Happiest Country in the World

For the last six years, Finland has been ranked the happiest country in the world. I’ve lived here most of my life, and as a psychologist and happiness researcher, I’m often asked: what exactly makes people in Finland so satisfied with their lives?


You may be surprised to learn that Finnish people are often the first to question this characterization. Our national self-image is that we’re quiet, introverted and somewhat melancholy types. This doesn’t exactly align with being the happiest people on earth.


However, research has shown that those most desperately seeking happiness tend to be less happy. So if true happiness is best achieved indirectly, without paying too much attention to it, that is something Finnish people excel at.     READ MORE...

Children That Don't Give Up

A raging pandemic, gun violence, climate change — as an educational psychologist, I’ve seen firsthand how the troubling events of today are taking a toll on our children.

“It’s hard to stop thinking about bad stuff,” an 11-year-old told me recently. “Sometimes I worry about waking up.”


Without the right tools to handle adversity, hopelessness can set in and kids’ overall well-being can decline. Hope is what energizes them to stay mentally strong during tough times, and it’s what sets them apart from those who give up easily.

Research shows that hopefulness can dramatically reduce childhood anxiety and depression. Hopeful kids have an inner sense of control. They view challenges and obstacles as temporary and able to be overcome, so they are more likely to thrive and help others.

Yet despite its immense power, hope is largely excluded from our parenting agendas. The good news? Hope is teachable. One of the best ways to increase this strength is by equipping children with skills to handle life’s inevitable bumps.

Here are nine science-backed ways to help kids maintain hope — especially during tough times:  READ MORE...

Shortest Path to Human Happiness

The researchers created a digital model of psychology aimed to improve mental health. The system offers superior personalization and identifies the shortest path toward a cluster of mental stability for any individual.

Deep Longevity, in collaboration with Harvard Medical School, presents a deep learning approach to mental health.

Deep Longevity has published a paper in Aging-US outlining a machine learning approach to human psychology in collaboration with Nancy Etcoff, Ph.D., Harvard Medical School, an authority on happiness and beauty.

The authors created two digital models of human psychology based on data from the Midlife in the United States study.


The first model is an ensemble of deep neural networks that predicts respondents’ chronological age and psychological well-being in 10 years using information from a psychological survey. This model depicts the trajectories of the human mind as it ages. 

It also demonstrates that the capacity to form meaningful connections, as well as mental autonomy and environmental mastery, develops with age. It also suggests that the emphasis on personal progress is constantly declining, but the sense of having a purpose in life only fades after 40-50 years. 

These results add to the growing body of knowledge on socioemotional selectivity and hedonic adaptation in the context of adult personality development.  READ MORE...

Psychedelics and Consciousness

SOURCE:  Johns Hopkins Medicine 

Psychedelic drugs like psilocybin, an ingredient found in so-called magic mushrooms, have shown promise in treating a range of addictions and mental health disorders. Yet, there’s something mysterious and almost mystical about their effects, and they are commonly believed to provide unique insights into the nature of consciousness.

Now, a new study by Johns Hopkins Medicine researchers addresses the question of whether psychedelics might change the attribution of consciousness to a range of living and nonliving things.

The findings, published March 28 in Frontiers in Psychology, reveal that higher ratings of mystical type experiences, which often include a sense that everything is alive, were associated with greater increases in the attribution of consciousness.

“This study demonstrates that when beliefs change following a psychedelic experience, attributions of consciousness to various entities tend to increase,” says Sandeep Nayak, M.D., postdoctoral research fellow at the Johns Hopkins Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research and one of the researchers involved in the study.

“It’s not clear why, whether that might be an innate drug effect, cultural factors, or whether psychedelics might somehow expose innate cognitive biases that attribute features of the mind to the world.”

For the study, the researchers analyzed data gathered between August 2020 and January 2021 on 1,606 people who had had a belief-changing psychedelic experience. Participants averaged 35 years of age and were predominately white (89%), male (67%) and from the United States (69%).  READ MORE...

Self-Esteem at age 5

Self-esteem could be set at a surprisingly young age — so what influences it? At the age of just five, children have developed a sense of self-esteem as strong as adults, a study finds.

Self-esteem tends to remain stable over the lifespan. This suggests self-esteem could be set very early on. Professor Andrew Meltzoff, one of the study’s authors, said: “Some scientists consider preschoolers too young to have developed a positive or negative sense about themselves. Our findings suggest that self-esteem, feeling good or bad about yourself, is fundamental. It is a social mindset children bring to school with them, not something they develop in school.”

