Howard Gardner Speaks at Harvard Law School on Wednesday

The Situation of Optimism

From theRSAorg:

Neuroscientist Tali Sharot visits the RSA to explain the biological bias of optimism, and its effect on our lives and societies.

Related Situationist posts:

• Dan Gilbert at HLS on The Situation of Good Decisions
• Missing the Situation Leads to Optimism Among Powerful
• Neural Origins of Optimism,
• Self-Serving Biases
• Some Situational Sources of War
• The Situation of Reason
• Power Goes to the Head

The Situation of Self-Regulation

From theRSAorg:

Roy F Baumeister visits the RSA to explain why willpower and self-control is one of the most important aspects of individual and societal wellbeing.

Related Situationist posts:

• Comparing Distractions – Beer versus Facebook
• The Situation of Good Habits
• The Situation of Willpower
• Friends on the Brain
• The Situation of Temptation
• David Vitter, Eliot Spitzer, John Edwards, Jon Ensign, and Now Mark Sanford: The Disposition Is Weaker than the Situation,
• Mistakes Were Made (but not by me),
• Bargh and Baumeister and the Free Will Debate — Part I & Part II,
• The Situation of Facebook Jealousy
• Christakis Speaks to Harvard Freshmen about Social Networks,
• Social Networks,
• The Social Awkwardness of Online Snubbing, Virtual Bias,
• Internet Disinhibition.
  
• Investing in Vice. and
• The Science of Addiction, The Myth of Choice.

Phil Zimbardo at HLS “We Need Heroes”

Related Situationist posts:

• Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison and Kingsfield’s Harvard Law
• The Situation of Heroism
• Zimbardo Interview at The Believer
• Speaking Truth to the Situation
• Dr. Z. on Dr. Phil
• “Situationist Phil Zimbardo Takes Over the Dr. Phil Show,”
• The Situation of Hazing, Torture, Gender, and Tears
• Gross & Evil
• The Lucifer Effect Lecture at Harvard Law School
• “The Devil You Know . . . ,” and
• “From Heavens to Hells to Heroes – Part II.”

Dan Gilbert at HLS on The Situation of Good Decisions – Another Version

From the Harvard Law Website (Jill Greenfield):

There is a simple method for making decisions, from trivial to life changing, that most people find easy to understand but impossible to follow. In a talk entitled “How To Do Precisely the Right Thing At All Possible Times,” Daniel Gilbert, Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, author of “Stumbling on Happiness,” and host of the PBS television series “This Emotional Life,” discussed research in psychology, neuroscience and behavioral economics that explains why it is indeed possible, yet incredibly difficult, to do the right thing at all possible times.

Gilbert’s talk was sponsored by the Living Well in the Law program at Harvard Law School, which endeavors to complement the teaching of the skills and substance of the law with attention to and development of each student’s sense of purpose as both a professional and a person.

Gilbert explained that our own minds thwart our attempts to make good decisions because our brains evolved to function in a world very different from the one we live in today, one in which decisions were limited to finding a mate and living in small communities, not purchasing long-term care insurance or making other complex decisions.

“We’re on an ancient vessel and can’t evolve quickly enough, but we’re not stupid,” Gilbert said. “The way we got to the moon wasn’t through intuition—we used science and disciplined rational thinking. We can use the same approach to make any kind of personal decision. The question isn’t whether we know how to do precisely the right thing at all the right times. The question is whether we will actually use what we know.”

He said that it should be simple to make a decision—all we need to do is multiply the odds of getting what we want by the value of getting it. But people make two classes of errors when trying to make decisions: errors in odds and errors in value.

Gilbert discussed the psychological phenomena leading to errors in odds, including the imaginability error and the optimism bias. We miscalculate the odds of a particular outcome because the imaginability error causes us to calculate odds based on how easy it is to bring something to mind. For example, people overestimate the odds of dying in a tornado or from using fireworks because those deaths make headlines, while they underestimate the odds of dying by drowning or from asthma, which are in reality far more common. The optimism bias, on the other hand, is simply attributed to the fact that we’re wildly optimistic about the odds of getting what we want, he said. Together, the imaginability error and the optimism bias distort our ability to anticipate odds of a particular outcome.

