Photo by Guillaume Bourdages on Unsplash

by Dr. Donna Roberts

Source: Going “Back Home” — Looking Back and Moving Forward

THE STORY

I was 40-something. I walked across the threshold of the house I grew up in. It was . . .

From the Greek philosopher Heraclitus, who said, “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man,” to Bon Jovi, who asked, “Who says you can’t go home?” humanity has ruminated on returning to our childhood homes.

The theme is one we revisit repeatedly.

We see it in movies, too, from comedies (The Royal Tenenbaums, Home for the Holidays, This is Where I Leave You) to dramas (On Golden Pond, Young Adult, The Judge) that have poignantly depicted heading home for a visit or a re-nesting. Homecoming is equally well represented in classic and contemporary literature (You Can’t Go Home Again by Thomas Wolfe, Gilead and its sequel Home by Marilynne Robinson, and An American Childhood by Annie Dillard).

Regardless of the circumstances of return — joyous or tragic — the experience is … well … it’s complicated.

For some, home is the ultimate safety net as one walks the tightrope of life — always there, always solid, always ready to catch you should you stumble. For others the concept of home dissipates like a morning dream and there is not much left to go back to, except in one’s head. Some childhood rooms are preserved like a time capsule. Others are transformed into the sewing room Mom always wanted, just days after one’s departure. Millennials are notorious for going back home — provided they left in the first place. This privilege has, supposedly, given them the freedom to pursue their dreams, to fail and fail again, without dire consequences.

So, it is paradise or inferno? As with so much in life, it depends.

To answer Bon Jovi, it was in fact Thomas Wolfe who insisted one cannot go back home again, and yet we have Dorothy returned from Oz proclaiming, “There’s no place like home!”

In the end, good or bad, love it or hate it, curse it or miss it, perhaps Nickleback says it best:

I miss that town
I miss the faces
You can’t erase
You can’t replace it
I miss it now
I can’t believe it
So hard to stay
Too hard to leave it

It’s hard to say it, time to say it
Goodbye … goodbye

PSYCH PSTUFF’S SUMMARY

Psychologist Carl Gustav Jung, in his autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections, spoke of the home that he built as a “self-realization of the unconscious … a concretization of the individuation process … a symbol of psychic wholeness.” Building on Jung’s work, Clare Cooper Marcus, architect, psychologist and author of House As a Mirror of the Self: Exploring the Deep Meaning of Home, asserts that “as we change and grow throughout our lives, our psychological development is punctuated not only by meaningful emotional relationships with people, but also by close, affective ties with a number of significant physical environments, beginning in childhood.” She insists that, regardless of the external nature of our dwellings — mansions or shacks — we all have a strong emotional relationship, positive or negative, with our homes.

But what is special about going back to the childhood home?

Our census tells us that fewer than 10% of the population remain in the same house they lived in 30 years prior. We are mobile in this 21st century, very mobile. In fact, it is estimated that the average American will move 11.7 times in his or her lifetime. We don’t stay permanently attached to our childhood homes and neighborhoods — at least not physically. But we do, psychologically.

The lure of nostalgia is strong. Millions of adults revisit their childhood homes long after they, or their family members, occupy that space. Some are content to merely drive by and observe from outside. Others write letters to the current owners or even knock on the door and ask to have a look at their old bedroom.

Psychologist Jerry Burger, in his study of the phenomena described in Returning Home: Reconnecting with our Childhoods, noted that approximately one third of American adults over the age of thirty have visited a childhood home — not the people of their childhoods, but the physical locations and structures.

We remember, and feel compelled to re-visit, the view from our bedroom window, the schoolyard playground, our dinner table, the front porch and backyard.

Propelled by his own experience of revisiting his childhood haunts, Burger surveyed other adults about their personal pilgrimages “home.” This is some of what he discovered:

There are three primary reasons for making a trip back to one’s childhood home or neighborhood:

• To reconnect with childhood — 42% percent of people Burger interviewed visited their childhood homes in hopes of jogging their memory and getting back in touch with who they were as a child.

