In a recent PsychologyToday.com article, I described how I helped a client develop a plan for meeting Mr. Right.

A reader asked, “So you’ve met him. Now what?”

Here are some thoughts.

Keep your antennae out.  Per Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink, we tend to, in just a few seconds, develop a hard-to-shake impression of a person. Often that’s surprisingly accurate: Looks and even a person’s first few words embeds many of their characteristics. For example, if they make eye contact, they’re not unduly shy or troubled and may be interested in you. If their first line comes out without hesitation and is clever but not cutesy, it speaks to their intelligence. If their dress is restrained vs.Goth, that says something.

You can learn all that in a few seconds and develop an impression of someone that’s quite indelible. Psychologists call that confirmation bias. Once we have an opinion about someone, we tend to reject input that’s discordant. For example, if a person who first said something intelligent and then something stupid, we might ignore the latter or even, if the person is physically attractive, deem it cute.

So yes, value that first impression but, at least for a while, remain open to the possibility you’re wrong.

Revealing your sexuality. Of course, some of sex appeal is mystical, magical, ineffable, but here are some behaviors that many people perceive as sexy:

• Posture. Shoulders back, back straight. Chin slightly above 90 degrees.  Occasionally, slightly tilt your head to the side.
• A warm but not salesy smile. Ah, the gift of an easy smile, someone who without trying, seems upbeat.
• Stand 2 ½ to 3 feet away rather than the typical 3 ½ to 4.
• Eye contact. Don’t stare but, most of the time, look the person in the eye well enough that you remember their eye color. That can be seductive.
• A relaxed voice. Don’t talk too fast. A relatively slow pace implies confidence.
• Long latency. After the other person finishes talking, wait a second. That both shows respect and calm confidence. That’s sexy.
  

What to say?  Best to start with a positive “environmental” comment. No, not “I’m glad they recycle here.” Say something about your immediate environment. For example, if you’re standing in front of a bookstore’s psychology section, you might say, “Quite a collection they have here.” If you’re in a Trader Joe’s line and you see something intriguing in the person’s shopping cart, you might say, “I’ve been curious to try the Kouigg Amann. Have you had it before?” Don’t use “lines,” for example, “Do you believe in love at first sight or should I walk by again?” “Lines” are transparently canned and appear techniquey.

Some people dislike small talk but it’s important. An opening bit of small talk lets a person know you’re interested without your being too forward or threatening. The person won’t think you’re shallow unless after two hours, all you’ve discussed are the weather, sports, and the Kardashians.

Now what?  After your opening comment,  listen, really listen and then say or ask something in response. This part of the conversation could be called the slow dig: Slowly dig a little deeper: reveal a little more, ask something a little more intimate.  For example:

You: They sure have quite a collection of psychology books.

S/he: Uh-huh.

You: (perusing the shelf): Hmm. “The Art of Communication.” I could use a few tips.

S/he cracks only the hint of a smile and turns away.

You: Hi, I’m Joe.

S/he: (hesitantly) Pat.

You: I like this bookstore.

S/he: It’s nice. (S/he turns away again.)

You: I like that they have sofas as a reading area.

S/he: That is nice.

You: Were you looking for a book on a particular topic, or just browsing?

S/he: I’m not sure…

You wait, giving her a chance to think about whether s/he wants to say more.

S/he: Well, maybe a book on ADHD.

You:  I was a very active kid in school. It was really hard to sit still. You don’t seem hyper.

S/he: It’s for my son. 

You: Has he been diagnosed?

S/he: No, but his teacher thinks I should get him evaluated.

You purse your lips.

S/he: Maybe it’s just because I’m his parent but I think he’s just an active boy.

You: I’d guess the thought of putting him on Ritalin feels wrong or at least scary.

S/he nods.

(In real-life, the conversation should probably go a little longer before his asking her out but for space reasons here, I’ll cut to the chase.)

You: Hey, I gotta go now but would you like to get together for coffee or a drink some time this weekend? 

S/he: Okay.

Principles demonstrated in that dialogue

In addtition the principles explained in the "What to say" section, here are others used in this dialogue:

A ping-pong exchange. Both talked about the same amount and their comments were brief. That back-and-forth leads to more connection than do lecturettes.

The longer your statements, the more likely you’ll be viewed as egotistical.

If you tend to be long-winded, consider using the traffic-light rule: During the first 30 seconds of an utterance, your light is green. In the second 30 seconds, it’s yellow: the person may start to think you’re long-winded or has something they’d like to say in response. At the 60-second mark, your light turns red. Yes, occasionally you want to “run a red light,” for example, if telling an interesting story, but generally you want to stop, perhaps asking a question.

Mirror their pace of revealing intimacies. Some people say little about their fears, insecurities, and problems for weeks. Others tell all in the first few minutes. While remaining true to your basic character, err on the side of mirroring your conversation partner.

Quickly ask for a date.  First meetings like at a bookstore usually can’t last long without seeming pushy. So if you want to continue the conversation, after just a few minutes, ask the person out on a date.

What’s next?

Tomorrow’s installment: On making the most of a first date.

Marty Nemko's bio is in Wikipedia.

Guest Blogger: Carly Rodgers, M.S.

Ebola. It’s a term we’ve all become far too familiar with, especially within the recent weeks, as this deadly virus has made its way into the United States. It’s nearly impossible to open a newspaper, listen/watch the news, let alone check your Facebook or Twitter, without at least one mention of the term. The media has created mass fear and panic that has been fueled by misinformation. 

Ebola, also referred to as Ebola hemorrhagic fever, is a rare and deadly disease caused by infection with one of the Ebola virus strains. The signs and symptoms of Ebola include: fever, severe headache, muscle pain, weakness, diarrhea, vomiting, abdominal (stomach) pain, and unexpected hemorrhage (bleeding or bruising). These symptoms may appear anywhere from 2 to 21 days after exposure to Ebola, with the average at around 8 to 10 days. 

According to the Centers for Diseases Control and Prevention (CDC) (2014), the total number of cases is just under 9,000 (with 5006 laboratory-confirmed cases) and the total number of deaths is 4493, with the majority of these being isolated to West Africa. The truth it Ebola is scary, however, being (properly) informed about what Ebola is and how it is spread is crucial. Ebola is not spread through the air, water, or in general, by food.  Rather, Ebola is spread through: direct contact with blood or bodily fluids (e.g., urine, saliva, sweat, feces, vomit, breast milk, and semen) or a person who is sick with Ebola; infected animals; and objects (needles and syringes) that have been contaminated with the virus. The likelihood of Ebola becoming a widespread epidemic is very unlikely, based on the way the virus is spread. 

Ebola can kill you, but so can a number of other things. It is more likely an individual will die from heart disease, cancer, traffic accidents, guns, the flu, ISIS, and even your own furniture (yes, tripping over furniture is more likely to kill you). Being afraid and worrying excessively over Ebola can be detrimental to your health. Worry is biologically identified as stress, one that the body interprets as a mini fight-or-flight response. Stress that lasts for more than several days becomes damaging to our health.  Chronic stress has been shown to raise blood pressure and increase the risk of cardiovascular problems and also suppresses the immune system (making it more likely to catch infectious diseases or get sicker). Mood is also heavily impacted by (chronic) stress, and is strongly associated with clinical depression. The old adage still holds true, knowledge is power, and in this case knowledge also means a sense of relief and comfort. Be sensible. Being alert is fine (and normal), but within reason. Learning the basics and protecting your own health can help protect yourself from fear and undue stress. 

Carly Rodgers received her Master's in Clinical Psychology in 2009 and is currently completing her pre-doctoral training in Portland, Maine.  She endorses Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) principles and teaches resiliency skills with Dr. Breazeale. 

White or wheat or rye? Would you like fries with that? ~ The Book of Choice

In Renegotiation, I mentioned the phenomenon of social mindfulness. To be socially mindful means to be able to take the perspective of another person and to respect it, even if this comes at a price. Van Doesum, Van Lange, & Van Lange (2013) developed a 2-person paradigm, in which the first person can choose 1 of 3 items, and the second person can choose between the remaining 2. Suppose the 3 items are 2 blue pens and 1 red pen of equal value. On their own, most people would choose the red pen for its rarity and uniqueness. When being the first of 2 choosers, however, some people choose a blue pen, thereby preserving a choice for the second person. Choosing a common item – when one would otherwise have chosen a unique one – and thereby passing on the privilege of choice is said to be the socially mindful thing to do. Social mindfulness is correlated with prosocial values (i.e., valuing others’ outcomes and being willing to cooperate), but it is not the same.

Why not? Each pen has the same value. Yet, not choosing the unique one is considered a costly decision. The uniqueness of an object is a value added by the context. It is not intrinsic to the object. Likewise, having a choice is seen as a valuable thing, although this value does not reside within any one object. Choice arises from the context of having more than one object and the procedural quality of being able to, well, choose among them.

Now consider Julia who takes a blue pen and lets Jessica choose between a blue and a red pen. Julia is socially mindful. Case closed? No. First, note that the inferences that might arise from Julia’s action are asymmetric. If she chooses the single red pen, we can be quite certain that she is self-interested and not socially mindful. If, however, Julia chooses a blue pen, we might conclude that she really prefers the red pen but took one of the blue pens out of social mindfulness. However, we have not ruled out the possibility that Julia is merely self-interested. She might actually prefer a blue pen. In other words, it is easier to rule social mindfulness out than it is to detect it. In the pen paradigm, social mindfulness and ordinary kindness are still closely related. If you were to predict what a kind person would do, you would predict what a socially mindful person would do.

Second, Julia knows that the single red pen is unique and that the two blue pens are not. She has enough information to make that determination. If Julia now chooses a non-unique blue pen, she is paying the price of social mindfulness (she’d rather fancy the single red pen). If we thought she was paying this price in order to pass a privilege on to Jessica, we would be wrong. Once Julia has taken any pen, of whatever color, neither of the two remaining pens is unique. Neither one of 2 blue pens is unique, and if there is 1 blue pen and 1 red pen, neither is unique either. In other words, Julia makes a sacrifice in order to be socially mindful, but she cannot transfer to Jessica what she has given up. To be truly socially mindful, Julia would have to defy the experimenter and tell Jessica that she can go first.

