Love is Happiness | Psychology Today Blogs

Love is Happiness
By T. Byram Karasu, M.D. on December 03, 2008 in The Mystery of Happiness

-Leonard Cohen

One afternoon, according to thirteenth-century Sufi folktale, the beloved character Nasreddin, a humorous philosopher and wise fool, was sitting in a café with his friend, discussing serious matters of life and love, as told to Rick Fields.

When the friend asked if Nasreddin was ever interested in getting married, he replied that years before he had set out to find the perfect wife. In Damascus he had found a wonderful and beautiful woman-but she wasn’t spiritual enough. Then, in another city he found a spiritual woman, but they didn’t communicate well together. Ultimately, in Cairo he found what he was looking for-”She was the ideal woman, spiritual, gracious, beautiful and at ease in the world-perfect in every way.” When the friend asked why he hadn’t married her, Nasreddin replied, “Unfortunately, she was looking for the perfect man.”

When we refer to the perfect person, what we may really mean is someone resembling ourselves. That is why it is so difficult to find the perfect one, because each of us is unique. The people we encounter are to varying degrees different from ourselves. In fact, rewording the esteemed thirteenth-century monk, Thomas Aquinas, “Diversity is the only perfection in the universe.” As there are billions of different faces in the world, there are that many variations in human personalities. “I” as the norm is puzzled and confused if the other behaves differently from “me.” We automatically expect the other person’s psychological structure to be similar to our own. Yet the moment a difference is recognized, however small, the individual would likely pull back, either remain relatively distant or emulate the other. Both attempts interfere wit the development of intimacy. Genuine intimate relationships require that both individuals accept and foster each other’s separateness. This acceptance is not a form of tolerance-it is a celebration. We should not be hoping that one day this person will finally mature and become like ourselves.

To know a man as he really is, you must accept him as he is; otherwise, he may not reveal himself to you and you will miss him forever. Constant self-scrutiny as to be rational, perfect, sane, or praiseworthy undermines one’s authenticity, and thus the possibility of genuine relations with others. Irrationalities are fertile ground for souls to join, as are their shortcomings and failures. Enduring relations are a series of optimum failures. If you want successful relations, make a habit of practicing the following daily prayer from the Course in Miracles: “today, I shall judge nothing.”

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PsyBlog: 12 Laws of the Emotions

2 Laws of the Emotions
Explore your feelings, and how they affect your behaviour, with this new series on the psychology of the emotions.

We tend to think of our emotions as having laws unto themselves, but one psychological researcher has suggested that our emotions do follow certain general rules.

This post begins a new series on the psychology of emotions with Professor Nico Frijda’s twelve laws of the emotions (Fridja, 2006). As for most laws there are exceptions, but these have been synthesised from years of psychological research and hold true much of the time.

1. The Law of Situational Meaning
The first law is simply that emotions derive from situations. Generally the same types of situation will elicit the same types of emotional response. Loss makes us grieve, gains make us happy and scary things make us fearful (mostly anyway – see all the other laws).

2. The Law of Concern
We feel because we care about something, when we have some interest in what happens, whether it’s to an object, ourselves, or another person. Emotions arise from these particular goals, motivations or concerns. When we are unconcerned we don’t feel anything.

3. The Law of Apparent Reality
Whatever seems real to us, can elicit an emotional response. In other words how we appraise or interpret a situation governs the emotion we feel (compare with laws 11 & 12). The reason poor movies, plays or books don’t engage us emotionally is because, in some sense, we fail to detect truth. Similarly it’s difficult to get emotional about things that aren’t obvious, right in front of us. For example grief may not strike when we are told about the death of loved one, but only once it becomes real to us in some way – say when we pick up the phone to call them, forgetting they are gone.

4, 5 & 6. The Laws of Change, Habituation and Comparative Feeling
The law of habituation means that in life we get used to our circumstances whatever they are (mostly true, but see laws 7 & 8). The emotions, therefore, respond most readily to change. This means that we are always comparing what is happening to a relatively steady frame of reference (what we are used to). As a result our emotions tend to respond most readily to changes that are relative to this frame of reference.

