Psychologist Best Quotes

Do you know what the worst thing about being a parent is? That you're always judged by your worst moments. You can do a million things right, but if you do one single thing wrong you're forever that parent who was checking his phone in the park when your child was hit in the head by a swing. We don't take our eyes off them for days at a time, but then you read just one text message and it's as if all your best moments never happened. No one goes to see a psychologist to talk about all the times they weren't hit in the head by a swing as a child. Parents are defined by their mistakes.

I appreciate the confidence, Your Imperial Psychologist, but we're way beyond that. Cress if over me and...it's for the best.

Just thugs only ever got so far. The best thugs were all psychologists.

Nobel Prize–winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman and his colleagues have shown that what we remember about the pleasurable quality of our past experiences is almost entirely determined by two things: how the experiences felt when they were at their peak (best or worst), and how they felt when they ended. This “peak-end” rule of Kahneman’s is what we use to summarize the experience, and then we rely on that summary later to remind ourselves of how the experience felt.

The best listeners aren’t just listening,” said Margaret Clark, the Yale psychologist. “They’re triggering emotions by asking questions, expressing their own emotions, doing things that prompt the other person to say something real.

When psychologists Catherine Caldwell-Harris and Ayse Ayçiçegi compared U.S. and Turkish samples, they found that having "an orientation inconsistent with societal values" is a risk factor for poor mental health. The findings support what the researchers call the personality-culture clash hypothesis: "Psychological adjustment depends on the degree of match between personality and the values of surrounding society." To the extent that introverts feel the need to explain, apologize, or feel guilty about what works best for them, they feel alienated not only from society but from themselves.

The best description of motivated reasoning I’ve ever seen comes from psychologist Tom Gilovich. When we want something to be true, he said, we ask ourselves, “Can I believe this?,” searching for an excuse to accept it. When we don’t want something to be true, we instead ask ourselves, “Must I believe this?,” searching for an excuse to reject it.4

In books, even the very best boy detectives are dismissed with a laugh. In real life, they're sent to psychologists.

Feminist psychologists have suggested that a toxic friendship is often one in which a women's own personal growth and individuation is sacrificed at the expense of the demands of the other person. Sometimes choosing oneself rather than the friendship is important for future personal growth and individuation. But women have a difficult time separating from each other because emotional connection is so highly valued and broken friendships are seen as failures.

Who would appreciate such candor? No one. None of us really likes honesty. We prefer deception –but only when it is unabashedly flattering or artfully camouflaged. Groups seem to need to believe that they are superior to others and that they have a purpose greater than just passing along their genes to the next generation. Individuals seem to need similar delusions – about who they are and why they do what they do. They need heroes, however fraudulent… Studies show that people are more likely to accept the opinion of a confident con man than the cautious view of someone who actually knows what he is talking about. And professionals who form overconfident opinions on the basis of incorrect readings of the facts are more likely to succeed than their more competent peers who display greater doubt. What’s more, deception works best, according to studies by psychologists, when the person doing the deceiving is fool enough to be deceived, too; that is, when he believes his own lies. That is why incompetent leaders – who are naïve enough to fall for their own guff – are such a danger to civilized life. If they are modern leaders, they must also delude themselves into thinking they know how to make the world a better place. Invariably, the answers they propose to problems are ones that bubble up from their own vanity, the essence of which is to make the rest of the world look just like them!

No one system reveals the entire truth; at best, each organizes one point of view or perspective. We must consider many perspectives, and a philosopher should not imprison his thought in one system.

Nobel Prize–winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman and his colleagues have shown that what we remember about the pleasurable quality of our past experiences is almost entirely determined by two things: how the experiences felt when they were at their peak (best or worst), and how they felt when they ended.

A hallmark of interactions on the best teams is what psychologist Jonathan Baron termed “active open-mindedness.” The best forecasters view their own ideas as hypotheses in need of testing. Their aim is not to convince their teammates of their own expertise, but to encourage their teammates to help them falsify their own notions.

cognitive psychologists I spoke with led me to an enormous and too often ignored body of work demonstrating that learning itself is best done slowly to accumulate lasting knowledge, even when that means performing poorly on tests of immediate progress. That is, the most effective learning looks inefficient; it looks like falling behind.

Psychologists point out that the pandemic, like most transformative events, has the ability to bring out the best and the worst in us.

Most people tell you they want to get out of kindergarten, but don’t believe them. Don’t believe them! All they want you to do is to mend their broken toys. “Give me back my wife. Give me back my job. Give me back my money. Give me back my reputation, my success.” This is what they want; they want their toys replaced. That’s all. Even the best psychologist will tell you that, that people don’t really want to be cured. What they want is relief; a cure is painful.

Your motivations--get that promotion, throw the best parties, run for public office--aren't impersonal abstractions but powerfully reflect who you are and what you focus on. An individual's goals figure prominently in the theories of personality first developed by the Harvard psychologist Henry Murray. According to his successor David McClelland, what Friedrich Nietzsche called "the will to power," which he considered the major driving force behind human behavior, is one of the three basic motivations, along with achievement and affiliation, that differentiate us as individuals. A simple experiment show show these broad emotional motivations can affect what you pay attention to or ignore on very basic levels. When they examine images of faces that express different kinds of emotion, power-oriented subjects are drawn to nonconfrontational visages, such as "surprise faces," rather than to those that suggest dominance, as "anger faces" do. In contrast, people spurred by affiliation gravitate toward friendly or joyful faces.

The guiding visionary behind Project Spectrum is Howard Gardner, a psychologist at the Harvard School of Education.7 “The time has come,” Gardner told me, “to broaden our notion of the spectrum of talents. The single most important contribution education can make to a child’s development is to help him toward a field where his talents best suit him, where he will be satisfied and competent. We’ve completely lost sight of that. Instead we subject everyone to an education where, if you succeed, you will be best suited to be a college professor. And we evaluate everyone along the way according to whether they meet that narrow standard of success. We should spend less time ranking children and more time helping them to identify their natural competencies and gifts, and cultivate those. There are hundreds and hundreds of ways to succeed, and many, many different abilities that will help you get there.

Psychologists say the best way to handle children at this stage of development is not to answer their questions directly but instead to tell them a story. As pediatrician Alan Greene explained, “After conversing with thousands of children, I’ve decided that what they really mean is, ‘That’s interesting to me. Let’s talk about that together. Tell me more, please?’ Questions are a child’s way of expressing love and trust. They are a child’s way of starting a conversation. So instead of simply insisting over and over again that the object of my son’s attention is, in fact, an elephant, I might tell him about how, in India, elephants are symbols of good luck, or about how some say elephants have the best memories of all the animals. I might tell him about the time I saw an elephant spin a basketball on the tip of his trunk, or about how once there was an elephant named Horton who heard a Who. I might tell him that once upon a time, there was an elephant and four blind men; each man felt a different part of the elephant’s body: the ears, the tail, the side, and the tusk . . .

Some of the studios behind these “freemium” mobile games even hired psychologists to try to figure out the best way to keep players addicted.

The only thing the sport gives us are moments. But what the hell is life, Peter, apart from moments?” The best psychologist in town.

In fact, one of the best predictors of dominance is the ratio of “eye contact while speaking” to “eye contact while listening.” Psychologists call this the visual dominance ratio. Imagine yourself out to lunch with a coworker. When it’s your turn to talk, you spend some fraction of the time looking into your coworker’s eyes (and the rest of the time looking away). Similarly, when it’s your turn to listen, you spend some fraction of the time making eye contact. If you make eye contact for the same fraction of time while speaking and listening, your visual dominance ratio will be 1.0, indicative of high dominance. If you make less eye contact while speaking, however, your ratio will be less than 1.0 (typically hovering around 0.6), indicative of low dominance.53

Reason is overrated. Many pundits have argued that a good heart and steadfast moral clarity are superior to triangulations of overeducated policy wonks, like the best and brightest and that dragged us into the quagmire of Vietnam. And wasn't it reason that gave us the means to despoil the planet and threaten our species with weapons of mass destruction? In this way of thinking, it's character and conscience, not cold-hearted calculation, that will save us. Besides, a human being is not a brain on a stick. My fellow psychologists have shown that we're led by our bodies and our emotions and use our puny powers of reason merely to rationalize our gut feelings after the fact

The undeniable reality is that how well you do in life and business depends not only on what you do and how you do it . . . but also on who is doing it with you or to you,” says psychologist Henry Cloud in The Power of the Other.

I dove into work showing that highly credentialed experts can become so narrow-minded that they actually get worse with experience, even while becoming more confident—a dangerous combination. And I was stunned when cognitive psychologists I spoke with led me to an enormous and too often ignored body of work demonstrating that learning itself is best done slowly to accumulate lasting knowledge, even when that means performing poorly on tests of immediate progress.

to re-enter the roundtable of morality. As the psychologist Peter DeScioli points out, when you face an adversary alone, your best weapon may be an ax, but when you face an adversary in front of a throng of bystanders, your best weapon may be an argument.

But psychology is passing into a less simple phase. Within a few years what one may call a microscopic psychology has arisen in Germany, carried on by experimental methods, asking of course every moment for introspective data, but eliminating their uncertainty by operating on a large scale and taking statistical means. This method taxes patience to the utmost, and could hardly have arisen in a country whose natives could be bored. Such Germans as Weber, Fechner, Vierordt, and Wundt obviously cannot ; and their success has brought into the field an array of younger experimental psychologists, bent on studying the elements of the mental life, dissecting them out from the gross results in which they are embedded, and as far as possible reducing them to quantitative scales. The simple and open method of attack having done what it can, the method of patience, starving out, and harassing to death is tried ; the Mind must submit to a regular siege, in which minute advantages gained night and day by the forces that hem her in must sum themselves up at last into her overthrow. There is little of the grand style about these new prism, pendulum, and chronograph-philosophers. They mean business, not chivalry. What generous divination, and that superiority in virtue which was thought by Cicero to give a man the best insight into nature, have failed to do, their spying and scraping, their deadly tenacity and almost diabolic cunning, will doubtless some day bring about. No general description of the methods of experimental psychology would be instructive to one unfamiliar with the instances of their application, so we will waste no words upon the attempt.

eyes off them for days at a time, but then you read just one text message and it’s as if all your best moments never happened. No one goes to see a psychologist to talk about all the times they weren’t hit in the head by a swing as a child. Parents are defined by their mistakes.

