Despite their time in therapy, men still don’t have a clue about what their wives and therapists want from them. (…) Most of my male clients feel that their previous therapy experience was about forcing them to fit a template of what the Therapy World believes love and relationships should look like. While the therapeutic language of “intimacy” is supposedly gender-neutral, most men see it as reflecting values and ideals that appeal disproportionately to women. (…)

The reason men can talk about feelings and relationship patterns in consultation rooms, but are unlikely to keep doing it at home is simple: emotional talk tends to produce more physiological arousal in men—they experience it more stressfully. Unlike women, they don’t get the oxytocin reward that makes them feel calm, secure, and confident when talking about emotions and the complexities of relationships; testosterone, which men produce more of during stress, seems to reduce the effect of oxytocin, while estrogen enhances it. It takes more work with less reward for men to shift into and maintain the active-listening and self-revealing emotional talk they learn in therapy, so they’re unlikely to do it on a routine basis. (…)

Men have to feel compelling reasons to change and, most important, to incorporate new behavior into their daily routine. I believe that the primary motivation keeping men invested in loving relationships is different from what keeps women invested, that it has a strong biological underpinning present in all social animals, and that it’s been culturally reinforced throughout the development of the human species.

The glue that keeps men (and males in social animal groups) bonded is the instinct to protect. If you listen long enough to men talking about what it means to love, you’ll notice that loving is inextricably linked, for many men, to some form of protection. If men can’t feel successful at protecting, they can’t fully love.

The main role of males in social groups throughout the animal world is to protect the group from outside threats. For the most part, males participate in packs and herds only if the group has predators or strong competition for food. Herds and packs without predators or competitors, like elephants and hippos, are matriarchal, with males either absent or playing peripheral or merely sperm-donor roles.

Male physiology is well-evolved for group protection, with greater muscle mass, more efficient blood flow to the muscles and organs, bigger fangs and claws, quicker reflexes, longer strides, more electrical activity in the central nervous system (to stimulate organs and muscle groups), and a thicker amygdala—the organ that activates the flight or fight response. That’s right, the first emergency response in male social animals is flight, with the option to fight coming into play only when flight isn’t possible. The principal protective role of males in social groups is to lead the pack to safety. (…)

As historian Stephanie Coontz puts it, previous generations widely assumed that men and women had different natures and couldn’t truly understand each other. The idea of intergender emotional talk independent of the need to protect didn’t emerge until the dissolution of the extended family, which began in the middle of the 20th century. Previous to that, the nuclear family—an intimate couple and children living as an isolated unit—was a rarity. Other family members were in the same house, next door, or across the street. Women got their emotional validation from other women, although they certainly wanted admiration from their men and vice versa. Today, research shows that the healthiest, happiest women have a strong network of girlfriends. In earlier times, men tended to associate mostly with other men—a cultural construct that’s still prevalent in many parts of the world, frequently reinforced by religious beliefs. (…)

Couples typically find it particularly interesting that males remain connected to social animal groups by proximity to the females, even though they don’t interact much, while the females enhance group cohesion by frequently interacting with one another. If the couple has had a boy and girl toddler, they can see this difference in social orientation for themselves early on. Assuming that the children are both securely attached, the boy will tend to play in proximity to the caregiver, always checking to see that he or she is there, but seeking far fewer direct interactions—talking, asking questions, making eye contact, touching, hugging—than the girl. As long as he knows his caregiver is present, his primary interaction is with the environment.

Similarly, a man can feel close to his wife if he’s in one room—on the computer, in front of the TV, or going about his routine—and she’s in another. He’ll likely protest, sulk, or sink into loneliness if she goes out, which she may well do since he isn’t talking to her anyway. To her, and to uninformed therapists, it seems that he wants her home so he can ignore her. But he isn’t ignoring her; her presence gives stability to his routine.

This little example of why proximity to his wife is crucial to him works wonders in opening a man’s eyes to that fact that his wife gives meaning and purpose to his life. In fact, we tend to think about meaning or purpose only when we’re losing it, which is why men tend to fall in love with their wives as they’re walking out the door, with their bags packed. Evidence for the drastic loss of meaning and purpose that men suffer when they lose their wives is seen in the effects of divorce and widowerhood on men: poorer job performance, impaired problem-solving, lowered creativity, high distractibility, “heavy foot” on the gas while driving, anxiety, worry, depression, resentment, anger, aggression, alcoholism, poor nutrition, isolation, shortened lifespan, and suicide. The divorced or widowed man isn’t merely lonely—he’s alone with the crushing shame of his failure to protect his family.

