Can you be happy when those around you are miserable? Can you be miserable when everyone around you is happy? These researchers were interested in how happiness spreads, and the impact of social networks on individual happiness, and changes over time.
The study draws on the Framingham Heart Study which was started in 1948, and draws on three generations of families. Researchers measured happiness with a validated four-item scale, and distinguished between three different types/qualities of friends.
They found that happy and unhappy folks do tend to “cluster” depending on different variables, so that “happy people tend to be connected to one another.” The study concludes that:
“People’s happiness depends on the happiness of others with whom they are connected. This provides further justification for seeing happiness, like health, as a collective phenomenon.”
See study at http://bmj.com/cgi/content/full/337/dec04_2/a2338.
Full cite: James H. Fowler & Nicholas A. Christakis, “Dynamic spread of happinesses in a large social network: longitudinal analysis over 20 years in the Framingham Heart Study,” BMJ 2008; 337:a2338.
June 29th, 2009 in
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Two things:
1. Mind Garden’s web system is currently going through a major upgrade which will be rolled out over the next few months. The new system will allow web administration users to add items and demographics to the MLQ; will give better tracking and creation of norms; and will eventually allow customers to build their own web surveys and reports. Currently, the MLQ system has a new “add raters” page which allows editing of the rater until the evaluation is started; it also gives the ability to drag and drop rater names and emails into an input box. New changes and announcements will be posted here….
2. If you are interested in belonging to an Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire (MLQ) Coaches and Consultants professional group, there is a new one forming on LinkedIn. If you would like to join, just send an email to info@mlqcoaching.com or donna@leadership-solutions.info. The purpose of the group is to:
- Share positive experiences with clients - things that work especially well
- Get input on issues and concerns
- Stay on top of new research studies
- Share effective sales tools and techniques - particularly evidence of the improved business results from using Transformational Leadership behaviors
- Learn about improvements to the MLQ over time
- Share practical applications in the real world
2.
June 24th, 2009 in
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How do you know your body is your own? How do you perceive it separately from the rest of the world? Seeing, feeling, knowing? Psychologists have long used illusions to explore the basic processes at work in normal perception. The “Rubber Hand Illusion,” for example, gives people the sense that a prosthetic hand is their own, suggesting that a web of “temporal and spatial patterns of visual and somatosensory signals” are at play in our bodily perception.
In this study, neuroscience researchers at the University of Stockholm, Sweden were able to use perceptual illusions and simultaneous multisensory information to manipulate subjects into believing that an entire artificial body was their own. They found:
Our experiments reveal that healthy volunteers can indeed experience other people’s bodies, as well as artificial bodies, as being their own. This effect is so robust that, while experiencing being in another person’s body, a participant can face his or her biological body and shake hands with it without breaking the illusion. The existence of this illusion (and the identification of the factors triggering it) represents a major advance because it informs us about the processes that make us feel that we own our body in its entirety…more
Full cite: Valeria I. Petkova & H. Henrik Ehrsson (2008), “If I Were You: Perceptual Illusion of Body Swapping,”PLoS ONE 3(12):e3832 or go here
We might be shooting ourselves in the foot here, but we think this 2002 article by Tom Buchanon offers a thoughtful and still-relevant discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of online assessment. Issues include the benefits of increased accessibility, the possibility of increased candor and freer disclosure in an online environment, assessment of instrument validity, gender differentials, and potential problems.
“Evidence of online tests to date have indicated that they can be valid and useful instruments. However, there is evidence that their psychometric properties cannot be taken for granted. When an established, traditional test is converted for use on the Internet, one cannot simply assume that it will remain an adequate measure of the same constructs or that the published norms will be usable with the new version of the instument…” (152)
Please feel free to offer your thoughts and comments by clicking on the “Comment” button below.
Full cite: Tom Buchanon (2002), “Online Assessment: Desirable or Dangerous,” Professional Psychology: Research and Practice 33:2, 148-154.
Also see Buchanan, Johnson & Goldberg (2005), “Implementing a Five-Factor Personality Inventory for Use on the Internet” European Journal of Psychological Assessment 21:2, 115-127.
A fascinating new study by Agnes Kovacs and Jacques Mehler 
offers solid evidence that bilingualism enhances cognitive control in children. Despite popular myths about the need to “teach one language first”, a growing literature shows that bilingualism actually improves a child’s long-term language development.
The study authors tested the ability of 7-month-old pre-lingual babies to modify “a previously learned response and found that those raised in a bilingual home were able to do this, whereas babies from a monolingual home were not.
Dozens of babies learned that when they heard certain nonsense words, a puppet would always appear on the same side of a screen. All the babies - whether from monolingual or bilingual homes - soon learned to anticipate the appearance of the puppet, and shifted their eyes promptly to the appropriate side of the screen.
During the second phase of the experiment, the location of the puppet moved to the other side of the screen. Crucially, the babies from bilingual homes managed to learn to anticipate the new location, but the babies with monolingual parents did not - they were stuck on the previously learned response. The bilingual babies, by contrast, appeared to have the cognitive control needed to inhibit the previous response.
This difference between the two groups of babies persisted even when the task was made easier by using different nonsense words for when the puppet changed location, and it also persisted when visual stimuli, rather than spoken words, were used to cue puppet appearance.
The researchers said their findings suggested there’s an early mental benefit of being raised in a bilingual environment - one that’s apparent even before a baby can utter any words of their own. “Just processing two languages and having to deal with the representations of each of them is sufficient for enhancing cognitive control,” the researchers said.
Full story at BPS Research Digest
What do baseball players, skydivers, preindustrial fishermen, and first-year MBA students have in common?
Researchers have found that each of these groups, when feeling a lack of control over their environment, are more likely to perceive patterns where none may exist. Based on this research, psychologists Whitson and Galinsky[2008] conducted a series of six interrelated experiments aimed at isolating “lack of control” as an influence on perceptual processes. The experiments also include a values affirmation exercise component as a way to break the connection between loss of control and illusory pattern perception.
The authors do indeed demonstrate that “participants who lacked control were more likely to perceive a variety of illusory patterns, including seeing images in noise, forming illusory correlations in stock market information, perceiving conspiracies, and developing superstitions. “ They conclude that “lacking control motivates pattern perception: Experiencing a loss of control led participants to desire more structure and to perceive illusory patterns. The need to be and feel in control is so strong that individuals will produce a pattern from noise to return the world to a predictable state.”
Listen to a podcast interview about the study with Jennifer Whitson here
Read abstract here. Full cite: Science, 3 October 2008:Vol. 322. no. 5898, pp. 115 - 117 DOI: 10.1126/science.1159845
This fascinating article by Joshua Wolf Shenk at the Atlantic discusses the life’s work of psychiatric researcher George Vaillant, who tracked 268 Harvard undergraduate men over a period of seventy years, tracking their mental and physical well-being. The objective – What makes a good life?
For 72 years, researchers at Harvard have been examining this question, following 268 men who entered college in the late 1930s through war, career, marriage and divorce, parenthood and grandparenthood, and old age. Here, for the first time, a journalist gains access to the archive of one of the most comprehensive longitudinal studies in history. Its contents, as much literature as science, offer profound insight into the human condition—and into the brilliant, complex mind of the study’s longtime director, George Vaillant.
via What Makes Us Happy? - The Atlantic (June 2009).
Here’s the fun and interesting “Authentic Happiness website”, courtesy of Dr. Bud Seligman at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Seligman is Director of the Positive Psychology Center at Penn, which focuses on the empirical study of “positive emotions, strengths-based character, and healthy institutions.”