“The optimism bias occurs because, when you practice doing things, they become easier to do,” Gilbert said. “Motivational speakers tell you to practice thinking about success and not even let thoughts of failure cross your mind. If you just keep thinking about how your plans will work without being willing to entertain equally how they’re not going to work, success becomes easier and easier for you to imagine, and thus the imagineability error is at play. We practice thinking about success so much that it’s inevitable that we’ll overestimate the likelihood that it’s going to happen.”

Calculating how happy we’ll be if we actually achieve the outcome we want—the value of that outcome—is even more difficult. Anticipating value is so difficult because every form of judgment works by comparison, Gilbert explained. To illustrate that point, he used a decision very familiar to law students—deciding between two job offers. Job 1 offers a salary of $100,000, but everyone else at that firm will earn $105,000. The salary for Job 2 is $90,000, but everyone else will earn $85,000. Gilbert said that most study participants respond that Job 2 will make them happier because, although they’ll make less money, they won’t feel underpaid. But for that to be the right decision, one who chooses Job 2 must then walk around all day in that new job thinking about how wonderful that extra $5,000 is. In reality, people will not spend time making that comparison once they dive in and start the job.

“You forget about the setup. The comparison you make when determining the value of getting what you want is no longer the comparison you make once you get it, so it bedevils your attempt to make a good decision,” Gilbert said.

He warned that there is really nothing we can do to ensure that we make the right decisions—there’s no pill we can swallow, class we can take, or book we can read that will prevent us from making these errors in odds and value because they’re simply so natural to us.

“How can you do the right thing at all possible times? You probably can’t,” he said. “The best thing you can do is to catch yourself making these errors and know to watch out for them. Ask if yesterday’s price really matters today, or if today’s comparison will really matter tomorrow. We can stop ourselves not from making errors, but from completing errors.”

Related Situationist posts.

• Dan Gilbert at HLS on The Situation of Good Decisions
• Dan Gilbert on the Situation of Happy
• The Psychological Situation of Climate Change
• Dan Gilbert on Why the Brain Scares Itself
• Dan Gilbert To Speak at Harvard Law School
• Dan Gilbert on the Situation of Our Decisions
• Dan Gilbert on the Situation of Psychology
• The Situation of Climate Change
• The Heat is On
• The Situation of Happiness and
• Conversation with Dan Gilbert.

Dan Gilbert at HLS on The Situation of Good Decisions

From the Harvard Gazette:

To take a gratifying, low-paying job or a well-paid corporate position, to get married or play the field, to move across the country or stay put: The fact that most people face such choices at some point in their lives doesn’t make them any easier. No one knows the dilemma better than law students, who are poised to enter a competitive job market after staking years of study on their chosen field.

When faced with a tough choice, we already have the cognitive tools we need to make the right decision, Daniel Gilbert, professor of psychology at Harvard and host of the PBS series “This Emotional Life,” told a Harvard Law School (HLS) audience on Feb. 16. The hard part is overcoming the tricks our minds play on us that render rational decision-making nearly impossible.

Gilbert’s talk, titled “How To Do Precisely the Right Thing at All Possible Times,” was part of Living Well in the Law, a new program sponsored by the HLS Dean of Students Office that aims to help law students consider their personal and professional development beyond the fast track of summer associate positions and big-law job offers.

There is a relatively simple equation for figuring out the best course of action in any situation, Gilbert explained: What are the odds of a particular action getting you what you want, and how much do you value getting what you want? If you really want something, and you identify an action that will make it likely, then taking that action is a good move.

Unfortunately, Gilbert said, “these are also the two ways human beings screw up.”

