Tag: psychology

Posted in Life & Happiness

The Secret To Positivity

Posted on by Jinavie

There are mixed responses to the concept of positivity. Many people (often realists) feel that it is “unnecessary” and “fluffy” – something that does not help you survive in this dog-eat-dog world. Others lie at the other end of the spectrum and spit out generic, pseudo-inspirational quotes, saying that they are so happy that nothing can touch them. But as with anything, balance is crucial. Being overly pessimistic can make you a miserable, anhedonic person who is incapable of getting any enjoyment out of life. Being overly optimistic can make you have false hope, setting you up for a catastrophic crash when a bad situation arises to knock you off your feet.

So what is a good balance? According to the broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions, having an overall positive balance of emotions leads to a happier life with not only more contentment, but more awareness, mindfulness, creativity and success. Through positivity, a person can break out of the prison made by everyday stress and explore hobbies and interests, learning new skills, meeting people and building relatinoships. It also builds resilience, allowing you to withstand more stress and endure on until a better time. A rough rule of thumb is a 3:1 ratio of positive and negative emotions.

The reason it is important to allow for some negativity is that human emotions are not black and white. Sadness, pain and stress can be crippling if left unchecked, but they also catalyse growth and change. Human beings grow by learning from experience. If you ignore and push down the negative emotions, you will never react to them and you will not learn how to become better at preventing and managing such harsh times. Much like how something as foul and repulsive as manure can be an excellent fertiliser, negativity in controlled amounts acts to help you develop positivity. Do not let negativity control your life and do not bottle it up, pretending not to be affected by it. Instead, let yourself be overwhelmed once in a while, cry if you need to and learn from the experience.

The secret to positivity is not just boosting your happiness level, but being mindful of all of your emotions and learning to find the balance.

Posted in History & Literature, Special Long Essays

Hell

Posted on by Jinavie

The concept of hell is one of the oldest and most widespread concepts in the history of humanity. The idea that you are punished in the afterlife for your misdeeds during your earthly life is found in both the Western and Eastern hemisphere, from ancient civilisations to tribal communities to modern societies. Hell is typically described as the place the wicked are sent to for eternal damnation. It is often populated by all kinds of demons and monsters, located underground in a hot, fiery location. Depending on the religion, there may be a “death god” ruling over the realm, such as Satan, Yama, Hades or Hel. In hell, sinners are usually punished with various forms of torture, often fitting their crimes or having an ironic twist.

For example, in the Buddhist hell, seven “death gods” judge you for 49 days. One judgement tests whether you committed crimes of the tongue, such as lying or conning. If you are judged guilty, your tongue will be pulled out and it will be ploughed and sowed with seeds for eternity. In another court, you are judged for “how cold you were to others”, turning away from them when they needed your warmth and generosity. If you are guilty, you are locked away in a frozen hell for eternity. After being found not guilty in all seven courts, you are granted a chance to be reborn into your next life.

Why is hell such a common concept around the world? Every child knows the answer to that: if you do bad things, you will burn in hell. Ergo, you should not do bad things. This is the classic appeal to fear fallacy that has been used time and time again by politicians to control the masses. Death is an excellent deterrent to misdemeanour. In ancient times (and in certain modern nations), the death penalty was used to keep order in society, as the threat of death is usually good enough to persuade people out of doing something bad.

However, if a person does not care about death because they believe that all the woes of earthly life end with death, then what do you do? Early religious leaders most likely found the answer in hell – a place where you will suffer for eternity, without relief. Hell is an extremely simple way of persuading the masses that living by the law and a moral code will lead to a peaceful rest in the afterlife. Heaven is the perfect positive reinforcement and hell is the perfect positive punishment.

In Christianity, breaking one of the Ten Commandments is a clear sin. If you do not repent for this sin or ask for forgiveness, then you will be barred entry from heaven and be sent to a fiery hell, where Satan and his minions will put you in a chamber full of torture for the rest of eternity. However, the greatest punishment in Christian hell is not the torture itself, but knowing that you will forever be separated from the love and blessing of God.

