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This preference, which is perhaps a strong one, may have resulted in a bias to maintain the status quo. You rely on heuristics to help identify your deodorant (usually by sight) and you add it to your virtual cart and place your order. In this instance, your bias influenced your preference toward your current deodorant, and your heuristic helped you to identify it. Potential stinkiness crisis averted.

In that case, you will likely be motivated to make a purchasing decision consistent with your strong bias (i.e., look to purchase it from a different vendor, maintaining the status quo with your deodorant). Thus, in this scenario, you decide to look elsewhere.

At this step, the availability heuristic is likely to guide your decision, causing you to navigate to an alternative site that quickly comes to mind[6].

Your heuristics will help you select an alternative product that meets some criteria.

satisficing heuristic (opting for the first product that looks good enough), a similarity heuristic (opting for the product that looks closest to your current deodorant) or some other heuristic to help you select the product you decide to order.

The question, though, is often whether your biases and heuristics are aiding or inhibiting the ecological rationality of your decision, and that will vary from situation to situation.

Parental consistency can help protect children from emotional problems. Children can and do become caught in the middle between parents who aren’t getting along. Such "triangulation" distracts children from addressing their own needs. Compassion buffers empathy, allowing parents to tolerate their children's distress without getting overwhelmed, numbing out, or becoming enraged. Parents are encouraged to engage their curiosity when they feel the urge to accommodate or try to overpower children.

Perception was important for mothers. Mothers who reported that their children showed more severe symptoms were more likely to use accommodation, but maternal accommodation was unrelated to the mothers' own reported distress and emotional state. It may be that mothers wish to spare their children anticipated distress, and that this desire is different from overall distress. Including measures of empathy and parental distress due specifically to child's distress could tease this apart in future studies.

Accommodation increases anxiety because youngsters never have a chance to fail and persist. This can stunt self-efficacy, preventing “fear extinction” and “habituation” to anxiety-provoking situations. It's a vicious cycle, increasing the chance of giving up too easily with future challenges, though innate resilience, related to child temperament, can mitigate the effects of problematic environmental factors.

Higher child distress and emotional dysregulation, as measured by parents, was associated with increased parental accommodation. Parental accommodation was not correlated with child-reported distress and emotional dysregulation.

maternal accommodation was correlated with child anxiety and externalizing behaviors (in which emotions are directed outward, typically in aggressive or destructive ways, rather than processed in healthy ways or bottled up)

Accommodation fixes problems short-term—for instance when a parent "gives in" to a child's tantrums to get them to stop screaming, or bribes a child to do something rather than building intrinsic motivation with a longer-term process of rewarding effort and building an inner sense of confidence

In support of compassion fatigue, both self-report and physiological measures of affect showed that positive affect declined substantially when the group size was two or more.”

After several puffs of neurotransmitter are released, however, that channel may undergo a process called “desensitization” in which it closes and stops responding to signals from the presynaptic neuron.

“Observing that the tendency to mentalize with one person more than many people is built into our brains does not mean we should accept it as an excuse for acting passively when facing large-scale crises. This observation implies, however, that we can no longer rely on our moral intuitions.”

eople may cope with the enormity of the pandemic by trying to find ways to minimize or even dismiss it. Saying that there are other diseases that cause more deaths than COVID-19 could be one such emotional mechanism.

We need to tell more stories about real people who have had COVID-19 and experienced it as more than mild symptoms, including stories about people who have been killed by the disease. The stories need to be told one by one. That way, we will be harnessing what we know from cognitive neuroscience to bring the sad message home.

We know that adolescents undergo significant biological changes that impact their circadian rhythm—as a result, their biological clocks shift so that their bodies naturally want to go to sleep later. However, in many communities, these biological shifts are at odds with school schedules which often have younger, elementary school age youth beginning school later, and older, high-school teens beginning school earlier.

researchers found that students slept an average of 34 minutes more after the start time delay. Moreover, the increase in sleep duration was explained by students waking up later (that is, students were still going to bed around the same time). In addition, delaying school start times was also associated with higher grades, lower levels of daytime sleepiness, and fewer first-period tardies and absences. 

With California schools leading the way in implementing a delay at the state level, in the next three years, it is my hope that we will have more information and data about all the ways in which school start times impact all levels of a school system (e.g., bus drivers, teachers, students, parents, families, administrators) and for all students.  

As compared to dogmatic atheists, non-dogmatic disbelievers go only one (modest) step beyond the undecided agnostic. It’s accurate to say that neither the non-dogmatic atheist nor the agnostic holds any faith in the existence of a god. But the more tolerant (or less “doctrinaire”) atheist—unlike the agnostic, who prefers to remain non-committal—is still ready to take a stand on the matter, asserting (though as an opinion): “I believe that no god (and certainly not God in the traditional sense)  exists.”

But even though they strive to keep an open mind on all things—for they’re oriented toward the world empirically and governed by facts rather than faith— non-dogmatic atheists simply can’t find any compelling evidence for a (monotheistic or biblical) god's existence.

To them, all that humans are able to know for sure exists in the realm of the relative. Anything beyond that points to the insoluble mysteries of the universe—which even today’s scientists recognize may be forever beyond their ever-more-precise instruments of knowing.

Coming full circle, if scientists in general—and physicists in particular—can’t ever be absolutely certain about Absolutes, how much more difficult must it be for metaphysicists to attain such certitude? To answer my own question: very difficult, indeed!

the notion that minds and bodies exist in separate realms (i.e. Cartesian Dualism) is entirely untenable. 

Our bodies have an address in the first realm, whereas our minds and everything psychological about minds make their home in the second realm.  According to Descartes, these realms are forever separate such that the mind and body cannot influence one another.

We are amazed to learn that when the mind is stressed over time, this can lead the body to break down, producing a variety of physical ailments.  This is amazing to us because we believe stress is of the mind and it is difficult to imagine something of the mind affecting our bodies.  Its hard to believe because it violates our intuitive dualistic understanding of the world.

Are you smart?  Are you kind?  Are you funny?  Are you afraid of being alone?  These two different kinds of questions, focused on body and mind, respectively, rely on different networks within your brain.  When you think about your body and the actions of your body, you recruit a prefrontal and parietal region on the outer surface of your right hemisphere (these are called ‘lateral’ regions).  When you think about your mind you instead recruit different prefrontal and parietal regions in the middle of the brain, where the two hemispheres touch each other (these are called ‘medial’ regions). 

Knowing that our sense of dualism is just an illusion is very important.  Thomas Mussweiler’s lab recently conducted a study showing that those who have a stronger belief in dualism tend to be less healthy.  Why?  Dualists believe their body is just a shell that is far less important than the mind. 

The left cerebral hemisphere is to the “right-brained” poet or novelist as the hamstrings and quadriceps are to a competitive sprinter

Because the ability to understand and produce language is focused in the left side of the brain in almost everyone, caricaturing these creative types as using their right brain more than their left brain is silly.

visual-spatial abilities—localized to the right cerebral hemisphere—are skills that are absolutely critical for “left-brained” talents like science or engineering.

But much of our obsession with the brain’s left and right cerebral hemispheres may have started with studies of split brain patients in the ‘50s. During this time, people who suffered multiple seizures a day underwent intense surgery to treat their epilepsy.

To calm the electrical storms that ravaged these patients’ brains, the nerve fibers connecting the left and right hemispheres of the brain were cut. These fibers are collectively known as the corpus callosum

Once the corpus callosum is severed on the operating table, the new split brain patient appears astonishingly normal at first glance

But careful experiments reveal that this person is really two persons, two streams of consciousness in one body

only the left hemisphere can speak

The right hemisphere cannot speak, but it can point to words like “yes” or “no” to answer a question

Each hemisphere, it seems, maintains independent beliefs and personalities, challenging the notion that we are each an indivisible “self.”

We are all “brain-ambidextrous.”

The advantage of having many different waves of data from the same people is that it enables researchers to speculate on whether changes in one characteristic cause changes in another. This can be done by asking whether changes at one time in one factor predict another more strongly than the reverse

irst, as we might expect, people’s personality characteristics and values are fairly stable. People’s responses to both the personality inventory and the values scale did not change much over time. However, the responses to the personality inventory changed less than the responses to the values survey.

Overall, some personality characteristics and some values are related. Agreeableness was correlated with the value of being prosocial (that is, wanting to engage in positive actions for society). Conscientiousness was correlated with conformity (which reflects that conscientious people tend to want to follow rules including societal rules). Extraversion was related to the value of enjoyment. Openness correlated with the value of self-direction. There were no strong correlations between neuroticism and any of the values.

