Love Fool

“I believe everything happens for a reason and I never have regrets...But I regret ever meeting this girl. She hurt me worst than any girl ever has. Now my problem is,should I say now it's over for us, or should I say for her I’m still massively attached to her. She has moved on and already has another guy… she treated me balyd and I can't understand this myself. I embarrassed myself today by calling and texting her and I could tell she no longer had any interest in me at all” Andy79

I came across this on a self help forum whilst desperately trying to find out how to write a best man speech and couldn’t help but feel sorry for Andy79. But after some thinking I also felt quite frustrated about not being able to put Andy79 straight with some psychology talk about love, break ups and getting over ‘the one’ (this phrase is horrific). From the looks of things Andy79 didn’t get treated particularly well at all and this girl is almost definitely not right for him. But Andy79 can’t seem to see this, stuck hoping and desperate to get back with someone that has treated him terribly. What has gone wrong with poor Andy79?

First of all Andy believes that everything happens for a reason. People who say this are largely idiots for numerous reasons. But I will not bang on about fate or destiny regardless of the fact they are ridiculous ideas. Instead we will discuss some research that suggests Andy is going to be a lot better a lot sooner than he realises and that although when writing that tear-wrenching post he thought his life was terrible - in reality it probably wasn’t all that bad.

People break up and within days they are back together. What does this mean? That they got it wrong and quickly rekindled the flame? Perhaps in some cases, but in other cases it is likely to be very strong feelings of loneliness and loss clouding their judgement. Eastwick et al. (2008) did some interesting research examining break up’s and individuals predictions and feelings of happiness as a consequence of the break up. University students signed up to the study at the start of the academic year and the researchers literally waited for relationships to fall to pieces. On a weekly basis participants rated how happy they though they would be if they were to break up with their boy/girlfriend, as well as some additional questions. If a participant broke up with their partner they then continued to answer questions every week, but instead were asked about how happy they were, amongst other things. Heartbreakingly quite a few did break up with their respective partners.

From this kind of design the researchers can examine a number of things. First of all, they could examine whether people overestimate how much of an impact the break up will have on their happiness. Additionally, they could examine whether people are wise to the fact that the pain eases in time. Interestingly there was a large bias in the expected direction. Although participants predictions indicated that they appreciated the pain would become easier over time, they overestimated how bad they would feel. Furthermore, there were some individuals that made this over-estimation to an even greater extent. Participants that; a) thought they would be unlikely to enter a new relationship any time soon, b) played less of a part in the break up and c) rated themselves as being very much in love with their partner, all underestimated how happy they would be feeling in the near future.

How can this help Andy79? Probably because a, b and c are all applicable to him. At a bit of a guess he doesn’t seem to truly believe he will be happy again. This is unlikely to be true. Additionally, if you have broken up with someone that you very much loved and didn’t have much of a say in it, it is likely you will be feeling really quite bad and the future doesn’t look too rosy. Yet, it probably won’t be the case. As humans we are extremely resilient, but it seems as though when break ups occur we tend to lose our minds in this respect.

A second piece of research that is of relevance underlines how we can have a tendency to add too much weight to our love life in terms of how happy it can or will make us. A classic study asked participants two questions ‘How happy in life are you in general? And ‘How often do you normally go on a date?”. When asked in that order there was next to no correlation between the two questions. Yet, when the order was reversed and the dating question came first, the two became highly correlated. In essence, participants based their life satisfaction response more on how often they dated as it was recently thought about. The fact that there was no association between the two when the order was: life in general question > dating question, suggests dating habits really don’t have too big an impact on how happy we really are.

In no way do I even suggest that relationships aren’t any good. There is very good reason to believe they can make us happier, healthier and more satisfied with life. But what I do suggest is that for the average singleton dwelling on dating habits may lead him/her to believe they are less happy in life than they actually are.

