week 9 post 1

Week 9 post 1

New frontier/exploratory

Awe: feeling in the presence of something greater than the self, acheived from:

• High expansive vantage points
• Encountering viewpoints that are challenging or expand our worldview 
• People performing extraordinary inspiring acts

The science of awe:

     A brief history of awe:

• a religious experience--being in the presence of god (e.g., St. Paul’s conversion)
• Edmund burkes revolution (1757): secular awe
• Immanuel Kant(1764); awe vs. beauty
• Ralph waldo emerson (1860s): transcendent self in nature
• Max weber (1905): political awe

E.O wilson; evolved love of natural beauty, beautiful delight appeal to food, water, shelter

BENEFITS OF GREEN

• Chicago housing projects with more greenery have 48% fewer property crimes, 56% fewer violent crimes
• Girls surrounded by greenery have better self-discipline, delay of gratification, impulse control, concentration
• Kids’ ADHD symptoms drop more after walking in a park than in a quiet urban area
• In chicago housing projects with more greenery, neighbors feel greater community and safety

Self entitlement and less self importance, our desires are less pressing when in the presence of nature, kindness and altruism also elevated

• Spiritually-oriented people report higher levels of happiness (myers, 2000)
• Spiritually-oriented people report less depression (smith et al., 2003)
• Possibly because its connected to awe and community

Can Awe Buy You More Time and Happiness?

By Stacey Kennelly

- a new study suggests that experiencing awe—which psychologists define as the feeling we get when we come across something so strikingly vast in number, scope, or complexity that it alters the way we understand the world—could help us do just that.

- What’s more, awe might make us more generous with how we spend our time and improve our overall well-being.

- researchers induced feelings of awe in participants by showing them video clips of people encountering tremendous things

-The results, published by Psychological Science, show that members of the awed group were more likely to report feeling like they had more time than those who felt happiness.

- “Awe-eliciting experiences might offer one effective solution to the feelings of time starvation that plague so many people in modern life,” write the researchers, who were based at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business and the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management.

- who experience awe would be less likely to feel impatient—since people feel impatient when they think they’re short on time

- awe did not make people more likely to donate money, suggesting that awe does not make people more generous in general. Instead, it was the sense that they had more time to spend that seems to have made participants more willing to lend a hand.

• Awe is a more accurate and vigilant compared to  other positive emotions

Awe, Health, and Social Life

Can Awe Boost Health?

By Yasmin Anwar

• Researchers have linked positive emotions—especially the awe we feel when touched by the beauty of nature, art, and spirituality—with lower levels of pro-inflammatory cytokines, which are proteins that signal the immune system to work harder.
• -cytokines are necessary for herding cells to the body’s battlegrounds to fight infection, disease and trauma, sustained high levels of cytokines are associated with poorer health
• two separate experiments, more than 200 young adults reported on a given day the extent to which they had experienced such positive emotions as amusement, awe, compassion, contentment, joy, love and pride. 

How Awe Makes Us Generous

By Adam Hoffman 

-They can awaken a deep appreciation for the world around us and inspire a profound sense of awe. This sensation is often accompanied by an awareness of something larger than ourselves—that we play a small part in an intricate cosmic dance that is life.

-New research from UC Berkeley and UC Irvine suggests that experiencing awe can actually prompt us to act more benevolently toward others.

-Participants consistently reported that awe produced “a reduced sense of self importance relative to something larger and more powerful that they felt connected to,” says Piff. And subsequent analysis confirmed that this feeling of the “small self” was responsible for their ethical behavior

DISCUSSION

ow has the gratitude journal experience been for you, and do you think you can maintain the practice in perpetuity? Do you feel like it's been beneficial to you? Why or why not?