Third, perhaps social mindfulness is just about foregoing a choice and allowing someone else to choose – aside from any consideration of uniqueness. A transfer of choice makes sense if one cares more about the other person having the choice than about oneself having it. If Julia takes a blue pen she is saying that Jessica having a choice is more valuable to her, Julia, than having a choice herself. This begins to look like Julia is giving Jessica something that she does not want herself. But that would not be socially mindful.

Finally, let’s assume the objects on the table have different values. There are two chicken dinners and one pasta dish, and Julia is a budding vegetarian. By taking a chicken dinner, she harvests 1 pleasure point (PP). The pasta would have provided 2. If Jessica is a carnivore, she chooses the remaining chicken dinner (2PP for her) and Julia feels the sting of regret (she could have had the pasta) and loses 1PP; 1 – 1 = 0. If Jessica is a vegetarian, Julia gains 1PP from the gratification of being socially mindful; 1 + 1 = 2. As Julia does not know Jessica’s preferences when she makes her move, she may expect 0PP or 2PP with a probability of .5 each, so that the expected value of her experience is 1. Jessica gets 2PP for sure. To be socially mindful is also to be generous. But is it more than that?

Van Doesum, N. J., Van Lange, D. A. W., & Van Lange, P. A. M. (2013). Social mindfulness: Skill and will to navigate the social world. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 105, 86-103.

Intimate partners count on each other to maintain a “sane” interaction between them. In short, that means they have a common reality they both share, a way that each believes the other will see things in approximately the same way. Though they might not always like what they hear or see, they are not typically faced with unexpected surprises or unpredictable outcomes.

Such is not the case if you’re on the end of a crazy-making partner. This breed of intimate relationship dweller does the opposite of maintaining a sane interpersonal environment. Instead, you never know how they are going to react in any given situation. When you think you know what to expect or how to deal with them, they change the rules, seemingly arbitrarily. When you try to get them to acknowledge what they are doing by weaving the past into the present, they don’t agree with your account of what happened.

If you are involved with a crazy-making partner, don’t think you’re alone. You probably had no idea you were getting into this no-win relationship when it began. If the emotional and sexual connections were rewarding, you may have been intrigued by the Houdini-like escape pattern. Though unsettling, your partner was not boring. You couldn’t easily figure out what was going on, and you probably liked the challenge, so you became an eager relationship sleuth, avidly putting together clues that seem to make the next move more predictable. When you did actually accurately zero in once in a while, you may have thrived enough on the intermittent reinforcement to hang in for subsequent disappointing rounds. When the symbolic slot machine pays off, you were likely to have been off and running through the interpersonal “Alice-in-Wonderland” maze again.

Over time, you may have begun to feel a little desperate, wondering if there wasn’t some sort of underlying torture game going on. You sometimes got what you needed but not what you expected in unpredictable moments that made no sense. Other times, you may have felt you were doing everything right to get a predictable outcome, but your efforts were unproductive or even erased. Your confidence in yourself as a reasonable and intelligent human being was rapidly diminishing.

As time went by, your belief that you had any influence at all was fading. Your well-intended desires to connect in rational and predictable ways gave way to superstitious behaviors: “if I just pay close enough attention to all the previous interactions, I can control the outcome by doing everything just right.” Like making sure the sun comes up by accurately participating in the correct rituals.

If you started out as a control freak, you would have been pulling your hair out after a while. But if you’re just a normal person, innocently trying to maintain a sane environment, you might realize that you’ve morphed into one. As your confusion increased, you probably felt an ever stronger need to make things happen the way they should have, as your crazy-making partner was accusing you of obsessively tracking his or her every move. You began mumbling to yourself, “Is this person taunting me on purpose? It can’t be. They wouldn’t do that, would they? Not while professing such love for me and genuinely remorseful when I’m upset. I’m doing everything I can to make things work between us. I must just not be seeing things clearly. I have to just try harder.” The variables didn’t add up, but you were determined to hang in there and solve the situation by wits and endurance.

You are surely not alone. Here are just a couple of typical statements from partners who are in a relationship with crazy-making partners:

Miriam:

“I’m really confused. Last Friday night, he worked late and came home exhausted. I had his favorite dinner prepared and all possible distractions blocked. He’s let me know so many times that when he’s had a hard day, he loves a home-cooked meal, watching his favorite show, going to sleep, and then making love in the morning. I planned everything exactly the way he liked and it went down just like I thought it would. He even told me the next day that he was the luckiest guy in the world.

So last night, I did everything exactly the same way, but it was a disaster. He came home and threw his briefcase on the ground. He said he wasn’t hungry and why would I think he’d want to eat after a rotten day? Then he said he was going out to watch the game at a bar because he needed “time alone,” and that he’d be home in a couple of hours. He came home four hours later. I was in bed, asleep. He’d had a lot to drink and wanted sex right then. I reminded him that he likes sex better in the morning and he called me a frigid bitch and slept on the couch. I cried myself to sleep. And then, the next morning, he was an angel and brought me coffee in bed. I feel like I’m in a relationship with two people, one who really loves me and his evil twin who emerges without warning or reason.”

Jeff:

“She tells me what her favorite cologne is, so I buy it for her for her birthday. Then she tells me she doesn’t wear that anymore and how come I didn’t notice? She asks me to tell her how much I love her regularly, so I do. Now I’m just boring because I’m too repetitive. I’m supposed to make sure she’s taking care of herself and she’s so grateful that someone cares that much and the next day I’m trying to control her. Last weekend she wanted to spend time just the two of us so I found a great B and B and set up a romantic weekend. When I surprised her with it, she told me that we don’t have any friends and why would I think that she’d want to waste a whole weekend in some hotel when we could be painting the bedroom and actually accomplishing something.

Damn it, I can’t win for losing. Every time I try to get ahead of the game, I feel like the rug is pulled out. I love this woman, but there’s no pleasing her. She’s driving me crazy and I don’t know how long I can take it.”

Well-intentioned and devoted partners of crazy-making people become obsessive in trying to find the magic potion that will make their partners happy and appreciative of their efforts. But, every time they think they’ve got it right, they find themselves, as if in a bad dream, back at ground zero. They are frustrated, undermined, and terribly confused.

What makes a person so hard to please or so unwilling to be predictable? Are they driven by some internal fear or do they just get off on the game? Are they harboring some passive/aggressive need to prove that love won’t last and unconsciously sabotaging every chance that it could? Or are they just not able to love without losing themselves? Do they really want intimacy but fear that their need will end up in entrapment?

In the four decades of observing these crazy-making partners in therapy, I have seen many underlying reasons why these people will simply not let their partners add up any “pleasing” points. But the most consistent and deep internal driver is the terror of being controlled. Crazy-makers often give up the love they most desperately need when they feel any sense of an obligatory payback. They’ll sacrifice a perfect moment of tenderness if they feel there is the possibility of a reciprocal expectation lurking behind the scenes. It is as if some hidden combination of childhood trauma and life experiences that made them terrified to “owe” their partners anything. Their only way out of that terror of entrapment is to keep their partners “owing” them.

Here’s the good news.

When crazy-making partners are not driven by malevolent motives, they are very open to changing their behavior if it is pointed out in a non-judgmental environment. When they are able to see the effect it has on the ones they love without being seen as intending to harm, they are surprisingly willing to change. Once they believe that true love need not be obligatory and that intimacy is not automatically correlated with entrapment, they are often eager to learn new ways to make their needs and fears know and to let love in.

They do need the help of their partners to learn to love in this new way. Their partners also need to understand that most of the sabotaging behavior is not only unintended but carries significant grief and guilt with it. Those twin feelings are what create the strong urge to come back with intense commitment after each “escape.”

Overly forgiving and intensely devoted partners do not help their partners by taking their patterns personally and destroying their own confidence when they cannot control the outcome. They have their own part to play in the healing of the relationship. Often, in their own backgrounds, they have seen a “too-good-to-be-true” martyred parent in a devoted relationship with a partner who would not acknowledge their caring. They clearly saw that parent as the “good guy,” and are unconsciously playing out the same part, unable to stop giving even when it cannot be reciprocated.

The Golden Rule for all intimate relationships is just as relevant here: No matter how good your intention or how deeply you care for your partner, don’t keep participating in interactions that create frustration and emotional distance. However you come about discovering a new way to be together, it is better to take a chance of doing something different than to let layers of disappointment bury the love you once held sacred.

Dr. Randi’s free advice e-newsletter, Heroic Love, shows you how to avoid the common pitfalls that keep people from finding and keeping romantic love. Based on over 100,000 face-to-face hours counseling singles and couples over her 40-year career, you’ll learn how to zero in on the right partner, avoid the dreaded “honeymoon is over” phenomenon, and make sure your relationship never gets boring.www.heroiclove.com

In the first installment in this is series, I described how I helped my client develop her plan for meeting Mr. Right. In the second installment, I offered advice on how you might handle a first meeting—I used the example of  a chance encounter in a bookstore.

Here I share thoughts on the first actual date.

What to do? First dates shouldn’t demand hours or talking. So coffee, a drink, a walk, dancing, or a movie, yes. Dinner or a baseball game, with tons of time between the action, no.

Pick up or meet?  Safest is for the person who asked for the date to give the other person the choice: "Would you like me to pick you up or should we meet at (insert the location?)"

Digging Deeper.  In the previous installment, I described the getting-to-know-you part of the conversation as the slow dig: Slowly dig a little deeper: reveal a little more, ask something a little more intimate. I offered an example of how that might start. Here is how that might continue:

You: I can relate to being an active boy. Is he your only child?

S/he: Yes…

He waits to see if she’ll say more.

S/he: One’s enough for now.

You: For now?

S/he: Well, who knows…

You: You’d have nine more?

