Psychology

Eric Barker writes Barking Up the Wrong Tree.

What can we do to cure boredom?

The quickest and easiest way is to change your context.

If you’re alone, it’s pretty straightforward: get up, go out, see friends, put yourself in a new situation where you have less control over your environment and things will stimulate you.

But there are a lot of areas where boredom seems tougher to deal with: relationships, work, etc.

Boring Relationship?

In the context of a relationship, stop thinking about you or your partner. Again, change your context. Don’t get dinner or drinks and talk. That relies on you two to be interesting. Go somewhere that’s already fun.

Doing thrilling stuff is the key to a fantastic first date. Roller coasters.Horror movies or suspense films.

And if you are just talking, stop playing it so safe. The best questions to ask on a first date are offbeat and fun. It’s better to talk about STD’s and abortions than the weather.

What kills most long-term relationships? A lack of excitement. The research points again and again to how important thrills are:

1. What reignited passion in long term marriages? Doing exciting things together.
2. Think a pleasant evening is all it takes? Researchers did a 10 week study comparing couples that engaged in “pleasant” activities vs “exciting” activities. Pleasant lost.
3. What can improve the sex in a relationship? Try a roller coaster together. Anything that stimulates your central nervous system also gets you going sexually.
4. Why would doing anything exciting have such a big effect on a relationship? Because we’re lousy about realizing where our feelings are coming from. Excitement from any source will be associated with the person you’re with, even if they’re not the cause of it.

Bored At Work?

What about at work? Work can be boring and you can’t change the context as much. Very true and this is a serious issue: a boring job can kill you.

The key to fighting boredom at the office is not excitement, it’s finding meaning in what you do. Broadening the definition of what it is you are doing, seeing it as a mission or calling, and feeling you are making a difference can make you happier, more fulfilled and less bored.

What if YOU are boring?

What if you’re boring? People who bore others are often self-indulgent — they just talk about what interests them. We all fall prey to this on occasion.

The best lesson here is from Steven Pressfield’s advice on improving writing: keep in mind that nobody wants to read your stuff. So keep things simple and always have the audience in mind.

What about chores that are undeniably boring?

If you have to do tasks that are boring and there’s no two ways about it, don’t take a break:

You may think that taking a break during an irritating or boring experience will be good for you, but a break actually decreases your ability to adapt, making the experience seem worse when you have to return to it. When cleaning your house or doing your taxes, the trick is to stick with it until you are done.

What about when other people are boring you?

At least in some situations, don’t be afraid to let your mind wander. Especially on the phone, research shows that people actually like us better when we’re distracted: we’re less negative, less complex and more personal in our speech. We also encourage the other person to talk more.

This piece originally appeared on Barking Up the Wrong Tree.

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What assumptions are you making based on incomplete information?

Answer by Heather Spruill on Quora.

When you’re not calm, you’re reacting. More specifically, you’re reacting to something that touches on fear or insecurity (worried about something bad or defending your ego), and that’s slipping in ahead of your logical thoughts.

That’s a thought habit. You do it because you’ve been doing it, and you can change it with some mindfulness — it’s easier with a little help from a friend or confidant, if one is available.

The hardest part is learning to stop yourself BEFORE you get jammed up. There’s an opportunity to tap the breaks when distressing things arise, and you need to pay attention and look for it. Practice “taking a step back” and thinking about what’s happening in your head vs. what’s actually happening in the world.

There are two types of situations that commonly result in unproductive excitement:

• Getting confronted when you aren’t prepared
• Anticipating something with an uncertain outcome

The first situation, confrontation, takes discipline and practice. You need to do some mental work ahead of time so that you’re better prepared for the next experience — that means reviewing past experiences and dissecting them so that you have more tools ready to handle the next surprise/uncomfortable conversation/etc.

The second, anticipation, is something you can work through as it happens once you get some basic ideas worked out.

Here’s what to think about:

What’s happening in your head?
Are you afraid of a particular poor outcome? Humiliation? Loss? Pain? The unknown? Loss of control? Something burdensome or annoying? Bad news?

What is it that you’re really worried about? How likely is that outcome? How bad would it be really? What’s the worst thing that can happen? How likely is it to go in that direction? So what if it did? How bad is that really?

In your mind, the stakes might automatically be set at “disastrously high” — is that accurate, though?

