The Greater Good Blog

Can Meditation Make Your Brain Stronger?

October 13th, 2009 by Madeleine Goodkind | Tags: aging, meditation, mindfulness, neuroscience | 3 Comments »

If we want to build up strong muscles, we assume we’ve got to hit the gym and lift some weights. But what if we want to strengthen our brains? Try meditation, according to a recent study.

In the study, published in the journal NeuroImage, UCLA neuroscientist Eileen Luders and her colleagues compared the brains of 22 people who had practiced various forms of meditation—for anywhere from five to nearly 50 years—with the brains of 22 people (of similar ages and education levels) who had never practiced any kind of meditation. Using a brain imaging technique that allowed them to view changes across the entire brain, the researchers looked to see if any particular brain regions were bigger in one group or the other.

They found that two brain regions were bigger in the meditators than in the non-meditators, while non-meditators showed no advantage in any brain region. The regions that had greater volume in the meditators have both been linked to our ability to manage our emotions; one of them, the hippocampus, located in the temporal lobes of the brain, near the ears, has also been found to play a role in our skills of attention. Additionally, the authors found evidence that meditation may actually improve the hippocampus’ ability to grow new neurons into adulthood, which may be particularly important to keeping our brains sharp as we age.

Previous studies have shown that an active meditation practice is associated with a stronger ability to regulate one’s behavior and emotions, and with reductions in physical and psychological symptoms of illness. With this study, Luders and her colleagues have found further evidence for these links, down to the neural level. They note that more research in this area is necessary before they can draw any definite conclusions. But they argue that if effects of meditation are linked to the particular brain changes they observed, then meditators are strengthening the brain regions necessary for the “singular abilities and habits to cultivate positive emotions, retain emotional stability, and engage in mindful behavior

For more tips on how to strengthen your brain, check out Jill Suttie’s Greater Good article this month, “How to Keep Your Brain Young (Even as You Grow Old).”

Turn Up the Red

October 9th, 2009 by Josiah Leong | Tags: Dacher Keltner, morality, social connections, social exclusion | 3 Comments »

Most people try to hide their blushes when they’re embarrassed. Some have even gone so far as to undergo a surgical procedure that prevents their face from blushing. But new research suggests that rather than being something we should cover up, a blush actually serves an important role in smoothing social interactions.

In a recent study, published in the journal Emotion, researchers from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands had participants read vignettes about various social transgressions—driving away after a car crash or cheating on an exam, for example—and mishaps such as spilling coffee on someone or steering a bike into the bushes.

The vignette was followed by a picture of a face—ostensibly the person from the story—with one of four types of display: a neutral expression with or without a blush, and an expression of shame or embarrassment with or without a blush. Participants were then asked to rate how favorably they felt toward the person in the picture.

The results showed that blushing people were judged more favorably than non-blushers, regardless of the other emotional cues on their face. In addition, compared with non-blushing faces, participants more quickly understood when blushing faces were conveying shame or embarrassment.

The researchers argue that blushing signals a sincere acknowledgement of wrongdoing, and communicates to others that we won’t make the same mistake again. As result, they conclude, blushing might prevent people from being socially excluded after they’ve committed some kind of transgression.

“Although most people consider blushing to be an undesirable response,” they write, “our results showed that in the context of transgressions and mishaps, blushing is a helpful bodily signal with face-saving properties.”

For more on the social importance of blushing and embarrassment, check out Greater Good Executive Editor Dacher Keltner’s May essay, “Born to Blush.”

How to De-Stress

October 5th, 2009 by Katie Goldsmith | Tags: exercise, health | 1 Comment »

When life gets stressful, many of us tend to dwell on whatever it is that’s causing us stress rather than taking a break to enjoy our favorite hobby or a meal with friends, which can seem like a waste of time. However, a new study suggests that making time for leisure activities actually alleviates stress and helps us function better physically and psychologically.

In the study, published in the journal Psychosomatic Medicine, psychologist Sarah Pressman of the University of Kansas and her colleagues asked 1,400 adults how often they engaged in a variety of different leisure activities, including eating with friends, communing with nature, playing sports, and spending quiet time alone. Then these adults were given surveys measuring their physical and psychological health.

The results showed that people who more frequently engaged in enjoyable leisure activities had lower blood pressure, waist circumference, body mass index, and levels of cortisol, a hormone linked to stress.

These people also reported stronger social networks, greater satisfaction with and engagement in their lives, and lower levels of depression. Plus, they tended to sleep better and exercise more consistently.