A final mention is more speculative. Philosopher Alain de Botton suggests that when we meet someone special we are overwhelmed by how lucky we have been and this can make us fall even deeper in love. What were the chances of having to have bumped into her or him as a result of your delayed train and then helping her or him pick up her bag they had dropped, as well having happened to both be reading the same books? At first glance it is 1/100000 and almost like fate. The importance of numbers and probability might also be important in the reverse of getting over a lover. Perhaps some of the participants in Eastwick et al.’s study were down and so negative in predicting future happiness because they were at odds with the numbers and probability of them ever finding anyone quite as special as the ex. Maybe finally realising he/she isn’t ‘the one’ and that the probability of meeting someone else you will probably also end up calling ‘the one’ is good is a big step in recovering from the break up blues. Maybe.

Application

Don’t watch Sex and the City.

Although it is difficult, give things a try and attempt not to let emotions override good decisions. You broke up for a reason, he was probably rubbish. Go girlfriend!
Dating: Andy79 is single and from the sounds of things quite desperate.

Great Expectations

Thinking about how enjoyable and how much fun future events will be is a great joy of life. If we didn’t have things to look forward to it would be a sad, sad world. But at the same time we sometimes really don’t look forward to things at all. We often dread upcoming dental surgery and visits to annoying relatives. The consequences of anticipation and expectation are possibly more important than you would assume. This blog will hopefully outline how expectations can change the experiences we have and also our subsequent memories of such experiences. Additionally we will address the age old question of when awaiting some potentially bad news, should one optimistically hope for the best or pessimistically fear for the worst?

Often you drag a friend to the cinema to watch a very well reviewed film. The critics think it is good and there is no reason that it shouldn’t be enjoyed. However, from the very start you can tell your friend simply won’t like it. You tell them that they have come with a negative attitude and they expect it to be quite boring, but should give it a chance. However, they couldn’t be any les enthusiastic. Well more fool them, because there is very good reason to believe that our expectations shape how enjoyable we find future experiences. If you expect something to be very enjoyable you will be more likely to enjoy it. If you expect a meal to be extremely tasty, this expectation is likely to influence how tasty you find it.

A nice study by Wilson and colleagues (1989) underlines this idea. The researchers showed participants a series of cartoons. The first half of the cartoons were funny and the other half not very funny at all. When participants looked at the cartoons without any prior expectations they reported exactly that; funny first half, not very funny second half. However, the researchers also led some participants to believe that previous participants had found all of the cartoons extremely funny. The result: these participants also reported that the three not particularly funny cartoons were a hoot. Furthermore, they didn’t only just report they were funnier but their facial expressions followed suit too. They exhibited a greater ‘facial humour’ response than participants with no prior expectations.

There is also good reason to believe that expectations are likely to be important when it comes to remembering the past too. A set of experiments by McDonald & Hirt (1997) using a fictional character called ‘J.W’ show this effect. Participants were led to believe that they were participating in a study examining interviewing skills and recruitment. At the start they were provided with a performance sheet of our friend J.W. Here it had noted down some old exam marks amongst other seemingly relevant items. After completing various tasks to back up the cover story, they were then led to believe one of two things through reading a counsellors report about J.W. One half of participants were led to believe that after getting those older grades J.W had acquired a girlfriend that he loved very much and that was extremely good for him and helped him greatly with his academic work (thus, they were implicitly led to believe he would be likely to improve his grades). The other half of participants were led to believe J.W hadn’t been so lucky with his choice of girlfriend. She was bad for him and their relationship hampered his usual hard working nature. What a bitch (these participants were implicitly led to believe J.W’s grades would get worse).

Shortly afterwards all participants were then given a sheet with J.W’s most recent grades on. Finally, participants were asked to make a number of judgements about J.W as well as noting down his older exam grades. This is now the interesting part! Participants that had expected J.W to have improved his academic ability (because of his amazing girlfriend) remembered his initial grades to have been lower than they actually were. The reason? To fit in with their expectations. They had his current grades right in front of them and because they expected him to have improved significantly they remembered his older results to have been worse than they were. Conversely, participants that were expecting a decline in J.W’s performance because of his horrid girlfriend actually remembered his original grades to have been better than they actually were. By selectively remembering J.W’s grades to have been higher or lower than they actually were participants were able to satisfy their expectations about changes in J.W’s academic performance.