• To help resolve a current crisis or problem by reflecting on their past — 15% of those studied expressed the need to reevaluate how they developed their values and what led them to make the decisions that they made.

• To bring closure to unfinished business from childhood — 12% reported abuse or trauma and hoped that returning to the home where they experienced that pain would be therapeutic and cathartic.

Regardless of the underlying motivations for the return, Burger discovered that in almost all of the cases, people reported being glad they made the journey to their childhood home, even though it was often a deeply emotional and unpredictable experience.

He found three exceptions, where the experience was not a positive one and people reported wishing they had not made the trip back to their past:

• When the house in which they grew up had significantly changed or was no longer there — this usually proved unexpected and very upsetting.

• For those who returned anticipating an escape from problems and hoping to relive the romanticized memory of their childhood — in these cases, reality did not match their expectations and they were deeply disappointed and disillusioned.

• For those who returned to work through childhood trauma — often the painful memories seemed more intense while visiting the childhood home and they did not experience the anticipated relief or closure. (Burger recommends people revisiting the past to confront a traumatic period in their lives do so with the help of a professional counselor.)

In any event, there are few experiences in one’s life that can move a person as deeply and unpredictably as returning “home.”

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Higher empathy people appear to process music like a pleasurable proxy for a human encounter — in the brain regions for reward, social awareness and regulation of social emotions.

Source: People who deeply grasp the pain or happiness of others also process music differently in the brain

People with higher empathy differ from others in the way their brains process music, according to a study by researchers at Southern Methodist University, Dallas and UCLA.

The researchers found that compared to low empathy people, those with higher empathy process familiar music with greater involvement of the reward system of the brain, as well as in areas responsible for processing social information.

“High-empathy and low-empathy people share a lot in common when listening to music, including roughly equivalent involvement in the regions of the brain related to auditory, emotion, and sensory-motor processing,” said lead author Zachary Wallmark, an assistant professor in the SMU Meadows School of the Arts.

But there is at least one significant difference.

Highly empathic people process familiar music with greater involvement of the brain’s social circuitry, such as the areas activated when feeling empathy for others. They also seem to experience a greater degree of pleasure in listening, as indicated by increased activation of the reward system.

“This may indicate that music is being perceived weakly as a kind of social entity, as an imagined or virtual human presence,” Wallmark said.

Researchers in 2014 reported that about 20 percent of the population is highly empathic. These are people who are especially sensitive and respond strongly to social and emotional stimuli.

The SMU-UCLA study is the first to find evidence supporting a neural account of the music-empathy connection. Also, it is among the first to use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to explore how empathy affects the way we perceive music.

The new study indicates that among higher-empathy people, at least, music is not solely a form of artistic expression.

“If music was not related to how we process the social world, then we likely would have seen no significant difference in the brain activation between high-empathy and low-empathy people,” said Wallmark, who is director of the MuSci Lab at SMU, an interdisciplinary research collective that studies — among other things — how music affects the brain.

“This tells us that over and above appreciating music as high art, music is about humans interacting with other humans and trying to understand and communicate with each other,” he said.

This may seem obvious.

“But in our culture we have a whole elaborate system of music education and music thinking that treats music as a sort of disembodied object of aesthetic contemplation,” Wallmark said. “In contrast, the results of our study help explain how music connects us to others. This could have implications for how we understand the function of music in our world, and possibly in our evolutionary past.”

The researchers reported their findings in the peer-reviewed journal Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, in the article “Neurophysiological effects of trait empathy in music listening.”

The co-authors are Choi Deblieck, with the University of Leuven, Belgium, and Marco Iacoboni, UCLA. The research was carried out at the Ahmanson-Lovelace Brain Mapping Center at UCLA.

“The study shows on one hand the power of empathy in modulating music perception, a phenomenon that reminds us of the original roots of the concept of empathy — ‘feeling into’ a piece of art,” said senior author Marco Iacoboni, a neuroscientist at the UCLA Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior.

