I think it’s recognising that things that we might deem to be negative can still serve flourishing and adaptation and wellbeing, so it can perhaps expand our way, expand our horizons and concern in the field.”

the second wave is an important and exciting development for the field of positive psychology, which can help it to become a more mature and well-rounded discipline. By focusing research on both the positive and the negative as ways for people to flourish, this allows for a broader scope of interventions for people to use, in order to thrive and be successful.

While it’s imperative that you actually read and study the book itself, sometimes it’s helpful to gain understanding by also reading what others have taken from the book, and how it helps them become better marketers and run a successful business. The Psychology of Persuasion was written by Robert Cialdini, a world-renowned psychologist who has previously worked at many universities, including Stanford. His principles have stood well the test of time, and this book has topped the New York Times Bestseller List.

The foundation of the book is simple – if someone does go out of their way for you, you are more likely to do so in return. Now, let’s think of this from a business standpoint. Let’s say you are a business that offers terrific incentives, programs, or sales. You also offer great customer service (a very liberal return policy, for example). What you get in return as reciprocity is customer loyalty, as well as word of mouth. Building a customer base is one of the most important parts of marketing, and in this instance, sometimes you have to give a little to get some in return. However, having a customer for life, who speaks well of you to their friends, is worth the price of a liberal return policy, or whatever method you choose.

if one person says black, the other person would say white. This correlation is also known as priming. This is one of those functions that works well in both a psychological and marketing arena.

This is our efficient markets hypothesis in action. The EMH does not insist, not at all, that markets are the efficient manner of organising everything. Rather, simply that markets are efficient at processing the information about what prices should be in a market. And this is one of the ways this works. We don’t know the result of that coming referendum. But we do know that it will have major effects on prices either way. Leave and sterling tumbles, stay in and it rises (largely offsetting that current risk of it falling). And obviously we’ll not actually know until the votes have been counted.

Firstly, information about what will happen in the future gets incorporated into prices today. Because people trade on it today to profit from that future event. Secondly, there’s significant incentive to go out and find the information about what will happen in the future.

“Our emotions, which drive us so strongly, are inherently not rational,” says Dan Ariely, author of Predictably Irrational and a leader in the field, which examines the place where psychology and economics overlap. “If you think about an environment in which we have to think long-term and abstractly, that’s just not something we’re good at. Saving is about now versus later, it’s about concrete versus abstract, and we don’t do those well.”

One aspect of our nature that’s to blame is called present bias—the human tendency to emphasize now over later. “We get the money now, when we take a loan, and we pay it back some time in the future. This temporal component triggers a host of behavioral psychological effects,” says Oren Bar-Gill, a Harvard Law School professor who specializes in law and economics. “One of them is basic myopia. We think more about the present and less about the future, and so we’re more likely to take on debt, because we don’t put enough weight in our decision-making process on the future paybacks.”

although in theory you’d like to take care of yourself in the future, when it comes to how you live your lif

Yet you’d be hard pressed to find the word in any official document, or to hear any politician utter it today. In fact we seem almost embarrassed to talk about beauty, other than in private. Instead we have invented all kinds of pseudo, management-speak words to describe the things we need to look after: words like ecosystem services, natural capital and sustainable development

But it wasn’t always like that. Beauty was a word and an idea that people in previous centuries used freely and confidently, including in legislation and public policy. And because people celebrated beauty it was something they sought to create, in town and country, and enacted laws to protect the things and places people loved.

Beauty is written deeply into our culture. Some of the earliest texts show a yearning for beauty, with Chaucer reminding us that it was the beauty of an April spring that “longen folk to goon on pilgrimages”. Medieval stonemasons constructed fabulous churches and cathedrals, carving flowers and animals into their stone.

Charles Koch is known for being CEO of industrial giant Koch Industries and a chief financier of the massive conservative political operation he runs with his brother David. In recent years, student activists and investigative journalists have exposed another of Koch’s hats: mega-donor to hundreds of colleges and universities, often funding free-market-focused academic centers housed at public and private schools alike. One Koch-funded program is advocating cutthroat economics to grade school students, even sacrificing lives for profits.

From 2005 to 2014, the Charles Koch Foundation doled out nearly $108 million to colleges and universities. The school that has accepted the second highest total from the Charles Koch Foundation from 2005 to 2014 is Florida State University, whose economics department entered into a 2008 agreement that gave the foundation a say in its curriculum and hiring decisions, as Dave Levinthal of the Center for Public Integrity reported. One part of the 2008 agreement, which proposed a $6.6 million budget to be funded by the Charles Koch Foundation and unnamed “Donor Partners,” established a “Program for Excellence in Economic Education” within the Gus A. Stavros Center for the Advancement of Free Enterprise and Economic Education, part of the economics department. Annual reports confirm these funding arrangements

Time to call an end to free market supremacy Recently published book, ‘Concrete Economics’, advocates a new industrialism that requires some form of activist government

If you’re at all concerned about economic policy, this is a book you need to read. It will take you only a couple of hours, and the time will be well spent

But despite the inherent limitations of historical analysis, the message of ‘Concrete Economics’ is one that US policymakers need to hear. One reason is that DeLong and Cohen are absolutely right — the American mind has been far too captured by the beguilingly simple and powerful theory of free-market dogma. That theory was oversold, and we need a corrective. We need history.

