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 an 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 detect a lie 73% of the time.
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 labelled 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.
© Kare Anderson. All Rights Reserved.