So next time you get invited out to eat with friends or go for a jog and you think your stressful life simply doesn’t allow for it, remember that activities like those are much more important than we give them credit for. They may even help you deal with the stresses that life throws your way: The authors speculate that these “breather” activities may lead to “restoration [that] is typically marked by greater feelings of well-being, calm, and vigor.”

Forgiveness and Mindsight

September 29th, 2009 by Jason Marsh | Tags: Forgiveness, events, mindfulness | 1 Comment »

This Friday, the Greater Good Science Center will be hosting “Forgiveness and Mindsight,” the fifth seminar in its “Science of a Meaningful Life” series. It’ll be an all-day event held at De Neve Plaza Auditorium on the UCLA campus. There’s still time to register here.

We want to hear from those of you attending and give you a chance to connect with one another. Comment on this post to share a bit about your interests and reasons for attending, with an eye toward generating some fruitful discussion among like-minded people and colleagues. And please check this blog after the event to share ideas and feedback with fellow attendees. This space should be a resource for those of you looking for innovative applications of ground-breaking science.

What are you hoping to get out of the event?

Who would you like to connect with at the event, for what purpose?

How do you hope the presentations will help you in your personal or professional life?

We’ve heard from several attendees and Greater Good readers who would like to start regular discussion groups around the topics that will be discussed this Friday–forgiveness, mindfulness, empathy–as well as many others. Would this be something that interests you?

We look forward to seeing you Friday!

Aging in Reverse: A Review of Counterclockwise

September 25th, 2009 by Linda Graham | Tags: aging, happiness, health, mindfulness, positive psychology | 1 Comment »

In Counterclockwise, Ellen Langer, a renowned social psychologist at Harvard, suggests that our beliefs and expectations impact our physical health at least as much as diets and doctors do. She argues that, as we grow older, our physical limitations are largely determined by the way we think about ourselves and what we’re capable of. As a result, we need to challenge our socially constructed, implicitly learned assumptions around health and aging in order to take control of our own well-being.

For evidence, Langer draws on her 30 years of pioneering mind-body research, including her 1979 “Counterclockwise” study in which eight elderly men lived in a residential retreat that recreated the social-physical environment of 1959. After one week sequestered in this virtual 20-year journey back in time, all eight participants showed marked improvements in their hearing, memory, dexterity, appetite, and general well-being. They even looked younger to outside observers who saw photos of them before and after the experiment.

Langer cites other research that has made similar findings. In one study, for instance, 650 people were surveyed about their attitudes on aging. Twenty years later, those with a positive attitude had lived seven years longer on average than those with a negative attitude. (By comparison, researchers estimate that we extend our lives by four years if we lower our blood pressure and reduce our cholesterol.) In another study, participants read a list of negative words about aging; within 15 minutes, they were walking more slowly than they had before.

“That beliefs might be the most important determinant of life span goes against the grain of what we ‘know’ to be true,” writes Langer. Indeed, by considering whether limbs can regenerate or paralysis be reversed, Langer tries to push science beyond what we know, to discover what might be.

At times, though, Langer’s research seems surprisingly thin–studies with small sample sizes, not widely replicated–and the book lacks concrete suggestions for how to put her ideas into practice. Still, since I finished reading Counterclockwise, I’ve found myself constantly sharing her ideas about the “psychology of possibility” with colleagues and friends. And I challenge myself daily to think more optimistically about my own health and aging than I ever could have imagined before.

Linda Graham, MFT, publishes an e-newsletter, Healing and Awakening into Aliveness and Wholeness, archived at www.lindagraham-mft.com.

Forgiveness and Gratitude

September 23rd, 2009 by Jason Marsh | Tags: Forgiveness, events, gratitude | 7 Comments »

This Friday, the Greater Good Science Center will be hosting “Forgiveness and Gratitude,” the fourth seminar in its “Science of a Meaningful Life” series. It’ll be an all-day event held at the International House, on the UC Berkeley campus. There’s still time to register here.

We want to hear from those of you attending and give you a chance to connect with one another. Comment on this post to share a bit about your interests and reasons for attending, with an eye toward generating some fruitful discussion among like-minded people and colleagues. And please check this blog after the event to share ideas and feedback with fellow attendees. This space should be a resource for those of you looking for innovative applications of ground-breaking science.

What are you hoping to get out of the event?

Who would you like to connect with at the event, for what purpose?

How do you hope the presentations will help you in your personal or professional life?