What’s actually happening in the world?
The other person isn’t a complete unknown. What are they looking for? What are they responding to? What do they need? f they’re mad or intense, what will help them feel less upset? Do they need you to listen? To act? To apologize? To reassure them? To take them seriously?

What assumptions are you making based on incomplete data? We often assign personal meaning to things that have no implications for us personally, or assume that a particular outcome necessarily follows something that’s really not strongly correlated. Challenge those assumptions. It’s not easy, which makes it helpful to have a calm friend to help you keep things at arm’s length. What’s really happening? What does it really mean?

Meanwhile — what can you do to make things less fraught? Recognizing you’re upset/un-calm lets you re-negotiate the circumstances.

• Ask for time, ask for space.
• Communicate ahead of time to let people you work closely with know that for you, having the information in advance and having a chance to review (rather than just springing an ad hoc discussion on you) it will make meetings more productive, if that’s true for you.
• Have words ready to de-escalate tense situations. Try to remove emotional language and accusatory statements from your tool box.
• Stay on what’s real without immediately leaping to what the implications are (or might be) when you’re discussing things.
• Have questions ready to re-focus things in productive directions.
• Stay aware of how you’re feeling and what your body language is telling the other person and yourself. Your tension can compound when you feel yourself tensing up physically — concentrate on neutralizing your posture, relaxing your shoulders, avoid leaning forward, and open your hands.

This question originally appeared on Quora: How can I stay calm in difficult situations?

Eric Barker writes Barking Up the Wrong Tree.

Know it or not, you often decide whether or not to trust someone based on crazy reasons. How attractive someone is, whether they’re the same gender as you are, whether someone blushes, and the state of your ever-changing mood all affect whether you trust somebody.

In some situations you trust people more just because they have a beard:

…male politicians might want to consider not shaving because the “presence of a beard on the face of candidates could boost their charisma, reliability, and above all their expertise as perceived by voters, with positive effects on voting intention.”

You make up your mind about someone in 100 milliseconds.

Yeah, read it again: 100 milliseconds. What happens when you’re given additional time? You become more convinced you’re right:

Judgments made after a 100-ms exposure correlated highly with judgments made in the absence of time constraints, suggesting that this exposure time was sufficient for participants to form an impression. In fact, for all judgments—attractiveness, likeability, trustworthiness, competence, and aggressiveness—increased exposure time did not significantly increase the correlations… additional time may simply boost confidence in judgments.

And what quality do you value in a friend more than any other? You guessed it: trustworthiness.

What’s the reason most people cite for wanting to leave their job? Not trusting their employer.

And maybe you’re right to be wary. Most people do violate the trust of even close friends:

“60 percent of people confessed to sharing even their best friends’ secrets with a third party.”

Research shows that in life-or-death situations, you can probably forget about all that better-angels-of-our-nature stuff. It’s pretty much every man for himself.
But is that the best way to live? Probably not if you want a long, enjoyable life.

People who give others the benefit of the doubt are both happier and healthier. In fact, high-trusters are actually better at lie detection:

…high trusters were significantly better than low trusters were at detecting lies. This finding extends a growing body of theoretical and empirical work suggesting that high trusters are far from foolish Pollyannas and that low trusters’ defensiveness incurs significant costs.

Expecting others to be selfish can be a self-fulfliing prophecy:

The expectations people have about how others will behave play a large role in determining whether people cooperate with each other or not… One’s own expectation thereby becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: those who expect people to act selfishly, actually experience uncooperative behaviour from others more often.

And cynicism can lead to a downward spiral:

When people trust others, they painfully learn when other people prove to be untrustworthy; however, when people refrain from trusting others, they fail to learn of instances when the other person would have honored their trust.

Think that people are poor because they trust too much and the wealthy get their money by duplicity? Actually, being skeptical of people’s motives isn’t the path to riches:

People were asked how much they trust others on a scale of 1 to 10. Income peaked at those who responded with the number 8.

Those with the highest levels of trust had incomes 7% lower than the 8’s. Research shows they are more likely to be taken advantage of.

Those with the lowest levels of trust had an income 14.5% lower than 8’s. That loss is the equivalent of not going to college. They missed many opportunities by not trusting.

Clearly, on average, it’s better to trust too much than too little, even from a financial perspective.