S/he smiles.

S/he: Do you have kids?

You: No but I’ve often wondered if I’d want to raise a child in this world.

She: I think the world is a pretty good place. No?

You: Yes but all the terrorism and I see ever more people having trouble finding a decent job…

S/he: Isn’t it a glass half-empty/half-full issue?

You: I guess. (He feels he needs to change the topic and lighten a bit.)  So I’m guessing you see your own glass as more than half full?

This sort of conversation may be heavier than the usual but more quickly gets the couple to know each other and to decide if they should continue the relationship. So many people stay superficial for multiple dates, resulting in their staying with the wrong people for too long.

Sex?

Of course, the best-laid plans can go awry if sparks burst into flames but it’s usually wise to decide in advance that—unless you’re just looking for sport sex—you’ll restrain intimacy for a few dates, especially if, for you, having sex establishes a hard-to-break bond.

The goodbye

If you’d like to see the person again, make a date right then or at least specify when you’ll be back in touch. It’s rude to leave a person hanging.

If you want to end the relationship, of course, there’s no reason to hurt the person’s feelings. But if you feel generous, instead of the typical unhelpful, “I don’t think we’re quite right for each other,” offer a bit of tactful feedback by adding, for example, “You’re a little serious for me. I’m more about being light and having fun.”

What’s next?

I have previously written an article on a later step: deciding whether to marry or break up. In tomorrow’s article, I make the case for hermitage.

Marty Nemko's bio is in Wikipedia.

Over the last two decades I have written a lot of research papers about the structural characteristics of gambling and their effect on subsequent human behaviour. One of the most basic structural characteristics that may determine whether someone gambles on a particular type of game in the first place is the size of the jackpot that a game has to offer. Most of the research in this area has been carried out on lottery gambling as this form of gambling tends to have the largest jackpots. However, there is no reason to assume that these general findings should not be any different in other types of gambling such as winning a million dollars on a slot machine.

As I have noted in some of my previous blogs, structural characteristics in gambling are typically those features of a game that are responsible for reinforcement, may satisfy gamblers' needs and may (for some ‘vulnerable’ players) facilitate excessive gambling. Such features include the event frequency of the game, jackpot size, stake size, the probability of winning, and the use of ‘near misses’ and other ‘illusion of control’ elements. By identifying particular structural characteristics it is possible for researchers (and the gaming industry) to see how needs are identified, to see how information about gambling is perceived, and to see how thoughts about gambling are influenced.

Showing the existence of such relationships has great practical importance as potentially ‘risky’ forms of gambling can be identified. Furthermore, by identifying particular structural characteristics it may be possible to understand more about gambling motivations and behaviour, which can have useful clinical, academic and commercial implications. It has been widely accepted that structural characteristics have a role in the acquisition, development, and maintenance of gambling behaviour. However, it would appear that the role of structural characteristics has become even more significant within the past decade and has led to increased empirical research on structural gaming features.

One of the main reasons that people gamble is that it provides the chance of winning money. But does winning large amounts of money actually make people happy? People often dream about winning large life changing amounts of money on games like a national lottery. The winners hopefully look forward to a long life of everlasting happiness although studies have found that lottery winners are euphoric very briefly before they settle back to their normal level of happiness or unhappiness. This is because happiness is relative. There is a popular belief by some psychologists that in the long run, winning large amounts of money on gambling activities will not make someone happy. Researchers who study happiness say that everyone has a certain level of happiness that stays relatively constant but can be changed by particular events that make the person happy or sad.

Thankfully, this change only lasts for a short period of time. For instance, if someone is a generally happy person and a close relative dies, research shows that after a few months or so, the person will go back to the same happiness level that they were previously. However, this works the other way too. If a person is not very happy in their day-to-day life, they could win a large amount of money gambling and they would probably be happy for a couple months but then they would ‘level out’ and go back to life at their normal unhappiness level.

Back in 1978, research by Dr. Phillip Brickman and his colleagues in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology compared a sample of 22 major lottery winners with 22 controls and also with a group of 29 paralysed accident victims. They found that major lottery winners were no happier than control groups. Another 1994 study by Dr. G. Eckblad and Dr. A. von der Lippe (in the Journal of Gambling Studies) investigated 261 Norwegian lottery winners who had won more than one million Norwegian Krone (approximately £100,000). There were few typical emotional reactions to winning apart from moderate happiness and relief. Their gambling was modest both before and after winning the lottery and their experiences with winning were almost all positive. The researchers reported that their quality of life was stable or had improved. They concluded that their results support earlier research by Dr. Roy Kaplan (also published in the Journal of Gambling Studies) who found that that lottery winners are not gamblers, but self-controlled realists.

One of the infamous questions in social science is whether money makes people happy. In 2001, Dr. Jonathan Gardner and Dr. Andrew Oswald carried out a longitudinal study on the psychological health and reported happiness of approximately 9,000 randomly chosen people. Their research reported that those who received financial windfalls (i.e., by large gambling wins or receiving an inheritance) had higher mental wellbeing in the following year. In another longitudinal data study on a random sample of Britons who received medium-sized lottery wins of between £1000 and £120,000, the same authors compared lottery winners with two control groups (one with no gambling wins and the other with small gambling wins). They reported that big lottery winners went on to exhibit significantly better psychological health. Two years after a lottery win there was an improvement in mental wellbeing using the General Health Questionnaire. Other data (published in 2009) have also been analysed by Dr. Benedict Apouey and Dr. Andrew Clark who also found increased health benefits among lottery winners when compared to non-lottery winners. However, they also showed that lottery winners also drank and smoked more socially than non-lottery winners. Similar findings that lottery winners have better health indicators have also been reported by other researchers (such as Dr. Mikael Lindahl in a 2005 issue of the Journal of Human Resources).

On a more practical day-to-day level, most of the research on big winners has shown that their lives are much better as a result of their life changing wins but there are always a few winners who find other problems occur as a result of their instant wealth. They may give up their jobs and move to a more luxurious house in another area. This can lead to a loss of close friends from both the local neighbourhood and from their workplace. There can also be family tensions and arguments over the money and there is always the chance that winners will be bombarded with requests for money from every kind of cause or charity. There are also case reports in the literature of people become depressed after winning life-changing amounts of money (such as a 2002 study by Dr. S. Nissle and Dr. T. Bschor in the International Journal of Psychiatry in Clinical Practice), although these are presumably the exception as no researcher(s) would get case reports published showing people were happier after winning a large amount of money! However, despite potential problems, most of the psychological research (perhaps unsurprisingly) indicates that winners are glad they won.

Interestingly, one large study by Dr. Richard Arvey and his colleagues (published in a 2004 issue of the Journal of Psychology) of 1,163 lottery winners in the USA showed that the vast majority of lottery winners (63%) carried on working in the same job after their big win, with a further 11% carrying on working part-time in the same job after their big win. The mean average amount won by those who carried on working was 2.59 million US dollars. This appears to show that winning the lottery does not necessarily lead to a changing of lifestyle for the vast majority of winners although smaller scale studies have tended to show that the majority of lottery winners give up work following a big win of over $1 million US dollars.

There are also those groups of people who will view the acquisition of instant wealth as ‘undeserved’. Basically, when people win large amounts of money through gambling, other people around treat them differently even if the winners do not move neighbourhood or carry on in their job. This can lead to envy and resentment not just from people who know the winners but also from those in the locality of where the winners may move to. However, most gaming operators have an experienced team of people to help winners adjust to their new life and to minimize potential problems.

Research into the effects of high jackpots on human behaviour has been relatively sparse. The research that has been carried out suggests that huge jackpot winners do not suffer negatively as a result of winning. There is little research that indicates that high jackpot cause people to develop problems unless the large jackpot is combined with other structural features such as high event frequencies.

References and further reading

Apouey, B. & Clark, A.E. (2009). Winning Big but Feeling no Better? The Effect of Lottery Prizes on Physical and Mental Health. Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei Working Papers (Paper 357). Berkeley Electronic Press. 

Arvey, R.D., Harpaz, I. & Liao, H. (2004). Work centrality and post-award work behavior of lottery winners. Journal of Psychology, 138, 404-420.

Brickman, P., Coates, D. & Janoff-Bulman, R. (1978). Lottery winners and accident victims: Is happiness relative? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 36, 917-927.

Eckblad, G.F. & von der Lippe, A.L. (1994). Norwegian lottery winners: Cautious realists. Journal of Gambling Studies, 10, 305-322.

Gardner, J. & Oswald, A.J. (2001). Does money buy happiness? A longitudinal study using data on windfalls. Warwick University Mimeograph.

Gardner, J. & Oswald, A.J. (2007). Money and mental well-being: A longitudinal study of medium-sized lottery wins. Journal of Health Economics, 26, 49-60.

Griffiths, M.D. (2009). The lottery of life after a jackpot win. Western Mail, November 11, p.16. 

Griffiths, M.D. (2010). The effect of winning large jackpots on human behaviour. Casino and Gaming International, 6(4), 77-80. 

Griffiths, M.D. & Wood, R.T.A. (2001). The psychology of lottery gambling. International Gambling Studies, 1, 27-44.

Imbens, G. W., Rubin, D. B., & Sacerdote, B. I. (2001). Estimating the effect of unearned income on labor earnings, savings, and consumption: Evidence from a survey of lottery players. American Economic Review, 91, 778-794.

Kaplan, H. R. (1985). Lottery winners and work commitment: A behavioral test of the American work ethic. Journal of the Institute for Socioeconomic Studies, 10, 82-94

Kaplan, H.R. (1987). Lottery winners: The myth and reality. Journal of Gambling Studies, 3, 168-178.

Lindahl, M. (2005). Estimating the effect of income on health and mortality using lottery prizes as an exogenous source of variation in income. Journal of Human Resources, 40, 144-168.

Nissle, S. & Bschor, T. (2002). Winning the jackpot and depression: Money cannot buy happiness. International Journal of Psychiatry in Clinical Practice, 6, 181-186.

