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Does warm weather make decision making difficult?

When you think of the affects that temperature change has on your behavior, do your decision making abilities come to mind?  According to the article Winter Weather Wakes Up Your Mind--and Warm Weather Makes it Harder to Think Straight, by Adrian F. Ward, higher temperatures impair our ability to make complex decisions and cause us to shy away from making complex decisions in the first place.  

According to one study in the article, sales for scratch tickets, which require making decisions and choosing different options, reduced with every one degree increase in temperature, while sales for lotto tickets, which require few decisions, were unaffected.  In another study, participants were asked to proofread articles in warm and cool rooms, and the participants in the warm rooms failed to notice half of the mistakes in the articles while the participants in the cool rooms only failed to notice a quarter of the mistakes. 

One of the explanations given in the article is that our bodies have to constantly regulate our internal temperature, which uses up glucose.  When we are in a warm environment and our body is trying to cool down, we use up more energy than when we are in a cool environment and are trying to warm up.  This causes less glucose to be available for our mental processes, therefore reducing our capacity to make complex decisions.  The warmer temperatures seem to deplete the resources needed for us to make decisions. 

Despite the fact that people are better able to make complex decisions in cooler temperatures, Ward notes that temperature only affects decision making when the person is subject to temperature change, because humans are able to adapt to their climate.  Just because a person may live in a warmer climate does not mean that they have difficulty making complex decisions every day. 

Do you agree that temperature change can affect our decision making abilities?  Do you think that living or working in a cooler climate gives a person an advantage in making complex decisions?  Do you have an example of a time when your decision making abilities were affected by the temperature of your environment? 

The One Story You WON'T Tell

Everyone has embarrassing stories, whether it's the time you fell down the stairs on the way to gym class, or the day you wore two different shoes to school.  Everyone likes a good laugh, too, and usually, no one has a problem with sharing their funny mishaps with others.

However, recent studies have shown that experiences that were extremely embarrassing to people are usually not told to others, as explained by Ira E. Hyman Jr., Ph.D., a professor of psychology at Western Washington University in his article, Embarrassing Memories: Sharing and Not Sharing the Self .  The article explains that in an experiment, people were asked to record their daily activities in a journal, and indicate which events the person told to other people.

The results showed that the more emotional an event was, the more likely that the event was to be shared with others.  However, although small embarrassments were told to others, people commonly said that they did not share overly embarrassing situations.  While they did share sad stories or happy events, the humiliating experiences were left out.  Although people chose not to tell others of these instances, they were not forgotten by any means.  People still remember the time they were called fat or the day they were mocked for their hair, yet they will not share the story as a means of humor.  Do we purposely avoid sharing stories we still feel humiliated by?  Why are we still bothered by some memories, even if we have grown out of an embarrassing trait?  Why do you think people can laugh about some embarrassing stories and suppress others?

Work Hard, Play Hard

"Work hard, play hard" is a phrase we hear all the time. If we do everything we're supposed to, we take all the right classes, get the right grades, perform well in our jobs, we deserve to have fun as well, right? 

Not only do we deserve this break from hard work, but this break can also benefit us in numerous ways, as Emma M. Seppala, Ph. D., describes in her article "5 Reasons to Increase Your Play in 2013". 

Taking time to play can improve our creativity. We can become locked in our own thoughts and have trouble seeing things from new perspectives after long hours of work. Mark Beeman, Ph. D., Northwestern University found that people could more easily solve a puzzle after watching a comedy clip. Having fun eases tension we may feel, and allows us to think more creatively in challenging situations. In fact, in his book Play, Stuart Brown, M.D., describes how the Jet Propulsion Lab experiences difficulty in finding young engineers of the same caliber as their predecessors. The reasoning was found to be because the retirees had engaged in analytic play and as a result the lab now questions engineering candidates about their type of play in youth. 

Google's work environment is especially conducive to creativity. 

Play can also help our health. Naturally, laughter comes with play. We have fun, we joke, we laugh. Preliminary studies have shown that along with the enjoyment that comes with laughing, laughter can also improve physical health. It can improve vascular health and decrease stress and inflammation.

Play makes us more present in our lives as well. More often than not, as we work on one task, we are thinking about a few others. According to a study done by at Harvard University, about 50% of the time we are not in the present moment. When we lose ourselves, if only for a short time, in play we can enter something research psychologist, Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, calls flow. Flow is a state of being completely in the present moment and occurs when we are entirely focused on one activity.  And because we are happiest in the present moment, play can make us happier people. When we dwell on the past, we tend to think of anger, regret, and other negative emotions. When we think of the future, we tend to worry or feel anxious. It is in the present that we can find our happiest state and it is in play that we can experience the present.

In our world of never ending to-do lists and responsibilities, it is so easy to forget to take time to let loose. Play may even be seen as immature or irresponsible in the face of things that seem more important. However, play is essential to our health, happiness, and creativity.

What do you think about the importance of play? Have there been any times where taking a break has helped improve your work? Are there any other benefits to play that you have experienced? 