7. The Law of Hedonic Asymmetry
There are certain awful circumstances to which we can never become accustomed. If things are bad enough, it is impossible to escape negative feelings like fear or anxiety. On the other hand positive emotions always fade over time. No matter how much we are in love, how big the lottery win, or how copious the quantities of drugs consumed, positive emotions like pleasure always slip away.

8. The Law of Conservation of Emotional Momentum
Time doesn’t heal all wounds – or if it does, it only does so indirectly. Events can retain their emotional power over the years unless we re-experience and re-evaluate them. It’s this re-experiencing and consequent re-definition that reduces the emotional charge of an event. This is why events that haven’t been re-evaluated – say, failing an exam or being rejected by a potential lover – retain their emotional power across the decades.

9. The Law of Closure
The way we respond to our emotions tends to be absolute. They often lead immediately to actions of one kind or another, and they will brook no discussion (but see laws 10, 11 & 12). In other words emotional responses are closed to goals other than their own or judgements that can mitigate the response. An emotion seizes us and send us resolutely down one path, until later that is, when a different emotion sends us down the opposite path.

10. The Law of Care for Consequences
People naturally consider the consequences of their emotions and modify them accordingly. For example anger may provoke violent feelings towards another, but generally people refrain from stabbing each other willy-nilly. Instead they will shout, hit their head on the wall or just silently fume. Emotions may absolutely dictate a type of response, but people do modulate the size of that response (usually!).

11 & 12. Laws of the Lightest Load and the Greatest Gain
The emotional impact of an event or situation depends on its interpretation. Putting a different ‘spin’ on a situation can change the feeling. The law of the lightest load means people are particularly motivated to use re-interpretations to reduce negative emotions. For example we might reduce the fear of the credit crunch by generating the illusion we won’t be affected. The exact reverse is also true: whenever a situation can be reinterpreted for a positive emotional gain, it will be. For example anger can be used to make others back down, grief attracts help and fear may stop us rashly attempting difficult or dangerous tasks.

Exploring the emotions
You may not agree with all of these ‘laws’, for example this is quite an individually based account of emotion, and tends to downplay the social aspects of emotion. Nevertheless it is an excellent starting point which provides a very useful way of thinking about emotions, and helps pave the way for examining individual emotions.

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Neuropolitics.org

We Empathize, Therefore We Are: Toward a Moral Neuropolitics

by Gary Olson

Voters perceived Obama to be substantially more compassionate than John McCain

You need to indoctrinate empathy out of people in order to arrive at extreme capitalist positions. F. B. M. de Waal

Empathy is the only human superpower-it can shrink distance, cut through social and power hierarchies, transcend differences, and provoke political and social change. Elizabeth Thomas

People in Third World countries think and laugh and smile, just like us. We have got to understand that we are them; they are us. Rachel Corrie (as a 10-year-old)

The official directives needn’t be explicit to be well understood: Do not let too much empathy move in unauthorized directions. Norman Solomon

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Neuropolitics.org

We Empathize, Therefore We Are: Toward a Moral Neuropolitics

by Gary Olson

Voters perceived Obama to be substantially more compassionate than John McCain

You need to indoctrinate empathy out of people in order to arrive at extreme capitalist positions. F. B. M. de Waal

Empathy is the only human superpower-it can shrink distance, cut through social and power hierarchies, transcend differences, and provoke political and social change. Elizabeth Thomas

People in Third World countries think and laugh and smile, just like us. We have got to understand that we are them; they are us. Rachel Corrie (as a 10-year-old)

The official directives needn’t be explicit to be well understood: Do not let too much empathy move in unauthorized directions. Norman Solomon

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I have been focused on the role of emotions quite a bit lately. This research puts a whole new spin on mastery and the rightful use of emotions in negotiation.

Deal or No Deal? The Role of Emotions in Negotiating Offers (10/18/2008)

“We believe that when proposers rely on their feelings, the relative power implied by the rules of the game is central to their gist representation of the negotiation, and this representation shapes whether offers ‘feel right’ to them,” the authors stated.