(from The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch)

As with many aspects of religion, hell was an important part of keeping order in ancient civilisations. To enforce this system, the picture of hell had to be fleshed out with as many grotesque, horrific details as possible. Luckily, hell was a rich source of inspiration for artists and writers throughout history. Dante wrote extensively on how he imagined hell to be structured in The Divine Comedy. Hieronymus Bosch painted large works where he used his twisted imagination to create all kinds of strange monsters. Auguste Rodin made a large sculpture called The Gates of Hell to depict imagery from Dante’s The Divine Comedy (this is where the famous figures of The Thinker and The Kiss come from). Some of the most famous Greek mythology stories involve hell and the underworld in some way, such as Orpheus’ rescue of his wife and the banishment of the Titans to Tartarus by the New Gods.

Hell appears to be the perfect form of divine judgement of your sins, but it also poses a question. Many religions preach that their gods are benevolent, just and moral. How could a god that sends their beloved children into a place of eternal suffering be called just? One would expect this to be too harsh a punishment and unnecessarily immoral. This is especially the case for those who are called “wicked” for being a non-believer. The Rapture described in the Bible explains that on Judgement Day, Jesus Christ will collect those who are good and worthy of God’s love and ascend to heaven, while the rest of the world will be left in hell. This is very different to the doctrine of Buddhism and Judaism where it is believed that hell is a “process” through which you are cleansed of sin after paying for your sins, after which you may receive peace and rebirth.

One proposed answer to the so-called “problem of hell” is that human beings are given free will and what we decide to do with it is our responsibility. Therefore, going to hell is seen as a “choice” you make in life.

(The Last Judgement by Michelangelo, from the Sistine Chapel)

But is going to hell really a choice? I cannot speak for the process of going to the afterlife as I have never been there. However, one interpretation you could consider is that hell is not some fiery realm in another dimension – but Earth itself.
It appears that Earth itself is not the best world to live in. Children die of starvation, men are murdered, women are raped, the elderly suffer from incurable diseases… If that does not sound bad enough, most people live in a hell of their own in one way or another.

Our insecurities prevent us from truly loving. We fail to achieve our dreams because we are too afraid of taking the risk. When things do not go the way we planned, we blame and beat ourselves up about it until we are miserable. The neurotic are trapped in constant anxiety, the depressed cannot see light amongst the darkness they wallow in, the pessimists are too cynical to see joy in this world and the optimists have their hopes and dreams crushed by the cruel face of reality.

We do not know whether there is hell or heaven in the afterlife, but there certainly is a hell on Earth and that is the one you create in your own mind. Instead of worrying about what kind of eternal suffering we may experience after our death, perhaps we should focus on saving ourselves from the hell that we live in. Until you find a way to escape this hell, whether it be through love, happiness or success, you will forever be trapped in misery and regret. Hell is not a fiery underworld of suffering nor a frozen wasteland of damnation – it is a state of mind.

(Image source: http://akirakirai.deviantart.com/art/Fear-194527543)

Posted in Psychology & Medicine

Rubber Hand Illusion

Posted on by Jinavie

The five senses are something we take for granted as we never even give a thought as to how complex the way we receive sensory information about the world we live in. As incredible the science behind all the senses may be, it is also interesting to see such intricate mechanisms being fooled by sensory illusions. An experiment that highlights how intricate the senses can be is that of the rubber hand illusion.

In this experiment, researchers made participants look at a dummy rubber hand, while obscuring their real hand from view. They then applied exactly the same stimulus to the real hand as the rubber hand, such as stroking it with a brush or feather. Within a short amount of time, the participants reported that they were convinced that the rubber hand was their real hand, confusing the visual sensation of seeing the rubber hand with the tactile sensation of their real hand being brushed.

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Because the brain is so good at piecing together things to come up with explanations, it links the two sensations and thus concludes that the rubber hand must be part of the body. The association is so strong that some participants would even feel pain when the rubber hand was attacked, pulling away their real arm.

One of the lesser known senses of the body is proprioception – the sensation of knowing where your body lies in three-dimensional space. This sensation is what lets you do things with your eyes closed, while also being responsible for the feeling of embarrassing yourself with a fall when someone pulls the chair out from under you. Proprioception is based on a delicate “body map” your brain draws out from various sensory information such as your joint position and touch sensation from your muscle and skin. It then adds more information such as vision and spatial orientation information from your inner ears to accurately predict how you will interact in your environment. In the case of the rubber hand illusion, the brain is fooled into remapping the body map to accommodate the rubber hand.

The application of this phenomenon, known as multisensory integration, extends from out-of-body experiences to phantom limb pain, where amputees feel pain and sensation from an amputated limb. There are also anecdotal evidence of men with penile prostheses being able to achieve orgasms, most likely thanks to the rubber hand illusion.

