NLPhilia Blog

I’ve long questioned the value of pursuing and cultivating “self-esteeeeeeem”. My take on it is pretty much the same as that of author Jane Haddam: “In my day, we didn’t have self-esteem. We had self-respect, and no more of it than we had earned.”

I’d expand on this, but the blog “Violent Acres” recently did a much better job:

Remember when the hippy dippy girl with the dreads was the only one dashing off to Indonesia to ‘find herself?’ Now everyone under 30 is off searching for themselves in some misguided attempt to discover inner peace and the results are nothing to write home about. Usually, when people ‘find themselves,’ the only thing they really discover is more things to hate.

The reason for this is simple: If you’re spending all your time focusing inward, it’s pretty impossible to make a positive impact anywhere else. Self fulfillment never comes after looking in the mirror and finally realizing you’re a raging narcissist.

Go read Learning to Love Yourself is a Pointless Waste of Time at the very funny and insightful blog, Violent Acres.

Incidentally, some years back I developed a process for improving one’s self-respect. It’s really a method by which it’s discovered… that is to say, we’ve earned it and don’t realize it. I really must write it down sometime.

The American Psychological Association has a relatively recent article on lying, and it has an interesting perspective:

As humans, we are as much defined by our economy with the truth as we are by our cooperation. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing, say psychologists. Lying is a cognitive signal that people understand what others are thinking, the important cognitive milestone known as theory of mind.

Read more at Monitor on Psychology – Liar, liar, neurons fire

Psych Central News is finally helping the rest of the world catch up to a little something NLPers have known for bloody ages:

A NIMH-funded research study discovers a behavioral therapy program designed to treat children diagnosed with social phobia helped them overcome more of their symptoms than the antidepressant fluoxetine (Prozac). The study is published in the December 2007 issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.

Go to Psych Central and read more of Therapy More Effective than Medication for Kids with Social Phobia.

Here’s some cool research on subliminals:

Subliminal messages–messages that are processed by our brains but never reach our consciousness–really do influence attitudes and behavior, according to a new study.

However, some subliminal messages may have an opposite effect than expected. For example, exposing people to a subliminal image of a national flag moderates rather than intensifies their political attitudes.

Go check out the rest of The Influence of Subliminal Messages at Psych Central News.

Psych Central News writes about some interesting research showing a link between being depressed and a lack of olfactory sensitivity:

Can’t smell the roses? Maybe you’re depressed, say researchers from Tel Aviv University. Scientists recently linked depression to a biological mechanism that affects the olfactory glands.

It might explain why some women, without realizing it, wear too much perfume.

I used to know a woman who was rather severely depressed (she had good reason!) and she’d leave a scent trail one could follow for several minutes. She used a lot of perfume. When someone mentioned it to her, she was surprised; she really had no idea.

I wonder how this might affect the way I approach people who tell me they want help with depression. Maybe I’ll make sure to add in some hallucinated “aromatherapy” during the session.

Randy Cassingham of This Is True fame blogs a great article on the real-world differences between experiencing something and knowing about something.

Well, no wonder I’ve struggled so long trying to figure it out and explain it; why I couldn’t explain it has perplexed me for some time. I think Dan is right: that’s impossible. All I know is that many Premium subscribers absolutely love it, and say things like Belinda did — it’s a life “essential” — or liked Daniel, who “savors” it. Or like Dan: he’ll read it for life (his or mine, I guess: whichever comes first!)

Read Randy’s Mystery Solved. And if you don’t already get his newsletters, start with This Is True, collections of strange-but-true stories like:

• A man sued his doctor because he survived his cancer longer than the doctor predicted.
• Two robbers were in the process of their crime when one changed his mind and arrested the other.
• A woman had her husband’s ashes made into an egg timer when he died so he could still “help” in the kitchen.
• Only 68 of 200 Anglican priests polled could name all Ten Commandments, but half said they believed in space aliens.

(I’ve been a Premium subscriber for several years and have appreciated every issue.)

Powells.com has an interview with Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker, author of several excellent books on language and the mind.

I’ve loved everything I’ve read that Dr. Pinker has written, starting with The Language Instinct.
Approachable and intelligent at the same time. Great stuff.

Powells.com Interviews – Steven Pinker

Over at Interesting Thing of the Day there’s an interesting article on how experience in one modality can affect experience in another modality. It’s given me some insight on why they score “plating” so highly on the TV show, Iron Chef.

Color can even fool our taste buds into perceiving taste differences where none exist. This point was illustrated by a recent study that appeared in the March 2007 issue of the Journal of Consumer Research, “Taste Perception: More than Meets the Tongue.” By changing both the sweetness and the color of orange juice in various increments, researchers found that test subjects ascribed a greater difference in taste between juices of different colors than they did between juices with unequal levels of sweetness.

I actually liked Crystal Pepsi. I thought it tasted lighter, not as sweet… and it didn’t bother my stomach the way most colas do. Now I have to wonder.

More detail is at The Influence of Color on Taste Perception.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Hey, they work, and we want what works, right? From Psych Central:

A survey of doctors practicing in Chicago found that 45% recommended placebos — interventions not known to have any scientific treatment effect on the problem — to patients in their clinical practice. The same doctors also said they believed in the mind-body connection.

It’s funny how they refer to “the mind-body connection,” as if the two could be separated. But at least they’re waking up to how powerful the human mind is.

Read the full article at Psych Central News.

The Psych Central Blog brings up recent research which may point the way toward a simple method for unlearning “learned helplessness“.

The researcher began with the hypothesis that rats would learn to be more adaptable in social situations, or in pairs, however, the research results revealed a very different picture. Rats that were exposed to uncontrollable conditions in pairs coped less well when they were no longer in uncontrollable situations than rats that were exposed to these situations alone.

The article goes on to say that all the researchers had to do was pair up one “learned helpless” rat with one that had never learned to be helpless, and the pair of them were able to cope with difficult situations as if the helpless little guy had never had any trouble before.

Read more at Psych Central.