Okay, but does this mean trust everyone? How do you pick?

You can tell Nobel Peace Prize winners from America’s Most Wanted at a rate much better than chance. More often than not for first impressions, you can trust your gut:

Estimates were significantly better than chance, indicating that individuals can identify permanent altruistic traits in others.

But how does this affect how you should handle relationships?

Oddly enough, nothing worked better than good ol’ tit-for-tat:

A tit-for-tat strategy plays the iterated prisoners’ dilemma game by cooperating on the first move, and then making the same choice as the other player did on the previous move. This strategy has been shown to be a very robust in that it does well with a wide variety of other strategies, provided that there is a sufficiently large chance that the same players will meet again.

That old rule we all know turned out to be incredibly robust. All it required was imitating the other player’s last move. If they’re cooperative, you cooperate. If they screw you, you screw them back.

Robert Axelrod, who documented the findings in his book, The Evolution of Cooperation, explained what we can learn from the findings:

“Tit-for-tat won the tournament, not by beating the other player, but by eliciting from the other player behavior that allowed both to do well.”

At least in the Prisoner’s Dilemma game, “doing unto others as they do unto you” may not put you ahead, but with time it educates others that, all other things being equal, it’s clearly more profitable to work with you than not.

So…

All things being equal, trust people or at least trust your gut. Early in ongoing relationships, consider tit-for-tat.

This piece originally appeared on Barking Up the Wrong Tree.

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"I learned there were things I couldn't do on my own"

Answer by John McCain, United States Senator and author of Thirteen Soldiers: A Personal History of Americans at War, on Quora.

That’s not a question I can answer briefly. So, I won’t really try. I wrote a book, Faith of My Fathers, which gave the experience the space I needed to describe all my thoughts about it. Suffice it to say, it was a mostly terrible experience but not all of it. I hated it, and yet I made some of the most important discoveries and relationships of my life in prison.

I was treated poorly by my captors, but not as poorly as they treated other POWs, and the treatment improved as the years passed, though it never met Geneva Convention standards.

My contact with the outside world was pretty much limited to conversations with new prisoners, who would bring the old timers up to date on world events. Otherwise, we were stuck with Hanoi Hannah’s propaganda broadcast for news, which for all her enthusiasm wasn’t exactly fair and balanced.

I adjusted instantly to life after prison. It was nothing but a pleasure to get used to the freedoms and conveniences of American life again. My experiences in Vietnam didn’t change me as dramatically as you might think they would or as much as some people probably wish they would have. I learned two big things though. I learned I wasn’t as strong as I thought I was, but I was strong enough. And I learned there were things I couldn’t do on my own, but that nothing is as liberating as fighting for a cause that’s bigger than yourself.

This question originally appeared on Quora: What is it like to be a prisoner of war?

Eric Barker writes Barking Up the Wrong Tree.

First impressions matter even more than you think. They’re the most important part of any job interview. And once they’re set, they are very hard to resist. Optimize first impressions from the outset by framing the conversation with a few well-rehearsed sentences regarding how you want to be perceived. This will end up being the structure the other person forms their memories around.

Your handshake, body language and appearance all matter. In fact, the weather matters.

If you have the option, schedule it earlier in the day. People prefer things that are first and are more likely to say “yes” to things when they don’t have a lot of things going on.

Getting the interviewer to explain why they wanted to bring you in is a good persuasion technique.

A course that was successful in making managers more charismatic focused on these techniques:

• framing through metaphor-stories and anecdotes
• demonstrating moral conviction
• sharing the sentiments of the collective
• setting high expectations
• communicating confidence
• using rhetorical devices such as contrasts, lists, and rhetorical questions together with non-verbal tactics such as body gesture, facial expression, and animated voice tone.

Finally, don’t get too stressed out. People who have no job are happier than people with a job they don’t like.

This piece originally appeared on Barking Up the Wrong Tree.

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What if, for 18 years, millions of people have been snarking Zellweger's face, and she thought she ought to do something about that?

This story originally appeared on xoJane.com.

How many times do you have to hear something in order to believe it’s true? How often do you need to be told something about yourself before you internalize it and accept it part of your identity, part of your fundamental being?