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Posted in Psychology & Medicine

The Importance Of Hugging

Posted on by Jinavie

American psychologist Harry Harlow was interested in the debate surrounding the role of the mother. Some scholars argued that a mother’s role is to provide food for the baby, while others argued for the importance of the mother’s tender loving care for the baby. To investigate this, Harlow created two “mothers” for a group of infant rhesus macaques (species of monkeys). One mother was made of wire and wood and the other made of soft cloth to simulate the physical contact of an actual mother monkey. The twist was that only the wire mother provided milk for the infant. Despite this, an overwhelming number of infant macaques chose the cloth mother over the wire mother, choosing physical contact over nourishment. It was found that when given the two choices, the infants would visit the wire mother only for a feed, then would cling to the cloth mother the rest of the time. Harlow concluded that the mother’s role is not only to feed the young, but to provide them with “contact comfort” through physical contact.

Hugging is a form of physical contact found in almost every culture across the globe. It non-verbally communicates to the other person that you love and care for them and that you are compassionate for their happiness. It can provide the warmth, comfort, support and security the other person may need at the end of a tough day.

The act of hugging induces a massive release of oxytocin into your system, giving you the sensation of happiness and connection. It reduces your blood pressure and dissolves anxiety, making you feel more at peace. The behaviour of hugging is seen in a mother holding her child, a child cuddling a teddy bear, a couple communicating their affection, or two friends sharing a moment of happiness.

When two people hug, they become something more than a simple group of two people. In that moment of a hug, the two people enter a transcendent zone filled with only love and happiness, where they are protected from the sorrows and evils of the world. It is the physical form of human connection. In other words, a hug is the closest thing to the physical manifestation of true happiness.

1 + 1 = 3

Posted in Psychology & Medicine

Autopilot

Posted on by Jinavie

Anyone who drives to work knows the strange sensation of realising that you have no memory of driving the last few kilometres. It is as if you turn on an autopilot in your brain. Because your brain is a master of pattern recognition, it analyses the route and all the movements like handle turning that takes you to the destination then converts it into a habit. After many commutes, the habit is so strong that the brain does not need to spare any thought on the activity. Ergo, your brain literally turns on an autopilot for you so to spare brainpower.

Thanks to this autopilot, the brain does not have to think about the drive to work. This means that it creates no new memories about the commute and you come out the other side not remembering the drive. An analogy would be to think of your brain’s information processing ability as if it was taking photos. The more new information it processes, the more photos it takes. Because your commute is an automatic process, the brain takes hardly any photos. Therefore, the “album” has few photos and takes little time to flip through. In comparison, your brain takes far more photos if you were to spend an equal time exploring a new scenic route. When you look back on this drive, the album is much thicker and you perceive it as a longer, more detailed memory.

Of course, this is extremely dangerous as your brain’s autopilot does not protect you from changes to your usual commute, such as a car swerving into you by accident. The automatic process means your brain is less ready for information processing and you have a delayed reaction, which may cost you your life.

The same goes for meeting a new person. On a first date, you learn many things about the other person and your brain frantically takes as many photos as it can. Looking back on it, it feels as if every second lasted forever and you can remember every little detail like the song that was playing in the background or the colour of her nails. But twenty years down the line, a day with that same person might feel less special and more “automatic”. Just like your drive to work, such an “autopilot” might result in a horrible accident.

So never stop paying attention to details, avoid forming ruts with surprises and new things. Don’t let your relationship turn into a boring commute.

Posted in Psychology & Medicine

Attraction

Posted on by Jinavie

The saying goes that “opposites attract”, suggesting that people are attracted to those who are different to them, complementing each other like yin and yang. But then, another saying states that “like attracts like”, suggesting that people feel attraction to those that are similar to them, helping them bond over similar interests and hobbies. So which is true?

Biologically speaking, it makes sense for people to look for those who are “different” as it allows for a more varied gene pool. This is highlighted by the famous experiment where women were asked to smell and grade the “attractiveness” of t-shirts worn by different men. It was discovered that the t-shirts each woman chose belonged to a men who were most immunologically different to the woman. Every human being has a unique marker on their cells called the major histocompatibility complex (MHC). The more dissimilar the MHC is, the more likely that the person is not related to you genetically. By choosing a mate with a different MHC, your offspring will have an immune system that has a broader cover against various pathogens. It seems that we have an innate ability to smell this difference. The way we do this best, of course, is through the act of kissing.

