It’s hard to set your emotions aside when you’re faced with a difficult decision. This is problematic, since our emotions often cause us to make the wrong decision in important areas of life, including in our relationships, our finances, and our health.
The Secret to Emotional Freedom? Feel Everything
Mindful Judgment and Decision Making
A full range of psychological processes has been put into play to explain judgment and choice phenomena. Complementing work on attention, information integration, and learning, decision research over the past 10 years has also examined the effects of goals, mental representation, and memory processes. In addition to deliberative processes, automatic processes have gotten closer attention, and the emotions revolution has put affective processes on a footing equal to cognitive ones. Psychological process models provide natural predictions about individual differences and lifespan changes and integrate across judgment and decision making (JDM) phenomena. “Mindful” JDM research leverages our knowledge about psychological processes into causal explanations for important judgment and choice regularities, emphasizing the adaptive use of an abundance of processing alternatives. Such explanations supplement and support existing mathematical descriptions of phenomena such as loss aversion or hyperbolic discounting. Unlike such descriptions, they also provide entry points for interventions designed to help people overcome judgments or choices considered undesirable.
The Engineering Manager’s Guide to Emotional Tolerance
Five ways to lead with emotion without losing yourself in the process.
Why major life decisions should be approached with ‘epistemic humility’ | Psyche Videos
At a crossroads in life? No matter how much you deliberate, one unknowable remains: the person you will be on the other side
How to take things less personally and avoid mind reading | Psyche Guides
Always blaming yourself or assuming others think ill of you? A CBT therapist shares ways to break these self-critical habits
Anticipation and Choice Heuristics in the Dynamic Consumption of Pain Relief
Humans frequently need to allocate resources across multiple time-steps. Economic theory proposes that subjects do so according to a stable set of intertemporal preferences, but the computational demands of such decisions encourage the use of formally less competent heuristics. Few empirical studies have examined dynamic resource allocation decisions systematically. Here we conducted an experiment involving the dynamic consumption over approximately 15 minutes of a limited budget of relief from moderately painful stimuli. We had previously elicited the participants’ time preferences for the same painful stimuli in one-off choices, allowing us to assess self-consistency. Participants exhibited three characteristic behaviors: saving relief until the end, spreading relief across time, and early spending, of which the last was markedly less prominent. The likelihood that behavior was heuristic rather than normative is suggested by the weak correspondence between one-off and dynamic choices. We show that the consumption choices are consistent with a combination of simple heuristics involving early-spending, spreading or saving of relief until the end, with subjects predominantly exhibiting the last two.
Managing intrusive thoughts | Lifeline
Dealing with overwhelming and distressing thoughts can be difficult, but knowing how to handle them can make a big difference to how you feel. Learn why you might be experiencing intrusive thoughts and strategies that can help you manage them.
Measures of emotion: A review
A consensual, componential model of emotions conceptualises them as experiential, physiological, and behavioural responses to personally meaningful stimuli. The present review examines this model in terms of whether different types of emotion-evocative stimuli are associated with discrete and invariant patterns of responding in each response system, how such responses are structured, and if such responses converge across different response systems. Across response systems, the bulk of the available evidence favours the idea that measures of emotional responding reflect dimensions rather than discrete states. In addition, experiential, physiological, and behavioural response systems are associated with unique sources of variance, which in turn limits the magnitude of convergence across measures. Accordingly, the authors suggest that there is no “gold standard” measure of emotional responding. Rather, experiential, physiological, and behavioural measures are all relevant to understanding emotion and cannot be assumed to be interchangeable.
People Reject Algorithms in Uncertain Decision Domains Because They Have Diminishing Sensitivity to Forecasting Error
Will people use self-driving cars, virtual doctors, and other algorithmic decision-makers if they outperform humans? The answer depends on the uncertainty inherent in the decision domain. We propose that people have diminishing sensitivity to forecasting error and that this preference results in people favoring riskier (and often worse-performing) decision-making methods, such as human judgment, in inherently uncertain domains. In nine studies ( N = 4,820), we found that (a) people have diminishing sensitivity to each marginal unit of error that a forecast produces, (b) people are less likely to use the best possible algorithm in decision domains that are more unpredictable, (c) people choose between decision-making methods on the basis of the perceived likelihood of those methods producing a near-perfect answer, and (d) people prefer methods that exhibit higher variance in performance (all else being equal). To the extent that investing, medical decision-making, and other domains are inherently uncertain, people may be unwilling to use even the best possible algorithm in those domains.
Emotionale Dysregulation: der Fehler liegt oft im System | Neue Narrative
Wiederkehrende Gefühlsausbrüche belasten alle Beteiligten. Organisationen können Menschen mit emotionaler Dysregulation helfen, indem sie nicht verurteilen, sondern Rückzugsräume und Platz für Emotionen schaffen.
People Spend Too Much Time On Decisions with Equally Satisfying Outcomes
The pitfalls of analysis paralysis
The Case for Lowering Your Expectations
It may be the key to happiness and sustainable performance
Epistemic Vigilance
Humans massively depend on communication with others, but this leaves them open to the risk of being accidentally or intentionally misinformed. To ensure that, despite this risk, communication remain...
Time-inconsistent Preferences and Consumer Self-Control
Abstract Why do consumers sometimes act against their own better judgment, engaging in behavior that is often regretted after the fact and that would have been rejected with adequate forethought? More generally, how do consumers attempt to maintain self-control in the face of time-inconsistent preferences? This article addresses consumer impatience by developing a decision-theoretic model based on reference points. The model explains how and why consumers experience sudden increases in desire for a product, increases that can result in the temporary overriding of long-term preferences. Tactics that consumers use to control their own behavior are also discussed. Consumer self-control is framed as a struggle between two psychological forces, desire and willpower. Finally, two general classes of self-control strategies are described: those that directly reduce desire, and those that overcome desire through will power.
Eradicating Unhappiness
Is there a manual for living well? Where modern science, society, and psychology underserves, a philosophy nearly as old as time emerges. “Take a simple idea, and take it seriously.”—Charlie Munger…
What Happens When Your Career Becomes Your Whole Identity
Many people with high-pressure jobs find themselves unhappy with their careers, despite working hard their whole lives to get to their current position. Hating your job is one thing – but what happens if you identify so closely with your work that hating your job means hating yourself?Psychologists use the term “enmeshment” to describe a situation where the boundaries between people become blurred, and individual identities lose importance. Enmeshment prevents the development of a stable, independent sense of self. While identifying closely with your career isn’t necessarily bad, it makes you vulnerable to a painful identity crisis if you burn out, get laid off, or retire. Individuals in these situations frequently suffer anxiety, depression, and despair. By claiming back some time for yourself and diversifying your activities and relationships, you can build a more balanced and robust identity in line with your values.