The Authentic Happiness website offers a substantial collection of online questionnaires and resources in areas of emotion, engagement, meaning, and life satisfaction. These include the Authentic Happiness Inventory, the Transgression Motivations Questionnaire, the Work-Life Questionnaire, the Close Relationships Questionnaire, and the Satisfaction with Life Scale, among many others. All instruments are free once you register.
Dr. Seligman’s work was been well documented in the July-August issue of American Psychologist (”Positive Psychology of Progress: Empirical Validation of Interventions”), available here
The forgiveness intervention study, published in Psychology and Health 24:1 (2009), 11-27) shows an improvement in cardiac functioning (not to normal levels, but nonetheless statistically significant) for male cardiac patients who received forgiveness therapy compared to control-group participants who had a cardiac-health approac).
Forgiveness is defined as a person’s individual act of “offering mercy, compassion, and empathy towards an offender,” as distinguished from reconciliation (negotiated resolution) or making excuses. This is the first study ever published showing a cause-and-effect relationship between learning to forgive and experiencing a statistically significant improvement in a vital organ of the body.
See the study here. Full cite: Walman, Martina A., Douglas C. Russell, Catherine T. Coyle, Robert D. Enright, Anthony C. Holter and Christopher M. Swoboda (2008) “The effects of a forgiveness intervention on patients with coronary artery disease,” Psychology & Health
We mentioned last week the Takahasi study which found that where envy activates pain-related neural circuitry, the experience of schadenfreude (delight at someone else’s misfortune) activates reward-related circuitry. Elsewhere in that same journal of Science, Matthew Lieberman and Naomi Eisenberger discuss the implications for our understanding of the brain and neural systems responsible for pain and pleasure. It is surprising, they note, that “social pains and pleasures activate the… same networks [as physical pain]. This link, they argue, “between social and physical pains and pleasures adds to the growing chorus of neurocognitive findings that point to the critical importance of the social world for the surviving and thriving of humans…” (891). See the full discussion here
Full cite: Matthew D. Lieberman and Naomi I. Eisenberger, “Pains and Pleasures of Social Life,” Science 323 (13 February 2009), 890-91.
Dear Customers, Colleagues and Friends,
We at Mind Garden would like to thank you for participating in our website and utilizing our products. As the Mind Garden community continues to expand globally, we have been exploring new ways for you to communicate with your colleagues about how you are using Mind Garden products to help individuals, communities, and organizations.
We greatly appreciate your work, and would like to announce a new tool intended to support your work and foster communication among all of us.
The Mind Garden blog, http://blog.mindgarden.com will post research news relating to our instruments, communication from authors, and fascinating psychological insights that we have learned. It provides you with a way to dialogue with colleagues, authors, and Mind Gardeners.
Since we feel “life is too short,” we will also include some humor and original photography that we enjoy.
We hope you will take a look and participate at http://blog.mindgarden.com and keep us bookmarked on your browser. We especially encourage you to use the “comments” section on each post to give feedback and suggestions. Finally, look for the “Subscribe2″ button in the right column if you’d like us to email you whenever there is a new post.
Again, thank you for your participation!
The Mind Gardeners
Most of us know what envy feels like. The Germans have another related term, schadenfreude, to mean that perverse pleasure we feel when someone we envy experiences misfortune, or “falls from grace.” Both terms are important for what they reveal about our personal life, and the way we relate to others around us.
A recent study by Takahashi et al, sought to put scientific measurement to the experiences of envy and schadenfreude. Takahashi and crew used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to study the role of social comparison in the neurocognitive mechanisms of both envy and schadenfreude. They found a clear correlation between envy of a person and magnitude of schadenfreude, with interesting activation patterns in the dorsal Anterior cingulate cortex (dACC).
“Considering the role of the dACC in conflict-monitoring, the association between envy and dACC activation suggests that envy is a condition in which information recognized by social comparison conflicts with positive self-concept.” (19)
Full cite:
See Hidehiko Takahashi et al, “When Your Gain Is My Pain and Your Pain Is My Gain: Neural Correlates of Envy and Schadenfreude,” Science 323, 13 Feb 2009.
