Imagine that you and a colleague (or spouse) have been at odds. You have argued and fought, each trying to persuade the other. Alas, there has been no meeting of the minds. What might you do next to create an opportunity for conflict resolution? To “put behind” where you have been stuck, to “move on” from your standstill, to “get beyond” your impasse, one simple, practical strategy is literally to take steps forward—to go for a walk. In a new American Psychologist article, Christine Webb, Maya Rossignac-Milon, and E. Tory Higgins argue “that walking together can facilitate both the intra- and interpersonal pathways to conflict resolution.” At the individual level, they report, walking supports creativity. It boosts mood. It embodies notions of forward progress. At the interpersonal level, walking does more. Walkers’ synchronous movements, as they jointly attend to their environment and coordinate their steps, increases mutual rapport and empathy. It softens the boundary between self and other. And it engenders cooperation beyond the shared walking cadence. If, indeed, synchronous walking increases rapport and prosociality, might there be a similar effect of synchronized singing? Does group singing help unify a diverse audience? The question crossed my mind as folk singer Peter Yarrow (of “Peter, Paul and Mary”) rose near the beginning of a recent small group retreat of diverse people and invited us to join him in singing “Music Speaks Louder Than Words.” Yarrow, now age 79, has spent his career—from the civil rights and anti-war movements of the ´60s to today—in engaging audiences in synchronized singing of prosocial poetry. Photo courtesy Byron Buck What do you think? Does music speak louder than words alone? Do synchronized walking and group singing have overlapping psychological effects? Can both lift us beyond where words, in isolation, can take us? ... View more

Speaking to military personnel on February 6 th , President Trump lamented that terrorist attacks are “not even being reported. And in many cases, the very, very dishonest press doesn’t want to report it.” The implication was that opposition to his seven-country immigration ban arises from our being insufficiently aware and fearful of the terrorism threat.   Or, we might ask, are we instead too afraid of terrorism? In 2015 and again in 2016, feared Islamic terrorists (none from the seven countries) shot and killed fewer Americans than did armed toddlers (see here and here). Homicidal, suicidal, and accidental death by guns claim more than 30,000 American deaths each year.   After vivid media portrayals of terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, 27 percent of Americans identified terrorism as their biggest worry. In two national surveys (here and here), terrorism topped the list of “most important” issues facing the country.   Ergo, does the evidence not compel us to conclude that we are, thanks to the hijacking of our emotions by vividly available images, too much afraid of terrorism . . . and too little afraid of much greater perils? And might we instead fault the media for leaving us too unafraid of the future’s great weapon of mass destruction—climate change? Are some prominent voices today, as in George Orwell’s 1984, seeking to control us by manipulating our fears? To me, George Gerbner’s cautionary words to a 1981 congressional subcommittee seem prescient: Fearful people are more dependent, more easily manipulated and controlled, more susceptible to deceptively simple, strong, tough measures and hard-line postures. ... View more

Have you expanded the amount of positive psychology you cover in Intro Psych? Here’s an in-class activity to get students to consider their happiness and the happiness of others around the world. Ask students, “What is the happiness country in the world?” Before they answer, ask students to consider how such a thing could be measured. Give students a minute or two to jot down some ideas, then ask students to turn to one or two nearby students to share ideas. After a couple minutes of sharing ask for a few volunteers to share their ideas. Researchers (Helliwell, Layard, & Sachs, 2016) looked at Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita (World Bank data), “healthy life expectancy” (World Health Organization data), social support, freedom of choice, generosity, perceptions of corruption, and self-report on yesterday’s positive and negative affect (all from Gallup World Poll data). From these data, researchers calculated scores for 157 countries. Ask students to guess which country is the happiest. The answer: Denmark. Switzerland, Iceland, Norway, and Finland round out the top 5. Canada is number 6. The United States? Number 13. Why is Denmark so happy? The Danes and Dana Dunn (2017) will tell you it is (at least partially) because of the concept of hygge (HOO-gah) -- cozy. “Danes burn 13 pounds of [unscented] candle wax a person a year, doing so even in classrooms and office buildings” (Green, 2016). “How to get hygge? Go home and stay there, preferably in your hyggekrog – a.k.a. ‘cozy nook’ – wrapped in a blanket, drinking a cup of coffee and watching a Danish police procedural about a serial killer with your friends” (Green, 2016). Ask your students to take a couple minutes to think about whether they have hygge in their own lives. If so, what does it look like? If not, what might it look like? Then give students a couple minutes to share their hygge experiences with one or two other students. Following this short discussion, ask for volunteers to share with the class.   References Dunn, D. (2017, January). Quotidian positive psychology: Helping students seek strengths and apply what they learn. Paper presented at the National Institute on the Teaching of Psychology, St. Petersburg Beach, FL. Green, P. (2016, December 24). Move over, Marie Kondo: Make room for the hygge hordes. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/24/fashion/wintering-the-danish-way-learning-about-hygge.html Helliwell, J., Layard, R., & Sachs, J. (2016). World Happiness Report 2016, Update (Vol. I). New York: Sustainable Development Solutions Network. ... View more