Logic, reason, and common sense are your best tools for synthesizing reality and understanding what to do about it. Be wary of relying on anything else. Unfortunately, numerous tests by psychologists show that the majority of people follow the lower-level path most of the time, which leads to inferior decisions without their realizing it. As Carl Jung put it, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” It’s even more important that decision making be evidence-based and logical when groups of people are working together. If it’s not, the process will inevitably be dominated by the most powerful rather than the most insightful participants, which is not only unfair but suboptimal. Successful organizations have cultures in which evidence-based decision making is the norm rather than the exception.

In a commentary on CNNMoney.com, Fortune senior writer Anne Fisher reported that scientists have begun to realize “that people may do their best thinking when they are not concentrating on work at all.” She cites studies published in the journal Science by Dutch psychologists who concluded, “The unconscious mind is a terrific solver of complex problems when the conscious mind is busy elsewhere or, perhaps better yet, not overtaxed at all.” That’s why I subscribe to the philosophy of the late Satchel Paige, who said, “Sometimes I sits and thinks, and sometimes I just sits.

Do you know what the worst thing about being a parent is? That you’re always judged by your worst moments. You can do a million things right, but if you do one single thing wrong you’re forever that parent who was checking his phone in the park when your child was hit in the head by a swing. We don’t take our eyes off them for days at a time, but then you read just one text message and it’s as if all your best moments never happened. No one goes to see a psychologist to talk about all the times they weren’t hit in the head by a swing as a child. Parents are defined by their mistakes.

Psychologist Arthur S. Reber offers the following summary of the psychological research on decision making: “During the 1970s . . . it became increasingly apparent that people do not typically solve problems, make decisions, or reach conclusions using the kinds of standard, conscious, and rational processes that they were more-or-less assumed to be using.” To the contrary, people could best be described, in much of their decision making, as being “arational”: “When people were observed making choices and solving problems of interesting complexity, the rational and logical elements were often missing.

Csikszentmihalyi teamed up with two other leading psychologists—Howard Gardner at Harvard, and William Damon at Stanford—to study these changes, and to see why some professions seemed healthy while others were growing sick. Picking the fields of genetics and journalism as case studies, they conducted dozens of interviews with people in each field. Their conclusion32 is as profound as it is simple: It’s a matter of alignment. When doing good (doing high-quality work that produces something of use to others) matches up with doing well (achieving wealth and professional advancement), a field is healthy. Genetics, for example, is a healthy field because all parties involved respect and reward the very best science. Even though pharmaceutical companies and market forces were beginning to inject vast amounts of money into university research labs in the 1990s, the scientists whom Csikszentmihalyi, Gardner, and Damon interviewed did not believe they were being asked to lower their standards, cheat, lie, or sell their souls. Geneticists believed that their field was in a golden age in which excellent work brought great benefits to the general public, the pharmaceutical companies, the universities, and the scientists themselves.

when it comes to the bread and butter of human misery, try a major depression. It can be life-threatening, it can destroy lives, demolish the families of sufferers. And it is dizzyingly common—the psychologist Martin Seligman has called it the common cold of psychopathology. Best estimates are that from 5 to 20 percent of us will suffer a major, incapacitating depression at some point in our lives, causing us to be hospitalized or medicated or nonfunctional for a significant length of time. Its incidence has been steadily increasing for decades—by the year 2020, depression is projected to be the second leading cause of medical disability on earth.

hallmark of interactions on the best teams is what psychologist Jonathan Baron termed “active open-mindedness.” The best forecasters view their own ideas as hypotheses in need of testing. Their aim is not to convince their teammates of their own expertise, but to encourage their teammates to help them falsify their own notions.

Paul Bloom, a Yale psychologist and author of the book Against Empathy, believes empathy is inherently selfish. It biases us toward the people we can most identify with, and against those we can’t, he writes. And when it comes to making a real difference in the world, he argues, it’s best to set empathy aside and skip right to compassion.

And I was stunned when cognitive psychologists I spoke with led me to an enormous and too often ignored body of work demonstrating that learning itself is best done slowly to accumulate lasting knowledge, even when that means performing poorly on tests of immediate progress. That is, the most effective learning looks inefficient; it looks like falling behind.

Psychologist and New York Times best-selling author Phil McGraw states, “I always say that the most important relationship you will ever have is with yourself. You’ve got to be your own best friend first.” How can you be “best friends” with someone you don’t know or don’t like? You can’t. That’s why it’s so important to find out who you are and work to become someone you like and respect.

Moral for psychologists. -- Not to go in for backstairs psychology. Never to observe in order to observe! That gives a false perspective, leads to squinting and something forced and exaggerated. Experience as the wish to experience does not succeed. One must not eye oneself while having an experience; else the eye becomes "an evil eye." A born psychologist guards instinctively against seeing in order to see; the same is true of the born painter. He never works "from nature"; he leaves it to his instinct, to his camera obscura, to sift through and express the "case," "nature," that which is "experienced." He is conscious only of what is general, of the conclusion, the result: he does not know arbitrary abstractions from an individual case. What happens when one proceeds differently? For example, if, in the manner of the Parisian novelists, one goes in for backstairs psychology and deals in gossip, wholesale and retail? Then one lies in wait for reality, as it were, and every evening one brings home a handful of curiosities. But note what finally comes of all this: a heap of splotches, a mosaic at best, but in any case something added together, something restless, a mess of screaming colors. The worst in this respect is accomplished by the Goncourts; they do not put three sentences together without really hurting the eye, the psychologist's eye. Nature, estimated artistically, is no model. It exaggerates, it distorts, it leaves gaps. Nature is chance. To study "from nature" seems to me to be a bad sign: it betrays submission, weakness, fatalism; this lying in the dust before petit faits [little facts] is unworthy of a whole artist. To see what is--that is the mark of another kind of spirit, the anti-artistic, the factual. One must know who one is. Toward a psychology of the artist. -- If there is to be art, if there is to be any aesthetic doing and seeing, one physiological condition is indispensable: frenzy. Frenzy must first have enhanced the excitability of the whole machine; else there is no art. All kinds of frenzy, however diversely conditioned, have the strength to accomplish this: above all, the frenzy of sexual excitement, this most ancient and original form of frenzy. Also the frenzy that follows all great cravings, all strong affects; the frenzy of feasts, contests, feats of daring, victory, all extreme movement; the frenzy of cruelty; the frenzy in destruction, the frenzy under certain meteorological influences, as for example the frenzy of spring; or under the influence of narcotics; and finally the frenzy of will, the frenzy of an overcharged and swollen will. What is essential in such frenzy is the feeling of increased strength and fullness. Out of this feeling one lends to things, one forces them to accept from us, one violates them--this process is called idealizing. Let us get rid of a prejudice here: idealizing does not consist, as is commonly held, in subtracting or discounting the petty and inconsequential. What is decisive is rather a tremendous drive to bring out the main features so that the others disappear in the process. In this state one enriches everything out of one's own fullness: whatever one sees, whatever one wills, is seen swelled, taut, strong, overloaded with strength. A man in this state transforms things until they mirror his power--until they are reflections of his perfection. This having to transform into perfection is--art. Even everything that he is not yet, becomes for him an occasion of joy in himself; in art man enjoys himself as perfection.

A good marketer can sell practically anything to anyone. Tobacco is literally dried, decaying vegetable matter that you light on fire and inhale, breathing horrid-tasting, toxic fumes into your lungs.121 At one point marketers promoted smoking as a status symbol and claimed it had health benefits. Once you give it a try, the addictive nature of the drug kicks in, and the agency’s job becomes much easier. If they can get you hooked, the product will sell itself. Since the product is actually poison, advertisers need to overcome your instinctual aversion. That’s a big hill for alcohol advertisements to climb, which is why the absolute best marketing firms on the globe, firms with psychologists and human behavior specialists on staff, are hired to create the ads. These marketers know that the most effective sale is an emotional sale, one that plays on your deepest fears, your ultimate concerns. Alcohol advertisements sell an end to loneliness, claiming that drinking provides friendship and romance. They appeal to your need for freedom by saying drinking will make you unique, brave, bold, or courageous. They promise fulfillment, satisfaction, and happiness. All these messages speak to your conscious and unconscious minds.

Since the product is actually poison, advertisers need to overcome your instinctual aversion. That’s a big hill for alcohol advertisements to climb, which is why the absolute best marketing firms on the globe, firms with psychologists and human behavior specialists on staff, are hired to create the ads. These marketers know that the most effective sale is an emotional sale, one that plays on your deepest fears, your ultimate concerns.

I BELIEVE THAT we know much more about God than we admit that we know, than perhaps we altogether know that we know. God speaks to us, I would say, much more often than we realize or than we choose to realize. Before the sun sets every evening, he speaks to each of us in an intensely personal and unmistakable way. His message is not written out in starlight, which in the long run would make no difference; rather it is written out for each of us in the humdrum, helter-skelter events of each day; it is a message that in the long run might just make all the difference. Who knows what he will say to me today or to you today or into the midst of what kind of unlikely moment he will choose to say it. Not knowing is what makes today a holy mystery as every day is a holy mystery. But I believe that there are some things that by and large God is always saying to each of us. Each of us, for instance, carries around inside himself, I believe, a certain emptiness—a sense that something is missing, a restlessness, the deep feeling that somehow all is not right inside his skin. Psychologists sometimes call it anxiety, theologians sometimes call it estrangement, but whatever you call it, I doubt that there are many who do not recognize the experience itself, especially no one of our age, which has been variously termed the age of anxiety, the lost generation, the beat generation, the lonely crowd. Part of the inner world of everyone is this sense of emptiness, unease, incompleteness, and I believe that this in itself is a word from God, that this is the sound that God’s voice makes in a world that has explained him away. In such a world, I suspect that maybe God speaks to us most clearly through his silence, his absence, so that we know him best through our missing him. But he also speaks to us about ourselves, about what he wants us to do and what he wants us to become; and this is the area where I believe that we know so much more about him than we admit even to ourselves, where people hear God speak even if they do not believe in him. A face comes toward us down the street. Do we raise our eyes or do we keep them lowered, passing by in silence? Somebody says something about somebody else, and what he says happens to be not only cruel but also funny, and everybody laughs. Do we laugh too, or do we speak the truth? When a friend has hurt us, do we take pleasure in hating him, because hate has its pleasures as well as love, or do we try to build back some flimsy little bridge? Sometimes when we are alone, thoughts come swarming into our heads like bees—some of them destructive, ugly, self-defeating thoughts, some of them creative and glad. Which thoughts do we choose to think then, as much as we have the choice? Will we be brave today or a coward today? Not in some big way probably but in some little foolish way, yet brave still. Will we be honest today or a liar? Just some little pint-sized honesty, but honest still. Will we be a friend or cold as ice today? All the absurd little meetings, decisions, inner skirmishes that go to make up our days. It all adds up to very little, and yet it all adds up to very much. Our days are full of nonsense, and yet not, because it is precisely into the nonsense of our days that God speaks to us words of great significance—not words that are written in the stars but words that are written into the raw stuff and nonsense of our days, which are not nonsense just because God speaks into the midst of them. And the words that he says, to each of us differently, are be brave…be merciful…feed my lambs…press on toward the goal.