This may come across as a slightly complicated study. A simpler analogy that has research backing is as follows. Couples generally like the idea that they are very happy with their partner and over time they have grown to love each other more. This can thus lead them to remember themselves as being less happy than they actually were in the relationship a year or so earlier to fulfil these expectations. In a slightly over the top and tabloid like analogy – expectations shape memory to almost trick people into remembering the past in a way that falls into line with current expectations. In the same way that your arse of a friend didn’t enjoy that film, he will probably remember it to have been even worse than it actually was.

The final set of studies that will be covered here examine an expectation related old wives tale. If you don’t get your hopes up and expect the worse, when you get bad news the impact won’t make you feel quite so bad. The classic ‘I tell myself and believe I’ve probably failed so that when I hear my results I will feel relieved whatever.’ Golub and colleagues (2009) suggest this is probably isn’t such a good idea after all. In one of a series of studies the researchers examined how student’s expectations about their scores on midterm exams influenced how they felt both before and after receiving the dreaded results. Seventy two hours before receiving their test results participants filled out an online questionnaire measuring how worried they were about their soon to be received grades, as well as measurements of current mood. Then twenty fours hours after receiving their grades participants again filled out the mood measurements.

Analysis revealed that expecting the worse and worrying about the results made individuals feel much worse in the run up to the exams. However, participant’s expectations about the exam results had no effect on how they felt 24 hours afterwards. Thus, expecting the worse didn’t make individuals feel any better after the event and actually made participants feel much worse prior to getting the exam results. Fearing for the worst probably isn’t such a good idea as you spend the build up to the event literally living in fear. And according to this study there isn’t any benefit of this as early as 24 hours after the feared event. Admittedly expecting the worse could have some effect immediately after the event (‘relief’ experienced in the first few minutes or so), but one must wonder if this is worth it, especially if you’ve spent the days running up to the dreaded exams results feeling quite worried and down.

Application?

If participating in Come Dine With Me ensure that your menu descriptions are insanely appetizing. Raising individuals expectations about what they will be eating may be rather beneficial on their later enjoyment.

If you are stuck with a future event you can’t duck out of then try and be a little more optimistic.

Don’t be afraid to question your memory for past events.

David Owen isn’t an idiot after all…

Being able to get inside the mind of another person and take their perspective would be a handy skill. Knowing what a friend is feeling would probably be quite useful a lot of the time. I would also suspect that the majority of us think we are quite good at this. The good news is that we probably aren’t too bad after all and that there is some quite interesting relevant research that will be covered in this blog. The first study underlines that:- a) we are quite good at it, and b) we can use it to improve our dating success (always a good thing). The second study is something quite different. The flip side of perspective taking is revealed and it is somewhat unexpected. It is either good or bad news dependent on whether you see yourself as an academic type or more of a cheerleader.

Place et al. (2009) designed a nice study to examine how good participants would be at judging a fairly important and common social phenomena - whether or not individuals on a date are interested in their dating partner. At the Humboldt University of Berlin the researchers set up a speed dating event and had an awful lot of speed daters attend numerous 3 minute dates during the evening and after each date make a simple decision of yes (a.k.a ‘I would love to see you again’) or no (‘you’re not fit or interesting’). In return for a free evening of speed dating the researchers filmed the dates and asked participants to complete some short questionnaires (I have been speed dating and am not sure participants did get a great deal here). The researchers then randomly selected a proportion of the many dates and invited some undergraduate participants to watch them and guess what the responses of each daters were.