Parke, J. & Griffiths, M.D. (2007). The role of structural characteristics in gambling. In G. Smith, D. Hodgins & R. Williams (Eds.), Research and Measurement Issues in Gambling Studies (pp.211-243). New York: Elsevier.

You knew it was going to happen. Anytime a particular idea gets a bit too popular, it is going to get taken down a notch. American society has been totally preoccupied with happiness and positive thinking and optimism and romantic love and all that cheery stuff. Many psychologists have made careers out of studying those things and a few book authors have hit the jackpot. But now, more and more people are asking whether that positivity is all it's cracked up to be. Isn't there a place for negativity and pessimism and even sadness?

Yes, there is. Two recent books offer research-based arguments for what's good about negativity. Todd Kashdan and Robert Biswas-Diener wrote The Upside of Your Dark Side and Gabriele Oettigen authored Rethinking Positive Thinking. Julie Norem's book, The Positive Power of Negative Thinking, though not new, is also relevant to the discussion. All have been getting media attention. Here are some of the authors' insights about what's so good about negative thinking and feeling, plus a few relevant findings from the psychology of deception.

1. If you feel too relaxed and happy and dreamy, you may not be all that motivated to get things done. As the Atlantic said about one of Oettigen's points, "…a cheery disposition and good attitude can zap the motivation needed to mobilize and strategize…dreaming isn't doing."
2. An excerpt from Kashdan and Biswas-Diener's book, published in New York magazine, was aptly titled, "Grumpy people get the details right." As the authors noted, "Negative emotions like anxiety and suspiciousness can act like an attentional funnel that narrows the mind's eye to important details."
3. They also pointed to research showing that "people prone to depressed moods also tend to notice more details," particularly in facial expressions. Julie Lane and I found something similar in research we did a while back. In a pair of studies, we showed that mildly depressed people were especially sensitive to false reassurances and phoniness. Sometimes happy people are more easily fooled.
4. Maybe we should not be trying too hard to be all smiley-faced ourselves. As the Kashdan and Biswas-Diener noted, "A furrowed brow or frown warns people off when you aren't in the mood (and sometimes you're not in the mood)."
5. A New York Timesstory on The Upside of Your Dark Side pointed to research by Rebecca Mitchell on the upside of negative feelings in the workplace: "…a little bit of negativity at work can keep people from agreeing too quickly and instead encourage them to focus on getting it right…"
6. In The Positive Power of Negative Thinking, Julie Norem explains what's so good about a style she calls defensive pessimism. If that's your approach, you tend to imagine worst-case scenarios when you have something important in the works (such as a paper or a presentation). How is that a good thing? It's good if it motivates you to think of the many specific things that could go wrong, then take steps to avoid them. People who do that "end up performing better than if they didn't use the strategy." (Want to know if you are a defensive pessimist? Take the test here.)
7. Romantic love is the topic of lots of syrupy odes, but it may not be such a great thing when it comes to knowing when someone is lying to you. In fact, sometimes perfect strangers are better at knowing when someone is lying than that person's romantic partner is.

“It’s still hard explaining what it was like to people who didn’t experience it. I think most people think I’m exaggerating. I’ve gotten to used to it, over time, but it still stings and recovery is mostly a lonely process..”

                        Adele, age 42

“I have ghost images of my mother, most usually when I want a woman to like me, hire me, or include me in her circle. Nothing I ever did pleased my mother and it made me feel nothing I did was ever good enough. I still feel that way when I seek a woman’s approval.”

                        Sarah, age 56

In the years since I wrote Mean Mothers, I’ve talked to many women about the process of healing from the wounds of childhood.  As a layperson who’s been on this journey herself—and who’s sought professional help—my understanding has been enriched by two important insights. The first is from A General Theory of Love written by Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini, and Richard Lannon. In simple terms, they explain that lack of love has both neurological and psychological consequences:

“ Love, and the lack of it, change the young brain forever….as we now know, most of the nervous system (including the limbic brain) needs exposure to crucial experiences to drive its growth… The lack of an unattuned mother is a nonevent for a reptile and shattering injury to the complex and fragile limbic brain of a mammal.”

The second is from Deborah Tannen’s book, You’re Wearing that?Understanding Mothers and Daughters in Conversation:

“This, in the end, may be the crux of a parent’s power over a child: not only to create the world the child lives in but also to dictatehow that world is to be interpreted.”   

For me, these two insights in combination—the rather literal shaping of the brain in response to the conditions of an individual’s childhood and the super sized influence a mother has on a daughter’s understanding of how the world works—capture why recovery can be so elusive.

The unloved daughter’s responses, both automatic and conscious, are different in kind from those of a daughter who has an attuned and loving mother. The unloved daughter grows up not trusting her own experience of events and interactions; she may be confused by the very nature of emotional interactions and her neediness—caused by the shattering injury to which Lewis and his co-authors refer—may make it impossible for her to navigate boundaries in relationships. Often, when she challenges her mother, she will be told that she’s wrong, or too sensitive, or, even more destructively, that what she’s talking about didn’t happen. These events create an internal wellspring of doubt which often yields to an incorrect but seemingly inevitable conclusion: “My mother doesn’t love me because I am unlovable. It’s my fault.”

The lack of love and approval leaves a daughter desperate for both. It’s not surprising that the quest to fill that metaphorical hole in the heart—an expression I have heard many times over and have used myself—can include both destructive and constructive behaviors.  Alas, the journey to recovery may be even more complicated for the daughter who seeks comfort in behaviors that ultimately are dangerous blind alleys.

I’ll detail the blind alleys first and then proceed to what I’ll call the clear paths.

Blind Alleys

1.  Unhealthy relationship to food

In most households, it’s the mother who’s in charge of food—both its preparation and serving—which, when a mother is unloving or manipulative, makes eating a potential locus for control. In her groundbreaking book, The Hungry Self. Kim Chernin detailed and explored the primal connections between food and female identity, as well as mothering and emotional hunger. These connections are both subtle and obvious. In response, a daughter may seize on eating or not eating as something she can control, as a way of countermanding her mother’s vision of the world or her place in it. Some daughters will develop clinically disordered eating while others will simply carry their complicated relationships with food and its connection to self-image into adulthood. In her book. When Food is Love, Geneen Roth (the daughter of a physically abusive mother and an emotionally distant father) explains that disordered eating may be an act of self-protection, a way of armoring the self against pain.

Recent studies exploring the connection between insecure childhood attachment and disordered eating more closely have made some interesting discoveries. For example, Jenna Elgin and Mary Pritchard found that while it was true enough that secure attachment was negatively correlated with disordered eating, not every type of insecure attachment was positively correlated. Only the fearful attachment style (which includes both a negative view of self and a negative view of others) was positively correlated with bulimia but neither the dismissive or preoccupied styles were associated with disordered eating.

2. Self-harm

Paradoxically, many emotionally abused or neglected daughters often comment that they wish the maltreatment had been physical because, as one woman put it,” Then, at least, the scars would show and I wouldn’t have to prove their existence to anyone.” It’s been hypothesized that self-harm or cutting is intimately connected to lack of love, another effort both to fill the emptiness and to feel pain which you are able to control. In their book Bodily Harm, Karen Conterio and Wendy Lader write, “ self-injury represents a frantic attempt by someone with low coping skills to ‘mother herself.’ …Bodily care has been transformed into bodily harm: the razor blade becomes the wounding caregiver, a cold but available substitute for the embrace, kiss, or loving touch she truly desires.”  Following up on previous lines of research, Jean-François Bureau and his co-authors looked at specific dimensions of parenting and their relationship to NSSI (non-suicidal self-injury) in young adults. What they found was that among those engaging in self-injury, their descriptions of childhood included portraits of parents who failed to protect them and abdicated their roles as parents, of parents from whom they felt alienated, as well as those who were over-controlling. These parents were generally seen as less caring, untrustworthy, and more difficult to communicate with. Generally, research has confirmed the link between self-harm and emotionally distant or abusive parenting and insecure attachment.

3. Compulsive behaviors

Substance abuse, compulsive shopping, and even sexual promiscuity have been understood as ways of filling the hole in the heart. Unloved daughters may turn to the instantaneous self-soothing and oblivion offered up by alcohol or drugs. In her book, Mothering Ourselves, psychotherapist Evelyn S. Bassoff writes that, “For some, alcohol—which warms, fills, and anesthetizes the inner emptiness or aching—becomes the soothing mother…the alcoholic stupor replaces the sensations of being wafted to a sound sleep in mother’s arms.”  Hope Edelman describes the “emotional hoarding” of those who are unloved and writes, “Back-to-back relationships, overeating, overspending, alcoholism, drug abuse, shoplifting, overachieving—all are her attempts to fill that empty space, to mother herself, to suppress feelings of grief or loneliness, and to get the nurturing she feels she lost or never had.”

4. Hurtful relationships

Research shows that all of us are more likely to choose partners who are more like our parents than not—which is fine if you were raised by loving and attuned parents and not so wonderful if you were not. These relationships are comfort zones—which offer no real emotional comfort but which feel comfortable because we feel the way we did when we were children, living in our mother’s house. They offer no real solace, and, for many unloved daughters, finding ourselves in a relationship like this may prove to be the turning point that propels us to seek help in the form of therapy.

But these blind alleys aren’t the only ways daughters seek to fill the hole in their hearts; many—even those who have been stuck in a blind alley— find the healing they seek and need.

Clear Paths

The hole in the heart can be filled productively with new experiences and voices that tell the unloved daughter that she is worthy, valuable, and lovable. While the experiences of childhood shape us, they need not hobble us and many unloved daughters, by confronting and articulating their past, move into the present and future as loving and loved partners, friends, and mothers. 

1. Earning secure attachment

Even if your upbringing didn’t offer you secure attachment, you can earn secure attachment in adulthood.  Self-understanding is the basis for new interactions and healthy and healing connections to others as various as teachers, mentors, therapists, friends, or lovers. As one woman confided, “My first steps towards healing took place in the company of an older woman, my neighbor, who was kind and understanding. She was the first person in whom I confided my story and by telling her, I broke the silence my mother had imposed me. I heard my voice for the very first time in my conversations with her.”