Interestingly, the negotiators who were guided by their emotions did not fare worse than the others financially. Indeed, they ended up with at least as much, and often more, than their more calculating counterparts, suggesting that emotional decision making may not only be simpler, but may also be more lucrative.

Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by the Association for Psychological Science

emotions, negotiation,

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Having read mcLuhan manytimes and been amazed with how accurately he predicted the coming age and its implications, i ran into the piece which takes the idea of an extended nervous system to include the www. Fascinating read, and I look forward to seeing where this goes. At the very least ti got my mind thinking about the location of self, and where/how does one define the boundaries of one’s experience and existence.

Reality Sandwich | Living in the Infosphere

In the Introduction to Digital Dharma, I wrote:

An electronic web surrounds the planet. Our ideas travel instantaneously to all points of the globe on electromagnetic waves and pulses of light. In the last decade communications networks have advanced from wires to fiber optics, from interconnected radio and television grids to a world of billions of wirelessly communicating sensory devices — each with its own address in cyberspace… the Infosphere is now a field that engulfs our physical, mental and etheric bodies; it affects our dreaming and our cultural life. Our evolving nervous system has been extended, as media sage Marshal McLuhan predicted in the early 1960′s, into a global embrace.

marshall mcluhan, infosphere,

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At the heart of marketing is “applied economics” i.e. the ability to turn economic theory into manage demand/supply. This means understanding how decisions are made is essential to understanding economics, and the emergent feild of neuroeconomics is there at the cross roads – where the brain science meets the market, and decisions are made/forced upon individuals like you and me. Look for more articles and blogs in the future on this topic

Do economists need brains? | The Economist

FOR all the undoubted wit of their neuroscience-inspired concept album, “Heavy Mental”—songs include “Mind-Body Problem” and “All in a Nut”—The Amygdaloids are unlikely to loom large in the annals of rock and roll. Yet when the history of economics is finally written, Joseph LeDoux, the New York band’s singer-guitarist, may deserve at least a footnote. In 1996 Mr LeDoux, who by day is a professor of neuroscience at New York University, published a book, “The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life”, that helped to inspire what is today one of the liveliest and most controversial areas of economic research: neuroeconomics.

neuroeconomics, decision making, brain,

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Political Science: What Being Neat or Messy Says about Political Leanings: Scientific American

Researchers insist they can tell someone’s politlcal affiliation by looking at the condition of their offices and bedrooms. Messy? You’re a lefty. A neatnik? Welcome to the Right.

According to a controversial new study, set to be published in The Journal of Political Psychology, the bedrooms and offices of liberals, who are generally thought of as open, tend to be colorful and awash in books about travel, ethnicity, feminism and music, along with music CDs covering folk, classic and modern rock, as well as art supplies, movie tickets and travel memorabilia.

Conservatives, on the other hand, tend to surround themselves with calendars, postage stamps, laundry baskets, irons and sewing materials in their personal spaces, according to the study. Their bedrooms and offices are well-lighted and decorated with sports paraphernalia and flags—especially American ones.

political leanings,

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Chapel Perilious is hard to explain, but not just poeple but companies themselves often find themself in this no man’s land or mapless territory.

Robert Anton Wilson on Chapel Perilous

“Chapel

Perilous is a stage in the magickal quest in which your maps turn out

to be totally inadequate for the territory and you’re completely lost.

And at that point you get an ally who helps you find your way back to

something you can understand. And then after that for the rest of your

life you’ve got this question: Was that ally a supernatural helper, or

was it just part of my own mind trying to save me from going totally

bonkers with this stuff? And the people I know who’ve had that kind of

experience, very few of them have come to an absolutely certain

conclusion about this.” Robert Anton Wilson

robert anton wilson, chapel perilous,

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The interesting questions that come out of this study atleast as I read them are as follows

1. What sort of patterns do you/I look for?
2. What perceptive filters cause us to see what patterns?
3. Is it possible to break or shift between different pattern sort?