Originally posted on April 7, 2014. How could a person resent making millions of dollars? Sam Polk suggests that some people develop wealth addiction. The more wealth they accumulate, the more money they need to achieve the same buzz. When they don’t get enough, they go into withdrawal and desire even greater wealth. Signs of wealth addiction pop up often. Consider Dennis Kozlowski, the former CEO of Tyco International and recently released prison inmate. He’s the guy who bought a $6,000 shower curtain and a $15,000 umbrella stand. If there was ever a model of wealth addiction, it’s this guy. Or is he? Society teaches us that money has power. My three year-old nephew, Graham, has no money sense. He doesn’t care if I give him a $1, $5, or $20 bill. Regardless of the value, he’ll wad it up and throw it across the room. Eventually he’ll learn about money, how to use it, and what it can give him. So, how do some people get so hooked on money? They may not be addicted to the money itself, but rather to the way money gains them entry into the broader social system. If my annual salary is $30,000, I feel accepted and included if my peers earn about the same. We can afford to eat at the same restaurants, pursue the same hobbies, and treat our romantic partners to similar gifts. But what if my annual salary stays the same and my peers begin to earn $300,000 annually? Now how can I relate to them? While I live paycheck to paycheck, they take international vacations, develop fine culinary tastes, and enjoy hobbies that demand a hefty entrance fee. I feel left out and alienated. Who can afford to fly to Tanzania and hike to the top of Mt. Kilimanjaro? How many times can you use the word oaky to describe a wine’s taste? Who knew a triathlon bicycle could cost $13,500? If I want to join my high-earning friends, I need to earn more money. Social acceptance is the most valuable asset a person can own. We evolved a need for close and lasting relationships. This need to belong informs many of our decisions, even if we don’t realize it. And for good reason. For our ancestors, social exclusion was a death sentence. Even today, psychologists argue that loneliness harms health as much as smoking and obesity. How might money’s symbolic power influence how people approach their relationships? Consider the situation students faced in a group of clever studies conducted by Xinyue Zhou, Kathleen Vohs, and Roy Baumeister. Students believed they would complete a three-person, virtual ball-tossing game. Unbeknownst to the students, the virtual players’ behavior was preprogrammed to accept or reject them. The socially accepted students received the ball an equal number of times. The socially rejected students received a couple of tosses and never got the ball again. They watched as the two other players tossed the ball back and forth, back and forth, until the experimenter stopped the three-minute game. Imagine what those three grueling minutes were like. You enter a study expecting to toss a virtual ball to a pair of strangers. Now you find yourself reliving a scene from a school dance. You watch the cool kids enjoy the fun while you wait for someone to notice you’re there. Next, the students reported how much they desired money. Would social rejection, even by computer-animated strangers, influence how much people wanted money? It did. When students felt rejected, they wanted more money. What would that money give them? Relief from the pain of rejection. Simply handling money, rather than regular paper, was enough to shield the students from heartbreak. They even developed a thicker skin, enabling them to withstand more physical pain. What might have happened if those same students surrounded themselves with reminders of money all day? Would their confidence have grown and insecurities have weakened?      These findings paint a different portrait of so-called wealth addiction. Yes, some people develop an addiction to money. CEOs, real estate moguls, and their super-rich counterparts might shower themselves with yachts, private jets, and lavish estates. These money reminders might originate from an unquenchable thirst for money. When one yacht isn’t enough, buy a few more or build a bigger one. But wealth addiction may represent the exception rather than the rule. Many wealthy people only buy what they need. Warren Buffett prefers french fries over foie gras. Carlos Slim lives in the same house he purchased 40 years ago. Ingvar Kamprad flies economy class and drives an old Volvo.  What drives most people to become wealthy? People want the social acceptance they think wealth will give them. Greater wealth means access to more activities and relationship opportunities. What few people realize is that it’s often lonely at the top. Socially deprived people desire money to fill the void—and use reminders of money to stave off the pain of isolation. For the rest of us, it pays to surround ourselves with people who give our lives richness, complexity, and meaning. ... View more

Originally posted on April 9, 2014. Most of us have dreamt of having a personal genie. We summon the genie, it grants our wishes, and our lives get better. But we forget that our genie is not bent on improving our lives. The same genie can make you a hero or a villain; grateful or green with envy; cooperative or antagonistic. It all depends on how you ask your question. On the heels of research showing these positive and negative responses to the hormone oxytocin, we have a new genie in a bottle. Instead of rubbing a lamp to summon our genie, we sniff nasal spray. And with oxytocin nasal spray showing impressive benefits in offsetting deficits associated with certain mental conditions, it is time for researchers to get a grip on understanding when oxytocin will inspire us toward benevolence or malice. Oxytocin motivates bonding. But personality traits and situations can bend oxytocin’s influence. For example, people use different strategies to maintain their relationships. Most people act nice, forgive, and adapt to their partner’s needs. Others dominate their relationship partners, pummeling them into submission. Oxytocin might affect these two groups of people differently. The nice guys and gals should continue their efforts to keep their relationship together by acting nice. The dominators, in contrast, might go on the offensive and try to dominate their partners. To test this hypothesis, my colleagues and I randomly assigned college students to sniff either a placebo or oxytocin. The students waited patiently as the oxytocin took effect. While they waited, they completed some uncomfortable activities meant to provoke an aggressive response. They gave a stressful speech and also put an icy bandage on their foreheads. Next, participants reported their aggressive intentions toward a current or recent romantic partner. Some example items were “slap my partner” and “push or shove my partner.” Could the love hormone lead to violence? It could. Oxytocin increased aggressive intentions, but the effect only occurred among those who were predisposed toward aggression. The implication is that aggressive people try to keep their romantic partners close by dominating them. When they get a boost of oxytocin, it triggers an aggressive response. Oxytocin continues to inspire interest and confusion. We’re hard-wired to connect, and oxytocin can help make that happen. But this study shows that it isn’t enough to look at people’s oxytocin levels to know if they will act nice or aggressive. By understanding their personality traits, we can better predict whether the love hormone will promote benevolence or violence. ... View more

Originally posted on April 15, 2014. For those of us living in the American Midwest, it’s been an historic winter. The phrase “polar vortex,” once beholden to meteorologists, crept into daily conversation. Dozens of inches of snow, frozen pipes, and school cancellations can build stress, weariness, and even depression. To get rid of the blues, find the green space. Green spaces refer to parks, forests, or other parcels of land meant to connect people to nature. Numerous studies have shown that green spaces relate to better mental health. But one recent study took things to an entirely new level. A group of University of Wisconsin researchers, led by Kirsten Beyer, surveyed a representative sample of Wisconsin residents for mental health issues. They also used satellite imagery to estimate the amount of local green space. What did they find? The more green space people had close to them, the better their mental health. When people search for a new apartment, condo, or house, the only green they often consider is the money they need to spend. But these findings suggest that living near green spaces pays off by predicting better mental health. ... View more