Psychologically speaking, we appear to find those who look similar to us attractive. Professor Penton-Voak undertook a study where he showed people a book of photos of the opposite gender and asked them to pick the most attractive one. He found that the participants tended to rate the picture with their own face morphed into the opposite gender as most attractive. Other studies have shown that similar personality, interests and hobbies, attitude and life goals were all strong predictors of attraction between two people. This is most likely because of self-affirmation – the theory that suggests that people like receiving confirmation about every aspect of their life and there is no better confirmation than spending time with someone similar to you and discovering said similarities as you connect.

According to studies on this exact debate, researchers determined that similarity is more important in initial attraction, while being different helped the relationship develop over time. Surveys have shown that people tend to be more satisfied in a relationship when their partner was different to them, especially in terms of how dominant – that is, how much they lead the relationship – they are. When two people are similar in dominance, such as both being dominant leading to frequent conflict, while both being submissive will lead to frustration as neither takes initiative.

Another interesting point is that when the couple is complementary, they tend to change each other for the better, such as an active person helping their shy partner improve their social skills while she teaches her partner the importance of keeping his head on when under stress. Through this process, long-term couples tend to become similar over time. Not only that, but because people tend to mimic people close to them, their speech, behaviour, idiosyncrasies and even facial expressions become similar.

However, there is a law of attraction that surpasses both similarity and complementarity. The mere-exposure effect is a psychological phenomenon where the more we are exposed to something, the more we like it. This is further expanded by the propinquity effect that states that the more we see and interact with someone, the more likely we are to befriend or date them. Simply put, just spending more time with or even living in close proximity to someone is a high predictor of them becoming your friend or romantic partner.

Posted in Psychology & Medicine

Art Of Persuasion

Posted on by Jinavie

An effective way to persuade or manipulate someone into doing a favour for you is the foot-in-the-door technique. Firstly, ask the person a small request that they will probably agree to. This is the metaphorical foot in the door. Once that is successful, continue to pry open the door with slowly increasing (not drastically as it raises suspicion) demands. Finally, like a frog swimming in a boiling pot, the person will happily say yes to your original intended request as you escalate the scale of your demand until you reach it. You have successfully made a sale to someone who would have otherwise closed the door on you.

For example, ask your friend if you can borrow a pen. Then, ask if you can borrow their phone to make a phone call. After a reasonable amount of time, ask casually if you can borrow a few coins for a drink from the vending machine. If your friend complies with these requests without protest, ramp up to your original intent of asking if you can actually borrow $10 because you left your lunch at home. If that is successful, then say you might need some cash for the rest of the day and ask to borrow a nice even $50 (with the addendum that you will pay them back soon).

This technique of slowly and surely expanding the size of your demand works because it is far easier complying with a small favour than a big one. Once that is established, the increasing demand becomes more tolerable as the person only compares it to the previous demand rather than seeing the absolute size of the favour. This is called reciprocal concession.

Strangely, the opposite stratagem seems to be just as effective. The door-in-the-face technique works by starting with an unreasonable, ridiculous request. The person will say no straight away, to which you respond with a milder favour, which seems much more reasonable relatively speaking. For example, ask a friend if you can borrow $1000. In most cases, that request will be denied. Then suggest that it is quite a large amount of money and ask if you can just borrow $100 instead. This will be far more effective than asking to borrow $100 from the start.

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Posted in Philosophy

Buridan’s Ass

Posted on by Jinavie

French philosopher Jean Buridan proposed the following thought experiment. Imagine a donkey that is equally hungry and thirsty. It is placed exactly in the middle of a pail of water and a stack of hay. The donkey wants to eat the hay because it is hungry, yet it also wants to go for the pail of water to quench its thirst. However, it is precisely the same distance from the food and the water, meaning it has to sacrifice one for the other. Unable to choose between the hay and water, the donkey ultimately dies from hunger and thirst.

We laugh at the stupidity of the ass, but how often are we placed in such a predicament where we try to chase two things at once and end up with nothing? How often do we miss an amazing opportunity just because we failed to make a decision?

Posted in Psychology & Medicine

Eye Contact

Posted on by Jinavie

When you see a person of the opposite sex for the first time, what part do you see first? Each person may give a different body part such as face, shoulders, legs or breasts, but the universal truth is that most people will unconsciously look at the person’s eyes first. The eyes are literally “windows to the soul”, providing valuable information about the person’s state of mood and mind.

