So this is definitely a part of our experience.

You may not have realized, though, just how infectious our emotions are. The effect of one person’s emotions — whether negative or positive — can be measured as they ripple outward through our friendships and contacts.

Let’s deal with the negative first.

An important study by University of Chicago psychologist John Cacioppo showed that lonely people tend to share their loneliness with others. He uncovered this by looking at data from a large-scale study that has been following health conditions for more than 60 years.

You might be wondering: if lonely people aren’t in contact with others, how can they spread their loneliness? The thing is that loneliness is a state of mind rather than an absolute absence of social connections. Lonely people may be with others much of the time, but they aren’t able to connect. They feel disconnected and isolated even in social situations. And the people they are in contact with pick up on and share those feelings. But those feelings do of course affect relationships, and lonely people lose friends. Sadly, before their friends leave, they end up feeling lonely as well!

This is true for other negative emotions, too, such as anger and depression. It’s even true for factors such as obesity, criminality, and bankruptcy.

Now for the positive.

Another study by Harvard Medical School professor Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler from the University of California, San Diego, found that happiness also spreads through populations. One happy person spreads their joy to others. In fact, they could measure the increase in happiness as it formed a chain reaction that benefitted not only people’s friends, but their friends’ friends, and their friends’ friends’ friends. This effect lasts for up to one year.

How strong is this effect? It’s strong. If you’re happy, a friend living within a mile experiences a 25% chance of being more happy. One of your friends’ friends has nearly a 10 percent chance of increased happiness, and a friend of that friend has a 5.6 percent increased chance—a three-degree cascade. Compare that to, say, a $5000 income bump, which increases your odds of being happy by just 2%.

Every happy person in our world has a significant effect on many people around them, adding in a measurable way to the sum total of human happiness.

A study by Nicholas A. Christakis and others showed that the average lifetime of a contentment “infection” is 10 years, while the average lifetime of a discontentment “infection” is 5 years.

Also, this study showed that happiness spreads faster than misery. As Christakis says, “It’s pleasurable to be near other happy individuals and not near other unhappy individuals.”

Sometimes the quest for happiness is seen as being selfish, but it’s clear that that’s a shortsighted view. Our own happiness has an effect on others around us, and it’s almost an imperative for us to become happier if we want others to be happy.

As the Buddha said, 2,500 years ago,

Conquer the angry man by love.
Conquer the ill-natured man by goodness.
Conquer the miser with generosity.
Conquer the liar with truth.

When you consider how powerfully interconnected our world is (for example, on Facebook every person is, on average five connections away from any other person) it’s clear that this ripple effect is a powerful force for changing the world. Remember, one happy person raises the happiness of people — measurably — even at three degrees of separation, and possibly beyond.

This means each of us is more powerful than we may give ourselves credit for. Your happiness (or your grumbling) can affect the world. Use your power wisely!

I’ve been meaning for a while to write about a fascinating study that touches on Terror Management Theory — something I mention in my book, Living as a River.

A Canadian study showed that when faced with thoughts about their own mortality, a sample of people in the US

expressed relatively more positive reactions to intelligent design theory and its proponent, Michael Behe, and “significantly greater negativity” toward evolutionary theory and its proponent, Richard Dawkins.

People, in other words, would rather believe fairy stories than believe that their lives and deaths were meaningless. But…

In one of their experiments, featuring 269 psychology students, half of the participants read a passage by cosmologist and science writer Carl Sagan.

In it, he argued that “humans can attain meaning and purpose by seeking to understand the natural origins of life.” Even if we are “merely matter,” he wrote, “we can still find purpose, but it must be one that we work out for ourselves.”

Reading that passage produced the opposite result of the earlier studies. Among those who were exposed to Sagan’s notions, thoughts of mortality produced a negative reaction to intelligent design theory and a positive one toward evolution.

It seems the study participants were still looking for meaning in response to an existential threat. But after being told by a trusted source that scientific study can satisfy this longing, they found Darwin’s concepts surprisingly appealing.

So, the researchers conclude, resistance to evolutionary theory can be traced to its “apparent lack of an existentially compelling solution to life’s origins.” But their Sagan study suggests this barrier to acceptance isn’t entirely impenetrable.

This suggests that we need better science communicators (although it would help of course if we had popular media that were interested in good scientific storytelling).

