7. April 2011 by John Schinnerer.

How Music Connects People - Eric Whitacre at TED with ‘Sleep’

The human spirit is lifted through music, regardless of proximity or time.

As much as I hate to admit it, life is about relationships and connection.

Happiness, our satisfaction with life, is strongly related to quality relationships.

Relationships hinge on connection.

Music connects us. Music brings us together.

John Schinnerer, Ph.D.
Founder, Guide to Self, Inc.

For a FREE PDF copy of John’s award-winning self-help book on proven exercises to increase human connection, to turn down the volume on negative emotions and ways to turn up the volume on positive emotions, including mindfulness tips, visit GuideToSelf.com. Click on the yellow book icon and enter your name and email address for instant access!

For FREE online anger management courses, visit WebAngerManagement.com where you can have full access to 4 free anger management classes by anger management expert John Schinnerer, Ph.D. 

There is also a full 10 week course on Positive Psychology of Anger Management available at the same site for the ridiculously low price of $297.

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15. February 2011 by John Schinnerer.

February 14, 2011

When psychotherapy is helping someone get better, what does that change look like in the brain? This was the question a team of Canadian psychological scientists set out to investigate in patients suffering from social anxiety disorder. Their findings are published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association of Psychological Science.

Social anxiety is a common disorder, marked by overwhelming fears of interacting with others and expectations of being harshly judged. Medication and psychotherapy both help people with the disorder. But research on the neurological effects of psychotherapy has lagged far behind that on medication-induced changes in the brain.

“We wanted to track the brain changes while people were going through psychotherapy,” says McMaster University Ph.D. candidate Vladimir Miskovic, the study’s lead author.

To do so, the team—led by David Moscovitch of the University of Waterloo, collaborating with McMaster’s Louis Schmidt, Diane Santesso, and Randi McCabe; and Martin Antony of Ryerson University—used electroencephalograms, or EEGs, which measure brain electrical interactions in real time. They focused on the amount of “delta-beta coupling,” which elevates with rising anxiety.

The study recruited 25 adults with social anxiety disorder from a Hamilton, Ontario clinic. The patients participated in 12 weekly sessions of group cognitive behavior therapy, a structured method that helps people identify—and challenge—the thinking patterns that perpetuate their painful and self-destructive behaviors.

Two control groups—students who tested extremely high or low for symptoms of social anxiety—underwent no psychotherapy.

The patients were given four EEGs—two before treatment, one halfway through, and one two weeks after the final session. The researchers collected EEG measures of the participants at rest, and then during a stressful exercise: a short preparation for an impromptu speech on a hot topic, such as capital punishment or same-sex marriage; participants were told the speech would be presented before two people and videotaped. In addition, comprehensive assessments were made of patients’ fear and anxiety.

When the patients’ pre- and post-therapy EEGs were compared with the control groups’, the results were revealing: Before therapy, the clinical group’s delta-beta correlations were similar to those of the high-anxiety control group and far higher than the low-anxiety group’s. Midway through, improvements in the patients’ brains paralleled clinicians’ and patients’ own reports of easing symptoms. And at the end, the patients’ tests resembled those of the low-anxiety control group.

“We can’t quite claim that psychotherapy is changing the brain,” cautions Miskovic. For one thing, some of the patients were taking medication, and that could confound the results. But the study, funded by the Ontario Mental Health Foundation, is “an important first step” in that direction—and toward understanding the biology of anxiety and developing better treatments.

The work might also alter perceptions of therapy. “Laypeople tend to think that talk therapy is not ‘real,’ while they associate medications with hard science, and physiologic change,” says Miskovic. “But at the end of the day, the effectiveness of any program must be mediated by the brain and the nervous system. If the brain does not change, there won’t be a change in behavior or emotion.”

Provided by Association for Psychological Science

From www.PhysOrg.com

Have a fantastic Valentine’s Day!

Cheers,
John Schinnerer, Ph.D.

Founder Guide to Self, Inc.

Positive psychology of anger management

Turning down the  volume on anger

For your complimentary copy of John’s award-winning self-help book, Guide to Self: The Beginner’s Guide to Managing Emotion and Thought, visit www.GuideToSelf.com and enter your name and email address for instant access to a PDF version! It’s 216 pages of life-altering tools to make the most of your mind.

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20. August 2010 by John Schinnerer.

How do you feel about your employer? A new study in Perspectives on Psychological Science indicates that how happy a company’s employees are is strongly related to how well the company performs in a number of important areas - increased employee retention, improved customer loyalty, and greater profitability.