After her appearance at the ELLE 2014 Women in Hollywood awards, everyone (well, everyone who hadn’t kicked it off the night before on Twitter) started talking about Renée Zellweger. The commentary was largely of the “that is NOT Renée Zellweger” variety, though some of it has finally veered into the “leave Renée Zellweger alone” territory.

There is one theory — that this “new look” (it’s not really new, reports of her face looking very different started cropping up last year though reports in general might be exaggerated: our own Jane saw her repeatedly in person and never noticed a difference) is down to the pressure placed on women (particularly famous women) to always present a youthful face. Plastic surgery is, the Washington Post posits, only a problem when people get caught having it but they are most assuredly having it. They seem to think Zellweger was fighting the onset of age, trying to look young and glam even as photos get more and more high def. The Guardian rightfully points out that there is nothing wrong with her face — there is only something wrong with a public who feels entitled to effortless beauty.

I am not entirely convinced by that, though.

Jerry Maguire came out in 1996 and was the ninth top-grossing film of the year. It was nominated for five Academy Awards, three Golden Globes and three Screen Actors Guild Awards. It was also Zellweger’s breakout role — and it was the first time a lot of people were totally smitten by her face.

Bridget Jones’s Diary came out in 2001. I was dragged to the movie by some friends who loved the book (I did not love the book) and I was surprised by how delightful Zellweger was — by how sympathetic I found her character to be. There was so much earnest good intention combined with bad decisions, and it was all there in that distinctive face.

Her face was distinctive then, yeah — and what people seem to be conveniently glossing over now is how often Zellweger was the subject of truly cruel commentary.

I could list a lot of things that people have said about Zellweger’s face. I suspect you’ve heard or read most of them though — possibly even said some of them yourself with varying degrees of appreciation. I’d rather not have this be one more place where those critical adjectives get applied.

It’s been 18 years since Jerry Maguire brought the world’s attention to Zellweger and her uncommon face (uncommon in Hollywood, at least). Maybe it really is, as the WP says, about a fear of aging. But what if it isn’t?

What if, for 18 years, millions of people have been insulting Zellweger’s face and telling her she ought to do something about that?

If that’s the case, then it’s basically the Internet’s fault that things have come to this. (And the extent of “this” probably isn’t even as severe as wild Internet speculation spread around. None of us actually know and guessing is just as insulting as all the current insults.)

The Atlantic ended their weirdly invasive questions to Zellweger with a quote from Bridget Jones’s Diary about liking her just the way she was. And obviously she is a movie star so her face had appeal to lots of people.

But as a mainstream American culture, we seem to lack any degree of empathy for our stars — we love to watch them fall, right? And I can’t help but think about the power of being told over and over and over again that some part of you is hideous, that some part of you is flawed.

When I was in high school, a nerdy kid fresh back from Thailand, I was pretty sure that I was fatter than my peers but I wasn’t really worried about it. My thighs rubbed together a little bit and my grandmother took me to shop at Cato’s and the plus-size department of K-Mart. But people kept telling me I was fat all the time — family members and a couple of boys at school and some “well-meaning” adults.

Even though no one came right out and said that I was going to die alone and unloved (mostly because there was no such thing as Internet trolls yet to fill that gaping need in my life), the subtext was clear. Why would I be encouraged to work so hard not to be fat if it weren’t going to ruin everything that was good in life?

It was confusing because I didn’t hate my body then — but I tried to be better and thinner and prettier because I wanted my family to be happier with me. I wanted them to feel like I was worth loving. And, slowly, they convinced me. Eventually, I felt like a monster.

I hated my body — and by extension, my self — because I learned that I was supposed to; there was no other option. No one was there to tell me that there were alternatives. Instead, everyone was there to reward me for hiding in baggy jeans and skipping meals.

There is some fairly basic psychology going on here: bad stuff almost always makes for a stronger memory than the good stuff. This is why negativity bias is a thing. If enough trusted people tell you that you’re a hideous beast who can’t be seen in the light of day, it’s really hard not to internalize that message.

Even if you manage to fight some of it off, you’ve used up a lot of your energy — you have put all of your efforts into defending yourself, and then there isn’t anything left for building yourself back up.

At the end of the day, Zellweger has the same body autonomy that anyone else does. She gets to make her choices for her own reasons. Anyone saying she made a mistake really ought to sit down — Zellweger is the only one who can judge that (and here is your obligatory Jennifer Grey link).