Give and You Shall Receive

Everyone says that giving is better than receiving, that helping out a friend— or even a stranger—will result in happiness and a sense of satisfaction within ourselves. Of course it feels great to reach out to people, but are there actual health benefits that come with the act of giving? According to Michael J. Poulin, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Buffalo, along with researchers from other areas of the country, giving is good for your body! Poulin’s five-year study, which included the self-reporting of 423 older married couples, concluded that helping people in one’s home or community “reduces the association between stress and mortality for the helpers.” The study, which took into account the participants’ original stress levels, how much time they spent helping friends and family, as well as their various ages and health conditions, concluded that those who spent more time dedicated to lending a hand to others essentially lived longer. The study is discussed in this article.

While twenty years of studies have shown that social isolation, loneliness, and stress are often causes for physical illnesses (such as headaches, body inflammation, and problems with learning and memory), no other research has proven that providing help and reaching out in society have physically positive effects. There is evidence proving that such isolation and anxiety even leads to premature death, but no one has ever attempted to study the flip side of the coin. Not until now. The effects of stress on the body are known to be extremely severe, and Poulin has discovered how much life can change if we limit the stress, appreciate what we have, and are willing to help other people.

 Perhaps more importantly than showing the health benefits of helping, Poulin’s findings exhibit how social processes in general may influence physical health. The way we act and the choices we make in terms of interacting with other people have now been shown to play a major part in our body’s functioning. What do you think about Poulin’s findings? Have you ever thought about our emotional/social decisions playing a part on our body’s physical condition? Could you relate this study to anyone in your life?

The Unconscious Choice

It's Sunday night--you're sitting with your laptop, aimlessly scrolling through Twitter, while you should be studying for that history test you have first period tomorrow.  You begin to question how you even got in this position; what happened to your plans Friday afternoon, Saturday morning, or even a few hours ago to study?  How could you have ever come to the decision that watching five hours of Friends was more important than the Great Depression?  Well, new books by Dr. Gino, a psychology professor at Harvard, and the Heath brothers, who work at Stanford and Duke, explain how we end up in these situations.

We may not consciously be making these decisions, but there are underlying unconscious reasons that fuel these choices.  According to Gino, we are constantly bombarded with "irrational" factors that change our mindsets.  The example she gives is adding extra items to your Amazon shopping cart just to get free shipping. Then, once the object gets delivered, it gets tossed in the back of a drawer to be found on a later date.  This has happened to me multiple times, before realizing what I ordered cost me more than the price of shipping.

Maybe the reason we find ourselves wondering what was going through our minds when we decided to not study, or make any other decision that strays from our original objective, is because it was not a conscious choice, but instead a choice made behind the scenes.  As we read in Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell, we make unconscious decisions all the time, affected by the priming and other "irrational factors." Additionally, having too many decisions to make seems to be a pitfall for many, especially for those who (like IHA girls) do not even have time to think a certain decision through.  Too many influences can fall prey to outside influences, and biological science backs this.  As teenagers, our frontal lobes are still developing, and we weigh the immediate benefits of a choice more than the risk that comes with it.  So maybe that's why sitting and watching just one more episode of Friends is more appealing than getting up getting our history textbook--we forget that later we'll be in the same position as every Sunday night, wondering where the weekend went.

Emotions also come into play, and we'll blame a current choice without acknowledging how we were feeling when we made that decision. When you have a bad workout, you may blame it on the fact that you went at the wrong time or you were too sore--but you fail to acknowledge that you were in a bad mood when you go there because of a fight you had with your sister before leaving.  This same kind of thinking can come into play when we make decisions, and we blame the choices on external factors instead of the true culprit: our emotions.

So if you've been extremely productive each consecutive Sunday and cannot relate to the first example, think to any other decision you've made that's had you wonder, "What was I thinking?!"  Can you trace back that choice to how you were feeling at that moment, or other factors that could have unconsciously influenced you?  Or do you think there is a conscious aspect to this seemingly irrational decision making?

The Mindlessness of Technology

With the massive outbreaks in technological advancements we’ve seen over the last decade, many are questioning if these developments can actually be considered progress for our society; specifically, what consequences this easy access to technology can have on our children. In the article The Tech-Savvy Child, one psychologist questions the "mindfulness" that technology possibly hinders. The author, Jim Taylor, defines mindfulness as being able to engage fully in a situation and receive the full benefits out of that situation; kind of like a '"carpe diem" lifestyle, one that is often associated with happier individuals. 
It isn't too difficult to see that technology promotes the opposite of mindfulness, that being mindlessness. Technology is all about staying connected, creating a constant flow of information from the outside world, especially through texting and social media. The author argues that subjecting children to a continual stream of information keeps their focus off of the current moment and promotes an external view of themselves, meaning they lack abilities of self-examination and only understand themselves in regards to how others perceive them. This kind of stream, Taylor says, creates a hyper-vigilant and stressful state for kids, and prevents them from focusing on the present.
This "mindlessness" actually isn't very mindless; combined with an over-scheduled lifestyle, Taylor says kids rarely have the chance to be calm. In extreme circumstances, some children have trouble engaging in the present, leading to trouble with school, relationships, and even developmental milestones. Having the ability to simply let your mind wander is crucial to overall happiness, a state that only comes from being "mindful." In recent research, chemicals released in the brain when experiencing continuous connectivity are akin to those found in drug users and gamblers, suggesting a possible addiction of technology.
So, what do you think? Does technology promotes "mindlessness?" Do the ideas Taylor present resonate in your own life? Or should children be encouraged to be tech savvy in order to compete with a tech savvy world? How does technology help or hinder your own happiness and sense of self?