Science of the SpiritS


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6 ways nice people master conflict

Mastering conflict
© Hans Neleman/Getty
When you're a nice person, conflict can be a real challenge. Not that mean people are any better at conflict; they just enjoy it more.

Research from Columbia University shows that how you handle conflict can make or break your career. The researchers measured something scientifically that many of us have seen firsthand - people who are too aggressive in conflict situations harm their performance by upsetting and alienating their peers, while people who are too passive at handling conflict hinder their ability to reach their goals.
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The secret to effective handling of conflict is assertiveness - that delicate place where you get your needs met without bullying the other person into submission. Assertive people strike a careful balance between passivity and aggression (that is, they never lean too far in either direction).

How To Handle Conflict Assertively

It's easy to think that nice people are too passive. While that's often true, unchecked passivity can boil over into aggression. So there are plenty of very nice people out there who have exhibited both extremes of the assertiveness spectrum.

To be assertive, you need to learn to engage in healthy conflict. Healthy conflict directly and constructively addresses the issue at hand without ignoring or trivializing the needs of either party. The strategies that follow will get you there.

Consider the repercussions of silence. Sometimes it's hard to muster the motivation to speak up when the likelihood is high that things will turn ugly. The fastest way to motivate yourself to act is to fully consider the costs of not speaking up - they're typically far greater than not standing up for yourself. The trick is that you need to shift your attention away from the headache that will come with getting involved to all of the things you stand to gain from your assertiveness.

Target

What is psychological projection and how to discover if someone is using it on you

Finger point
© Exploring your mind'It's not me, it's you.'
Narcissists are renowned for using psychological projection to blame other people, even when it is entirely apparent that they are the ones in the wrong.

Whichever way they can, they will project the blame, stating that the other person made them do it, was responsible for their own bad behaviour or simply did not do what they asked.

What is psychological projection?

It was psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud that first coined the term projection, describing it as a way in which an individual projects their own undesirable thoughts and beliefs onto someone else.

Examples of psychological projection:
  • Parents who have not achieved their goals in life demanding that their own children succeed.
  • Fearing your partner will cheat on you is often a reflection of how you view yourself.
  • Believing someone hates you could be signs of your hidden intense dislike for that person.
With regards to the narcissist, they too can have deep and repressed feelings, this is because their view of the world is so cut off from real life. It is often the case that a narcissist will blame their partner when their boundaries or rules are challenged. When this happens, a narcissist will suddenly experience a loss of control that threatens the very façade and world they have created.

Brain

Transgenderism: The "desistance myth" is the real myth

Dr. Ken Zucker
© Jim RossDr. Ken Zucker’s approach made him a polarizing figure in an emotional debate about how to best treat children and teenagers not so easily pushed back into one box or the other.
Gender dysphoric children who are treated using a "watchful waiting" approach largely desist, no longer identify as transgender as adults, and accept their bodies as they are. Those who are subjected to medical intervention do not.

Last month a new chapter was opened in the debate on childhood desistance with the publication of a new article in the International Journal of Transgenderism by a group of transgender-affirming activists and clinicians headed by Julia Temple Newhook. Desistance is when children who are diagnosed as gender dysphoric by medical practitioners go on to accept their bodies and do not end up identifying as transgender once they have passed through puberty. The article questions the exceedingly high rates of desistance reported by previous studies.

Comment: Dr. Zucker has laid his finger on the key to the militancy of the transgender community, the kids' health be damned.
"[I]f the child desists and is allowed to accept his or her sexed body, this poses a threat to the trans narrative"



People

Anticipating a stressful day can harm your memory

chronisches erschöpfungssyndrom, stress, ausgelaugt, müde
© fotolia / leszekglasner
There may be some truth to the saying "getting up on the wrong side of the bed," according to Penn State researchers who say starting your morning by focusing on how stressful your day will be may be harmful to your mindset throughout the day.

It's been clear for some time that psychological stress is linked to high blood pressure, or hypertension.

The researchers found that when participants woke up feeling like the day ahead would be stressful, their working memory -- which helps people learn and retain information even when they're distracted -- was lower later in the day. Anticipating something stressful had a great effect on working memory regardless of actual stressful events.

Jinshil Hyun, a doctoral student in human development and family studies, said the findings suggest that the stress process begins long before a stressful event occurs.

Brain

Consciousness: How we're still not much closer to solving the mystery of our minds

mountains art consciousness
© Ivan Blažetić Šumski
TWENTY years ago this week, two young men sat in a smoky bar in Bremen, northern Germany. Neuroscientist Christof Koch and philosopher David Chalmers had spent the day lecturing at a conference about consciousness, and they still had more to say. After a few drinks, Koch suggested a wager. He bet a case of fine wine that within the next 25 years someone would discover a specific signature of consciousness in the brain. Chalmers said it wouldn't happen, and bet against.

It was a bit of fun, but also an audacious gamble. Consciousness is truly mysterious. It is the essence of you - the redness of red, the feeling of being in love, the sensation of pain and all the rest of your subjective experiences, conjured up somehow by your brain. Back then, its elusive nature meant that many believed it wasn't even a valid subject for scientific investigation.

Today, consciousness is a hot research area, and Koch and Chalmers are two of its most influential figures. Koch is head of the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle. Chalmers is a professor at New York University and famous for coining the phrase the "hard problem" to distinguish the difficulty of understanding consciousness from that of grasping other mental phenomena. Much progress has been made, but how close are we to solving the mystery? To find out, I decided to ask Chalmers and Koch how their bet was going. But there was a problem - they had mislaid the terms of the wager. Luckily, I too was in Bremen as a journalist 20 years ago and was able to come to their rescue.

