Joelle Nebbe-Mornod's Library tagged psychology →  View Popular, Search in Google

Jamie Pennebaker, has developed a writing exercise that is typically done three or four nights in a row, where you write about a problem for about 15 minutes each time.  Doing so has remarkable long-term benefits on people’s health and well-being. 

  Researchers such as Ethan Kross and Ozlem Ayduk have honed this method and, along with Pennebaker, have shown how it works. Think back to the story editing metaphor: What these writing exercises do is make us address problems that we haven't been able to make sense of  and put us through a sense-making process of reworking it in such a way that we gain a new perspective and find some meaning, so that we basically come up with a better story that allows us to put that problem behind us. This is a great example of a story editing technique that can be quite powerful.

How does the mind work and how does it make decisions? How do people think about themselves and the social world? Social psychologists have a unique way of looking at the mind, doing so very broadly and considering the role of emotion, instead of focusing solely on cold cognition. People like me, Dan Gilbert, and many others, are investigating social cognition as a way of understanding how people think about themselves and the social world and how this influences their behavior.  For example, Dan and I have been looking at the topic of Affective Forecasting, which is concerned with the way in which people think about the future and how they think they will react emotionally to a specific event that might befall them.

  How will we feel and how long will we feel that way if we become ill, or if we have a windfall of money or if we take this career path, or if we marry this person instead of that person? Many of our most important decisions in life are based on these affective forecasts, whereby we try to gauge how we will feel about an event in the future, especially over the long run. We are by no means terrible at this; obviously we have a pretty good sense of what will lead to positive feelings and what will lead to negative feelings.  But, there are systematic mistakes to which people are prone when making affective forecasts.