Originally posted on April 21, 2014. Aggressive urges crop up, even for the most saintly people. What helps keep our aggressive urges at bay? Self-control. We can override our aggressive urges and do something more constructive. But what makes self-control possible? Most of us struggle with self-control failure when we’re hungry. We might get angrier than usual, a term called ‘hangry.’ In a recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, my colleagues and I argue that glucose helps people control their aggressive urges. Glucose fuels the brain, and it takes brainpower to quiet our anger. If people have less brain fuel, they should behave more aggressively. To test the idea, we recruited married couples, asked them to prick their fingers every day to measure their blood sugar levels, and then gave them a chance to express their aggression. Each day, people could stab a voodoo doll that represented their spouse with between 0 and 51 pins. On the last day of the study, people also completed a competitive reaction-time game against their partner, in which they could blast their partner with intense and prolonged noise. (Don’t worry, the game was rigged so that people never actually blasted their spouses.) Low blood glucose related to greater aggression. The lower amount of sugar floated in people’s blood, the more pins they stuck into the voodoo doll and the more their blasted their spouse. To avoid what Popular Science Cartoonist Maki Naro now calls the Hanger Games (click for a sweet cartoon summarizing this research), I have one suggestion: Don’t argue on an empty stomach. ... View more

Originally posted on May 29, 2014. How would you like to increase your brainpower? All you need is a 9-volt battery, some mad scientists, and a heaping portion of creativity. So says a slew of recent studies using a noninvasive, neuroscientific technique called transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS). Think of tDCS as the ultimate symphony conductor. It can pep up certain brain regions by exciting neuronal impulses. But it can also quiet a crowd of neurons by decreasing their firing rate. A 9-volt battery powers the electrodes that rest on people’s scalps, giving people a slight twinge as the equipment increases or decreases their brain activity. In one study, Air Force pilots who received frequent tDCS stimulation, compared with those who didn’t, learned more information in less time. But tDCS isn’t merely a way to learn better. It can help people cope with upsetting situations. In a pair of papers, my colleagues and I showed that stimulating a brain region that aids emotion regulation reduced rejection-related distress and aggression. To succeed, people need some combination of talent, grit, and luck. Should a personal brain zapping machine get added to the list? ... View more

Originally posted on July 10, 2014. Why don’t people vote? This question puzzles pollsters, political candidates, and people who cherish the right to choose their elected officials. To predict voter turnout, all you might need is a test tube, a willing participant, and a little saliva. So says a group of University of Nebraska-Omaha researchers, who tested the hypothesis that the stress hormone cortisol would predict voting behavior. Stress often leads people to avoid high pressure situations. If people have high cortisol levels, voting might only increase their stress. They might fear that their chosen candidate would lose the election, or that the candidate would underperform if elected. As a result, stressful souls might avoid the polls. In the study, people spit in a tube to provide a measurement of their cortisol levels. Next, the researchers collected the study participants’ actual voting behavior in six U.S. national elections. Sure enough, the most stressed out people voted about half as often as their more relaxed counterparts. To get people to vote, politicians might frame voting as a relaxing activity. “Take a break from work, relax, and make a difference in your community,” might help get even the most stressed out people to visit the polls. ... View more

Originally posted on July 22, 2014. Social support can take many forms. A helpful tweet, the annual Facebook birthday barrage of well wishes, and long conversations with friends and family can put things in perspective and reduce our stress. But, according to recent research from Renison University, Wilfrid Laurier University, and the University of Waterloo, these acts of kindness backfire when interacting with people who have low self-esteem. People with low self-esteem have social support preferences that often put them on a collision course with their friends and family. They desire information that validates their negative self-feelings. When their friends offer positive feedback, people with low self-esteem don’t accept it. This aversion to positivity causes low self-esteem spillover: Their friends begin to feel bad about themselves, too. What is the moral of the story? Find someone who has a similar self-concept as you do. Birds of a feather should often flock together. Although it might be hard to imagine wanting information that validates our negative self-feelings, it is unwise to force people to enjoy something they dislike. Knowing yourself and what you like is the first step in building a successful relationship. The next step is finding someone who shares your preferences, no matter how sunny or gloomy they might be. ... View more

Originally posted on August 28, 2014. When your friend tells you about her terrific first date, you will eventually ask the question. You might stall by inquiring about the food she ate, the jokes he told, and the outfit she wore. Eventually, you’ll ask: Is he cute? Recent research suggests that you’ll know how she arrived at her answer.  An in-depth analysis of 1,000 facial images identified three main ingredients of attractiveness: Approachability, or how friendly a person seems. A large mouth, wide nose, and curvy bottom lip were some of the strongest predictors of approachability. Youthful-attractiveness. Here, the eyes have it. To seem youthful, have large eyes. You should also avoid sporting a moustache or beard. Dominance. Looking dominant relates to having angular cheeks, large eyebrows, and slightly dark skin. These are some of the strongest predictors of each attractiveness ingredient. Of course, they don’t tell you much about people’s sense of humor, clothing style, or hobbies. For that, you’ll have to take the plunge and actually meet them. She might have large eyes and a curvy bottom lip, but would you want to date someone who never laughed at your jokes? I doubt it. Or what about an angular-cheeked, naturally tan man who always turns heads but also is profoundly dull and shallow? Maybe give him a fake phone number when he asks for yours. Attractiveness matters, especially during the initial passionate stages of a relationship. But there are many ingredients that are far more important than attractiveness when selecting a mate. Trust is key. Think about it: Would you rather date an attractive compulsive liar, or a less attractive person who always tells the truth? Self-control also fosters relationship success. Highly self-controlled people, compared with their sluggardly counterparts, are more forgiving, generous, and less aggressive. So, it’s natural to wonder whether your friend’s date is cute. You might not ask whether he has a large mouth, angular cheeks, or big eyes. But if she says, “Yes, he’s gorgeous,” you can be confident that he received an extra helping of some of these attractiveness ingredients. ... View more