Psychologist Susan Fiske observes, ‘Attention is directed up the hierarchy. Secretaries know more about their bosses than vice versa; graduate students know more about their advisors than vice versa.’ Fiske explains this happens because, like our fellow primates, ‘people pay attention to those who control their outcomes. In an effort to predict and possibly influence what is going to happen to them, people gather information about those with power.

And sometimes, even though Dad said Dr. Snow was the best psychologist in the city and a very famous man, Jess thought there were things he didn't know either. "Time heals all wounds," he'd said to them once, his voice so soft and thoughtful he could have been talking to himself. It had seemed a cruel thing to say, though Jess knew he hadn't meant to be unkind. Vida had been really angry with him. "No, it doesn't!" she shouted. "You're wrong! It doesn't!

But young children, whose prefrontal cortexes have barely begun to ripen, can’t conceive of a future, which means they spend their lives in the permanent present, a forever feeling of right now. At times, this is a desirable state of consciousness; indeed, for meditators, it’s the ultimate aspiration. But living in the permanent present is not a practical parenting strategy. “Everybody would like to be in the present,” says Daniel Gilbert, a social psychologist at Harvard and author of the 2006 best-seller Stumbling on Happiness. “Certainly it’s true that there is an important role for being present in our lives. All the data say that. My own research says that.” The difference is that children, by definition, only live in the present, which means that you, as a parent, don’t get much of a chance. “Everyone is moving at the same speed toward the future,” he says. “But your children are moving at that same speed with their eyes closed. So you’re the ones who’ve got to steer.” He thinks about this for a moment. “You know, back in the early seventies, I hung out with a lot of people who wanted to live in the present. And it meant that no one paid the rent.” In effect, parents and small children have two completely different temporal outlooks. Parents can project into the future; their young children, anchored in the present, have a much harder time of it. This difference can be a formula for heartbreak for a small child.

At this point, I must describe an important study carried out by Clare W. Graves of Union College, Schenectady, N.Y. on deterioration of work standards. Professor Graves starts from the Maslow-McGregor assumption that work standards deteriorate when people react against workcontrol systems with boredom, inertia, cynicism... A fourteen-year study led to the conclusion that, for practical purposes, we may divide people up into seven groups, seven personality levels, ranging from totally selfpreoccupied and selfish to what Nietzsche called ‘a selfrolling wheel’-a thoroughly self-determined person, absorbed in an objective task. This important study might be regarded as an expansion of Shotover’s remark that our interest in the world is an overflow of our interest in ourselves—and that therefore nobody can be genuinely ‘objective’ until they have fully satiated the subjective cravings. What is interesting—and surprising—is that it should not only be possible to distinguish seven clear personality-ypes, but that these can be recognised by any competent industrial psychologist. When Professor Graves’s theories were applied in a large manufacturing organisation—and people were slotted into their proper ‘levels’—the result was a 17% increase in production and an 87% drop in grumbles. The seven levels are labelled as follows: (1) Autistic (2) Animistic (3) Awakening and fright (4) Aggressive power seeking (5) Sociocentric (6) Aggressive individualistic (7) Pacifist individualistic. The first level can be easily understood: people belonging to it are almost babylike, perhaps psychologically run-down and discouraged; there is very little to be done with these people. The animistic level would more probably be encountered in backward countries: primitive, superstitious, preoccupied with totems and taboos, and again poor industrial material. Man at the third level is altogether more wide-awake and objective, but finds the complexity of the real world frightening; the best work is to be got out of him by giving him rules to obey and a sense of hierarchical security. Such people are firm believers in staying in the class in which they were born. They prefer an autocracy. The majority of Russian peasants under the Tsars probably belonged to this level. And a good example of level four would probably be the revolutionaries who threw bombs at the Tsars and preached destruction. In industry, they are likely to be trouble makers, aggressive, angry, and not necessarily intelligent. Management needs a high level of tact to get the best out of these. Man at level five has achieved a degree of security—psychological and economic—and he becomes seriously preoccupied with making society run smoothly. He is the sort of person who joins rotary clubs and enjoys group activities. As a worker, he is inferior to levels three and four, but the best is to be got out of him by making him part of a group striving for a common purpose. Level six is a self-confident individualist who likes to do a job his own way, and does it well. Interfered with by authoritarian management, he is hopeless. He needs to be told the goal, and left to work out the best way to achieve it; obstructed, he becomes mulish. Level seven is much like level six, but without the mulishness; he is pacifistic, and does his best when left to himself. Faced with authoritarian management, he either retreats into himself, or goes on his own way while trying to present a passable front to the management. Professor Graves describes the method of applying this theory in a large plant where there was a certain amount of unrest. The basic idea was to make sure that each man was placed under the type of supervisor appropriate to his level. A certain amount of transferring brought about the desired result, mentioned above—increased production, immense decrease in grievances, and far less workers leaving the plant (7% as against 21% before the change).

ultimately, most of us would choose a rich and meaningful life over an empty, happy one, if such a thing is even possible. “Misery serves a purpose,” says psychologist David Myers. He’s right. Misery alerts us to dangers. It’s what spurs our imagination. As Iceland proves, misery has its own tasty appeal. A headline on the BBC’s website caught my eye the other day. It read: “Dirt Exposure Boosts Happiness.” Researchers at Bristol University in Britain treated lung-cancer patients with “friendly” bacteria found in soil, otherwise known as dirt. The patients reported feeling happier and had an improved quality of life. The research, while far from conclusive, points to an essential truth: We thrive on messiness. “The good life . . . cannot be mere indulgence. It must contain a measure of grit and truth,” observed geographer Yi-Fu Tuan. Tuan is the great unheralded geographer of our time and a man whose writing has accompanied me throughout my journeys. He called one chapter of his autobiography “Salvation by Geography.” The title is tongue-in-cheek, but only slightly, for geography can be our salvation. We are shaped by our environment and, if you take this Taoist belief one step further, you might say we are our environment. Out there. In here. No difference. Viewed that way, life seems a lot less lonely. The word “utopia” has two meanings. It means both “good place” and “nowhere.” That’s the way it should be. The happiest places, I think, are the ones that reside just this side of paradise. The perfect person would be insufferable to live with; likewise, we wouldn’t want to live in the perfect place, either. “A lifetime of happiness! No man could bear it: It would be hell on Earth,” wrote George Bernard Shaw, in his play Man and Superman. Ruut Veenhoven, keeper of the database, got it right when he said: “Happiness requires livable conditions, but not paradise.” We humans are imminently adaptable. We survived an Ice Age. We can survive anything. We find happiness in a variety of places and, as the residents of frumpy Slough demonstrated, places can change. Any atlas of bliss must be etched in pencil. My passport is tucked into my desk drawer again. I am relearning the pleasures of home. The simple joys of waking up in the same bed each morning. The pleasant realization that familiarity breeds contentment and not only contempt. Every now and then, though, my travels resurface and in unexpected ways. My iPod crashed the other day. I lost my entire music collection, nearly two thousand songs. In the past, I would have gone through the roof with rage. This time, though, my anger dissipated like a summer thunderstorm and, to my surprise, I found the Thai words mai pen lai on my lips. Never mind. Let it go. I am more aware of the corrosive nature of envy and try my best to squelch it before it grows. I don’t take my failures quite so hard anymore. I see beauty in a dark winter sky. I can recognize a genuine smile from twenty yards. I have a newfound appreciation for fresh fruits and vegetables. Of all the places I visited, of all the people I met, one keeps coming back to me again and again: Karma Ura,

dove into work showing that highly credentialed experts can become so narrow-minded that they actually get worse with experience, even while becoming more confident—a dangerous combination. And I was stunned when cognitive psychologists I spoke with led me to an enormous and too often ignored body of work demonstrating that learning itself is best done slowly to accumulate lasting knowledge, even when that means performing poorly on tests of immediate progress. That is, the most effective learning looks inefficient; it looks like falling behind.

I dove into work showing that highly credentialed experts can become so narrow-minded that they actually get worse with experience, even while becoming more confident—a dangerous combination. And I was stunned when cognitive psychologists I spoke with led me to an enormous and too often ignored body of work demonstrating that learning itself is best done slowly to accumulate lasting knowledge, even when that means performing poorly on tests of immediate progress. That is, the most effective learning looks inefficient; it looks like falling behind.

Twenty years of being in the classroom have taught me that 90% of ‘emotional problems’ in the classroom are manipulation tactics. Why is it that so many students who exhibit emotional problems in other classes are miraculously able to make them disappear in mine? Well, either I have eight advanced psychology degrees I haven’t told you about, or the student knows they have to face a consequence they don’t want. 4. Self-esteem is not built by pow-wows in class about connections and cultural understanding, but by honest, hard work. Education theorists and other ‘professionals’ whose salaries are dependent on a dysfunctional system will tell you a teacher’s job is part psychologist, part parent, blah blah blah. This is opinion, not fact. The truth is, the best teachers spend their time doing their job—teaching. The best thing you can do for your students is to teach them your subject matter—and the best way to do that is with a classroom that is quiet, attentive, focused, and on task. To achieve that you need leverage—consequences that count for those who do not comply with your behavior standards.

It is well-known that a big percentage of all marriages in the United States end in divorce or separation (about 39 percent, according to the latest data).[30] But staying together is not what really counts. Analysis of the Harvard Study data shows that marriage per se accounts for only 2 percent of subjective well-being later in life.[31] The important thing for health and well-being is relationship satisfaction. Popular culture would have you believe the secret to this satisfaction is romantic passion, but that is wrong. On the contrary, a lot of unhappiness can attend the early stages of romance. For example, researchers find that it is often accompanied by rumination, jealousy, and “surveillance behaviors”—not what we typically associate with happiness. Furthermore, “destiny beliefs” about soul mates or love being meant to be can predict low forgiveness when paired with attachment anxiety.[32] Romance often hijacks our brains in a way that can cause the highs of elation or the depths of despair.[33] You might accurately say that falling in love is the start-up cost for happiness—an exhilarating but stressful stage we have to endure to get to the relationships that actually fulfill us. The secret to happiness isn’t falling in love; it’s staying in love, which depends on what psychologists call “companionate love”—love based less on passionate highs and lows and more on stable affection, mutual understanding, and commitment.[34] You might think “companionate love” sounds a little, well, disappointing. I certainly did the first time I heard it, on the heels of great efforts to win my future wife’s love. But over the past thirty years, it turns out that we don’t just love each other; we like each other, too. Once and always my romantic love, she is also my best friend.

You’re suggesting the mysterious X. Where do we look for him?’ Poirot said: ‘Obviously in a close circle. There were five people, were there not, whocould have been concerned?’ ‘Five? Let me see. There was the old duffer who messed about with his herb brewing. A dangerous hobby-but an amiable creature. Vague sort of person. Don’t see him as X. There was the girl-she might have polished off Caroline, but certainly not Amyas. Then there was the stockbroker-Crale’s best friend. That’s popular in detective stories, but I don’t believe in it in real life. There’s no one else-oh yes, the kid sister, but one doesn’t seriously consider her. That’s four.’ Hercule Poirot said: ‘You forget the governess.’ ‘Yes, that’s true. Wretched people, governesses, one never does remember them. I do recall her dimly though. Middle-aged, plain, competent. I suppose a psychologist would say that she had a guilty passion for Crale and therefore killed him. The repressed spinster! It’s no good-I just don’t believe it. As far as my dim remembrance goes she wasn’t the neurotic type.’ ‘It is a long time ago.’ ‘Fifteen or sixteen years, I suppose. Yes, quite that. You can’t expect my memories of the case to be very acute.

The intelligent want self-control; children want candy. —RUMI INTRODUCTION Welcome to Willpower 101 Whenever I mention that I teach a course on willpower, the nearly universal response is, “Oh, that’s what I need.” Now more than ever, people realize that willpower—the ability to control their attention, emotions, and desires—influences their physical health, financial security, relationships, and professional success. We all know this. We know we’re supposed to be in control of every aspect of our lives, from what we eat to what we do, say, and buy. And yet, most people feel like willpower failures—in control one moment but overwhelmed and out of control the next. According to the American Psychological Association, Americans name lack of willpower as the number-one reason they struggle to meet their goals. Many feel guilty about letting themselves and others down. Others feel at the mercy of their thoughts, emotions, and cravings, their lives dictated by impulses rather than conscious choices. Even the best-controlled feel a kind of exhaustion at keeping it all together and wonder if life is supposed to be such a struggle. As a health psychologist and educator for the Stanford School of Medicine’s Health Improvement Program, my job is to help people manage stress and make healthy choices. After years of watching people struggle to change their thoughts, emotions, bodies, and habits, I realized that much of what people believed about willpower was sabotaging their success and creating unnecessary stress. Although scientific research had much to say that could help them, it was clear that these insights had not yet become part of public understanding. Instead, people continued to rely on worn-out strategies for self-control. I saw again and again that the strategies most people use weren’t just ineffective—they actually backfired, leading to self-sabotage and losing control. This led me to create “The Science of Willpower,” a class offered to the public through Stanford University’s Continuing Studies program. The course brings together the newest insights about self-control from psychology, economics, neuroscience, and medicine to explain how we can break old habits and create healthy habits, conquer procrastination, find our focus, and manage stress. It illuminates why we give in to temptation and how we can find the strength to resist. It demonstrates the importance of understanding the limits of self-control,

Failure to act in a crisis is tantamount to accepting a dreadful outcome. I must try to save myself before a rash personal act stubs me out reminiscent of a sucked dry cigarette. I lack a disciplined mind to engage in rigorous study. I am an accidental psychologist, an unreliable philosopher, an unscrupulous self-ethnographer, a crackpot cultural anthropologist, an untrustworthy historian, and a deceitful reporter whom surrounded himself with a facade of untruths, delusions, and illusions. I need to gather personal willpower and attempt my level best to tackle my greatest obstacle – a personal penchant to parley with self-destructive behavior. I seek to penetrate the barriers of constructed falsehoods and reveal the brutal truth of why my soul is so tarnished, engage in many acts of contrition, and atone for a wasteful life. My goal is to construct a living philosophy that will sustain me through all stages of life. I shall use whatever resources are available to me including an intuitive belief in free will to design a self-rescue plan. I must obliterate all vestiges of narcissistic and selfish persona by slaying the ego and dissolving a grotesque sense of self that is preoccupied with the past and fearful of the future.

The man looked at him calmly, almost sympathetically, and replied, “Do you know what the worst thing about being a parent is? That you’re always judged by your worst moments. You can do a million things right, but if you do one single thing wrong you’re forever that parent who was checking his phone in the park when your child was hit in the head by a swing. We don’t take our eyes off them for days at a time, but then you read just one text message and it’s as if all your best moments never happened. No one goes to see a psychologist to talk about all the times they weren’t hit in the head by a swing as a child. Parents are defined by their

A surprisingly large majority of people are quite happy to be fed a steady diet of music chosen by others, but there is a small minority who really don’t like it. These naysayers are concentrated in one social group—males over the age of forty, or, to use their more technical appellation, grumpy middle-aged men. The psychologist’s best guess as to why we grumpy middle-aged men don’t like background music is that we are used to having control over things around us.17 We don’t like it when we can’t choose, so we get tetchy and disagreeable, and we don’t like shoe shops anyway, so the irritating music gives us a good excuse to stalk off to the nearest pub.

Psychologists and philosophers created a world where anxiety, fear and struggle are the norm, where happiness and peace are impossible to attain or available only to the most adept after long torment, and where existence is, above all, futile. In this world, people must constantly struggle with and repress what is supposedly their true nature for an end that is, at best, an abstract morality. Any outside assistance is impossible as all interpersonal interactions are also a continual existential struggle. Every outside person can only be the subject or the subjugated in this world, and all love is simply object desire. Existence here has no joy, no connection and no purpose. The happy ending is death.

The brain best remembers things that are repeated, rhythmic, rhyming, structured, and above all easily visualized. The principles that the oral bards discovered, as they sharpened their stories through telling and retelling, were the same basic mnemonic principles that psychologists rediscovered when they began conducting their first scientific experiments on memory around the turn of the twentieth century: Words that rhyme are much more memorable than words that don’t; concrete nouns are easier to remember than abstract nouns; dynamic images are more memorable than static images; alliteration aids memory. A striped skunk making a slam dunk is a stickier thought than a patterned mustelid engaging in athletic activity.

research psychologist named Hans Eysenck hypothesized that human beings seek “just right” levels of stimulation—not too much and not too little. Stimulation is the amount of input we have coming in from the outside world. It can take any number of forms, from noise to social life to flashing lights. Eysenck believed that extroverts prefer more stimulation than introverts do, and that this explained many of their differences: introverts enjoy shutting the doors to their offices and plunging into their work, because for them this sort of quiet intellectual activity is optimally stimulating, while extroverts function best when engaged in higher-wattage activities like organizing team-building workshops or chairing meetings.

Dr. Zackson’s is a licensed clinical psychologist in Greenwich, CT and New York City, and her practice is in a private, confidential, therapeutic setting. She has modeled her practice in the style of an ‘old-time’ family practitioner, with the goal of getting to know you beyond presenting issue taking into account family, work, and financial constraints. She will customize therapy to best suit your needs, and will ultimately help you to become your own therapist by learning how to better deal with the challenges that come up in your life. Services:- * Therapy Trauma * Therapy social anxiety * Therapy Depression * Therapy for anxiety * Therapist Nyc Judith zackson * Psychologist Nyc Judith zackson * Psychologist Greenwich * Therapist Greenwich

Some researchers, such as psychologist Jean Twenge, say this new world where compliments are better than sex and pizza, in which the self-enhancing bias has been unchained and allowed to gorge unfettered, has led to a new normal in which the positive illusions of several generations have now mutated into full-blown narcissism. In her book The Narcissism Epidemic, Twenge says her research shows that since the mid-1980s, clinically defined narcissism rates in the United States have increased in the population at the same rate as obesity. She used the same test used by psychiatrists to test for narcissism in patients and found that, in 2006, one in four U.S. college students tested positive. That’s real narcissism, the kind that leads to diagnoses of personality disorders. In her estimation, this is a dangerous trend, and it shows signs of acceleration. Narcissistic overconfidence crosses a line, says Twenge, and taints those things improved by a skosh of confidence. Over that line, you become less concerned with the well-being of others, more materialistic, and obsessed with status in addition to losing all the restraint normally preventing you from tragically overestimating your ability to manage or even survive risky situations. In her book, Twenge connects this trend to the housing market crash of the mid-2000s and the stark increase in reality programming during that same decade. According to Twenge, the drive to be famous for nothing went from being strange to predictable thanks to a generation or two of people raised by parents who artificially boosted self-esteem to ’roidtastic levels and then released them into a culture filled with new technologies that emerged right when those people needed them most to prop up their self-enhancement biases. By the time Twenge’s research was published, reality programming had spent twenty years perfecting itself, and the modern stars of those shows represent a tiny portion of the population who not only want to be on those shows, but who also know what they are getting into and still want to participate. Producers with the experience to know who will provide the best television entertainment to millions then cull that small group. The result is a new generation of celebrities with positive illusions so robust and potent that the narcissistic overconfidence of the modern American teenager by comparison is now much easier to see as normal.

Schnall’s strong reaction to the failed replication of her own work provoked a mixed reaction from the psychological community. While many psychologists were bewildered by her response, a number of prominent US psychologists voiced support for her position. Dan Gilbert from Harvard University likened Schnall’s battle to the plight of Rosa Parks, and he referred to some psychologists who conducted or supported replications as “bullies,” “replication police,” “second stringers,” McCarthyists, and “god’s chosen soldiers in a great jihad.” Others accused the so-called replicators of being “Nazis,” “fascists,” and “mafia.” Rather than viewing replication as an intrinsic part of best scientific practice, Gilbert and his supporters framed it as a threat to the reputation of the (presumably brilliant) researchers who publish irreproducible findings, stifling their creativity and innovation

The worst bosses condemn their people to live in constant fear as they wait for the next wave of bad news, which always seems to hit without warning and at random intervals. The best bosses do everything possible to communicate when and how distressing events will unfold. When the timing of a stressful event can be predicted, so can its absence: Psychologist Martin Seligman called this the safety signal hypothesis. Predictability helps people know when to relax versus when dread and vigilance are warranted – which protects them from the emotional and physical exhaustion that results when people never feel safe from harm for even a moment. Seligman illustrated his hypothesis with air-raid sirens used during the German bombing of London during World War II. The sirens were so reliable that people went about their lives most of the time without fear; they didn’t need to worry about dashing to the shelters unless the sirens sounded.