“On the other hand,” Iacoboni said, “the study shows the power of music in triggering the same complex social processes at work in the brain that are at play during human social interactions.”

Comparison of brain scans showed distinctive differences based on empathy
Participants were 20 UCLA undergraduate students. They were each scanned in an MRI machine while listening to excerpts of music that were either familiar or unfamiliar to them, and that they either liked or disliked. The familiar music was selected by participants prior to the scan.

Afterward each person completed a standard questionnaire to assess individual differences in empathy — for example, frequently feeling sympathy for others in distress, or imagining oneself in another’s shoes.

The researchers then did controlled comparisons to see which areas of the brain during music listening are correlated with empathy.

Analysis of the brain scans showed that high empathizers experienced more activity in the dorsal striatum, part of the brain’s reward system, when listening to familiar music, whether they liked the music or not.

The reward system is related to pleasure and other positive emotions. Malfunction of the area can lead to addictive behaviors.

Empathic people process music with involvement of social cognitive circuitry
In addition, the brain scans of higher empathy people in the study also recorded greater activation in medial and lateral areas of the prefrontal cortex that are responsible for processing the social world, and in the temporoparietal junction, which is critical to analyzing and understanding others’ behaviors and intentions.

Typically, those areas of the brain are activated when people are interacting with, or thinking about, other people. Observing their correlation with empathy during music listening might indicate that music to these listeners functions as a proxy for a human encounter.

Beyond analysis of the brain scans, the researchers also looked at purely behavioral data — answers to a survey asking the listeners to rate the music afterward.

Those data also indicated that higher empathy people were more passionate in their musical likes and dislikes, such as showing a stronger preference for unfamiliar music.

Precise neurophysiological relationship between empathy and music is largely unexplored
A large body of research has focused on the cognitive neuroscience of empathy — how we understand and experience the thoughts and emotions of other people. Studies point to a number of areas of the prefrontal, insular, and cingulate cortices as being relevant to what brain scientists refer to as social cognition.

Studies have shown that activation of the social circuitry in the brain varies from individual to individual. People with more empathic personalities show increased activity in those areas when performing socially relevant tasks, including watching a needle penetrating skin, listening to non-verbal vocal sounds, observing emotional facial expressions, or seeing a loved one in pain.

In the field of music psychology, a number of recent studies have suggested that empathy is related to intensity of emotional responses to music, listening style, and musical preferences — for example, empathic people are more likely to enjoy sad music.

“This study contributes to a growing body of evidence,” Wallmark said, “that music processing may piggyback upon cognitive mechanisms that originally evolved to facilitate social interaction.” — Margaret Allen, SMU

Photo by Clem Onojeghuo on Unsplash

by Dr. Donna Roberts

Source: The Psychology of Stories -Media Psychology – Donna L Roberts, PhD (Psych Pstuff) – Medium

The Story

Did you have a favorite bedtime story as a child? I loved the fairy tale Snow White. My mother, on the other hand, was not so thrilled about reading it to me every night. Not only because of the boring repetition, but also because every time she got to the part where the witch enticed Snow White to bite into the poisonous apple that caused her to fall into a deep sleep, I would start crying. Every time. Even though I knew the happily-ever-after ending that was coming. I was that engrossed in the emotion of the story. She had to stop reading and convince me that it was all ok, and that it would all work out in the end. But I was unconvinced. Happy ending on its way or not, there was pain and loss along the journey. That was what the author was trying to show and that was exactly what I was experiencing.

Isn’t that what writers aspire to — to connect readers with the feelings of their characters? Isn’t that part of the mystery and the magic that makes a good story?

I can’t remember exactly when I transitioned from having bedtime stories read to me to reading them myself under the covers with a flashlight (long after “lights out”). But I do know that reading (and writing) has remained an important part of my life.