Originally posted on September 2, 2014. Graduation brings few guarantees. Jobs are scarce, job security is even more difficult to find, and many people earn less and receive fewer employee benefits than they anticipated. But graduation often brings at least two things: pomp and presents. When I finished graduate school, my parents bought me a dog. I knew he had basic emotions, such as happiness and fear. Now I know he also gets jealous. Finnegan, an English golden retriever, is one of my best friends. Early in my professor job, I would bring him to the office with me. He slept while I wrote papers. He even participated in some of my research studies. [Not to worry, a graduate student ran the experimental sessions. When we discussed the studies in front of Finn, I covered his ears to keep him blind to condition. ] We would take walks around campus. Students would pop in and pet him. When I left the office to teach, he would yelp a little before settling down and falling asleep. Then something happened. I got engaged. My fiancée Alice (now wife of more than six years) moved to Kentucky and started sleeping on Finnegan’s side of the bed. Suddenly, he wasn’t top dog anymore. I was happy. Finnegan wasn’t.  But then another major event occurred. We purchased another dog, Finnegan’s half-brother, and named him Atticus. We wanted Finnegan to have a playmate. Things went well. Finnegan and Atticus played and wrestled and did all of the cute things that make YouTube videos go viral. Finnegan did show a curious new behavior, however. He seemed to get jealous when I petted Atticus. Was Finnegan’s jealousy an illusion? It’s easy to fool yourself into thinking that animals can do more than they can. For examples, dogs don’t know they are dogs. They don’t have that kind of self-awareness. Dogs also don’t have strong belief systems. Sure, they might like to eat my pizza, pretzels, and shoes. But it would never occur for one dog to ask another, “Do you avoid eating meat pizza for health or ethical reasons?” They just gobble and go. According to a recent study, dog jealousy is real. The researchers tested 36 dogs. Just how might you evoke dog jealousy? Have a dog’s owner interact with a stuffed dog that barks, whines, and wags its tail. The owners also were instructed to ignore their own dogs while they played with the stuffed dog. To provide comparison conditions, owners also ignored their dogs to interact with a jack-o-lantern or a book. Boy, the dogs got jealous when their owners ignored them! The dogs acted needy and tried to “shoo the rival [dog] away.” They fixed their gaze on the interloper. They even got a little nippy. The dogs only got jealous when their owners paid attention to another dog. They didn’t mind their owners playing with the jack-o-lantern or a book. Just like my Finnegan, the dogs only started to show pangs of jealousy when they felt they were being replaced. The moral of the story is that dogs experience complex emotions. Jealousy can sour relationships. Fortunately, humans and dogs can overcome their jealousy and learn to include others in their lives. Finnegan loves Alice, and Atticus is his best friend. Finn got over his jealousy. In that way, old dogs might be able to teach us some new tricks. ... View more

Originally posted on September 25, 2014. Most of our daily lives hum along effortlessly. We automatically rise when we wake, speak when we wish to communicate, and eat when our empty bellies grumble. These behaviors helped our ancestors survive and reproduce. But we also need to size up situations and people that might threaten us. How well do we do this? In one recent investigation, researchers from Australia and the United States argued that angry faces tell a specific story that takes little effort to understand. Rather than being a simple threat signal, angry faces gives us information about people’s physical strength, which is the crucial element in determining their fighting ability. Using some cool facial morphing software, the researchers showed participants faces and then manipulated the seven primary facial muscles involved in an angry facial expression. Some faces flexed all seven angry facial muscles; others flexed fewer than seven. The more angry muscles the faces flexed, the more participants rated the person as being physically strong. The key is that participants did not need to take a course on the biology of human emotion to make their ratings. They didn’t need to know the seven facial muscles that comprise an angry facial expression. Participants automatically knew the strongest and angriest face when they saw it. So, the next time you get a twinge of terror when you see an angry face, don’t sweat it. Your mind is automatically telling you something aimed at keeping you safe and sound. ... View more

Originally posted on November 20, 2014. Have you ever seen a baby so cute you wanted to snuggle it and take a bite out of it at the same time? Ever said to a new niece or nephew, “You’re so cute, I could just eat you up?” Have you cried after a happy occasion, such as crossing the finish line of a race for which you’ve long prepared, or proposing to your girlfriend and getting a yes? Two weeks ago, I experienced these conflicting emotions when I shed several tears after finishing a 100 mile running race. These conflicting concurrent emotions help us maintain emotional balance, according to research from Yale University. An adult’s reaction to an adorable baby is to kiss them and coo at them. But an adult may also pinch, squeeze, and playfully nip at them. Knowing that most people don’t intend to actually harm babies, the researchers designed several experiments to find out why adults respond to them with aggressive behavior. In one study, participants looked at and evaluated photos of different babies, some of whom appeared more infantile than others. The participants said they wanted to care for and protect the infantile babies, but they also reported higher expressions of aggression in response to the babies. Participants were also more likely to feel overwhelmed with very strong positive feelings in response to the more infantile babies. What do these findings tell us? Being overwhelmed by positive emotion produce responses designed to bring us down to our emotional baseline. Ever in need of emotional equilibrium, people will engage in behaviors aimed at leveling off their extreme emotional reactions. So the next time you cry during a happy scene in a movie, laugh nervously, or feel compelled to take a bite out of a cute baby, remember that it is just your body’s way of maintaining emotional balance. ... View more

Originally posted on December 4, 2014. Walk down a sidewalk and someone will likely take notice. Just where do their eyes linger? You can tell a lot about whether they think you are Mr. Right—or Mr. Right Now—based on where their eyes gravitate. So says recent research conducted at the University of Chicago. Students viewed photographs of people and reported whether they caused them to experience romantic love or sexual desire. The students also wore an eyetracker, which recorded which parts of each photograph captured their attention. The idea is that romantic love causes people to try to understand what another person is thinking. Sexual desire encourages people to pay attention to objects that reflect concrete sensations and feelings. Romantic love drove people to fixate their attention on people’s faces. This makes sense. If I want to understand what someone is thinking, I should look at their face. Their facial expression might also give me a clue as to whether they return my interest. Sexual desire created a different picture. When people saw a photograph that caused them to experience sexual desire, their eyes stuck on people’s bodies. This love versus lust response operates automatically. Participants didn’t think carefully about where to position their eyes. Their eyes simply gravitated toward bodily locations that were most relevant to romantic love or sexual desire. Just how big of a difference was there between how long participants spent looking at faces when they experienced love rather than lust? A little over 400 milliseconds. That’s a tad longer than an eyeblink. But don’t let that slight difference take anything away from how cool these findings are. They show how efficiently our minds work to alert us to information that relates to our emotions and goals. By knowing this wrinkle about how the mind works, your walks may never be the same.  ... View more

