Why Positive People Are Hot!

It seems obvious that moping around a bar is not a great way to pick up a cute guy or girl, but did you know that true happiness can not only make it easier to find someone for a first date, but can also increase your likelihood of finding and keeping a spouse? In 2001, L.A. Harker and Dacher Keltner took a look at some yearbook photos from the 1950s. The women in the photos who were smiling a “Duchenne” smile, a true smile with a wrinkle radiating from the eyes, were more likely to be married in middle age, and were more likely to be happy in that marriage. True happiness is attractive.

Best, 

Stella Grizont + Amanda Rodhe

Wanna learn more? Resource:
Harker, L. & Keltner, D. (2001). Expressions of positive emotion in women’s college yearbook pictures and their relationship to personality and life outcomes in adulthood. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 80, 112-124.

How Games Can Solve World Hunger...maybe

I spent a lot of quality time in college ragging on a few of my friends for playing hours upon hours of World of Warcraft.  It went a little something like this: “Why don’t you do something useful, like study for your physics exam?” Well, turns out, the last time I used physics in my daily life was never. But according to Jane McGonigal, game designer and author of Reality is Broken, playing online games like World of Warcraft, where you work on solving epic problems in a virtual world, is teaching an entire generation of gamers skills that will help them solve the biggest problems plaguing the real world. I’m talking about the “ending world hunger, finding alternative long-term energy solutions, and stopping global warming” kind of big problems.

Ms. McGonigal discusses what it is that draws gamers to a virtual world:

• People are able to work on missions that they are perfectly suited for.
• Teammates must trust them implicitly and instantly to be able to solve the problem at hand.
• When they work toward achieving their goal they receive immediate positive reinforcement, which encourages them to keep going and to work toward bigger and better things.
• Their missions are giant, all-important quests that impact the virtual world on a huge scale.

That doesn’t happen in the real world today: many people are unemployed or they don’t have jobs that suit them.  Not all higher-ups trust their employees to do their jobs properly. Often people feel micro-managed. And even when employees are doing an amazing job, they often have to wait until their year-end review to get any feedback. Finally, many companies fail to communicate or apply meaning to the mission at hand - and so workers go on with their daily tasks without feeling like they ladder up to anything near epic.  

Since World of Warcraft first launched in the 1990s, gamers have spent 5.93 million years in that online world. If we look at that time span over human evolution, that takes us back to when humans were first beginning to stand upright. Another way to look at it is that the average gamer spends 10,000 hours playing before they reach the age of 21. In the U.S., a student will spend 10,080 hours in school between fifth grade and high school graduation if they have perfect attendance. This means that gamers are essentially experiencing an alternate learning track online that parallels their time spent in the classroom. And all of this time spent in the virtual world has enabled gamers to develop their problem-solving skills. McGonigal advocates that we need to something about leveraging these skills into the real world. As such, McGonigal has begun to develop video games in which the gamers are put into hypothetical real-world situations and asked to solve real problems, but in a virtual setting, such as: what would you do if all of the oil ran out in the world and we were plunged into a global energy crisis? And she says that, through these games, gamers have come up with some really creative solutions to these real-world problems.

All of that is great and pretty amazing, but what if you’re not an avid gamer? How does this research apply to you? When adults are put in a situation where they are encouraged to think outside of the box and are trusted to be smart enough to think about big issues and come up with real solutions, they are able to rise to the occasion. How can you create situations for others where they actually have the opportunity to rise to the occasion?

Best,

Amanda 

Wanna learn more? Resource:

Jane McGonigal (February 2010). Gaming Can Make a Better World. Lecture presented at TED2010. Video retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dE1DuBesGYM

Positivity May Be Your Remedy for Cold & Flu Season

According to the National Institute of Health’s website, there are over 1 billion cases of the common cold annually in the United States. And with reports from the FDA about the potential dangers of some popular over-the-counter remedies to shorten the length of one’s cold, what is a poor, sniffling, sneezing person to do to combat their illness?

It turns out, the secret to boosting your immune system may not be in the aisles of Duane Reade, but rather, it may lie in staying positive! Scientists have found that people who are happier show fewer signs of illness when they are sick (Cohen, S., Tyrell, D.A.J., & Smith, A.P., 1991). In their study in 1991, researchers quarantined people who were sick with the common cold virus in a hotel room, and then measured everything from their saliva to the weight of the tissues in which they blew their noses. They discovered that over a seven-day period, the more positive people exhibited fewer symptoms.

So keep a bottle of Purell in hand and a smile on your face this winter if you want to keep that fever and runny nose at bay!

To your health!