Comment: Perhaps the problem is that "consciousness researchers" are thinking about consciousness in the wrong way. Whitehead arguably solved the consciousness problem philosophically a century ago, and David Ray Griffin laid out the argument in Unsnarling the World-Knot. While Antonio Damasio doesn't go there philosophically, his explanation of consciousness being rooted in feelings is compatible: The Strange Order of Things.


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SOTT Focus: The Truth Perspective: And Then They Came for the Psychologists: Why SJWs Can't Stand Science

Vladimir Lenin
As Jordan Peterson often says, biologists will be the next group targeted by the radical Left. But psychologists are in even more danger. In today's episode of the Truth Perspective we discuss a chapter in Dr. Andrew Lobaczewski's book Political Ponerology on the state of psychiatry and psychology under totalitarian regimes and what it means for us in the West.

Marx thought that human nature didn't exist and that 'consciousness' was solely determined by social forces. The postmodern left also believes that human nature can be shaped into their own image. They're wrong. But that won't stop them from trying to force-fit humans into their narrow ideological vision of what humanity should be like. And as history shows, the only way to attempt such folly is through the use of force and terror.

By looking at the state of psychiatry and psychology in former Communist nations, we can get a clue as to what they were trying to hide - and why psychology is so important when it comes to protecting ourselves from the terrors of mass ideological possession.

Tune in Saturday at 12 pm EDT as we take off the mask of totalitarian leftist ideology and see what lies beneath.

Running Time: 01:28:33

Download: MP3


Cheesecake

Marshmallow test shows white middle class children over successive generations are waiting longer

marshmallow test
© J. Adam Fenster/Univ. of RochesterHOLD OUTS Over the past 50 years, white, middle-class kids have shown an increasing willingness to delay gratification on the marshmallow test, a new study finds. Reasons for this trend, and the relationship of marshmallow test scores to later behavior, are unclear.
Hold that marshmallow and don't ask for s'more.

Some kids today wait much longer to get an extra treat in the famed marshmallow test than they did in the 1960s or even the '80s, researchers say. So, so much for the view that internet-savvy, smartphone-toting tykes want what they want at warp speed.

This willingness to delay gratification has recently bloomed among U.S. preschoolers from predominantly white, middle-class families, say psychologist Stephanie Carlson of the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis and her colleagues. Youngsters aged 3 to 5 in the 2000s waited an average of two minutes longer during the marshmallow test than children in the 1960s did, and an average of one minute longer than 1980s kids did, the scientists report June 25 in Developmental Psychology.

Reasons for kids' rising patience when confronted with an available treat are unclear. Carlson's team offers several possible explanations, including increases in the ability to think abstractly, pay attention, plan and prioritize that have been linked to preschool attendance and early use of digital technologies.

Comment: It's a limited study with obvious flaws but it does throw up some interesting statistics of how the youth of today may be changing - at least white, middle-class children. But how they may be changing isn't clear; are they actually more patient or are they simply more aware of psychological games? For many children growing up in the West, the future is looking very bleak indeed: The Health & Wellness Show: Game Over: Is Video Game Addiction Ruining Lives?


People

Study: Loneliness begins in your genes and could be damaging your heart

lonely girl beach
© StoryblocksA lonely woman on a beach.

Loneliness may not be entirely down to a floundering social life. A new study has found that a person's gene coding may contribute to a crippling feeling of isolation.

Scientists at Cambridge University explored the biological causes of loneliness as well as whether the onset of life-threatening depressive feelings are a cause or symptom of social withdrawal.

During the study, which has been published in the journal Nature, researchers gleaned data from hundreds of thousands of people thanks to the UK Biobank. Using survey responses from 452,000 volunteers in the databank, the research team were able pinpoint 15 genomic loci that are likely to contribute to loneliness in certain people.

Comment: One always needs to be leery of claims of genetic basis for general traits. The science of genetics is incredibly young and incredibly complex. At this point, very little is known about how genes actually interact and how epigenetics affect outcomes. While there is little doubt that genetics play a role in how a number of traits are expressed, they are simply part of a very complicated picture. The age of genetic determinism will likely end as soon as the zeitgeist catches up with the latest science.

See also:


Cassiopaea

Ways to think about... Consciousness

Consciousness
© Arthur Yu/EyeEm/Getty
Can a mind ever know itself? Maybe we don't want to know: solving the 'hard problem' of consciousness could threaten our sense of self and free will

It is a concept so intrinsic to the fabric of our reality that starting to pick away at it leaves us feeling quite unravelled. "We can come closer to defining what it is to be an elephant than what it is to be conscious," says Nicholas Shea, who researches philosophy of the mind at the University of Oxford.

Consciousness is the essence of what it is to be "you". It is all your subjective experiences - from the feeling of the sun's warmth on your skin to the desolation of grief - conjured up somehow by your brain. "It still seems to many people, sometimes to me, very hard to see how things happening in the physical world could give rise to any sort of conscious experience at all," says neuroscientist Anil Seth at the University of Sussex, UK.

Comment: Perhaps a part of 'growing' consciousness means allowing ourselves to think on - and become aware of - possibilities where we thought none existed previously.


Attention

Anticipating stress negatively affects your working memory

surprise
Anticipating stress messes with your memory, new research finds.

People who woke up feeling the day would be stressful had worse memory later on, even if the stress did not materialise.

Mr Jinshil Hyun, the study's first author, said:
"Humans can think about and anticipate things before they happen, which can help us prepare for and even prevent certain events.

But this study suggests that this ability can also be harmful to your daily memory function, independent of whether the stressful events actually happen or not."
Working memory was the type affected by anticipating stress.

Dr Martin Sliwinski, study co-author, explained its function:

Comment: An excellent deep breathing technique for dealing with stress is Éiriú Eolas See also: