Science of the SpiritS


Life Preserver

Listening to our emotions and learning to heed their valuable insights

Margarita Tartakovsky, M.S.
PsychCentral
Mon, 15 Dec 2014 00:00 UTC
Emotions
© ArtFamily/Shutterstock
Many of us dismiss our emotions. We think of them as capricious and inconvenient. We think they stall problem-solving. We think they take too much time to process, and we don't have the luxury of simply sitting and stewing.

If we grew up in a home where emotions were vilified or regularly suppressed, where good girls didn't get angry and good boys didn't cry, we might've adopted the same views and habits of repressing ourselves.

But "emotions communicate invaluable insights to us," said Katie Kmiecik, LCPC, a psychotherapist at Postpartum Wellness Center in Hoffman Estates, Ill. She thinks of emotions as signs on the highway of life. "People who pay attention to these 'signs' lead happier lives. People who ignore their emotional signs may end up 'lost.'"

According to Sheri Van Dijk, MSW, RSW, a psychotherapist in Sharon, Ontario, Canada, "emotions always serve a function." They give us information about a situation, and motivate us to act, she said.

Comment: Dr. Gabor Maté says that emotions are deeply implicated in both the development of illness and in the restoration of health. The emotional centers of the brain, which regulate our behaviors and our responses and our reactions, are physiologically connected with the immune system, the nervous system and the hormonal apparatus.

His work with patients undergoing palliative care showed a number of characteristics of these patients. One was the repression of anger; people did not know how to express negative emotions. Another was people who were pleasers, they always tried not to disappoint other people and never knew how to say no. They took on everything without a murmur, because they saw their role as always being the caregivers and the caretakers. And they had an exceedingly powerful sense of duty, role and responsibility.

Learning how to acknowledge and express emotions properly may just save your life!





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Snakes in Suits

Super psychopaths reign in politics and medicine

Dr. Sircus
Dr. Sircus
Wed, 10 Dec 2014 20:24 UTC
Psychopaths rule our world
© sott.net
The incidence of psychopathy among CEOs is about 4 percent, four times what it is in the population at large. According to Wikipedia, the DSM IV-TR gives the prevalence of psychopathy as 3% in males and 1% in females. Many forensic psychologists, psychiatrists and criminologists use the terms sociopathy and psychopathy interchangeably. Leading experts disagree on whether there are meaningful differences between the two conditions. Certainly there are meaningful differences from one psycho and sociopath to another.

In the United States congress the percentage is higher. In fact, in reading Dr. Ron Paul's most recent essay Reckless Congress Declares War on Russia - all but ten congressmen voted for the measure. Any good psychologist would conclude that there are 425 psychopaths in the House of Representatives and only 10 normal people who care about children and everyone else.
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People 2

Flashback Masters and Disasters: Researchers able to predict marital happiness by measuring kindness and generosity

Emily Esfahani Smith
The Atlantic
Thu, 12 Jun 2014 10:00 UTC
couple sketch
© sketchblog/flickr
Every day in June, the most popular wedding month of the year, about 13,000 American couples will say "I do," committing to a lifelong relationship that will be full of friendship, joy, and love that will carry them forward to their final days on this earth.

Except, of course, it doesn't work out that way for most people. The majority of marriages fail, either ending in divorce and separation or devolving into bitterness and dysfunction. Of all the people who get married, only three in ten remain in healthy, happy marriages, as psychologist Ty Tashiro points out in his book The Science of Happily Ever After, which was published earlier this year.

Social scientists first started studying marriages by observing them in action in the 1970s in response to a crisis: Married couples were divorcing at unprecedented rates. Worried about the impact these divorces would have on the children of the broken marriages, psychologists decided to cast their scientific net on couples, bringing them into the lab to observe them and determine what the ingredients of a healthy, lasting relationship were. Was each unhappy family unhappy in its own way, as Tolstoy claimed, or did the miserable marriages all share something toxic in common?
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Heart

Study finds mere presence of mother soothes infants and changes genes in emotional centers of the brain

Jeremy Dean
PsyBlog
Tue, 09 Dec 2014 16:10 UTC
infant brain development
© Oleg SidorenkoWonderful influence of mother’s presence on infants’ brain development and experience of pain.
The mere presence of the mother helps sooth an infant as well as changing genes in the emotional centres of the brain.

The new study from the NYU Langone Medical Center examined which genes in rat pups were active when its mother was either present or absent.

The study found that when experiencing pain, hundreds of genes in the rat pups brains were modified by the mother's presence.

The pups were also soothed by the mother's presence.

This is the first time that scientists have shown how the infant brain reacts to the presence or absence of its mother when in distress.

Comment: Any mother knows that an infant needs her presence to feel emotionally safe and nurtured. We don't necessarily need scientific studies to tell us this, but what is disturbing is that in our emotionally crumbling society, scientific researchers are still trying to find substitutes for parental nurturing.

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People

Personality traits determine the strength of the immune system

Emma Rayner
University of Nottingham
Fri, 12 Dec 2014 14:32 UTC
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Researchers have found new evidence that explains how some aspects of our personality may affect our health and wellbeing, supporting long-observed associations between aspects of human character, physical health and longevity.