In addition, personality traits appeared to influence a variety of measures of well-being. People high in agreeableness, conscientiousness, extraversion, and openness tended to show higher measures of well-being while being high in neuroticism was linked to decreased measures of well-being.

First, in an era in which key findings fail to replicate, this study solidifies the relationship between personality characteristics and values that have been observed before. It also demonstrates that both personality characteristics and values change slowly.

Second, this work suggests that changes in personality characteristics (which reflect people’s underlying motivation) have a bigger impact on values than changes in values have on people’s personality characteristics.

Third, this work suggests that both personality characteristics and values are related to people’s sense of well-being. However, personality characteristics seem to have a broad impact. Changes in personality can precede changes in well-being, but it appears that changes in well-being may actually have an impact on people’s values.

When the study drew attention and controversy, there was a moment when they both could have said: "We didn't look carefully enough at this the first time. Now we can see that it doesn't meet our standards." Instead they allowed Facebook and the PR people to take the lead in responding to the controversy.

What should this reality signal to Facebook users? Is it time to pull-back? You have (almost) no rights. You have (almost) no control. You have no idea what they're doing to you or with you. You don't even know who's getting the stuff you are posting, and you're not allowed to know. Trade secret!

Are there any particular warnings here for journalists and editors in terms of their exposure on Facebook? Yeah. Facebook has all the power. You have almost none. Just keep that in mind in all your dealings with it, as an individual with family and friends, as a journalist with a story to file, and as a news organization that is "on" Facebook.

I am not in a commercial situation where I have to maximize my traffic, so I can opt out. Right now my choice is to keep my account, but use it cynically. 

does this level of experimentation indicate the prospect of a further undermining of audience-driven news priorities and traditional news values? The right way to think about it is a loss of power—for news producers and their priorities. As I said, Facebook thinks it knows better than I do what "my" 180,000 subscribers should get from me.

Facebook has "where else are they going to go?" logic now. And they have good reason for this confidence. (It's called network effects.) But "where else are they going to go?" is a long way from trust and loyalty. It is less a durable business model than a statement of power. 

I distinguished between the "thin" legitimacy that Facebook operates under and the "thick" legitimacy that the university requires to be the institution it was always supposed to be. (Both are distinct from il-legitimacy.) News organizations should learn to make this distinction more often. Normal PR exists to muddle it. Which is why you don't hand a research crisis over to university PR people.

some commentators have questioned the practice of A/B headline testing in the aftermath of this scandal—is there a clear connection? The connection to me is that both are forms of behaviourism. Behaviourism is a view of human beings in which, as Hannah Arendt said, they are reduced to the level of a conditioned and "behaving" animal—an animal that responds to these stimuli but not those. This is why a popular shorthand for Facebook's study was that users were being treated as lab rats.

Journalism is supposed to be about informing people so they can understand the world and take action when necessary. Action and behaviour are not the same thing at all. One is a conscious choice, the other a human tendency. There's a tension, then, between commercial behaviourism, which may be deeply functional in some ways for the news industry, and informing people as citizens capable of understanding their world well enough to improve it, which is the deepest purpose of journalism. A/B testing merely highlights this tension.

The researchers studied a group of brain cells in the hippocampal region of the mouse brain. They found that they could create false associations between events and environments by artificially stimulating the neurons.

A member of the MIT team, Susumu Tonegawa, commented on the significance of the research in Science  magazine's weekly podcast:Independent of what is happening around you in the outside world, humans constantly have internal activity in the brain. So just like our mouse, it is quite possible we can associate what we happen to have in our mind with a bad or good high valence, online event. So, in other words, there could be a false association of what you have in your mind rather than what is happening to you, so this is a way we believe that at least some form of strong force memory observed in humans could be made. Because our study showed that the false memories and the genuine memories are based on very similar, almost identical, brain mechanisms, it is difficult for the false memory bearer to distinguish between them. So we can study this, because we have a mouse model now.

Primary emotions are our first emotional reaction. They’re often followed by a more defended secondary emotion.

However, if we look at our initial reaction, our primary emotion, we may recognize that we had more vulnerable feelings, such as feeling hurt, unwanted, or ashamed

t is a vital feeling that often leaves the [person] feeling very open and perhaps vulnerable.”