Being able to make sense of your experience—making it into a coherent and understandable narrative—is the key to earned secure attachment, as posited by Mary Main one of the proponents of attachment theory.  In an important study, Glenn I. Roisman and his co-authors looked at individuals with earned secure attachment in an effort to determine whether or not they were, however, more at risk for depressive symptoms. What they found was that not only were those with earned status (by making coherent sense of their past) involved in romantic relationships of a quality comparable to those with happy childhoods, parented as effectively as those raised in secure environments, but also were at no greater risk for internalizing distress than other secure groups.

2. Re-defining family

For many unloved daughters, creating a “family” on her own terms is part of the journey toward healing; sometimes, it will include distancing herself from her family of origin but not always. More than anything, this is an important act of reinvention, which can take the form of a close-knit circle of friends or getting married and having a child or children herself. In my early twenties, when I was estranged from my mother and single, I made Thanksgiving dinner every year for friends who had nowhere to go or whose families lived far away. Those dinners were one of the first steps I took to claiming earned secure attachment for myself. As one daughter commented: “In adulthood, I have surrounded myself with people I feel safe with. That wasn’t true of my childhood but it is now and it has made a world of difference. This doesn’t mean that everyone always loves everything I do or say, or that no one ever gets critical or ticked off at me. But I always know I am cared for, no matter what.”

3. Mothering the self

Learning how to self-soothe in healthy ways and replace the critical or dismissive maternal voice internalized in your head—the one that tells you that nothing you do is good enough or that you are “less than” a daughter should be—with a message of self-love and an admonition for patience are also important steps toward healing. A therapist can be of enormous help at this juncture. 

Giving voice to what actually happened in your childhood is part of self-mothering because it gets you out from under the code of denial imposed on you and allows you to develop an inner voice that is truthful, strong, and reliable. Permitting yourself to acknowledge your pain, frustration, and anger with your mother and her treatment of you is a necessary part of the process—both in terms of stilling the critical or dismissive maternal voice and growing your own inner voice. Grievingy may be part of the process as well as mourning the loss of what you needed and never had.

Learning to be kind to yourself, as well as patient—as your mother wasn’t—is also part of self-mothering.  All of this takes time—there’s no magic wand to replace the acceptance and love you lacked with a sense of self-acceptance—but it can be accomplished. Talk to yourself as you wish you’d been spoken to by your own mother, and cut yourself slack as necessary. Acknowledge the process, applaud the steps forward, and accept the steps backwards. The hole doesn’t vanish but it gets smaller and smaller, and has a different context.

Fellow travelers, good luck and Godspeed!

Copyright© Peg Streep 2014

VISIT ME ON FACEBOOK: www.Facebook.com/PegStreepAuthor

READ MY NEW BOOK: Mastering the Art of Quitting: Why It Matters in Life, Love, and Work

READ Mean Mothers: Overcoming the Legacy of Hurt

Lewis, Thomas, Fari Amini and Richard Lannon. A General Theory of Love. New York: Vintage Books, 2001.

Tannen, Deborah. You’re Wearing That? Understanding Mothers and Daughters in Conversation. New York: Ballantine Books, 2006.

 Chernin, Kim. The Hungry Self. New York: Harper & Row, 1985.

Bassoff, Evelyn. Mothering Ourselves: Help and Healing for Adult Daughters, New York; Plume Books, 1992.

Roth, Geneen. When Food is Love: The Relationship Between Eating and Intimacy. New York: Plume Books, 1992.

Conterio, Karen and Wendy Lader. Bodily Harm.  New York: Hyperion Books, 1998.

 Bureau, Lean-François, Jodi Martin, Nathalie Freynet, Alexane Alie Porier, Marie-France Lafontaine, and Paula Cloutier, “Perceived Dimensions of Parenting and Non-suicidal Self-inury in Young Adults, Journal of Youth and Adolescence  (2010), 39, 484-494.

Edelman, Hope. Motherless Daughters. New York: Delta Books, 1994.

 Roisman, Glenn I, Elena Padron, L. Alan Sroufe, and Byron Egeland, “Earned-Secure Attachment Status in Retrospect and Prospect,” Child Development (2002), vol. 73, no. 4, 1204-1219.

Most of us absolutely love music. We are compelled by it. We are provoked by it. We are moved by it. We are inspired by it. We feel connected to it. It reflects something profound about who we are and our experience of the world.

If I asked you to tell me your favorite bands, musicians, or genres, most of you could quickly reply with a list of beloved artists. Our favorite singers captivate us with lyrics that have powerful messages and sounds that touch us in some special way. In fact, most of us have playlists for just about every situation and emotion in life: a relaxed playlist for a low-key night at home; an energetic playlist for workouts; a somber playlist for contemplative moments; and an angry playlist that we reach for when we need to scream.

Given the emotionally charged nature of music, it can be an incredibly effective way to express ourselves and cope with challenging life circumstances. Because sometimes life is really hard. Really really hard. Whether it be conflict with family, ending a relationship, or experiencing trauma, we all have moments in which we are brought to our knees with pain, sadness, and confusion.

This is particularly true if you are actively working on being more honest with yourself. Self-deception, at the most basic level, is a protective mechanism: its role is to keep us safe and secure. Often unconsciously, lying to ourselves protects us from knowing truths that would temporarily harm our ego—our core sense of self. As we confront these truths, we are going to feel worse before we feel better. Feeling some discomfort is an inescapable part of the process of becoming more honest with ourselves. 

In these tough life moments, music can be a constructive way to express who you are and what you are feeling. If you are feeling particularly sad about a reality in your life, listen to a song that connects you to that emotion. If you are anxious, turn up the volume in your living room and dance around. If you are angry, grab a pillow and hit is as hard as you can while listening to your favorite lyrics.

I am not suggesting that you use music to wallow in pain or negativity; that would not be positive for your mental health or for those around you. What I am suggesting is that when we are emotionally struggling, we often have a hard time expressing how we feel through words. The intellectual, verbal expression of feelings doesn't do justice to our experience of the emotion. Connecting to music is one effective way to become more honest about who you are, what you are really experiencing, and coping with negative emotion.

The Naked Truth is this: Whether we resonate with rap, classical, house, techno, country, alterative, heavy metal, or blues, music is an incredible vehicle for expressing emotions and capturing our internal experience of life. In times of strife or newly-discovered truths, use it to find your true voice. Perhaps you may want to write your own song, analyze the lyrics of a favorite artist, or play an instrument. Perhaps you will explore new genres that are foreign to you. The key is that music is a powerful vehicle for helping you become more aware and honest with yourself.

If you are looking for new music that you might connect to, I recently compiled a list of my personal favorites (http://choosehonesty.com/music/). To add your song to my list, send me a suggestion at https://www.facebook.com/choosehonesty?ref=hl or cortneywarren@choosehonesty.com.

Copyright Cortney S. Warren, Ph.D.

There is so much to like about the new Dear White People promo, Racism Insurance (see clip below).

For starters, the skits are laugh-out-loud funny, and most of us can use more laughter in our lives.

But they are not just funny. They also shed some light on real-world racial dynamics. There is content in these clips worth examining more closely.

1. Some racist acts are unintentional, but intention is not all that matters. A lack of intent to cause harm doesn't mean that one's actions don't cause any. Perhaps the first clip does not make this point as explicitly as necessary, but it does suggest that some harmful statements are not so much a product of bad intentions as a lack of sophistication in regard to both racial dynamics and language usage, with perhaps a little social awkwardness thrown in. This lack of harmful intent shouldn't get the speaker off the hook, but it does open up the possibility of a different kind of response. After all, we generally react differently to someone who pushes us on purpose compared to someone who bumped into us on accident, especially if that someone is a friend. None of this is to suggest that it is the responsibility of either those targeted by unintentional racism to educate the speaker or the speaker's Black friends to smooth things over (more on that later). Whether that kind of support is offered or not depends on a host of other considerations, including the nature of the relationship, the emotional resources of those who might offer support, and the specific context in which the unintentional micro-aggression occurred. The point, rather, is that all racist comments are not the same, and it is helpful to have different schemas and different language to talk about the different types.

2.  It's possible to talk about sensitive topics with sensitivity. The first clip especially shows how racist comments can be translated into non-racist, racially sensitive speech. The idea of racism insurance is funny, but the truth is that, instead of leaning on our imaginary (or real!) Black friends to translate on our behalf, we can all learn how to express ourselves in a way that is both honest and not harmful. If the White fellow in the first skit did mean all that, then wouldn't it have been nice for him to have said it all himself? There is no reason why we cannot all learn to do so. Having insurance is nice. Not needing it is priceless.

3.  Having a Black friend can work like "racism insurance" but we shouldn't count on it. Perhaps the most clever part of the promos is what is not explicitly stated - that having a Black friend is not unlike "racism insurance" in that it can get White people out of some (though not all!) jams. It works as humor, but part of the reason the concept is funny is because we instantly (perhaps unconsciously) recognize the kernel of truth -- that it is not that uncommon for White folks to rely on their Black friends to bail them out.  Indeed, it is not uncommon for White folks accused of racial insensitivity to invoke their relationship to some person of color, sometimes even explicitly suggesting that, because they have such a friend, they should receive the benefit of the doubt. In the skits, this is funny. In the real world, it's more complicated. Relationships do matter and sometimes a friend stepping in can indeed save a lot of needless aggravation for all involved. Consider, as just one example, how, Mookie vouches for Vito in front of Buggin Out, in Do The Right Thing. On the other hand, having non-White friends (or significant others) no more protects us from saying (or doing) hurtful things to people of color than having female friends protects us from saying (or doing) hurtful things to women. And any insinuation to the contrary is itself a micro-aggression.