Originally posted on February 20, 2015. This morning my wife, our one-month-old daughter, and I went to a local diner. It was a snow day, my University was closed, and we were enjoying a rare morning together. Before our food arrived, I took a sip of coffee, looked outside, and said, “I’m so happy.” The story should end there, with our tiny family devouring pancakes and running errands. But then I returned to my house, opened my email, and received some bad news. I was supposed to be miserable. Or so suggested the latest Gallup Report, “The State of American Well-Being: 2014 State Well-Being Rankings.” For the sixth straight year, my state, Kentucky, ranked 49th of 50 U.S. States. Only West Virginians have lower well-being than my fellow Kentuckians do. My first impulse was to try to make sense of all of this. Was I conning myself when I said I was happy? Can you ever really measure happiness? Let’s not fool ourselves. You can’t measure happiness the same way you can’t measure your weight in gold. But I agree with one of my favorite social psychologists, Dan Gilbert, who said, “maybe we just need to accept a bit of fuzziness and stop complaining” (Stumbling on Happiness, p. 65). So, I accepted my happiness. This is when I started to understand why I’m throwing off the statewide dish of depression. Here are the five elements of well-being (taken from the Gallup site): Purpose: liking what you do each day and being motivated to achieve your goals Social: having supportive relationships and love in your life Financial: managing your economic life to reduce stress and increase security Community: liking where you live, feeling safe, and having pride in your community Physical: having good health and enough energy to get things done daily This is when I started to understand, and my heart began to sink. I max out on each ingredient. I love my daily activities, both personal and professional. I have relationships that allow me to have the diner experience I mentioned. I’m neither the richest nor the poorest person in my state, but my wife and I manage our finances so that we can feel secure and have rewarding experiences. I love where I live, and enjoy showing people our great state. I take care of myself physically, at least enough so that I can make words move across the page. All of that is annoying to read and even harder to write. But it’s true. Then why did my heart start to sink? I have a theory of mind and a concern for others. Unlike my dogs, a blowfish, or the horses I drive by on my way to work, I can simulate another person’s experience. And when I simulated how it felt to be deprived of purpose, meaningful relationships, financial security, community pride and safety, and physical health, I realized the seriousness of today’s Gallup results. We need chang e. The good news is that each well-being ingredient can be mended. To have higher well-being, people don’t need to grow a third leg or become enthralled with the taste of cod liver oil. Those things are impossible. Psychological science provides clear answers about how to improve our well-being. The biggest challenge is that the scale of change needed to buck our spot in the well-being basement could take years. Kentucky will never be Hawaii, but we can improve. Is it worth a try? I think so. ... View more

Originally posted on February 12, 2015. Did you watch all five seasons of “Breaking Bad” over a long weekend? Have you ever longed for the weekend so that you can watch episode after episode of your new favorite television show? Are you counting down until Netflix releases Season 3 of “House of Cards” later this month? You’re not alone. Binge-watching seems harmless—I’ve been known to veg out occasionally after a long week, watching hours of “The Wire”—but is it really? New research says maybe not. It turns out, loneliness and depression are linked to TV binge-watching. In a recent study, over 300 18-to-29-year-olds reported their loneliness, depression, self-regulation, and binge-watching behavior. The more depressed the survey participants were, the more they binge-watched. The depression-binge watching relationship was strongest among people who lacked self-control. Faced with the option of watching yet another episode, impulsive participants went along with the binge-watching program. These findings complement other research showing relationships between depression, loneliness, and self-regulation problems and general binging behavior. To escape from a lonely or depressed mood, people often engage in addictive behaviors. Most of us have fallen prey to the binge watching bug. It’s okay to enjoy an occasional marathon TV-watching session. But remember the science: If you’re feeling blue, try not to hide your sorrows in the “boob tube.” It’s not likely to help, and it just might make matters worse. ... View more

Originally posted on February 24, 2015. Dog research always fascinates me. You could say I have a nose for it. As humans, we spend a lot of time with our canine friends: they share our homes and steal our hearts—and sometimes the food off our plates. I’ve always loved dogs, and I couldn’t wait to get one of my own. Nearly eight years ago, I adopted Finnegan, a lovable yet slobbery Golden Retriever who regularly knocks over the trash can and cuddles with me and my wife. A year later we adopted his half-brother, Atticus, and doubled our fun. And our mischief. From across the room, both dogs seem to suspect when we’re angry or happy. All they need is a peek at our body language and facial expressions. If you have a dog, you’ve likely noticed the same thing. But did you know that dogs also can tell the difference between happy and angry faces in photographs? One study says so. A team of researchers trained dogs to discriminate between images of the same person making a happy or angry face. Twenty dogs were shown photos of faces side-by-side on a touchscreen. Half of the dogs were trained to touch images of happy faces; the other group was rewarded for choosing angry faces. The dogs needed only a little training before they could choose the angry or happy face more often than would be expected by random chance. So, not only can dogs learn to interpret their owners’ facial expressions, but they can also perceive emotions in photographed strangers. A cool wrinkle in the study was that the dogs were slow to associate an angry face with a reward. Perhaps they instinctually knew to stay away from angry people, making it hard for the dogs to think angry people were linked to anything positive? I can’t wait to see how this line of research progresses. In the meantime, I’m going to go smile at my dogs. ... View more

Originally posted on April 9, 2015. Many people call laughter the best medicine, but did you know that it can also help you make new friends? It doesn’t surprise me at all. Some of my best friendships have had their roots in belly laughs. Sharing a laugh makes people more likely to open up to each other, according to a recent study . Laughter increases our willingness to share something personal, without even realizing that’s why we’re doing it. Allowing someone to truly know us—perhaps sharing our most embarrassing moment, or talking about a personal goal or fear—is crucial in building and growing relationships. To test their theories about laughter and self-disclosure, researchers gathered 112 students who did not know each other. They split them into groups and then showed each group a 10-minute “mood induction” video, one of which featured a standup comedian. (The other two were a golf instruction video and an excerpt from a nature show.) Researchers measured how much the students laughed and their other emotional states. The students also wrote a message to another participant to help them get acquainted. The results: Group members who laughed together while watching the comedian shared much more intimate information than those who did not watch the comedy routine. That’s probably because laughter triggers the release of endorphins, which play a role in forming social bonds. Try it out next time you’re in a social situation with strangers or mere acquaintances. If they’re a bit aloof, get them laughing. You’ll be surprised at how a little laughter can defrost even the toughest audience. Kevin Kozcicki/Getty Images ... View more

