When it comes to intelligence, the whole can indeed be greater than the sum of its parts. A new study documents the existence of collective intelligence among groups of people who cooperate well, showing that such intelligence extends beyond the cognitive abilities of the groups' individual members, and that the tendency to cooperate effectively is linked to the number of women in a group. So that when it comes to intelligence, the best of all groups is a group that includes a woman. You can read the details here.
It’s a great piece of research and very welcome because we need to be reminded of what we have always known, expressed in the Zulu proverb which heads this post. With the important proviso - that to get anywhere (worth getting), you need women as well as men. I knew that.
Annabel
Take note of that last para, Andy Gray, Richard Keys and Katie Hopkins.
Lucy
1/28/2011
IF YOU WANT TO GO FAST, GO ALONE. IF YOU WANT TO GO FAR, GO TOGETHER
1/27/2011
Stay Happy, Live Longer
The idea that feeling good may be good for your health is not new. Three decades ago, Lazarus et al (1980), suggested that under intensely stressful conditions positive emotions might be protective. Whilst helping to sustain coping efforts, positive emotions also appeared to replenish vital resources that had been depleted by stress.
In a more recent review of the literature, Anthony Ong* of Cornell University looked at how positive emotions can influence health outcomes in later adulthood.
"We all age. It is how we age, however, that determines the quality of our lives," he says. The data he reviewed suggests that positive emotions may be a powerful antidote to stress, pain, and illness. Studies found that people with stronger positive emotions have lower levels of chemicals associated with inflammation related to stress.
Ong became interested in the study of positive emotion when he learned about what researchers call the paradox of ageing: despite the notable loss of physical function throughout the body, a person's emotional capacity seemed to stay consistent with age. Ong speculated that if positive emotions are indeed good for our health then, "one direct, measurable consequence of this should be the extended years of quality living." And that is what he found.
So there you have it - stay happy, live longer.
*Anthony D. Ong (2010). Pathways Linking Positive Emotion and Health in Later Life. Current Directions in Psychological Science, December 2010; vol. 19, 6: pp. 358-362.
In a more recent review of the literature, Anthony Ong* of Cornell University looked at how positive emotions can influence health outcomes in later adulthood.
"We all age. It is how we age, however, that determines the quality of our lives," he says. The data he reviewed suggests that positive emotions may be a powerful antidote to stress, pain, and illness. Studies found that people with stronger positive emotions have lower levels of chemicals associated with inflammation related to stress.
Ong became interested in the study of positive emotion when he learned about what researchers call the paradox of ageing: despite the notable loss of physical function throughout the body, a person's emotional capacity seemed to stay consistent with age. Ong speculated that if positive emotions are indeed good for our health then, "one direct, measurable consequence of this should be the extended years of quality living." And that is what he found.
So there you have it - stay happy, live longer.
*Anthony D. Ong (2010). Pathways Linking Positive Emotion and Health in Later Life. Current Directions in Psychological Science, December 2010; vol. 19, 6: pp. 358-362.
Annabel
1/26/2011
Saving Us From Ourselves - The Psychological Immune System
The thing I have always found most surprising about myself is my resilience. I suffer a rejection and a few hours later I’m OK about it. I go to bed upset and wake up the next morning feeling fine. I seem to have this default to equilibrium - I can’t keep feelings of rejection up for very long. I don’t seem able to hold a grudge. I’ve tried. I’ve even written post-it notes to remind me. DON’T FORGET YOU’RE NOT TALKING TO...
I’m not a happy clappy forgiving kind of person (just because I can’t hold a grudge doesn’t mean I can forgive easily). So can’t explain it that way. And no-one who knows me would ever accuse me of positive thinking. As a general rule I take the dim view. Nor do I seem to take it personally. I could of course be a self serving, don’t give a toss what you think of me type of person. Only I’m not. What people think about me really matters to me. Perhaps that’s the explanation. But it’s not that either. I don’t think that highly of other people, least of all those who reject me. So how come I get over rejection so readily?
The puzzle is over. It’s taken awhile but I now know what lies behind my ability to get up when knocked down - psychologically, that is.
One of the most incredible things about the human mind is its resilience. We have a psychological immune system. When we experience events that have the power to knock us sideways, such as rejection, it kicks in to try and protect us from the worst of it. Interestingly, unlike the physical immune system, we seem not to notice it. There it is working away on our behalf and we didn’t even know.