First, he said, humans have a hard time estimating how likely we are to get what we want. “We know how to calculate odds [mathematically], but it’s not how we actually calculate odds,” he said.

We buy lottery tickets, because we “never see interviews with lottery losers.” If every one of the 170 million losing ticket holders were interviewed on television for 10 seconds apiece, we’d be having the image of losing drilled into our brains for 65 straight years, he said.

“When something’s easy to imagine, you think it’s more likely to happen,” he said.

For example, if asked to guess the number of annual deaths in the United States by firework accidents and storms versus asthma and drowning, most people will vastly overestimate the former and underestimate the latter. That’s because we don’t see headlines when someone dies of an asthma attack or drowns, Gilbert said. “It’s less available in your memory, but it is in fact more frequent.”

Then there’s the fact that we’re prone to irrational levels of optimism, a pattern that has been documented across all areas of life. Sports fans in every city believe their team has better-than-average odds of winning; the vast majority of people believe they’ll live to be 100.

A study of Harvard seniors, Gilbert gleefully reported, showed they on average believed they’d finish their theses within 28 to 48 days, but most likely within 33 — “a number virtually indistinguishable from their best-case scenario.” In reality, they complete their theses within 56 days on average.

Still, he said, calculating our odds of success is actually the easy part. “What’s really hard in life is knowing how much you’re going to value the thing you’re striving so hard to get,” he said.

When we consider buying a $2 cup of coffee at Starbucks, for example, we don’t compare the satisfaction of a morning caffeine jolt against the millions of other things we could purchase for $2. Rather, we compare the value of that cup of coffee against our own past experiences. If the same coffee only cost $1.50 yesterday, we might balk at paying $2 for it today.

“One of the problems with this bias, this tendency to pay attention to change, is that it’s hard to know if things really did change,” he said. “Whether things changed is often in the eye of the beholder.

“It turns out that every form of judgment works by comparison,” he said. “People shop by comparison.” Unfortunately, our comparisons are easily manipulated, and comparing one option with all other possible options is an impossible task.

Real estate companies, for example, show potential buyers “set-up properties,” rundown fixer-uppers that they actually own, to lower their clients’ expectations for houses that are actually for sale.

In his own lab, Gilbert’s research team had two groups of college students predict how much they would enjoy eating a bag of potato chips. The group that sat in a room with chocolates on display predicted they’d enjoy the chips less, while the second group — stuck in a room with the chips and a variety of canned meats — predicted much higher enjoyment of the salty snack.

But when the students rated their enjoyment of the chips while they were eating them, those differences disappeared. While their previous visual judgment was tainted by comparison, their judgment of the actual taste was not.

“The comparisons you make when you’re shopping are not the ones you’ll make after you’ve bought,” Gilbert said.

The human mind evolved to deal with different dilemmas than the ones we face today, Gilbert explained. Our ancestors weighed short-term consequences to ensure their survival, evolving a snap-judgment process that often serves us poorly when making long-term decisions such as buying a home, investing in the stock market, or making a cross-country move.

The brain “thinks like the old machine it is,” Gilbert said. “We are in some sense on a very ancient vessel, and we are sailing a very ancient sea.”

Still, he told his audience, we have the ability to overcome these evolutionary roadblocks to self-aware, smart decision-making, as long as we acknowledge our biases.

“We’ve been given that gift,” Gilbert said. “The question is, will we use it?”

Related Situationist posts.

• Dan Gilbert on the Situation of Happy
• The Psychological Situation of Climate Change
• Dan Gilbert on Why the Brain Scares Itself
• “Dan Gilbert To Speak at Harvard Law School,”
• “Dan Gilbert on the Situation of Our Decisions,”
• “Dan Gilbert on the Situation of Psychology,”
• “The Situation of Climate Change,”
• “The Heat is On,”
• “The Situation of Happiness,” and
• “Conversation with Dan Gilbert.”

