Autumn Savoring

Japanese Maple

Earlier this year, I wrote about savoring on an early summer day, watching and hearing and smelling the glories of new life as it is emerging. Now it’s autumn and time for a different kind of savoring as leaves fall and trees become more and more bare.

It’s still a heady sort of savoring. There’s a special sharpness to it because it is so transitory and because it heralds the beginning of winter, a time of bareness and dormancy.

One day I walked down the hallway.  In the room on the right, the sunlight was filtering through the crimson leaves of the Japanese maple outside the window, giving the whole room a soft pink glow.

Carpeted Driveway

Another day, the wind blew strongly, carpeting the driveway with yellow leaves.  It was a sudden change, from a tree full of yellow leaves to bare limbs in just a few hours.

An especially good way to savor autumn is to go walking in the woods. We’re lucky to have many acres of woods behind our house with many kinds of trees. We’ve taken several walks this fall, watching the change from week to week.  I made a conscious catalog of things that I was savoring:

• The crunchy sound of leaves underfoot
• The soft rustle of wind in the trees, followed in seconds by a rainfall of yellow leaves
• Looking up through leaves that looked like a stained glass window with sunlight coming through tiny panes of green, yellow, and golden brown.
• Finding a “green and burning tree” — with one side still green, the other crimson
• Crisp air that tingles on your skin

I picked up a number of leaves for my husband to photograph for me — to capture not only the mix of trees we saw, but also the different states of change and the range of colors.

Sycamore, Tulip Poplar ...

Oak, Cherry, Sweetgum...

Maple, Beech, ...

Bryant and Veroff describe savoring as “not just the awareness of pleasure, but also conscious attention to the experience of pleasure” (p. 5). Perhaps that’s why it is so much easier to savor autumn than midsummer. At any given moment, I am aware that the view I am seeing, right now the sunlight coming through the last remaining yellow and crimson leaves at the back of my yard, will no longer be there in a matter of days, if not hours. There’s an urgency that makes it easy to focus conscious attention.

References

Bryant, F. B. & Veroff, J. (2007). Savoring: A New Model of Positive Experience. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Managing Diabetes – Applying Self-Determination Theory

My earlier article on Motivation and Self-Determination Theory has been my most-accessed article so far.  That gave me the idea of posting the following dialogue that occurred in a comment exchange on Positive Psychology News Daily.  Sometimes we have some interesting discussions there, which do not get much exposure and can be hard to find later.  I think it might be easier to retrieve from here.

Question from Jeff: If you are game, here is a scenario for you. You have a friend who is diabetic. The doctor has informed this friend she will lose toes and fingers if she doesn’t take better care of her diabetes by watching her diet, monitoring her blood, etc. She wants to keep doing what she’s been doing all her life: drinking, eating sweets, having fun at parties and not being hassled by pricking her finger. She’s amotivated to change her current practices but recognizes that, yes, she’ll probably go blind and die prematurely without changing…so in her head, there is more than amotivation, but her heart isn’t in it. I’d love to hear a hypothetical solution to this problem.

Blood Glucose Meter - Blood sugar slightly high

Answer: Your scenario was like Brer Rabbit begging to be thrown in the briar patch (”I was born and bred in the briar patch!”).  I’ve been a Type 1 diabetic myself for 29 years. I’ve been in various levels of motivation over the years, and I recognize the friend you describe.

Competence really does play into the picture. Managing blood sugars is hard. It’s a constant, day-by-day balancing act, and perfect performance is impossible. There are 8 variables (at least) that contribute to each blood sugar reading, and I only have control over some of them. So learning to feel competent in spite of numerous small “failures” is a very important step. That’s a matter of interpretation — of understanding what is “good enough”, of knowing that small failures are inevitable but one can influence trends, and of believing that one’s own efforts make a beneficial difference. I’ve found managing blood sugars very humbling because I’m not used to so many small failures. It’s hard to keep my eyes on the trends. By the way, this connects to vicarious mastery in self-efficacy research — that is, seeing people like me, having the same small failures that I have, have long and healthy lives is motivating because it helps me believe I can too.

