The Benefits of Capturing your Everyday Experiences

Source

What would you rather do right now, write down the last conversation you had or watch a funny video guaranteed to make you laugh? What about a month from now – do you think you’d rather read about a random conversation you had last month or watch another funny video? These are some of the questions researchers asked in a recent set of studies exploring our tendency to underestimate how much pleasure we get out of rediscovering mundane experiences. Participants in these studies consistently expected that they would not be very interested in rereading a log of an ordinary event in their everyday lives. But a couple of months down the road when the time came to reread that log, they found themselves much more interested and experienced more pleasure than they had expected. This was partly because they had forgotten a lot more of the event than they had expected they would! In the moment, we think why record our everyday experiences, we will remember them in the future and they aren’t that memorable anyway. Even just a month later though, our memories of the event begin to dim, the details fall away, and what once seemed ordinary feels a bit more extraordinary.

The Regifting Dilemma

source

It’s the first week of December, and we’re back in another holiday gift-giving season! For a psychologist, this is an especially fun time of year because it seems like people are all trying to get inside each other’s heads. As gift-givers, we do our best to predict what others will like and appreciate the most. Maybe we purchase the latest trends or use our own talents to create a special gift for our loved ones. Sometimes the perfect match is even sitting right in our closet - a gift initially given to us by someone else. If you run into this situation, is it okay to regift?

I’m sure you’ve heard this debate before and what the etiquette experts say: usually a range from a flat-out “no” to “only in rare circumstances.” They claim the original gift-giver would feel disrespected if he or she knew, as effort and money were put into the purchase and the intention was not for the gift to go to another person. Note that this line of reasoning about regifting relies on an assumption about how other people might feel if they were involved in regifting. According to the experts, we shouldn’t regift because the original gift-giver might be hurt. But is this actually the case – are people really offended when someone regifts their gift?

A Learning Tip from Dancers

source

If you watch any of the numerous dance shows on TV, such as Dancing with the Stars, So You Think You Can Dance, or even Dance Moms, you know that dancing at the elite level requires a lot more than strong muscles, a flexible body, and fierce determination. Professional dancers are smart. Not only are their bodies working at a high level, but their minds are as well. When performing, dancers are juggling numerous thoughts as they strive to execute each movement as precisely as possible. “Point my feet, lengthen my neck, drop my shoulders, SMILE!” Somehow, dancers must get their bodies to perform all of these movements with specific qualities, all the while making the dance appear both physically and mentally effortless. As someone who has danced my whole life, I often joke that dance is the only kind of physical exercise I enjoy because dancing well means I don’t have any mental resources left to realize I’m exhausted!

In addition to all the mental effort required of dancers onstage, there is a whole lot of it needed behind the scenes as well. In both rehearsals for performances and in classes honing one’s technique, choreography has to be committed to memory. At the elite level, choreography is taught quickly and in large amounts. Dancers have to be attentive and skilled at learning lots of information in a short amount of time and then putting that information to use immediately. Not only do they need to remember the movements themselves – where each part of the body should be - but they also need to memorize the timing of the movement and the quality with which it should be done. Because so many elements need to be encoded for each moment of a dance routine, learning choreography requires that dancers be completely present mentally.

Living Abroad and Thinking Outside of the Box



source

Two weeks ago, I had the exciting opportunity to visit my sister in London where she is studying for the year. As she showed me her new lifestyle and daily routine, we reflected on some of the benefits she has gained from her time abroad thus far, such as greater knowledge about European history and new friends from different countries. We also talked about some less tangible advantages, like changing the way she thinks about the world, learning to interpret behaviors from a new perspective, and improving her ability to solve problems. In other words, we came to the conclusion that living abroad has helped foster her creativity.

The notion that living abroad enhances creativity may be quite familiar to you. There is certainly plenty of anecdotal evidence to support this idea and a long tradition of the “expatriate artist.” For example, while visiting Westminster Abbey, my sister and I saw memorials to George Händel and Henry James – two artists who were not born in England but who produced some of their most famous works while living there. It’s easy to conjure up glamorous ideas of artists living and working abroad, their creativity sparked by new environments and lifestyles, as in the movie Midnight in Paris. But can the rest of us improve our creativity by living abroad? Were my sister and I right to think that her experience abroad has fostered her creativity? In this post, I’ll present some evidence that such a connection does exist and that it occurs not just for artists, but also within the general population.

Is it the thought that counts?

source

Now that we are in the midst of the holiday gift-giving season, many of you may be searching for the perfect presents to give friends and family members. Whether braving the busy parking lots at malls or surfing the internet for the latest deals, shoppers are likely putting a lot of time and energy into purchasing gifts that are just right. After all, when it comes to gift-giving, isn’t it the thought that counts? Conventional wisdom tells us that how much a gift is liked or appreciated is based not just on the gift’s objective quality, but also (and more) on how much thought the gift-giver put into choosing it. If that’s the case, then, you need not worry about getting the “perfect” gift. Your gift will be appreciated and valued for the thought behind it, right?

The secret to flourishing? Science says it's in the numbers

Flourishing is in the numbers

When it comes to human flourishing, science is getting pretty specific. Over the course of our daily lives, we have a variety of positive and negative experiences. And I think most of us would agree that we are likely to be happiest when we maximize the positive and minimize the negative. But researchers suggest that it is not just about having more positive and less negative in our lives – it is the ratio of positive to negative that matters.

So what is that magical ratio? At or above 3:1. Researchers Fredrickson and Losada tracked people’s daily experiences over the course of a month and found that people who are flourishing (as opposed to languishing) report experiencing at least three times as many positive emotions as negative emotions in their daily lives.