Dan Gilbert Returns to Harvard Law

Tomorrow (2/16) Daniel Gilbert, Situationist friend, Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, author of Stumbling on Happiness, and host of the PBS television series This Emotional Life, returns to Harvard Law to deliver a talk entitled

“How To Do Precisely the Right Thing At All Possible Times.”

Most experts tell us what to decide but they don’t tell us how. So the moment we face a novel decision—should I move to Cleveland or Anchorage? Marry Jennifer or Joanne? Become an architect or a pastry chef?—we’re lost. Is it possible to do the right thing at all possible times? In fact, there is a simple method for making decisions that most people find easy to understand but impossible to follow. New research in psychology, neuroscience, and behavioral economics explains why.

February 16 – 4pm WCC – 2036 Milstein East C.

Want To Lose Weight?: Consider the Situational Values of Values

The outstanding Wray Herbert has a terrific piece on The Huffington Post about research done by Situationist Contributor, Geoffrey Cohen.

Dieting and weight control are really pretty simple. We gain weight and have trouble losing it because we eat too much and move too little. If we can switch that around, most of us should be able to maintain a sensible weight without resorting to unhealthy gimmicks.

But that’s just the biology of weight control. What about the psychology? Why do we habitually take in too many calories, even when we know those calories are a ticket to obesity and all sorts of chronic diseases?

There are two major reasons for unhealthy weight, according to experts. One is a simple lack of self-control. We live in a society where every day we confront an abundance of high-calorie foods. Not overeating in this environment requires extraordinary discipline. The second is an inability to cope with stress. Struggling with ordinary but constant life stresses can drain the cognitive energy needed for discipline, weakening our resolve. Stress-related eating packs on unhealthy calories, contributing to weight gain — and over time to obesity.

What if there were a simple psychological intervention that addressed both of these issues at once — bolstering self-control and buffering against everyday stress?

I know. It sounds like one more gimmick, too good to be true. Perhaps, but in a new study, two psychological scientists propose just such an intervention — along with some preliminary evidence to back it up. Christine Logel of the University of Waterloo, Ontario, and Geoffrey Cohen of Stanford University describe a brief and simple way to give people the tools for resisting temptation and coping with life’s pressures.

It’s called “values affirmation,” and it’s done with a simple writing exercise. The theory is that focusing on one’s core values triggers a cascade of psychological processes: It bolsters a sense of self-worth and personal integrity. It underscores our higher values rather than our impulses, and by reminding us what’s really important in life, it buffers against mundane stresses. Since stress saps our limited cognitive resources, such an affirmation frees up these resources for willpower and self-discipline.

At least that’s the theory, which Logel and Cohen tested in a simple experiment. They recruited a group of young women (apparently, women are more prone to stress-related overeating), recording their baseline weight and body mass index, or BMI. The women were representative of North American women in general. That is, nearly 60 percent were overweight or obese, the rest normal. Notably, all were dissatisfied with their current weight.

Then half of the women wrote an essay about their most cherished values — religious beliefs, relationships, whatever they considered most important to them. The remainder, the controls, wrote about something they did not prize particularly, and why it might be important to someone else. Importantly, none of the values in the exercise had to do with weight or health.

That’s it. That’s the entire intervention. Then the scientists waited for about 2.5 months, at which point they called all the volunteers back into the lab. They again measured their weight and BMI, and also their waistlines. They also gave the volunteers a test of working memory, which is one of the cognitive processes crucial to self-control. Reducing stress should theoretically boost working memory capacity, and consequently discipline.

The results, reported online in the journal Psychological Science, were clear and quite dramatic. The control subjects gained 2.76 pounds on average, and this gain boosted average BMI as well. Anyone who has ever struggled with weight knows that this is a huge weight gain in just 2.5 months. It’s the equivalent of more than 13 pounds in a year — for no particular reason. By contrast, those who had completed the values affirmation lost an average of 3.4 pounds — also huge — and trimmed their BMI in the process. Women in the values intervention also had smaller waistlines, independent of BMI. And these women also had better working memory, suggesting that it was indeed their enhanced cognitive function that bolstered their self control. Even the most seriously overweight women experienced these dramatic results after the brief writing exercise.