Second, many people are motivated by relatedness. I’ve read numerous articles in Diabetes Forecast where newly diagnosed diabetics say things like, “I want to be alive and well to see my child graduate from high school.” (This might be weaker for younger people in the “party animal” phase.)  Marzilli (no date) has explored different effects of social support on eating behavior of people with diabetes.

Insulin Pump

Third, autonomy does play into the picture. Young people who feel like their parents are breathing down their necks can be very stubborn about not taking care of themselves. People whose doctors give lots of orders and don’t acknowledge differences in life styles can undermine motivation.

Now, do these three psychological needs cover all the ground? Are they necessary AND sufficient? I don’t really know the answer to that and would have to do considerably more reading to figure it out.

For your hypothetical friend, this gives some structure for exploration. Does she value good health? Does she feel that it is within her power to get “good enough” results? Are there people she wants to please or to whom her health makes a major difference? Does she feel like she is in control — that others interfere only when necessary?

Self-Determination Theory is a theory — which means that it’s a hypothetical explanation that the theorists have created to fit previous observations and structured so that it can be tested empirically. Yes there has been considerable empirical research addressing self-determination theory. Ryan and Deci have been evolving and testing it for 30 years. There’s an SDT site with information about their research, including some questionnaires for assessing SDT concepts: http://www.psych.rochester.edu/SDT/ In fact, their publication list includes a book related to the scenario you bring up:

Marzilli, G. (no date).  The Effects of Social Support on Eating Behavior of People with Diabetes.  Research paper at WIlliams College.

Sheldon, K. M., Williams, G. C., & Joiner, T. (2003). Self-determination theory in the clinic: Motivating physical and mental health. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Images:

Blood Glucose Meter from http://www.nativeremedies.com/images/design/ailmentPhotoHypoglycemia.jpg

Why I support Barack Obama in the US Presidential Elections

I support Barack Obama not because of any particular position or plan or promise. In fact, promises make me uncomfortable because I’ve seen the limits on presidential powers. Obama is not the only one who will have a voice when it comes to tax policies in the upcoming years.

I support Barack Obama because he has the spirit, strength, and understanding to guide us as in a nonzero direction as we participate in the formation of a global human society. In his book, Nonzero, Robert Wright argues that human history shows that new technologies permit new, richer forms of non-zero-sum interaction that lead to social structures that realize this potential, turning non-zero-sum situations into positive sums, embedding people in larger and richer webs of interdependence (p. 5-6).

Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny

We are participating in the formation of a global web of interdependence. I believe that Barack Obama has the better understanding of the direction the world is moving, a better grasp on the impact of technology, and a greater ability to lead us as we face “tests of our moral imagination” (p. 9) that can lead to a world at “a new equilibrium at a level of organization higher than any past equilibrium.” He gives me hope.

The Audacity of Hope

I also believe that Obama has the capacity to listen to many voices, respect people who do not agree with him, and search for tradeoffs that honor many interests. Here’s an example in the chapter called Values in his book, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream. In the state of Illinois, he sponsored a bill to require videotaping of confessions and interrogations in capital cases.

“It would have been typical of today’s politics for each side to draw a line in the sand: for death penalty opponents to harp on racism and police misconduct and for law enforcement to suggest that my bill coddled criminals. Instead, over the course of several weeks, we convened sometimes daily meetings between prosecutors, public defenders, police organizations, and death penalty opponents, keeping our negotiations as much as possible out of the press.

Instead of focusing on the serious disagreements around the table, I talked about the common value that I believed everyone shared, regardless of how each of us might feel about the death penalty: that is, the basic principle that no innocent person should end up on death row, and that no person guilty of a capital offense should go free. … At the end of the process, the bill had the support of all the parties involved. It passed unanimously in the Illinois Senate and was signed into law.” pp. 58-59

I support thet man whose debate comments sometimes started with the words, “Here’s where I agree with Senator McCain…”

Reflections on Marriage Part 2 – One thing to know

A colleague asked me recently about positive psychology lessons that could help people strengthen marriages.  I’ve written about this before (Reflections on Marriage), but his question reminded me of something very germane that I read in Marcus Buckingham’s book, The One Thing You Need to Know (pp. 16-24), based on research by Sandra Murray and colleagues at SUNY Buffalo.