Too often, out of the best of intentions, we do the very thing guaranteed to make matters worse: We hector, lecture, bully, plead, or threaten. Anthony Pratkanis, a social psychologist who investigated how scammers prey on old people, collected heartbreaking stories of family members pleading with relatives who had been defrauded: “Can’t you see the guy is a thief and the offer is a scam? You’re being ripped off!” “Ironically, this natural tendency to lecture may be one of the worst things a family member or friend can do,” Pratkanis says. “A lecture just makes the victim feel more defensive and pushes him or her further into the clutches of the fraud criminal.” Anyone who understands dissonance knows why. Shouting “What were you thinking?” will backfire because it means “Boy, are you stupid.” Such accusations cause already embarrassed victims to withdraw further into themselves and clam up, refusing to tell anyone what they are doing.

Having a TV—which gives you the ability to receive information—fails to establish any capacity for sending information in the opposite direction. And the odd one-way nature of the primary connection Americans now have to our national conversation has a profound impact on their basic attitude toward democracy itself. If you can receive but not send, what does that do to your basic feelings about the nature of your connection to American self-government? “Attachment theory” is an interesting new branch of developmental psychology that sheds light on the importance of consistent, appropriate, and responsive two-way communication—and why it is essential for an individual’s feeling empowered. First developed by John Bowlby, a British psychiatrist, in 1958, attachment theory was further developed by his protégée Mary Ainsworth and other experts studying the psychological development of infants. Although it applies to individuals, attachment theory is, in my view, a metaphor that illuminates the significance of authentic free-flowing communication in any relationship that requires trust. By using this new approach, psychologists were able to discover that every infant learns a crucial and existential lesson during the first year of life about his or her fundamental relationship to the rest of the world. An infant develops an attachment pathway based on different patterns of care and, according to this theory, learns to adopt one of three basic postures toward the universe: In the best case, the infant learns that he or she has the inherent ability to exert a powerful influence on the world and evoke consistent, appropriate responses by communicating signals of hunger or discomfort, happiness or distress. If the caregiver—more often than not the mother—responds to most signals from the infant consistently and appropriately, the infant begins to assume that he or she has inherent power to affect the world. If the primary caregiver responds inappropriately and/or inconsistently, the infant learns to assume that he or she is powerless to affect the larger world and that his or her signals have no intrinsic significance where the universe is concerned. A child who receives really erratic and inconsistent responses from a primary caregiver, even if those responses are occasionally warm and sensitive, develops “anxious resistant attachment.” This pathway creates children who feature anxiety, dependence, and easy victimization. They are easily manipulated and exploited later in life. In the worst case, infants who receive no emotional response from the person or persons responsible for them are at high risk of learning a deep existential rage that makes them prone to violence and antisocial behavior as they grow up. Chronic unresponsiveness leads to what is called “anxious avoidance attachment,” a life pattern that features unquenchable anger, frustration, and aggressive, violent behavior.

The speediest and most reliable way to strengthen the prefrontal cortex, and begin to recover the resilience of our true self, is through experiences with people who can be, as the clinical psychologist Diana Fosha puts it, true others to our true self. True others are those who can see and reflect our true self back to us when we have forgotten, or perhaps have never known, who we truly are. They remember our best self when we are mired in our worst self and accept without judgment all of who we are. True others are not necessarily the people closest to us, though they may be: they are the people most attuned to us, those most accepting of our innate goodness, our essential worth as human beings. For many people, a true other can be a spiritual figure or deity; for others, it may be a counselor, teacher, or friend. When someone who is acting as a true other genuinely sees us at our best, we can see ourselves in that light, too. This mirroring helps us rediscover our resilient self.

Colby arrived the next day, with stitches down one lean cheek and a new prosthesis. He held it up as Cecily came out to the car to greet him. He held it up as Cecily came out to the car to greet him. “Nice, huh? Doesn’t it look more realistic than the last one?” “What happened to the last one?” she asked. “Got blown off. Don’t ask where,” he added darkly. “I know nothing,” she assured him. “Come on in. Leta made sandwiches.” Leta had only seen Colby once, on a visit with Tate. She was polite, but a little remote, and it showed. “She doesn’t like me,” Colby told Cecily when they were sitting on the steps later that evening. “She thinks I’m sleeping with you,” she said simply.” So does Tate.” “Why?” “Because I let him think I was,” she said bluntly. He gave her a hard look. “Bad move, Cecily.” “I won’t let him think I’m waiting around for him to notice me,” she said icily. “He’s already convinced that I’m in love with him, and that’s bad enough. I can’t have him know that I’m…well, what I am. I do have a little pride.” “I’m perfectly willing, if you’re serious,” he said matter-of-factly. His face broke into a grin, belying the solemnity of the words. “Or are you worried that I might not be able to handle it with one arm?” She burst out laughing and pressed affectionately against his side. “I adore you, I really do. But I had a bad experience in my teens. I’ve had therapy and all, but it’s still sort of traumatic for me to think about real intimacy.” “Even with Tate?” he probed gently. She wasn’t touching that line with a pole. “Tate doesn’t want me.” “You keep saying that, and he keeps making a liar of you.” “I don’t understand.” “He came to see me last night. Just after I spoke to you.” He ran his fingers down his damaged cheek. She caught her breath. “I thought you got that overseas!” “Tate wears a big silver turquoise ring on his middle right finger,” he reminded her. “It does a bit of damage when he hits people with it.” “He hit you? Why?” she exclaimed. “Because you told him we were sleeping together,” he said simply. “Honest to God, Cecily, I wish you’d tell me first when you plan to play games. I was caught off guard.” “What did he do after he hit you?” “I hit him, and one thing led to another. I don’t have a coffee table anymore. We won’t even discuss what he did to my best ashtry.” “I’m so sorry!” “Tate and I are pretty much matched in a fight,” he said. “Not that we’ve ever been in many. He hits harder than Pierce Hutton does in a temper.” He scowled down at her. “Are you sure Tate doesn’t want you? I can’t think of another reason he’d try to hammer my floor with my head.” “Big brother Tate, to the rescue,” she said miserably. She laughed bitterly. “He thinks you’re a bad risk.” “I am,” he said easily. “I like having you as my friend.” He smiled. “Me, too. There aren’t many people who stuck by me over the years, you know. When Maureen left me, I went crazy. I couldn’t live with the pain, so I found ways to numb it.” He shook his head. “I don’t think I came to my senses until you sent me to that psychologist over in Baltimore.” He glanced down at her. “Did you know she keeps snakes?” he added. “We all have our little quirks.

One other thing. And this really matters for readers of this book. According to official Myers–Briggs documents, the test can ‘give you an insight into what kinds of work you might enjoy and be successful doing’. So if you are, like me, classified as ‘INTJ’ (your dominant traits are being introverted, intuitive and having a preference for thinking and judging), the best-fit occupations include management consultant, IT professional and engineer.30 Would a change to one of these careers make me more fulfilled? Unlikely, according to respected US psychologist David Pittenger, because there is ‘no evidence to show a positive relation between MBTI type and success within an occupation…nor is there any data to suggest that specific types are more satisfied within specific occupations than are other types’. Then why is the MBTI so popular? Its success, he argues, is primarily due to ‘the beguiling nature of the horoscope-like summaries of personality and steady marketing’.31 Personality tests have their uses, even if they do not reveal any scientific ‘truth’ about us. If we are in a state of confusion they can be a great emotional comfort, offering a clear diagnosis of why our current job may not be right, and suggesting others that might suit us better. They also raise interesting hypotheses that aid self-reflection: until I took the MBTI, I had certainly never considered that IT could offer me a bright future (by the way, I apparently have the wrong personality type to be a writer). Yet we should be wary about relying on them as a magic pill that enables us suddenly to hit upon a dream career. That is why wise career counsellors treat such tests with caution, using them as only one of many ways of exploring who you are. Human personality does not neatly reduce into sixteen or any other definitive number of categories: we are far more complex creatures than psychometric tests can ever reveal. And as we will shortly learn, there is compelling evidence that we are much more likely to find fulfilling work by conducting career experiments in the real world than by filling out any number of questionnaires.32

Our failure to keep our children attached to us and to the other adults responsible for them has not only taken away their shields but put a sword in the hands of their peers. When peers replace parents, children lose their vital protection against the thoughtlessness of others. The vulnerability of a child in such circumstances can easily be overwhelmed. The resulting pain is more than many children can bear. Studies have been unequivocal in their findings that the best protection for a child, even through adolescence, is a strong attachment with an adult. The most impressive of these studies involved ninety thousand adolescents from eighty different communities chosen to make the sample as representative of the United States as possible. The primary finding was that teenagers with strong emotional ties to their parents were much less likely to exhibit drug and alcohol problems, attempt suicide, or engage in violent behavior and early sexual activity. Such adolescents, in other words, were at greatly reduced risk for the problems that stem from being defended against vulnerability. Shielding them from stress and protecting their emotional health and functioning were strong attachments with their parents. This was also the conclusion of the noted American psychologist Julius Segal, a brilliant pioneer of research into what makes young people resilient. Summarizing studies from around the world, he concluded that the most important factor keeping children from being overwhelmed by stress was “the presence in their lives of a charismatic adult — a person with whom they identify and from whom they gather strength.” As Dr. Segal has also said, “Nothing will work in the absence of an indestructible link of caring between parent and child.” Peers should never have come to matter that much — certainly not more than parents or teachers or other adult attachment figures. Taunts and rejection by peers sting, of course, but they shouldn't cut to the quick, should not be so devastating. The profound dejection of an excluded child reveals a much more serious attachment problem than it does a peer-rejection problem.

them. By far the best theory for describing the principles of our irrational decisions is something called Prospect Theory. Created in 1979 by the psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, prospect theory describes how people choose between options that involve risk, like in a negotiation. The theory argues that people are drawn to sure things over probabilities, even when the probability is a better choice. That’s called the Certainty Effect. And people will take greater risks to avoid losses than to achieve gains. That’s called Loss Aversion. That’s why people who statistically have no need for insurance buy it. Or consider this: a person who’s told he has a 95 percent chance of receiving $10,000 or a 100 percent chance of getting $9,499 will usually avoid risk and take the 100 percent certain safe choice, while the same person who’s told he has a 95 percent chance of losing $10,000 or a 100 percent chance of losing $9,499 will make the opposite choice, risking the bigger 95 percent option to avoid the loss. The chance for loss incites more risk than the possibility of an equal gain.

