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Growing evidence suggests that gloomy moods improve key types of thinking and behavior, Forgas asserts in a new review paper aptly titled “Don’t worry, be sad!” For good evolutionary reasons, positive and negative moods subtly recruit thinking styles suited to either benign or troubling situations,

Many emotion theorists now agree that negative moods direct attention to tasks at hand and promote analytical thinking, whereas positive moods broaden attention and prompt original thinking. Researchers in a field dubbed “positive psychology” have put a lot of recent focus on exploring how happiness profits mind and body.

Whether good or bad, moods are relatively low-intensity, background feelings that can last for anywhere from a few minutes to the whole day. A person may feel somewhat good or bad, happy or sad, without knowing why or even being aware of such moods.

On “good” days, he reasoned, everything just felt right without any past triumphs coming to mind. On “bad” days, life felt lousy in the moment, without any tragic memories returning for an encore.

Individuals aren’t slaves to their moods, Schwarz cautions. A sad person can think outside the box if necessary, say, to solve problems at work. And a happy person can accurately fill out tax forms or complete other detail-heavy tasks.

Moods provide surprisingly keen insights into one’s environment, the team concluded.

By embracing their moods, superior forecasters gained unconscious access to a vast amount of learned information that informed their predictions, Pham speculated.

Alternatively, good moods trigger a loose mode of thought conducive to creativity and seeing the big picture. Happiness signals that a situation is safe, or at least not immediately threatening,

Sad moods also improve eyewitness memory, apparently by lowering the tendency to incorporate false and misleading details into accounts of what was observed. In a 2005 study in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, college students witnessed a staged altercation between a lecturer and a woman who angrily interrupted the talk.

Sad moods can also make first impressions of others more reliable,

Sad folks took longer to read and rate the essays than happy and neutral participants did. That’s probably because feeling sad fostered a more careful appraisal of essays and photos, Forgas suggests. As a result, he proposes, sad volunteers largely rejected the stereotype of philosophers as tweedy, professorial men, helping to minimize the halo effect.

In these experiments, moods were induced either by having participants watch happy or sad film clips or by falsely telling volunteers that they had scored extremely well or poorly on a test of spatial abilities.

In both conditions, raters determined that sad volunteers communicated more information relevant to the movie scenes and less unrelated information than the other two groups did, especially the happy folks. Those in a sad mood were especially good at keeping accounts brief, clear and to the point.

Moods were induced after participants watched movie clips but before they described the scenes, ensuring that the clips didn’t sway their manipulated moods.

Sad feelings may influence communication differently in situations where conversation

But moods may not engage specific mental strategies as proposed

If these findings hold up, happy and sad moods simply signal whether or not to change one’s current thinking style, Huntsinger says, rather than indicating whether to adopt an analytical or playful thinking style. Researchers have yet to test which of these two possibilities best explains mood-related behaviors.

much remains unknown about precisely how moods influence thought

angst and sadness promote “information-processing strategies best suited to dealing with more-demanding situations.” This helps explain why test subjects who are melancholy — Forgas induces the mood with a short film about death and cancer — are better at judging the accuracy of rumors and recalling past events; they’re also much less likely to stereotype strangers and make fewer arithmetic mistakes.

shoppers in the “low mood” condition remembered nearly four times as many of the trinkets. The wet weather made them sad, and their sadness made them more aware and attentive.

There are two important lessons of this research. The first is that our fleeting feelings can change the way we think. While sadness makes us more focused and diligent — the spotlight of attention is sharpened — happiness seems to have the opposite effect, so that good moods make us 20 percent more likely to have a moment of insight. The second takeaway is that many of our creative challenges involve tasks that require diligence, persistence and focus. It’s not easy making a collage or writing a poem or solving a hard technical problem, which is why sometimes being a little miserable can improve our creative performance.

Why is mental illness so closely associated with creativity? Andreasen argues that depression is intertwined with a “cognitive style” that makes people more likely to produce successful works of art. In the creative process, Andreasen says, “one of the most important qualities is persistence.”

While Andreasen acknowledges the burden of mental illness — she quotes Robert Lowell on depression not being a “gift of the Muse” and describes his reliance on lithium to escape the pain — she argues that many forms of creativity benefit from the relentless focus it makes possible. “Unfortunately, this type of thinking is often inseparable from the suffering,” she says. “If you’re at the cutting edge, then you’re going to bleed.”

"The twenties were the highest peak of joy-related words that we see," he says. "They really were roaring." But then there came 1941, which, of course, marked the beginning of America's entry into World War II. It doesn't take a historian to see that peaks and valleys like these roughly mirror the major economic and social events of the century. "In 1941, sadness is at its peak," Bently says.

They weren't just novels or books about current events, Bentley says. Many were books without clear emotional content — technical manuals about plants and animals, for example, or automotive repair guides. "It's not like the change in emotion is because people are writing about the Depression, and people are writing about the war," he says. "There might be a little bit of that, but this is just, kind of, averaged over all books and it's just kind of creeping in."

Generally speaking the usage of these commonly known emotion words has been in decline over the 20th century," Bentley says. We used words that expressed our emotions less in the year 2000 than we did 100 years earlier — words about sadness, and joy, and anger, and disgust and surprise. In fact, there is only one exception that Bentley and his colleagues found: fear. "The fear-related words start to increase just before the 1980s," he says.

For psychologists, he says, there are only a handful of ways to try to understand what is actually going on with somebody emotionally. "One is what a person says," Pennebaker explains, "kind of the 'self report' of emotion. Another might be the physiological links, and the third is what slips out when they're talking to other people, when they're writing a book or something like that."

Barrett is a professor of psychology at Northeastern

her research has led her to conclude that each of us constructs them in our own individual ways, from a diversity of sources: our internal sensations, our reactions to the environments we live in, our ever-evolving bodies of experience and learning, our cultures.

if Barrett is correct, we’ll need to rethink how we interpret mental illness, how we understand the mind and self, and even what psychology as a whole should become in the 21st century.

The problem was the options that Ekman had given his subjects when asking them to identify the emotions shown on the faces they were presented with. Those options, Barrett discovered, had limited the ways in which people allowed themselves to think. Barrett explained the problem to me this way: “I can break that experiment really easily, just by removing the words. I can just show you a face and ask how this person feels. Or I can show you two faces, two scowling faces, and I can say, ‘Do these people feel the same thing?’ And agreement drops into the toilet.”

The brain, it turns out, doesn’t consciously process every single piece of information that comes its way. Think of how impossibly distracting the regular act of blinking would be if it did. Instead, it pays attention to what you need to pay attention to, then raids your memory stores to fill in the blanks.

emotion isn’t a simple reflex or a bodily state that’s hard-wired into our DNA, and it’s certainly not universally expressed. It’s a contingent act of perception that makes sense of the information coming in from the world around you, how your body is feeling in the moment, and everything you’ve ever been taught to understand as emotion. Culture to culture, person to person even, it’s never quite the same. What’s felt as sadness in one person might as easily be felt as weariness in another, or frustration in someone else.

Just as that first picture of the bee actually wasn’t a picture of a bee for me until I taught myself that it was, my emotions aren’t actually emotions until I’ve taught myself to think of them that way. Without that, I have only a meaningless mishmash of information about what I’m feeling.

In many quarters, Barrett was angrily attacked for her ideas, and she’s been the subject of criticism ever since. “I think Lisa does a disservice to the actual empirical progress that we’re making,” says Dacher Keltner, a Berkeley psychologist

Keltner told me that he himself has coded thousands of facial expressions using Ekman’s system, and the results are strikingly consistent: Certain face-emotion combinations recur regularly, and others never occur. “That tells me, ‘Wow, this approach to distinct emotions has real power,’” he says.