The One Thing you need to know about marriage is

“Find the most generous explanation for each other’s behavior and believe it.” (p. 22)

Let me give an example of putting this to work.

My husband is a very organized person. He has a system for making to-do lists that includes consulting several master lists — one for annual events like eye doctor appointments, one for monthly events, one for weekly events, and one for ongoing projects. Once he has made a list, he doesn’t like to do something that is not on the list unless it is of overarching importance. When I first knew him, I sometimes found it very annoying if I had an idea for a project, and he said, “It’s not on the list.”

So I could think, “I love him, even if he is sometimes really rigid about his lists.”

Or I could find a generous way to think about his list-making that includes it among the things I love about him. Buckingham says, “When you notice a flaw, recast it in your mind as an aspect of a strength.” In this case, I can think about how we never fail to pay bills or get the filters changed or shop for holidays or …. When we have a big event coming up, like giving a party or preparing for a hurricane, I can count on him to plan for it and execute all the things that on his list. His list-making has made my life easier and more secure.

So when I think about his list-making, my feelings are fondness and amusement and acceptance — even awe for how much he accomplishes. I haven’t compartmentalized a piece of him away hoping not to think about it. Compartmentalizing doesn’t really work. Those cordoned-off aspects of the person continue to be there, ready to generate irritation and resentment whenever you can’t ignore them. Besides, ignoring them takes energy.

I view this as a form of realistic optimism where I’m choosing how I want to deal with fuzzy meaning (a lovely term that I got from Dr. Sandra Schneider). There is no right or wrong interpretation of his list-making behavior. So I can choose an interpretation that increases my appreciation of him every time it becomes evident. It took a while to make this interpretation habitual, but it becomes easier all the time.

Aside: This approach is not suitable for violence or abuse of any kind. But it is helpful for the personality differences that lead to ongoing friction between two people who love each other and want to make marriage work together.

Source of to-do list picture

Murray, S., Holmes, J., Dolderman, D., & Griffin, D. W. (2000). What the motivated mind sees: Comparing friends’ perspectives to married partners’ views of each other. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 36(6), 600-620. First sentence of abstract: This article argues that satisfaction in marriage is associated with motivated and benevolent biases in perception. Link to place to order

Prospect Theory and its Relationship to Negative Campaigns

I wonder if Prospect Theory could shed some light on why negative campaigning exists and continues, even though people express distaste for it. People call some forms of negative campaigning the politics of distraction, which brings to mind Obama’s statement,

“No, what’s troubling is the gap between the magnitude of our challenges and the smallness of our politics — the ease with which we are distracted by the petty and trivial, our chronic avoidance of tough decisions, our seeming inability to build a working consensus to tackle any big problem.” Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope, p. 22.

In an earlier posting,  I reflected on why the greater salience of negative over positive might incline campaigners to spend more ink, airtime, and robocalls on negative than positive messages.

But I think it goes beyond that.

Prospect Theory was introduced by Danny Kahneman and Amos Tversky to explain observed behavior in contrast to the ‘rational behavior’ predicted by Expected Utility Theory. Here are some paragraphs from a short essay I wrote when we were studying Prospect Theory under Dr. Barry Schwartz.  The figure was one taken from course notes:

Prospect theory models the relationship between objective changes associated with decisions and the associated subjective responses that people either anticipate or experience for the decision. This theory explains why people experience more or less satisfaction than objective reality can explain.

The prospect theory model can be visualized as graph with the zero point representing the person’s baseline state before the decision, the horizontal axis representing the objective change, and the vertical axis representing anticipated or experienced subjective response. The model is not a diagonal line through the zero point, as would be expected if the magnitude of objective changes directly determined variations in subjective experience.

