10. December 2010 by John Schinnerer.

How Anger is the New Sex

Switch off the Housewives they’re making you crazy. How to keep your temper in an angry age.

WebMD Feature from “Marie Claire” MagazineBy Joanne Chen

Whether it’s Wall Street bonuses, the Gulf oil fiasco, or cultural icons (David Letterman! Tiger Woods! Al Gore?!) flagrantly cheating on their wives, Americans have more reason than ever to be pissed off - a sentiment Charles Speilberger, Ph.D., University of South Florida psychologist, says we’re also quicker than ever to express. As coeditor of the recently published International Handbook of Anger - just one of the new releases examining our current age of rage - he should know. Because not only are there more reasons to get angry today, there are more outlets for it as well, from social media to reality TV to books, including Koren Zailckas’ tellingly titled memoir, Fury, out this month. Anger, it seems, is the new sex: It sells. And none of us, especially women, can get enough - just check out the bonanza ratings enjoyed by any reality show in which there’s even the potential for a hissy fit. So how will we ever calm down, and, more importantly, do we even want to? Take a deep breath (or two), and we’ll tell you.
WHAT’S MAKING YOU MAD
(And How to Stop It)

Once upon a time, we told each other off in person. Discussions grew heated, doors were slammed, and we moved on. Now, with so much of our daily communication done via e-mail, texting, or Facebook, many of the impulse controls we’d normally employ in confrontations have gone out the window. “Electronic media disinhibit the expression of anger,” says Michael Potegal, Ph.D., associate professor of pediatrics and neurology at the University of Minnesota. Alone, typing angry thoughts to a friend or a loved one, we don’t have the benefit of seeing a facial reaction, reading body language, or hearing a voice - we’re wearing conversational blinders, so we end up typing things we’d never say in person.

This, in turn, breeds an anger-making dynamic all its own. Scott Wetzler, Ph.D., department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences professor at New York City’s Montefiore Medical Center, calls this sort of one-sided expression of emotion “venting.” When we e-mail or text, which allows us to ignore the other side of the argument, “we feel justified; the more justified we feel, the angrier we get.” What’s more, typing a thoughtful response to your boyfriend in the heat of an argument is particularly tough when shorthand expressions (whatev!) roll so easily off the fingers. Soon, our inbox and Twitter feeds can devolve into rage-filled echo chambers, leaving us feeling vulnerable and guilty over things we wish we could un-type.

And according to University of Minnesota researchers, even cell-phone communication is fraught with risk. Chatting as we run errands may make us feel like great multitaskers, but the reality is that it means we take longer to react. Add poor sound quality and other distractions into the mix, and you have a recipe for misinterpretations and unintended interruptions - all of which, researchers say, lead to “hurt feelings, conflict, and misunderstandings.” What’s more, the fallout from this is often hardest on women: Says Ray Novaco, Ph.D., professor of psychology and social behavior at the University of California, Irvine, women relive angry incidents more, and stay angry longer, than men do.

FINDING PEACE IN AN ANGRY WORLD
 

Turn off the TV. In a University of Maryland study, people who chose reading over watching TV were more likely to describe themselves as “very happy” than those who did the opposite, watching TV more than reading.

Live in 3-D. Save e-mails and cell-phone calls for appointments and reservations, never for heart-to-hearts. And always keep Twitter-talk light and conflict-free.

Breathe. Delay responding to an e-mail or text message that annoys you. Take five breaths; call when you have time to talk calmly. Better yet, take a night to sleep on it. Never, ever send a work e-mail in anger.

Sleep. “Irritability is a symptom of insomnia,” notes Nancy Molitor, Ph.D., a clinical psychologist at Northwestern University. The message: Snooze more and you’ll be in better control of your emotions - and your tongue.

Be grateful. Make a daily list of everything you’re grateful for as a way to dispel anger, which Novaco says is the “absence of appreciation.”