Ekman reached the peak of his fame in the years following 2001. That’s the year the American Psychological Association named him one of the most influential psychologists of the 20th century. The next year, Malcolm Gladwell wrote an article about him in the New Yorker, and in 2003 he began working pro bono for the TSA. A year later, riding the updraft of success, he left his university post and started the Paul Ekman Group,

a small research team to visit the isolated Himba tribe in Namibia, in southern Africa. The plan was this: The team, led by Maria Gendron, would do a study similar to Ekman’s original cross-cultural one, but without providing any of the special words or context-heavy stories that Ekman had used to guide his subjects’ answers. Barrett’s researchers would simply hand a jumbled pile of different expressions (happy, sad, fearful, angry, disgusted, and neutral) to their subjects, and would ask them to sort them into six piles. If emotional expressions are indeed universal, they reasoned, then the Himba would put all low-browed, tight-lipped expressions into an anger pile, all wrinkled-nose faces into a disgust pile, and so on.

It didn’t happen that way. The Himba sorted some of the faces in ways that aligned with Ekman’s theory: smiling faces went into one pile, wide-eyed fearful faces went into another, and affectless faces went mostly into a third. But in the other three piles, the Himba mixed up angry scowls, disgusted grimaces, and sad frowns. Without any suggestive context, of the kind that Ekman had originally provided, they simply didn’t recognize the differences that leap out so naturally to Westerners.

“What we’re trying to do,” she told me, “is to just get people to pay attention to the fact that there’s a mountain of evidence that does not support the idea that facial expressions are universally recognized as emotional expressions.” That’s the crucial point, of course, because if we acknowledge that, then the entire edifice that Paul Ekman and others have been constructing for the past half-century comes tumbling down. And all sorts of things that we take for granted today—how we understand ourselves and our relationships with others, how we practice psychology

Barrett’s theory is still only in its infancy. But other researchers are beginning to take up her ideas, sometimes in part, sometimes in full, and where the science will take us as it expands is impossible to predict. It’s even possible that Barrett will turn out to be wrong, as she herself acknowledges. “Every scientist has to face that,” she says. Still, if she is right, then perhaps the most important change we’ll need to make is in our own heads. If our emotions are not universal physiological responses but concepts we’ve constructed from various biological signals and stashed memories, then perhaps we can exercise more control over our emotional lives than we’ve assumed.

“Every experience you have now is seeding your experience for the future,” Barrett told me. “Knowing that, would you choose to do what you’re doing now?” She paused a beat and looked me in the eye. “Well? Would you? You are the architect of your own experience.”

Mr. Trachtenberg understood the centrality of the university as a physical place. New structures were a visceral sign of progress. They told visitors, donors and civic leaders that the institution was, like beams and scaffolding rising from the earth, ascending. He added new programs, recruited more students, and followed the dictate of constant expansion.

the American research university had evolved into a complicated and somewhat peculiar organization. It was built to be all things to all people: to teach undergraduates, produce knowledge, socialize young men and women, train workers for jobs, anchor local economies, even put on weekend sports events. And excellence was defined by similarity to old, elite institutions. Universities were judged by the quality of their scholars, the size of their endowments, the beauty of their buildings and the test scores of their incoming students.

John Silber embarked on a huge building campaign while bringing luminaries like Saul Bellow and Elie Wiesel on board to teach and lend their prestige to the B.U. name, creating a bigger, more famous and much more costly institution. He had helped write a game plan for the aspiring college president.

GWU is, for all intents and purposes, a for-profit organization. Best example: study abroad. Their top program, a partnering with Sciences Po, costs each student (30 of them, on a program with 'prestige' status?) a full semester's tuition. It costs GW, according to Sciences Po website, €1000. A neat $20,000 profit per student (who is in digging her/himself deeper and deeper in debt.) Moreover, the school takes a $500 admin fee for the study abroad application! With no guarantee that all credits transfer. Students often lose a partial semester, GW profits again. Nor does GW offer help with an antiquated, one-shot/no transfers, tricky registration process. It's tough luck in gay Paris.Just one of many examples. Dorms with extreme mold, off-campus housing impossible for freshmen and sophomores. Required meal plan: Chick-o-Filet etc. Classes with over 300 students (required).This is not Harvard, but costs same.Emotional problems? Counselors too few. Suicides continue and are not appropriately addressed. Caring environment? Extension so and so, please hold.It's an impressive campus, I'm an alum. If you apply, make sure the DC experience is worth the price: good are internships, a few colleges like Elliot School, post-grad.GWU uses undergrad $$ directly for building projects, like the medical center to which students have NO access. (Student health facility is underfunded, outsourced.)Outstanding professors still make a difference. But is that enough?

Mr. Trachtenberg, however, understood something crucial about the modern university. It had come to inhabit a market for luxury goods. People don’t buy Gucci bags merely for their beauty and functionality. They buy them because other people will know they can afford the price of purchase. The great virtue of a luxury good, from the manufacturer’s standpoint, isn’t just that people will pay extra money for the feeling associated with a name brand. It’s that the high price is, in and of itself, a crucial part of what people are buying.

Mr. Trachtenberg convinced people that George Washington was worth a lot more money by charging a lot more money. Unlike most college presidents, he was surprisingly candid about his strategy. College is like vodka, he liked to explain.

The Absolut Rolex plan worked. The number of applicants surged from some 6,000 to 20,000, the average SAT score of students rose by nearly 200 points, and the endowment jumped from $200 million to almost $1 billion.

The university became a magnet for the children of new money who didn’t quite have the SATs or family connections required for admission to Stanford or Yale. It also aggressively recruited international students, rich families from Asia and the Middle East who believed, as nearly everyone did, that American universities were the best in the world.

U.S. News & World Report now ranks the university at No. 54 nationwide, just outside the “first tier.”

The watch and vodka analogies are correct. Personally, I used car analogies when discussing college choices with my kids. We were in the fortunate position of being able to comfortably send our kids to any college in the country and have them leave debt free. Notwithstanding, I told them that they would be going to a state school unless they were able to get into one of about 40 schools that I felt, in whatever arbitrary manner I decided, that was worth the extra cost. They both ended up going to state schools.College is by and large a commodity and you get out of it what you put into it. Both of my kids worked hard in college and were involved in school life. They both left the schools better people and the schools better schools for them being there. They are both now successful adults.I believe too many people look for the prestige of a named school and that is not what college should be primarily about.

In 2013, only 14 percent of the university’s 10,000 undergraduates received a grant — a figure on a par with elite schools but far below the national average. The average undergraduate borrower leaves with about $30,800 in debt.

When I talk to the best high school students in my state I always stress the benefits of the honors college experience at an affordable public university. For students who won't qualify for a public honors college. the regular pubic university experience is far preferable to the huge debt of places like GW.

Carey would do well to look beyond high ticket private universities (which after all are still private enterprises) and what he describes as the Olympian heights of higher education (which for some reason seems also to embitter him) and look at the system overall . The withdrawal of public support was never a policy choice; it was a political choice, "packaged and branded" as some tax cutting palaver all wrapped up in the argument that a free-market should decide how much college should cost and how many seats we need. In such an environment, trustees at private universities are no more solely responsible for turning their degrees into commodities than the administrations of state universities are for raising the number of out-of-state students in order to offset the loss of support from their legislatures. No doubt, we will hear more about market based solutions and technology from Mr. Carey

I went to GW back in the 60s. It was affordable and it got me away from home in New York. While I was there, Newsweek famously published a article about the DC Universities - GW, Georgetown, American and Catholic - dubbing them the Pony league, the schools for the children of wealthy middle class New Yorkers who couldn't get into the Ivy League. Nobody really complained. But that wasn't me. I went because I wanted to be where the action was in the 60s, and as we used to say - "GW was literally a stone's throw from the White House. And we could prove it." Back then, the two biggest alumni names were Jackie Kennedy, who's taken some classes there, and J. Edgar Hoover. Now, according to the glossy magazine they send me each month, it's the actress Kerry Washington. There's some sort of progress there, but I'm a GW alum and not properly trained to understand it.