Until now it has been difficult to test the self-esteem of young children. Dr Dario Cvencek, the study’s lead author, explained: “Preschoolers can give verbal reports of what they’re good at as long as it is about a narrow, concrete skill, such as ‘I’m good at running’ or ‘I’m good with letters,’ but they have difficulties providing reliable verbal answers to questions about whether they are a good or bad person.”  READ MORE...

Our Curious Experiencs

Imagine you are walking on warm sand, on a sunny summer’s day, holding hands with your partner. While perceiving this environment, your brain receives and needs to integrate a cascade of sensory information coming from both outside and inside your body: the warmth of the sand, the brightness of the sunlight, the salty smell of the air, the sound of your heart pounding in your chest, the warmth of your partner’s skin touching your hand.

We usually experience a ‘real me’ that is linked to the body and which lies at the core of all of our sensory experiences, emotions, memories, and thoughts. This ‘I’ or ‘me’ is somehow always there, even if only in the background – transparently, so to speak; and it is felt as being distinct from the world and other people (the sand and your partner, let’s say).

This sense of being a ‘real me’ connected with a real world ‘out there’ makes us feel present and immersed in the flow of our daily lives. But how exactly does this work?

In a seminal paper entitled ‘Whatever next? Predictive brains, situated agents, and the future of cognitive science’, Andy Clark1 proposed that the brain’s job is to predict whatever information is coming next based on the information perceived before. 

Instead of being a passive sponge receiving information from inside and outside our bodies, the brain actively anticipates the world through the lens of past experiences. Whatever we have perceived and experienced before leaves traces, so to speak, in our nervous and perceptual systems. The brain uses these ‘traces’ prevailingly to spot danger. 

This is why it’s so difficult to forget negative events: the brain wants to keep us out of trouble. Harmless information, like the colour of the doorknob at my hotel, will likely be treated as boring and erased from memory. However, the colour of the jacket on the thief that attacked me on the street stays with me. This is an important insight stressed by Clark and other researchers like Karl Friston2 and Jakob Hohwy.  READ MORE...

Higher Emotional Awareness

 

Abstract

The tendency to reflect on the emotions of self and others is a key aspect of emotional awareness (EA)—a trait widely recognized as relevant to mental health. However, the degree to which EA draws on general reflective cognition vs. specialized socio-emotional mechanisms remains unclear. Based on a synthesis of work in neuroscience and psychology, we recently proposed that EA is best understood as a learned application of domain-general cognitive processes to socio-emotional information. In this paper, we report a study in which we tested this hypothesis in 448 (125 male) individuals who completed measures of EA and both general reflective cognition and socio-emotional performance. As predicted, we observed a significant relationship between EA measures and both general reflectiveness and socio-emotional measures, with the strongest contribution from measures of the general tendency to engage in effortful, reflective cognition. This is consistent with the hypothesis that EA corresponds to the application of general reflective cognitive processes to socio-emotional signals.

Introduction
Trait differences in emotional awareness (EA) have been the topic of a growing body of empirical work in psychology and psychiatry. Individuals with high EA report granular emotional experiences and perceive similar experiences in others, often promoting more adaptive social and emotional functioning (for a review, see1; for related work, see2). Current theoretical models posit that the tendency to consciously reflect on the emotions of self and others (e.g., their causes, associated sensations, and how they can be regulated) is a key aspect of EA3, as well as of related constructs such as emotional intelligence4,5,6,7 and alexithymia8,9,10. As measured by the Levels of Emotional Awareness Scale (LEAS;11,12), multiple studies suggest that EA is an important determinant of adaptive emotional functioning. High EA has been linked to emotion recognition abilities and openness to experience, among other adaptive skills11,13,14,15,16,17,18,19. Low EA has also been associated with multiple affective disorders20,21,22,23,24,25. The neurocognitive basis of EA is also an important question within both basic science and clinical research, with a growing number of studies on its developmental basis16,26,27 and neural correlates (e.g., for a review, see28; for more recent studies, see23,29,30,31,32,33,34,35,36,37).

One important unanswered question pertains to the degree to which the tendency to reflect on emotion in EA depends on domain-general reflective cognitive processes vs. specialized socio-emotional mechanisms. Some models make strong distinctions between emotional and cognitive processes and suggest that the brain contains specialized emotional mechanisms38,39; and some neuroscientific studies also suggest the presence of brain regions selectively engaged by social cognition40,41,42,43,44. In contrast, other cognitive and neural models suggest less separability between socio-emotional and cognitive process1,45,46,47,48,49. In a recent review50, we drew on work within evolutionary, developmental, and cognitive neuroscience to argue that EA may have an important dependence on domain-general cognitive processes. 

