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Robert Kamper

Positive Emotions Increase Life Satisfaction By Building Resilience - 4 views

  • People who seed their life with frequent moments of positive emotions increase their resilience against challenges,
  • This study shows that if happiness is something you want out of life, then focusing daily on the small moments and cultivating positive emotions is the way to go,”
  • Those small moments let positive emotions blossom, and that helps us become more open. That openness then helps us build resources that can help us rebound better from adversity and stress, ward off depression and continue to grow.”
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  • month long study
  • daily “emotion reports
  • Building up a daily diet of positive emotions does not require banishing negative emotions, she said. The study helps show that to be happy, people do not need to adopt a “Pollyanna-ish” approach and deny the upsetting aspects of life. “The levels of positive emotions that produced good benefits weren’t extreme. Participants with average and stable levels of positive emotions still showed growth in resilience even when their days included negative emotions.”
  • A lot of times we get so wrapped up in thinking about the future and the past that we are blind to the goodness we are steeped in already, whether it’s the beauty outside the window or the kind things that people are doing for you,” she said. “The better approach is to be open and flexible, to be appreciative of whatever good you do find in your daily circumstances, rather than focusing on bigger questions, such as ‘Will I be happy if I move to California?’ or ‘Will I be happy if I get married?’
Hypnosis Training Academy

5 Hypnosis Techniques For Grinch-Free Holidays - 0 views

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    Yes, Christmas is meant to be a happy and festive time. But let's face it, the holidays can get pretty stressful. Which means this time of the year presents the perfect opportunity to practise your hypnosis skills so you can keep yourself and everyone around you feeling calm and cheerful without letting holiday stress get in the way. Check out this "Christmas Survival Guide" created by the Hypnosis Training Academy to discover how to beat the Grinch and transform negative emotions by: Setting your daily intention using self-hypnosis and powerful mantras to keep a positive attitude throughout the day. Using distraction methods to lift others out of bad moods -- when one person (especially the host) is stressed it can trickle down and make others also feel tense… but not once you know how to break the "Grump Pattern"! Giving a shot of "hero fuel" to a friend or relative going through a tough time to help them focus on the positive aspects of their life and re-energize their self-belief using conversational hypnosis. Showing off your hypnosis talents and giving your family a "hypnotic gift" using a 4-step sequence to instantly provide a self-esteem boost So break out the eggnog and check out this amusing and useful article so you can stay feeling festive throughout the holidays and lift the spirits of everyone around you!
thinkahol *

How to size up the people in your life - opinion - 15 August 2011 - New Scientist - 0 views

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    Why are we all so different? Here is a toolkit for finding out what people are really like IN THE 4th century BC, the Greek philosopher Theophrastus, Aristotle's student and successor, wrote a book about personality. The project was motivated by his interest in what he considered a very puzzling question: "Why it has come about that, albeit the whole of Greece lies in the same clime, and all Greeks have a like upbringing, we have not the same constitution of character?" Not knowing how to get at the answer, Theophrastus decided to instead focus on categorising those seemingly mysterious differences in personality. The result was a book of descriptions of personality types to which he assigned names such as The Suspicious, The Fearful and The Proud. The book made such an impression that it was passed down through the ages, and is still available online today as The Characters of Theophrastus. The two big questions about personality that so interested Theophrastus are the same ones we ask ourselves about the people we know: why do we have different personalities? And what is the best way to describe them? In the past few decades, researchers have been gradually answering these questions, and in my new book, Making Sense of People: Decoding the mysteries of personality, I take a look at some of these answers. When it comes to the origins of personality, we have learned a lot. We now know that personality traits are greatly influenced by the interactions between the set of gene variants that we happen to have been born with and the social environment we happen to grow up in. The gene variants that a person inherits favour certain behavioural tendencies, such as assertiveness or cautiousness, while their environmental circumstances influence the forms these innate behavioural tendencies take. The ongoing dialogue between the person's genome and environment gradually establishes the enduring ways of thinking and feeling that are the building blocks of personality. This de
Hypnosis Training Academy

How to Lose Weight Using Hypnosis: A 5-Step Guide - 0 views

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    Interested in discovering how you can use hypnosis for weight loss? Yes? Well we've got good news for you as the Hypnosis Training Academy has created an in-depth guide that explains 5 key reasons for weight gain and how you can overcome them. With this guide, you'll get a very clear sense of how you can effectively use hypnosis for weight loss so you can help your subjects lead healthy and happy lives. No matter the fitness or health level, hypnosis allows for longer lasting results than any other diet or fad treatment because you're dealing with weight gain at a core and holistic level. Visit HypnosisTrainingAcademy.com today to find out how you can use hypnosis for weight loss with this 5-step guide.
Heather McQuaid

