29. May 2010 by John Schinnerer.

From EurekAlert!…

‘Will we succeed? The science of self-motivation

Can you help you? Recent research by University of Illinois Professor Dolores Albarracin and Visiting Assistant Professor Ibrahim Senay, along with Kenji Noguchi, Assistant Professor at Southern Mississippi University, has shown that those who ask themselves whether they will perform a task generally do better than those who tell themselves that they will.

Little research exists in the area of self-talk, although we are aware of an inner voice in ourselves and in literature. From children’s books like ‘The Little Engine That Could,’ in which the title character says, ‘I think I can,’ to Holden Caulfield’s misanthropic musings in ‘A Catcher in the Rye,’ internal dialogue often influences the way people motivate and shape their own behavior.

But was ‘The Little Engine’ using the best motivational tool, or does ‘Bob the Builder’ have the right idea when he asks, ‘Can we fix it?’

Albarracin’s team tested this kind of motivation in 50 study participants, encouraging them explicitly to either spend a minute wondering whether they would complete a task or telling themselves they would. The participants showed more success on an anagram task, rearranging set words to create different words, when they asked themselves whether they would complete it than when they told themselves they would.

Further experimentation had students in a seemingly unrelated task simply write two ostensibly unrelated sentences, either ‘I Will’ or ‘Will I,’ and then work on the same task. Participants did better when they wrote, ‘Will’ followed by ‘I’ even though they had no idea that the word writing related to the anagram task.

Why does this happen? Professor Albarracin’s team suspected that it was related to an unconscious formation of the question ‘Will I’ and its effects on motivation. By asking themselves a question, people were more likely to build their own motivation.

In a follow-up experiment, participants were once again parsed into the ‘I will’ and ‘Will I’ categories, but this time were then asked how much they intended to exercise in the following week. They were also made to fill out a psychological scale meant to measure intrinsic motivation. The results of this experiment showed that participants not only did better as a result of the question, but that asking themselves a question did indeed increase their intrinsic motivation.

These findings are likely to have implications in cognitive, social, clinical, health and developmental psychology, as well as in clinical, educational and work settings.

‘We are turning our attention to the scientific study of how language affects self-regulation,’ Professor Albarracin said. ‘Experimental methods are allowing us to investigate people’s inner speech, of both the explicit and implicit variety, and how what they say to themselves shapes the course of their behaviors.’

For full press release, click here to go to EurekAlert. 

Will you have a fantastic weekend? You will!

Will I have an amazing weekend? I will!

Cheers,

John Schinnerer, Ph.D.

Guide To Self, Inc.

Positive Psychology Coach

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26. May 2010 by John Schinnerer.

 (Note: This is humor!) 

1. You start out each morning with a 30-minute jog around the bathroom.

2. You write to your mother in Denmark every week, even though she sends you mail from Ohio asking why you never write.

3. You wear your boxers on your head because you heard it will ward of evil alien spirits.

4. You begin to stop and consider all of the blades of grass you’ve stepped on as a child, and worry that their ancestors are going to one day seek revenge.

5. You have meaningful conversations with your toaster.

6. Your father pretends you don’t exist, just to play along with your little illusion.

7. You put tennis balls in the microwave to see if they’ll hatch.

8. Your dentist asks you why each one of your teeth has your name etched on it and you say it’s for security reasons.

9. You tend to agree with everything your mother’s dead uncle tells you.

10. You argue with yourself about which is better, to be eaten by a koala or to be loved by an infectious disease.

Have a mirth-filled week!

Dr. John Schinnerer

Guide To Self, Inc.

Positive Psychology Coach

Author of #1 Positive Psych blog on the web

Keynote speaker

Swell guy

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26. May 2010 by John Schinnerer.

This is an small cut from a conversation between Martin Seligman and the Dalai Lama. It took place in Sydney, Australia in December 2009…

‘So people said to me you want to work on happiness? And I said ‘no, not exactly’—happiness has become over the centuries something that has very different meanings for different people and was scientifically unwieldy. And so we break into four different disciplines in positive psychology.

So the first is about happiness, it’s the study of positive emotion and so for example people interested in this look at the most catastrophic thoughts that people say when bad events happen, and how to find a realistic perspective on catastrophic thoughts. So we teach people to argue against the catastrophic and to see good possibilities; so one field is positive emotion.

The second field is meaning. Human beings ineluctably want to be part of something bigger than they are, to belong to and serve something bigger than they are. So we asked people to identify their highest strengths, their highest virtues… humour, fairness, kindness and to learn to use them more particularly in difficult tasks and to use them to be part of something larger than they are.

The third discipline that people in positive psychology work on is positive relationships, how to get along better with people. And so for example there have actually been discoveries that I didn’t know ten years ago in this area in which, if you tell me something in traditional marital therapy, what you do is you teach people to argue better with each other. So you’re trying to change insufferable marriages into being barely tolerable! But in positive psychology we teach people to celebrate together rather when something good happens. If you tell me something enormously good that happened to you the technique not of being destructive about it but of getting you to relive it and to elaborate it. So, the third discipline is positive relationships.

And the fourth discipline is positive accomplishment—mastery, competence, achievement—and so we look for example of high grit, people who never give up, people with high self control and we ask ‘how do you build that?’

So those are the four things that positive psychologists do and work on. If you teach people early in life techniques of positive emotion, of engagement, of meaning, of good relationships, of accomplishment, can you prevent many of the ills of life; depression, anxiety, anger.’