Specifically, EA appears to require holding emotional information in mind, integrating it with other available information in perception and memory, and using this information to reflectively plan adaptive courses of action (especially in social situations). While these abilities may be constrained by cognitive capacity (e.g., working memory span, IQ;32), it is suggested that trait differences in EA may further depend on the tendency to engage these reflective processes, independent of whether latent cognitive capacity is high or low. In this view, EA involves the application of effortful cognitive processes to emotion-related information (e.g., interoceptive information within oneself, facial, postural, and vocal cues in others, context cues, etc.), which may be facilitated during development by prepared learning and automatic attention biases toward socio-affective signals. The domain-general processes under discussion are “reflective” in the sense that they operate on mental contents in an integrative, slow, and deliberate manner—often reducing the chances of responding maladaptively in emotionally charged situations. However, the degree to which EA depends on domain-general reflective cognitive processes requires further empirical testing.  READ MORE...

Zodiac Personality Disorders

Every person has a distinct personality and is capable of great things in life. Who they are, where they come from, where they wish to go are some of the factors that shape a person's character and determine what they become.

However, sometimes the things that meet the eye may differ from what actually is. This is when astrology comes in handy. Zodiac signs can reveal a lot about a person's nature and temperament. It can decipher and bring to the forefront the hidden aspects of a person, the traits that are good as well as bad.

That said, given that every person has a positive personality trait, there are certain negative qualities that can cause distinct personality disorders in each person. In respect to that, here are the kind of personality disorders one may experience, according to their zodiac signs.





Besides being impulsive, Aries can also be aggressive. People belonging to this zodiac sign may have sudden bouts of anger and explosive aggression, which may prove disadvantageous for them. Such behaviour can be characteristic of Intermittent Explosive Disorder, where a person has terrifying bursts of anger and aggression, often leading to worst scenarios.  READ MORE

Selfish Mindfulness

Mindfulness is said to do many things for our psyche: it can increase our self-control, sharpen our concentration, extend our working memory and boost our mental flexibility. 

With practice, we should become less emotionally reactive – allowing us to deal with our problems more calmly.

One ‘benefit’ that you might not expect to gain, however, is heightened egotism. 

Yet a recent study suggests that, in some contexts, practicing mindfulness really can exaggerate some people’s selfish tendencies. 

With their increased inward focus, they seem to forget about others, and are less willing to help those in need.

This finding, alone, should not be a cause for you to cease meditating, if you do find it useful in other ways. 

But it adds to a growing body of research suggesting that mindfulness training can have undesirable side effects as well as potential benefits – and many psychologists now believe that the potentially negative consequences of certain meditative practices should be advertised alongside the hype.

The ‘me’ in meditation
The study comes from Michael Poulin, an associate professor in psychology at the State University of New York at Buffalo, who wanted to investigate whether the effects of mindfulness might depend on its cultural context and the existing values of the people who are practicing it.  READ MORE

A Sign of Intelligence

Your ability to BS your way through life may be a sign of intelligence, according to a recent study.

“If someone is a good bulls----er, they are likely quite smart,” says Martin Turpin, a graduate student at the Reasoning and Decision Making Lab at the Unversity of Waterloo and co-lead on the study recently published in the scientific journal Evolutionary Psychology.

Turpin and his colleagues found that people who are better at producing believable explanations for concepts, even when those explanations aren’t based on fact, typically score better on intelligence tests than those who struggle to “bulls---,” as the study puts it.

“However, it is not the case that those who are not good bulls----ers are less intelligent,” Turpin says.

Turpin says just like having a sense of humor is linked to intelligence, many smart people are not funny. “The same could be said of bulls----ing,” he says.

For the study, researchers described a “bullsh---er” as someone who “is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false...He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.”

To conduct the study, researchers used 1,017 participants across two separate studies that examined the subjects’ willingness to BS, how good they were at it and their overall cognitive ability.

To measure subjects’ ability to BS, each person was asked about 10 “concepts” with names like “Sexual Selection Theory” and “General Relativity” — some were real concepts and some were made up. Participants rated their knowledge of each using a five-point scale ranging from “never heard of it” to “know it well, understand the concept.”  TO READ ENTIRE ARTICLE, CLICK HERE...