I would argue that our values/adaptive intelligences will play a large role in what we sort for and what kind of patterns we look for. However I am curious what the readers sort for .. and at the very least what worldviews are prevelant in each of us, sorting us to search for some specific patters

NeuroLogica Blog » Hyperactive Pattern Recognition

People like patterns. More specifically, we have a need to feel a sense of control over ourselves and our world, a perceived prerequisite to control is understanding, and we seek patterns in order to make sense of the world. As a result we tend toward hyperactive pattern recognition.

Understanding of the role and power of pattern recognition – especially seeing patterns that are not really there – has become a core tool in the skeptic’s toolbox. Skepticism in part is the study of how people confidently arrive at false conclusions. Skepticism is the pathology of belief. Seeing patterns that are not real, meaning they are illusory, is a major contributor to false beliefs.

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Continuing thoughts from the last post, even enterprises are moving towwards the open source model. Here profit will be made ironically by the very people who made the software for free, since they and their peers are the true expert in this “gift economy”

Seems like the little project of open sourcing personal growth may afteral have merit, maybe its before its time, and but perhaps the core idea at the radical change group was on the right path afterall.

CIOs look to open source to do ‘more for less’ in tough economy | The Open Road – The Business and Politics of Open Source by Matt Asay – CNET News

I’ve been doing an informal poll recently of open-source companies, asking them how the tight economy is affecting their sales. In every single case, these companies are recording record sales.

It’s perhaps not hard to find an answer: open-source solutions tend to cost a lot less than their proprietary counterparts, and provide equal or better functionality.

Open source is not merely about lower software price tags, however. As CIO.com highlights with the Oregon Department of Human Services’ attempt to find a new CRM system, the cost of product discovery and implementation also favor open source, in this case SugarCRM:

One of our top system architects came to our rescue when he discovered SugarCRM’s application on the Internet and since it was an open-source application he was able to download and install it in a single day. Our customers loved it and since it was an open-source application we were able to make some minor modifications (mostly to screen literals) and have it in production within days. We were also able to download contact information from our mainframes and create a comprehensive partner database.

The bottom line was that when we went live with the HIPAA compliant transactions and code sets almost every electronic filler was ready and there was almost no increase in paper invoice volumes. While the cost savings were substantial the speed in which we able to meet everyone’s needs was the big payoff.

open source, cio, personal growth, cnet,

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A fasinating read and analysis. It seems more and mroe we are moving into what can be called a gif economy, where the services become basically free, and the value is create in that. meaning the emergence of a new business model, where content and basic service is free, but what people pay for is contextualing and managing the process of handling many of these otherwise free services.

Makes one wonder if the only real service worth paying for in the emrging future is one which will “shape your attention” in other words a service to manage your perception and filters for taking in information.

The Long Tail – Wired Blogs

The biggest fortunes built on free

sergey-brin From the Forbes 400 list, the following are the billionaires who made their money on businesses whose products are primarily free to consumers:

(Note: I didn’t include diversified media tycoons, such as Rupert Murdoch and Barry Diller, even though much of their business is free-to-air broadcast and web media. That’s because it’s too hard to separate the free bits from their pay-media businesses, or to say which is bigger.)

#13 Sergey Brin $15.9 billion, Google

#14 Larry Page $15.8 billion, Google

#54 Pierre Omidyar $6.3 billion, eBay

#59 Eric Schmidt, $5.9 billion, Google

#155 Oprah Winfrey, $2.7 billion, free-to-air TV

#161 Mark Cuban, $2.6 billion, Broadcast.com

#246 Omid Kordestani, $1.9 billion, Google

#246 Joseph Mansueto, $1.9 billion, Morningstar (freemium investing services)

#281 David Filo, $1.7 billion, Yahoo

#281 Jerry Yang, $1.7 billion, Yahoo

#281 Kavitark Ram Shriram, $1.7 billion, Google

#321 Todd Wagner, $1.5 billion, Broadcast.com

#321 Mark Zuckerberg, $1.5 billion, Facebook

#377 Peter Thiel, $1.3 billion, Facebook, Paypal

free economy, gift economy, business model, long tail,

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Frank Herbert interview. Political prophecy.
Prophetic interview with Frank Herbert, the creator of the Dune saga. “Leaders mistakes are amplified by those who follow them without question.” His books were metaphors for oil dependency, pollution, corruption, and govt. control.

frank herbert, political prophecy,

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Positive Deviants is a notion I learnt about from Marshal Thurber, and its a powerful idea about how to recognize those who are on the leading edge of change, and are driven by a string social purpose.