Philip Pullman, a British writer of children’s books, science fiction and fantasy, once described the importance of reading and writing by noting, “After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.”

*

Psych Pstuff Summary

Friedrich Nietzsche and Wilhelm Fleiss first explored the psychological meaning of the concept of sublimation as a diversion of aggressive tendencies and impulses into socially acceptable venues. Later, Freud incorporated this into his psychoanalytic theories. He posited that creative endeavors represent examples of the ego defense mechanism of sublimation, the only defense mechanism that he considered functional and healthy for the individual psyche as well as society at large. Sublimation, he wrote, “is what makes it possible for higher psychical activities, scientific, artistic or ideological, to play such an important part in civilized life.”

The more mystical psychologist Carl Jung, who considered creativity an aspect of psychic transformation of the highest order, believed, “Sublimation is not a voluntary and forcible channeling of instinct into a spurious field of application. It is a great mystery.” Whereas Freud considered creative endeavors to be intentional and directed, Jung incorporated the mystique of the muse and sublime of the sacred, akin to what modern guru Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls “flow.”

From a psychological standpoint, stories and the process of storytelling have merit and purpose both for the reader and the writer. Creative activities in various media, from journaling to artwork to dance, have often been incorporated into therapeutic settings with both children and adults. Therapists will encourage clients to artistically express their emotions, especially when the traditional “talking cure” seems blocked or plateaued. The basic premise is that self-awareness and understanding will result both from the creative process as well as from the interpretation of the product.

However, as Jung intimated, there is still a bit of mystery involved in the healing power of creativity. He believed, “The neurotic is ill not because he has lost his old faith but because he has not yet found a new form for his finest aspirations.”

For readers, curling up with a good book has long been an acceptable form of escapism, a way to detach from the banalities of their real world for a time and vicariously indulge in someone else’s reality (or fantasy).

Bibliotherapy represents a focused treatment plan whereby specific text, fiction or non-fiction, is assigned reading to address a particular problem or facilitate insight. Lest you think this is a new age idea, the ancient Greeks inscribed ψγxhσ Iatpeion — House of Healing for the Soul — above the entrance to what is believed to be the world’s oldest library.

Poetry has traditionally been a medium to express the angst and sorrow of both the poet, and vicariously, the reader. It has the enigma of a higher level of emotion. And song lyrics, especially those that tell a story, seem to speak to us with an uncanny level of understanding — as Elton John crooned, “Sad songs say so much.” Somehow, connecting with the angst of others, even nameless, faceless or “made-up” others, helps us manage our own angst.

Creative expression it seems, in all its various forms, is good for the body, the mind and the soul and can serve many purposes both for the creator and those who enjoy the creation.

Perhaps the Eagles summed it up most succinctly in the line from their song Hotel California, “Some dance to remember. Some dance to forget.”

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We live in the age of social media, an age where we collect friends like stamps. However, there seems to be a connection between using social networks and being lonely.

Source: Here’s What Facebook Is Doing to Your Brain. It’s Kind of Shocking

Credits: Script, Design & Animation by Shimi Cohen. Quoting the words of Sherry Turkle’s TED talk. Based on ‘The Invention of Being Lonely’ by Dr. Yair Amichai.

by Dr. Donna Roberts

Photo by Benedikt Geyer on Unsplash

Source: Does “Closure” really bring the relief we seek? – Donna L Roberts, PhD (Psych Pstuff) – Medium

The Story

Carmela enters … “Just a small town girl, livin’ in a lonely world, she took the midnight train goin’ anywhere.”

Cut to Tony … “Just a city boy, born and raised in South Detroit, he took the midnight train goin’ anywhere.”

Suddenly, Journey’s Don’t Stop Believin’ is abruptly silenced and the screen cuts to black …

When the highly anticipated finale of the HBO series The Sopranos aired fans reeled. Not because their beloved Tony was killed, but because, well, they weren’t sure whether he was or not.

It was a cliffhanger. But cliffhangers are not supposed to happen in the finale of a long-running series.