This explains a lot of the modern, emerging mentality. It encompasses the culture of enforced grade inflation, cheating and anti-intellectualism in much of higher education. It is consistent with our culture of misleading statistics and information, cronyism and fake quality, the "best and the brightest" being only schemers and glad handers. The wisdom and creativity engendered by an honest, rigorous academic education are replaced by the disingenuous quick fix, the winner-take-all mentality that neglects the common good.

I attended nearby Georgetown University and graduated in 1985. Relative to state schools and elite schools, it was expensive then. I took out loans. I had Pell grants. I had work-study and GSL. I paid my debt of $15,000 off in ten years. Would I have done it differently? Yes: I would have continued on to graduate school and not worried about paying off those big loans right after college. My career work out and I am grateful for the education I received and paid for. But I would not recommend to my nieces and nephews debts north of $100,000 for a BA in liberal arts. Go community. Then go state. Then punch your ticket to Harvard, Yale or Stanford — if you are good enough.

American universities appear to have more and more drifted away from educating individuals and citizens to becoming high priced trade schools and purveyors of occupational licenses. Lost in the process is the concept of expanding a student's ability to appreciate broadly and deeply, as well as the belief that a republican democracy needs an educated citizenry, not a trained citizenry, to function well.Both the Heisman Trophy winner and the producer of a successful tech I.P.O. likely have much in common, a college education whose rewards are limited to the financial. I don't know if I find this more sad on the individual level or more worrisome for the future of America.

This is now a consumer world for everything, including institutions once thought to float above the Shakespearean briars of the work-a-day world such as higher education, law and medicine. Students get this. Parents get this. Everything is negotiable: financial aid, a spot in the nicest dorm, tix to the big game. But through all this, there are faculty - lots of 'em - who work away from the fluff to link the ambitions of the students with the reality and rigor of the 21st century. The job of the student is to get beyond the visible hype of the surroundings and find those faculty members. They will make sure your investment is worth it

My experience in managing or working with GW alumni in their 20's or 30's has not been good. Virtually all have been mentally lazy and/or had a stunning sense of entitlement. Basically they've been all talk and no results. That's been quite a contrast to the graduates from VA/MD state universities.

More and more, I notice what my debt-financed contributions to the revenue streams of my vendors earn them, not me. My banks earned enough to pay ridiculous bonuses to employees for reckless risk-taking. My satellite tv operator earned enough to overpay ESPN for sports programming that I never watch--and that, in turn, overpays these idiotic pro athletes and college sports administrators. My health insurer earned enough to defeat one-payor insurance; to enable the opaque, inefficient billing practices of hospitals and other providers; and to feed the behemoth pharmaceutical industry. My church earned enough to buy the silence of sex abuse victims and oppose progressive political candidates. And my govt earned enough to continue ag subsidies, inefficient defense spending, and obsolete transportation and energy policies.

as the parent of GWU freshman I am grateful for every opportunity afforded her. She has a generous merit scholarship, is in the honors program with some small classes, and has access to internships that can be done while at school. GWU also gave her AP credits to advance her to sophomore status. Had she attended the state flagship school (where she was accepted into that exclusive honors program) she would have a great education but little else. It's not possible to do foreign affairs related internship far from D.C. or Manhattan. She went to a very competitive high school where for the one or two ivy league schools in which she was interested, she didn't have the same level of connections or wealth as many of her peers. Whether because of the Common Application or other factors, getting into a good school with financial help is difficult for a middle class student like my daughter who had a 4.0 GPA and 2300 on the SAT. She also worked after school.The bottom line - GWU offered more money than perceived "higher tier" universities, and brought tuition to almost that of our state school system. And by the way, I think she is also getting a very good education.

This article reinforces something I have learned during my daughter's college application process. Most students choose a school based on emotion (reputation) and not value. This luxury good analogy holds up.

The entire education problem can be solved by MOOCs lots and lots of them plus a few closely monitored tests and personal interviews with people. Of course many many people make MONEY off of our entirely inefficient way of "educating" -- are we even really doing that -- getting a degree does NOT mean one is actually educated

As a first-generation college graduate I entered GW ambitious but left saddled with debt, and crestfallen at the hard-hitting realization that my four undergraduate years were an aberration from what life is actually like post-college: not as simple as getting an [unpaid] internship with a fancy titled institution, as most Colonials do. I knew how to get in to college, but what do you do after the recess of life ends?I learned more about networking, resume plumping (designated responses to constituents...errr....replied to emails), and elevator pitches than actual theory, economic principles, strong writing skills, critical thinking, analysis, and philosophy. While relatively easy to get a job after graduating (for many with a GW degree this is sadly not the case) sustaining one and excelling in it is much harder. It's never enough just to be able to open a new door, you also need to be prepared to navigate your way through that next opportunity.

this is a very telling article. Aimless and directionless high school graduates are matched only by aimless and directionless institutes of higher learning. Each child and each parent should start with a goal - before handing over their hard earned tuition dollars, and/or leaving a trail of broken debt in the aftermath of a substandard, unfocused education.

it is no longer the most expensive university in America. It is the 46th.Others have been implementing the Absolut Rolex Plan. John Sexton turned New York University into a global higher-education player by selling the dream of downtown living to students raised on “Sex and the City.” Northeastern followed Boston University up the ladder. Under Steven B. Sample, the University of Southern California became a U.S. News top-25 university. Washington University in St. Louis did the same.

I currently attend GW, and I have to say, this article completely misrepresents the situation. I have yet to meet a single person who is paying the full $60k tuition - I myself am paying $30k, because the school gave me $30k in grants. As for the quality of education, Foreign Policy rated GW the #8 best school in the world for undergraduate education in international affairs, Princeton Review ranks it as one of the best schools for political science, and U.S. News ranks the law school #20. The author also ignores the role that an expanding research profile plays in growing a university's prestige and educational power.

And in hundreds of regional universities and community colleges, presidents and deans and department chairmen have watched this spectacle of ascension and said to themselves, “That could be me.” Agricultural schools and technical institutes are lobbying state legislatures for tuition increases and Ph.D. programs, fitness centers and arenas for sport. Presidents and boards are drawing up plans to raise tuition, recruit “better” students and add academic programs. They all want to go in one direction — up! — and they are all moving with a single vision of what they want to be.

this is the same playbook used by hospitals the past 30 years or so. It is how Hackensack Hospital became Hackensack Medical Center and McComb Hospital became Southwest Mississippi Regional Medical Center. No wonder the results have been the same in healthcare and higher education; both have priced themselves out of reach for average Americans.

a world where a college is rated not by the quality of its output, but instaed, by the quality of its inputs. A world where there is practically no work to be done by the administration because the college's reputation is made before the first class even begins! This is isanity! But this is the swill that the mammoth college marketing departments nationwide have shoved down America's throat. Colleges are ranked not by the quality of their graduates, but rather, by the test scores of their incoming students!

The Pew Foundation has been doing surveys on what students learn, how much homework they do, how much time they spend with professors etc. All good stuff to know before a student chooses a school. It is called the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE - called Nessy). It turns out that the higher ranked schools do NOT allow their information to be released to the public. It is SECRET.Why do you think that is?