Move. “The chemicals released during anger can feel like muscular tension that needs releasing,” says Rich Pfeiffer, Ph.D., a Sedona, Arizona-based psychologist. Hit the gym to keep your limbs loose and your mind open.

Take action. Anger strikes when we feel powerless. Whether you’re outraged by disease in Africa or the latest eco-disaster, join a volunteer group to do something about it. Your mood will improve, and you may even have an impact on the problem.

For the full article at WebMD, click here.

For more information on how you can turn down the volume on your anger with the latest scientifically-proven anger management tools, visit http://drjohnsblog.wordpress.com for some free online anger management classes!

To life, love and laughter,

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

 P.S. For a free PDF copy of the award-winning self-help book, Guide To Self: The Beginner’s Guide to Managing Emotion And Thought, visit http://www.GuidetoSelf.com and enter your name and email. There are dozens of tools included to turn down the volume on anger along with the latest methods for anger management.

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27. November 2010 by John Schinnerer.

From the ubiquitous ScienceDaily.com… 

Upper-Class People Have Trouble Recognizing Others’ Emotions

ScienceDaily (Nov. 23, 2010) — Upper-class people have more educational opportunities, greater financial security, and better job prospects than people from lower social classes, but that doesn’t mean they’re more skilled at everything. A new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds surprisingly, that lower-class people are better at reading the emotions of others.

The researchers were inspired by observing that, for lower-class people, success depends more on how much they can rely on other individuals. For example, if you can’t afford to buy support services, such as daycare service for your children, you have to rely on your neighbors or relatives to watch the kids while you attend classes or run errands, says Michael W. Kraus of the University of California-San Francisco. He co-wrote the study with Stéphane Côté of the University of Toronto and Dacher Keltner of the University of California-Berkeley.

To learn more about HOW to read emotions properly, visit http://www.GuideToSelf.com for a FREE copy of the award-winning book, Guide To Self: The Beginner’s Guide to Managing Emotion and Thought by U.C. Berkeley-trained emotion expert, John Schinnerer, Ph.D. Just share your email address and name for a free, instant PDF copy of the 216 page book!

One experiment used volunteers who worked at a university. Some had graduated from college and others had not; researchers used educational level as a proxy for social class. The volunteers did a test of emotion perception, in which they were instructed to look at pictures of faces and indicate which emotions each face was displaying. People with more education performed worse on the task than people with less education. In another study, university students who were of higher social standing (determined from each student’s self-reported perceptions of his or her family’s socioeconomic status) had a more difficult time accurately reading the emotions of a stranger during a group job interview.

These results suggest that people of upper-class status aren’t very good at recognizing the emotions other people are feeling. The researchers speculate that this is because they can solve their problems, like the daycare example, without relying on others — they aren’t as dependent on the people around them.

A final experiment found that, when people were made to feel that they were at a lower social class than they actually were, they got better at reading emotions. This shows that “it’s not something ingrained in the individual,” Kraus says. “It’s the cultural context leading to these differences.” He says this work helps show that stereotypes about the classes are wrong. “It’s not that a lower-class person, no matter what, is going to be less intelligent than an upper-class person. It’s all about the social context the person lives in, and the specific challenges the person faces. If you can shift the context even temporarily, social class differences in any number of behaviors can be eliminated.”

To life, love and laughter,

 John Schinnerer, Ph.D.

Founder of Guide to Self, Inc.

http://drjohnsblog.wordpress.com Hot blog on the latest in anger management tips, tools and tricks

@johnschin Follow john on Twitter

Story Source:
The above story is reprinted (with editorial adaptations by ScienceDaily staff) from materials provided by Association for Psychological Science.
________________________________________
Journal Reference:
1. M. W. Kraus, S. Cote, D. Keltner. Social Class, Contextualism, and Empathic Accuracy. Psychological Science, 2010; 21 (11): 1716 DOI: 10.1177/0956797610387613

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20. November 2010 by John Schinnerer.

Fantastic and uplifting reminder about the unifying power and necessity of compassion in today’s world. Compassion is the antidote to anger.