Before I move on to the results of the study, I would like to let you know some interesting stats. As is the case with speed dating in general, males were far more likely to say yes (a lot of desperate men and picky women knocking about) and very few dates resulted in two yes’s (15%). These stats suggest that men might consider not bothering with 10-15 potentially terrible 3 minute interactions. Now to the results; Interestingly participants tended to perform quite well (well above what we would expect from chance) and whether participants watched 10 or 30 seconds of the date didn’t seem to have any impact on performance. Obviously quite a lot can be read in a little time. What is also interesting is that female daters were a lot harder to read than males. Participants performed only marginally better than chance when they were trying to figure out if the girl was just not into him. The researchers suggest that women tend to be harder to read as they are more likely to mask their true intentions – bad times for the single men amongst us. Finally, participants that were in a relationship consistently outperformed singletons. Why? Perhaps because they are inherently better at picking up on dating signals or perhaps because the singletons don’t get out and see people very much. Whatever the reason it is an interesting finding.

A friend and housemate of mine during final year exams came up with the idea of dressing in a suit and tie everyday for his 9-5 revision hours as he thought it would get him in the right frame of mind - quite odd in itself. But to add to this, he was revising in his bedroom. I thought he was a massive idiot for it. However, it turns out he may well have been onto something very clever and in my ignorance I was blind to his brilliance (an explanation I am not fond of). Recent research suggests that taking the perspective of another can have marked effects on how we view ourselves and influence our behaviour accordingly. A series of experiments by Gallinsky et al. (2008) underline this idea well. The general experiments involved participants listening or reading about another person and then either being asked to a) imagine and write about spending a day in their life (taking their perspective) or b) do something else that was similar but didn’t involve perspective taking. In one study the researchers found that simply taking the perspective of a cheer leader resulted in participants later viewing themselves as more attractive, sexy and gorgeous! In another, participants took the perspective of an academic and accordingly later viewed themselves as more intelligent.

This is all quite nice, but what about effects on behaviour? To answer this question the researchers carried out two studies involving an analytical test (kind of like an intelligence-problem solving test). Prior to doing the test some participants took the perspective of our blond and beautiful cheer leaders and others took the perspective of academics. The results? Taking the perspective of a cheer leader resulted in participants performing worse in the exam and taking one of an academic resulted in improved performance. It would appear that when we do take others perspectives we might be getting more than we bargained for. We seemingly end up unknowingly utilizing stereotypes and perceptions of that person to shape who we are and what we subsequently do.

Points of Interest

Be very wary of females on speed dates. Regardless of all those signals they probably find you quite repulsive.

Conversely, if you are in a relationship and speed dating:
a) you might waste less time on lost causes
b) you probably aren’t a very good girl/boyfriend.

Premonition or Superstition

“A Computer expert who dreamed of scooping the Euro Millions jackpot has won £6.4million in the draw. Ryan Magee had a premonition last week he would win a share of a £96million stake on Friday – and was so certain he bought 11 tickets in four different towns on the day.” (Extract from metro online August 2008)

Ryan Magee would appear to be a very lucky man. Not only did he win the lottery but according to metro online he also has some form of supernatural/paranormal ability to see into the future. So what is going on here? I would suggest nothing paranormal, but a lot of other interesting things that can tell us a lot about how we think. To suggest that someone could see into the future, retrieve information and then act on it is rather far fetched and problematic. It would require us to completely re-think our knowledge of space, time and free will. Luckily there are a number of other explanations.

First of all we seem to have a natural problem handling very large numbers and working out probabilities. To the naked eye, what happened with Ryan Magee is far too much of a coincidence to be explained away by chance or numbers. He had a dream he was going to win the lottery and then goes and does it. But some very quick calculations can show us that it really isn’t that much of an impressive coincidence. If we guess that the average person has 3 dreams a night that he/she can recall then over a space of a week that is 21 dreams and over the space of a year it is around 1150. I have 601 friends on Facebook (nearer 6 actual friends). So between me and my Facebook friends we experience over an astonishing six hundred thousand dreams a year (600,000). We dream about things that go on in life all the time – sooner or later a coincidence will happen. It is inevitable.