-       Martin Seligman

If you want more on this topic, visit this link:   http://www.abc.net.au/rn/allinthemind/stories/2009/2766891.htm 

Have a wonderful week!

John Schinnerer Ph.D.

Guide To Self, Inc.

Danville CA

If you interested in a twelve week course on the latest in cultivating positive emotions, please send me an email at Info@GuideToSelf.com. I am looking at developing a weekly, web-based coaching course where you can view hour long presentations inthe convenience of your own home for $47 per week. Compared to the rate clients pay me hourly, this is a huge savings.

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26. May 2010 by John Schinnerer.

From EurekAlert!

Fantastic new study on using gratitude to strengthen relationships out of UNC Chapel Hill….

‘Chapel Hill (University of North Carolina), NC—Our busy lives sometimes feel like they are spinning out of control, and we lose track of the little things we can do to add meaning to our lives and make our loved ones feel appreciated. A new article in Personal Relationships points the way to the methods of gratitude we can use to give a boost to our romantic relationships, and help us achieve and maintain satisfaction with our partners.

Humans are interdependent, with people doing things for each other all the time. Simply because a person does something for another does not mean that the emotion of gratitude will be felt. In addition to the possibility of not even noticing the kind gesture, one could have many different reactions to receiving a benefit from someone else, including gratitude, resentment, misunderstood, or indebtedness.

Positive thinking has been shown to have a longstanding constructive effect on our emotional life. Extending these positive emotions and gratitude to our romantic partners can increase the benefit of positive thinking tenfold, say the authors of this new study. Lead author Dr. Sara Algoe says, “Feelings of gratitude and generosity are helpful in solidifying our relationships with people we care about, and benefit to the one giving as well as the one on the receiving end.” The authors propose that the emotion of gratitude is adaptive, and ultimately helps us to find, remind, and bind ourselves to people who seem to care about our welfare.

Events such as one partner planning a celebratory meal when the other partner gets a promotion, taking the children to the zoo so the other partner can have some quiet time, or stopping to pick up the other partner’s favorite coffee drink are each examples of gratuitous behavior that could strengthen romantic relationships, if the recipient feels grateful in response.

The study authors chose to study over sixty-five couples who were already in ongoing, satisfying, and committed relationships. They tracked the day-to-day fluctuations in relationship satisfaction and connection for each member of the relationship. These little, everyday, ups and downs in relationship quality were reliably marked by one person’s feelings of gratitude. The effects on the relationship were noticed even the day after feeling the gratitude was expressed. This research thus suggests that even everyday gratitude serves an important relationship maintenance mechanism in close relationships, acting as a booster shot to the relationship.

The authors of the study claim that this emotional response may be beneficial for relationships that are on the rocks, or in a context where people already have solid and satisfied relationships—a little gratitude may go a long way toward maintaining the connection. By temporarily changing the perspective on the relationship, everyday gratitude may work as a booster shot for ongoing romantic relationships.

However, the authors are quick to warn that the everyday emotional response of indebtedness did not facilitate relationship maintenance. Indebtedness implies a need to repay kind gestures. This may work to help to keep relationships in working order, but will not yield as many benefits or long-term growth in the relationship as an expression of gratitude. Algoe says, “Gratitude triggers a cascade of responses within the person who feels it in that very moment, changing the way the person views the generous benefactor, as well as motivations toward the benefactor. This is especially true when a person shows that they care about the partner’s needs and preferences.”

###

This study is published in the June 2010 issue of Personal Relationships. Media wishing to receive a PDF of this article may contact scholarlynews@wiley.com.

Article: “It’s the Little Things: Everyday Gratitude as a Booster Shot for Romantic Relationships.” Sara Algoe, et. al. Personal Relationships.

Dr. Sara Algoe is an Assistant Professor of Research in the Psychology Department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has published multiple articles and book chapters, and has presented widely on the topics of relationships, emotional, social interaction, and gender. She can be reached for questions at algoe@unc.edu.’

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23. May 2010 by John Schinnerer.

Misery in the Genes

A professor finds DNA that can turn emotional stress into physical illness

By Noah Berger for The ChronicleMisery isn’t just depressing, it’s bad for your health. People going through stressful events, like divorce, are more likely to get sick. People who are HIV-positive see their condition worsen more quickly if they don’t have good social support. But nobody knows exactly how mental stress causes illness and death. 

Now a study by researchers at the University of California at Los Angeles and several other institutions has come up with an actual biological pathway: a chain of molecules that connects stress to disease through genes. The scientists also learned that some people can get through tough times without ruining their health, thanks to a particular genetic variation that breaks the chain. 

The study, published this spring in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is wildly multidisciplinary, spanning psychology, molecular biology, immunology, and epidemiology. That posed challenges in lining up grants, says Steven W. Cole, an associate professor of medicine at UCLA, who led the research. But the study’s success signals the growth and increasing sophistication of Mr. Cole’s field, psychoneuroimmunology, the study of connections between mind and health. 

Robert Ader, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Rochester, coined the discipline’s name around 1980, when he was studying animals that could be psychologically “tricked” into suppressing their immune systems. The animals were fed saccharin-flavored water and simultaneously dosed with a drug that suppressed the immune system. Later, just the taste of saccharin was enough to suppress their immune systems. Psychology appeared to affect biology. 

“That was not received with open arms by the immunology community,” Mr. Ader says. Thirty years later, however, it is more established that the brain and immune system are linked. …

For the whole article, click here to go the Chronice of Higher Education’s website.

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