May 5th, 2009 in
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These are some unique questions that get at the heart of an employment environment. Question one is:
Who will I learn from and how?
Is career development outsourced to training companies that know little about the specific environment? Does the company tell employees “You’re responsible for your own career,” avoiding involvement?
Or does the employer have a mentoring culture where more experienced people gracefully accept the responsibility of helping new people develop? Does it have a peer learning model where people are expected to take time to help each other learn? Do managers share the responsibility for career development with employees? Is mentoring ever tipped upside-down so that senior people learn new skills, such as computer proficiency, from younger people?”
See “Powerful Questions to Ask at a Job Interview ” on Positive Psychology News Daily
April 29th, 2009 in
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Just like it sounds. Hutcherson, Seppala & Gross did a simple experiment with a loving-kindness meditation, finding that “even just a few minutes of meditation increased feelings of social connection and positivity toward strangers on both explicit and implicit levels.” They found that a simple 7-min exercise in “cultivating positive regard” brought changes in positivity toward strangers, others, and the self. Changes in mood explained part of the results, but mood alone did not account for the implicit effects.
The researchers anticipate several avenues for future research, including implicit or explicit effects of LKM to social behavior; issues mechanisms that make the manipulation successful; and exploring generalization effects of LKM.
Read the full study here
Full cite: “Loving-Kindness Meditation Increases Social Connectedness” (2008), Emotion 8:5, 720-724.
April 22nd, 2009 in
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Wow. University of Colorado psychologist Geoff Cohen has found that a simple psychological affirmation of values boosts minority student performance in the classroom by reducing stress. The effect was both immediate and consistent over time. The British Psychological Society digest reports:
Fear of failure at school can be crippling, especially for ethnic minority students. Research shows it’s all too common for them to fear that their own poor performance will reinforce negative stereotypes. Unfortunately this anxiety only serves to undermine their achievement, thus perpetuating the cycle. Now Geoff Cohen and colleagues have shown a simple psychological intervention based on self-affirmation can help prevent this downward spiral, leading to academic benefits up to two years’ later.
The intervention involved twelve-year-old students at an American school choosing one or more values, such as relationships with friends or family, music, art, politics, and so on, and then spending 10 minutes writing about why those values were important to them. Doing this has been shown in past research to reduce stress and to bolster people’s ability to withstand the threat of failure….–Story continues at BPS Research Digest
See Geoff Cohen’s home website
Full cite: “Recursive Processes in Self-Affirmation: Intervening to Close the Minority Achievement Gap,” Science 324 (17 April 2009): 400-403.
April 20th, 2009 in
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Mind Garden president Robb Most presented at the 10th Anniversary Global Conference of the International Leadership Association in Los Angeles on November 12-15, 2008. In a workshop titled “Transformational and Charismatic Leader Development Using the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire (MLQ) and Social Skills Inventory (SSI),” Robb presented along with conference tri-chair Ron Riggio (Kravis Leadership Institute, Claremont McKenna College, California) on these “two well-validated instruments as tools for leader development.”
See Conference proceedings here. Robb’s presentation is also available on the Mind Garden website becoming a Transformational Leadership consultant.
In this 2003 study, Davidson et al explore some of the long-term changes in brain function resulting from meditation practices (not just those changes occurring during meditation itself). Researchers measured the subjects’ positive and negative affect and anxiety before and after meditation training using the Spielberger State-Trait Anxiety Inventory. They found a significant decrease in negative affect over time, with interesting ramifications for central and prefrontal activation assymetries, as well as effects of meditation on the “in vivo measure of immune function.”
See article here or full cite: Davidson, Kabat-Zinn, Schumacher, et al, “Alterations in Brain and Immune Function Produced by Mindfulness Meditation,” Psychosomatic Medicine 65: 564-570 (2003).