Rue and Racism: Intergroup dynamics and the Hunger Games

 Today we have the second installment of awesome guest blogger Maya Kuehn's posts on the psychology behind the Hunger Games. Check out the first installment here.

Rue

In the original, written version of The Hunger Games, it’s made fairly clear that both Rue and her fellow District 11 tribute, Thresh, are African American. Yet when faced with their ethnicity on the movie screen, many people have expressed great disappointment (to state it delicately) over these tragic characters not being White. But why?

Well, it turns out that empathy across group boundaries is a complicated matter. Although part of the glue holding society together is a desire to reduce the suffering of others, and though we’re quick to empathize with and help members of our own groups, this dynamic can go haywire when it must extend to members of different groups (Cikara, Bruneau, & Saxe, 2011).

Mind Games: The Psychology of the Hunger Games

Guest blogger Maya Kuehn is back with a two-part post on the psychology of the Hunger Games. So sit back and enjoy another round of “at the movies with a psychologist.”

Watching The Hunger Games come to life on screen (at, full disclosure, a midnight show), I found that actually witnessing the slaughter of several teenagers was more gut-wrenchingly graphic than it had seemed in the books. So when (PYM blogger and fellow social psychologist) Amie asked me whether the movie was gruesome, I had to admit it was. But because I can’t resist translating my bizarrely specific psychological know-how to daily advice, I encouraged her to use her favorite emotion regulation strategy while viewing the more horrifying scenes. Just what does this mean, and what other aspects of The Hunger Games could social psychology address? Allow me to elaborate. 

Two ways to right: The perils of naive realism

In honor of PYM's 1-year anniversary last week, I'm re-posting my very first post for PYM today. I also wanted to re-post it because, almost one year later, I found myself in a situation very similar to the one that prompted this post! Last week, after a few bad nights of sleep, I got into a stupid fight with my husband. Just as the last time, I was baffled at how a pleasant evening could suddenly end with us barely speaking to each other. In the midst of things, I returned to this post and decided that I should try taking my own advice. The good news - the advice still works!

Last weekend my husband and I got into a fight over a pillowcase. It was one of those times where it was clearly his fault, and I was sure he would apologize the next day. He didn't. Instead he seemed surprised that I wasn't apologizing to him. How could we have such different views of the same conflict? Which one of us was right?

It turns out that we were both right, in our own way. Misunderstandings like the one that led to a fight over a pillowcase occur because people tend to be naïve realists. That is, we believe that we see social interactions as they truly are, and that other people see them the same way that we do. However, one of the most enduring contributions of social psychology is the understanding that two people can interpret the same social interaction in very different ways based on their own personal knowledge and experiences (Asch, 1952). What does this mean for me? I thought my husband had taken my pillowcase as a joke. He knew he had done it on accident. These different pieces of knowledge led us to interpret the same conversation in very different ways.

Why we sometimes make bad decisions: The anchoring and adjustment heuristic

How much to pay for the house of your dreams

Imagine you are interested in buying a house and you've been out looking on the weekends. You find a 3 bedroom, 2 bath bungalow on a quiet street that already feels like home. The asking price is $475,000 (for those of us living in pricier areas, play along by imagining it's 1995). You want the house, but you don't want to pay too much. You've noticed other comparable homes in the area seem to go for anything from $350,000 to $600,000. So how much do you offer? Have a number in mind? Now, read through the scenario again, but this time imagine that the asking price is $439,999. How much would you offer then? Do you come up with a different number?

Let's try a different example: First, what are the last two digits of your telephone number? Got that number in mind? Now, I'd like you to think about what percentage of African countries are in the United Nations. Do you think there are more or less than the telephone number? How many more or less? Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman did a similar study in their seminal 1974 paper on biases in judgment and they found that people who had a lower number (after spinning a wheel of fortune) estimated fewer countries than people who had a higher number. For example, the median answer for people who spun a '10' was 25%, whereas the median answer for people who spun a '65' was 45%. So why does a random number influence our judgment about something unrelated?

Modern Day Freudian Slips

Source

George H. W. Bush once made the following classic Freudian slip in a public speech: "For seven and a half years I've worked alongside President Reagan, and I'm proud to have been his partner. We've had triumphs. We've made some mistakes. We've had some sex -- setbacks." When the audience erupts in laughter, you can't help but feel a little bad for the guy, who appears to have a minor heart-attack if you watch his chest closely (see the video here).

Source

Rather than revealing that Bush unconsciously wished to have intimate relations with Reagan, as a Freudian interpretation might suggest, this slip was more likely an example of a speech error called a deletion, which involves omitting a word or part of a word. In this case, "ba" was inadvertently omitted from "setbacks." Speech errors like this are common (though generally less embarrassing), and they are especially likely to occur when people are tired, nervous, or otherwise not at their peak level of cognitive functioning. Linguists argue that speech errors reflect the complex way that language is organized and produced, and are unlikely to reflect repressed desires or conflicts. But that doesn't mean that speech errors are always psychologically meaningless.

Time, Space, and Synesthesia

Source

When we talk about time, we often use metaphors related to space. For example, "I'm looking forward to this weekend." Some people experience this connection more literally, feeling as though units of time have an almost physical reality, one with a definitive size, location, and sometimes even color. This tendency has been termed time-space synesthesia. In a 2006 study conducted by researchers at the University of Waterloo, participants were asked to draw their unique representations of the months of the year, pictured above.