I’m able to use education about the effects of divorce on men clinically, because most guys know someone at work who’s lost his family and become a shadow of his former self. As a quick way of accessing men’s fundamental sense of the meaning and purpose of their lives, I ask each man to write down what he thinks is the most important thing about him as a person. “How do you want those you love to remember you,” I ask. “Near the end of your life, what will you most regret not doing enough of?”
Because meaning and purpose are elusive psychological concepts—a way of describing why we do something rather than what we do—men will rarely hit the mark at first. They say they want to be remembered as a “good provider,” “hard worker,” “loyal man,” choosing mostly protective terms. I then ask them to imagine that they have grown children and how they’d most like their children to feel about them when they’re gone. “Dad was a good provider, hard worker, loyal, etc. I’m not sure he cared about us, but he was a good provider, worked, and was loyal” or “Dad was human; he made mistakes. But I always knew that he cared about us and wanted what was best for us.” On a deep level, all the men I’ve worked with have wanted to be remembered with some version of the second statement—as both protective and compassionate. Helping men learn to express care and compassion directly to the people they love is the key to bridging the divide between their protective instinct and their reluctance to show their emotions. (…)

A major challenge to lasting change in marriage lies in the fact that couples’ day-to-day interactions operate largely on automatic pilot. Emotional response is triggered predominantly by unconscious cues, such as body language, tone of voice, and level of mental distractedness. Negativity in any of these inadvertently sets off the automatic defense system that’s developed between the parties. Once triggered, the unaware couple can easily spiral into dysfunctional patterns of relating. They tend to get lost in the details of whatever they’re blaming on each other, with no realization of what’s actually happened to them—namely, an inadvertent triggering of the automatic defense system. (…)

Rather than forcing themselves to act like the same instruments playing the same notes in a duet, couples who begin to interact in this way become like two different instruments playing different notes to create something together that neither can do individually—relational harmony.

{ Steven Stosn/Psychotherapy Networker | Continue reading }

Why are gamblers such a difficult subject for academic study?

“We have both spent over 10 years playing in and researching this area, and we can offer some explanations on why it is so hard to gather reliable and valid data,” wrote psychologists Mark Griffiths, of Nottingham Trent University, and Jonathan Parke, of Salford University explained, in a monograph called Slot Machine Gamblers – Why Are They So Hard to Study?

Here are three from their long list.

First, gamblers become engrossed in gambling. “We have observed that many gamblers will often miss meals and even utilise devices (such as catheters) so that they do not have to take toilet breaks. Given these observations, there is sometimes little chance that we as researchers can persuade them to participate in research studies.”

Second, gamblers like their privacy. They “may be dishonest about the extent of their gambling activities to researchers as well as to those close to them.” (…)

Third, gamblers sometimes notice when a person is spying on them. “The most important aspect of non-participant observation research while monitoring fruit-machine players is the art of being inconspicuous. If the researcher fails to blend in, then slot-machine gamblers soon realise they are being watched and are therefore highly likely to change their behaviour.”

{ The Guardian | Continue reading }

Psychopathy is a personality disorder manifested in people who use a mixture of charm, manipulation, intimidation, and occasionally violence to control others, in order to satisfy their own selfish needs. Although the concept of psychopathy has been known for centuries, the FBI leads the world in the research effort to develop a series of assessment tools, to evaluate the personality traits and behaviors attributable to psychopaths.

Interpersonal traits include glibness, superficial charm, a grandiose sense of self-worth, pathological lying, and the manipulation of others. The affective traits include a lack of remorse and/or guilt, shallow affect, a lack of empathy, and failure to accept responsibility. The lifestyle behaviors include stimulation-seeking behavior, impulsivity, irresponsibility, parasitic orientation, and a lack of realistic life goals.

Research has demonstrated that in those criminals who are psychopathic, scores vary, ranging from a high degree of psychopathy to some measure of psychopathy. However, not all violent offenders are psychopaths and not all psychopaths are violent offenders. If violent offenders are psychopathic, they are able to assault, rape, and murder without concern for legal, moral, or social consequences. This allows them to do what they want, whenever they want.  Ironically, these same traits exist in men and women who are drawn to high-profile and powerful positions in society including political officeholders.