But the people offering constant commentary on her face (and also her body because she’s often been targeted by people who want to call her fat and make fun of her) have created the environment and atmosphere in which Zellweger made her choice.

No man is an island, no one lives in a vacuum, all that philosophical claptrap. We are all connected and there is no such thing as being completely unaffected by the weight of that much public commentary.

Every individual I know who is into snark (and there is no denying that has become part of our entertainment culture) defends it as being just for fun. It’s suggested that people simply ought to grow a thicker skin.

I disagree. I think snark, especially on a cultural level, is actively damaging. I think it tells people, over and over again, that they are monstrous — for whatever reason — until that idea is inescapable.

How many times do you have to hear something about yourself before you believe it? I look back at pictures of me in high school. I was, in fact, fatter than my peers. But the person I was taught to see in the mirror is not in the few photographs I have from that time period. There is no monster in those photos.

There’s just a body that I learned to hate because I believed what I was taught.

And, hey, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe Zellweger’s wide-eyed gaze has nothing to do with the incessant caricaturing of her signature (adorable) grin. But even so, I hope that we, as the collective Internet, think for a moment about how responsible we are for teaching people what to see in the mirror.

And I hope Zellweger is happy with what she sees, no matter what.

Marianne Kirby is a Weekend Editor at xoJane.com.

Eric Barker writes Barking Up the Wrong Tree.

Trick question. Don’t blame. It makes you less able to deal with the problems of life.

Via The Blame Game: How the Hidden Rules of Credit and Blame Determine Our Success or Failure:

A study conducted by Harvard Medical School psychiatrist George Valliant showed that people who “projected,” or blamed others for their misfortunes, were much less able to adjust to the changing events in their lives… In another study, conducted by psychiatrist Leslie Phillips at Worcester State Hospital, it was found that the more people fell into the pattern of blaming others for their problems, the worse off they became in dealing with their life in general.

Blaming others can actually make you physically ill. And it makes you miserable:

…divorced individuals in the study who blamed ex-spouses, or even themselves, had more anxiety, depression and sleep disorders than individuals who blamed the way that they and their partners interacted.

Blaming external factors is even bad for corporations.

Via The Blame Game: How the Hidden Rules of Credit and Blame Determine Our Success or Failure:

One compelling study showed that organizations that blame themselves for their poor results actually achieve higher stock prices over the long term than those that blame external factors. The researchers studied 655 annual reports issued by fourteen public companies over a twenty-one-year period spanning from 1975 to 1995…

And, sadly, blaming is contagious.

Stop Blaming Yourself

Yes, you want to learn from mistakes but turns out punishing yourself has a lot of negative consequences. Forgiving yourself can help you reduce procrastination, increase creativity, and, ironically, even increase self-control.

Via The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do To Get More of It:

Study after study shows that self-criticism is consistently associated with less motivation and worse self-control. It is also one of the single biggest predictors of depression, which drains both “I will” power and “I want” power. In contrast, self-compassion— being supportive and kind to yourself, especially in the face of stress and failure— is associated with more motivation and better self-control.

Forgiveness, not guilt, increases accountability.

Via The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do To Get More of It:

Surprisingly, it’s forgiveness, not guilt, that increases accountability. Researchers have found that taking a self-compassionate point of view on a personal failure makes people more likely to take personal responsibility for the failure than when they take a self-critical point of view. They also are more willing to receive feedback and advice from others, and more likely to learn from the experience.

Resisting blame makes you more productive and happier.

Via The Winner’s Brain: 8 Strategies Great Minds Use to Achieve Success:

A study conducted in Diego’s Pizzagalli’s Harvard-based Affective Neuroscience Laboratory suggests that those who tolerate mistakes show lower activity in the anterior cingulate cortex — the part of the brain that is responsible for monitoring conflicts among different brain signals and that processes the significance of emotional events — and are able to move on to the next task far more easily than those who don’t tolerate their mistakes very well. In fact, those who become overly upset by the errors they make — i.e., failures — may experience more symptoms of anxiety and depression than others.

How can we resist the urge to blame?

When you want to blame yourself, try to find a benefit in the failure.