Such findings may signal a coming downturn for companies such as JetBlue whose former flight attendant recently told a customer over the loudspeaker to take a hike and then jumped out the emergency exit. Assuming more of Jetblue’s workforce is equally unhappy, the company’s profitability is likely to decrease in the short term.

Given the amount of time you spend at work, it seems reasonable that work influences how happy we are. More and more studies are documenting the connection between your attitudes towards work, your mood outside of the workplace and physical outcomes like coronary heart disease.
Come to find out, that may be merely the tip of the iceberg. Gallup scientist James K. Harter reported recently that how you perceive your work conditions also seems to have a significant effect on company profitability.

In Harter’s latest findings, Gallup examined data from over 2,000 business units (e.g., retail stores and sales offices) within 10 firms. Harter and colleagues pored over employee satisfaction surveys, customer loyalty numbers, employee retention rates, and financial performance of the organizations. Harter performed data anayses to determine the strength of relationships between employee job satisfaction and the outcome measures of the firms.

Findings showed that how employees perceive work conditions predict critical organizational outcomes. In other words, when employees hold their company in a positive light, the company was far more likely to have higher employee retention, increased customer loyalty, and improved profitability.

Unexpectedly, the findings indicate that employee perceptions influence these outcomes more than the outcomes affect employee perceptions. It may be that profitability begins with positive employee perceptions of their employer, their job and their overall contribution. Thus, happy employees seem to be key to increased profitability.

Harter suggests that ‘helping employees see the ultimate outcomes the organization is working to achieve and how they play a role in achieving those outcomes’ may be the greatest benefit managers can provide to those they supervise.

By John Schinnerer, Ph.D.
Founder Guide To Self
Award-winning author (Guide to Self: The Beginner’s Guide to Happiness)
Award-winning blogger (Top 3 in positive psychology by PostRank, Top 100 by The Daily Reviewer)
Free 216 page eBook on latest ways to increase happiness from the inside out at http://www.Guidetoself.com

——————————————————————————–

Journal References:

1.     Manon Mireille LeBlanc, Julian Barling. Workplace Aggression. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 2004; 13 (1): 9 DOI: 10.1111/j.0963-7214.2004.01301003.x

2.     H. R. Bowles, M. Gelfand. Status and the Evaluation of Workplace Deviance. Psychological Science, 2009; 21 (1): 49 DOI: 10.1177/0956797609356509

3.     Paul E. Spector. Employee Control and Occupational Stress. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 2002; 11 (4): 133 DOI: 10.1111/1467-8721.00185

4.     J. K. Harter, F. L. Schmidt, J. W. Asplund, E. A. Killham, S. Agrawal. Causal Impact of Employee Work Perceptions on the Bottom Line of Organizations. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2010; 5 (4): 378 DOI: 10.1177/1745691610374589

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3. August 2010 by John Schinnerer.

July 30, 2010

Imagine technology that allows you to get inside the mind of a terrorist to know how, when and where the next attack will occur.

That’s not nearly as far-fetched as it seems, according to a new Northwestern University study.
Say, for purposes of illustration, that the chatter about an imminent terrorist attack is mounting, and specifics about the plan emerge, about weapons that will be used, the date of such a dreaded event and its location.

If the new test used by the Northwestern researchers had been used in such a real-world situation with the same type of outcome that occurred in the lab, the study suggests, culpability extracted from the chatter could be confirmed.

In other words, if the test conducted in the Northwestern lab ultimately is employed for such real-world scenarios, the research suggests, law enforcement officials ultimately may be able to confirm details about an attack - date, location, weapon — that emerges from terrorist chatter.

In the Northwestern study, when researchers knew in advance specifics of the planned attacks by the make-believe “terrorists,” they were able to correlate P300 brain waves to guilty knowledge with 100 percent accuracy in the lab, said J. Peter Rosenfeld, professor of psychology in Northwestern’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences.

For the first time, the Northwestern researchers used the P300 testing in a mock terrorism scenario in which the subjects are planning, rather than perpetrating, a crime. The P300 brain waves were measured by electrodes attached to the scalp of the make-believe “persons of interest” in the lab.

The most intriguing part of the study in terms of real-word implications, Rosenfeld said, is that even when the researchers had no advance details about mock terrorism plans, the technology was still accurate in identifying critical concealed information.
 

“Without any prior knowledge of the planned crime in our mock terrorism scenarios, we were able to identify 10 out of 12 terrorists and, among them, 20 out of 30 crime- related details,” Rosenfeld said. “The test was 83 percent accurate in predicting concealed knowledge, suggesting that our complex protocol could identify future terrorist activity.”