We’ve heard from several attendees and Greater Good readers who would like to start regular discussion groups around the topics that will be discussed this Friday–forgiveness, gratitude, happiness–as well as many others. Would this be something that interests you?

We look forward to seeing you Friday!

Global Giving

September 21st, 2009 by Cjay Roughgarden | Tags: Giving, altruism, cooperation, empathy, globalization, money, prosocial behavior, social connections | Leave a Comment »

It’s a small world we live in, increasingly connected by technology, trade, and common threats to our species’ survival. Cooperation and collaboration are needed to overcome the enormous environmental challenges before us. But will globalization encourage this kind of cooperation—or will it just breed more intense competition, as people reinforce their attachments to their own national and ethnic groups?

That’s what a group of researchers from around the globe ask in a study recently published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In the study, participants from six countries—the United States, Italy, Russia, Argentina, South Africa, and Iran—played a game in which they were given tokens and had to decide whether to make a contribution to their own personal account, to a local group, or to an international group. If they donated a token to their personal account, they simply kept it for themselves. But if they gave to the local group, their contribution was doubled and spread among three other people from their country, so they received back only a percentage of the pool for themselves. If they gave to the international group, their donation was tripled and spread among 11 others, most of whom were from other countries, so they received back an even smaller percentage of the pool.

The more that participants gave, the greater the potential payout to each individual group member. So for everyone to benefit, they needed to cooperate with one another. Participants did not know what countries the international players were from, and they did not communicate during the pooling of tokens, so choices to share at the regional and international level required increasing amounts of trust in strangers.

The researchers found that people from countries with higher levels of globalization were more likely to cooperate with participants from other places around the world, giving more money to the international group, though not to the regional group.

The researchers also had individual study participants take a survey measuring their own personal level of globalization, meaning the degree to which they were involved in a network of global economic, social, and cultural connections. Whether they watch foreign films, talk on the phone with people in other countries, or work for an international corporation were among the defining characteristics of a “globalized” person.

The researchers found that, within each country, the people who had more of these connections were more likely to donate to the international group.

These results suggest that globalization does in fact promote global cooperation, rather than reactionary movements to favor kin and ethnic relations. Other studies have also shown that people from countries with higher levels of economic globalization are more likely to want to help other around the world. In this study, however, the researchers go one step further, suggesting that social (rather than just economic) connections across national borders foster global cooperation. They speculate that this is because these social connections promote feelings of empathy, a decrease in perceived distance between themselves and people of other nations, and the urge to cooperate on the global level.

So it seems the smaller the world feels to us, the more likely we are to work together to save it.

The Dark Side of Self-Help

September 16th, 2009 by Katie Goldsmith | Tags: happiness, health | 6 Comments »

“I am a beautiful person.” “I am capable of anything.” Self-help books and motivational speakers are often quick to recommend these kinds of personal mantras to make us feel better about ourselves. But it seems that for many of us, this technique may actually do more harm than good: According to a recent study published in Psychological Science, these statements may only help people who already have high self-esteem, and may make things worse for people with low self-esteem.

In the study, led by psychologist Joanne Wood of the University of Waterloo in Canada, people took a survey to measure their self-esteem. Then Wood and her colleagues randomly assigned these people to one of two conditions, with equal numbers of people with high self-esteem and low self-esteem in each group. In one condition, participants wrote down any thoughts or feelings they had over four minutes. In the other condition, participants not only wrote down their thoughts and feelings but had to repeat to themselves “I am a lovable person” every time they heard a sound like a doorbell. This cue occurred 16 times. After the writing task, participants again completed surveys measuring their mood and self-esteem.

The results showed that the people with low self-esteem who had to tell themselves how lovable they were felt worse after the writing task than they did before the writing task; they also felt worse than people with low self-esteem in the other condition. The people with high self-esteem who repeated the statement felt slightly better after the task than before it and also felt better than their counterparts who did not repeat the statement.

The researchers speculate that people with low self-esteem might have been harmed by the “lovable” statement because those kinds of personal affirmations may remind them that they aren’t measuring up to standards they have for themselves.

With that assumption in mind, the researchers did a follow-up study in which participants once again had to repeat “I am a lovable person.” In one condition, participants were told to focus on ways and times that the statement is true for them. But in the other condition, participants were told to focus on ways the statement is true for them and ways that it is not true for them. They found that people with low self-esteem had better moods when they were allowed to have negative thoughts than when they were told to focus exclusively on the positive.