The debate raged on blogs, on talk-shows, on media pages and certainly over cocktails. So much so that David Chase, creator of the series and director of the last episode, was called on to explain himself and settle the deliberation once and for all. And he did … but not really … saying things like “Whether Tony Soprano is alive or dead is not the point. To continue to search for this answer is fruitless. The final scene of The Sopranos raises a spiritual question that has no right or wrong answer,” and, “Life is short. Either it ends here for Tony or some other time. But in spite of that, it’s really worth it. So don’t stop believing.” Even when asked directly if Tony was shot in the last scene, he replied, “I’m not saying anything. I’m not trying to be coy. It’s just that I think that to explain it would diminish it.”

Hmm …

Chase has never answered the one burning question of that final scene — not in the interview the morning after the finale aired and not in any of his numerous public comments since the show ended over eight years ago. He has explained, in great detail, the symbolism he used and how he employed various elements to subtly create tension in the last scene. But what he won’t say, no matter how it is asked or how much we need to know, is what happened at the end.

But that doesn’t mean the fans have let it go. On the eight year anniversary of The Sopranos finale, one blogger posted a new and updated Sopranos: Definitive Explanation of the Final Scene Annotated Guide where every shot of the final scene is analyzed in detail, and references are made to prophetic quotes from previous seasons. Comments continue to be posted on that site, reflecting on his observations and continuing the debate.

But why, eight years later, why are we still asking the question we have been told repeatedly will never be definitely answered, about a fictional character anyway?

In this, as in many of our human endeavors, we have an undeniable desire to “close the loop,” to tie up the package with a pretty bow, or at least a string with a tight knot, and put it on the shelf, accessible if we need, but out of the way of our daily endeavors. In short, the stories we tell — from our entertainment to our real-life relationships to justice for wrongdoing — we want unfinished business finished.

Closure, or more accurately the lack of, is often blamed for our inability to move on and, thus, sought as the Holy Grail that will set our minds at ease. Even heal us.

But does closure really bring the relief we seek? Does it really do all it promises to? Can justice heal the wounds of loss? Can just knowing make the bad somehow more ok?

In a word: sometimes. It depends. On what? On whether or not we have done the emotional work to accompany it.

Seeking closure can become an intellectual pursuit, a distraction, a physical reality that tricks the mind and heart into thinking we are actively addressing a problem, pain, the cruel randomness and injustice of the human condition, when all we are really doing is, in a sense, wallowing.

Is the closure of a diagnosis really better? Most people say so, even if it is bad news. And yet closure doesn’t necessarily relieve the symptoms, it simply changes our perceptions of them. Closure means the mind can relax — oh it’s that. OK, now I know what I am dealing with. Now I can move on.

From the whimsical to the serious, the need to know and know with finality, is so strong it will drive us to seek the unanswerable and run off tilting at windmills.

Psych Pstuff’s Summary

Psychologically speaking, what we call closure is actually referred to as the need for cognitive closure (NFCC). It is generally defined as both the desire for definitive answers and the corresponding aversion to ambiguity. For psychologists it is, like so many other traits, considered a defining and relatively stable aspect of character. In short, you either crave it or you don’t and if you do, you really, really crave it.

Also like many things in psychology, researchers have struggled to quantify the need for closure — in psych speak, to operationalize it — so they can compare apples with apples. The Need for Closure Scale (NFCS) was developed by researchers Arie Kruglanski, Donna Webster, and Adena Klem in 1993 as a standard way to measure the concept and compare individuals along this trait. The NFCS is a forty-seven-item test that measures five separate motivational facets that comprise our underlying affinity for clarity and resolution. These include the preference for (1) order; (2) predictability; and (3) decisiveness; and a corresponding (4) discomfort with ambiguity; and (5) closed-mindedness. Taken together, these elements indicate one’s level of need for closure. You can take an online version of this test at terpconnect.umd.edu.