Originally posted on April 8, 2014. An editorial in yesterday’s New York Times questioned the nearly $1 billion the U.S. Transportation and Security Administration has invested in training and employing officers to identify high-risk airline passengers. In 2011 and 2012, T.S.A. behavior-detection officers at 49 airports “designated passengers for additional screening on 61,000 occasions.” The number successfully detected and arrested for suspected terrorism? Zero. But then again, the number of plane-destroying terrorists they failed to detect was also, I infer, zero. (Wonkish note:  A research psychologist might say the T.S.A. has made no Type II errors.) Regardless, psychological science studies of intuitive lie detection, as the Times’ John Tierney noted in an earlier article, suggest that this has not been a wise billion-dollar investment. Despite our brain’s emotion-detecting skill, we find it difficult to detect deceiving expressions. Charles Bond and Bella DePaulo reviewed 206 studies of people discerning truth from lies. The bottom line: People were just 54 percent accurate—barely better than a coin toss. I have replicated this in classroom demonstrations—by having some students either tell a true or a made-up story from their lives. When seeking to identify the liars, my students have always been vastly more confident than correct. Moreover, contrary to claims that some experts can spot lies, research indicates that few—save perhaps police professionals in high-stakes situations—beat chance. The behavioral differences between liars and truth-tellers are just too minute for most people to detect. Before spending a billion dollars on any safety measure, risk experts advise doing a cost-benefit analysis. As I reported in Intuition: Its Powers and Perils, some people were outraged when the Clinton administration did not require General Motors to replace ill-designed fuel tanks on older model pickup trucks. The decision spared General Motors some $500 million, in exchange for which it contributed $51 million to traffic safety programs. “GM bought off the government for a pittance,” said some safety advocates, “at the expense of thirty more people expected to die in fiery explosions.” Actually, argued the Department of Transportation, after additional time for litigation there would only have been enough of the old trucks left to claim 6 to 9 more lives. Take that $500 million ($70 million per life)—or the $1 billion more recently spent on behavior detection—and apply it to screening children for preventable diseases (or more vigorous anti-smoking education programs or hunger relief) and one would likely save many more lives. By doing such cost-benefit analyses, say the risk experts, governments could simultaneously save us billions of dollars and thousands of lives. Ergo, when considering how to spend money to spare injuries and save lives, critical thinkers seek not to be overly swayed by rare, dreaded catastrophes. The smart humanitarian says: “Show me the numbers.”  Big hearts can cohabit with cool heads. ... View more

Originally posted on May 8, 2014. Knowing that people don't wear their hearts on their sleeves, psychologists have longed for a "pipeline to the heart."  One strategy, developed nearly a half century ago by Edward Jones and Harold Sigall, created a “bogus pipeline.” Researchers would convince people that a machine could use their physiological responses to measure their private attitudes.  Then they would ask them to predict the machine's reading, thus revealing attitudes which often were less socially desirable than their verbalized attitudes.  More recently, psychologists have devised clever strategies for revealing “implicit attitudes,” by using reaction times to assess automatic associations between attitude objects and evaluative words. (In contrast to consciously held “explicit attitudes,” implicit attitudes are like unconscious habits.) A new working paper (abstract; PDF) by Katherine Coffman and fellow economists demonstrates a third strategy for getting people to reveal sensitive information—the “Item Count Technique” (ICT). One group was given four simple statements, such as “I spent a lot of time playing video games as a kid,” and then was asked how many of the four statements “apply to you.”  A second group was given the same four statements plus a fifth:  “I consider myself to be heterosexual,” and then was asked how many of the five statements “apply to you.” Although no individual is asked to reveal which specific statements are true of them, a comparison of the two groups’ answers reveals—for the sampled population—the percent agreeing with the fifth statement. Thus, without revealing anyone’s sexual orientation, the ICT aggregate data showed a 65 percent higher rate of non-heterosexual identity than was self-reported among people who were asked straight-out: “Do you consider yourself to be heterosexual?”   But then let’s not discount public surveys.  Nate Silver’s digest of presidential polling data correctly predicted not only the 2012 U.S. national presidential outcome, but also the outcome in all 50 U.S. states.  Specific, explicit attitudes can predict behavior. ... View more

Originally posted on June 17, 2014 Is religion toxic to human flourishing . . . or is it supportive of human happiness, health, and helpfulness? Let’s make this empirical: Is religious engagement associated with humans living well, or with misery, ill-health, premature death, crime, divorce, teen pregnancy, and the like? The answer differs dramatically by whether we compare places (such as more versus less religious countries or states) or individuals. For starters, I manually harvested data from a Gallup World Poll, and found a striking negative correlation across 152 countries between national religiosity and national well-being: Then I harvested General Social Survey data from the U.S. and found—as many other researchers in many other countries have found (though especially in more religious countries) a positive correlation between religiosity and happiness across individuals. For additional striking examples of the religious engagement paradox—associating religious engagement with life expectancy, smoking, arrest rate, teen pregnancy, and more (across states versus across individuals)—see here . Princeton economist Angus Deaton and psychologist Arthur Stone have recently been struck by the same paradox. They ask ( here ), “Why might there be this sharp contradiction between religious people being happy and healthy, and religious places being anything but?” Before answering that question—and wondering whether the more important story is told at the aggregate or individual level—consider a parallel paradox, which we might call “the politics of wealth paradox.” Question: Are rich Americans more likely to vote Republican or Democrat? When we compare states (thanks to Chance News ) we can see that low income predicts Republican preferences. Folks in wealthy states are more likely to vote Democratic!  So, being rich inclines one to liberalism? Not so fast: comparing individuals, we see the opposite (and more expected) result—high income folks vote more Republican. These are the sorts of findings that excite behavioral science sleuths. Surely there must be some confounding variables. With religiosity, one such variable is income—which is lower in highly religious countries and states. Controlling for status factors such as income (as Louis Tay did for our article with Ed Diener) and the negative correlation between religiosity and well-being disappears, and even reverses to slightly positive. Likewise, low income states differ from high income states in many ways, including social values that also predict voting. Ergo, my hunch is that, in both the religious and political realms, the most important story is found at the level of the individual. Nevertheless, there are practical uses for these data. If you’re wanting to make religious engagement look bad, use the aggregate, macro-level data. If you want to make religious engagement look good, use the individual data. ... View more