The relationship between psychopathy and serial killers is particularly interesting. All psychopaths do not become serial murderers. Rather, serial murderers may possess some or many of the traits consistent with psychopathy. Psychopaths who commit serial murder do not value human life and are extremely callous in their interactions with their victims. This is particularly evident in sexually motivated serial killers who repeatedly target, stalk, assault, and kill without a sense of remorse. However, psychopathy alone does not explain the motivations of a serial killer.

What doesn’t go unnoticed is the fact that some of the character traits exhibited by serial killers or criminals may be observed in many within the political arena. While not exhibiting physical violence, many political leaders display varying degrees of anger, feigned outrage and other behaviors. They also lack what most consider a “shame” mechanism. Quite simply, most serial killers and many professional politicians must mimic what they believe, are appropriate responses to situations they face such as sadness, empathy, sympathy, and other human responses to outside stimuli.

{ Examiner NY | Continue reading }

Competitors playing a match against Bobby Fischer, perhaps the greatest chess player of all time, often came down with a mysterious affliction known as “Fischer-fear.” Even fellow grandmasters were vulnerable to the effect, which could manifest itself as flu-like symptoms, migraines and spiking blood pressure. As Boris Spassky, Mr. Fischer’s greatest rival, once said: “When you play Bobby, it is not a question of whether you win or lose. It is a question of whether you survive.”

Recent research on what is known as the superstar effect demonstrates that such mental collapses aren’t limited to chess. While challenging competitions are supposed to bring out our best, these studies demonstrate that when people are forced to compete against a peer who seems far superior, they often don’t rise to the challenge. Instead, they give up. (…)

Because his competitors expect him to win, they end up losing; success becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. (…)

In the early 1960s, the psychologist Sam Glucksberg demonstrated that the same effect could also inhibit creativity. He gave subjects a standard test of creativity known as the Duncker candle problem. The “high drive” group was told that the person solving the task in the shortest amount of time would receive $20. The “low drive” group, in contrast, was reassured that their speed didn’t matter. Here’s where the results get weird: The subjects with an incentive to think quickly took, on average, more than three minutes longer to find the answer. Experiments like this have led Ms. Beilock to conclude that people should be skeptical of evaluations based on a single high-stakes performance.

{ Wall Street Journal | Continue reading }

The cure for procrastination? Forgive yourself!

There are so many things you’d rather be doing than what you ought to be doing and what happens is that you delay doing what you ought. All the evidence shows that this procrastination is bad for you, for your productivity, your school grades, for your health. But still we keep putting things off. Until. Tomorrow. Now Michael Wohl and colleagues have proposed a rather surprising cure - self-forgiveness. That’s right, forgive yourself for you have procrastinated, move on, get over it and you’ll be more likely to get going without delay next time around.

{ BPS | Continue reading }

photo { Alison Brady }

Empathy is a complicated emotion, even for mice. On seeing another in pain, a mouse will act as if it itself is also hurting—but only if it knows the first mouse. Monkeys, too, will feel bad for another monkey, but only if they’re on friendly terms. People also feel less empathy for those they dislike. But our species adds another layer of complication: We empathize more with people who are “like us” than with “them.” This study, published this month, suggests that this Us-Them divide is more general—that the brain responds differently to any action performed by “one of us,” not just to signs of trouble.

The study is part of a boom in research around the idea that people literally share feelings, at the physiological level: When I see you in pain, for example, neurons fire in my brain just as they would if I myself were in pain. It’s an intriguing notion, not least because it offers a way to integrate aspects of human behavior that are usually looked at separately. Empathy is a social fact, arising out of people’s relationships to each other; and it’s a psychological experience for each of us; and it’s a physiological phenomena in each empathizer’s body. A model that connects those different levels would offer a more complete explanation. It would also, of course, offer ways to corroborate theories: It’s great to be able to ask people if they feel empathy, but it’s even better if you can measure it as well.

{ Big Think | Continue reading }

When we’re creative, we feel we are living more fully than during the rest of life. The excitement of the artist at the easel or the scientist in the lab comes close to the ideal fulfillment we all hope to get from life, and so rarely do. Perhaps only sex, sports, music, and religious ecstasy—even when these experiences remain fleeting and leave no trace—provide a profound sense of being part of an entity greater than ourselves. But creativity also leaves an outcome that adds to the richness and complexity of the future.