Part of the problem is the extraordinary place that economics currently holds in the social sciences. In many ways it is treated as a kind of master discipline. Just about anyone who runs anything important in America is expected to have some training in economic theory, or at least to be familiar with its basic tenets. As a result, those tenets have come to be treated as received wisdom, as basically beyond question (one knows one is in the presence of received wisdom when, if one challenges some tenet of it, the first reaction is to treat one as simply ignorant—“You obviously have never heard of the Laffer Curve”; “Clearly you need a course in Economics 101”—the theory is seen as so obviously true that no one exposed to it could possibly disagree). What’s more, those branches of social theory that make the greatest claims to “scientific status”—“rational choice theory,” for instance—start from the same assumptions about human psychology that economists do: that human beings are best viewed as self-interested actors calculating how to get the best terms possible out of any situation, the most profit or pleasure or happiness for the least sacrifice or investment—curious, considering experimental psychologists have demonstrated over and over again that these assumptions simply aren’t true.2

Narrow behaviourist thinking permeates political and social policy and medical practice, the childrearing advice dispensed by “parenting experts” and academic discourse. We keep trying to change people’s behaviours without a full understanding of how and why those behaviours arise. “Inner causes are not the proper domain of psychology,” writes Roy Wise, an expert on the psychology of addiction, and a prominent investigator in the National Institute on Drug Abuse in the U.S.A.3 This statement seems astonishing, coming from a psychologist. In reality, there can be no understanding of human beings, let alone of addicted human beings, without looking at “inner causes,” tricky as those causes can be to pin down at times. Behaviours, especially compulsive behaviours, are often the active representations of emotional states and of special kinds of brain functioning. As we have seen, the dominant emotional states and the brain patterns of human beings are shaped by their early environment. Throughout their lifetimes, they are in dynamic interaction with various social and emotional milieus. If we are to help addicts, we must strive to change not them but their environments. These are the only things we can change. Transformation of the addict must come from within and the best we can do is to encourage it. Fortunately, there is much that we can do.

Southern violence was explored in one of the all-time coolest psychology studies, involving the use of a word rare in science journals, conducted by Nisbett and Cohen. Undergraduate male subjects had a blood sample taken. They then filled out a questionnaire about something and were then supposed to drop it off down the hall. It was in the narrow hallway, filled with file cabinets, that the experiment happened. Half the subjects traversed the corridor uneventfully. But with half, a confederate (get it? ha-ha) of the psychologists, a big beefy guy, approached from the opposite direction. As the subject and the plant squeezed by each other, the latter would jostle the subject and, in an irritated voice, say the magic word—“asshole”—and march on. Subject would continue down the hall to drop off the questionnaire. What was the response to this insult? It depended. Subjects from the South, but not from elsewhere, showed massive increases in levels of testosterone and glucocorticoids—anger, rage, stress. Subjects were then told a scenario where a guy observes a male acquaintance making a pass at his fiancée—what happens next in the story? In control subjects, Southerners were a bit more likely than Northerners to imagine a violent outcome. And after being insulted? No change in Northerners and a massive boost in imagined violence among Southerners.

Many of the principles Dale Carnegie writes about in How to Win Friends and Influence People apply directly to communication. Keep the following points in mind: • To get the best of an argument—avoid it. • Show respect for the other person’s opinion. Never tell a person he or she is wrong. • If you are wrong, admit it quickly, emphatically. • Begin in a friendly way. Get the other person saying “yes” immediately. • Let the other person do a great deal of the talking. • Let the other person feel the idea is his or hers. • Speak softly. • Smile appropriately. • If a confrontation can’t be avoided, don’t feel you have to get an unconditional surrender. Always give the other person an opening for an honorable retreat. RESOLVING CONFLICT This intelligent approach to resolving conflicts is not as easy as it may sound. Sometimes you may not feel calm, rational, or open-minded. The psychologist William James wrote, “Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling.” In other words, when you adopt the actions of a calm, rational person, you become calm and rational. When you act open-minded, your mind actually opens up. And almost magically, the person with whom you are interacting mirrors those behaviors and adopts the same feelings.

Despite the rise of the mental health profession, people are becoming increasingly vulnerable to depression. Why? Martin Seligman, a brilliant psychologist with no religious ax to grind, has a theory that it’s because we have replaced church, faith, and community with a tiny little unit that cannot bear the weight of meaning. That’s the self. We’re all about the self. We revolve our lives around ourselves. Ironically, the more obsessed we are with our selves, the more we neglect our souls. All of our language reflects this. If you’re empty, you need to fulfill yourself. If you’re stressed, learn how to take care of yourself. If you’re on a job interview, you have to believe in yourself. If you’re at the tattoo parlor, you must learn to express yourself. If someone dares to criticize you, you have to love yourself. If you’re not getting your own way, you have to stand up for yourself. What should you do on a date? You ought to be yourself. What if your self is a train wreck? What do you do then? Self is a stand-alone, do-it-yourself unit, while the soul reminds us we were not made for ourselves. The soul always exists before God. So soul is needed for deep art, poetry, and music. Former opera singer Scott Flaherty said it best: “I mean, when you sing you’re giving voice to your soul.” Imagine singing, “Then sings my self, my Savior God to thee,” or “Jesus, lover of my self.” Innately we know that the self is not the soul, even as we do everything we can to preserve it.

Any parent would be dismayed to think that this was their child’s experience of learning, of socializing, and of herself. Maya is an introvert; she is out of her element in a noisy and overstimulating classroom where lessons are taught in large groups. Her teacher told me that she’d do much better in a school with a calm atmosphere where she could work with other kids who are “equally hardworking and attentive to detail,” and where a larger portion of the day would involve independent work. Maya needs to learn to assert herself in groups, of course, but will experiences like the one I witnessed teach her this skill? The truth is that many schools are designed for extroverts. Introverts need different kinds of instruction from extroverts, write College of William and Mary education scholars Jill Burruss and Lisa Kaenzig. And too often, “very little is made available to that learner except constant advice on becoming more social and gregarious.” We tend to forget that there’s nothing sacrosanct about learning in large group classrooms, and that we organize students this way not because it’s the best way to learn but because it’s cost-efficient, and what else would we do with our children while the grown-ups are at work? If your child prefers to work autonomously and socialize one-on-one, there’s nothing wrong with her; she just happens not to fit the prevailing model. The purpose of school should be to prepare kids for the rest of their lives, but too often what kids need to be prepared for is surviving the school day itself. The school environment can be highly unnatural, especially from the perspective of an introverted child who loves to work intensely on projects he cares about, and hang out with one or two friends at a time. In the morning, the door to the bus opens and discharges its occupants in a noisy, jostling mass. Academic classes are dominated by group discussions in which a teacher prods him to speak up. He eats lunch in the cacophonous din of the cafeteria, where he has to jockey for a place at a crowded table. Worst of all, there’s little time to think or create. The structure of the day is almost guaranteed to sap his energy rather than stimulate it. Why do we accept this one-size-fits-all situation as a given when we know perfectly well that adults don’t organize themselves this way? We often marvel at how introverted, geeky kids “blossom” into secure and happy adults. We liken it to a metamorphosis. However, maybe it’s not the children who change but their environments. As adults, they get to select the careers, spouses, and social circles that suit them. They don’t have to live in whatever culture they’re plunked into. Research from a field known as “person-environment fit” shows that people flourish when, in the words of psychologist Brian Little, they’re “engaged in occupations, roles or settings that are concordant with their personalities.” The inverse is also true: kids stop learning when they feel emotionally threatened.

And whatever you make of the country-by-country surveys of national happiness that are now published with some regularity, it’s striking that the ‘happiest’ countries are never those where self-help books sell the most, nor indeed where professional psychotherapists are most widely consulted. The existence of a thriving ‘happiness industry’ clearly isn’t sufficient to engender national happiness, and it’s not unreasonable to suspect that it might make matters worse. Yet the ineffectiveness of modern strategies for happiness is really just a small part of the problem. There are good reasons to believe that the whole notion of ‘seeking happiness’ is flawed to begin with. For one thing, who says happiness is a valid goal in the first place? Religions have never placed much explicit emphasis on it, at least as far as this world is concerned; philosophers have certainly not been unanimous in endorsing it, either. And any evolutionary psychologist will tell you that evolution has little interest in your being happy, beyond trying to make sure that you’re not so listless or miserable that you lose the will to reproduce. Even assuming happiness to be a worthy target, though, a worse pitfall awaits, which is that aiming for it seems to reduce your chances of ever attaining it. ‘Ask yourself whether you are happy,’ observed the philosopher John Stuart Mill, ‘and you cease to be so.’ At best, it would appear, happiness can only be glimpsed out of the corner of an eye, not stared at directly.

In 1979, Christopher Connolly cofounded a psychology consultancy in the United Kingdom to help high achievers (initially athletes, but then others) perform at their best. Over the years, Connolly became curious about why some professionals floundered outside a narrow expertise, while others were remarkably adept at expanding their careers—moving from playing in a world-class orchestra, for example, to running one. Thirty years after he started, Connolly returned to school to do a PhD investigating that very question, under Fernand Gobet, the psychologist and chess international master. Connolly’s primary finding was that early in their careers, those who later made successful transitions had broader training and kept multiple “career streams” open even as they pursued a primary specialty. They “traveled on an eight-lane highway,” he wrote, rather than down a single-lane one-way street. They had range. The successful adapters were excellent at taking knowledge from one pursuit and applying it creatively to another, and at avoiding cognitive entrenchment. They employed what Hogarth called a “circuit breaker.” They drew on outside experiences and analogies to interrupt their inclination toward a previous solution that may no longer work. Their skill was in avoiding the same old patterns. In the wicked world, with ill-defined challenges and few rigid rules, range can be a life hack. Pretending the world is like golf and chess is comforting. It makes for a tidy kind-world message, and some very compelling books. The rest of this one will begin where those end—in a place where the popular sport is Martian tennis, with a view into how the modern world became so wicked in the first place.