Sketch of Prospect Theory

For changes in the positive direction, the relationship is represented as a curve that rises and then tapers off, reflecting diminishing marginal utility. That means that the amount of experienced benefit does not keep up with increasing positive objective change. For example, a person who gains $100 dollars will experience considerably less than twice the satisfaction if he were to gain an additional $100.

For changes in the negative direction, the relationship is represented as a curve that drops and then tapers off, showing a pattern of decreasing marginal disutility similar to the positive curve. However, it drops further and more steeply than positive curve rises. The model thus indicates that a loss of a certain objective amount hurts more than a gain of the same amount pleases.

So how does this relate to the election? Is it just another way of saying the negative is more salient than the positive?  I think it brings along the idea of the intuitive nature of decision-making when there are many many different pieces of information to incorporate.  Kahneman (2003) writes about two cognitive systems — on the one hand, the reasoning system that is slow, serial, controlled, rule-governed, effortful, flexible and emotion-neutral;  on the other hand, the intuition system that is fast, parallel, automatic, effortless, associative, slow-learning, and emotional.  We can get pretty frustrated if we think that political thinking is rule-governed and emotion-neutral.   Or even if we think it should be and find it isn’t.  Kahneman cites Klein (2003, chapter 4) as arguing that skilled decision makers often do better when they trust their intuitions than when they engage in detailed analysis.  So how skilled are we at making important political decisions?

References

Kahneman, D. (2003).  A perspective on judgment and choice:  Mapping bounded rationality.  American Psychologist, 58, 697-720.

Kahneman, D. & Tversky, A. (1979). Prospect theory: A analysis of decisions under risk. Econometrica, 47, 263-291.

Klein, G. (2003). Intuition at work: Why developing your gut instincts will make you better at what you do. New York:  Doubleday.

Butterflies and Hurricanes

The weather has been beautiful here, cool and sunny, remarkably so for the end of August and early September when it is often suffocatingly hot and humid.  My husband has gotten interested in butterflies and is frequently chasing them with the digital camera so that he can get enough information to identify them.  The smaller ones seldom stop fluttering, so it is harder to snap them.

I’ve written before about butterflies being particularly beautiful because they are so transient. We’re battening down for hurricanes that may go close by — hard-hearted Hanna, Ike, and Josephine in quick succession.  At the very least, they will bring heavy rains that will probably strip many of the flowers from the butterfly plants.  They may also bring wind damage and power outages.  So today is a lull, time to bring in all the wind-movable objects from the yard, charge the phones and computers, stock up on bread, water, and toilet paper (my sister has observed that people in Baltimore always shop for toilet paper when they are stocking up for a storm), and enjoy what is here that may not be in a few days.

So in the interest of savoring by sharing before the storms hit, here are some of the pictures he has taken in the garden this summer.

First, here’s a corner of the butterfly garden planted with butterfly bush and Brazilian sage and Monarda and several other plants beloved by bees, butterflies and even hummingbirds. Notice the stone on the ground on the left. It has a hollow to capture water and ridges where butterflies can sun themselves before flying away.

Butterfly Garden

The pictures and captions tell the story.

Pipevine Swallowtail on Monarda

Black Swallowtail on Butterfly Bush

Large Lace Border Moth

Red Spotted Purple

Summer Azure on a Fig Leaf

We were right under the storm track of Hurricane Fran in 1996. There’s still a hollow in the woods behind us where a circle of trees were knocked down. We lost power for more than a week. Hurricane Fran hit the month after my mother-in-law died. She had always stocked our freezer with containers of home-made chili whenever she visited. So after Fran, we invited friends who couldn’t cook because of power outages, pulled out all the chili from the not-working freezer, heated it on the gas stove in our basement apartment, and ate dinner by candle light.

Labor Day & Two Extraordinary People

It is Labor Day, a holiday in the United States to honor the contributions of working people to society.

Labor Day makes me think of two people in particular, John L. Lewis and my father-in-law, Thomas William Britton.