Eye contact is an important part of social life. Looking directly into someone’s eyes conveys the message of “I am interested in what you are saying and you have my attention”, as if a bridge is made between the two people’s minds. Strong eye contact is a common feature of two people in love, as they communicate non-verbally to share their feelings of attraction. Good eye contact is seen as “socially appropriate”, giving the person an air of confidence and helping them build better rapport with the person they are talking to as the other person feels listened to and that they matter.

However, eye contact may not always be a good thing. If eye contact is too intense, the other person will become uncomfortable as they may feel that they are being probed and their privacy is being invaded. This is why people in crowds, such as in the subway, avoid eye contact with each other as to protect their privacy.

In Eastern cultures, direct eye contact may be seen as disrespectful, especially when speaking to a superior or a person older than you. To show respect, the person lower in hierarchy lowers their gaze.

Certain psychiatric disorders can result in poor eye contact. It is common for patients with depression or social anxiety to avert eye contact, minimising the social connection that comes from it. Autistic children are particularly famous for finding it extremely difficult to make eye contact with others as it unsettles them. The poor eye contact gives these people a cold, uncaring, weak image which may be criticised by other people.

Unlike modern humans, many animals perceive eye contact as a threat or a sign of aggression. It is very dangerous to maintain eye contact with an aggressive monkey or dog as it will increase your chance of being attacked.

Posted in Life & Happiness

Movie Story

Posted on by Jinavie

Why do people enjoy movies? Although people might prefer different genres, everybody enjoys movies in one way or another. Perhaps this is because as human beings, we have an inherent love for stories. From the dawn of time, mankind has told story after story. From children listening to the elder telling a story by the fireplace, to adults telling each other funny or dramatic life stories over a glass of wine, we enjoy telling and listening to stories. This is most likely because through stories, we can relive someone’s experience as if they were our own.

The hallmark of a good story is its ability to plunge the listener into another world – overwhelming their senses and emotions. As far as we know, human beings are the only animals who possess language fluent enough to convey such detail and the imagination and creativity to reconstruct the story in our minds, converting words into a world. Storytelling is a defining characteristic of human nature and movies are a modern medium that helps us paint a more vivid world in our minds through the use of motion pictures.

If you look at the most famous movies of history, they share two common themes.

Firstly, they portray relatable, but almost fantastic life experiences. Romances that play our heartstrings like a guitar, bittersweet success stories, gripping dramas and silly comedic events that could happen to us… By playing jump ropes with the fine line between fantasy and reality, movies drench us in emotions, which induces powerful hormones such as adrenaline and endorphin to be released, giving us excitement and enjoyment.

Secondly, most successful movies show connection. Whether it be romantic love between two people or camaraderie shared between a platoon of soldiers, we like to see connection happening. Not only this, but a good movie makes us feel connected to the characters in some way, further enhancing the oxytocin-inducing emotion called happiness. Connecting to characters raises an interesting point. Perhaps it is not just the reliving of another person’s experience that we enjoy, but maybe we also feel true compassion for the characters and feel happy that they find connection and happiness at the end of the movie.

A friend once told me to “stop trying to make your life seem like a movie”. There is some truth to that, in that you should not over-idealise your experiences. However, I disagree with his view. I think the real reason people love movies is that it reminds us of our own experiences. Not everyone will admit it, but a successful businesswoman may watch an underdog movie and secretly reminisce her challenging climb to the top, while a middle-aged man may shed a tear at a romance movie because he still remembers the first time he kissed his first love.

Everyone has a story to tell. You would be surprised how many people have had experiences far greater than any movie: the dramas, the laughters, the coincidences and the twists. In fact, everyone’s life is a movie of their own. It just doesn’t always have a clear-cut introduction, middle and conclusion with a perfectly paced timeline. Instead it is tangled in the intricate fabric of life, seemingly crude and unrefined compared to a movie. The raw materials are there, but it is up to you to be the producer, director and screenwriter who edits and refines these experiences into a coherent “movie”.

Search your memories and experiences – you will find that there is a movie among there that is greater than any Oscar-winning movie out there. If you ever feel alone, hopeless or worthless, reach into your past and press the play button to that movie. You will find that your life has actually been quite awesome.