The article blames "the standard university organizational model left teaching responsibilities to autonomous academic departments and individual faculty members, each of which taught and tested in its own way." This is the view of someone who has never taught at a university, nor thought much about how education there actually happens. Once undergraduates get beyond the general requirements, their educations _have_ to depend on "autonomous departments" because it's only those departments know what the requirements for given degree can be, and can grant the necessary accreditation of a given student. The idea that some administrator could know what's necessary for degrees in everything from engineering to fiction writing is nonsense, except that's what the people who only know the theory of education (but not its practice) actually seem to think. In the classroom itself, you have tremendously talented people, who nevertheless have their own particular strengths and approaches. Don't you think it's a good idea to let them do what they do best rather than trying to make everyone teach the same way? Don't you think supervision of young teachers by older colleagues, who actually know their field and its pedagogy, rather than some administrator, who knows nothing of the subject, is a good idea?

it makes me very sad to see how expensive some public schools have become. Used to be you could work your way through a public school without loans, but not any more. Like you, I had the advantage of a largely-scholarship paid undergraduate education at a top private college. However, I was also offered a virtually free spot in my state university's (then new) honors college

My daughter attended a good community college for a couple of classes during her senior year of high school and I could immediately see how such places are laboratories for failure. They seem like high schools in atmosphere and appearance. Students rush in by car and rush out again when the class is over.The four year residency college creates a completely different feel. On arrival, you get the sense that you are engaging in something important, something apart and one that will require your full attention. I don't say this is for everyone or that the model is not flawed in some ways (students actually only spend 2 1/2 yrs. on campus to get the four yr. degree). College is supposed to be a 60 hour per week job. Anything less than that and the student is seeking himself or herself

This. Is. STUNNING. I have always wondered, especially as my kids have approached college age, why American colleges have felt justified in raising tuition at a rate that has well exceeded inflation, year after year after year. (Nobody needs a dorm with luxury suites and a lazy river pool at college!) And as it turns out, they did it to become luxury brands. Just that simple. Incredible.I don't even blame this guy at GWU for doing what he did. He wasn't made responsible for all of American higher ed. But I do think we all need to realize what happened, and why. This is front page stuff.

I agree with you, but, unfortunately, given the choice between low tuition, primitive dorms, and no athletic center VS expensive & luxurious, the customers (and their parents) are choosing the latter. As long as this is the case, there is little incentive to provide bare-bones and cheap education.

Wesleyan University in CT is one school that is moving down the rankings. Syracuse University is another. Reed College is a third. Why? Because these schools try hard to stay out of the marketing game. (With its new president, Syracuse has jumped back into the game.) Bryn Mawr College, outside Philadelphia hasn't fared well over the past few decades in the rankings, which is true of practically every women's college. Wellesley is by far the highest ranked women's college, but even there the acceptance rate is significantly higher than one finds at comparable coed liberal arts colleges like Amherst & Williams. University of Chicago is another fascinating case for Mr. Carey to study (I'm sure he does in his forthcoming book, which I look forward to reading). Although it has always enjoyed an illustrious academic reputation, until recently Chicago's undergraduate reputation paled in comparison to peer institutions on the two coasts. A few years ago, Chicago changed its game plan to more closely resemble Harvard and Stanford in undergraduate amenities, and lo and behold, its rankings shot up. It was a very cynical move on the president's part to reassemble the football team, but it was a shrewd move because athletics draw more money than academics ever can (except at engineering schools like Cal Tech & MIT), and more money draws richer students from fancier secondary schools with higher test scores, which lead to higher rankings - and the beat goes on.

College INDUSTRY is out of control. Sorry, NYU, GW, BU are not worth the price. Are state schools any better? We have the University of Michigan, which is really not a state school, but a university that gives a discount to people who live in Michigan. Why? When you have an undergraduate body 40+% out-of-state that pays tuition of over $50K/year, you tell me?Perhaps the solution is two years of community college followed by two at places like U of M or Michigan State - get the same diploma at the end for much less and beat the system.

In one recent yr., the majority of undergrad professors at Harvard, according to Boston.com, where adjuncts. That means low pay, no benefits, no office, temp workers. Harvard.Easily available student loans fueled this arms race of amenities and frills that in which colleges now engage. They moved the cost of education onto the backs of people, kids, who don't understand what they are doing.Students in colleges these days are customers and the customers must be able to get through. If it requires dumbing things down, so be it. On top of tuition, G.W. U. is known by its students as the land of added fees on top of added fees. The joke around campus was that they would soon be installing pay toilets in the student union. No one was laughing.

You could written the same story about my alma mater, American University. The place reeked of ambition and upward mobility decades ago and still does. Whoever's running it now must look at its measly half-billion-dollar endowment and compare it to GWU's $1.5 billion and seethe with envy, while GWU's president sets his sights on an Ivy League-size endowment. And both get back to their real jobs: 24/7 fundraising,Which is what university presidents are all about these days. Money - including million-dollar salaries for themselves (GWU's president made more than Harvard's in 2011) - pride, cachet, power, a mansion, first-class all the way. They should just be honest about it and change their university's motto to Ostende mihi pecuniam! (please excuse my questionable Latin)Whether the students are actually learning anything is up to them, I guess - if they do, it's thanks to the professors, adjuncts and the administrative staff, who do the actual work of educating and keep the school running.

When I was in HS (70s), many of my richer friends went to GW and I was then of the impression that GW was a 'good' school. As I age, I have come to realize that this place is just another façade to the emptiness that has become America. All too often are we faced with a dilemma: damned if we do, damned if we don't. Yep, 'education' has become a trap for all too many of our citizen.

I transferred to GWU from a state school. I am forever grateful that I did. I wanted to get a good rigorous education and go to one of the best International Affairs schools in the world. Even though the state school I went to was dirt-cheap, the education and the faculty was awful. I transferred to GW and was amazed at the professors at that university. An ambassador or a prominent IA scholar taught every class. GW is an expensive school, but that is the free market. If you want a good education you need to be willing to pay for it or join the military. I did the latter and my school was completely free with no debt and I received an amazing education. If young people aren't willing to make some sort of sacrifice to get ahead or just expect everything to be given to then our country is in a sad state.We need to stop blaming universities like GWU that strive to attract better students, better professors, and better infrastructure. They are doing what is expected in America, to better oneself.

"Whether the students are actually learning anything is up to them, I guess." How could it possibly be otherwise??? I am glad that you are willing to give credit to teachers and administrators, but it is not they who "do the actual work of educating." From this fallacy comes its corollary, that we should blame teachers first for "under-performing schools". This long-running show of scapegoating may suit the wallets and vanity of American parents, but it is utterly senseless. When, if ever, American culture stops reeking of arrogance, greed and anti-intellectualism, things may improve, and we may resume the habit of bothering to learn. Until then, nothing doing.

Universities sell knowledge and grade students on how much they have learned. Fundamentally, there is conflict of interest in thsi setup. Moreover, students who are poorly educated, even if they know this, will not criticize their school, because doing so would make it harder for them to have a career. As such, many problems with higher education remain unexposed to the public.

I've lectured and taught in at least five different countries in three continents and the shortest perusal of what goes on abroad would totally undermine most of these speculations. For one thing American universities are unique in their dedication to a broad based liberal arts type education. In France, Italy or Germany, for example, you select a major like mathematics or physics and then in your four years you will not take even one course in another subject. The amount of work that you do that is critically evaluated by an instructor is a tiny fraction of what is done in an American University. While half educated critics based on profoundly incomplete research write criticism like this Universities in Germany Italy, the Netherlands, South Korea and Japan as well as France have appointed committees and made studies to explain why the American system of higher education so drastically outperforms their own system. Elsewhere students do get a rather nice dose of general education but it ends in secondary school and it has the narrowness and formulaic quality that we would just normally associate with that. The character who wrote this article probably never set foot on a "campus" of the University of Paris or Rome

The university is part of a complex economic system and it is responding to the demands of that system. For example, students and parents choose universities that have beautiful campuses and buildings. So universities build beautiful campuses. State support of universities has greatly declined, and this decline in funding is the greatest cause of increased tuition. Therefore universities must compete for dollars and must build to attract students and parents. Also, universities are not ranked based on how they educate students -- that's difficult to measure so it is not measured. Instead universities are ranked on research publications. So while universities certainly put much effort into teaching, research has to have a priority in order for the university to survive. Also universities do not force students and parents to attend high price institutions. Reasonably priced state institutions and community colleges are available to every student. Community colleges have an advantage because they are funded by property taxes. Finally learning requires good teaching, but it also requires students that come to the university funded, prepared, and engaged. This often does not happen. Conclusion- universities have to participate in profile raising actions in order to survive. The day that funding is provided for college, ranking is based on education, and students choose campuses with simple buildings, then things will change at the university.

This is the inevitable result of privatizing higher education. In the not-so-distant past, we paid for great state universities through our taxes, not tuition. Then, the states shifted funding to prisons and the Federal government radically cut research support and the GI bill. Instead, today we expect universities to support themselves through tuition, and to the extent that we offered students support, it is through non-dischargeable loans. To make matters worse, the interest rates on those loans are far above the government's cost of funds -- so in effect the loans are an excise tax on education (most of which is used to support a handful of for-profit institutions that account for the most student defaults). This "consumer sovereignty" privatized model of funding education works no better than privatizing California's electrical system did in the era of Enron, or our privatized funding of medical service, or our increasingly privatized prison system: it drives up costs at the same time that it replace quality with marketing.

There are data in some instances on student learning, but the deeper problem, as I suspect the author already knows, is that there is nothing like a consensus on how to measure that learning, or even on when is the proper end point to emphasize (a lot of what I teach -- I know this from what students have told me -- tends to come into sharp focus years after graduation).

Michael (Baltimore) has hit the nail on the head. Universities are increasingly corporatized institutions in the credentialing business. Knowledge, for those few who care about it (often not those paying for the credentials) is available freely because there's no profit in it. Like many corporate entities, it is increasingly run by increasingly highly paid administrators, not faculty.

GWU has not defined itself in any unique way, it has merely embraced the bland, but very expensive, accoutrements of American private education: luxury dorms, food courts, spa-like gyms, endless extracurricular activities, etc. But the real culprit for this bloat that students have to bear financially is the college ranking system by US News, Princeton Review, etc. An ultimately meaningless exercise in competition that has nevertheless pushed colleges and universities to be more like one another. A sad state of affairs, and an extremely expensive one for students

It is long past time to realize the failure of the Reagonomics-neoliberal private profits over public good program. In education, we need to return to public institutions publicly funded. Just as we need to recognize that Medicare, Social Security, the post office, public utilities, fire departments, interstate highway system, Veterans Administration hospitals and the GI bill are models to be improved and expanded, not destroyed.

George Washington is actually not a Rolex watch, it is a counterfeit Rolex. The real Rolexes of higher education -- places like Hopkins, Georgetown, Duke, the Ivies etc. -- have real endowments and real financial aid. No middle class kid is required to borrow $100,000 to get a degree from those schools, because they offer generous need-based financial aid in the form of grants, not loans. The tuition at the real Rolexes is really a sticker price that only the wealthy pay -- everybody else on a sliding scale. For middle class kids who are fortunate enough to get in, Penn actually ends up costing considerably less than a state university.The fake Rolexes -- BU, NYU, Drexel in Philadelphia -- don't have the sliding scale. They bury middle class students in debt.And really, though it is foolish to borrow $100,000 or $120,000 for an undergraduate degree, I don't find the transaction morally wrong. What is morally wrong is our federal government making that loan non-dischargeable in bankruptcy, so many if these kids will be having their wages garnished for the REST OF THEIR LIVES.There is a very simple solution to this, by the way. Cap the amount of non-dischargeable student loan debt at, say, $50,000

The slant of this article is critical of the growth of research universities. Couldn't disagree more. Modern research universities create are incredibly engines of economic opportunity not only for the students (who pay the bills) but also for the community via the creation of blue and white collar jobs. Large research university employ tens of thousands of locals from custodial and food service workers right up to high level administrators and specialist in finance, computer services, buildings and facilities management, etc. Johns Hopkins University and the University of Maryland system employ more people than any other industry in Maryland -- including the government. Research universities typically have hospitals providing cutting-edge medical care to the community. Local business (from cafes to property rental companies) benefit from a built-in, long-term client base as well as an educated workforce. And of course they are the foundry of new knowledge which is critical for the future growth of our country.Check out the work of famed economist Dr. Julia Lane on modeling the economic value of the research university. In a nutshell, there are few better investments America can make in herself than research universities. We are the envy of the world in that regard -- and with good reason. How many *industries* (let alone jobs) have Stanford University alone catalyzed?

What universities have the monopoly on is the credential. Anyone can learn, from books, from free lectures on the internet, from this newspaper, etc. But only universities can endow you with the cherished degree. For some reason, people are will to pay more for one of these pieces of paper with a certain name on it -- Ivy League, Stanford, even GW -- than another -- Generic State U -- though there is no evidence one is actually worth more in the marketplace of reality than the other. But, by the laws of economics, these places are actually underpriced: after all, something like 20 times more people are trying to buy a Harvard education than are allowed to purchase one. Usually that means you raise your price.

Overalll a good article, except for - "This comes on the heels of Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa’s “Academically Adrift,” a study that found “limited or no learning” among many college students." The measure of learning you report was a general thinking skills exam. That's not a good measure of college gains. Most psychologists and cognitive scientists worth their salt would tell you that improvement in critical thinking skills is going to be limited to specific areas. In other words, learning critical thinking skills in math will make little change in critical thinking about political science or biology. Thus we should not expect huge improvements in general critical thinking skills, but rather improvements in a student's major and other areas of focus, such as a minor. Although who has time for a minor when it is universally acknowledged that the purpose of a university is to please and profit an employer or, if one is lucky, an investor. Finally, improved critical thinking skills are not the end all and be all of a college education even given this profit centered perspective. Learning and mastering the cumulative knowledge of past generations is arguably the most important thing to be gained, and most universities still tend to excel at that even with the increasing mandate to run education like a business and cultivate and cull the college "consumer".

As for community colleges, there was an article in the Times several years ago that said it much better than I could have said it myself: community colleges are places where dreams are put on hold. Without making the full commitment to study, without leaving the home environment, many, if not most, community college students are caught betwixt and between, trying to balance work responsibilities, caring for a young child or baby and attending classes. For males, the classic "end of the road" in community college is to get a car, a job and a girlfriend, one who is not in college, and that is the end of the dream. Some can make it, but most cannot.

as a scientist I disagree with the claim that undergrad tuition subsidizes basic research. Nearly all lab equipment and research personnel (grad students, technicians, anyone with the title "research scientist" or similar) on campus is paid for through federal grants. Professors often spend all their time outside teaching and administration writing grant proposals, as the limited federal grant funds mean ~%85 of proposals must be rejected. What is more, out of each successful grant the university levies a "tax", called "overhead", of 30-40%, nominally to pay for basic operations (utilities, office space, administrators). So in fact one might say research helps fund the university rather than the other way around. Flag

It's certainly overrated as a research and graduate level university. Whether it is good for getting an undergraduate education is unclear, but a big part of the appeal is getting to live in D.C..while attending college instead of living in some small college town in the corn fields.

. Later, those who produced the most oxytocin were the most likely to give money to others they couldn't see.

"Our results show why puppies and babies are in toilet paper commercials," Zak said. "This research suggests that advertisers use images that cause our brains to release oxytocin to build trust in a product or brand, and hence increase sales."

A study published in the Journal of Consumer Research demonstrated that consumers who experienced fear while watching a film felt a greater affiliation with a present brand than those who watched films evoking other emotions, like happiness, sadness or excitement.

The rude comments made participants dig in on their stance

That emotions are critical -- maybe even more than previously thought -- to marketing.

In an analysis of the IPA dataBANK, which contains 1,400 case studies of successful advertising campaigns, campaigns with purely emotional content performed about twice as well (31 percent versus 16 percent) as those with only rational content (and did a little better than those that mixed emotional and rational content).

The emotional brain processes sensory information in one fifth of the time our cognitive brain takes to assimilate the same input

we're not just sharing the object, but we're sharing in the emotional response it creates."

Yes, he knew they had other classes, jobs and extracurriculars; they could make arrangements to do that work silently and without a computer.

The class eased into the vow of silence, first restricting speech to 100 words a day. Other rules began on Day 1: no jewelry or makeup in class. Men and women sat separately and wore different “habits”: white shirts for the men, women in black. (Nonbinary and transgender students sat with the gender of their choice.)

Dr. McDaniel discouraged them from sharing personal information; they should get to know one another only through ideas. “He gave us new names, based on our birth time and day, using a Thai birth chart,”

“We were practicing living a monastic life. We had to wake up at 5 a.m. and journal every 30 minutes.”

If you tried to cruise to a C, you missed the point: “I realized the only way for me to get the most out of this class was to experience it all,” she said. (She got Dr. McDaniel’s permission to break her vow of silence in order to talk to patients during her clinical rotation.)

Dr. McDaniel also teaches a course called Existential Despair. Students meet once a week from 5 p.m. to midnight in a building with comfy couches, turn over their phones and curl up to read an assigned novel (cover to cover) in one sitting — books like James Baldwin’s “Giovanni’s Room” and José Saramago’s “Blindness.” Then they stay up late discussing it.

The course is not about hope, overcoming things, heroic stories,” Dr. McDaniel said. Many of the books “start sad. In the middle they’re sad. They stay sad. I’m not concerned with their 20-year-old self. I’m worried about them at my age, dealing with breast cancer, their dad dying, their child being an addict, a career that never worked out — so when they’re dealing with the bigger things in life, they know they’re not alone.”

Both courses have long wait lists. Students are hungry for a low-tech, introspective experience —

Research suggests that underprivileged young people have far fewer opportunities to think for unbroken stretches of time, so they may need even more space in college to develop what social scientists call cognitive endurance.

Yet the most visible higher ed trends are moving in the other direction

Rather than ban phones and laptops from class, some professors are brainstorming ways to embrace students’ tech addictions with class Facebook and Instagram accounts, audience response apps — and perhaps even including the friends and relatives whom students text during class as virtual participants in class discussion.

Then there’s that other unwelcome classroom visitor: artificial intelligence.

stop worrying and love the bot by designing assignments that “help students develop their prompting skills” or “use ChatGPT to generate a first draft,” according to a tip sheet produced by the Center for Teaching and Learning at Washington University in St. Louis.

It’s not at all clear that we want a future dominated by A.I.’s amoral, Cheez Whiz version of human thought

It is abundantly clear that texting, tagging and chatbotting are making students miserable right now.

One recent national survey found that 60 percent of American college students reported the symptoms of at least one mental health problem and that 15 percent said they were considering suicide

A recent meta-analysis of 36 studies of college students’ mental health found a significant correlation between longer screen time and higher risk of anxiety and depression

And while social media can sometimes help suffering students connect with peers, research on teenagers and college students suggests that overall, the support of a virtual community cannot compensate for the vortex of gossip, bullying and Instagram posturing that is bound to rot any normal person’s self-esteem.

We need an intervention: maybe not a vow of silence but a bold move to put the screens, the pinging notifications and creepy humanoid A.I. chatbots in their proper place

it does mean selectively returning to the university’s roots in the monastic schools of medieval Europe and rekindling the old-fashioned quest for meaning.

Colleges should offer a radically low-tech first-year program for students who want to apply: a secular monastery within the modern university, with a curated set of courses that ban glowing rectangles of any kind from the classroom

Students could opt to live in dorms that restrict technology, too

I prophesy that universities that do this will be surprised by how much demand there is. I frequently talk to students who resent the distracting laptops all around them during class. They feel the tug of the “imaginary string attaching me to my phone, where I have to constantly check it,”

Many, if not most, students want the elusive experience of uninterrupted thought, the kind where a hash of half-baked notions slowly becomes an idea about the world.

Even if your goal is effective use of the latest chatbot, it behooves you to read books in hard copies and read enough of them to learn what an elegant paragraph sounds like. How else will students recognize when ChatGPT churns out decent prose instead of bureaucratic drivel?

Most important, students need head space to think about their ultimate values.

His course offers a chance to temporarily exchange those unconscious structures for a set of deliberate, countercultural ones.

here are the student learning outcomes universities should focus on: cognitive endurance and existential clarity.

Contemplation and marathon reading are not ends in themselves or mere vacations from real life but are among the best ways to figure out your own answer to the question of what a human being is for

When students finish, they can move right into their area of specialization and wire up their skulls with all the technology they want, armed with the habits and perspective to do so responsibly

it’s worth learning from the radicals. Dr. McDaniel, the religious studies professor at Penn, has a long history with different monastic traditions. He grew up in Philadelphia, educated by Hungarian Catholic monks. After college, he volunteered in Thailand and Laos and lived as a Buddhist monk.

e found that no amount of academic reading could help undergraduates truly understand why “people voluntarily take on celibacy, give up drinking and put themselves under authorities they don’t need to,” he told me. So for 20 years, he has helped students try it out — and question some of their assumptions about what it means to find themselves.

“On college campuses, these students think they’re all being individuals, going out and being wild,” he said. “But they’re in a playpen. I tell them, ‘You know you’ll be protected by campus police and lawyers. You have this entire apparatus set up for you. You think you’re being an individual, but look at your four friends: They all look exactly like you and sound like you. We exist in these very strict structures we like to pretend don’t exist.’”

Colleges could do all this in classes integrated with general education requirements: ideally, a sequence of great books seminars focused on classic texts from across different civilizations.

“For the last 1,500 years, Benedictines have had to deal with technology,” Placid Solari, the abbot there, told me. “For us, the question is: How do you use the tool so it supports and enhances your purpose or mission and you don’t get owned by it?”

for novices at his monastery, “part of the formation is discipline to learn how to control technology use.” After this initial time of limited phone and TV “to wean them away from overdependence on technology and its stimulation,” they get more access and mostly make their own choices.

Evan Lutz graduated this May from Belmont Abbey with a major in theology. He stressed the special Catholic context of Belmont’s resident monks; if you experiment with monastic practices without investigating the whole worldview, it can become a shallow kind of mindfulness tourism.

The monks at Belmont Abbey do more than model contemplation and focus. Their presence compels even non-Christians on campus to think seriously about vocation and the meaning of life. “Either what the monks are doing is valuable and based on something true, or it’s completely ridiculous,” Mr. Lutz said. “In both cases, there’s something striking there, and it asks people a question.”

Pondering ultimate questions and cultivating cognitive endurance should not be luxury goods.

David Peña-Guzmán, who teaches philosophy at San Francisco State University, read about Dr. McDaniel’s Existential Despair course and decided he wanted to create a similar one. He called it the Reading Experiment. A small group of humanities majors gathered once every two weeks for five and a half hours in a seminar room equipped with couches and a big round table. They read authors ranging from Jean-Paul Sartre to Frantz Fanon

“At the beginning of every class I’d ask students to turn off their phones and put them in ‘the Basket of Despair,’ which was a plastic bag,” he told me. “I had an extended chat with them about accessibility. The point is not to take away the phone for its own sake but to take away our primary sources of distraction. Students could keep the phone if they needed it. But all of them chose to part with their phones.”