John L. Lewis

I first learned about John L Lewis when I visited my future mother-in-law’s apartment in Nitro, West Virginia. She had a bust of John L. Lewis carved in coal in a place of honor on her end table. Her husband was a working man who venerated Lewis’s leadership in the United Mine Workers of America. Here’s a quotation from a Lewis speech before the passage of the National Industrial Recovery Act (NRA), an important part of Roosevelt’s New Deal. His thoughts still resonate:

“The political stability of the republic is imperiled. In excess of twelve million wage earning are unemployed. In certain industrial states the percentage of unemployed equals 40 percent of the enrolled workers. Of the remaining 60 percent a large number are employed on a part-time basis, and are the victims of a continuous schedule of wage cutting. Those who are employed, directly or indirectly, must inevitably bear the burden of supporting the millions to whom employment is unavailable. The cost of maintenance of government, and the support of non-productive institutions, is, therefore, day by day being passed to the continuously decreasing number of citizens who are privileged to work.” John L. Lewis, speaking to the Senate Finance Committee, February 1933. For the entire speech, see “The Republic is Imperiled.”

Thomas W. Britton

I never met my father-in-law, one of my deep regrets. He died of black lung about 4 months before my first date with my husband. But my husband is an outstanding storyteller, a skill he exercised repeatedly with my children when they were little and and requested at bedtime, “Tell me a secret.”

There were stories about his father working as a coal miner, getting up early to drive 40 miles from the city, where he’d moved to raise his son, to the mines, picking up other other miners along the way. There were stories about him finishing supper and then mixing up butter and Karo syrup on his plate to get the calories he needed for his hard physical labor. He liked mining, and that’s what he did during WW II — it was war work as much as being a soldier. He was frequently on strike for better working conditions, pay, and mine safety. When he was, he had other ways to earn a living, such as driving a hearse long distances to bring bodies home for burial or stocking shelves in the grocery store owned by a friend.

He liked coon hunting — I always had him in mind when I read Where the Red Fern Grows out loud to my children. My husband sometimes went along, learning how to move through the woods in the dark. He was a very sociable man, visiting family and friends up various ‘hollers’ in the West Virginia mountains. There’s a story about the old man in a nursing home who yearned for the taste of ground hog. My father-in-law went hunting for one for his wife to cook up for the old man. It apparently stank everyone out of the house while it was cooking, but it made the old man happy. He also liked trading things. He once swapped a particularly good coon hound for an old car that he needed since he’d just been called back to the mines.

I never met him, but I’ve always imagined him as a happy man whose days were filled with vigorous work that he enjoyed and whose spare time was filled with time in the woods, visiting, and family. I truly wish that I’d had a chance to know him, and that he’d had the chance to enjoy his grandchildren.

Mutual enrichment rather than victory

This weekend, I had an interesting conversation with a friend about arguments. We both dislike them. Instead of getting fired up to state our positions well, we both start wishing we were somewhere else.

When people disagree about something in a conversation, any statement will exhibit either inquiry or advocacy. Inquiry involves asking questions to find out more about the other person’s point of view. Advocacy involves making statements to defend or advocate for one’s own point of view.

Obviously both are needed as the conversation unfolds so that one person is inquiring and learning while the other is advocating and teaching. Things go awry in a number of ways. Sometimes there is an unevenness in terms of give and take — one person never stops advocating so the other is doing all the learning — and feeling frustrated because he/she speaks because the other person doesn’t seem to listen. Sometimes both sides are tied up in too much advocacy — each side mentally rehearsing his/her next argument while the other advocates.

Marcial Losada

Emily Heaphy

Marcial Losada and Emily Heaphy (2004) report on research based on observing and coding the speech acts of 60 work teams in the middle of annual planning. They calculated the ratio between 3 bipolar opposites as they occurred during the meetings: inquiry versus advocacy, positive versus negative, and other versus self.

Then they sorted the teams according to business performance.