I have devoted 30 years of research to how creative people live and work, to make more understandable the mysterious process by which they come up with new ideas and new things. Creative individuals are remarkable for their ability to adapt to almost any situation and to make do with whatever is at hand to reach their goals. If I had to express in one word what makes their personalities different from others, it’s complexity. They show tendencies of thought and action that in most people are segregated. They contain contradictory extremes; instead of being an “individual,” each of them is a “multitude.”

Here are the 10 antithetical traits often present in creative people that are integrated with each other in a dialectical tension.

{ Psychology Today | Continue reading }

illustration { saimanchow }

Happier people tend to think about themselves with higher level of abstraction than less happy people, even after controlling for the overall valence and internality of their construals. … People randomly assigned to think about themselves in abstract rather than concrete terms reported greater pre- to post-manipulation increases in reports of life satisfaction.

{ via Overcoming Bias | Continue reading | Fortune favors the bold | Wikipedia }

Humans produce about 50 distinct types of smiles but there’s one distinction that really matters: between real and fake.

If we can tell the people who are showing what they’re feeling from the people who are faking it, then we’ve got a really good indicator of who to trust and work with.

{ PsyBlog | Continue reading }

A recent study examined the correlation between chocolate consumption and self-reported depression symptoms. (…)

The authors caution that cross-sectional studies have limited ability to explain correlations and are open to spurious findings. They note there findings are compatible with several possibilities:

• Depression drives craving for chocolate as a self-treatment

• Depression drives craving for chocolate for other reasons

• Chocolate may contribute to depressive symptoms

• A physiological factor could drive both depressive symptoms and chocolate consumption

• A more complex undefined relationship could exist

I’d vote for the last option. (…)

To be balanced, it must be noted that other studies found positive health associations with chocolate intake. In an older sample of Finnish men, chocolate preference as a sweet was linked to better overall health, optimism and better psychological well-being.

{ Brain Posts | Continue reading }

{ Our cynicism towards strangers may develop as early as 7 years old. Surprisingly people are even overly cynical about their loved ones, assuming they will behave more selfishly than they really do. | Photo: Tush magazine #3, 2009 }

Imagine two cities, one to the north of where you live and one an equal distance to the south. Should it take longer to drive to the northern city than to the southern one? Of course not. But evidence suggests we subtly believe that going north is more time-intensive than going south.

In this recent study by Leif Nelson and Joseph Simmons in the Journal of Marketing Research, a number of subjects were asked to estimate the travel time for a northbound versus southbound bird. The majority of respondents believed traveling north from the equator would take longer than the reverse. (…)

This striking study reminds us of an essential, if often underappreciated, truth about transportation: Our ideas about where and how to travel, what routes to use and how long they will take, are all prone to subtle distortions that may ultimately shape our decisions about where to go and why. As geographer Colin Ellard notes in his book You Are Here: Why We Can Find Our Way to the Moon, but Get Lost in the Mall, “unlike other animals, which are tightly anchored, body to ground, fixed to the earth with a sureness of footing than can be almost impossible to sunder, human beings seem preternaturally prone to a kind of spatial flight of fancy in which our minds sculpt physical space to suit our needs.”

The north-south imbalance is just one of any number of ways we rearrange objective time and space in our heads. There are the famous examples of geographical distortion, for example, in which people routinely assume that Rome is farther south than Philadelphia or that San Diego is west of Reno (when in both cases the opposite is true). Or take a simple trip into town: Studies have found that people tend to find the inbound trip to be shorter than the outbound trip, while a journey down a street with more intersections will seem to be longer than one with fewer (and not simply because of traffic lights).

Our state of mind on any trip can influence not just our perceptions of time but of geography itself.

{ Slate | Continue reading }

photo { Todd Hido }

Personality impressions associated with four distinct humor styles

This study examined how personality impressions about another person are influenced by the style of humor that person displays. Four distinct styles were examined, with two of these being adaptive (affiliative and self-enhancing humor), and two being maladaptive (aggressive and self-defeating humor). Participants read descriptions of an individual displaying each humor style, and then rated that individual on several other personality attributes (e.g., friendly, complaining). The adaptive humor styles enhanced personality impressions of another individual, whereas the maladaptive styles had strong detrimental effects. Furthermore, participants provided clearly differentiated personality impressions within both the adaptive and maladaptive humor categories. Affiliative humor led to more positive impressions of another than self-enhancing humor; whereas aggressive humor resulted in more negative personality impressions than self-defeating humor. These findings were discussed in terms of approaches to humor that acknowledge the multifaceted nature of this construct and the resulting impact on social relationships.