A team of health psychologists at The University of Nottingham and the University of California in Los Angeles carried out a study to examine the relationship between certain personality traits and the expression of genes that can affect our health by controlling the activity of our immune systems.

The study did not find any results to support a common theory that tendencies toward negative emotions such as depression or anxiety can lead to poor health (disease-prone personality). What was related to differences in immune cell gene expression were a person's degree of extraversion and conscientiousness.

The study used highly sensitive microarray technology to examine relationships between the five major human personality traits and two groups of genes active in human white blood cells (leukocytes): one involving inflammation, and another involving antiviral responses and antibodies.

Comment: It seems that Nature is all about balance, and those, who lead less "shielded" lives still have greater immune protection. If so, we wonder if conscious work on the self and intentional gradual change of personality traits would lead to modified immune system as well.

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Magnify

Reality and imagination flow in opposite directions in the brain

Jeremy Dean
PsyBlog
Thu, 11 Dec 2014 18:45 UTC
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© Nick BerardProfessor Barry Van Veen wearing an electrode net that measures brain activity.
Neural circuits that activate when we daydream run in the opposite direction to how we process reality, a new study finds.

Scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Liege in Belgium have tracked the electrical activity in the brains of people either watching a video or imagining watching a video (Dentico et al., 2014). The findings could lead to new ways of understanding what happens in our brains when we sleep and dream. The scientists also hope the results will reveal insights into how short-term memory works.

Professor Barry Van Veen, who led the study, said:
"A really important problem in brain research is understanding how different parts of the brain are functionally connected. What areas are interacting? What is the direction of communication?

We know that the brain does not function as a set of independent areas, but as a network of specialized areas that collaborate."
The study used electroencephalography (EEG) to measure the electrical activity in different regions of the brain while people were watching the video or imagining it.

Comment: From In Search of the Miraculous: Fragments of an Unknown Teaching - a 1949 book by Russian philosopher P. D. Ouspensky which recounts his meeting and subsequent association with G.I. Gurdjieff:
"He cannot stop the flow of his thoughts, he cannot control his imagination, his emotions, his attention. He lives in a subjective world of 'I love,' 'I do not love,' 'I like,' 'I do not like,' 'I want,' 'I do not want,' that is, of what he thinks he likes, of what he thinks he does not like, of what he thinks he wants, of what he thinks he does not want. He does not see the real world. The real world is hidden from him by the wall of imagination. He lives in sleep. He is asleep. What is called 'clear consciousness' is sleep and a far more dangerous sleep than sleep at night in bed." - G.I. Gurdjieff
"Let us take some event in the life of humanity. For instance, war. There is a war going on at the present moment. What does it signify? It signifies that several millions of sleeping people are trying to destroy several millions of other sleeping people. They would not do this, of course, if they were to wake up. Everything that takes place is owing to this sleep." - G.I. Gurdjieff


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Family

Punishing kids for lying just doesn't work


MgGill University
Mon, 08 Dec 2014 20:19 UTC
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Children more likely to tell the truth either to please an adult or because they believe it is the right thing to do.

If you want your child to tell the truth, it's best not to threaten to punish them if they lie. That's what researchers discovered through a simple experiment involving 372 children between the ages of 4 and 8.

How the experiment was done

The researchers, led by Prof. Victoria Talwar of McGill's Dept. of Educational and Counselling Psychology, left each child alone in a room for 1 minute with a toy behind them on a table, having told the child not to peek during their absence.

While they were out of the room, a hidden video camera filmed what went on.

Comment: A very good observation, but as always, the devil is in the details. In the course of educating our kids we must take into account concepts like Authoritarian personality and Authoritarian follower and make sure that we won't help Psychopaths in Power to continue perpetuate the reality we currently live in.

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Bullseye

Signs and symptoms that you are working for a psychopath

Melody Wilding
PsychCentral
Mon, 08 Dec 2014 00:00 UTC
Image
© iStock
Every boss has his or her moments when grumpiness or a negative attitude takes hold, causing them to lash out. Our superiors are human, after all, and they are entitled to bad days just like anyone else.

But have you ever worked for someone who seemed to constantly run hot and cold: charming and funny one second, then vicious and manipulative the next? If a power-wielding bully dominates your workplace, you could very likely be working for a psychopath.

You probably spend a great majority of your life at the office, and if just one psychopath inhabits your workplace, it can mean a very confusing and uncomfortable situation. People that work for psychopaths are subject to more bullying and stress, and the organizations that employ them are riddled with conflict, high turnover, reduced productivity, and absenteeism.

If psychopaths are so toxic, why do companies hire them in the first place?

Comment: Psychopaths leave a trail of destruction behind them, and trying to work in an environment where you are victimized by one of these predators can literally ruin your health and well-being. One of the most difficult things for people to understand is that these types are crafty and well-versed in being charming to hide their pathology. Normal people often cannot imagine that there are people who are intentionally malevolent, and will often rationalize their behaviors, until they are sucked dry from their efforts to normalize what is happening to them. This is why the best form of protection is to educate yourself about the nature of these inter-species predators, as the odds are that you or someone you know will encounter one at some point.