Via The Winner’s Brain: 8 Strategies Great Minds Use to Achieve Success:

Reframe a failure to find the benefit, even if it’s just a tiny nugget… Sarah Banks and colleagues have provided fMRI evidence that this act of consciously putting a positive spin on things actually changes brain activity patterns, specifically by engaging areas of the prefrontal cortex, which in turn dampens the response from the amygdalae. Consummate reformers like Wyeth and Meili seem able to tame their amygdalae, and thus negative thoughts, in order to translate even the most difficult circumstances into an affirmative challenge.

Learn from it and move on. Experts don’t waste time with blame. They see what they’re doing wrong and use it as information to improve. Via The Talent Code: Greatness Isn’t Born. It’s Grown. Here’s How:

“Our predictions were extremely accurate,” Zimmerman said. “This showed that experts practice differently and far more strategically. When they fail, they don’t blame it on luck or themselves. They have a strategy they can fix.”

Admitting error and using it to get better is a sign of a great team.

Via The Blame Game: How the Hidden Rules of Credit and Blame Determine Our Success or Failure:

What surprised Edmondson and her fellow researchers was that

 

What surprised Edmondson and her fellow researchers was thatthe most cohesive and best-led medical teams and institutions actually reported more errors than their counterparts… the higher-functioning teams were more willing to disclose their errors and, therefore, to learn from and avoid repeating them.

Eric Barker writes Barking Up the Wrong Tree.

In her book Counterclockwise, Harvard professor Ellen Langer recounts a groundbreaking study she did in 1979 that has since become the stuff of legend.

She took a group of male research subjects in their 70s and 80s on a retreat. The environment had been manipulated to make it seem as if it were 20 years prior.

The residents were all aware of the real year, but being immersed in the world of 1959 and encouraged to act as if they were younger men had powerful effects on them:

The experimental group showed greater improvement on joint flexibility, finger length (their arthritis diminished, and they were able to straighten their fingers more) and manual dexterity. On intelligence tests, 63% of the experimental group improved their scores, compared to only 44% of the control group. There were also improvements in height, weight, gait and posture. Finally, we asked people unaware of the study’s purpose to compare photos taken of the participants at the end of the week with those submitted at the beginning of the study. Those objective observers judged that all of the experimental participants looked noticeably younger at the end of the study.

Other research shows that people who held positive beliefs about getting older lived 7.5 years longer and were healthier.

Women who dye their hair not only report feeling younger, but also their blood pressure drops and they are rated as looking younger in photos — photos where their hair is cropped out.

“Will to live” has been shown to make a difference in when you die.

Langer cites studies showing that women with younger spouses live longer and those with older spouses die younger. How we think about aging affects how we age:

The psychologist Bernice Neugarten suggested that we are deeply influenced by “social clocks” that we gauge our lives by the implicit belief that is a “right age” for certain behaviors or attitudes.

Our mind may have more control over our body than we think. Processes we long believed to be out of our control, like heart rate and blood pressure, proved not to be.

Via Counterclockwise:

In 1961, Yale psychologist Neal Miller suggested that the autonomic nervous system, which controls blood pressure and heart rate, could be trained just like a voluntary system, which allows us to raise and lower our arm and other deliberate acts. His suggestion was met with a great deal of skepticism. Everyone knew that the autonomic nervous system was just that, autonomous and beyond our control. Yet his subsequent work on biofeedback — which makes autonomic processes such as heart rate visible by hooking people up to monitors — found that people could be taught to control them.

Radiolab did an amazing piece explaining how exhaustion is more in the mind than the body and how athletes manipulate this to complete marathons and Ironman competitions.

How strong is the power of belief in our lives? Can we make our lives better by changing what we believe?

Placebo Effect

We’ve all heard of the placebo effect. If I give you a sugar pill and tell you it’ll improve X, X often improves just because you believe the pill is working.

The placebo effect means that voodoo curses really can kill you, Axe body spray can make men sexier, and fake steroids can make you stronger. What’s truly amazing is that the placebo effect can work even when you know it’s a placebo.

The placebo effect might even have a role in exercise and health. Four weeks after being told their efforts at work qualified as exercise, female research subjects had lost weight and were healthier compared with a control group. Researchers speculate that believing something is exercise may make it have the results of exercise.

In Counterclockwise Langer cites studies that showed that when a medical therapy was believed in, it was 70% to 90% effective but only 30% to 40% effective when the patient was skeptical. Subjects exposed to fake poison ivy developed rashes, and fake caffeine spiked heart rate and motor performance.