Originally posted on December 9, 2014. Economic inequality is a fact of life.  Moreover, most folks presume some inequality is inescapable and even desirable, assuming that achievement deserves financial reward and that the possibility of making more money motivates effort. But how much inequality is good?  Psychologists have found that places with great inequality tend to be less happy places, and that when inequality grows so does perceived unfairness, which helps offset the psychological benefits of increased affluence.  When others around us have much more than we do, feelings of “relative deprivation” may abound. And as Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson document, countries with greater inequality also experience greater health and social problems, and higher rates of mental illness. So, how great is today’s economic inequality? Researchers Michael Norton and Dan Ariely invited 5,522 Americans to estimate the percent of wealth possessed by the richest 20 percent in their country. The average person’s guess—58 percent—“dramatically underestimated” the actual wealth inequality. (The wealthiest 20 percent possessed 84 percent of the wealth.) And how much inequality would be ideal?  The average American favored the richest 20 percent taking home between 30 and 40 percent of the income—and, in their survey, the Republican versus Democrat difference was surprisingly modest. Now, working with Sorapop Kiatpongsan in Bangkok, Norton offers new data from 55,238 people in 40 countries, which again shows that people vastly underestimate inequality, and that people’s ideal pay gaps between big company CEOs and unskilled workers is much smaller than actually exists.  In the U.S., for example, the actual pay ratio of S&P 500 CEOs to their unskilled workers (354:1) far exceeds the estimated ratio (30:1) and the ideal ratio (7:1). Their bottom line:  “People all over the world and from all walks of life would prefer smaller pay gaps between the rich and poor.” ... View more

Originally posted on April 14, 2015. As most introductory psychology students learn, negative emotions often affect health. And persistent anger can lash out at one’s own heart. Might negative emotions, such as anger, also be risk factors for entire communities? In an amazing study in the February Psychological Science, Johannes Eichstaedt and thirteen collaborators ascertained heart disease rates for each of 1,347 U.S. counties. They also obtained from Twitter 148 million county-identified tweets from these 1,347 counties. Their finding: a county’s preponderance of negative emotion words (such as “angry,” “hate,” and various curse words) predicted its heart disease deaths “significantly better than did a model that combined 10 common demographic, socioeconomic, and health risk factors, including smoking, diabetes, hypertension, and obesity.” A preponderance of positive emotion words (such as “great,” “fantastic,” and “enjoyed”) predicted low heart disease rates. Given that the median Twitter user is age 31, and the median heart disease victim is much older, why should Twitter language so successfully predict a county’s heart disease-related deaths? Younger adults’ tweets “may disclose characteristics of their community,” surmise the researchers, providing “a window” into a community’s social and economic environment. An anger-laden community tends to be, for all, a less healthy community, while happier makes for healthier. www.loopflorida.org.​ Steve Debenport/E+/Getty Images ... View more

Originally posted on August 4, 2015. From the daily information stream that flows across my desk or up my computer screen, here is a recent news flash: With age we mellow. A European research team led by Annette Brose sampled people’s emotions across 100 days. One finding: young adults’ self-reported emotions were more variable. This reminds me of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Randy Larson’s long-ago sampling, using pagers, of people’s experience. Young teenagers, they found, typically descend from elation or ascend from gloom in less than an hour. Adult moods are less extreme but more enduring. Having survived past sufferings and enjoyed past thrills, mature people look beyond the moment. ... View more

Originally posted on August 26, 2015. Imagine yourself on a Toronto to Lisbon flight. Five hours after takeoff and with open seas beneath you, your pilots become aware of fuel loss (a fractured fuel line is leaking a gallon per second). Declaring an emergency, the pilots divert toward an air base in the Azores. But while still 135 miles out, one engine dies of fuel starvation, and then, still some 75 miles out, the other. Moreover, your aircraft has lost its main hydraulic power, which operates the flaps. In eerie silence, and with nothing but water beneath, you are instructed to put on a life jacket and, when hearing the countdown to ocean impact, to assume a brace position. Periodically the pilot announces “[X] minutes to impact.” With the ocean’s surface approaching, you keep thinking, “I’m going to die.” Lisa Noble Photography/ Moment Open/ Getty Images But good news: when the engines went silent, you were still 33,000 feet in the air, and your captain is an experienced glider pilot. And the bad news: You are losing some 2000 feet per minute. After minutes of descent, the pilot declares above the passenger screams and prayers, “About to go into the water.” Then, “We have a runway! We have a runway!. . . Brace! Brace! Brace!” Nineteen minutes after losing all engine and primary electrical power and after a series of violent turns, the plane reaches the air base, making a damaging hard landing. You and 305 other passengers and crew members have escaped death. Your pilots return home as heroes. And your flight becomes the subject of television dramas. For psychologist Margaret McKinnon, now at McMaster University and St. Joseph's Healthcare Hamilton, this traumatic flight was not imaginary. It was the real August 24, 2001 Air Transat Flight 236, and she, as a honeymoon passenger, was among those thinking “I’m going to die.” Seizing this one-time opportunity to test people’s memory for details of a recorded traumatic event, McKinnon and her Baycrest Health Sciences colleagues Brian Levine and Daniela Palombo tracked down 15 of her fellow passengers. In a recent Clinical Psychological Science​ article, she reports that seven met criteria for PTSD, and that all of them, some four years later, exhibited vivid, “robust” memories of the details of their experiences. In a follow-up study, also appearing in Clinical Psychological Science​, eight of the passengers underwent fMRI scans while recalling the trauma. Their “enhanced” amygdala activation suggested that the amygdala may, via its links to the hippocampus and visual cortical areas, help create such emotion-fixed memories. The persistent memories from Flight AT236 confirm what other researchers have found—that it’s much easier to forget neutral events (yesterday’s parking place) than emotional experiences, especially extreme emotional experiences. After observing a loved one’s murder, being terrorized by a hijacker or rapist, or losing one’s home in a natural disaster, one may wish to forget. But such traumas are typically etched on the mind as persistent, haunting memories—for survivors of Nazi death camps, “Horror sear[ed] memory.” With many forms of trauma comes not repression but, more often, “robust” memory. Note:  Don’t let this essay leave you thinking that commercial flying is dangerous.  From 2009 to 2011, Americans were—mile for mile—170 times more likely to die in a vehicle accident than on a scheduled flight. In 2011, 21,221 people died in U.S. car or light truck accidents, while zero (as in 2010 and as on AT236) died on scheduled airline flights. When flying, the most dangerous part of the trip is your drive to the airport. ... View more