4. The reminder at the end about white privilege is worth heeding. I've written about this previously so won't elaborate other than to underscore the take home point of the final scene -- that the most appropriate and productive response to having someone point out your indiscretions or racial micro-aggressions is neither to cower in shame nor to deny culpability but to try to better understand one's own privilege and how one's comments or actions might have (often inadvertently) come across to others.

5.  Unpacking, critiquing, and making fun of racism does not excuse or even minimize blatant sexist behavior.  The third clip, which appropriately shows that there are some lines that cannot be crossed, no matter how much street cred (or racism insurance) one might have, also winks at (and therefore subtly supports) in-group sexism. "You can't trust these hoes," complain the two Black men in the clip who then take issue when their White companion repeats the same statement: "You can't say that" they tell him. "Why not?" he asks. Their answer is "Because we're talking about Black hoes." And then, in case it's not obvious, they explain: "Now, we can call Black women 'hoes', but you can't".  In a way, they are, of course, right. Those who are part of a group have much more license to criticize in-group members than those who are not part of the group. It's the difference between hearing an insult from a sibling and hearing the same thing from an unrelated classmate or work colleague. There are, in fact, different "rules" for those in the ingroup and those in the outgroup. There are good reasons for that, and we should all get on board. But the reality of this "double standard" does not excuse or legitimize in-group sexism. Yes, it's worse for White men to refer to Black women as "hoes" but that doesn't make it ok for Black men to do so. The writers of these promo clips have created content that challenges harmful racial dynamics. Too bad they gave themselves permission to condone in-group sexism in the process.  Too bad this isn't an isolated case of this sort.

^{__________________________________________}

For more racial analysis of news and popular culture, join the | Between The Lines |Facebook page and follow Mikhail on Twitter.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

It was always assumed I would be a professor. I grew up thinking it. ~ Danny Kahneman, thinking slow

Every now and then, it re-dawns on me that the person in the street does not know what a college/university professor does. How could they and why should they? Yet, when they let it transpire that they think profs do nothing for half a year and during the rest their work entirely consists of standing in front of a blackboard, or perhaps behind a powerpoint projector, I get a sinking feeling that we fail at public relations. To remedy these misconceptions, I now offer a partial list of our doings for the 300+ readers who will click on this post.

What we do:

Teach large courses on broad topics; prepare lectures and deliver them

Teach small seminars on special topics; lead discussions and challenge students to think and debate

Train students in deliverable skills (e.g., computation and communication)

Entertain while teaching

Run lab meetings

Mentor individual students

Write innumerable letters of recommendation

Read large amounts of scholarly writing in our field of expertise and beyond

Think of new research

Plan and design experiments or other types of study

Write grant proposals

Find money to do the research

Conduct the research

Analyze data

Write research reports

Submit reports to competitive journals

Get papers published and cited

Review other researchers' work

Edit journals, special issues, books (or write the whole thing)

Promote own research beyond the peer-reviewed sphere of own field

Go to conferences and give presentations; organize symposia

Strike up and maintain research collaborations in own department, country, and international

Participate in administration of department, university, and professional field

Committees, committees, committees

Oh, I know the man in the photo. It is not Danny Kahneman, but one of my colleagues, and he is legen---dary.

As Seen on TV: Advertising’s Influence on Alcohol Abuse

Excessive alcohol consumption is a leading cause of premature death in the U.S. and responsible for one in every 10 deaths. The statistics that describe the ways in which we drink ourselves to death are staggering. A study published in the journal Preventing Chronic Disease found that nearly 70% of deaths due to excessive drinking involved working-age adults. The study also found that about 5% of the deaths involved people younger than age 21.  Moreover, excessive alcohol use shortened the lives of those who died by about 30 years. Yes, 30 years.

One strong factor that reinforces the popular culture surrounding drinking is the glamour of advertising. Researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health examined alcohol-advertising placements to determine whether the alcohol industry had kept its word to refrain from advertising targeting young people. This included television programs for which more than 30% of the viewing audience is likely to be younger than 21 years, the legal drinking age in every state.

The study found that alcohol related advertising increased by 71% in the last decade; this is largely attributed to exposure on cable television. That increase coincided with a reported upsurge of alcohol consumption by high school students. In conclusion, the study suggested that if the National Research Council/Institute of Medicine’s proposed threshold of 15% exposure to advertising was implemented, young viewers would see 54% fewer alcohol ads and society would see a correlating decrease in alcohol related deaths.

What about those “drink responsibly” admonitions on so many commercials? Federal regulations do not require responsibility statements in alcohol advertising. The alcohol industry's voluntary codes for marketing and promotion emphasize responsibility, but they provide no definition for responsible drinking. So when you see the admonition to “drink responsibly” at the end of an alcohol-related television commercial, there is no idea given as to exactly what that may mean, particularly to someone under the legal drinking age.

David Jernigan, PhD, director of the Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health said:

"The contradiction between appearing to promote responsible drinking and the actual use of 'drink responsibly' messages to reinforce product promotion suggests that these messages can be deceptive and misleading."

Youth who start drinking before age 15 years are five times more likely to develop alcohol dependence or abuse later in life than those who begin drinking at or after age 21 years according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Alcohol advertising influences many people across a wide range of demographics. Regardless of the warning labels on alcohol containers, community prevention programs and general public knowledge of the risks of excessive alcohol consumption, people continue to drink in health-damaging ways. Drinking in public, at sporting events, in parks, during celebrations, etc., is firmly embedded in society as acceptable behavior. At the same time, the large number of alcohol related deaths among all age groups is a concern, especially when this drinking behavior is generally developed while individuals are underage.

Alcohol use is a major public health problem that can lead to social, financial, and health related setbacks and premature death. Talk to health care professional if you or someone close to you is struggling with excessive alcohol consumption.

http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=1810389&resultClick=3

http://www.cdc.gov/pcd/issues/2014/13_0293.htm

http://www.cdc.gov/features/alcohol-deaths/

Most people wouldn’t dream of becoming a recluse. After all, we’re said to be social animals, not to mention sexual ones. And there are more specific reasons:

• Many people like living and working with others so they can be benefit from each other.  
• In these tight economic times, two incomes may be required to afford decent housing.
• Many people want children, and kids generally do better if raised by two parents.
• Living with others boosts the chances that someone will take care of them in old age.

For such benefits, many people are willing even to accept marriage’s serious constraints. For example, if you’re one of the 50 percent that divorce, you may suffers years of dissolution war ending with your giving lots of money, for years, to the one you now hate.

Indeed, the desire to connect is primary, foundational, for most people.

Yet the freedoms afforded by the solitary lifestyle are many—and underconsidered, hence this article. Reclusiveness’s advantages span from morning to night:

• Waking. You awake when you want, slowly reentering the world of the living rather than suddenly being roused by your partner’s alarm clock or by your child jumping on you. And because, recluse that you are, you’re self-employed, you can indeed sleep as late as you like.

You needn’t, while half-asleep, make spouse’s or kiddies’ breakfast or fight with them to get dressed and ready for school. You can leisurely make your coffee and breakfast, enjoy it over the morning news or music, or merely in peace and quiet.

• Working. When you’re good and ready, you begin work. And because you needn’t worry about your income supporting anyone but you, you’re more likely to get to do the work you love, even if it’s not very remunerative. For example, so many people would love to be artists, performers, or writers but feel forced to be accountants, marketing managers, and factory workers because they need to provide for their family.

Because you’re self-employed, you don’t have to spend an hour and money buying expensive work get-ups. There’s no gridlocked commute, no misguided boss, no backstabbing coworkers, no idiotic processes or products, no interminable meetings resulting in CYA tepid plans. You’re the CEO of whatever business you want.

Sure, if you’re one of the many people who need the structure and support of an organization to keep you productive, fine. Get a job. But the freedoms of being your own boss are nonpareil. And as long as you keep your expenses down and your business simple, you may well be able to avoid being among half of people whose businesses go out of business within the first five years.

Need help? Hire someone part-time, temp to handle the stuff you can’t or don’t want to do. That exception to your reclusiveness may well be worth it…or not. I used to have a housecleaner. She did a fine job except that she expected to chat with me for a half hour as soon as she came over. I decided I’d clean my own house: Not only would I save that time and the money, I’d clean my house in drips and drabs, inserting needed activity into my sedentary lifestyle.

Speaking of breaks, work for yourself and you can usually take breaks whenever you want. Feel like taking a long hike with the dog in the middle of the day? No problem. You can make up the work in the evening or whenever.

• Sex.  Of course, as stipulated up-front, some people cohabitate in substantial measure to facilitate ready and regular sex. But, of course, that, like everything comes with a price. For some it’s worth it but the recluse decides that masturbation and perhaps brief sexual encounters are, net, better. For example, many people have a sexual appetite different from their partner's, which can be difficult to compromise about. In the solitary lifestyle, no compromise is needed.

• Spending. People vary enormously in materialism. Some crave a designer- label address, car, clothes, and college. Others think that’s absurd.

• Recreating. What TV show to watch, what movie to see, what to do on Saturday night, where to vacation? Some never want to vacation while others love regular getaways to fancy places. Live solitary and there’s no issue.

• Sleeping. Reclusiveness even helps your sleep. The room is precisely the temperature you’d like. Sure, couples can sleep with different blankets, Sleep Number beds, etc., but it ain’t the same. And if s/he snores?!

Again, these arguments not withstanding, most people will still opt for the benefits of more human connectedness. But while we increasingly accept many non-traditional forms of existence: LBGT relationships including marriage, group households, as well as, of course, cohabitation without marriage, the recluse option may be among the most underconsidered.

Marty Nemko's bio is in Wikipedia.

Lauren is a little Dutch-English bilingual girl whom Belgian psycholinguist Annick De Houwer tells us about in one of her recent publications. Her father spoke English to her and her mother Dutch. But because her father worked hard, and saw her rarely–mainly on weekends–Lauren only heard English about three hours a week. When she was three years old, she could only say "yes" and "no" and this upset her father no end. He thought she was rejecting him.

