NLPhilia Blog

Four placebo pills a day work better than two. Blue placebo pills are superior at improving sleep; you’ll want green placebo pills for reducing anxiety. But placebo capsules beat placebo pills—and placebo injections were even better. Oh, and expensive, brand-name placebos beat cheap generic ones. Huh? Why would the method of administration make such a difference when the (inactive) substance delivered was always the same? And the craziest result of all? Placebos even worked when they were “open label” placebos—yes, you could tell people that the fake medication was fake and they’d still feel better.

This Is How To Have A Long Awesome Life

When you combine Pattern Interruption with High-Stakes Decision-Making, you get this:

Dr. Jordan Peterson on propulsion systems.

NLPers have been saying for decades that you can change your internal experience by way of interruption. Science is catching up.

A new study shows that distractions might change our perception of what’s real, making us believe we saw something different from what we actually saw.

Distractions Can Change Perceptions of What is Real

There’s some suspicion among researchers that pacing of behavior is associated with a feeling of closeness and trust, and that it makes it easier for people to talk with one another. Have you ever heard of such an idea?

The UK-based Centre for Research and Evidence on Security Threats (CREST) is currently funding Ph.D.-level research into “nonverbal mimicry.”

My research aims to find out whether it is possible that if the interviewer was properly trained in mimicry they could use it as an information elicitation technique.

By the end of 2019 I will have completed the first experimental study of my PhD. Results of this study will illuminate whether nonverbal mimicry does increase according to relationship closeness. I will then be carrying out my second study, based entirely on the outcome of study one.

Is nonverbal mimicry an important tool in eliciting information?

Those of us with a fascination for the “P” in “NLP” may be delighted to learn that Maslow’s Pyramid of Needs has been updated to reflect the past 50-ish years of research.

The research team – which included Vladas Griskevicius of the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, and Mark Schaller of the University of British Columbia, Vancouver – restructured the famous pyramid after observing how psychological processes radically change in response to evolutionarily fundamental motives, such as self-protection, mating or status concerns.

The bottom four levels of the new pyramid are highly compatible with Maslow’s, but big changes are at the top. Perhaps the most controversial modification is that self-actualization no longer appears on the pyramid at all.

What do you think? Will you stop striving for self-actualization just because a group of psychologists says you no longer need it? Does the new pyramid make more sense?

Yet another “NLP was here first” example. I saw this on a trivia buff’s blog, “Futility Closet:”

In 2008, researchers at Oxford University found that subjects could reduce pain and swelling in an injured hand by viewing it through reversed binoculars.

Conversely, a magnified injury was more painful. “If it looks bigger, it looks sorer,” said physiologist G. Lorimer Moseley. “Therefore the brain acts to protect it.”

A judicious Googling led me to the pertinent issue of Current Biology online. On the right-hand side of that page, there are links to PDF and HTML versions of the article.

We have yet another “NLP said it first” moment in an article in a recent issue of the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology:

A new study underscores the benefit of receiving cognitive behavioral therapy CBT from a competent therapist who follows the guidelines for delivering CBT.

Prior studies have shown that while cognitive therapy is an effective treatment for depression, a clear understanding of the role therapists’ training and expertise plays in making treatment successful was unknown.

The new study suggests therapist competence may be a particularly important determinant of outcome for some patients.

I’ve heard this from my trainers from my first training with Richard in 1997. How is it that Psychology takes so long to catch up to NLP?

Go read the rest at Therapist Competency Important for Treatment Success on Psych Central.

I’m a bit of a money geek. Not too crazy, but I like to keep an eye on what I have. So I read a couple of personal finance blogs. Recently, Monevator had an article titled, “Keep It Simple, Stupid,” and it pointed me to an interesting group of articles of interest to implicit modelers:

Appearing this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the mystery of overimitation has been a long-standing one in developmental psychology. How is it that young children, who are able to learn and reason in so many impressively agile ways, can be utterly stumped by something as simple as the transparent Puzzle Box shown above? Specifically, when kids see an adult getting a prize out of that box in a way that adults — and even chimpanzees — can easily identify as clumsy and inefficient, they seem to lose the ability to figure out how to open the box “correctly”. Watching an adult doing it wrong, in other words, effectively blocks children from figuring out how to do it right. Children become stuck overimitating — or copying the adult’s wasteful strategy, even when doing so leads to bad outcomes.

We humans are too smart for our own good, and make things harder than they need to be. There’s nothing particularly revolutionary in discovering that. But I hadn’t heard of “overimitating” before. I’d heard that implicit modeling is the way we all do it from birth; it’s the way babies learn practically everything. At the same time, we forget how long it takes for babies to get it right. We don’t want to take seven to eight years to, say, learn a language… we want to hold a coherent conversation in a few weeks.

It’s important, then, when we model by imitation, to remember to take the model apart and find out what needs to be there and what doesn’t. We don’t want to have to tap stuff with a feather just because that’s how we learned to do it.

Read it all at The Mystery of Overimitation over at Hello Felix, a childhood development blog for parents.

We’ve intuited for ages that faces reflect personalities, and that we can “tell just by looking at them” what a person is really like. Some new research is bearing out our intuition, at least in the domain of aggression:

Volunteers viewed photographs of faces of men for whom aggressive behavior was previously assessed in the lab. The volunteers rated how aggressive they thought each person was on a scale of one to seven after viewing each face for either 2000 milliseconds or 39 milliseconds.

The photographs were very revealing: Volunteers’ estimates of aggression correlated highly with the actual aggressive behavior of the faces viewed, even if they saw the picture for only 39 milliseconds.

Facial Features May Predict Volatility is on Psych Central.