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As you
speed-click through your email messages, consider this: are you acting
or reacting to life? To make saner, more satisfying choices and savor
your life more, take five minutes or less to learn the highlights of
some recent research so you can "Say It Better" in more ways. Multi-tasking People who try
to do more than one thing at once tend to be less happy and more
error-prone, according to a study released this month by Marcel Just,
co-director of the Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging at Carnegie Mellon
University in Pittsburgh PA. He found that although people can feel they
are multitasking well, habitually dividing their attention makes them
exhausted, stressed, and more forgetful. For example, pilots who juggle
excessive amounts of information have faster heart rates, higher blood
pressure, and slower reaction times to new events, according to research
at the Air Force and Federal Aviation Administration Labs. Remembering
& Reacting Daniel Schacter,
a Harvard University psychology professor, says that if you read a book
while watching TV, what you read will probably be deleted from long-term
memory. Further, task-jugglers are slower to respond to a new situation
or a surprise -- such as noticing your toddler opening the medicine
cabinet. Interrupting People get more
confused trying to remember a shopping list if they are interrupted with
questions about the list. If the interruption was unrelated, such as
asking the person about another topic, people went back to their list
with little problem. Sensing Federal
Aviation Administration officials found cockpit warning signals don't
have to be only visual. Warning bells, digitized voices, and even
vibrations on the stick-shift device appeal simultaneously to more than
one sense and thus improve a pilot's ability to notice and respond.
Think of the ways you can apply this finding to your daily life. For
example, if the person shaking your hand has an attractive scent, your
positive response is multiplied over that which you would experience
from only shaking hands without the scent or only smelling the scent. By
the way, vanilla and citrus combinations are among the scents most
universally well liked. Lying When a person
lies, her or his true emotional state is betrayed by expressions in the
upper part of the face -- eyes, brows, forehead -- while the area around
the mouth projects the intended fake emotional state, according to
Elliott Ross, professor of neurology at the University of Oklahoma.
Earlier research has suggested that across most cultures, people learn
at an early age to control their facial expressions to conceal their
unhappiness or unease, particularly in awkward social situations. Brain-injury
survivors who lose the ability to understand speech develop a talent
that could come in handy during this election year . . . or as a poker
player or police interrogator: an uncanny talent for telling when
someone is lying. That's what Nancy Etcoff, a psychologist at
Massachusetts General Hospital, announced in a study published in last
month's Nature journal. She studied patients with aphasia (loss or
impairment of the power to use or comprehend words due to damage in the
brain's left hemisphere). Non-aphasics had only about a 50-50 chance of
spotting liars, while aphasics could watch the person talk and tell 73%
of the time. Attracting Just as you
suspected, beauty does influence destiny, according to psychologist
Nancy Etcoff in her new book, Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of
Beauty. Some findings: Across
cultures, everyone seems attracted to women with delicate jaw lines,
large eyes (relative to the length of the face), and short distances
between the mouth and the chin. If two women,
one pretty and one less attractive, are standing by a road with a flat
tire, the pretty one is rescued first 87% of the time. Homelier
children are more likely to be abused and mothers talk and play more
with beautiful babies. Teachers pay
more attention to taller boys than to shorter ones. Teachers expect
good-looking children to be smarter and more sociable; judges, juries,
and police officers go easier on the better looking; and attractive
people have an easier time getting a job and high pay. But are they
happier? "A bit" (but not as much as we might imagine, given
all their advantages), Etcoff said in an NPR interview. "Some
people just seem to be born optimistic and happy; others aren't. There's not a
strong correlation between looks, life events, and how happy you
are." Loving More than
anything, the key to compatibility with a romantic partner is whether
you share the same love stories, according to Robert Sternberg, a
professor of psychology and education at Yale University and author of
Love Is a Story. "To change the pattern of our relationships, we
must become conscious of our love stories," he says. In 1995
Sternberg and one of his students, Laurie Lynch, identified some of the
most commonly held love stories by asking people to rate, on a scale of
one to seven, the extent to which a group of statements characterized
their relationships. Their
highest-ranked statements indicated their personal love story. They
labeled some of the most common stories as "Humor,"
"Travel," "Horror," "Partnership,"
"Garden," and "Sacrifice." In his book, Sternberg
includes the list of questions that help you determine your love story. Women are more
likely to prefer "Travel," as in the shared adventure of love.
Men prefer "Sacrifice," what one must give up to make it work.
This surprised Sternberg because he thought the reverse would be true.
When people have different love stories, he found, they also have
different stories about the break-up, almost as if they were separate,
unrelated experiences. To end this newsletter on an optimistic note,
Sternberg believes that, once we understand the ideas and beliefs behind
our love stories, we can do some replotting by asking ourselves what we
like and don't like about our current story. |