If we imagine a moment of feeling tense, frustrated or stuck in a bad feeling, driven to react without a sense of relief, we were probably caught in a secondary emotion

able to access the deeper, more vulnerable feeling, perhaps a want or a need, or a core feeling of sadness or shame, we were then experiencing a primary emotion

Primary emotions can be either adaptive reactions to the moment or maladaptive reactions based on schemas from our past.

We may experience what I often refer to as a “critical inner voice,” a negative internal commentary that tells us things like, “You made such a fool of yourself. Look at how they’re looking at you. They all think you’re an idiot. You should just get out of here.”

The maladaptive secondary emotions can also lead us to react in ways that are not in our best interest: lashing out to defend ourselves, acting resentful or enraged, driven by thoughts

The good news is we can transform our emotions to become adaptive.

We can take our side by challenging our critical self-attacks and, thereby, offering ourselves compassion and love.

When we live in harmony with our emotions, we become more in touch with who we are.

Psychological research confirms the importance of self-awareness. It shows that self-awareness is crucial for us to experience self-development, take the perspective of others, exercise self-control, produce creative accomplishments, and experience high self-esteem.

Study – contemplative education is based upon introspection. You could take courses, workshops, retreats, and other learning opportunities that are inviting self-awareness. Those courses do not have to be titled “Self-awareness” – they just need to have the juice of introspection interwoven into their teaching. For example, mindfulness courses, and different mental health practitioner courses would offer you such introspection as they invite you to observe your own patterns and way of being.

Only the women candidates responded with an apology, and both apologized for their occasional anger. Said Senator Elizabeth Warren, “I will ask for forgiveness. I know that sometimes I get really worked up. And sometimes I get a little hot. I don’t really mean to.” Senator Amy Klobuchar said, “Well, I’d ask for forgiveness, any time any of you get mad at me. I can be blunt, but I am doing this because I think it is so important to pick the right candidates here.”

Expressing anger can help you influence others and can help you make change or get your way. But this seems to be truer if you’re a man, especially a white man.

expressions of anger detracted from the credibility and influence of women and African Americans relative to White males. The authors suggest that angry women and angry African Americans are perceived as “emotional” and this is used to discredit them, and consequently their social influence is reduced. 

The cost of the drugs also isn't given, although there has been a push that commercials offer this vital information. Furthermore, we're not offered quantitative information about risks or side-effects.

When you think about it, it’s actually the perfect cycle for the pharmaceutical companies whereby an increase in sales of one medication directly increases the demand of the other with the only losers being us, the consumers."

The quickest, easiest, most effective way to do this is by "consulting an Anti-You" before you make every decision. As one banking executive explained to me, "It's amazing how many poor decisions can be avoided simply by asking one other person for their opinion."

The act of explaining your situation to another person often gives you new insights about the decision before the other person even responds.  And the fresh perspective they offer in response is the second bonus.

The purpose of a decision is not to find the perfect option. The purpose of a decision is to get you to the next decision.

But the question is whether such infinitesimal differences, perceptible only in a laboratory, qualify as worldviews — cultural standpoints or ways of thinking that we consider important. I think the answer is no.

experiments do show that a language can have a fascinating effect on how its speakers think

If a language dies, a fascinating way of thinking dies along with it.

One psychologist argued some decades ago that this meant that Chinese makes a person less sensitive to such distinctions, which, let’s face it, is discomfitingly close to saying Chinese people aren’t as quick on the uptake as the rest of us. The truth is more mundane: Hypotheticality and counterfactuality are established more by context in Chinese than in English.

extrapolating cognitive implications from language differences is a delicate business.

But if a language is not a worldview, what do we tell the guy in the lecture hall? Should we care that in 100 years only about 600 of the current 6,000 languages may be still spoken?

The answer is still yes, but for other reasons.

First, a central aspect of any culture’s existence as a coherent entity is the fact of its having its own language, regardless of what the language happens to be like

because language is so central to being human, to have a language used only with certain other people is a powerful tool for connection and a sense of community.

Second, languages are scientifically interesting even if they don’t index cultural traits. They offer variety equivalent to the diversity of the world’s fauna and flora.

As with any other feature of the natural world, such variety tests and expands our sense of the possible, of what is “normal.”

Cultures, to be sure, show how we are different. Languages, however, are variations on a worldwide, cross-cultural perception of this thing called life.