Situations such as this one can be avoided in part if parents take the time to consider a number of questions when bringing up their child bilingual such as when should the languages be acquired, which bilingual strategy should be used, will the child have a real need for each language, what support can parents count on, etc. (see here). A question of primary importance concerns the type and amount of language input the child will receive, mainly from his/her parents but also from other sources. 

Annick De Houwer has spent many years researching this precise point. Using a questionnaire approach, she examined the language behavior of close to 2,000 families in Dutch-speaking Flanders, Belgium, where at least one parent spoke a language other than Dutch in the home. The first thing she found was that despite the presence of both Dutch and another language in the lives of these families, nearly one-quarter of the families had no children who spoke the other language. This only confirms that factors such as those mentioned above are crucial when fostering a child's bilingualism.

But what is perhaps even more interesting is that different parental input patterns had different effects on whether the children became bilingual or not. For example, when both parents only used the other language in the home, its transmission rate was quasi perfect (97%). The success rate only decreased by three percentage points when one of the two parents also spoke Dutch in the home. As for the "one person, one language" strategy, and contrary to general belief, it only produced a 74% success rate. In other words, a quarter of the children to whom the father spoke one language and the mother the other, simply did not become bilingual. It is interesting to note that both parents speaking both languages to their children obtained a score that is not significantly different (79%). As for the situation where one parent spoke both Dutch and the other language, and the other parent only spoke Dutch, then only 36% of the children spoke the other language.

Studies are still trying to isolate the reasons that underlie results such as these but what seems clear is that when the minority language is used exclusively, or at least extensively, in the home, it will be acquired by the child. Not only is there more parental input of that language but the home environment is conducive to using it. Thus there is every chance that the child will grow up speaking it. As for the majority language, it will be picked up very quickly, but mainly outside the home.

To better understand what is taking place in bilingual homes, researchers are turning more and more towards large databases of natural conversations in bilingual families. One of these was obtained by Canadian psycholinguist Shanley Allen in five families who, at home, speak both English and Inuktitut, one of the main Inuit languages in Canada. Annick de Houwer used it to examine the amount of dual language input the children received and the outcome of this on their bilingual language production. What she found was that caregivers who spoke more English had children who also spoke more English and, conversely, those who spoke more Inuktitut had children who used that language more. This simply substantiates the fact that the length of time a language is heard and used is a crucial factor in its acquisition by children.

In another study, Annick De Houwer examined trilingual families in Flanders. They used two minority languages in the home and some also used Dutch whereas others did not. In the latter case, Dutch was picked up outside the home, primarily at school. Once again, she found that despite this trilingual input, not all children actually spoke the three languages - two fifths were trilingual, more than a third were bilingual and more than a fifth spoke only one language. Thus trilingual input is no guarantee to actually developing three languages.

Two factors played an important role in accounting for these results. The first is that when no Dutch was spoken in the family, and only the two minority languages were used, then the probability of becoming trilingual was higher. Three quarters of the families in that case had children who were actively trilingual. The other factor was that when both parents (and not just one parent) used both minority languages with their children, then the chance of having trilingual children was higher.

In sum, children being brought up with two or more languages will need as much language input as they can from each of their languages, but primarily the minority language(s). The majority language is in less danger and will get its input in varying ways, outside and inside the home.

To end, let's go back to the example given at the beginning of this post. Little Lauren's lack of English was not a sign that she was rejecting her father. She simply had not received enough English input from him in the very restricted amount of time she spent interacting with him in their common language!

Photo of a young family from Shutterstock.

References

De Houwer, Annick (2007). Parental language input patterns and children's bilingual use. Applied Psycholinguistics, 28, 411-424.

De Houwer, Annick (2009). Bilingual First Language Acquisition. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.

Allen, Shanley (2007). The future of Inuktitut in the face of majority languages: Bilingualism or language shift? Applied Psycholinguistics, 28 (3), 515–536.

"Life as a bilingual" posts by content area.

François Grosjean's website.

For many, the holiday season is not the season to be jolly. It has a reputation for triggering stress and procrastination. However, any special event can stimulate these conditions.  Your mate’s birthday is coming up. At the last possible minute, you make it to the florists just before it closes. Your vacation is around the corner. As the clock winds down, you still don’t know where you’ll go and what you’ll do. 

If you are serious about breaking your procrastination traditions, should you make this your next New Year Resolution? Should you start now?  If you chose to start now, let's look at seven steps for easier living:

Teaching Yourself to  Follow Through on Special Occasions

Procrastination on preparing for the holidays (and other festive events) is not a reflex. Otherwise, you’d have no hope for change. This is more of a habit choice. 

Here are seven sample antidotes for cooling down this procrastination hotspot. See if you can use them--or come up with ideas of your own--to work easier, smoother, and more productively during the holidays or at any time of year.

1 Beware of false optimism. With each New Year, you may start with the hope that you will not delay when the times comes to prepare for the holidays. This optimism may be part of a self-deceptive pattern that you’ve practiced on other occasions, such as promising yourself that you’ll do your taxes early, then delaying. As an antidote, look for contradictions in your beliefs. If you make false promises to yourself, and you believe in truth and honesty, is it possible for you to be honest with yourself about false promises and then to get yourself on an honest, productive, path?

2 Pin down what you do when you procrastinate.  The seventeenth century British philosopher Francis Bacon once said, knowledge is power. When you know what you do when you procrastinate, you open options and choices for changing the process. That’s power! By changing the process from delaying to doing, you are using time you’d ordinarily spend procrastinating on actions to prevent the pains and the perils of feeling forced into eleventh- hour holiday rushes. More importantly, you’ll get more done. Here is an example of a basic procrastination pattern:  (1) You start out feeling optimistic that you’ll get things done and have time to spare. (2) Instead, you follow a cycle of delaying on preparation, running out of time, and then feeling flustered during your annual last-minute rush.  As an antidote, play the role of theskeptic where you accept that optimism for automatically overcoming procrastination is overrated. Then switch roles to therealist who recognizes that doing something constructive early can help end the cycle. Act sooner rather than later, and see what happens.

3 Be mindful of your incentives to do better.  When you define legitimate incentives for doing better, you can remind yourself of those incentives whenever you feel tempted to delay. Here are two positive incentives: (1) To feel good about your ability to take a disciplined approach. (2) To see yourself in command of yourself and what you do. Here are two negatives you can eliminate (eliminating negatives is positive):  (1) To stew less about things left undone that affect you, your family, and your friends. (2) To avoid stresses and hassles associated with last minute rushes.List these incentives on a wallet-size card and review them daily.

4 Don’t underestimate the power of past patterns. Past performances predict future performances.  If you previously put off preparing for special occasions, the odds are that you will do so again.  As an antidote, play a game with yourself where you get ahead of the curve.  (The idea of getting ahead of the curve is to spring ahead while others’ lag.)  Pick a date to start your holiday preparations and a date to stop that you believe is ahead of the curve. Then, stay on that curve. (The concept of getting ahead of the curve has other applications. You have a term report for your world history course. It’s the first day of class. You have over two months to do the research and write the paper. You set a date to start at a specific time three weeks before the due date and you stick with that date. At the end of the term, you observe classmates that are behind the curve and trying to write reports and study when there is little time to do both.)

5 Do one thing to change the pattern. Procrastination always involves substituting something less timely or important for what is timely and important to do. When special occasions are far in the future, it may seem like you have endless time.  Instead of leaving time open-ended (which raises your chances for delaying), plan one thing to help change the pattern, such as substituting productive action for a diversionary one, and do so at an early date. For example, buy a holiday gift that is in your plans to buy for a friend.Follow this plan with reasonable consistency, and you can get much of what you want done before you feel under the gun.

6Push yourself. Changing delaying patterns initially takes more effort than delaying does. Start early and put your mind to work against your discomfort dodging urges and other forms of emotional resistance.Getting past this resistance is challenging. Expect to push yourself to start. Try this experiment. Imagine that you are running out of time. Imagine the skills that you use when you follow through at the last minute. Visualize coupling your emotional drive with your last-minute follow through skills. Now, harness this visualizing action resource a month before your deadline, and beat the clock by a wide margin.

7 Take out a psychological insurance policy for the future. Pay up-front by doing work earlier so you don’t have to concern yourself about last minute rushes. To pay for this policy, use practically any opportunity to act more efficiently and effectively.  For example, instead of watching the seconds tick away while you wait for your coffee to heat, get a few things done in that interval. By setting yourself on this type course, you may find that you’ll create more time to do more of what you like to do. (Use this policy all year round.)

Procrastination, of course, is an impediment to overcoming itself. But you have to start somewhere if you intend to give yourself the gift of progress. 

For help combatting procrastination all year round, click on either of these resources:   The Procrastination Workbook   or  End Procrastination Now

For general information on making every year happy and productive, click on Make this your best year ever

                                    ©

                                  2014

                            Dr. Bill Knaus

                       All rights reserved

“You too fat.  No have pants for you.” It’s something I really didn’t want to hear, and not only because I had just evacuated to Hong Kong following the Japanese earthquake and had almost no clothes with me. But before I returned to Tokyo, where the Japanese prefer polite evasion to what I soon learned was the blunt honesty of the Chinese, I would have to develop a thicker skin.

“How old you are?” the sales women asked as she sat across from me in the sleek lounge of the high-end yoga studio where I had just attended a free class with a friend. “Can tell you used to be beautiful,” she added, smiling matter-of-factly as she “buttered me up” before trying to sell me an outrageously priced six-month membership card.

“Can tell you used to be very beautiful,” she continued rather doubtfully, clearly concerned at the distressed expression on my face. 

It was a scenario that would to be repeated too many times to count before I eventually moved to Beijing six months later. Luckily for me, by the time we arrived in the capital, I was quite familiar with the Chinese penchant for forthrightness, at least where certain topics are concerned. Having lived in Hong Kong for almost six weeks before returning to Tokyo, the U.S., and eventually China, I had already had many of my shortcomings pointed out to me. For example, I was well aware that I had gotten too much sun as a teenager. “That why you have so many wrinkles and spots on your face,” I was told more than once by the ladies at the skin care counter in the IFC mall in Hong Kong. 

