Better Way to Deal With Bad Memories

Instead of thinking about your emotions during a negative memory, looking away from the worst emotions and thinking about the context, like a friend who was there, what the weather was like, or anything else non-emotional that was part of the memory, will rather effortlessly take your mind away from the unwanted emotions associated with that memory. Once you immerse yourself in other details, your mind will wander to something else entirely, and you won’t be focused on the negative emotions as much.

– Dolcos (reported in an article on Science Daily)

Smoking

From a recent Freakonomics podcast episode entitled “How to Make People Quit Smoking”.

We actually have a cost per pack, so we actually know that smokers on balance save us 32 cents a pack through smoking due to decreased pension cost, nursing home care cost and the like.

Kip Viscusi, a Vanderbilt University distinguished professor. His article “The New Cigarette Paternalism” gives a breakdown of this saving.

It appears smoking may indeed be a form of self medication.

Perhaps as many as 40 to 50 percent of all smokers have a concurrent mental health disability or morbidity and/or other substance-abuse problem. The cigarette industry has always liked to talk about smoking as being a rational choice of well-informed adults and yet we have this strong correlation between smoking and mental illness.

Kenneth Warner, an economist at the University of Michigan School of Public Health who has been doing tobacco-policy research since the 1970’s.

The use of over…

The use of overly complex words […] leads to decreased ratings of intelligence. […] All in all, the effect is extremely robust:
needless complexity leads to negative evaluations.

“Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems with Using Long Words Needlessly” by Daniel M. Oppenheimer, Princeton University.

“Does a baby’s name affect its chances in life?”

From a recent BBC article.

There is less than a 30th of the expected number of Jades and an even smaller proportion of Paiges and Shannons. An Eleanor is 100 times more likely to go to Oxford than a Jade.

Freakonomics has a podcast episode on the same theme, “How Much Does Your Name Matter?”

 

 

“Bad Baby”

From a recent episode of the This American Life podcast entitled “Bad Baby“.

There’s some studies that suggest that the peak of human violence is at age two. We are most violent of all at that age. Families survive the terrible twos because toddlers aren’t strong enough to kill with their hands and aren’t capable of using lethal weapons. – Paul Bloom

Paul Bloom is a Yale professor who studies the moral psychology of children (among other things).

Curiously, peop…

Curiously, people seem to be unaware of their own unawareness, rarely answering “I don’t know” when asked to explain their decisions. People freely give reasons for their preferences, even when it is clear that these reasons are confabulations and not accurate reports.

From the article, “The Unseen Mind” by Timothy D. Wilson and Yoav Bar-Anan