Furthermore, we possess extremely selective memory systems. What stands out from the ordinary is more easily remembered than what doesn’t. Thus, all the seemingly realistic and wishful dreams of getting a raise, meeting a handsome dark stranger or winning the lottery that don’t come to fruition are quickly forgotten. The number of forgotten dreams that Ryan will have experienced that never ‘came true’ will be in the tens of thousands probably. A further consideration in this particular case is the idea of supposed ‘visions’ causing a self fulfilling prophecy. If we are told by a psychic at a gipsy fair that we will be meeting a new love this month, then there is a very realistic chance we will be on the look out for one and thus change our behaviour based on what that bizarre old hag said. Ryan went and bought a load of more tickets and in doing so increased the likelihood of him winning the lottery by over 1000%. If you believe something is going to happen then there is a decent chance you will start to behave in a manner that will make it a lot more likely.

A final interesting explanation for why it is all too often easy to jump to paranormal explanations is that we sometimes often struggle to understand how cause and effect work. A study by American parapsychologist Cox (1956) is a fine example. Cox tried to examine whether we could unconsciously sense danger and avoid it. Cox’s analysis interestingly showed that passenger rail traffic was significantly lower on days of accidents in comparison to days on which everything went tickityboo. A suggestion here is that some individuals were unconsciously ‘sensing’ the accident yet to occur and avoiding the train that day for whatever reason. But things aren’t this simple. A lot of other stuff could be going on to decrease the number of passengers using trains on days when there are accidents. Let’s look at the weather for example. Bad weather puts people off leaving the house and increases the chances of a rail accident. The problem is that if your attention is drawn towards two things that are superficially related we appear to have a tendency to jump to conclusions about cause and effect, without too much consideration of what else could be going on. Perhaps it can be traced back to it being fairly adaptive many millennia ago. To understand and navigate through our worlds we have to continuously infer cause and effect. It is key that we will readily attribute cause and effect – ‘eating that plant caused me to be sick’, ‘speaking loudly attracted that rather nasty looking animal’s attention’. But occasionally this mechanism will misfire as it isn’t perfect.

So, if we can’t trust self reports of these supposed premonitions, what should we do? Scientifically test for such ability is the obvious answer. Do I happen to know anybody that has done it? Yes. Yes I do. There are a few researchers that report odd results supporting the idea that this might actually go on. But luckily I have conducted and supervised a number of experiments testing this seemingly crazy idea. In the first experiment we asked participants to try and use any precognitive ability to guess which image from pairs of pictures would later be presented on the screen. Males, females, believers and non-believers all scored what we would expect through pure chance. In the second, participants kept dream diaries to examine whether the content of their dreaming could in any way predict the contents of a video clip they then watched the following day. Did our group of participants do anything that goes beyond chance expectation? Not really I am afraid. I’m sure that Ryan won’t lose too much sleep though.

Implications

1. Be very wary of weirdo’s with crystal balls.

2. Avoid journeys when it is raining or the carriages seem a little empty. Something bad might happen.

3.Take a bit of time to think through actual causes of effects in your life, rather than settling with what sounds alright. 

Dear Friend, please tell me how much to eat…

How much of that cake should I eat? How much of that broccoli should I serve myself? Neither are highly thought provoking questions and it is for this reason that such questions are actually quite interesting. There is an explicit assumption that we eat based on hunger and our body telling us what it needs. But the story isn’t so simple. Often factors in our environment will be making us do things we probably don’t want to do. Most people like company, but at the same time most people want to maintain a fairly slender build and not overeat. This blog discusses how the two don’t always go hand in hand, very much akin to dieting and cheesecake.

A wealth of research examining the psychology of eating behaviour suggests that we model how much we eat on what those around us are eating. A good example of such a study is that of Salvy et al. (2009). Here participants were invited to participate in a study that was cheekily labelled as an investigation of social interaction. Little did the participants know it was actually about food. Participants were either paired up with a friend or another participant and left at a table with a running tape recorder to discuss favoured past times. The researchers also conveniently left some bowls of snacks on the table.