God speaks to us, I would say, much more often than we realize or than we choose to realize. Before the sun sets every evening, he speaks to each of us in an intensely personal and unmistakable way. His message is not written out in starlight, which in the long run would make no difference; rather it is written out for each of us in the humdrum, helter-skelter events of each day; it is a message that in the long run might just make all the difference. Who knows what he will say to me today or to you today or into the midst of what kind of unlikely moment he will choose to say it. Not knowing is what makes today a holy mystery as every day is a holy mystery. But I believe that there are some things that by and large God is always saying to each of us. Each of us, for instance, carries around inside himself, I believe, a certain emptiness—a sense that something is missing, a restlessness, the deep feeling that somehow all is not right inside his skin. Psychologists sometimes call it anxiety, theologians sometimes call it estrangement, but whatever you call it, I doubt that there are many who do not recognize the experience itself, especially no one of our age, which has been variously termed the age of anxiety, the lost generation, the beat generation, the lonely crowd. Part of the inner world of everyone is this sense of emptiness, unease, incompleteness, and I believe that this in itself is a word from God, that this is the sound that God’s voice makes in a world that has explained him away. In such a world, I suspect that maybe God speaks to us most clearly through his silence, his absence, so that we know him best through our missing him. But he also speaks to us about ourselves, about what he wants us to do and what he wants us to become; and this is the area where I believe that we know so much more about him than we admit even to ourselves, where people hear God speak even if they do not believe in him. A face comes toward us down the street. Do we raise our eyes or do we keep them lowered, passing by in silence? Somebody says something about somebody else, and what he says happens to be not only cruel but also funny, and everybody laughs. Do we laugh too, or do we speak the truth? When a friend has hurt us, do we take pleasure in hating him, because hate has its pleasures as well as love, or do we try to build back some flimsy little bridge? Sometimes when we are alone, thoughts come swarming into our heads like bees—some of them destructive, ugly, self-defeating thoughts, some of them creative and glad. Which thoughts do we choose to think then, as much as we have the choice? Will we be brave today or a coward today? Not in some big way probably but in some little foolish way, yet brave still. Will we be honest today or a liar? Just some little pint-sized honesty, but honest still. Will we be a friend or cold as ice today? All the absurd little meetings, decisions, inner skirmishes that go to make up our days. It all adds up to very little, and yet it all adds up to very much. Our days are full of nonsense, and yet not, because it is precisely into the nonsense of our days that God speaks to us words of great significance—not words that are written in the stars but words that are written into the raw stuff and nonsense of our days, which are not nonsense just because God speaks into the midst of them. And the words that he says, to each of us differently, are be brave…be merciful…feed my lambs…press on toward the goal.

What possibilities are there for preventing actions with negative consequences, actions that we may later regret? One possibility is dhyāna, which in this context means “reflection.”3 Reflection can take many forms. For example, when faced with an important decision, you could imagine what would happen if you did the exact opposite of what your instincts suggest.4 Try to make the consequence of your decision as real as possible in your imagination. No matter what it is or what you feel, before you make an important decision and take action you should give yourself the opportunity to consider the matter with an open mind and a certain degree of objectivity. Dhyāna in this respect is a quiet, alert consideration, a meditation. The aim is to free yourself of preconceptions and avoid actions that you may later regret and that may create new troubles (duḥkha) for you. Dhyāna strengthens self-sufficiency. Yoga makes us independent. We all want to be free, although many of us are dependent on psychologists, gurus, teachers, drugs, or whatever. Even if advice and guidance are helpful, in the end we ourselves are the best judge of our own actions. No one is more interested in me than me. With the help of dhyāna we find our own methods and systems for making decisions and better understand our behavior. There are other ways of distancing ourselves from our actions than reflecting on how it would be if we were to act differently from what we intend. We might go to a concert or go for a walk or do something else that calms the thoughts. All the while the mind goes on working unconsciously, without any external pressure. In the pursuit of other activities we gain a certain distance. However short it may be, time becomes available to cast the mind over everything surrounding the decision that has to be made. Perhaps with ease and distance we will make a better decision. Stepping out of a situation in order to get a better look at it from another standpoint is called pratipakṣa. The same word describes the process of considering other possible courses of action.5 The time spent in dhyāna is extremely important. Through self-reflection our actions gain in quality.

Pioneer social psychologist Leon Festinger made sense of that behavior in his 1950s study, When Prophecy Fails. Festinger and two colleagues closely followed a tiny American sect that predicted natural disasters from which the faithful would be saved by flying saucers. When the prophesied time passed, the small group of believers suddenly began trying to convince the world of their beliefs. Festinger's explanation: When a person believes in something, and the belief is clearly proved wrong, a gap opens between what the person sees and what he or she knows is true. You can shed the beliefs, but if you've staked a lot on them, that hurts. One medicine is an explanation proving that the belief is still true. And the best way to convince yourself is persuade others: "If more and more people can be convinced that the system of belief is correct, then clearly it must, after all, be correct." Ergo, when a messianic figure dies or disappoints followers, or when a date set for the End passes, believers are likely to respond by evangelizing. At the least, they'll look for reassurance that they're right. That may explain why monthly sales of Left Behind books actually doubled in January 2000, after the Y2K bug failed to trigger the End.

Alan Loy McGinnis, author of the best-selling The Friendship Factor, says that America’s leading psychologists and therapists estimate that only 10 percent of all men ever have any real friends.2

To Aristotle, eudaimonia is not a fleeting positive emotion. Rather, it is something you do. Leading a eudaimonic life, Aristotle argued, requires cultivating the best qualities within you both morally and intellectually and living up to your potential. It is an active life, a life in which you do your job and contribute to society, a life in which you are involved in your community, a life, above all, in which you realize your potential, rather than squander your talents. Psychologists have picked up on Aristotle’s distinction. If hedonia is defined as “feeling good,” they argue, then eudaimonia is defined as “being and doing good”—and as “seeking to use and develop the best in oneself” in a way that fits with “one’s deeper principles.” It is a life of good character. And it pays dividends. As three scholars put it, “The more directly one aims to maximize pleasure and avoid pain, the more likely one is to produce instead a life bereft of depth, meaning, and community.” But those who choose to pursue meaning ultimately live fuller—and happier—lives. It’s difficult, of course, to measure a concept like meaning in the lab, but, according to psychologists, when people say that their lives have meaning, it’s because three conditions have been satisfied: they evaluate their lives as significant and worthwhile—as part of something bigger; they believe their lives make sense; and they feel their lives are driven by a sense of purpose.

In the 1970s, UCLA psychologist Eric Holman discovered that certain sweetened substances could make rodents prefer certain foods by virtue of their presence. For instance, by adding a saccharin to either a banana- or an almond-flavored solution, he was able to make rats prefer the taste of bananas or almonds, respectively, a process known as “flavor nutrient conditioning.” In recent years that work has been picked up with humans. Maltodextrin, a glucose polymer, is imperceptible to most of us. It doesn’t taste sweet. In fact, it doesn’t taste like anything. For it to activate the sweet receptors in the brain, the body must first break it down into glucose. If we mix it into another food, we don’t realize there’s a sugar present, but we still develop a preference for that flavor. In one study, people who tasted foods with maltodextrin mixed in would reliably choose the flavor that had been associated with the polymer in subsequent tests. They had been trained to prefer one food over another by a sort of sensory trickery. Imagine dusting a child’s broccoli florets with maltodextrin and transforming a disliked vegetable into a favorite.

The only thing that psychologists gain from their studies is arrogance, and arrogance is indeed the best indicator of how stupid a psychologist is, for only the very rare cases that don't show it deserve to be heard on any given topic.

The social sciences are lagging far behind physics when it comes to theoretical rigor and validity, but physics today has advanced far beyond where it was when the Wright brothers were working on their flight project. The brothers saw the necessity in seeking out the available theories and data and making the best of their material. Within practical politics and political philosophy, the situation is different. Classical philosophers such as Hobbes and Locke did not have the social sciences at their disposal and relied on their common sense, peppered with fragments of stories from abroad. Social scientists have evolved, but philosophy and praxis remain relatively unaltered, by and large proceeding in their pre-scientific state. Keynes once noted that “Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually slaves of some defunct economist,” and many a political philosopher takes after them in this respect. Political praxis has evolved, in economic arenas most of all, but the focus that economists have placed on the market has led to a serious imbalance in the relationship between social sciences and policy making. Even more than political philosophy, politics suffers from what psychologists call selective perception: decision-makers tend to seek out research that supports (or that they believe supports) their current positions.

The Passion Trap: How to Right an Unbalanced Relationship by relationship therapist and psychologist Dean C. Delis.

Parents need to see that every situation that their kids find themselves in is a teaching situation, and they need to take the time to explore cost and effect. So talking to your children, explaining things to children as to why things happen in the world. Getting them to see cost and relationships between events is the best way to increase comprehension skills. Daynette Gardiner, the best School Psychologist in The Bahamas.

You have to talk to your children about things, a lot of our parents don’t do that. You have to explain things to children as to why certain things happen. I think that a good way of improving comprehension is to read the newspaper with your child. A lot of times certain sensational things happen and children want to find out why it happened. And sometimes you would hear them talking to each other passing on erroneous information. Daynette Gardiner, the best School Psychologist in The Bahamas

psychologist Wendy Mogel, best-selling author of The Blessing of a Skinned Knee and The Blessing of a B Minus,

Yet for these high, hard goals to really work their magic, Locke and Latham found that certain moderators—the word psychologists use to describe “if-then” conditions—need to be in place. One of the most important is commitment. “You have to believe in what you’re doing,” continues Latham. “Big goals work best when there’s an alignment between an individual’s values and the desired outcome of the goal. When everything lines up, we’re totally committed—meaning we’re paying even more attention, are even more resilient, and are way more productive as a result.

