Generally Thinking

Month: October 2009

  • Positive Psychology Resources

    If, like me, you’re studying positive psychology, or if you’re keeping up with the field for personal or professional reasons, you will find the following links useful.  They are great for finding new information and opinions, and especially for getting hard-to-find journal articles in PDF:

    Positive Psychology Search

    – The Google of positive psychology

    Positive Psychology News Daily

    – Great site, regular updates.  Written mostly by current and former positive psychology students.

    Friends of PP

    – Very good email list.  Very frequent emails, so DO NOT sign up to this with your usual email address!

    Authentic Happiness

    – This is where to find all the questionnaires for happiness, character strengths, and so on.

    Researchers and Labs

    Places to find journal articles and in-press papers of researchers.  Most researchers have a webpage, but I’ve only included those you can get papers from.  The topic areas are not exhaustive, they’re just to give an idea of the main research interests.   Some are not ‘positive psychologists’ as such, but their work overlaps.  I haven’t found everyone, but will update as I find more.  If you know any more, please leave a comment with a link.

    Robert Biswas-Diener

    – Well-being, strengths, coaching; this is the guy that travelled the world studying happiness in various cultures.

    Richard Davidson

    – Mindfulness meditation, emotion, neuroscience, neuroplasticity, general brain stuff; this is the guy that did the brain scans of trained Buddhist monks.

    See also: Lab for Affective Neuroscience (Wisconsin)

    – The lab that the above guy is the head of.  Lots of stuff here.

    Edward Deci / Richard Ryan

    – Self-determination theory – very comprehensive site, probably all you will need on this topic.

    Ed Diener

    – Subjective well-being/happiness and related topics.  One of the main researchers into well-being.

    Barbara Fredrickson

    – Positive emotions, happiness, she came up with broaden-and-build theory.

    Compassion Lab (umich)

    Jane Dutton et al “We are a group of researchers working in business schools who strive to create a new vision of organizations as sites for the development and expression of compassion. “

    Gallup Research Reports

    – “Gallup experts and senior scientists are continually analyzing Gallup data and sharing their findings with fellow academics, researchers, and opinion leaders.”

    Daniel Gilbert

    – Useful site to stumble on, click “writing” for papers, his blog is also good.

    Jon Haidt

    – Morality.  See both the ‘Research and Publications (Full List)’ and ‘Positive Psychology Stuff’ sections.

    Barbara Held

    – A philosophical psychologist with some interesting critiques of positive psychology.

    Todd Kashdan

    – Well-being, abnormal psychology, mood, anxiety.  Author of “Curious?”

    Marcial Losada

    – “Interaction dynamics and productivity of business teams.”  Discovered the ‘Losada Line’; the 3:1 ratio of positivity to negativity that effective teams display.

    Sonja Lyubomirsky

    – Happiness, positive emotions.  She wrote the popular book “The How of Happiness”

    Barry Schwartz

    – If you’re not spoilt for choice already, here are Schwartz’s papers. (scroll down for the ones with pdfs; older papers only).

    Martin Seligman / Positive Psychology Centre

    – Positive Psychology’s founder, Martin Seligman runs this centre. Hover on ‘PPC research’ for papers.

    Ken Sheldon

    – Goals, motivation, psychological needs, plus many other topics. Lots of papers available here.

    Michael Steger

    – Meaning and quality of life.

    Heather Urry / Emotion, Brain and Behaviour Lab (Tufts University)

    – “Studying the brain and body correlates of emotion, from reaction to regulation”

    VIA Institute

    – Values In Action model of strengths homepage.  For some reason they only offer abstracts, but it’s a good starting point.

    Leave a comment, if you know any more.

    If all of this means nothing to you:

    What is Positive Psychology?

    One answer: What is positive psychology?

    Another answer: What and Why is Positive Psychology?

    Some good blogs on positive psychology:

    http://www.centreforconfidence.co.uk/pp/emilysnews.php

    What About Non-Academics?

    The above sources are journals/technical papers.  If that’s not your cup of tea, try the following books (full disclosure: all are Amazon affiliate links):

    And the following sites:

  • Smoking may cause cognitive functions to decline

    I saw an anti-smoking pop-up the other day. I hate pop-ups, pop-unders, pop-throughs and pop-whatever-else-they’ve-come-up-with, but I did appreciate the message. Not enough to make me like pop-ups, but it was nice to know they’re being used for a good purpose, at least. If I remember rightly it mentioned some of the classic health problems associated with smoking, but as usual none of the lesser known ones. For instance, did you know smoking causes stress? That’s one example. Here’s another one. It’s time to dust off your brain trainer, and postpone your application to Who Wants to be a Millionnaire?, because evidence suggests that smoking impairs certain cognitive functions.