The researchers suggest that not all kinds of personal affirmations are necessarily bad for people with low self-esteem. For instance, they write, “statements involving specific attributes (e.g., ‘I select good gifts for people’) may be less likely than global (e.g., ‘I am a generous person’) or extremely positive self-statements to arouse disconfirming thoughts.”

Still, they caution that people should think twice before embracing the “outlandish, unreasonably positive self-statements, such as ‘I accept myself completely,’ [that] are often encouraged by self-help books. Our results suggest that such self-statements may harm the very people they are designed for: people low in self-esteem.”

Mobilizing Health - Challenges and the Next Steps

September 11th, 2009 by Pooja Upadhyaya | Tags: Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Hi GGSC Readers,

Our 7 weeks in India flew by very fast and it was quite a roller coaster! The Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) we went to India with, the Narayan Sewa Sansthan, turned out to be corrupt and possibly brought us over to their city thinking we were just wealthy American donors.

Once they realized that was not our intention (but that our intention was to actually implement the project we had communicated about for months), it was an uphill battle to pilot what we came to do. However, with the help of many wonderful people inside and outside the NGO, we were able to pull together the resources to connect 8 villages to around-the-clock doctors on duty.

Each village had a Village Contact (VC) who was the point person to go to whenever anyone in their village became ill or had an emergency. Since the communication is done through text messaging (SMS), we trained every VC on how to send SMS and what information is needed for a doctor to give an accurate diagnosis. In just 25 days, we were able to successfully connect 64 patients to a doctor’s advice. With this promising outcome we will be returning to India this December to implement with 50 villages and a fully operating ambulance. This time, we will be implementing with the new trustworthy NGO, The Raven Foundation.

Please take a look at our presentation that gives an overview of what we have done, including some real SMS sent/received, and our next steps: Mobilizing Health Implementation Presentation

-Mobilizing Health Team-

mobilizinghealth.wordpress.com

Support for Coming Out

September 9th, 2009 by Katie Goldsmith | Tags: Prejudice, happiness, social exclusion, social integration | 1 Comment »

As anyone who saw last year’s Milk knows, Harvey Milk was the first openly gay man to hold a major public office in the United States, and he used his position to passionately urge gays and lesbians to come out to family, friends, and co-workers. This was the surest way, Milk believed, to overcome the social stigma and discrimination they faced. Now, a recent study offers some psychological evidence to support Milk’s political crusade, finding that people who come out as gay or lesbian actually experience greater emotional well-being.

In the study, published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, psychologist Kristin P. Beals and colleagues first gave a diverse sample of 35 lesbian women and 46 gay men a survey to judge their overall psychological well-being, examining their self-esteem and life satisfaction. The men and women took the same survey two months later. For two weeks in between, they were given two different diaries. In one, they noted whether they had disclosed their sexual orientation to anyone that day—not only to friends and family, but to new acquaintances or strangers as well. The other diary consisted of a series of questions that assessed various psychological factors, including levels of well-being and perceived social support.

The researchers found that participants reported more positive feelings, higher self-esteem, and more life satisfaction on days in which they revealed their sexual orientation than on days when they did not. Importantly, they also found that the decision to come out was strongly associated with perceived social support: On days when participants disclosed their sexual identity to others, they reported feeling more social support at the end of the day. In fact, these feelings of social support were even more closely tied to well-being than was the decision to come out itself. In other words, it seems that disclosure boosted well-being because it was connected to greater feelings of support and understanding.

The researchers also discovered that participants engaged in more emotional processing—that is, actively thinking about their experiences in ways that helped make sense of them—on days when they revealed their sexual orientation; in turn, this emotional processing was associated with greater levels of well-being at the end of the day.

Not surprisingly, the researchers found that when people concealed their sexual identity, they experienced more feelings of emotional suppression. More surprising was that participants even reported feeling this suppression after not coming out to a new acquaintance or stranger. In the two month follow-up survey, greater feelings of suppression were associated with lower life satisfaction and greater depression.

Though the study shows an important connection between disclosing one’s sexual identity and perceptions of social support, it’s not entirely clear which one causes the other. The researchers speculate that it’s disclosure that actually boosts one’s feelings of social support, and thus well-being, perhaps because “gay men and lesbians are skilled at picking suitable disclosure recipients”—i.e., those who will make them feel supported, and thus feel better about themselves and their lives. But they allow that people may be more willing to come out when they believe social support is available. They call for more research to help resolve this question.