Losing even a few pounds and keeping them off can be maddeningly difficult. So how could one brief intervention like this have such long-term results? The scientists believe that people can get stuck in repeating cycles, in which failure to lose weight impairs psychological functioning, which in turn increases the risk of more failure. Even a quick and simple intervention has the power to disrupt this destructive cycle.

More.

Related Situationist posts:

• Geoffrey Cohen on “Identity, Belief, and Bias
• The Situation of the Achievement Gap,
• The Project’s Second Conference – ‘Ideology, Psychology & Law’,
• The Implicit Value of Explicit Values,
• Fitting In and Sizing Up,
  
• The Situation of Weight and Fitness on the Campaign Trail,
• The Policy Situation of Obesity,
  
• The Situation of Eating – Part II,
  
• The Situation of Eating,
  
• Our Situation Is What We Eat,
• The Situation of Fatness = Our ‘Obesogenic’ Society,
• The Science of Addiction, The Myth of Choice,
• Common Cause: Combating the Epidemics of Obesity and Evil, and
  
• Situational Obesity, or, Friends Don’t Let Friends Eat and Veg.

Image from Flickr.

A Reminder: Smile

Your mom was right: turn that frown upside down.

She may not have had science to back up her suggestion, but Ron Gutman does (watch the video above)!

A number of studies in Gutman’s short talk may be familiar to readers, but putting them altogether in a nice little package is the payoff here.

Related Situationist posts:

• The Situation of Smiling
• The Body Has a Mind of its Own,
• The Situational Power of Appearance and Posture,
• The Magnetism of Beautiful People,
• Interpreting Facial Expressions,
• Smile If You Love Your Future Relationships
• Can You Turn the World on With Your Smile?, and
• A Look Into the Way Culture Affects Facial Expression.

Redirect

From the Atlantic, here is a review of Situationist Contributor Tim Wilson’s latest book:

In our ceaseless quest for self-improvement and our relentless pursuit of happiness, most of us have had some brush with the world that lives on the spectrum between self-help books and legitimate clinical psychotherapy. But a compelling new (non-self-help) book suggests many of these methods might be derailing rather than propelling our progress. In Redirect: The Surprising New Science of Psychological Change, social psychologist Timothy Wilson reveals insights from three decades of empirical evidence indicating that what is true of culture is also true of individuals: Our experience of the world is shaped by our interpretations of it, the stories we tell ourselves, and these stories can often become so distorted and destructive that they completely hinder our ability to live balanced, purposeful, happy lives, so the key to personal transformation is story transformation.

Let’s pause here and observe that this seems pretty commonsensical. What’s more, most of us believe that our character and circumstances are so unique that the universal human psychological flaws, biases, and shortcomings we are keenly aware of simply don’t befall us personally. Yet, in one domain of life or another, we find ourselves stuck in thought patterns and behavioral cycles we lack the tools to escape. This, Wilson demonstrates, is a pathological storytelling problem based on the stories we’ve led ourselves to believe and the behaviors that stem from them.

Of course, this isn’t news to anyone who has ever dabbled in cognitive-behavioral therapy — an entire branch of psychotherapy designed to address precisely that. But Wilson argues that there’s a new way to redirect people’s personal interpretations, one that doesn’t require one-on-one sessions and can address a wide array of personal and social problems, from severe trauma to everyday distress.

This new approach is based on the work of Kurt Lewin, who helped found the field of social psychology in the 1930s and 40s, and is rooted in three specific psychological interventions: story-editing — a set of techniques designed to reshape people’s narratives about themselves and the world in a way that results in lasting behavioral change (cue in the famous words of Susan Sontag, one of my big heroes: “I write to define myself — an act of self-creation — part of my process of becoming.”); story-prompting — redirecting people down a particular narrative path with subtle prompts; and do good, be good — an approach that dates back to Aristotle, premised on changing people’s behavior first, which in turn changes their self-perception of the kind of person they are based on the kinds of things they do. Wilson shows how these story-editing techniques have been used to make people happier, improve parenting, solve adolescent behavioral problems, and even reduce the racial achievement gap in schools.