BPS Research Digest: The new science of "Phew!" - 0 views

  • Roughly half the group described a "near-miss" kind of relief - rather like fearing that you've locked yourself out and then realising that you haven't. The other half described a kind of "task-completion" relief, in which a negative experience had come to an end.
  • near-miss relief was associated with having more thoughts about how much worse things could have been and feeling more socially isolated
  • xcessive rumination can be harmful to close relationships. Experience of task-completion relief, by contrast, was associated with more thoughts about how things could have been even better.
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  • "Experiencing near-miss relief could increase the likelihood that people will act to avert an unfavourable fate in the future" Sweeny and Vohs said. "In contrast, task-completion relief allows people to focus on the positive emotional experience with minimal distraction from downward counterfactual thoughts. This process might reinforce satisfaction in the completion of a job well done ... and therefore increase the likelihood that people will repeat the unpleasant experience."
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    It's better to complete a scary task than to have the sense of relief of a "near miss"
nat bas

Understanding the Anxious Mind - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • But some people, no matter how robust their stock portfolios or how healthy their children, are always mentally preparing for doom. They are just born worriers, their brains forever anticipating the dropping of some dreaded other shoe. For the past 20 years, Kagan and his colleagues have been following hundreds of such people, beginning in infancy, to see what happens to those who start out primed to fret. Now that these infants are young adults, the studies are yielding new information about the anxious brain.
  • Four significant long-term longitudinal studies are now under way: two at Harvard that Kagan initiated, two more at the University of Maryland under the direction of Nathan Fox, a former graduate student of Kagan’s. With slight variations, they all have reached similar conclusions: that babies differ according to inborn temperament; that 15 to 20 percent of them will react strongly to novel people or situations; and that strongly reactive babies are more likely to grow up to be anxious.
  • In the brain, these thoughts can often be traced to overreactivity in the amygdala, a small site in the middle of the brain that, among its many other functions, responds to novelty and threat. When the amygdala works as it should, it orchestrates a physiological response to changes in the environment. That response includes heightened memory for emotional experiences and the familiar chest pounding of fight or flight. But in people born with a particular brain circuitry, the kind seen in Kagan’s high-reactive study subjects, the amygdala is hyperreactive, prickly as a haywire motion-detector light that turns on when nothing’s moving but the rain. Other physiological changes exist in children with this temperament, many of them also related to hyperreactivity in the amygdala. They have a tendency to more activity in the right hemisphere, the half of the brain associated with negative mood and anxiety; greater increases in heart rate and pupil dilation in response to stress; and on occasion higher levels of the stress hormones cortisol and norepinephrine.
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  • The physiological measurements led them to believe something biological was at work. Their hypothesis: the inhibited children were “born with a lower threshold” for arousal of various brain regions, in particular the amygdala, the hypothalamus and the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, the circuit responsible for the stress hormone cortisol.
  • At age 4, children who had been high-reactive were four times as likely to be behaviorally inhibited as those who had been low-reactive. By age 7, almost half of the jittery babies had developed symptoms of anxiety — fear of thunder or dogs or darkness, extreme shyness in the classroom or playground — compared with just 10 percent of the more easygoing ones. About one in five of the high-reactive babies were consistently inhibited and fearful at every visit up to the age of 7.
  • By adolescence, the rate of anxiety in Kagan’s study subjects declined overall, including in the high-risk group. At 15, about two-thirds of those who had been high-reactors in infancy behaved pretty much like everybody else.
  • PEOPLE WITH A nervous temperament don’t usually get off so easily, Kagan and his colleagues have found. There exists a kind of sub-rosa anxiety, a secret stash of worries that continue to plague a subset of high-reactive people no matter how well they function outwardly. They cannot quite outrun their own natures: consciously or unconsciously, they remain the same uneasy people they were when they were little.
  • Teenagers who were in the group at low risk for anxiety showed no increase in activity in the amygdala when they looked at the face, even if they had been told to focus on their own fear. But those in the high-risk group showed increased activity in the amygdala when they were thinking about their own feelings (though not when they were thinking about the nose). Once again, this pattern was seen in anxiety-prone youngsters quite apart from whether they had problems with anxiety in their daily lives. In the high-risk kids, even those who were apparently calm in most settings, their amygdalas lighted up more than the others’ did.
  • Behaviorally inhibited children were much more likely to have older siblings: two-thirds of them did, compared with just one-third of the uninhibited children. Could having older siblings, he and his co-authors wondered, mean being teased and pushed, which becomes a source of chronic stress, which in turn amplifies a biological predisposition to inhibition?
  • high-reactive babies who went to day care when they were young were significantly less fearful at age 4 than were the high-reactives who stayed home with their mothers.
  • The predictive power of an anxiety-prone temperament, such as it is, essentially works in just one direction: not by predicting what these children will become but by predicting what they will not. In the longitudinal studies of anxiety, all you can say with confidence is that the high-reactive infants will not grow up to be exuberant, outgoing, bubbly or bold. Still, while a Sylvia Plath almost certainly won’t grow up to be a Bill Clinton, she can either grow up to be anxious and suicidal, or simply a poet. Temperament is important, but life intervenes.
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    This is a good article that looks at how anxiety happens- it is more or less something you are born with, but you learn to live with, if you are intelligent about it. Liked it. Good writing.
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