The problem with an unbridled pursuit of closure is that it tends to be paradoxical and feeds into our general fear of the unknown. According to Kruglanski, the need for closure exerts its effects via two general tendencies — the urgency tendency (the inclination to attain closure as quickly as possible) and the permanence tendency (the tendency to maintain it for as long as possible). Together, these tendencies may cause us to embrace a solution or make a judgment without considering all the possibilities. In short, needing an answer too desperately can cause us to accept any answer as soon as it comes along, simply to resolve the anxiety. This can block the way to finding a better alternative.

Needing an answer too desperately can cause us to accept any answer as soon as it comes along, simply to resolve the anxiety. This can block the way to finding a better alternative.

In popular psychology today the term most often refers to a proposed goal state in the process of overcoming grief or responding to tragedy. Its lure is certainly understandable. Faced with loss there is a natural tendency to desire a resolution to all things disrupted when one’s world is turned upside down. It may be comforting to imagine there is something concrete to be done that will set things somehow right again and help us to move on to a new normal.

However, for many, this fantasized state of resolution is elusive and the very thing we think will bring peace of mind and clarity is, in fact, an empty promise. Counting too much on the achievement of an external milestone to bring comfort and balance after a loss without engaging in the required internal grief work only leaves one feeling empty and still full of unresolved emotions. Certain overt actions can be symbolic and hold the power of ritual, but they are only as effective as a culmination of a larger process of healing and insight.

Some therapists maintain that true closure is a myth and impossible to achieve. They argue that instead of trying to find closure, which may never be possible, it more psychologically healthy to pursue meaning, even if there is no final “end” or resolution.

Hmm … that sounds a bit like what David Chase said in response to the “whatever happened to Tony” questions.

While it might be perfectly natural and part of our psychological makeup to desire resolution, learning how to be comfortable with not having all the answers can lead to deeper personal growth. Learning how to tolerate ambiguity — in fiction and in reality — strengthens one’s ability to tolerate the anxiety and uncertainty that is an inevitable part of the human condition.

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by Dr. Donna Roberts

Source: If at First You Don’t “Succeed” . . . Fail, Fail, Again

The Story

I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.
— Michael Jordan

Success. We all want it. But just what is it? How do you get it? How do you really know when you’ve reached it?

1923 was quite a year for baseball legend Babe Ruth. He broke the record for the most home runs in a season. He also broke the record for the highest batting average. And, he struck out more times than any other player in Major League Baseball. In fact, he accumulated a whopping 1,330 career strike outs — a record he held for 29 years until it was broken by none other than the highly successful Mickey Mantle.

Most of us certainly want to hit the home runs, but without the strike-outs. Turns out, it doesn’t work that way.

Turns out, it’s all about perception. Some of the greatest success stories, viewed from another angle, are profiles in failure. It’s just that they didn’t believe that. They wouldn’t believe that. And they didn’t stop there. They moved on to succeed.

Consider the profiles of these two entrepreneurs:

1. College dropout. Fired from a high level executive position. Unsuccessful businessman, launching several expensive product failures.

2. Revolutionized six industries (personal computers, animated movies, phones, music, tablet computing, and digital publishing). Founded one of the most successful companies in the world.

As you may have guessed, these descriptions both refer to the same person — the iconic Steve Jobs. He changed the world, but he didn’t always have the Midas touch. He failed, miserably. And succeeded, profoundly.

Generally, we consider failure a bad thing — success’s ugly stepsister. We try to avoid it. We hide ours in shame. We pretend it never happened. Or, worse yet, we quit trying because of it.

We consider failure a bad thing — success’s ugly stepsister. We try to avoid it. We hide ours in shame. We pretend it never happened. Or, worse yet, we quit trying because of it.