The second world history was a $5 find at Half-Price Books, published in 1925 by sci-fi author H.G. Wells. The third, published in 1993 by British historian J. M. Roberts, snuck into my library unnoticed. How might these books treat the same subject?

Most striking is how authors differ. Swinton concludes, “Many Mohammedans inspired Christian knights with esteem and admiration.” Wells concludes in 1925 that Crusades “left a quite insane intolerance between Christendom and Islam” — an issue resonating 91 years later

By checking our sources’ agendas. I trust Consumer Reports because it has no ads. I trust PolitiFact about lying politicians because it’s vetted by newspapers nationwide. I trust Wikipedia because of transparent fact-checking.

Trump would be not be in consideration for our endorsement if one of the Republicans with a modicum of qualification, dignity and serious purpose — think John Kasich, Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio — were still in contention

Instead, Clinton’s California appearances have been limited to rallies, photo opportunities, perfunctory interviews and fundraisers, fundraisers and more fundraisers. Her double-cross on the debate pledge only feeds into the perception (established through the years) of the Clintons’ sense of entitlement, and their presumption that they can set their own rules

Sanders has had a profound impact on the debate, moved Clinton to the left, and, admirably, he has inspired young people to engage in politics. The 74-year-old senator has tapped the legitimate anxieties of generations who see the promise of opportunity that has defined this nation slipping away.

Memorizing a person’s face in an instant, and being able to recall it later even if you only met once, and briefly at tha

With the discovery of super-recognizers in 2009 came a new way of thinking about face perception: The ability to recognize faces seems to exist on a spectrum, with the 2 percent of the population who are super-recognizers on one end, and prosopagnosiacs

— that is, the 2 percent who are unable to recognize familiar faces (including their own) — at the other. Previously, prosopagnosia was considered a disorder or an impairment; now many psychologists believe it’s just on the low end of normal visual functioning. And most of us, as is the case with any bell curve, are somewhere in between the two extremes.

Everything we do and see is real. It’s all experiential. Nobody has a dream and wakes up feeling like a victim of fraud. It really happened in the sense that we had a genuine dream. So when we talk about virtual reality, what is real and what is virtually real?

Suspension of disbelief, what we experienced essential in all mediums before, is not necessary in VR anymore. It’s what all prior mediums require and what VR, when done right, completely circumvents

Each and every facet of VR production relies on craft to properly convey an experience to the user and make it enjoyable and believable.

Many types of sensory information enter the brain at a structure called the primary sensory cortex, where they are processed by different layers of cells in ways that ultimately influence an animal's perception and behavioral response.

An ultimate goal of neurobiological research is to understand how a brain integrates a constant flow of various types of stimuli, makes sense of it, and helps coordinate an appropriate behavioral respons

Understanding the most basic principles of this system will require careful studies of regions of animal brains that are simple enough to keep track of nerve impulses as they enter, and yet complex enough to follow different types of signals as they exit along different routes.

Now, results of a landmark government-funded study call that approach into question. The findings, from by far the most rigorous trial to date conducted in the United States, concluded that schizophrenia patients who received smaller doses of antipsychotic medication and a bigger emphasis on one-on-one talk therapy and family support made greater strides in recovery over the first two years of treatment than patients who got the usual drug-focused care.

This approach is misguided. Too many scientists have given up on the computer analogy, and far too little has been offered in its place. In my view, the analogy is due for a rethink.To begin with, all the standard arguments about why the brain might not be a computer are pretty weak. Take the argument that “brains are parallel, but computers are serial.” Critics are right to note that virtually every time a human does anything, many different parts of the brain are engaged; that’s parallel, not serial.

But the idea that computers are strictly serial is woefully out of date. Ever since desktop computers became popular, there has always been some degree of parallelism in computers, with several different computations being performed simultaneously, by different components, such as the hard-drive controller and the central processor. And the trend over time in the hardware business has been to make computers more and more parallel, using new approaches like multicore processors and graphics processing units.Skeptics of the computer metaphor also like to argue that “brains are analog, while computers are digital.” The idea here is that things that are digital operate only with discrete divisions, as with a digital watch; things that are analog, like an old-fashioned watch, work on a smooth continuum.