This is also encouraging for me as a Buddhist — and a rather skeptical Buddhist at that, since I place little to no faith in the concept of rebirth — that we can find ways to communicate that life can be meaningful, without resorting to improbably stories about future births.

Related posts:

1. The science of lovingkindness
2. The Dumbing of Florida
3. Frederick Douglass: The Meaning of the Fourth of July for the Negro

Anyway, there was an interesting article recently in the New York Times, called Discovering the Virtues of a Wandering Mind, confirming the notion that daydreaming can be a creative act. Fortunately research is being done on the topic, and there are some interesting results:

During waking hours, people’s minds seem to wander about 30 percent of the time, according to estimates by psychologists who have interrupted people throughout the day to ask what they’re thinking. If you’re driving down a straight, empty highway, your mind might be wandering three-quarters of the time…

From one third to three quarters of our time being spent in mental wandering sounds about right. At first, meditation can seem more like “driving down a straight, empty highway,” so I wouldn’t be surprised if beginner’s mind’s wander the vast majority of the time when they first get started.

There’s one questionable assumption:

“People assume mind wandering is a bad thing, but if we couldn’t do it during a boring task, life would be horrible,” Dr. Smallwood says. “Imagine if you couldn’t escape mentally from a traffic jam.”

You’d be stuck contemplating the mass of idling cars, a mental exercise that is much less pleasant than dreaming about a beach and much less useful than mulling what to do once you get off the road.

Actually, there’s not just a choice between mind wandering and “contemplating the mass of idling cars,” but also the option to mindfully observe our present-moment experience, which can be very satisfying in itself. Or we can consciously do something like lovngkindness, which is neither mind-wandering nor simply observing what’s present. But I agree that mind-wandering can help us pass the time when things are dull.

The most interesting thing for me though is where we learn that “studies have found that people prone to mind wandering also score higher on tests of creativity.” We can mindfully allow the mind to wander, gently steering it away from useless thinking (e.g. thinking that leads to stress or depression), and catch the more creative thoughts, filing them for future exploration:

“For creativity you need your mind to wander [...] but you also need to be able to notice that you’re mind wandering and catch the idea when you have it. If Archimedes had come up with a solution in the bathtub but didn’t notice he’d had the idea, what good would it have done him?”

This dynamic is explored in more detail in an article I blogged about a few days back.

When you try to solve a problem, you begin by concentrating on obvious facts and familiar solutions, to see if the answer lies there. This is a mostly left-brain stage of attack. If the answer doesn’t come, the right and left hemispheres of the brain activate together. Neural networks on the right side scan remote memories that could be vaguely relevant. A wide range of distant information that is normally tuned out becomes available to the left hemisphere, which searches for unseen patterns, alternative meanings, and high-level abstractions.

Having glimpsed such a connection, the left brain must quickly lock in on it before it escapes. The attention system must radically reverse gears, going from defocused attention to extremely focused attention. In a flash, the brain pulls together these disparate shreds of thought and binds them into a new single idea that enters consciousness. This is the “aha!” moment of insight, often followed by a spark of pleasure as the brain recognizes the novelty of what it’s come up with.

Now the brain must evaluate the idea it just generated. Is it worth pursuing? Creativity requires constant shifting, blender pulses of both divergent thinking and convergent thinking, to combine new information with old and forgotten ideas. Highly creative people are very good at marshaling their brains into bilateral mode, and the more creative they are, the more they dual-activate.

At the moment I’m teaching teenagers how to use their brains more effectively. One thing I need to do is to find out how they can enhance their creativity. That’s something I’ll have to daydream about…

Related posts:

1. Stop Paying Attention: Zoning Out Is a Crucial Mental State
2. Mindful daydreaming
3. Creative captcha

In 1950, thousands of teenagers were asked if they considered themselves an “important person.” Twelve percent said yes. In the late 1980s, another few thousand were asked. This time, 80 percent of girls and 77 percent of boys said yes.

Read the full article…

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2. Bad guys really do get the most girls – sex – 18 June 2008 – New Scientist
3. Toddlers, TV, and troubling behavior

It’s a fascinating article (that I’m only half-way through), but in case one day you ever need to remind yourself what creativity was, here’s how it used to work:

When you try to solve a problem, you begin by concentrating on obvious facts and familiar solutions, to see if the answer lies there. This is a mostly left-brain stage of attack. If the answer doesn’t come, the right and left hemispheres of the brain activate together. Neural networks on the right side scan remote memories that could be vaguely relevant. A wide range of distant information that is normally tuned out becomes available to the left hemisphere, which searches for unseen patterns, alternative meanings, and high-level abstractions.