I appreciated not having to do a daily journal and found that 3x a week was doable. It reminded me of the other study about doing 5 acts of kindness all in one day or spread out during the week and the increase of happiness was when the acts of kindness were done all in one day. I found that laying in bed at night settled my mind and quieted the to do list allowed the gratitude moments to rise to the surface. I admit at first it was hard and then I felt ashamed that I didn't recognize them more quickly. As a skill it got easier and things popped to my mind quicker. I got to a point that I enjoyed that part of the day and found it exciting to read over the lists.

Happiness Practice #10: Awe Walk

Laughter

• Gender differences 

Laughter as medicine

• Decreases blood pressure
• Enhances immune function
• Reduces chronic pain
• Coupled with exercise regime, improves health in elderly populations

Study of laughter and bereavement

• 40 participants
• -spouse had died 6 months earlier
• Promoted to descrive relationship w spouse
• Emotional expressions were analyzed

• People who laughed when describing their relationship showed better psychological health two and four years later

Laughter and relationships

• Laughter predicts relationship satisfaction, laughing together frequently is key to marital success (lauer et al., 1990)
• Shared laughter made strangers feel closer to one another (Fraley and aaron, 2004)
• And people like strangers who laugh at their jokes (cann et al.,1997)

Why Do We Laugh?

By Jill Suttie

• Laughter can be so healing, it seems; “Laughter is the best medicine,” the saying goes. But, is that really true? Does humor serve some adaptive purpose? And if it’s good for us, why do we find some things funny—like Captain Kirk cringing over Cyrus’ performance—while others leave us flat?
• Dopamine relieves tension—which I discovered with my son—but it’s also implicated in motivation, memory, and attention, affecting processes as varied as learning and pain management.
• “What elicits laughter isn’t the content of the joke but the way our brain works through the conflict the joke elicits,” writes Weems.
• Humor is an important part of our evolution, claims Weems—and other animals, such as rats, have been shown to have a sense of humor, too. If one tickles a rat by scratching its belly, it emits high-pitched laughter (normally outside of the human hearing range)
• Experiments on humans have found that laughter can increase blood flow and strengthen the heart, much like aerobic exercise does. Laughter also helps decrease one’s threshold for pain, although not all humor is the same in this respect. According to Weems, positive humor—humor that looks for the bright side of troubling situations—is beneficial to our health, while darker, sardonic humor is not

Why Scientists Want to Make Rats Laugh

By Elizabeth Walter

• Laughter does sound different across species, of course. Chimpanzee laughter sounds more like rhythmic panting, and rat laughter is so high-pitched as to be undetectable without specialized equipment. And, as we all know, it even varies among individuals within a species (think Janis on Friends). However, the basic vocal pattern to laughter is remarkably familiar across the animal kingdom, and it is often expressed in similar social situations. Indeed, our tendency to laugh appears to be hardwired. Human babies, even those born both deaf and blind, will smile, gurgle, and laugh by the age of four months.

Play

Criteria to be considered ‘play’

• Apparently purposeless
• Voluntary
• Inherently attractive ‘fun’
• Feel free of time constraints
• Diminished consciousness of self
• Improvisational

Functions of play

• Teaches boundaries between the safe and the harmful or transgressive
• Teaches skills 
• Identity formation
• Knowledge of the physical world 

Can We Play?

By David Elkind

-play is rapidly disappearing from our homes, our schools, and our neighborhoods. Over the last two decades alone, children have lost eight hours of free, unstructured, and spontaneous play a week.

-More than 30,000 schools in the United States have eliminated recess to make more time for academics

- From 1997 to 2003, children’s time spent outdoors fell 50 percent, according to a study by Sandra Hofferth at the University of Maryland.

- play is the activity through which children learn to recognize colors and shapes, tastes and sounds—the very building blocks of reality. Play also provides pathways to love and social connection. Elementary school children use play to learn mutual respect, friendship, cooperation, and competition. For adolescents, play is a means of exploring possible identities, as well as a way to blow off steam and stay fit. Even adults have the potential to unite play, love, and work, attaining the dynamic, joyful state that psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls “flow.”