Also see Davidson’s wonderful website at
http://psyphz.psych.wisc.edu/web/
This classic article by John Krumboltz offers solid suggestions for career counseling:
“Clients generally come to counseling because they are unhappy, frustrated, distressed, and/or engaged in some self-defeating pattern of behavior. They want to feel better. Despite the years of work by Ellis, Beck, Burns, Dorn and others, many clients are surprised to learn that to feel better they will have to change the way they think. So counselors will frequently need to provide a rationale to explain how positive thinking can lead to happier emotions and more constructive behavior.
There are three steps to challenging troublesome career beliefs: (1) Identifying the troublesome belief, (2) Considering alternative ways of viewing the underlying problem, and (3) Taking action incompatible with the troublesome belief. Each step includes some specific techniques. All of these techniques empower clients by providing them with information or enabling them to make their own discoveries.”
See full article at ERIC Digest: Challenging Troublesome Career Beliefs. ERIC Digest..
Read an excerpt from “Counseling Older Persons” by Andrea Dixon Rayle and Jane E. Myers, in Counseling Multicultural and Diverse Populations: Strategies for Practitioners, ed. Nicholas A. Vacc, Susan B. DeVaney, & Johnston M. Brendel (Psychology Press, 2003, 355 pgs) at Google Books
Also see the annotated bibliography on Counseling Older Persons by Jane E. Myers and Valerie Schwiebert, at Greenwood Publishing.
This is an annotated compilation of 481 books, journal articles, dissertations, and documents arranged in nine topical chapters and various subsections dealing with the normative experience of aging, persons with impairments, needs and services, special situations, counseling and counselors, ethics, practica and internships, and pharmacology. Author and subject indexes make the guide easy for academic and professional use in the fields of gerontology, psychology, and adult education.
March 26th, 2009 in
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Here’s another handy review and discussion of the ACL by the American Assoc of Counseling Education:
The ACL is a broad-based, versatile personality assessment tool that can be used in a variety of contexts with adults and adolescents. A clear strength of the ACL is the variety of ways in which the adjective list can be used to generate profiles describing personally salient perceptions of different phenomena: self-personality, ratings of others’ personalities, personalities of famous people, ratings of ideal personality, stereotypes, characterizations of groups of people or cultures of cities.
The review continues here
Savita Abrahams, M.S. and Richard S. Balkin, Ph.D., at the Association for Assessment in Counseling and Education offer this review of the 5FWel:
The 5F-WEL had sound psychometric qualities developed through an evidence-based model. The test is easy to use and has reasonable time limits. Additionally, a guide to discussion and interpretation of results is provided in the manual. At this time, there are no reviews of the 5FWEL due to the recent publication of this instrument. Care should be taken in using the 5FWEL-E as the research is quite limited with this version. Additionally, care should be taken with the interpretation of scores for minorities, especially the 5F-WEL-T, in which limited information was available regarding ethnic differences. Overall, 5F-WEL may be very useful in assessing client wellness and designing strategies to improve on wellness.
See full review at http://www.theaaceonline.com/wel.pdf
This medical news seems relevant to Robb’s post about Positivity, offering support for the connection between emotional and physical health:
WASHINGTON – How the heart handles anger seems to predict who’s at risk for a life-threatening irregular heartbeat. Negative emotions like hostility and depression have long been considered risks for developing heart disease, and deaths from cardiac arrest rise after disasters such as earthquakes. But research released Monday goes a step farther, uncovering a telltale pattern in the EKGs of certain heart patients when they merely recall a maddening event — an anger spike that foretold bad news. Read the rest of this entry »
March 14th, 2009 in
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S.R. Tilton reviews the STAI for the Association for Assessment in Counseling and Education. Findings conclude:
Validity: In an example of its construct validity, the STAI was used in a study with multiple other assessments to study the correlation between Panic Disorder and right-hemisphere brain over activation (Smeets et al., 1996). The study was conducted with twenty-two patients who met the Panic Disorder criteria. The STAI-state and STAI-trait were found to be positively correlated with the Anxiety Sensitivity Index (Peterson & Reiss, 1987), and positively correlated with the Conjugate Lateral Eye Movements test (De Jong, Merckelbach & Muris, 1990) results. These results reinforced the convergent validity of the STAI for the purpose of this research study. Concurrent validity between the STAI-T Anxiety Scale and to other scales that measure anxiety. The Anxiety Scale Questionnaire (ASQ) and Manifest Anxiety Scales (MAS) have positive correlation of scores (.73 and .85) with the STAI –T, which is close enough to show reliability but different enough to be useful in its anxiety determination (Spielberger, et al, 1995).
