, after many failed attempts at fitness, I made a vow to go to the gym every day.  Just “show up”—nothing more. I found a reasonably convenient gym so that wasn’t an obstacle, then started putting on my sweats every morning and showing up. If I exercised, great, but if I didn’t, that was okay too. I would make an appearance.

And you know what? I never once showed up without doing something—even if it was just stepping on the Stairmaster for 20 minutes. And it was almost always more, just because I was there, and why not? I was already sweaty. What I had done, without even realizing it at the time, was to change my brain’s default position. Nowadays, choosing not to head to the gym is what takes the effort.