More.

Here is a related video of Timothy Wilson speaking (in an RSA talk) about Redirect.

Related Situationist posts:

• The Situation of Reason
• The Situation of Heroism
• The Situation of “Genius”
• “Wise Parents Don’t Have “Smart” Kids,”
• “How Situational Self-Schemas Influence Disposition,” 
• “The Perils of Being Smart,”
• “Jock or Nerd,”
• “First Person or Third,”
• “The Situation of ‘Winners’ and ‘Losers’.”
• “The Situation of Confabulation,”
• “The Situation of Constitutional Beliefs - Abstract,”
• “Social Psychology and the Unconscious: The Automaticity of Higher Processes,”
• “Jonathan Haidt on the Situation of Moral Reasoning,”
• “The Unconscious Situation of our Consciousness – Part IV,” and
• “Unconscious Situation of Choice.”

Dan Gilbert on the Situation of Happy

From TEDTalks:

Dan Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness, challenges the idea that well be miserable if we dont get what we want. Our “psychological immune system” lets us feel truly happy even when things dont go as planned.

Related Situationist posts:

• The Psychological Situation of Climate Change
• Dan Gilbert on Why the Brain Scares Itself
• “Dan Gilbert To Speak at Harvard Law School,”
• “Dan Gilbert on the Situation of Our Decisions,”
• “Dan Gilbert on the Situation of Psychology,”
• “The Situation of Climate Change,”
• “The Heat is On,”
• “The Situation of Happiness,” and
• “Conversation with Dan Gilbert.”

On Money and Motivation

This lively RSAnimate, adapted from Dan Pink’s talk at the RSA, examines some the ways that money doesn’t always buy motivation.

Related Situationist posts:

• Shocking for Money
• The Situation of High Marginal Income Tax Rates and Motivation
• Money and the Situation of Happiness
• “The Situation of Money and Happiness,”
• “Receiving by Giving,” and 
• “Something to Smile About.” 

To review a collection of Situationist posts exploring the causes and consequences of happiness, click here.

Richard Hackman on “What Makes for a Great Team”

Harvard University professor Richard Hackman spoke in March at Harvard Law School.Professor Hackman has studied the secrets of effective teams ranging from airplane cockpit crews to musical ensembles. In his talk, sponsored by the Student Association for Law and Mind Sciences, Professor Hackman summarized the conditions that increase the likelihood of creating teamwork “magic.” For a brief introduction to Professor Hackman’s recent research on teamwork, check out this Harvard Business Review article on “sand dune teams.”

Richard Hackman at Harvard Law School

Tomorrow, the HLS Student Association for Law and Mind Sciences (SALMS) is hosting a talk, “What Makes for a Great Team?,” by Harvard University professor Richard Hackman in Austin East, from 12:00 – 1:00.

Professor Hackman has studied the secrets of effective teams ranging from airplane cockpit crews to musical ensembles. His talk on Monday will identify conditions that increase the likelihood of creating teamwork “magic.” As always, there will be burritos.

For a brief introduction to Professor Hackman’s recent research on teamwork, check out this Harvard Business Review article on “sand dune teams.”

For more information, go to the SALMS website, here.

Can Meditation Make Us More Compassionate?

Last Friday, Sindya Bhanoo had an interesting little post on one of the New York Times blogs concerning recent research on the impact of meditation on the brain.

As is often the case in these mainstream media reports, I was left wanting more about the studies and less about the personal interest hook (in this case, the story of Sindya’s husband’s experiences meditating), but that was remedied easily enough by utilizing the wonders of the internet.