The findings were pretty clear. The more one participant ate, the more the other did. Whether with a stranger or friend this finding was the same. If you eat more, so will I. Quite interestingly this was very much the case with female participants, but didn’t appear to influence males in the same way. What was going on? We don’t have the time here to go too far off topic. But previous research has actually found that males can also be prone to this social influence effect too.

Other studies have used some clever deception by getting one of the researchers to pretend to be the ‘other participant’ in the study. Therefore, the researchers can control exactly how much is being eaten by one party. Again, the more the fake participant eats the more our real participant eats. It is a striking effect. Such an effect is even observed when participants have been instructed not to eat for a day! In a study by Goldman et al. (1991), even when massively hungry if the confederate ate next to nothing our starving participants followed suit. Eating behaviour being massively driven by social cues ahead of signals coming from the depleted and hungry body.

Why such a big effect? One explanation is the need to use other’s behaviour as a guideline for what we should do. Nobody wants to come across as greedy or a bit weird. So eating similar amounts to our eating partners may in part help us out with this problem and reduce feelings of being different or an outsider. Yet, research by Roth et al. 2001 takes this social eating effect even further and shows social eating without any socialising! Here participants were left alone with a plate of cookies and asked to complete ratings concerning sensory qualities of the cookies. Before leaving the researcher told each participant to ignore a piece of paper on the table he had left there ‘by mistake’ which noted down how much previous participants had eaten. As you might expect this was either quite a lot of cookies or very few. And as you are right to guess, regardless of participant weight, hunger, gender or dieting status, the amount of cookies eaten was strongly influenced by a group of people that weren’t present and didn’t even exist.

If we all had friends that eat very little in social situations then surely we would be onto a winner? This seems like a logical explanation, but an awful lot of research suggests most of do eat quite a lot when with others. Psychologist John De Castro has done a huge amount of research tracking how the number of people present at a meal influences amount eaten. Usually this has involved participants keeping a stringent diary of their days activities, including when, what, where and whom they ate with. The general finding: the greater the number of meal companions, the greater the number of calories consumed. Individuals often eat as much as 40-50% more when eating in a group than when eating alone. Friends seem to come at a price.

So what I hear you say? Who cares if I eat a lot with my friends? You only live once. This is true. But as we all know – unhealthy eating and weight gain all come at a cost which is likely to reduce the longevity of our one shot at life. Furthermore, there is evidence that suggests that you really are what you eat (well at least in others eyes). When it comes to food we can forge some quite terrible stereotypes based on what others eat. For example, Vartanien et al. (2000) showed participants a video of a young female eating a small or large meal alone. The findings ? If participants saw the young lady eating a lot she was thought to be more manly and also messier. The latter trait is quite intriguing. One suggestion is that it is due to an association that people who eat less are more self controlled and thus tidier.

Some Thoughts

Think before you eat. What do you really want from this meal? Nourishment or social approval?

Know Thyself

How well do you know yourself? Are you confident in your thoughts on what does and doesn’t make you happy? These are questions I have pondered and thought about a lot (an unhealthy amount someone might say). If academic psychology has taught me anything, it is that often enough we don’t know why we do what we do and feel the way we do. Who would have thought that the colour of a girl’s scarf, the letters in our names or even wind speed could have profound effects on our behaviour and life?

The typical psychology study takes a very large group of people, manipulates something and then sees what happens. From this we have shown various interesting things. Recalling memories can make us feel happier, we assume attractive people are more trustworthy and a stressful relationship can be damaging to our health. But how do we use this information? One sensible suggestion would be to assume the findings probably apply to us as well. Generally all human brains and bodies share very similar chemistry and structure. But what do you do if you think you stand out from the crowd? Or can’t find a psychological study that is relevant to your interests. It’s quite obvious: study yourself.