-Israeli psychologist Sara Smilansky’s classic studies of sociodramatic play, where two or more children participate in shared make believe, demonstrate the value of this play for academic, social, and emotional learning. “Sociodramatic play activates resources that stimulate social and intellectual growth in the child, which in turn affects the child’s success in school,” concludes Smilansky in a 1990 study that compared American and Israeli children. “For example, problem solving in most school subjects requires a great deal of make believe, visualizing how the Eskimos live, reading stories, imagining a story and writing it down, solving arithmetic problems, and determining what will come next.”

-The decline of children’s free, self-initiated play is the result of a perfect storm of technological innovation, rapid social change, and economic globalization.

-For too long, we have treated play as a luxury that kids, as well as adults, could do without.

- As adults have increasingly thwarted self-initiated play and games, we have lost important markers of the stages in a child’s development. In the absence of such markers, it is difficult to determine what is appropriate and not appropriate for children. We run the risk of pushing them into certain activities before they are ready, or stunting the development of important intellectual, social, or emotional skills.

The Power of Narrative

Two forms of narative

1. Micro-narratives: narrate your daily stresses and triumphs
2. Telling the meta-narrative of your self and your life’s journey

TELL EXPRESS STORIES

Benefits of narrative

-more vivid and engaging narratives predict increased well-being later in life(mcadams 2008)

-more ‘possible selves’ buffers us against depression (osyerman and fryberg 2006)

-writing about best possible self increases health and happiness (king, 2001; sheldon and lyubomirsky 2006)

How Stories Change the Brain

1. - as social creatures who regularly affiliate with strangers, stories are an effective way to transmit important information and values from one individual or community to the next. Stories that are personal and emotionally compelling engage more of the brain, and thus are better remembered, than simply stating a set of facts.
2. Stories bring brains together
1. Emotional simulation is the foundation for empathy and is particularly powerful for social creatures like humans because it allows us to rapidly forecast if people around us are angry or kind, dangerous or safe, friend or foe.
3. Paul Zak, Ph.D.,

person-activity fit

-Motivation and beliefs. layous says whether or not someone believes a happiness-increasing activity will work also comes into play. People who are confident they will become happier after adopting the new practices have reported greater increases in happiness in the end.

Effort. the amount of effort someone puts into increasing their happiness has a large effect on whether or not an activity works

Social support. Receiving encouragement from others also seems to maximize happiness. In the study entitled, What Is the Optimal Way to Deliver a Positive Activity Intervention? The Case of Writing About One’s Best Possible Selves ,  people who read bogus testimonials from peers saying an activity worked saw greater increases in happiness than those who did not.

Culture.  Westerners benefit more from positive activities than other populations, including Asians

Age. adults get more out of positive activities than adolescents and college-aged students. That said, the college-age sample may be misleading, says Layous, because many undergrads are required to participate in studies for course credit, not by their own volition.

Starting levels of happiness A person’s level of happiness before he or she undertakes one or more happiness-increasing activities also impacts how well an activity works. How the activities might affect people with depression is a particular area of scientific interest, and it’s an area Layous and Lyubomirsky are exploring. In one study, Layous and Lyubomirsky found that positive activities were effective for people who were mildly depressed, but not for people who reported already being happy or severely depressed

duration , dosage, and variety all help 

Your Fit Score for Three Good Things is: 4.8 

Your Fit Score for Active Listening is: 6.2 

Your Fit Score for Random Acts of Kindness is:5.2  

Your Fit Score for Eight Essentials When Forgiving is: 5.2

Your Fit Score for Mindful Breathing is: 5.6

Your Fit Score for Body Scan Meditation is: 4.8

Your Fit Score for Loving Kindness Meditation is: 6

Your Fit Score for Self-Compassion Letter is: 5.8

Your Fit Score for Best Possible Self is: 4.8

Your Fit Score for Gratitude Letter is: 5.8

Your Fit Score for Gratitude Journal is: 4.8

Your Fit Score for Awe Walk is: 5

HAPPINESS TAKES WORK!