Daniel Gilbert of Harvard University and colleagues explored this surprising phenomenon in a series of classic social psychology studies (Gilbert et al., 1998). They set up a situation almost all of us would be familiar with: going for a job interview and getting rejected.
First they led participants to believe they were going for a job interview but, beforehand, amongst other misleading questions, they asked them how they would feel if they didn't get it. Of course there was no job to get and they were duly told they didn't get it, then asked, again subtly, how they felt now.
What the researchers were interested in was the difference between how people predicted they'd feel and how they actually did feel. In other words: do people understand they have a psychological immune system and that it will be working to shield them from the downsides of rejection?
There was also another interesting slant to the study: half the participants were told they were being evaluated for the job by one person and the other half that they were being evaluated by three people. This meant that for the half that were evaluated by one person it was easier to rationalise a rejection since when there's only one person deciding it's easier to imagine the decision had more to do with that person's individual preferences. Being rejected by three people, though, feels like a more considered judgement.
Results showed that participants predicted that if they were rejected they would feel about 2 points worse on a scale of 1 to 10 compared with their mood when they started the experiment. Immediately after rejection those for whom the rejection was easy to rationalise only felt 0.4 of a point worse on the scale, not 2 points worse. And after 10 minutes they felt just as happy as when they started the experiment. The immune system had done its work and people's predictions were way off.
The news wasn't quite so good for the participants in the difficult to rationalise condition, but it still wasn't as bad as they expected. Instead of a 2 point drop on the scale of 1 to 10, they experienced a 0.68 drop immediately and 1.25 point drop after 10 minutes, once the rejection had really sunk in. The strain was much greater for the psychological immune system in this condition and it didn't do so well.
All the same, neither group felt as bad as they thought they would. And this pattern is repeated again and again across other studies. When we're knocked sideways by negative events such as rejection, the psychological immune system starts its work, rationalising what has happened and, over time, stopping it hurting as much as we expected.
In the same paper, Gilbert and colleagues report studies on people getting ditched by their partners, told their personalities were not up to scratch and academics failing to get tenure. The pattern repeats: people think it's going to feel bad, but generally it's not as bad as they expect, and people recover quicker than they predict.
The fact that we don't seem to notice our psychological immune system is probably the only reason it works. After all, in order to feel better we have to conveniently forget some important facts, such as how much we wanted the job we didn't get or loved the partner who walked out.
So it looks as if my ability to bounce back from rejection is just the sign of a healthy psychological immune system. I’m taking down the post it notes in case they remind me that I ought really to be feeling rejected and therefore miserable.
Posted by Annabel
I’m not a happy clappy forgiving kind of person (just because I can’t hold a grudge doesn’t mean I can forgive easily). So can’t explain it that way. And no-one who knows me would ever accuse me of positive thinking. As a general rule I take the dim view. Nor do I seem to take it personally. I could of course be a self serving, don’t give a toss what you think of me type of person. Only I’m not. What people think about me really matters to me. Perhaps that’s the explanation. But it’s not that either. I don’t think that highly of other people, least of all those who reject me. So how come I get over rejection so readily?
The puzzle is over. It’s taken awhile but I now know what lies behind my ability to get up when knocked down - psychologically, that is.
One of the most incredible things about the human mind is its resilience. We have a psychological immune system. When we experience events that have the power to knock us sideways, such as rejection, it kicks in to try and protect us from the worst of it. Interestingly, unlike the physical immune system, we seem not to notice it. There it is working away on our behalf and we didn’t even know.
Daniel Gilbert of Harvard University and colleagues explored this surprising phenomenon in a series of classic social psychology studies (Gilbert et al., 1998). They set up a situation almost all of us would be familiar with: going for a job interview and getting rejected.
First they led participants to believe they were going for a job interview but, beforehand, amongst other misleading questions, they asked them how they would feel if they didn't get it. Of course there was no job to get and they were duly told they didn't get it, then asked, again subtly, how they felt now.
What the researchers were interested in was the difference between how people predicted they'd feel and how they actually did feel. In other words: do people understand they have a psychological immune system and that it will be working to shield them from the downsides of rejection?