This blog will hopefully reveal some fairly interesting psychology research and findings. It will also reveal how strange I am. As I conducted a psychological study on my own mood for 2 months. For the love of this blog, for 60 days, before going to bed at night I asked myself ‘how happy do you feel Eric?’ and made a rating on a scale. I then entered this into a database and also entered responses to a number of questions (for example ‘how many hours sleep did I get last night?’ ‘did I read a book today?’) before finally turning my computer off and starting to act normal again. I wanted to know what might make me happy and unhappy. So rather than searching through journals and papers I studied my weird self.

Obviously such a study has a number of weaknesses. Two pertinent ones are that 60 days isn’t a massively long time in the grand scheme of things, so making big conclusions would be difficult. More importantly, all results reported are correlational. This means that they only show that two things are related. Such a study cannot prove cause and effect. But, we can at least make suggestions about what the results mean by looking at studies with bigger groups of people and also by using some common sense and reasoning. So, to the results………

Excitingly a number of things appeared to influence my mood. Exercise being one of them. On days that I had exercised I tended to be in a significantly better mood than on days in which I skipped the gym. This is probably not surprising, for years we have been force fed the benefits of exercise for healthier hearts and thinner waistlines, but to also know that it may be making me feel a bit happier is also good news. And there is good reason to believe it may be beneficial. Steinberg et al (1997) found that after participants assigned to a weekly exercise programme experienced increased positive feelings and decreased negative feelings pre to post exercise session. The mood enhancing effects of exercise have also resulted in calls for it being prescribed as a treatment for depression. Longitudinal research by Paffenbarger et al suggests that regular exercise may be protective against depression. Looking at a population of American college males, analysis revealed that those that partook in regular exercise were far less likely to experience depression over a 25 year follow up period.

Another finding, although a little unexpected was that if I had been drinking the night before, my mood tended to be substantially lower the next day. Furthermore, analysis of my data showed that this couldn’t be explained through a lack of sleep, having been in a bad mood the previous day (hence, a possible decision to drink) or being less likely to exercise. The hangover seems like the most likely cause then. Yet, most of the time I wasn’t drinking enough to cause one. Research on alcohol and mood is quite mixed. Many studies have actually found alcohol to enhance mood over shorter periods of time or have no effect. Whilst others have found it increases the likelihood of experiencing depressed moods over longer periods.

Reading is often a great joy of mine. My data may even suggest that I should be partaking in this pleasure a lot more often. On days that I had read my mood was strongly elevated. This was confusing at first. However, as I tend to read shortly before bed, perhaps this finding makes a little more sense. I am 100% sure reading a book won’t be a new treatment for depression anytime soon, but as my reading exploits tended to be minutes before making my happiness rating, the positive feelings and enjoyment may still have been bouncing around inside.

A final and controversial issue; my ex-girlfriend. Was she any good? Or was she just a massive bitch? For those ‘interesting’ people that believe in ‘the one’, like listening to The Lighthouse Family and call their partners ‘babe’ I have some bad news. If you have just broken up with a girlfriend/boyfriend and are currently crying at your computer whilst listening to The Smiths, I have some slightly better news. She didn’t seem to do very much at all (isn’t this always the case?). Having seen her the previous day didn’t result in a more positive mood. Having seen her earlier on in the day or knowing that I would be seeing her later on also had no effect on how happy I felt whatsoever. And who said romance was dead?

Conclusions

As this blog was all about me there are few implications for you. For me, there are many:

a) Exercise is pretty good.
b) I should be much happier about being single.
c) I have a lot of spare time on my hands.

I was quite wrong in my original preconceptions over what would shape my mood. Amongst others, my amount of sleep, eating unhealthily and amount of music listened to had little or no influence on my happiness rating.

Bad Times

As previously discussed in an earlier blog feeling good is normally what we want from life. Nobody wants to be in a bad mood and experience negative affect. It just isn’t a lot of fun. However, many misconceptions over what can cause us to feel happy or sad exist and although old wives tales sound good, they aren’t always accurate. Feeling down? What can turn that frown upside down? A nice sunny day with the birds singing? Thinking positively and telling yourself ‘You can achieve anything’?