If you have a chance to meet or listen to him, then go for it. In the meantime go and listen to the podcasts starting next week by the Radical Change group.

PDN – Who are Positive Deviants?

Who are Positive Deviants? PDF Print E-mail

The Seven Characteristics of Positive Deviants are:

1. Passion

2. High Moral or Social Purpose

3. Seeing Holes vs. the Net

4. Moving Towards, Not Away

5. Rapid Cognition

6. Checking the Edges

7. Low Regard for Social Convention

positive deviants, radical change group,

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I read this article and ordered the book, since personal branding is such a key to proffesional success.

However while these quick fix things do work the more important lesson and pattern is how does one find the balance and integrity in

1. Knowing how and where you operate out of your best, where you operate out of your best
2. Know where you are aimed, i.e. what are you serving

These keys to personal transformation are also standard to business success. Thinking about strategy the same pattern follows

1. What what the corporations core competencies are
2. Knowing what markets you need to serve

So the essence of personal branding  should be rooted more in who we are becoming rather than how  one can make a living today and how one wants to be perceived. This gap between who we are and who want to be (be it in person or as an organization) is essentially the difference between what is/can be and the spin factor.

What is Personal Branding – Personal Marketing – Peter Montoya

The Eight Laws of Personal Branding

1. The Law of Specialization: A great Personal Brand must be precise, concentrated on a single core strength, talent or achievement. You can specialize in one of many ways: ability, behavior, lifestyle, mission, product, profession or service.

2. The Law of Leadership: Endowing a Personal Brand with authority and credibility demands that the source be perceived as a leader by the people in his/her domain or sphere of influence. Leadership stems from excellence, position or recognition.

3. The Law of Personality: A great Personal Brand must be built on a foundation of the source’s true personality, flaws and all. It is a law that removes some of the pressure laid on by the Law of Leadership: you’ve got to be good, but you don’t have to be perfect.

4. The Law of Distinctiveness: An effective Personal Brand needs to be expressed in a way that is different from the competition. Many marketers construct middle-of-the-road brands so as not to offend anyone. This is a route to failure because their brands will remain anonymous among the multitudes.

5. The Law of Visibility: To be successful, a Personal Brand must be seen over and over again, until it imprints itself on the consciousness of its domain or sphere of influence. Visibility creates the presumption of quality. People assume because they see a person all the time, he/she must be superior to others offering the same product or service.

6. The Law of Unity: The private person behind a Personal Brand must adhere to the moral and behavioral code set down by that brand. Private conduct must mirror the public brand.

7. The Law of Persistence: Any Personal Brand takes time to grow, and while you can accelerate the process, you can’t replace it with advertising or public relations. Stick with your Personal Brand, without changing it; be unwavering and be patient.

8. The Law of Goodwill: A Personal Brand will produce better results and endure longer if the person behind it is perceived in a positive way. He/she must be associated with a value or idea that is recognized universally as positive and worthwhile.

personal branding, becoming

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This is a good article on how metaphors in the mind become real in our ody and experience. The more time i have spent looking at metaphors/myths the more i have become convinced that it not onl colors the outlook, but also colors/influences how we move through life.