    There’s some debate in this area though. This is often the case with smoking research. I remember one study that analysed all the evidence on passive smoking, and found that there were no negative health effects – until they removed the studies done by authors connected to the tobacco industry – then it showed, correctly, that there are indeed negative health effects.

    In this case, the debate is between some studies that show nicotine improves cognitive functions, and others that say it weakens them. The problem is that many of the studies didn’t include an important ingredient of the scientific process – a control group, in this case, non-smokers. This is important, because without one you couldn’t say whether smoking caused an increase in performance, or removed a deficit. A study in 2000 tried to clear this up. (1)

    To measure cognitive function, the researchers used the Sternberg task, which goes a little something like this: a string of letters is presented on a computer screen, then they disappear. Later, a couple of letters come up and you have to say if they were in the original string or not. It’s a test of both memory and reaction time – how long does it take for people to decide whether or not the letters were in the original set, and how accurate are they, under different conditions?

    In this study, the ‘conditions’ were whether people were heavy smokers (20+ cigarettes per day), light smokers (10 or fewer cigarettes per day), or non-smokers, and whether they have either recently smoked a cigarette or have abstained for 12 or more hours.

    What happened?

    When smokers were allowed to smoke, there was no difference in reaction time or accuracy between smokers or non-smokers. The scores were about the same. But, when smokers were deprived of cigarettes for 12 hours before taking the test, the results were different: this time the heavy smokers did worse than the non-smokers. After a cigarette, however, their performance returned to about the same level.

    This suggests that smoking does not heighten performance on this task, but merely removes a deficit in performance that smoking itself creates. This is similar to the finding that smoking causes stress.

    Urges to smoke

    But it raises another question – does nicotine deprivation slow reaction times directly, or is the urge to smoke distracting people from the task?

    The technical explanation, some researchers propose, goes like this: drug use is related to an action schema, stored in long-term memory: basically, a set of instructions telling smokers to find and take the drug, which is triggered by a drug-related cue (seeing cigarette packets, seeing other people smoke, etc.). According to this theory, if the schema is triggered, but smokers don’t get to take the drug for whatever reason, they get an urge. Once the schema is active, some mental resources will be allocated away from other functions in order to maintain the urge.

    A study in 2003 investigated whether the urge is what causes poorer reaction times. (2) They also used the Sternberg task, and had three groups – a group allowed to smoke, a group deprived of cigarettes, and a group deprived of cigarettes but given nicotine patches. The people given patches had an equal urge to smoke a cigarette as the deprived group, but they got a nicotine fix. So it’s an ideal test of whether nicotine deprivation or the urge causes poor performance.

    In the end, the deprived group had worse results than the patch group, who had worse results than the smoking group. Although the deprived group had the same urge to smoke as the patch group, they did worse on the test.

    This shows that having the urge to smoke does interfere with the performance on this test; but it doesn’t tell the whole story. In addition to the effect of the urge, nicotine deprivation has some direct effect on the brain which slows down reaction times.

    If you smoke, how often are you in a withdrawal state? Whenever you go without smoking for over an hour or so, you’re in withdrawal, and at least one of your mental functions – reaction time – is not as working as sharply as it could if you were a non-smoker. This has important ramifications – pop-ups! You’ll take longer to react click the ‘x’ of a pop-up window. You might even click the fake ‘x’, that just opens up another 10 pop-ups! I don’t know about you, but I think that’s as good a reason as any to quit.

     

    References:

    (1) Tait, R., Martin-Iverson, M., Michie, P.T., Dusci, L. (2000). The effects of cigarette consumption on the Sternberg visual memory search paradigm. Addiction. 95(3), 437-446.
    (2) Havermans, R.C., Debaere, S., Smulders, F.T.T., Wiers, R.W., Jansen, A.T.M. (2003). Effects of Cue Exposure, Urge to Smoke, and Nicotine Deprivation on Cognitive Performance in Smokers. Psychology of Addictive Behavious, 17(4), 336-339.

  • Mental time travel for happiness

    A recent experiment has just discovered that time travel can make you happy. Great Scott! I’m not talking about actual time travel, of course, but mental time travel; using your brain to do something that, at the moment, only us humans can do – simulate and predict future events.