Have a compassionate weekend!

To life, love and laughter,

John Schinnerer, Ph.D.
Founder Guide to Self, Inc.
http://www.GuideToSelf.com

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13. November 2010 by John Schinnerer.

From Ken Pope’s listserv…

Subject: recommended: *Science*: “A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind” by Matthew Killingsworth & Dan Gilbert at Harvard University

Today’s new issue of the American association for the Advancement of Science’s journal *Science* (Vol. 330. no. 6006) includes an article: “A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind.”

The authors are Matthew A. Killingsworth and Daniel T. Gilbert.

Here are some excerpts:

Many philosophical and religious traditions teach that happiness is to be found by living in the moment, and practitioners are trained to resist mind wandering and “to be here now.”

These traditions suggest that a wandering mind is an unhappy mind.

Are they right?

Laboratory experiments have revealed a great deal about the cognitive and neural bases of mind wandering (3-7), but little about its emotional consequences in everyday life.

The most reliable method for investigating real-world emotion is experience sampling, which involves contacting people as they engage in their everyday activities and asking them to report their thoughts, feelings, and actions at that moment.

<snip>

We solved this problem by developing a Web application for the iPhone (Apple Incorporated, Cupertino, California), which we used to create an unusually large database of real-time reports of thoughts, feelings, and actions of a broad range of people as they went about their daily activities.

The application contacts participants through their iPhones at random moments during their waking hours, presents them with questions, and records their answers to a database at www.trackyourhappiness.org.

The database currently contains nearly a quarter of a million samples from about 5000 people from 83 different countries who range in age from 18 to 88 and who collectively represent every one of 86 major occupational categories.

To find out how often people’s minds wander, what topics they wander to, and how those wanderings affect their happiness, we analyzed samples from 2250 adults (58.8% male, 73.9% residing in the United States, mean age of 34 years) who were randomly assigned to answer a happiness question (”How are you feeling right now?”) answered on a continuous sliding scale from very bad (0) to very good (100), an activity question (”What are you doing right

now?”) answered by endorsing one or more of 22 activities adapted from the day reconstruction method (10, 11), and a mind-wandering question (”Are you thinking about something other than what you’re currently doing?”) answered with one of four options: no; yes, something pleasant; yes, something neutral; or yes, something unpleasant.

Our analyses revealed three facts.

First, people’s minds wandered frequently, regardless of what they were doing.

Mind wandering occurred in 46.9% of the samples and in at least 30% of the samples taken during every activity except making love.

The frequency of mind wandering in our real-world sample was considerably higher than is typically seen in laboratory experiments.

<snip>

Second, multilevel regression revealed that people were less happy when their minds were wandering than when they were not [slope (b) = -8.79, P < 0.001], and this was true during all activities, including the least enjoyable.

Although people’s minds were more likely to wander to pleasant topics (42.5% of samples) than to unpleasant topics (26.5% of samples) or neutral topics (31% of samples), people were no happier when thinking about pleasant topics than about their current activity (b = -0.52, not

significant) and were considerably unhappier when thinking about neutral topics (b = -7.2, P < 0.001) or unpleasant topics (b = -23.9, P < 0.001) than about their current activity (Fig. 1, bottom).

Although negative moods are known to cause mind wandering (13), time-lag analyses strongly suggested that mind wandering in our sample was generally the cause, and not merely the consequence, of unhappiness (12).

Third, what people were thinking was a better predictor of their happiness than was what they were doing.

The nature of people’s activities explained 4.6% of the within-person variance in happiness and 3.2% of the between-person variance in happiness, but mind wandering explained 10.8% of within-person variance in happiness and 17.7% of between-person variance in happiness.

The variance explained by mind wandering was largely independent of the variance explained by the nature of activities, suggesting that the two were independent influences on happiness.

In conclusion, a human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind.

[end excerpts]

The author note provides the following contact info:

<mkilling@fas.harvard.edu>.

Ken Pope

To life, love and laughter,

John Schinnerer, Ph.D.