Having glimpsed such a connection, the left brain must quickly lock in on it before it escapes. The attention system must radically reverse gears, going from defocused attention to extremely focused attention. In a flash, the brain pulls together these disparate shreds of thought and binds them into a new single idea that enters consciousness. This is the “aha!” moment of insight, often followed by a spark of pleasure as the brain recognizes the novelty of what it’s come up with.

Now the brain must evaluate the idea it just generated. Is it worth pursuing? Creativity requires constant shifting, blender pulses of both divergent thinking and convergent thinking, to combine new information with old and forgotten ideas. Highly creative people are very good at marshaling their brains into bilateral mode, and the more creative they are, the more they dual-activate.

Read the full article…

Perhaps this is linked, but other research shows that giving children in families computers (in order to “bridge the digital divide”) actually reduces the kids’ grades. They end up playing computer games and getting distracted.

Related posts:

1. Creative daydreaming
2. How racism works
3. Is empathy declining?

Everyone has experienced pain and sickness at some point in their lives. For such physical ailments, one of the first things we do–or are instructed to do by medical providers–is take a pain reliever, like acetaminophen (a.k.a., Tylenol). But physical pain isn’t the only kind of pain. Our feelings can also be hurt. So researchers wondered whether acetaminophen, which acts on the central nervous system, could blunt social pain, too. In one experiment, healthy college students were randomly assigned to take acetaminophen or a placebo twice a day for three weeks. Those who took acetaminophen reported experiencing significantly fewer hurt feelings. In a second experiment, another set of healthy college students was randomly assigned to take acetaminophen or a placebo twice a day for three weeks. At the end of the three weeks, the students were scanned in an MRI machine while playing a virtual ball-tossing game with two other players. After a while, the other players stopped tossing the ball to the subject. Those who had taken the acetaminophen exhibited significantly less neural activity in areas of the brain previously associated with experiencing social and physical pain.

DeWall, N. et al., ”Acetaminophen Reduces Social Pain: Behavioral and Neural Evidence,” Psychological Science (forthcoming).

This is from the Boston Globe

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1. The physical roots of intelligence
2. Is empathy declining?
3. And my response

A key Buddhist teaching is a list of five reflections that the Buddha said everyone should contemplate daily. The reflections are:

1. I am subject to old age.
2. I am subject to sickness
3. I am subject to death.
4. I will be separated from all that is dear to me.
5 I am responsible for my own actions and destiny.

Basically it’s saying: life is short, make the most of it, take responsibility for yourself.

And I just came across a nice piece of research showing that your attitude to time affects your ability to fully appreciate the present moment.

This is from an article in Science Daily, last year:

Psychologist Jaime L. Kurtz from Pomona College investigated how our behavior and attitude towards an activity change when there is a limited amount of time remaining to engage in it. A group of college seniors participated in this study, which occurred 6 weeks prior to graduation. Every day for two weeks, the students were to write about their college experiences, including the activities they participated in. The experiment was designed so that some of the students were to think about graduation as a far-off event and some students were told to think about graduation as occurring very soon.

The results, reported in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, reveal that the students’ behavior was influenced by how the graduation deadline was framed (that is, whether graduation was occurring shortly or in the future).

It turns out that the students who thought of graduation as occurring very soon reported participating in more college-related activities compared to the students who thought of graduation as a far-off event. Kurtz surmises that when faced with the imminent end of college, students were more motivated to take advantage of the time they had left in school and participate in as many events as possible—the students realized it would be their last chance to engage in college-related activities.

Kurtz notes that although it may seem counterintuitive, these findings support the idea that “thinking about an experience’s future ending can enhance one’s present experience of it”. In addition, Kurtz suggests that “focusing on the fact the experiences like these are fleeting enhances enjoyment by creating a ‘now or never’ type of motivation”.

Fascinating stuff. I’m kind of bummed that I only just stumbled across this research, since I could have quoted it in my forthcoming book, Living as a River, which is about embracing impermanence. A point I make in that book is that although we may put a lot of effort into banishing thoughts of death and impermanence, assuming that such thoughts would be depressing, an awareness of impermanence can actually be life-enhancing. People, for example, who were asked to imagine the death of their significant other, found that their relationships improved.