But forthrightness can have its benefits. Before I stopped taking language lessons, I never felt guilty when I didn’t do my Mandarin homework, since my teacher told me almost from the start that I really didn’t have much of a chance of becoming fluent. After all, I graduated from a small, private Liberal Arts college in the States. “All my students who went to the Ivy League school learn much faster than people like you who went to the small college I never heard of." At least she softened the blow by telling me that she scored so low on the standardized tests in high school, the only option available to her was to become a language teacher.

 I now laugh with Beijingers when they make fun of my mispronunciation of words, that is, when they realize I'm trying to speak Chinese. How can I not be amused by the joy it seems to give people when I attempt to speak their language? But I wish I had a yuan for every time I’ve repeated a phrase in my absolute best Mandarin to an obviously confused listener, only to have them suddenly realize what I’m trying to say and begin parroting my words – in between gales of hysterical laughter – exactly as I have uttered them (or so it sounds to me). They always seem so astonished that I actually expected to be understood. Eventually, you figure out that it’s cultural, not personal, since they usually laugh even harder at themselves when I correct their English, even though I’m a guest in their country and can’t reasonably expect them to speak my language.

After friends of ours adopted their pre-school age daughters, Chinese twins, they took them home to Texas for an extended visit with family. While the twins’ grandmother was instantly enthralled with her adorable new grandchildren, she soon became so worried about their manners that she pulled her daughter aside to express her concerns. “You really need to teach my granddaughters how to say ‘please’. Why just now, one of then actually said ‘give me a cookie Grandma!’ And the other one added ‘give us milk now!’ Can you imagine?”

When our friends thought about it, they realized that as the twins became more fluent in English, they were naturally translating phrases from Mandarin into English, and in China, children don’t use “please” and “thank you” when speaking to their grandparents. These words are considered polite, but are too formal to use within families because they place distance between loved ones. While the girls thought they were drawing their “wai po” closer to them through their language, as they would in China, they were inadvertently pushing her away by speaking “rudely” to her in English!

I once mentioned to our Mandarin teacher - my husband and I used the same instructor - that I found Chinese people to be very forward and even blunt at times. (I think it was right after she told me that my husband’s Mandarin was better than mine, so he must be smarter. Being American and not Chinese, I chose not to tell her that she must have dementia because clearly she had forgotten that he took a nine-week immersion course before arriving in China and I had just started studying the language.) After thinking for a few moments, she admitted that she had to agree with me.  “Our country is full of so many people, we have to be tough and blunt, otherwise we won’t get what we want. We just say what we think and don’t waste our words.”

Over time I have come to realize that the startlingly blunt comments people often make to me are almost always meant to be helpful in some way.  When the doctor told me the black irregular spot on my back was a keratosis and that I was “just getting old,” I realized she was trying to reassure me that I didn’t have anything serious, such as melanoma.  And when the doorman told me that I looked “really awful” after I had just flown to Beijing from San Diego via San Francisco and had been awake for almost 24 hours straight, he was only worried about my health. 

What’s more, I can't recall one single seemingly blunt comment that was ever made to me with anything bordering on malice. After all, that would have caused me to “lose face”, and causing someone to lose face is to be avoided at all costs. 

After living in Beijing for almost three years, I’ve become endeared to the Chinese and their uninhibited way of speaking to one another.  I find their forthrightness a symptom of their lust for life and the vigor with which they approach it.  Why waste time and energy tiptoeing around something that is perfectly obvious to everyone?  Why not just state the facts and move on to more important things?

"You can't possibly be serious. You actually suggest that people read Anne of Green Gables as therapy?"  gasped my good friend, and analytically oriented, therapist-colleague.

Well, of course I do. And Harry Potter and The Secret Garden, The Secret Life of Bees, Lord of the Rings, Holes, The Professor and The Housekeeper, The Invention of Wings, The Art of Mending, Tell the Wolves I'm Home and books by Louis LaMour or Lurlene McDaniel, Jane Austen or Erica Bauermeister or any author whose novels represent people whose characteristics reflect good decision-making, optimism, strength in adversity, and so on.

Recent research shows that reading literature helps people make more thoughtful decisions. And I believe it allows people of all ages to reflect on what makes people's lives turn out as they do. Video games are fun and distracting, but mostly demonstrate how fast you are at making swift, strategic, spatial decisions. They don't add much to your ability to reflect, consider, choose and act.

What my clients with depression need are templates of how to BE. How to be a person who is not depressed, how to be strong, how to accept challenges. And they need VISION. They need a vision of how things might turn out okay in the end if you try, or are persistent, or take action even if you don't feel like it. The characters in literature have some depth and their stories involve hard decisions carried out in challenging circumstances. Novels make for good distraction, high involvement and entertainment, but they also are working on your brain in important ways.

The act of reading itself is a help. Reading activates your brain to visualize what is happening, it arouses your emotions (to manageable levels) when you have been feeling flat. Reading pushes you to think ahead and imagine outcomes and then see those outcomes tested out against the author's vision. You are using a lot of your brain to do that. A good novel will play in your mind even when you are not reading it, arousing empathy for the protagonist and perhaps even for the characters who display weakness or whose flaws prevent them from success. Now you are getting your depressed brain going!

The content of the novel can encourage you. If you are depressed while reading about the struggles of a character you identify with in some way, you can see the benefits of acting from your strengths and values even when you do not feel like it. The encouragement and bolstering of reading these kinds of stories stirs hope, an oft-missing feeling in a depressed person. That activation of circuits in your brain for encouragement and bravey can open your eyes to new options for your own life.

When I felt at the nadir of my life, reading Anne of Green Gables was full of unbearable tension. (I know, I know. If you have read the series you are asking yourself "What unbearable tension?" But I was not in good shape emotionally, and I felt my anxiety rise as I read, fearing her blunders would result in disasters. It is the way anxious misery affects one's perspective.) But reading these novels, seeing how Anne's need for "scope for the imagination" led to mistakes but also triumphs, helped me feel calmer, more optimistic, and distracted from my own anxieties and depressed mood. Other novels helped. Books by Louis LaMour were distractions and never raised the tension too high because his good, honest men of valor won over the bad guys every day. Lurlene McDaniel's characters faced even death and dying with character and everyone learned from their struggles. Jane Austen's writing encouraged patience in trouble and the significance of good character. Harry Potter was never perfect but kept on being true to his nature to be caring for others but also brave and determined and accepting responsibility. This could also be said for the Hobbit in The Lord of the Rings who was flawed but courageous. I could list endless choices here for people of different ages and genders (or for readers like me who read everything) like Jodi Picault, Sue Monk Kidd, or for those who are more interested in action there is Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan series or Lee Child's Jack Reacher series or the much briefer Spenser series by Robert Parker. I could go on.

This contribution of literature should not be ignored by people who are depressed. I realize that in our techno culture people are reading less, but that should not mean we do not suggest novels to people of every age. Reading can be done by listening to the novels. I will talk about using movies in my next blog: the great benefit of techno culture is entwining some of the value of novels with the ease and entertainment of watching a movie.

When I was researching for Blood & Ghosts, I looked at several Internet reports about the ghostly visitations of serial killers. Ted Bundy was one of them. Then I was writing Haunted Crime Scenes and I came across a more recent story.

To reiterate, just before his execution in January 1989, Bundy confessed to killing at least 30 young women in six states, and hinted at more. Charismatic and charming, he exploited every trick he could think of to prevent his execution in Florida’s electric chair, including giving interview opportunities to several people whom he believed would see the value in keeping him alive.

However, no effort saved him, not even his promise to provide even more victim names and locations. He was executed. But apparently, he didn’t go away, according to reports from the Florida State prison where he spent his final days

As I had mentioned before, in 2001, a guard told a reporter under conditions of anonymity that shortly after Bundy was put to death, several guards claimed to have seen his ghost sitting casually on the electric chair. He smiled knowingly, as if he now knew something about the afterlife that they didn’t. If a guard tried to approach him, he’d disappear.

The man telling the story said there were so many sightings at one point that the warden couldn’t find anyone willing to enter the execution chamber alone. I don’t know if the reporter tried to corroborate this by asking the warden. (I would have.)

However, some reports claimed that the warden had said that anyone who spreads stories about Bundy’s ghost will be fired. So, I guess there’s no need for a reporter's follow-up call. (Supposedly, some guards quit, anyway, rather than face the deceased killer.)

Bundy supposedly also showed up around his holding cell on death row. To some guards, he’d say, “Well, I beat all of you, didn’t I?” Presumably, he meant he’d beaten them to the “other side.”

The guards’ stories are intriguing because Bundy was quite overcome when led to his execution. One witness described his profuse sweating and faltering steps. Why, then, would he show up in the place that had so disturbed him? Some ghost hunters believe that strong emotion can glue a spirit in place.

Bundy’s remains were cremated and, at his request, scattered in the mountainous wilderness in Washington State.

Then in May 2013, a report was published about Bundy’s ghost showing up again. This time, the tale came from an inmate and it was repeated in quite a few publications.

“It would appear that the ghost of Ted Bundy is once again showing up at the Florida State Prison in Raiford, Florida (now known as Union Correctional Institution) according to a current inmate at the facility.”

Here’s what he said: “For many years I heard the rumors of Ted Bundy’s ghost appearing and didn’t believe it. Now, my mind has changed. I and other residents (including staff) have witnessed the ghost on many occasions. It is definitely Bundy. It comes in the early morning before dawn in our housing unit and in different cells. He’s always smiling. It’s a white-blue mist but very detailed. Some of the other residents claim to hear him talking. I have not heard that yet.”

This correspondent also asks how to get rid of Bundy's presence.

Supposedly, Ted has invited some former buddies to hang out, as reports of other ghosts have also emerged. Why does this remind me of one of my favorite ghost movies, Truly, Madly, Deeply?

Anyway, I await further reports.