Originally posted on August 27, 2015. It seems unfair . . . that mere skin-deep beauty should predict, as it has in so many studies, people’s dating frequency, popularity, job interview impressions, and income, not to mention their perceived health, happiness, social skill, and life success. “Personal beauty is a greater recommendation than any letter of introduction,” said Aristotle. Evolutionary psychologists see biological wisdom in our positive response to bodily shapes and facial clues to others’ health and fertility. Still, how unjust, this penalty for plainness—and especially so in today’s world where first impressions sway choices in settings from speed dating to Tinder swipes. Despite some universal aspects of physical attractiveness (such as facial symmetry), those of us with no better than average looks can find some solace in the varying beauty ideals across time and place. Today’s overweight was, in another era, Ruebens’ pleasingly plump “Venus in a Mirror.” And we can find more comfort in a soon-to-be-published study by Lucy Hunt, Paul Eastwick, and Eli Finkel. Compared to romances that form without prior friendship, couples who become romantically involved long after first meeting exhibit less “assortative mating” based on similar attractiveness. For those who are friends before becoming lovers, looks matter less. With slow-cooked love, other factors such as common interests matter more. This fits with earlier findings (here and here and here).  First, attractiveness is less a predictor of well-being and social connections in rural settings (where people often know those they see) than in urban settings (where more interactions are with strangers, and looks matter more). Second, not only do people’s looks affect our feelings, our feelings affect how we perceive their looks. Those we like we find attractive. The more we love someone, the more physically attractive we find them. These comforting findings help us answer Prime Charming’s question to Cinderella (in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musical): “Do I love you because you’re beautiful, or are you beautiful because I love you?” And they remind us of Shakespeare’s wisdom: “Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind.” Beauty, thank goodness, truly is in the eye of the beholder. TOMACCO/ Getty Images ... View more

Originally posted on December 1, 2015. “Happiness doesn’t bring good health,” headlines a December 9 New York Times article. “Go ahead and sulk,” explain its opening sentences. “Unhappiness won’t kill you.” Should we forget all that we have read and taught about the effects of negative emotions (depression, anger, stress) on health?  Yes, this is “good news for the grumpy,” one of the study authors is quoted as saying. In this Lancet study, which followed a half million British women over time, “unhappiness and stress were not associated with an increased risk of death,” reported the Times. A closer look at the study tells a somewhat different story, however. Its title—“Does Happiness Itself Directly Affect Mortality?”—hints at an explanation for the surprising result. Contrary to what the media report suggests, the researchers found that “Compared with those reporting being happy most of the time, women who had reported being unhappy had excess all-cause mortality when adjusting only for age.” Said simply, the unhappy women were 36 percent more likely to die during the study period. But the happy women also exercised more, smoked less, and were more likely to live with a partner and to participate in religious and other group activities. Controlling for those variables “completely eliminated” the happiness-longevity association, and that explains the headline. In much the same way, one can reduce or eliminate the religiosity-health association by controlling for the factors that mediate the religiosity effect (social support, healthier lifestyle, greater positive emotion).  Ditto, one can eliminate the seeming effect of a hurricane by “controlling for” the confounding effect of the wind, rain, and storm surge. A hurricane “by itself,” after eliminating such mediating factors, has little or no “direct effect.” Likewise, happiness “by itself” has little or no direct effect on health—a finding that few researchers are likely to contest. P.S. For more critique of the happiness-health study, see here. ... View more

Originally posted on May 12, 2016. With support from the Dalai Lama, the famed emotion researcher, Paul Ekman, has created an interactive Atlas of Emotions. Ekman’s survey of 248 emotion researchers identified five basic emotions that most agreed are shared by all humans: Anger (91 percent agreement): a reaction to interference. Fear (90 percent agreement): our response to danger. Disgust (86 percent agreement): a response to anything toxic. Sadness (80 percent agreement): occasioned by loss. Enjoyment (76 percent agreement): our experience of what feels good. Ekman’s interactive maps allow visitors to explore the varied experiences of these emotions (sadness, for example, ranges from disappointment to anguish). And they offer specific examples of what triggers each emotion, and what effect it has. For those looking for a class lab activity, the site warrants a visit. ... View more

Want to add a little psychopathy to your neuroscience or emotion lectures? Or add a little emotion and neuroscience to your psychopathy lecture? Kevin Dutton (University of Oxford), in a 5-minute video, presents a couple versions of the trolley problem and explains the role of emotion in responding to the dilemma. He notes that psychopaths respond in a purely utilitarian way, without emotion getting in the way. In the first video below, Dutton describes a scenario in which five people will die if a trolley continues on its path but where flipping a switch will send the trolley down a different track killing one person. Pause this video at the 49-second mark and give students an opportunity to think about their decision. Ask students to decide, but not reveal their response. If you use a student response system, ask students to click in with, say, A once they’ve made their decision. Return to playing the video. Dutton changes the scenario so that now you are faced with a different decision. The trolley, again, on its current course will kill five people. But now there is a “large stranger” in front of you. If you shove this person to their certain death in front of the trolley, the trolley will stop and the five people will be saved.  Pause the video at the 1:38 mark and give students time to mull over their decision. Again, ask students to decide, but not reveal their response. As before, if you use a student response system, ask students to click in with A once they’ve made their decision. Dutton goes on to say that the first decision involves primarily the cerebral cortex. But when it comes to the second decision of whether to physically push someone to their death, for most people the emotion-heavy amygdala becomes involved and the decision is much more difficult. What about psychopaths? The amygdala stays quiet, and psychopaths don’t feel a difference between the two dilemmas. The decision to shove the stranger feels no different than the decision to flip the switch. Video Link : 1665 If you have time and wish to continue the topic, Dutton has another 5-minute video that expands on this one. To introduce it, ask students if there are any benefits to having someone who is willing and able to sacrifice one person, regardless of circumstances, to save many people? If time allows, ask students to discuss in pairs or small groups, and then ask for volunteers to share their responses. Now, play this video. Video Link : 1666 After this, students will have a lot to think about and may not be able to focus on anything else you have to say. It may be best to time this activity so it ends when your class session ends. ... View more