Dr. Peña-Guzmán’s students are mostly working-class, first-generation college students. He encouraged them to be honest about their anxieties by sharing his own: “I said, ‘I’m a very slow reader, and it’s likely some or most of you will get further in the text than me because I’m E.S.L. and read quite slowly in English.’

For his students, the struggle to read long texts is “tied up with the assumption that reading can happen while multitasking and constantly interacting with technologies that are making demands on their attention, even at the level of a second,”

“These draw you out of the flow of reading. You get back to the reading, but you have to restart the sentence or even the paragraph. Often, because of these technological interventions into the reading experience, students almost experience reading backward — as constant regress, without any sense of progress. The more time they spend, the less progress they make.”

Dr. Peña-Guzmán dismissed the idea that a course like his is suitable only for students who don’t have to worry about holding down jobs or paying off student debt. “I’m worried by this assumption that certain experiences that are important for the development of personality, for a certain kind of humanistic and spiritual growth, should be reserved for the elite, especially when we know those experiences are also sources of cultural capital,

Courses like the Reading Experiment are practical, too, he added. “I can’t imagine a field that wouldn’t require some version of the skill of focused attention.”

The point is not to reject new technology but to help students retain the upper hand in their relationship with i

Ms. Rodriguez said that before she took Living Deliberately and Existential Despair, she didn’t distinguish technology from education. “I didn’t think education ever went without technology. I think that’s really weird now. You don’t need to adapt every piece of technology to be able to learn better or more,” she said. “It can form this dependency.”

The point of college is to help students become independent humans who can choose the gods they serve and the rules they follow rather than allow someone else to choose for them

The first step is dethroning the small silicon idol in their pocket — and making space for the uncomfortable silence and questions that follow

“We think we’re all unique, and we think every novel is individual, and it is. So when they reduce us all to a bunch of data about words, I guess you have to laugh.

A 1999 study found that when social and economic conditions were bad, movie actresses with “mature facial features” — small eyes, thin cheeks, large chins — were popular, but when conditions were good, the public liked actresses with childlike features.

In the new study, researchers also analyzed 650,000 German books and found the same misery correlation.

Still, the practice of applying data-sorting algorithms to art can only go so far. For one thing, the lists of emotion words, created by other researchers and used for years, include some surprising choices: words like “smug” and “wallow” were among 224 words on the “joy” list; potentially neutral adjectives like “dark” and “low” were among 115 words on the “sadness” list.

A new book by Harvey Silverglate, a lawyer in Massachusetts, titled “Three Felonies a Day,” claims the average professional in the United States commits at least three crimes every day. How? While academics, lawyers and even government officials don’t actually know how many laws exist in today’s judicial system, it’s estimated that there are from 10,000 to 300,000 federal regulations that could be enforced criminally.

it is not clear whether the rise of post-war tower dwelling is a definite improvement on the modern city sprawl. Tall buildings (with the exception of glassed-office buildings and landmarks) are often found in sad scenes.

In recent years, the new mayor of the Colombian capital Bogota, Enrique Penalosa, has cancelled highways projects and poured the money instead into cycle lanes, parks and open spaces for locals – undoing decades of car-centric planning that had made the streets a no-go area for the capital’s children. On the day in February 2000 when Penalosa banned cars from the street for 24 hours, hospital admissions fell by a third, air pollution levels dropped and residents said it made them feel more optimistic about living in the city.

are the technologies we are designing really helping its users to be happy? Take the simple example of a web map. It usually gives us the shortest walking direction to destination. But what if it would give us the small street, full of trees, parallel to the shortest path, which would make us happier? As more and more of us share these city streets, what will keep us happy as they become more crowded?

the share of the world’s population living in cities has surpassed 50%. By 2025, we will see another 1.2 billion city residents. With more and more of us moving to urban centres, quality of life becomes ever-more important.

Unsurprisingly, people who consistently make others feel good are more central to their social networks—in Elfenbein’s study, more of their classmates considered them to be friends. They also got more romantic interest from others in a separate speed-dating study.

It seems that “our own way of being has an emotional signature,”

affective presence is an effect one has regardless of one’s own feelings—those with positive affective presence make other people feel good, even if they personally are anxious or sad, and the opposite is true for those with negative affective presence.

“To use common, everyday words, some people are just annoying. It doesn’t mean they’re annoyed all the time,”

“They may be content because they’re always getting their way.

Some people bring out great things in others while they’re themselves quite depressed.”

The researchers found that a significant portion of group members’ emotions could be accounted for by the affective presence of their peers

leaders who make other people feel good by their very presence have teams that are better at sharing information, which leads to more innovation. Subordinates are more likely to voice their ideas, too, to a leader with positive affective presence.

xactly what people are doing that sets others at ease or puts them off hasn’t yet been studied. It may have to do with body language, or tone of voice, or being a good listener

a big part of affective presence may be how people regulate emotions—those of others and their own.

Throughout the day, one experiences emotional “blips” as Elfenbein puts it—blips of annoyance or excitement or sadness. The question is, “Can you regulate yourself so those blips don’t infect other people?” she asks. “Can you smooth over the noise in your life so other people aren’t affected by it?”

This “smoothing over”—or emotional regulation—could take the form of finding the positive in a bad situation, which can be healthy.

it could also take the form of suppressing one’s own emotions just to keep other people comfortable, which is less so.

Elfenbein notes that positive affective presence isn’t inherently good, either for the person themselves, or for their relationships with others. Psychopaths are notoriously charming

Neither is negative affective presence necessarily always a bad thing in a leader—think of a football coach yelling at the team at halftime, motivating them to make a comeback.

“Is there a weight of evidence that says we can totally ignore both dietary cholesterol and LDL? Absolutely not,” he said. “You can legitimately say we’re starting to rethink some things, but ignoring LDL could absolutely result in heart attacks and strokes.

The medical community’s understanding of the danger of cholesterol is changing. Many cardiologists are starting to think that independent of other considerations, the level of LDL in our blood may not be as important as it previously seemed.

In November, the American Heart Association and the American College of Cardiology released new guidelines that redefined the use of statins. While they continue to recommend that people at high risk for heart disease and people with LDL levels above 189 take a statin, the long-standing goal of lowering one’s LDL level to 70 is no longer deemed worthwhile to monitor.

Katz acknowledges that dietary cholesterol may be an innocuous part of an overall healthy diet. “The problem is that people are going to get their dietary cholesterol from things other than fish and eggs; they’re going to get it from meats and dairies. The problem with diets like that is if you eat more of A, you’re probably going to eat less of B. So people who are eating more meat and dairy and high-fat, high-cholesterol foods are eating fewer plants—they’re not eating beans; they’re not eating lentils. So yes, I think it’s entirely confabulated and contrived, and potentially dangerous on the level of lethal.”

Having talked to all of these people and read their work, here is how I walk away from this. Oxidative stress will increasingly be the target of medical treatments and preventive diets. We’ll hear more about the role of blood sugar in Alzheimer’s and continue to focus on moderating intake of refined carbohydrates. The consensus remains that too much LDL is bad for you. We do not have reason to believe that gluten is bad for most people. It does cause reactive symptoms in some people. Peanuts can kill some people, but that does not mean they are bad for everyone

I agree with Katz that the diets consistently shown to have good long-term health outcomes—both mental and physical—include whole grains and fruits, and are not nearly as high in fat as what Perlmutter proposes.

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.

this is like if Russell Moore came out and said that, on the whole, Christianity turns out to be a bad thing. It’s that big of a deal.