Rosenfeld is a leading scholar in the study of P300 testing to reveal concealed information. Basically, electrodes are attached to the scalp to record P300 brain activity — or brief electrical patterns in the cortex — that occur, according to the research, when meaningful information is presented to a person with “guilty knowledge.”

Research on the P300 testing emerged in the 1980s as a handful of scientists looked for an alternative to polygraph tests for lie detection. Since it was invented in the 1920s, polygraphy has been under fire, especially by academics, with critics insisting that such testing measures emotion rather than knowledge.

Rosenfeld and Northwestern graduate student John B. Meixner are co-investigators of the study, outlined in a paper titled “A Mock Terrorism Application of the P300-based Concealed Information Test,” published recently in the journal Psychophysiology.

Study participants (29 Northwestern students) planned a mock attack based on information they were given about bombs and other deadly weapons. They then had to write a letter detailing the rationale of their plan to encode the information in memory.

Then, with electrodes attached to their scalps, they looked at a computer display monitor that presented names of stimuli. The names of Boston, Houston, New York, Chicago and Phoenix, for example, were shuffled and presented at random. The city that study participants chose for the major terrorist attack evoked the largest P300 brainwave responses.

The test includes four classes of stimuli known as targets, non-targets, probes and irrelevants. Targets are sights, sounds or other stimuli the person being questioned already knows or is taught to recognize before the test. Probes are stimuli only a guilty suspect would be likely to know. And irrelevants are stimuli unlikely to be recognized.

“Since 9/11 preventing terrorism is a priority,” Rosenfeld said. “Sometimes you catch suspicious people entering a building. You suspect that they’re terrorists, and you have some leads from the chatter. You’ve heard they’re going to attack one city or another in one fashion or another on one date or another. Our hope is that our new complex protocol - different from the first P300 technology developed in the 1980s - will one day confirm such chatter in the real world.”

In the laboratory setting, study participants only had about 30 minutes to learn about the attack and to detail their plans. Thus, Rosenfeld said, encoding of guilty knowledge was relatively shallow. It is assumed that real terrorists rehearse details central to a planned attack repeatedly, leading to deeper encoding of related memories, he said. “We suspect if our test was employed in the real world the deeper encoding of planned crime-related knowledge could further boost detection of terrorist intentions.”

Provided by Northwestern University

The implications of this are far-reaching, disturbing and reassuring simultaneously.

Disturbing since this same procedure, when perfected, can be used with any of us (which is fine along as you’re staying away from involvement in destructive activities, OR activities which arouse guilt in you!).

Reassuring as it will provide a better means of discovering solid leads on imminent attacks by domestic threats. 

Far-reaching because this technology can and likely will be extended far beyond the scope of hunting terrorists. Easy rationalizations can be made to use it to fight drug trafficking and other major clear cut illegal operations. But where does the line get drawn once we get into lesser, gray areas?

Obviously, it will be many years before the technology is accessible and affordable enough to use ubiquitously. However, what about if the IRS uses it around issues of tax evasion? Or the courts use it in child custody evaluations? At what point do our civil liberties get breached?

This will be an ongoing issue as we head into the next decade because, like it or not, it’s coming!

Best,

John Schinnerer, Ph.D.

Positive Psychology Coach

Author of the award-winning Guide To Self: The Beginner’s Guide To Managing Emotion & Thought

Guide To Self, Inc.

913 San Ramon Valley Blvd. #280

Danville CA 94526

GuideToSelf.com - Web site

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11. June 2010 by John Schinnerer.

From Science Daily…

‘New Software to Measure Emotional Reactions to Web

ScienceDaily (June 9, 2010) — While most people have intuitive reactions to Web sites, a group of Canadian scientists is developing software that can actually measure those emotions and more.Aude Dufresne, a professor at the University of Montreal Department Of Communications, led a team of researchers that are designing a new software to evaluate the biological responses of Internet users.Simply put, the new software measures everything in Web users from body heat to eye movements to facial expressions and analyzes how they relate to online activities.

The technology is now being tested at the newly opened Bell User Experience Centre, which is located at the telecom giant’s Nun’s Island campus. Bell will use the University of Montreal technology to investigate how people react to Web sites. Such studies will provide companies with facts on how they can improve online experiences.

“With e-commerce and the multiplication of retail Web sites, it has become crucial for companies to consider the emotions of Web users,” says Professor Dufresne. “Our software is the first designed to measure emotions at conscious and preconscious levels, which will give companies a better sense of the likes and dislikes of Web users.”‘

For full article, click here.

Between the fMRI, neuromarketing and emotional measurement software, we have to be more mindful about our media consumption.

Cheers,

John Schinnerer, Ph.D.

Real Emotions for Real Men

Guide To Self, Inc.

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