Priming

Priming is when you’re unconsciously influenced by a concept and it affects how you behave.

There has been a torrent of priming studies in recent years showing just how much words and ideas in our environment can affect how we act:

• Thinking about old people can make you drive slower.
• Seeing superheroes can make you stronger.
• Seeing the Apple logo can make you more creative.
• You often embody the traits associated with the clothes you wear.
• Watching TV shows about stupid people can temporarily reduce your IQ.

And these aren’t just theoretical. They can be used to improve performance.

Being primed to feel happy before a challenge can make us perform better. Thinking about college professors before a test can get you a better grade.

Overconfidence

I’ve posted before about the multitude of benefits a little delusion can offer:

• People with positive illusions about their relationship are more satisfied, score higher on love and trust and have fewer problems.

• “People who were unrealistically idealistic about their partners when they got married were more satisfied with their marriage three years later than less idealistic people.”

• Irrational overconfidence increases productivity and improves teamwork.

• “Self-deception has been associated with stress reduction, a positive self-bias and increased pain tolerance, all of which could enhance motivation and performance during competitive tasks.“

• Superstition can be performance enhancing. This is why someone wishing you luck can actually make you do better because it increases confidence.

Optimism

Just believing you can become smarter and can become a better negotiator have both been shown to increase improvement.

Optimism is associated with better health and a longer life. It can make you happier. The Army teaches soldiers to be optimistic because it makes them tougher and more resourceful. Hope predicts academic achievement better than intelligence, personality or previous grades.

Being socially optimistic — expecting people to like you — makes people like you more. Expecting a positive outcome from negotiations made groups more likely to come to a deal and to be happy with it.

Dangers of Too Much Belief

Being totally delusional, paranoid or believing in things that are patently untrue is obviously not good. I’m not recommending that.

Optimism can blind us. The happiest people and the most trusting people both had suboptimal outcomes. Those who think they have the most willpower are actually the most likely to give in to temptation. The reason you can predict your friends’ behavior better than they can is that we are all realistic about others’ actions and optimistic about our own. Some priming studies have been disputed.

Recommendations

So what can we do to improve our lives with belief? Here are a few suggestions:

• Manipulate your context to feel younger and feel better. You don’t need to make it look like 1959, but don’t act as if your surroundings don’t matter.

• Try priming yourself to improve performance.

• Moderate overconfidence is beneficial.

• Good-luck charms and placebos can help. A little magic can be scientifically sound.

• Be optimistic. Yes, pessimism softens the blow of bad news, but it isn’t worth it.

This piece originally appeared on Barking Up the Wrong Tree.

Here's the best way to calm kids' fear and anxiety over Ebola

Even Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Dr. Tom Frieden admits it: “Ebola is scary.” But for kids seeing alarming headlines without understanding the context of the disease, Ebola can seem like a looming and personal threat.

TIME spoke to Dawn Huebner, a clinical child psychologist and author of the book What to Do When You Worry Too Much: A Kid’s Guide to Overcoming Anxiety about the best way to talk about Ebola with your kids—without scaring them silly.

What should I say to my child who is really scared about Ebola?
Let them know that it’s important to think about proximity—how close they themselves are to the virus. Which is to say: not very. “It’s really important to underline that we are safe in the United States, and that people who have contracted Ebola have been in West Africa or were treating patients with Ebola,” says Huebner. “Not only should parents underline how rare Ebola is, and how far away the epidemic is occurring, but also how hard the disease is to contract.” Huebner says parents can tell their older children that direct contact with an infected person’s bodily fluids like vomit or diarrhea is necessary to spread Ebola. “This has been reassuring to the children I see, as they know they are not going to be touching that,” she says.

By ages 7 and up, kids begin to grasp that their worries and fears aren’t always rational. “Parents can talk to kids about how one of the ways worries and anxiety get their power is by making us think about things that are very unlikely,” says Huebner.

Should I keep my child away from the news?
Your kids can watch the news to stay informed, but media overload is not always a good thing. “The news is often sensationalized and gives kids the idea that they are at an imminent risk,” says Huebner. When kids see endless stories about Ebola on the news, they don’t always realize they’re hearing the same thing on loop. “I’ve had kids come into my office who are under the impression that there are hundreds of people in the U.S. with Ebola.”