Reliability: Test-retest reliability of the STAI was evaluated using 29 male undergraduate students before and after a stressful social analogue situation (Rule & Traver, 1983). The first test administration occurred approximately two weeks before the stressful event, and the retest was administered after the analogue social situation. The study results supported previous studies using the STAI, in which state anxiety increased from the test to the retest while the trait anxiety remained at similar levels before and after (Rule & Traver, 1983). According to the test-retest correlations provided by Spielberger et al. (1970,) the state anxiety should have a .54 (state) and the .86 (trait) correlation. Rule’s and Tarver’s findings of .40 (state) and .86 (trait) were similar to the reliability coefficients reported by the test author. The similarities of the study and the author’s correlations emphasize the STAI’s reliability.
Full review at http://www.theaaceonline.com/stai.pdf
Barbara Frederickson has a new book in the domain of positive psychology. I have been a huge fan of Barbara’s research and her broaden and build theory of emotion.
Here are some tips from her research:
- Positive emotions literally expand the scope of your vision, allowing you to see both the forest and the trees.
- When people feel positive emotions, things that divide people - including racial differences - melt away.
- If you increase your daily diet of positive emotions today, you can be better off next season, mentally, psychologically, socially, even physically.
- Just as negativity sparks downward spirals that can lead to misery, clinical depression and illness, positivity sparks upward spirals that open people’s minds, build their resources for handling life’s demands, and promote health.
- Even though positive emotions are often far milder than negative emotions, they are the key to rebounding from adversity.
- Flourishing is distinct from mere happiness - it entails not only feeling good, but also doing good, adding value to those around you.
- A ratio of positivity to negativity of 3 to 1 is the tipping point that predicts whether or not people flourish.
Psychological Capital (Oxford University Press, 2007), by Fred Luthans, Carolyn M. Youssef, and Bruce J. Avolio, introduces both a significant stream of research and an important framework for the application of positive psychology to organizations. The stream of research involves a construct they call “PsyCap” — a composite construct made up of self-efficacy, hope, optimism, and resiliency. The framework suggests that the application of positive psychology to organizational success and leadership requires support and development of multiple interrelating and mutually supportive constructs that have theoretical and empirical research behind them, valid measurement techniques, are state-like and therefore can be developed, and have been shown to impact performance.
By Dave Shearon - Review continues at pos-psych.com
I have always been a believer that social rules are relaxed when the environment has a press toward rule breaking. This excellent article published in Science (December 12, 2008) evidenced this in a naturalistic setting.
The Spreading of Disorder
Kees Keizer, Siegwart Lindenberg, Linda Steg
Imagine that the neighborhood you are living in is covered with graffiti, litter, and unreturned shopping carts. Would this reality cause you to litter more, trespass, or even steal? A thesis known as the broken windows theory suggests that signs of disorderly and petty criminal behavior trigger more disorderly and petty criminal behavior, thus causing the behavior to spread. This may cause neighborhoods to decay and the quality of life of its inhabitants to deteriorate. We found that, when people observe that others violated a certain social norm or legitimate rule, they are more likely to violate other norms or rules, which causes disorder to spread.
–Science 12 December 2008: Vol. 322. no. 5908, pp. 1681 - 1685