Beware the Workplace Psychopath

Here a psycho, there a psycho...

Workplace Psychopaths Leave a Trail of Destruction

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Phoenix

The intelligence of self observation and self-awareness

Steve Gillman
The Mind Power Report
Sun, 07 Dec 2014 13:09 UTC
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Why is observing yourself so important to the exercise of your intelligence? Because much of what gets in the way of thinking effectively and powerfully is not a lack of ability or brainpower, but the interference of ones own reactive mind. Let's look at some examples.

John opens up a book about moral philosophy, and he is excited to read it. But what has him excited is not exactly the prospect of discovering new ideas. What he's really looking forward to is the confirmation of his own beliefs, and the discovery of new arguments to defend them and push them onto others.

This is common, of course. Many of us buy books that are based on ideas we already agree with after all, don't we? Capitalists buy books about the virtues of free markets, creationists buy books about the flaws in evolutionary theory, and environmentalists buy books about the damage we're causing to the planet. By itself, this tendency is not harmful, and certainly not surprising. It limits our thinking, though, when we do not recognize it in ourselves and therefore don't make allowance for the bias it creates.

This isn't just about books, of course. In fact, we "buy" ideas all the time from the intellectual environment around us. We "pay" for these ideas by investing our time and thought and ego into them. But we don't see how often we are only interested in those that fit our existing way of thinking. And because of that lack of awareness resulting from a lack of self observation, we pass over facts and ideas that may lead to a better understanding.

Comment: See Stranger to Ourselves for more information:
"Know thyself," a precept as old as Socrates, is still good advice. But is introspection the best path to self-knowledge? What are we trying to discover, anyway? In an eye-opening tour of the unconscious, as contemporary psychological science has redefined it, Timothy D. Wilson introduces us to a hidden mental world of judgments, feelings, and motives that introspection may never show us.

This is not your psychoanalyst's unconscious. The adaptive unconscious that empirical psychology has revealed, and that Wilson describes, is much more than a repository of primitive drives and conflict-ridden memories. It is a set of pervasive, sophisticated mental processes that size up our worlds, set goals, and initiate action, all while we are consciously thinking about something else.

If we don't know ourselves - our potentials, feelings, or motives - it is most often, Wilson tells us, because we have developed a plausible story about ourselves that is out of touch with our adaptive unconscious. Citing evidence that too much introspection can actually do damage, Wilson makes the case for better ways of discovering our unconscious selves. If you want to know who you are or what you feel or what you're like, Wilson advises, pay attention to what you actually do and what other people think about you. Showing us an unconscious more powerful than Freud's, and even more pervasive in our daily life, Strangers to Ourselves marks a revolution in how we know ourselves.


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Magic Wand

Out of the mouths of babes: Extensive research indicates that reincarnation is real

Tara MacIsaac
The Epoch Times
Sun, 30 Nov 2014 20:21 UTC
The universe is full of mysteries that challenge our current knowledge. In "Beyond Science" Epoch Times collects stories about these strange phenomena to stimulate the imagination and open up previously undreamed of possibilities. Are they true? You decide.
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Multiple researchers have thoroughly investigated cases of children who report past-life memories. In many cases, the details given by a child have been verified to correspond (sometimes with startling accuracy) to a deceased person. In other cases, the details have been more difficult to verify.

Even in the most convincing cases, some will find a grain of doubt. Could the parents have influenced their suggestible children with a certain line of questioning? Could the children have overheard information and repeated it without their parents' knowledge? Could an overactive imagination or desire for attention have fueled the talk of a past life? Maybe probability can explain how the "memories" match up with real people or events, maybe they're just lucky guesses.

The Psychology

Psychologist Dr. Erlendur Haraldsson, professor emeritus at the University of Iceland in Reykjavik, studied 30 children in Lebanon who had persistently spoken of past-life memories, comparing these children to a test group of 30 other children. Dr. Haraldsson wondered whether children who associate so strongly with being another person (their past-life incarnation) are psychologically similar to people with multiple personalities.

Comment: Indeed, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that reincarnation has a high probability. Listen to the following podcasts to learn more:
Reincarnation Part 1

In this podcast, we discuss the possible reality of reincarnation with Laura Knight-Jadczyk. In part one, Laura discusses evidence that she collected during her years as a hypnotherapist. In part two, Laura shares a very personal experience that provided startling evidence to suggest that reincarnation is indeed a reality.

Running Time:27:54Date:2006-01-14
Streaming
Large Download- 9.2 MB
Small Download- 4 MB
Reincarnation Part 2

In this podcast, we discuss the possible reality of reincarnation with Laura Knight-Jadczyk. In part one, Laura discusses evidence that she collected during her years as a hypnotherapist. In part two, Laura shares a very personal experience that provided startling evidence to suggest that reincarnation is indeed a reality.

Running Time:30:44Date:2006-01-14
Streaming
Large Download- 10.1 MB
Small Download- 4.4 MB


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