The art world is rife with examples — Van Gogh, Paul Cézanne, Georges-Pierre Seurat, Johannes Vermeer — of famous artists who were unrecognized, or outright rejected in their time, only later to be lauded as brilliantly creative and talented. Literature too has its share of later recognized geniuses who were misfits to their contemporaries, including Henry David Thoreau, Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson. Even scientists who contributed some of the greatest discoveries — Gregor Mendel, Nicholas Copernicus, Galileo Galilei — were rejected by their peers and often publically humiliated.

It seems a bit elusive, this success thing. After all, if Poe and Van Gogh and Galileo couldn’t pull it off with their peers, do we stand a chance?

It begs the question, is success really success if you are not recognized for it?

Psych Pstuff’s Summary

We’ve all heard the old adage, If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Like many clichés, there is sage advice buried in that maxim.

Psychologists have long been interested in individual differences and particularly why one person succeeds, while another with similar resources and opportunities does not. In 1907, William James, one of the founding fathers of psychology, wrote, “Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake. Our fires are damped, our drafts are checked. We are making use of only a small part of our possible mental resources … men the world over possess amounts of resource, which only exceptional individuals push to their extremes of use.”

In modern psychological studies the concept of grit has been identified as setting apart the achievers from the non-achievers, as part of a growing movement to examine the role of non-cognitive skills (i.e., things other than standard measures of intelligence) in various aspects of success. While once IQ was considered the holy grail of measurements that determined an individual’s fate, now we are not so confident about that singular, and controversial metric.

In general, these researchers define grit as perseverance and passion for long-term goals. They recognize that “Grit entails working strenuously toward challenges, maintaining effort and interest over years despite failure, adversity, and plateaus in progress. The gritty individual approaches achievement as a marathon; his or her advantage is stamina. Whereas disappointment or boredom signals to others that it is time to change trajectory and cut losses, the gritty individual stays the course.”

Of course psychologists want to measure this thing they call grit and thus have developed The Grit Scale.

How gritty are you? Take the online test and find out.

Collectively, these studies have concluded that the achievement of difficult goals entails not only talent but also the diligent, sustained and focused application of abilities over time.

We all have that kind of perseverance when we are very young. If we didn’t only some of us would ever learn to walk. Slowly, that kind of initiative, that natural pick-yourself-up, dust-yourself-off and start-all-over-again momentum becomes tempered by the judgments of others and morphs into a fear of failure, which unchecked, can become a fear of trying anything at all. Psychologists even have a diagnostic label for the abnormal, unwarranted, and persistent fear of failure — Atychiphobia.

Much of what makes our lives meaningful, much of what we spend our time pursuing when we can choose what to do with our hours, is subjective and esoteric. What is deemed success in these realms — friendship, charity, entertainment, just to name a few — is highly personal and idiosyncratic.

One criticism of the studies is that the researchers are concerned exclusively with objective accomplishments, such as vocational achievements, that are judged to have worth in the eyes of others and subject to collective goals and measurements. But much of what makes our lives meaningful, much of what we spend our time pursuing when we can choose what to do with our hours, is subjective and esoteric. What is deemed success in these realms — friendship, charity, entertainment, just to name a few — is highly personal and idiosyncratic.

This leads us to ask ourselves, is it internal or external recognition that comprises true success?

Famed guru of positive psychology, ‎Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, considered the concept of flow as the optimal experience. He defined flow as the mental state of operation in which a person performing an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity.

The philosophical question then becomes, is happiness enough of a measure of success, or do we need the external accoutrements of fame and fortune?

Either way you slice it, as an intensely personal or highly public measure, success is neither guaranteed, nor permanent.

But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Some psychologists argue that not only do some individuals succeed despite obstacles and failures, but rather, becauseof them. In other words, the notion that failure is the opposite of success, as we are taught, is just plain wrong. Instead, what has been labeled, in all its judgmental glory, as failure, can be considered a necessary stepping stone to greater success. Just ask Michael Jordan.

Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash

by Dr. Donna Roberts

Source: The Persuasive Power of Words — Media Psychology – Donna L Roberts, PhD (Psych Pstuff) – Medium

The Story

Newly landed in Italy, we gorged ourselves on everything Italian. The sights, sounds and food were all to die for. Pizza, pasta and peperonata became our daily fare. Even the local cats and dogs could be seen enjoying huge bowls of spaghetti. The country, the weather and the food were all delicious. Not to speak of the wonderful wine … but I digress.

Soon after arriving, we decided to explore the sites and do a little shopping. We were in one of the world’s fashion capitals after all — what could possibly go wrong? My spouse needed some lighter, brighter shirts to replace the heavy, checkered lumberjack style he’d favored in Canada. The latest fashionable color at the time in Italy was melone, a lobster shade we both adored.

So, one evening, after yet another delectable meal, we strolled into a village clothing store to admire the venerable selection. Each shirt was displayed in its own beautiful box, cushioned in a cloud of designer tissue paper. Too pretty to touch, really. The salesperson lovingly unwrapped each shirt and artfully displayed the array on the counter in front of us. One by one, she laid out a series of progressively beautiful (and increasingly expensive) melon colored shirts. Finally, sensing that we were hooked, she told us that a most exquisite shirt had just come in, but in a different color — salmone.

Out came the ultimate shirt and it did not leave us wanting. The fabric, the stitching, the cut — it was all intoxicating, as only Italian fashion can be. But the salmon color of the shirt? Well, it was identical to the melon colored shirts. Precisely the same! The price, however, was considerably higher.

No one spoke of this out loud. Yet each of us knew that, to justify the exorbitant price, the salesperson had changed the name to a more chic sounding version of the hue.

Naturally, we were tickled pink to leave with the chic salmon shirt in our designer shopping bag. Was there ever any doubt?

Psych Pstuff’s Summary

Learning to speak and use language is one of the major milestones of childhood. From that time on we are honing the skill — learning how to use words effectively to get our needs met and make our thoughts and feelings known. Written or spoken it is the instrument we use for human connection.

In “Romeo and Juliet,” Shakespeare challenged us with the question:

What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
by any other name would smell as sweet.

But was Shakespeare right? Is a name just a name? Or is it more?

Turns out it is a whole lot more.

Words have both denotative and connotative meanings. The denotative meaning is the straightforward definition, what you would consider the dictionary definition. It’s clear, logical, factual and therefore doesn’t have much impact beyond basic understanding of information.

Connotative meanings are more open to individual interpretation. They encompass all the associations and emotions that are conjured up by a word. They can be complex and even paradoxical. While the denotative meaning of a word is generally the same for all, the connotative meanings can vary widely based on experience, personality and context.

The word home is a good example of how these categorizations can differ in impact. Denotatively, home is simply a place of residence, a structure for shelter. It is the connotative meaning that embraces all the things that home means to us — whether good or bad.

Some words, by nature tend to be fairly innocuous — jelly, wood, cup — although even these, if tied to a strong enough memory, can be impactful for some. Others — war, mother, dog — inherently seem to carry a weight far beyond their syntax.

Through denotative meanings we can share information. Through connotative meanings we can share the full realm of human experience.

Through denotative meanings we can share information. Through connotative meanings we can share the full realm of human experience.

Advertisers, for example, count on this distinction and use it to attempt to persuade consumers to behave in certain ways — namely to buy a particular product usually on merits beyond its denotative purpose. They either use existing universal connotations to attach to a product or brand or they create scenarios which establish new connections and ingrain new connotations.

Just think of these two words — Fiat and Mercedes. On the surface both are just brands of automobiles, which are themselves just means of transportation. However, one generally has significantly different feelings about them. If I asked you which one you would rather have parked in your driveway, you would probably have a clear preference.

Authors too use the connotative power of words to connect people, to broaden our minds to the experiences of others — real or imagined — who are both like us and unlike us, to both relate to our common experience and to share a glimpse of that which may be a wholly different experience.

So, the question remains, is there a difference between a melone shirt and a salmone one? The choice is yours — the meaning is in the mind of the beholder.