Another Buddhist teaching is a list of cognitive distortions known as viparyasas — literally “topsy-turvies.” These cognitive distortions lead us to believe, for example, that the things that will make us happy will actually make us unhappy, and vice versa. Thinking that reflecting on impermanence will make us unhappy is a perfect example of a viparyasa.

Related posts:

1. Is empathy declining?
2. Back to the Present: How to Live in the Moment
3. Awareness of death, and ego-defense

We learn:

For mechanical skills, the higher the reward, the better the performance. But, for even moderately demanding cognitive skills, a larger reward leads to poorer performance.

The way money works as a motivator is that if you don’t pay people enough, they won’t be motivated. Once people are comfortable with the amount they’re being paid, money isn’t an issue and they can concentrate on their work. Once the money issue is dealt with, there are three factors that lead to better performance:

1. Autonomy: if you want engaged workers, they have to be self-directed.
2. Mastery: people like to develop excellence. It’s satisfying to do something well.
3. Purpose: They also like to make a contribution beyond creating profit.

Examples given of purpose-driven individuals are the cofounder of Skype, Niklas Zennström (“Our goal is to be disruptive, but in the cause of making the world a better place”), and Steve Jobs (“I want to put a ding in the universe”). As Pink says, these are the kinds of things that would get you racing to work in the morning.

The absence of this kind of thinking is seen in the recent banking collapse, where profit was unhinged from purpose, and those who were paid literally millions in bonuses had no interest whatsoever is achieving anything beyond walking away with a large chunk of money. Pink emphasizes that this research encourages us to treat people as people, and not as horses who need carrots and sticks.

This is all great stuff. It helps me to reconnect with the mission of Wildmind, which is to spread compassion and mindfulness through the practice of Buddhist meditation in order to make the world a better place.

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2. How good are people at making ethical evaluations?
3. Blind to logic

“We found the biggest drop in empathy after the year 2000,” said Sara Konrath, a researcher at the U-M Institute for Social Research. “College kids today are about 40 percent lower in empathy than their counterparts of 20 or 30 years ago, as measured by standard tests of this personality trait.”

Konrath conducted the meta-analysis, combining the results of 72 different studies of American college students conducted between 1979 and 2009, with U-M graduate student Edward O’Brien and undergraduate student Courtney Hsing.

Compared to college students of the late 1970s, the study found, college students today are less likely to agree with statements such as “I sometimes try to understand my friends better by imagining how things look from their perspective” and “I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me.”

The researchers suggest that the media may be to blame: “…this generation of college students grew up with video games, and a growing body of research, including work done by my colleagues at Michigan, is establishing that exposure to violent media numbs people to the pain of others.”

They also hypothesize that the rise in socla media — where people have “friends” they don’t even know — and an increasingly competitive world, may be factors.

I suppose it’s possible that students are simply becoming more honest. Perhaps people in the past felt it was more socially acceptable to claim compassionate feelings they didn’t really have. In a way I hope it’s something like that: it’s bad enough having our health insurance companies, banks, etc, being managed by the people who run them now. What happens if a “less empathetic” generation starts running the country. Then, I think, we’re really screwed.

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3. Teaching empathy

About once a year, some new study confirms Denmark’s status as a happiness superpower. Danes receive this news warily, with newspaper headlines that invariably read: "We’re the happiest lige nu." Lige nu is a Danish phrase that means literally "just now" but strongly connotes a sense of "for the time being but probably not for long." Danes, in other words, harbor low expectations about everything, including their own happiness. Though not an especially religious people, Danes would make good Buddhists. They live their lives as the Buddha advised: in the present tense, not grasping at some future happiness jackpot.

Danes seem to know instinctively that expectations kill happiness, leaving the rest of us unhappy un-Danes to sweat it out on the "hedonic treadmill." That’s what researchers call the tendency to constantly ratchet up our expectations, a sort of emotional inflation that devalues today’s accomplishments and robs us of all but the most fleeting contentment. If a B-plus grade made us happy last semester, it’ll take an A-minus to register the same satisfaction this semester, and so on until eventually, inevitably, we fail to reach the next bar and slip into despair.

Related posts:

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2. Learning happiness
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