To me, the most interesting referenced article was a 2008 study by Antoine Lutz, Julie Brefczynski-Lewis, Tom Johnstone, and Richard Davidson on the regulation of our emotional neural circuitry through compassion meditation.

Here is the abstract:

Recent brain imaging studies using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) have implicated insula and anterior cingulate cortices in the empathic response to another’s pain. However, virtually nothing is known about the impact of the voluntary generation of compassion on this network. To investigate these questions we assessed brain activity using fMRI while novice and expert meditation practitioners generated a loving-kindness-compassion meditation state. To probe affective reactivity, we presented emotional and neutral sounds during the meditation and comparison periods. Our main hypothesis was that the concern for others cultivated during this form of meditation enhances affective processing, in particular in response to sounds of distress, and that this response to emotional sounds is modulated by the degree of meditation training. The presentation of the emotional sounds was associated with increased pupil diameter and activation of limbic regions (insula and cingulate cortices) during meditation (versus rest). During meditation, activation in insula was greater during presentation of negative sounds than positive or neutral sounds in expert than it was in novice meditators. The strength of activation in insula was also associated with self-reported intensity of the meditation for both groups. These results support the role of the limbic circuitry in emotion sharing. The comparison between meditation vs. rest states between experts and novices also showed increased activation in amygdala, right temporo-parietal junction (TPJ), and right posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS) in response to all sounds, suggesting, greater detection of the emotional sounds, and enhanced mentation in response to emotional human vocalizations for experts than novices during meditation. Together these data indicate that the mental expertise to cultivate positive emotion alters the activation of circuitries previously linked to empathy and theory of mind in response to emotional stimuli.

To download a free copy of the entire article, click here.

Related Situationist posts:

• “Happiness and Legal Policy – Abstract,”
• “The Situation of Pleasure,”
• “Imagine You Could Change Your Brain. Oops, You Just Did!,”
• “Think you’ve got magical powers?,”
• “Placebo and the Situation of Healing,”
  
• “Money and the Situation of Happiness,” and
• “Something to Smile About.”

Phillippe Golden on Emotions

From Google Tech Talks:

The ability to recognize and work with different emotions is fundamental to psychological flexibility and well-being. Neuroscience has contributed to the understanding of the neural bases of emotion, emotion regulation, and emotional intelligence, and has begun to elucidate the brain mechanisms involved in emotion processing. Of great interest is the degree to which these mechanisms demonstrate neuroplasticity in both anatomical and functional levels of the brain.

* * *

For a sample of related Situationist posts, see

• “Joseph LeDoux on the Neural Situation of Emotion and Memory,”
• “The Interior Situation of Complex Human Feelings,”
• “The Situation of Memory,”
• “The Interior Situation of Complex Human Feelings,”
  
• “Accidentally Us,”
• “The Neuro-Situation of Violence and Empathy,”
  
• “The Affective Situation of Ethics and Mediation,” and
• “Situating Emotion.”

Barry Schwartz on Using Our Practical Wisdom

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For a sample of related Situationist posts, see

• “Barry Schwartz on the Situation of Incentives,”
• “Barry Schwartz on Wisdom,”
• “A Choice Worth Having,”
• “Can’t Get No Satisfaction!: The Law Student’s Job Hunt – Part II,” and
• “Just Choose It!“

Performing Under Pressure

Situationist friend Sian Beilock’s highly anticipated new book, Choke: What the Secrets of the Brain Reveal About Getting It Right When You Have To, is now out.  As someone who has had both great successes and great failures under pressure, I’ve been very excited to read Choke since Sian first mentioned it to me.  What exactly happened in that 8^th-grade piano recital when my mind went blank halfway through that Bach three-part invention?  Mom, I finally have an answer . . .

Here’s a description of the book:

It happens to all of us. You’ve prepared for days, weeks, even years for the big day when you will finally show your stuff—in academics, in your career, in sports—but when the big moment arrives, nothing seems to work. You hit the wrong note, drop the ball, get stumped by a simple question. In other words, you choke. It’s not fun to think about, but now there’s good news: This doesn’t have to happen.