Similarly, these metaphors in business do change the tone/structure of the overall organization. To get a better understanding of how these metaphors impact us and how these metaphors evolve look/listen to the podcasts on Adaptive Intelligence 

Metaphors of the Mind: Why Loneliness Feels Cold and Sins Feel Dirty: Scientific American

ZHONG: I came across this popular 1970s song on YouTube called Lonely This Christmas written by Nicky Chinn and Mike Chapman. It goes, “It’ll be lonely this Christmas, lonely and cold, it’ll be cold so cold, without you to hold.” It just occurred to me that maybe what the song describes is more than a metaphor but a real psychological connection between loneliness and coldness. Indeed, my collaborator Geoffrey Leonardelli [a professor of organizational behavior at the University of Toronto] and I found that people not only use coldness-related terms to describe social rejection (for example, “cold shoulder”), but also experience rejection as physical coldness: feeling cold becomes an integral part of our experience of being socially isolated. This research is consistent with recent theories on embodied cognition as well as general research on the connection between mind and body.

LEHRER: What are some other examples of how seemingly abstract thoughts, such as feeling excluded, can have physical manifestations?

ZHONG: Another example would be the relation between morality and physical cleanliness. In my early work “Washing Away Your Sins: Threatened Morality and Physical Cleansing” in collaboration with Katie Liljenquist [a professor of organizational behavior at Brigham Young University], we discussed how metaphors such as “dirty hands” or “clean records” may have a psychological basis such that people make sense of morality through physical cleanliness.

adaptive intelligence, spiral dynamics, radical change group, metaphors,

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Was reading the long tail, and it made me realize that what the Radical Change Group does is not freemium but really is about a gift economy. RCG has not recognized itself right.
This different kinds of free reveals not only differences, but also what the motivation is all about.

The Long Tail

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long tail, business model, four kinds of free,

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For a long time I had a tough time with Blink, as it gets people to believe that slicing and snap judgements are the best way to make decisions. The trouble with that is it assumes these people are experts and have studied enough patterns to make that kind of recognition and adjustment. While I do believe this kid of judgment and decision making works in one’s area of specialization, it should not be used in making decisions where one is not absolutely at home with the field/information.

Decision trees (from management) and/or inter dependence (from Buddhism/Jainism/Hinduism) of the decisions with all consequences is an important criteria. Having made quite a few judgements/decisions in the blink of an eye and now regretting it can attest to it. A systemic view and taking into account “consequences” not just on oneself but on all interdependent relationships is crucial. 

This research below also confirms my own experiential arrival at the my preffered way to arrive at decisions at this point in time.

The process that has been working for me is

1. Look at consequences
2. Look at inter dependencies
3. See path with highest profit(happiness) with the least cost (suffering)

Complex decisions? Don’t sleep on it (8/24/2008)

Neither snap judgments nor sleeping on a problem are any better than conscious thinking for making complex decisions, according to UNSW research.

The finding debunks a controversial 2006 research result asserting that unconscious thought is best for complex decisions, such as buying a house or car. If anything, the new study suggests that conscious thought leads to better choices.

Since its publication two years ago by a Dutch research team in the journal Science, the earlier finding had been used to encourage decision-makers to make “snap” decisions (for example, in the best-selling book Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell) or to leave complex choices to the powers of unconscious thought.

But in the new study, to be published in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, scientists ran four experiments in which participants were presented with complex decisions and asked to choose the best option immediately (“blink”), after a period of conscious deliberation (“think”), or after a period of distraction (“sleep on it”), which is claimed to encourage “unconscious thought processes”.

In all experiments, there was evidence that conscious deliberation can lead to better choices and little evidence for superiority of choices made “unconsciously”.

“Claims that we can make superior ‘snap’ decisions by trusting intuition or through the ‘power’ of unconscious thought have received a great deal of attention in the media,” says UNSW psychologist, Dr Ben Newell, lead author of the study.

“At best, these sorts of reports are misleading,” says Dr Newell. “At worst, they’re outright dangerous. In stark contrast to claims made by the Dutch research team and in the media, we found very little evidence of the superiority of unconscious thought for complex decisions.

“In fact, our research suggests that unconscious thought is more susceptible to irrelevant factors, such as how recently information has been seen rather than how important it is. If conscious thinkers are given adequate time to encode material, or are allowed to consult material while they deliberate, their choices are at least as good as those made ‘unconsciously’.”

Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by The University of New South Wales

decision making, malcom gladwell, blink, decision trees,

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