They observed the following ratios for inquiry versus advocacy:

1. High-performing teams (N=15): 1.143 inquiry to advocacy
2. Medium-performing teams (N=26): .667 – These teams generally started out with a more even ratio which dropped when they faced major difficulties.
3. Low-performing teams (N=19): .052. That works out to 20 advocacy statements for every inquiry statement.

My friend and I talked about inquiry and advocacy, and what we’ve observed in the arguments that we like and dislike. My friend summarized it thus, “I prefer mutual enrichment to victory.” But we both agreed that not everybody feels or behaves that way. When arguing with someone who prefers victory, we both just want to escape. I feel somewhat vindicated by the Losada and Heaphy’s data.

On occasion, I’ve been the mediator between groups with conflicting goals. When we’ve been successful finding an acceptable middle ground, it always follows some form of positive emotion and an agreement on both sides to allow themselves to be changed by what they hear.

Postscript:

Here’s a wonderful statement from the section in the Losada & Heaphy paper (2004) called Qualitative Observations:

Qualitative observations of the teams showed that high performance teams were characterized by an atmosphere of buoyancy that lasted during the whole meeting. By showing appreciation and encouragement to other members of the team, they created emotional spaces that were expansive and opened possibilities for action and creativity as shown in their strategic mission statements. In stark contrast, low performance teams operated in very restrictive emotional spaces created by lack of mutual support and enthusiasm, often in an atmosphere charged with distrust and cynicism. The medium performance teams generated emotional spaces that were not as restrictive as the low performance teams, but definitively not as expansive as the high performance teams. They did not show the distrust and cynicism of low performance teams, but they also did
not manifest the mutual support and enthusiasm characteristic of high performance teams.”

Losada, M. & Heaphy, E. (2004). The role of positivity and connectivity in the performance of business teams: A nonlinear dynamics model. American Behavioral Scientist, 47, 740-765.

Podcast – An Interview about Applied Positive Psychology

Karel Vredenburg has been collecting a set of podcasts called, Life Habits: Learn habits to optimize your life and stay sane in this crazy world. Most of the podcasts are Karel himself talking about topics ranging from anger management to career strategies to dealing with technology.

Recently Karel interviewed me over Skype and has made the interview available as one of his podcasts:

http://lifehabits.podbean.com/2008/07/21/lifehabits-16-positive-psychology/

I’m not sure what exactly I talked about, but I gave him this list of possible topics and we hit a lot of them.

• Four Ways to Build Self-Efficacy
• Gratitude at Work
• Learned Optimism and Resilience
• Celebrating Successes Effectively
• Establishing the Conditions for Flow
• Broaden and Build: The Power of Positive Emotions
• Meaningful Work
• Strategies for High-Quality Connections
• Discovering and applying strengths

I invite you to listen in.

New Image Maps: Reader’s Guides to Positive Psychology

I’ve just finished a big project in my role as associate editor for Positive Psychology News Daily.

We have been running the site for about 18 months and have nearly 300 articles from more than 30 authors. The topics are a random jumble. Authors independently decide what to write about, perhaps based on questions they’ve faced in their work, perhaps based on talks they’ve heard or books they’ve read. I’ve chosen topics because the editor-in-chief has challenged me to write about something — once it was awe and elevation, another time it was meaning in life. Having many voices keeps the site lively and surprising. But it doesn’t really help people put pieces together when they want to explore one idea in particular. Articles on Hope or Gratitude or Strengths or Goals are scattered over the months.

With the help of Senia Maymin, the editor-in-chief, and my fellow associate editor, Timothy So, I came up with visual maps that show how the ideas relate and then link them to short articles about the different topics. These articles include brief introductions, followed by links to related PPND articles, followed by other resources — books, papers, YouTube clips, Web sites, names of prominent researchers, and links to Amazon for ordering books.

My first image map came out in June and I posted a brief description. Since then, I’ve drawn three additional maps, written new articles on 5 topics, and completely updated the 12 articles on Positive Emotion topics. So I invite you to drop in by clicking on the image below, click around, and explore what we hope will serve as a systematic reader’s guide.