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How do I know if my child is reacting appropriately to the news?
“An appropriate reaction would be to feel nervous and ask some questions, but to be reassured by the parents’ answers,” says Huebner. Psychologists distinguish between questions that are information-gathering, and questions that are reassurance-seeking. If a child asks reassurance-seeking questions—like “Are we going to be ok?”—once or twice, that’s normal. But asking the same questions over and over signifies that a child is really dealing with anxiety and that their concern is not being curbed. At that point, parents may need to sit their children down for a longer conversation to address their fears and concerns.

My kids don’t want to fly on an airplane over the holidays. How do I convince them they are safe?
It’s important to emphasize that the vacation destination is one that is safe, and not at great risk for Ebola. Parents can also stress that no one in the United States has yet contracted Ebola from a plane ride. However, parents should avoid making comparisons, like “It’s more likely to get in a car crash than to get Ebola.” That will only stress a child out more.

Ebola freaks me out too, and I accidentally overreacted in front of my child. How do I fix this?
“One of the wonderful things about children is that you really can revisit things that didn’t go so well the first time,” says Huebner. If parents slip up with an overreaction, they should have a conversation with their children and reference the moment. She suggests a conversation opener like this one: “I was thinking about when you overheard me on the phone with my friend. I was really overreacting. I got nervous when I heard about Ebola, and you saw me when I was nervous. Now I’ve gotten information and I’ve calmed down, and I’ve realized this is a very sad thing that’s happening far away. It’s sad, but it doesn’t have to be scary for us.” Rational, calm conversations will help ease a child’s fears about Ebola.

It’s a Hollywood stereotype: Men prefer to partner up with feminine-looking women, and women favor masculine men. But even when you allow for same-gender couples and variations in personal preference, plenty of research suggests that the proposition is generally true. “It’s been replicated many times across different cultures,” says Isabel Scott, a psychologist at Brunel University in Uxbridge, on the outskirts of London, “so people tend to assume it’s universal.” A new study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences challenges that thinking, however.

Historically, human studies have shown that women with more feminine faces tend to have higher estrogen levels, which are in turn associated with reproductive health. In men, the argument is that masculine-looking faces are associated with stronger immune systems—always a good thing in a mate, especially if that trait is passed on to the kids. Masculine appearance may also a sign of a dominant and aggressive personality, but our distant female ancestors might plausibly have gravitated toward these men anyway, for the sake of their children’s health.

These theories fall under the rubric of evolutionary psychology—the idea that many of our fundamental behaviors have evolved, just as our bodies did, to maximize reproductive success. But as in many cases with evolutionary psychology, it’s easier to come up with a plausible explanation than to demonstrate that it’s correct. In this case, says Scott, “the assumptions people were making weren’t crazy. They just weren’t fully tested.”

To correct that, Scott and the 21 colleagues who put together the new study used computer simulations to merge photos of men’s and women’s faces into composite, “average” faces of five different ethnicities. Then they twirled some virtual dials to make more and less masculine-looking male faces and more or less feminine female versions. (“More masculine” in this case means that they calculated the specific differences between the average man’s face and the average woman’s for each ethnicity, then exaggerated the differences. “Less masculine” means they minimized the differences. Same goes, in reverse, for the women’s faces.)

Then they showed the images to city-dwellers in several countries and also to rural populations in Malaysia, Fiji, Ecuador, Central America, Central Asia and more—a total of 962 subjects. “We asked, ‘What face is the most attractive’ and ‘What face is the most aggressive looking,'” says Scott.

The answers from urban subjects more or less confirmed the scientists’ expectations, but the others were all over the place. “This came as a big surprise to us,” Scott says. “In South America,” for example, “women preferred feminine-looking men. It was quite unexpected.”

If these preferences had an evolutionary basis, you’d expect them to be strongest in societies most similar to the ones early humans lived in. “These are clearly modern preferences, though,” Scott says, which raises the question of why they arose.

One idea, which she calls “extremely speculative at this point,” is that when you pack lots of people together, as you do in a city, stereotyping of facial characteristics might be a way of making snap judgements. “In urban settings,” she says, “you encounter far more strangers, so you have a stronger motive to figure out their personalities on zero acquaintance.”

Read next: Wide-Faced Men: Good Guys or Bad?