{ University of Western Ontario, Canada | Scandinavian Journal of Psychology }

The lure of instant gratification is hard to resist: when we want something, we want it right now. Of course, maturity and reality demand that we learn to wait, that we postpone our pleasures until tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. And so we stash money in our savings account, and forgo the SUV for the sake of climate change and don’t eat the entire pint of ice cream. We resist the tug of immediate delight for the sake of even more delight in the future.

That, at least, is how we’re supposed to behave. The problems arise with a mental process known as delay discounting, which refers to our tendency to discount the value of a future reward as a function of its temporal distance.

{ The Frontal Cortex/ScienceBlogs | Continue reading }

photo { Richard Avedon }

It’s hard to get good payoffs from slot machines, yes. But it’s also hard to get good information from slot-machine gamblers, and that made things awkward for psychologists Mark Griffiths, of Nottingham Trent University, and Jonathan Parke, of Salford University. They explained how, in a monograph called Slot Machine Gamblers – Why Are They So Hard to Study?

Griffiths and Parke published it a few years ago in the Electronic Journal of Gambling Issues. “We have both spent over 10 years playing in and researching this area,” they wrote, “and we can offer some explanations on why it is so hard to gather reliable and valid data.”

Here are three from their long list.

First, gamblers become engrossed in gambling. “We have observed that many gamblers will often miss meals and even utilise devices (such as catheters) so that they do not have to take toilet breaks. Given these observations, there is sometimes little chance that we as researchers can persuade them to participate in research studies.”

Second, gamblers like their privacy. They “may be dishonest about the extent of their gambling activities to researchers as well as to those close to them. This obviously has implications for the reliability and validity of any data collected.”

Third, gamblers sometimes notice when a person is spying on them.

{ The Guardian | Continue reading }

I think the same is true of sex thoughts. People often say they spend a lot of time thinking about sex, but when you beep them they very rarely report it. It’s probably that our sex thoughts, though rare, are much more frequently remembered than other thoughts and so are dramatically overrepresented in retrospective memory.

{ Experimental Philosophy | Continue reading }

photo { Helmut Newton }

As airport security employees scan luggage for a large variety of banned items, they may miss a deadly box cutter if they find a water bottle first. According to new research at Duke University, identifying an easy-to-spot prohibited item such as a water bottle may hinder the discovery of other, harder-to-spot items in the same scan. (…)

Missing items in a complex visual search is not a new idea: in the medical field, it has been known since the 1960s that radiologists tend to miss a second abnormality on an X-ray if they’ve found one already. The concept — dubbed “satisfaction of search” — is that radiologists would find the first target, think they were finished, and move on to the next patient’s X-ray.

{ EurekAlert | Continue reading }

Emails feel so transient, so disembodied, that we’re more tempted to lie when sending them compared with writing with pen and paper. That’s according to Charles Naquin and colleagues who tested the honesty of students and managers as they played financial games.

{ BPS | Continue reading }

Experiments 1-3 demonstrated that exposure to the letter A enhances performance relative to the exposure to the letter F, whereas exposure to the letter F prior to an achievement task can impair performance. This effect was demonstrated using two different types of samples (undergraduate and graduate students), in two different experimental settings (classroom and laboratory), using two different types of achievement tasks (analogy and anagram), and using two different types of letter presentation (Test Bank ID and Subject ID). Results from the funnelled debriefing, self-report goals, and word-stem completion support our position that the effect of letter on academic performance takes place outside the conscious awareness of participants. (…)

Our findings suggest that students are vulnerable to evaluative letters presented before a task, and support years of research highlighting the significant role that nonconscious processes play in achievement settings.

{ The British Psychological Society | Continue reading }

A link between romantic love and face recognition and sexual desire and verbal recognition is suggested. When in love, people typically focus on a long-term perspective which enhances global perception, whereas when experiencing sexual encounters they focus on the present which enhances a perception of details. Because people automatically activate these processing styles when in love or sex, subtle reminders of love versus sex should suffice to change ways of perception. Global processing should further enhance face recognition, whereas local processing should enhance recognition of verbal information. In two studies participants were primed with concepts and thoughts of love versus sex. Compared to control groups, recognition of verbal material was enhanced after sex priming, whereas face recognition was enhanced after love priming. In Experiment 2 it was demonstrated that differences in global versus local perception mediated these effects. However, there was no indication for mood as a mediator.

{ European Journal of Social Psychology }