Thompson’s case centers around constraints and supply, particularly as they apply to content creation.

In the pre-internet days, creating and distributing content was relatively expensive, which placed content publishers—be they newspapers, or TV stations, or movie studios—high on the value chain.

The internet reduced distribution costs to zero and this shifted value away from publishers and over to aggregators: Suddenly it was more important to aggregate an audience—a la Google and Facebook—than to be a content creator.

Audiences were valuable; content was commoditized.

What has alarmed Thompson is that AI has now reduced the cost of creating content to zero.

what does the world look like when both the creation and distribution of content are zero?

Hellscape

We’re headed to a place where content is artificially created and distributed in such a way as to be tailored to a given user’s preferences. Which will be the equivalent of living in a hall of mirrors.

What does that mean for news? Nothing good.

So the challenges the New York Times face will be different than the challenges that NPR or your local paper face.

It doesn’t really make sense to talk about “news media” because there are fundamental differences between publication models that are driven by scale.

Two big takeaways:

(1) Ad-supported publications will not survive

Zero-cost for content creation combined with zero-cost distribution means an infinite supply of content. The more content you have, the more ad space exists—the lower ad prices go.

Actually, some ad-supported publications will survive. They just won’t be news. What will survive will be content mills that exist to serve ads specifically matched to targeted audiences.

(2) Size is determinative.

The New York Times has a moat by dint of its size. It will see the utility of its soft “news” sections decline in value, because AI is going to be better at creating cooking and style content than breaking hard news. But still, the NYT will be okay because it has pivoted hard into being a subscription-based service over the last decade.

At the other end of the spectrum, independent journalists should be okay. A lone reporter running a focused Substack who only needs four digits’ worth of subscribers to sustain them.

But everything in between? That’s a crapshoot.

Technology writers sometimes talk about the contrast between “builders” and “conservers” — roughly speaking, between those who are most animated by what we stand to gain from technology and those animated by what we stand to lose.

in our moment the builder and conserver types are proving quite mercurial. On issues ranging from Big Tech to medicine, human enhancement to technologies of governance, the politics of technology are in upheaval.

Dispositions are supposed to be basically fixed. So who would have thought that deep blue cities that yesterday were hotbeds of vaccine skepticism would today become pioneers of vaccine passports? Or that outlets that yesterday reported on science and tech developments in reverent tones would today make it their mission to unmask “tech bros”?

One way to understand this churn is that the builder and the conserver types each speak to real, contrasting features within human nature. Another way is that these types each pick out real, contrasting features of technology. Focusing strictly on one set of features or the other eventually becomes unstable, forcing the other back into view.

being with him wasn’t like being with a conventional person; it was like being with an entity who was playing the role of Donald Trump. And that role had no sense of continuity. He was fully immersed in whatever dominance battle he was fighting at that moment.

I wonder if the era of the short-attention spans and the online avatars is creating a new character type: the person who doesn’t experience life as an accumulation over decades, but just as a series of disjointed performances in the here and now, with an echo of hollowness inside.

McAdams calls Trump an “episodic man,” who experiences life as a series of disjointed moments, not as a coherent narrative flow of consciousness

“He does not look to what may lie ahead, at least not very far ahead,” McAdams writes. “Trump is not introspective, retrospective or prospective. There is no depth; there is no past; there is no future.”

In his book, “The Strange Case of Donald J. Trump,” the eminent personality psychologist Dan McAdams argues that Trump could continually lie to himself because he had no actual sense of himself. There was no real person, inner life or autobiographical narrative to betray.

As the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre once observed, you can’t know what to do unless you know what story you are a part of.

In this past weekend’s Styles section of the New York Times, Siegel uses “The Lonely Crowd” to analyze the putative “Yelpification” of contemporary life: according to Siegel, Riesman’s view was that “people went from being ‘inner-directed’ to ‘outer-directed,’ from heeding their own instincts and judgment to depending on the judgments and opinions of tastemakers and trendsetters.” The “conformist power of the crowd” and its delighted ability to write online reviews led Siegel down a sad path to a lackluster expensive dinner.

What Riesman actually suggested was that we think of social organization in terms of a series of “ideal types” along a spectrum of increasingly loose authority

On one end of the spectrum is a “tradition-directed” community, where we all understand that what we’re supposed to do is what we’re supposed to do because it’s just the thing that one does; authority is unequivocal, and there’s neither the room nor the desire for autonomous action

In the middle of the spectrum, as one moves toward a freer distribution of, and response to, authority, is “inner-direction.” The inner-directed character is concerned not with “what one does” but with “what people like us do.” Which is to say that she looks to her own internalizations of past authorities to get a sense for how to conduct her affairs.

Contemporary society, Riesman thought, was best understood as chiefly “other-directed,” where the inculcated authority of the vertical (one’s lineage) gives way to the muddled authority of the horizontal (one’s peers).

The inner-directed person orients herself by an internal “gyroscope,” while the other-directed person orients herself by “radar.”

It’s not that the inner-directed person consults some deep, subjective, romantically sui generis oracle. It’s that the inner-directed person consults the internalized voices of a mostly dead lineage, while her other-directed counterpart heeds the external voices of her living contemporaries.

“the gyroscopic mechanism allows the inner-directed person to appear far more independent than he really is: he is no less a conformist to others than the other-directed person, but the voices to which he listens are more distant, of an older generation, their cues internalized in his childhood.” The inner-directed person is, simply, “somewhat less concerned than the other-directed person with continuously obtaining from contemporaries (or their stand-ins: the mass media) a flow of guidance, expectation, and approbation.

Riesman drew no moral from the transition from a community of primarily inner-directed people to a community of the other-directed. Instead, he saw that each ideal type had different advantages and faced different problems

As Riesman understood it, the primary disciplining emotion under tradition direction is shame, the threat of ostracism and exile that enforces traditional action. Inner-directed people experience not shame but guilt, or the fear that one’s behavior won’t be commensurate with the imago within. And, finally, other-directed folks experience not guilt but a “contagious, highly diffuse” anxiety—the possibility that, now that authority itself is diffuse and ambiguous, we might be doing the wrong thing all the time.

Siegel is right to make the inference, if wayward in his conclusions. It makes sense to associate the anxiety of how to relate to livingly diffuse authorities with the Internet, which presents the greatest signal-to-noise-ratio problem in human history.

The problem with Yelp is not the role it plays, for Siegel, in the proliferation of monoculture; most people of my generation have learned to ignore Yelp entirely. It’s the fact that, after about a year of usefulness, Yelp very quickly became a terrible source of information.

There are several reasons for this. The first is the nature of an algorithmic response to the world. As Jaron Lanier points out in “Who Owns the Future?,” the hubris behind each new algorithm is the idea that its predictive and evaluatory structure is game-proof; but the minute any given algorithm gains real currency, all the smart and devious people devote themselves to gaming it. On Yelp, the obvious case would be garnering positive reviews by any means necessary.

A second problem with Yelp’s algorithmic ranking is in the very idea of using online reviews; as anybody with a book on Amazon knows, they tend to draw more contributions from people who feel very strongly about something, positively or negatively. This undermines the statistical relevance of their recommendations.

the biggest problem with Yelp is not that it’s a popularity contest. It’s not even that it’s an exploitable popularity contest.

it’s the fact that Yelp makes money by selling ads and prime placements to the very businesses it lists under ostensibly neutral third-party review

But Yelp’s valuations are always possibly in bad faith, even if its authority is dressed up as the distilled algorithmic wisdom of a crowd. For Riesman, that’s the worst of all possible worlds: a manipulated consumer certainty that only shores up the authority of an unchosen, hidden source. In that world, cold monkfish is the least of our problems.