    Mental Time Travel (MTT) can be done in various ways. One dimension on which it can vary is valence. For example, it could be positively valenced, such as imagining tomorrow’s job interview going well; negatively valenced, such as imagining an argument with a friend; or neutral, such as imagining eating your breakfast.

    We do this naturally; the unconscious part of our divided mind likes to wander ahead and hypothesise about what might be waiting for us in the future. But we’re able to get in the driver’s seat of our mental delorean, and choose where we want to go.

    The idea of thinking positively about the future is nothing new; it’s a linchpin of the self-help movement, and has become massively popular since that awful book, The Secret, came out. So positive MTT could be seen as one branch of the positive thinking tree, along with other branches like positive reframing, affirmations, optimism, and so on.

    back to the future
    Great Scott!

    A team of psychologists carried out a two-week study to find out what effects positive, negative, and neutral time-travel have on happiness and anxiety. You might be thinking, isn’t this an obvious thing to study? Well, maybe. I mean, you don’t necessarily need a psychology almanac from 2015 to figure out what the results will be, and the researchers did agree that positive MTT and happiness tend to go together.

    But the provocative research question was, do the positive thoughts cause the happiness, or does happiness cause positive thoughts? Maybe the link is incidental, not causal – you become happy for whatever reason, then you start thinking positive, and maybe make an incorrect causal assumption. Either way, scientists need to test even obvious things when they are building their models; the truth is that you don’t know until you test it. Besides, how else can scientists get to brag about having a 20 page CV?

    Plus, these ‘obvious’ studies sometimes turn out unexpected results…

    The Test

    Here’s the basic instruction given to participants:

    “Please try to imagine, in the most precise way, four positive events that could reasonably happen to you tomorrow. You can imagine all kinds of positive events, from simple everyday pleasures to very important positive events.”

    Three groups of people were in the test; the negative and neutral group got the same instructions with the word ‘positive’ replaced as appropriate. What makes MTT different to general positive thinking is the additional instruction to be specific: they were told to imagine the event at a specific time, a specific place, and going into as much detail as possible; sounds, smells, emotions, and so on. So no manifesting mansions or unicorns or anything; just things that will happen tomorrow, happening well (or not).

    The researchers measured everyone’s happiness and anxiety levels before and after spending 2 weeks on this exercise.

    The Results

    Let’s start with happiness. The positive MTT group became significantly happier after two weeks of practising this simple exercise. Not exactly a heavy finding, but it does mean there’s another scientifically supported intervention that people like you can do to become happier, and it’s really simple to do, too. Support for these exercises is really picking up now; here’s another ten, for instance.

    Positive MTT making people happier is about what you’d expect. But it’s interesting that negative MTT didn’t decrease happiness. Strangely, the negative and neutral groups both had marginal increases in happiness, but nothing that was statistically significant, so we can safely discount this as a fluke finding.

    So the results suggest that positive future imaginings aren’t just a consequence of happiness, but they’re a cause of it. The authors suggest a follow up study to test the difference between positive future MTT, and more general positive thinking (i.e., without pictures).

    But what about anxiety? What do you imagine happened to that? Here it gets more interesting. The positive MTT group’s anxiety was unaffected, and so was the negative MTT group. Happiness and anxiety aren’t at opposite ends of the same scale, so it’s not necessarily a surprise that positive MTT had no effect on anxiety. But maybe it is a surprise that negative MTT had no effect either. So if you worry about how much you worry, don’t worry!

    The really strange finding is that the neutral group had a significant decrease in anxiety. This had the authors a little stumped, but they suggest it might be due to the structuring nature of neutral MTT. They examined reports of what all participants had imagined, and those in the neutral group tended to think about daily routines. Perhaps mentally preparing and structuring their time ahead in this way served to reduce their stress over upcoming events, sort of organising their mental to do list. But more studies will need to be done to figure this one out.

    The practical conclusion is that thinking about 4 of the next day’s events in a detailed and positive way made the participants in that group happier after two weeks’ practice.

    Why not give it a try? It might cheer you up a bit.

    What’s the matter?

    Are you chicken?

    Recommended Reading:


    Reference (look what they called it! Awesome!):

    Quoidbach, J., Wood, A.M., Hansenne, M. (2009). Back to the future: the effect of daily practice of mental time travel into the future on happiness and anxiety. Journal of Positive Psychology. 4(5). 349-355.