Founder of Guide to Self

P.S. For a free PDF copy of John’s award-winning self-help book on ways to focus the mind, turn down negative emotions, and turn up positive emotions simply visit http://www.GuideToSelf.com, click on the yellow book icon on the left side of the page, and enter your email and name. You will be granted instant access to 216 pages of life-improving scientifically-proven tools to focus your mind!

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12. November 2010 by John Schinnerer.

From Science Daily…

ScienceDaily (Nov. 10, 2010) — Couples who score well on a simple test of numeracy ability accumulate more wealth by middle age than couples who score poorly on such a test, according to a new study of married couples in the United States.

Researchers found that when both spouses answered three numeracy-related questions correctly, family wealth averaged $1.7 million, while among couples where neither spouse answered any questions correctly the average household wealth was $200,000. Numeracy is the ability to reason with numbers and other mathematical concepts, and are skills typically learned during school.

“We examined several cognitive skills and found that a simple test that checks a person’s numeracy skills was a good predictor of who would be a better family financial decision maker,” said James P. Smith, a co-author of the study and Distinguished Chair in Labor Markets and Demographic Studies at the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit research organization. The other two authors of the study are John McArdle of the University of Southern California and Robert Willis of the University of Michigan.

Researchers found that choosing the wrong person as a family’s primary financial decision maker can have consequences. While families choose the less-numerate spouse less than 20 percent of the time, when this does happen total household wealth is lower.

The findings are published in the November edition of The Economic Journal.

The study relied on a sample of married couples from the Health and Retirement Survey, a nationally representative survey of Americans at least 50 years old that includes high-quality measurement of family wealth and tests of cognitive ability of both husbands and wives. The Health and Retirement Survey is funded by the National Institute on Aging.

Researchers say the skills needed to make successful investment choices are among the most cognitively demanding that a family has to make, especially as they get older and assume greater control of decisions about their wealth, pensions and health care.

The new study is one of the first to examine who makes these financial decisions for a household, how that selection is influenced by couple’s personal attributes and the relative cognitive abilities of both wives and husbands.

In addition to studying numeracy skills, the study also examined the impact that other cognitive skills, including memory retrieval and intact mental status, may have on financial outcomes. Researchers found the other cognitive functions studied had far less influence on a household’s wealth.

Other findings from the study include:

• As the numeracy score of each spouse rose, the percent of a family’s portfolio held in stocks increased.

• A man was the financial decision maker in 62 percent of the households studied. This male preference was particularly pronounced when the husband was older and more educated than his wife.

• Selection of the husband as the financial decision maker was more sensitive to a husband’s numeracy ability than it was to the numeracy skills of the wife. Even when a husband scored zero in his numeracy test, there was essentially a 50-50 chance that he would still be selected as the financial decision maker. This male bias in choosing the financial decision maker has been declining over time so that it is smaller among younger couples in this age range.

The research was supported by grants from the National Institute on Aging to RAND, the University of Southern California and the University of Michigan.

1. James P. Smith, John J. McArdle, Robert Willis. Financial Decision Making and Cognition in a Family Context. The Economic Journal, 2010; 120 (548): F363 DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-0297.2010.02394.x

RAND Corporation (2010, November 10). Couple’s numeracy skills linked to greater family wealth, study finds. ScienceDaily.

Study your math! Study your math! Study your math!

To life, love, laughter and wealth!

John Schinnerer, Ph.D.

Founder Guide to Self, Inc.

For a free PDF copy of the award-winning self-improvement book on positive psychology and optimal human functioning, Guide to Self: The Beginner’s Guide to Managing Emotion and Thought, visit http://www.GuideToSelf.com and enter your name and email address for 216 pages of the latest tools to manage your mind. This book includes tools to turn down sadness, stress, anxiety, guilt and anger. What’s more it includes tools to turn up the volume on curiosity, joy, pride, love, compassion and relaxation. It’s the key to your courage, success, wealth and happiness.

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