Disappointingly research suggests that these two common notions are probably not going to make us feel that much better. Furthermore, dependent on the person one of them is likely to make you feel a whole lot worse. Generally we aren’t all that good at working out what does and doesn’t influence our mood. A case in point is the weather. A popular held belief is that when the sun is out and the birds are singing we tend to feel a lot happier, active and enthusiastic. A large scale by Denissen et al. 2008 examined how weather conditions may influence mood. The study involved over 1000 participants in Germany. Participants were recruited through various internet advertisements and completed the study over the internet. Each night (for 30 nights) participants would log onto a specially designed website and answer various questions. The questionnaires assessed a number of constructs. Positive affect (the amount of positive emotion one feels), negative affect (the amount of negative emotion one feels) and tiredness (you guessed it: how tired one feels).

Researchers then accessed weather data from the German weather institute matching participants post codes to the relevant weather reports from the area. Did the temperature, wind power or amount of sunlight have an effect on positive affect? Did the world literally and mentally glow more? Results from this study suggest not. Warmer and sunnier days did not tend to make individuals experience more positive affect. The good weather didn’t make individuals feel more active, inspired or determined. Additionally, previous studies have come to similar conclusions.

So if weather can’t make us feel better can it make us feel more afraid, anxious and distressed? Did weather have an impact on how bad our German friends were feeling? Yes it did. Lower temperatures, less sunlight and high wind speeds were associated with greater negative emotions and feelings. Finally, the data also suggested that fewer hours of sunlight resulted in greater feelings of tiredness. But it must be mentioned that these effects were only small but nevertheless significant. It would therefore appear that rather than looking forward to summer we should probably be worrying more about winter. More interestingly, could these small changes in mood shape what we do with our day? Could a cloudy gray morning influence you in choosing not to take a chance with a job application or controversial art exhibit?

Self help books are a vast and lucrative business. They tend to tell us not only do we have to feel good about ourselves, but we also have to tell ourselves this and believe it. Should you? I would be extremely sceptical about this. In an ingenuous article entitled ‘Self help statements: Power for Some, Peril for Others’, Wood et al. 2009 examined what the effects of such self help statements may be. The experiments tended to be quite simple; researchers assigned participants to either a self help statement condition or no-self help statement condition. Participants were required to continuously write down any thoughts or feelings that occurred during a 4 minute period. In addition to this, the self help statement group were required to repeat to themselves ‘I am a loveable person’ every time they heard a doorbell. The bell was rung every 15 seconds automatically. After this all participants completed a number of measures covertly assessing mood and their current positive/negative feelings about themselves. Prior to the experiment all participants had completed measures of self esteem (self esteem is essentially how positively you view yourself).

Across the studies the researchers found a strong trend of repeating the over the top typical self help phrase ‘I am a loveable person’ to make individuals with low self esteem actually feel worse about themselves. In comparison, for individuals with high self esteem the self help phrase repetition had a very small positive effect. The irony behind this of course is that it’s fairly likely that self help books attract those that aren’t all that happy with themselves. Thinking a little deeper it isn’t just self help books that might trigger the use of such statements. Friends and magazines advising to ‘think positively’ may cause this inadvertent back firing too.

Why did the researchers discover this unexpected finding? One explanation may be that self help statements direct some attention or thought toward exactly the opposite: why you aren’t such a loveable person. Yet, it is a tricky one to answer and the researchers couldn’t find any obvious explanation from their data

Implications

When colleagues declare they are feeling great because of the sunny weather outside bring them crashing back down to reality.
Blindly thinking positively isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Perhaps such instructions are sometimes just too unrealistic and hopelessly optimistic and thus remind us why we are forcing ourselves to say them.

If you are extremely fond of yourself then go crazy with self help statements. Based on Wood et al. you might feel even better.

Try not to let the weather get you down.