In lively prose and accessibly rendered science, Beilock examines how attention and working memory guide human performance, how experience and practice and brain development interact to create our abilities, and how stress affects all these factors. She sheds new light on counter-intuitive realities, like why the highest performing people are most susceptible to choking under pressure, why we may learn foreign languages best when we’re not paying attention, why early childhood athletic training can backfire, and how our emotions can make us both smarter and dumber. All these fascinating findings about academic, athletic, and creative intelligence come together in Beilock’s new ideas about performance under pressure—and her secrets to never choking again. Whether you’re at the Olympics, in the boardroom, or taking the SAT, Beilock’s clear, prescriptive guidance shows how to remain cool under pressure—the key to performing well when everything’s on the line.

Dr. Sian Beilock, an expert on performance and brain science, reveals in Choke the astonishing new science of why we all too often blunder when the stakes are high. What happens in our brain and body when we experience the dreaded performance anxiety? And what are we doing differently when everything magically “clicks” into place and the perfect golf swing, tricky test problem, or high-pressure business pitch becomes easy? In an energetic tour of the latest brain science, with surprising insights on every page, Beilock explains the inescapable links between body and mind; reveals the surprising similarities among the ways performers, students, athletes, and business people choke; and shows how to succeed brilliantly when it matters most.

Read an excerpt from Choke here.

For a sample of related Situationist posts, see “Social Psychologists Discuss Stereotype Threat,” “Stereotype Threat and Performance,” “Your Group is Bad at Math,” “The Bar Exam Situation,” “A (Situationist) Body of Thought,” and “The Situation of ‘Winners’ and ‘Losers.’”

Happiness and Legal Policy – Abstract

Peter Huang recently posted his interesting paper, “Happiness Studies and Legal Policy” (forthcoming Annual Review of Law & Social Science) on SSRN.  Here’s the abstract.

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Social scientists have conducted numerous empirical and experimental studies of self-reported happiness. This review focuses on two fundamental areas of research in happiness and law, namely alternative measures of happiness and various policies to foster happiness. There are many aspects, concepts, dimensions, and visions of happiness. Empirical findings often depend critically on which particular measure of happiness is analyzed. Happiness studies have applications to national well-being indices; policy evaluation; civil judicial and jury decision-making about liability and damages in cases of sexual harassment, employment discrimination, torts; optimal tax law design; family law; criminal sentencing, legal education, and legal practice. There are decision-making, health, productivity, and psychological benefits to various types of happiness. There are more or less paternalistic happiness interventions, including policies to encourage regular physical exercise, good sleep, and meditation. Hopefully analysis of these topics offers exemplars of possibilities and limits to utilizing happiness studies in designing legal policy.

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You can download the paper for free here.  To review a sample of related Situationist posts, see “The Situation of Pleasure,” “Money and the Situation of Happiness,” and “Something to Smile About.” To review a collection of Situationist posts exploring the causes and consequences of happiness, click here.

Sheena Iyengar on the Situation of Choosing

From Ted Talks: “[Situationist friend] Sheena Iyengar studies how we make choices — and how we feel about the choices we make. At TEDGlobal, she talks about both trivial choices (Coke v. Pepsi) and profound ones, and shares her groundbreaking research that has uncovered some surprising attitudes about our decisions.”

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For a sample of related Situationist posts, see “Sheena Iyengar on the Situation of Choice,” “Sheena Iyengar’s Situation and the Situation of Choosing,” “Sheena Iyengar on ‘The Multiple Choice Problem,’” “Can’t Get No Satisfaction!: The Law Student’s Job Hunt – Part II,” “Dan Gilbert on the Situation of Our Decisions,”and “Just Choose It! “  To review all of the Situationist posts that discuss the problem with, or illusion of, choices, click here.