Professional help for those suffering with their mental health is now only a key stroke away, thanks to a new online directory. BALLARAT, VIC - Website truecounsellor.com.au is one of the only online catalogues of mental health services in Australia, allowing people to source, and instantly reach out for help - all from their computer. Website truecounsellor.com.au is one of the only online catalogues of mental health services in Australia, allowing people to source, and instantly reach out for help - all from their computer. Launched in 2015, the website allows people to simply search professionals nearby and review their profile, background, specialisations and fees. Once they have selected a professional, they can immediately connect with them via phone, Skype or instant message to book an appointment. Website founder Luciano Devoto was keen to establish the online directory after experiencing his own struggles. “As a person who has suffered from bullying, as well as depression, I know how hard it can be to reach out for help,” he said. “TrueCounsellor aims to make it easier for people to share their concerns safely and privately with experienced mental health professionals” The website boasts a large number of qualified and experienced counsellors, psychotherapists, psychologists, couples’ therapists and other mental health practitioners in various suburbs across Australia. “What makes TrueCounsellor exciting is that we are the only directory offering mental health professionals the opportunity to promote their services for free,” Luciano said. “We believe that by making it easy for these professionals to list their practices, we create real value for the public as they are able to find the right support.” The website also offers extensive advice about conditions like depression and anxiety, along with information about common stressors including debt, relationship issues and career worries. Watersedge Counselling director Colleen Morris, who is part of the online directory, said the website was a vital resource. “Finding a mental healthcare professional that you consider to be safe, trustworthy, empathetic and effective can often be challenging and at times, a confusing process,” she said. “Websites like TrueCounsellor make this task less confusing by allowing consumers to make a more informed choice that suits their need.” To find a mental health expert or for more information, visit truecounsellor.com.au About TrueCounsellor TrueCounsellor is Australia’s online directory of mental health professionals. Our mission is to help people experiencing emotional challenges discover a better and happier version of themselves. TrueCounsellor gives people access to a large number of qualified and experienced counsellors, psychotherapists, psychologists, couples therapists and other mental health practitioners across Australia. Visitors can review profiles and learn about the practitioner’s background, specialisations and fees in order to make the best decision when booking an appointment! In addition to offer a comprehensive list of qualified and experienced mental health professionals, TrueCounsellor has detailed information on mental health issues and types of therapy available. For more information, visit truecounsellor.com.au

Csíkszentmihályi, a very brilliant psychologist, believed that what he called Flow was a state of complete absorption which produced the highest level of human happiness. It comes about when you are doing something which is difficult enough to require all your concentration and effort and skill, but not so hard that it defeats you. Because that activity takes everything you have got, you have no time to think about all the existential flies that swarm about your head. You can’t worry about money or love or death or taxes; you are simply thinking about this thing. You are your best, most authentic self. He said that, in this state of Flow, a person is ‘completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you're using your skills to the utmost.’ He then got a little technical. There are, apparently, nine crucial states of achieving Flow, which include: ‘challenge-skill balance, merging of action and awareness, clarity of goals, immediate and unambiguous feedback, concentration on the task at hand, paradox of control, transformation of time, loss of self-consciousness, and autotelic experience.

Dave and I had a family ritual at dinner where we’d go around the table with our daughter and son and take turns stating our best and worst moments of the day. When it became just three of us, I added a third category. Now we each share something for which we are grateful. We also added a prayer before our meal. Holding hands and thanking God for the food we are about to eat helps remind us of our daily blessings. Acknowledging blessings can be a blessing in and of itself. Psychologists asked a group of people to make a weekly list of five things for which they were grateful. Another group wrote about hassles and a third listed ordinary events. Nine weeks later, the gratitude group felt significantly happier and reported fewer health problems. People who enter the workforce during an economic recession end up being more satisfied with their jobs decades later because they are acutely aware of how hard it can be to find work. Counting blessings can actually increase happiness and health by reminding us of the good things in life. Each night, no matter how sad I felt, I would find something or someone to be grateful for. I

The romantic notion of "opposites attract" works well in fairy tales. However, science proves that "like attracts like" for healthy communication and successful relationships. Social psychologists have long relied upon the "Similarity Attraction Theory" to explain why we are more positively inclined toward people who are the most like ourselves. Similarity reduces uncertainty and gives us a comforting degree of psychological safety. It is no wonder, then, that "birds of a feather flock together." Our tribe understands our vibe.

As ingenuity gaps widen the gulfs of wealth and power among us, we need imagination, metaphor and empathy more than ever, to help us remember each other’s essential humanity. I believe this will be the central challenge of the coming century—one that will shape everything else about who we are and what we become. Anatol Rapoport, a pioneering mathematical psychologist and one of the wisest people I have ever known, once told me: “The moral development of a civilization is measured by the breadth of its sense of community.” Have we paid enough attention to the moral development of the global civilization we are creating today? A sense of community, of shared humanity, isn’t the only thing we need. If we’re to maintain and improve our civilization in the next century, we also need to close, as best we can, those ingenuity gaps that debilitate people and societies. And here a final metaphor—the metaphor of flight—may point us in the right direction. The idea of flight wound its way through my entire quest to piece together the ingenuity puzzle.

Yet he appeared to be a year or two older than that. She sat down on the stool next to Syn. “Out of curiosity, why are you keeping me here?” It was against military protocol. In the past, whenever her father had “protected” her, she’d been moved to a safe location. Nykyrian took a drink of his juice before he answered. “When you’re being hunted to the extent you are, there’s no real safe place. You’re famous, which makes it all the harder to hide you. Better to keep you here where you have the advantage of knowing the terrain and are most comfortable.” “Not to mention, we’re using you for bait.” Nykyrian cocked his head at Syn. “Are you that drunk?” Syn’s eyes widened. “What? I wasn’t supposed to tell her that?” Kiara was horrified. “I’m bait?” “No, you’re not bait. Ignore the alcoholic whose view of reality is distorted by his brain-damaged hallucinations. What the psychologists have found is that people in your position cope best when there’s as little interruption as possible in their routine.” Kiara swallowed. “Not to mention we both know the one truth neither of you is talking about.” “And that is?” “That I’m really nothing more than a waco.” It was an assassin’s term that meant walking corpse. “I’m not going to live through the night, am I?

Liberal politics is based on the idea that the voters know best, and there is no need for Big Brother to tell us what is good for us. Liberal economics is based on the idea that the customer is always right. Liberal art declares that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Students in liberal schools and universities are taught to think for themselves. Commercials urge us to ‘Just do it.’ Action films, stage dramas, soap operas, novels and catchy pop songs indoctrinate us constantly: ‘Be true to yourself’, ‘Listen to yourself’, ‘Follow your heart’. Jean-Jacques Rousseau stated this view most classically: ‘What I feel to be good – is good. What I feel to be bad – is bad.’ People who have been raised from infancy on a diet of such slogans are prone to believe that happiness is a subjective feeling and that each individual best knows whether she is happy or miserable. Yet this view is unique to liberalism. Most religions and ideologies throughout history stated that there are objective yardsticks for goodness and beauty, and for how things ought to be. They were suspicious of the feelings and preferences of the ordinary person. At the entrance of the temple of Apollo at Delphi, pilgrims were greeted by the inscription: ‘Know thyself!’ The implication was that the average person is ignorant of his true self, and is therefore likely to be ignorant of true happiness. Freud would probably concur.fn1 And so would Christian theologians. St Paul and St Augustine knew perfectly well that if you asked people about it, most of them would prefer to have sex than pray to God. Does that prove that having sex is the key to happiness? Not according to Paul and Augustine. It proves only that humankind is sinful by nature, and that people are easily seduced by Satan. From a Christian viewpoint, the vast majority of people are in more or less the same situation as heroin addicts. Imagine that a psychologist embarks on a study of happiness among drug users. He polls them and finds that they declare, every single one of them, that they are only happy when they shoot up. Would the psychologist publish a paper declaring that heroin is the key to happiness? The idea that feelings are not to be trusted is not restricted to Christianity. At least when it comes to the value of feelings, even Darwin and Dawkins might find common ground with St Paul and St Augustine. According to the selfish gene theory, natural selection makes people, like other organisms, choose what is good for the reproduction of their genes, even if it is bad for them as individuals. Most males spend their lives toiling, worrying, competing and fighting, instead of enjoying peaceful bliss, because their DNA manipulates them for its own selfish aims. Like Satan, DNA uses fleeting pleasures to tempt people and place them in its power.

Reason #1: Downtime Aids Insights Consider the following excerpt from a 2006 paper that appeared in the journal Science: The scientific literature has emphasized the benefits of conscious deliberation in decision making for hundreds of years… The question addressed here is whether this view is justified. We hypothesize that it is not. Lurking in this bland statement is a bold claim. The authors of this study, led by the Dutch psychologist Ap Dijksterhuis, set out to prove that some decisions are better left to your unconscious mind to untangle. In other words, to actively try to work through these decisions will lead to a worse outcome than loading up the relevant information and then moving on to something else while letting the subconscious layers of your mind mull things over. Dijksterhuis’s team isolated this effect by giving subjects the information needed for a complex decision regarding a car purchase. Half the subjects were told to think through the information and then make the best decision. The other half were distracted by easy puzzles after they read the information, and were then put on the spot to make a decision without having had time to consciously deliberate. The distracted group ended up performing better. Observations from experiments such as this one led Dijksterhuis and his collaborators to introduce unconscious thought theory (UTT)—an attempt to understand the different roles conscious and unconscious deliberation play in decision making. At a high level, this theory proposes that for decisions that require the application of strict rules, the conscious mind must be involved. For example, if you need to do a math calculation, only your conscious mind is able to follow the precise arithmetic rules needed for correctness. On the other hand, for decisions that involve large amounts of information and multiple vague, and perhaps even conflicting, constraints, your unconscious mind is well suited to tackle the issue. UTT hypothesizes that this is due to the fact that these regions of your brain have more neuronal bandwidth available, allowing them to move around more information and sift through more potential solutions than your conscious centers of thinking. Your conscious mind, according to this theory, is like a home computer on which you can run carefully written programs that return correct answers to limited problems, whereas your unconscious mind is like Google’s vast data centers, in which statistical algorithms sift through terabytes of unstructured information, teasing out surprising useful solutions to difficult questions. The implication of this line of research is that providing your conscious brain time to rest enables your unconscious mind to take a shift sorting through your most complex professional challenges. A shutdown habit, therefore, is not necessarily reducing the amount of time you’re engaged in productive work, but is instead diversifying the type of work you deploy.

Positive control is the opposite (of aversive control). Even though the teacher or psychologist has created an environment that "controls" the persons behavior through positive reinforcement, the person doesn't feel like he's being controlled probably because he is getting reinforced for behaviors he didn't "have" to do ... described as those that we 'like' or 'chose' to engage in.