Stella Grizont and Amanda Rodhe

Wanna learn more? Resources:

Cohen, S., Tyrell, D. A. J, & Smith, A. P. (1991). Psychological stress and susceptibility to the common cold. New England Journal of Medicine, 325, pp. 606-612.

Common Cold. Medline Plus: A Service of the U.S. National Library of Medicine, NIH (July 4, 2011). http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/commoncold.html

Warnings on Three Zicam Intranasal Zinc Products. FDA’s Consumer Updates Page (June 16, 2009). http://www.fda.gov/ForConsumers/ConsumerUpdates/ucm166931.htm

New Year, New You? How to Achieve Your Resolutions.

 

Srikumar Rao TED Talk “Plug Into Your Hard-Wired Happiness”

2012 is here, and many people like to begin a new year with a list of resolutions: lose weight, quit smoking cigarettes, get a better job, find a great relationship. And every year, they fail at meeting these goals. The gym membership expires unused, the nicotine patches lay on the counter next to the new pack of cigarettes, and they’re left feeling even more miserable, because now they’ve failed to live up to the resolution they set for themselves.

But Srikumar Rao has a solution for you that will help you achieve your goals and resolutions through happiness. In his TED talk, “Plug Into Your Hard-Wired Happiness” he argues that happiness, not unhappiness is our innate nature. We live in a culture, however, that is completely results-oriented and focuses solely on the outcome, not the journey: “If I get that new job with the six-figure salary, then I’ll be happy.” And this is where we set ourselves up for unhappiness. This “If/Then” model of existing makes us miserable because we can’t control the outcome, only our actions are within our control. When we only focus on the goal and create a perfect image in our mind for what it’s going to look like when we achieve it, and then it doesn’t fit our expectations perfectly, we’re inevitably disappointed.

Dr. Rao argues that we have to focus on the journey, not the outcome. People often fail at their resolution to lose weight because they’re focused only on the final result: when they don’t lose 10 pounds after their first week at the gym, they get discouraged and give up. But if they focus on and enjoy the process: finding delicious new healthy recipes, getting a chance to experience lots of interesting classes at the gym, taking up running outside in the park and enjoying nature, the desired result (weight loss) often follows. And the person is happier because they enjoyed the journey of learning to live a healthier life, rather than just focusing on the end result.

Accessing this “hard-wired happiness” allows you to live out your dreams. Dr. Rao argues that when you begin living your inner passion, the universe rearranges itself for you, making it easier for you to live that passion. It’s a self-perpetuating cycle: find happiness by living in the moment, and this will bring you the things that you desire, which will bring you more happiness. So as you begin the new year, focus on the actions, not the results in your resolutions, and you’ll find yourself living a richer, happier life in 2012!

Here's to your "blood singing with gratitude" as you revel on your way to your resolutions!

Amanda + Stella

Are you black or are you white? I can't tell. The oneness effect of positivity.

Positivity has all sorts of good effects - one major one being the sense of oneness it creates among people. Literally, your brain changes how it sees the world. This process, called “self-expansion,” happens when, on a perceptual level, we begin to see others as closer and more interconnected to our own core. It shifts the idea of “me” and “you,” to “us” and “we.” (Aron, Aron, & Smollan, 1992). This concept of self-expansion expands to our perceptions of race. Typically race is the first thing we notice about a stranger; we register it in about 100 milliseconds (compare that to noticing someoneʼs sex in 150 milliseconds). When people are of the same race, itʼs easier to distinguish their unique features. However, typically, when asked to distinguish people of other races, participants normally experience difficulty in telling people apart (Meissner & Brigham, 2001). In an experiment replicated several times over, Barbara Fredrickson and her student found that when injected with positivity (as in watching happy movies or seeing positive imagery), racial bias is completely eliminated: people become just as good at recognizing unique features in people of different races as they are of people of the same race (Johnson & Fredrickson, 2005).

Ehhh hemmm, can anyone say WOOPAAH experience for diversity training?!

Wanna learn more? Resources:

Aron, A., Aron, E. N. & Smollan, D. (1992). Inclusion of others in the self scale and the ! structure of interpersonal closeness, Journal of Personality and Social ! Psychology 63:596-612.

Fredrickson, B. L. (2009). Positivity. New York: Crown Publisher.

Johnson, K. J., Waugh, C. E., & Fredrickson, B. L. (2008). Smile to see the forest: ! Expressed positive emotions broaden attentional copes and increase attentional ! flexibility. (manuscript under review).

Meissner, C. & Brigham, J. (2001). Thirty years of investigating the own-race bias in ! memory for faces. Psychology, Public Policy, and Law 7:3-35.