There was also another interesting slant to the study: half the participants were told they were being evaluated for the job by one person and the other half that they were being evaluated by three people. This meant that for the half that were evaluated by one person it was easier to rationalise a rejection since when there's only one person deciding it's easier to imagine the decision had more to do with that person's individual preferences. Being rejected by three people, though, feels like a more considered judgement.
Results showed that participants predicted that if they were rejected they would feel about 2 points worse on a scale of 1 to 10 compared with their mood when they started the experiment. Immediately after rejection those for whom the rejection was easy to rationalise only felt 0.4 of a point worse on the scale, not 2 points worse. And after 10 minutes they felt just as happy as when they started the experiment. The immune system had done its work and people's predictions were way off.
The news wasn't quite so good for the participants in the difficult to rationalise condition, but it still wasn't as bad as they expected. Instead of a 2 point drop on the scale of 1 to 10, they experienced a 0.68 drop immediately and 1.25 point drop after 10 minutes, once the rejection had really sunk in. The strain was much greater for the psychological immune system in this condition and it didn't do so well.
All the same, neither group felt as bad as they thought they would. And this pattern is repeated again and again across other studies. When we're knocked sideways by negative events such as rejection, the psychological immune system starts its work, rationalising what has happened and, over time, stopping it hurting as much as we expected.
In the same paper, Gilbert and colleagues report studies on people getting ditched by their partners, told their personalities were not up to scratch and academics failing to get tenure. The pattern repeats: people think it's going to feel bad, but generally it's not as bad as they expect, and people recover quicker than they predict.
The fact that we don't seem to notice our psychological immune system is probably the only reason it works. After all, in order to feel better we have to conveniently forget some important facts, such as how much we wanted the job we didn't get or loved the partner who walked out.
So it looks as if my ability to bounce back from rejection is just the sign of a healthy psychological immune system. I’m taking down the post it notes in case they remind me that I ought really to be feeling rejected and therefore miserable.
Posted by Annabel
1/25/2011
Talking About Happiness
I was interviewed today by Helen McDermott at BBC Radio Norfolk about happiness, the new campaigning charity, Action for Happiness and the BBC's Happiness Challenge - and, of course, The Real Secret.
Helen claimed she was a glass-half-empty kind of person, and revealed that she had in fact experienced depression, which just goes to show that you often have to look beneath the surface as she comes across as positive and full of energy - even if coping with her new presenting role and the technical demands of the job meant she called me Lynn several times. I can't blame anyone for failing to pronounce "McCarraher" correctly, though - it sounds like "M'Carra", not the "MacCarragher" it reads as.
Anyway, if you want to hear the interview, and the quick tips for boosting your Happiness Set Point on a daily basis, you can listen here (interview starts at 4.45 minutes in): http://bbc.in/h5Fm4B
Lucy
How long does it take to form habits?
A paper recently published in the European Journal of Social Psychology by Lally et al. (2009) looked at the question of how long it takes to form new habits. Very little scientific research had been done on this question; the general understanding was that it takes more or less a month, depending on the habit and whether it was designed to replace an old 'bad' habit, such as smoking. It was assumed that an easy habit to form - lets say drinking a glass of water every morning on waking - would, in comparison, take very little time to become automatic. Whilst this all made sense there was, until Lally's research, no real evidence to support it.
What the researchers found was that on average a new habit became embedded - and therefore automatic - after 66 days, and that at 66 days it had become as much a habit as it was ever going to become.
Although the average was 66 days, there was marked variation in how long habits took to form, anywhere from 18 days up to 254 days in the different habits examined in this study. As you'd imagine, drinking a daily glass of water became automatic very quickly but doing 50 sit-ups before breakfast required a great deal more dedication.
What was critical to success was the daily repetition. The researchers also found that missing the odd day did not reduce the chance of forming a habit, and that some people take longer to form habits than do others.
What this study reveals then, is that if we want to develop a relatively simple habit like taking a 5 minute walk in the park, it could take us no more than a month of daily repetitions before the behaviour becomes a habit, but if we want to introduce a habit such as 'not' smoking, or doing 50 sit-ups before breakfast then it will take at least 66 days and possibly more. The crucial key to success was daily repetition.
The question of what kinds of habits we should adopt is another story. Well it's a book actually - The Real Secret.
1/22/2011
How to be Popular
Recent research reported in Scientific American explains why you're probably less popular than your friends - see here for details. That'll explain those imaginary friends.
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