#psychology (66 links)
- The Imperfectionist: Acting because you don't have to ckarchive.com
I’ve long been allergic to the notion, prevalent in self-help circles, that if you truly managed to liberate yourself from your issues, you’d ideally spend your days just sort of passively floating around, smiling at everyone, maybe attending the occasional yoga retreat, but not much more. “The more I heal, the less ambitious I become” is a phrase I’ve encountered multiple times online in recent months. And yes, sure, if your ambition was only ever a function of anxiety, becoming less ambitious would be an excellent development. Then again, the desire to create remarkable outcomes in your creative work, relationships or community – or even just in your bank balance – might just be an authentic part of who you are, once the clouds of insecurity begin to clear.
- Game design is simple, actually raphkoster.com
- Thin Desires Are Eating Your Life joanwestenberg.com
The desire to understand calculus versus the desire to check your notifications are both real desires, and both produce (to a degree) real feelings of satisfaction when fulfilled. But the person who spends a year learning calculus becomes someone different, someone who can see patterns in the world that were previously invisible, who has expanded the range of things they're capable of caring about, who has Been Through It.The person who checks their notifications is, afterward, exactly the same person who wanted to check their notifications five minutes ago.
- Why Some People See Collapse Earlier Than Others adrianlambert.substack.com
Those who have been told they are “too much,” “too intense,” or “too literal,” often turn out to have been responding to conditions that others were able to avoid seeing. They noticed something real, and they noticed it early, not because they were broken, but because the dominant cultural paradigm was. For people whose perception is attuned closely to the world as it is, collapse awareness is not a failure of coping, but an understandable response to the realities of an overextended and collapsing civilisation.
- Don’t like joining in? Why it could be your superpower theguardian.com
- BICEPS palomamedina.com
There are six core needs researchers find are important for humans (both at work and in our personal lives). Each of us have a personal hierarchy for the six however: You might find that equity and belonging are most important to you, but choice and status are most important to your employee, your partner, your child. Getting to know them is a shortcut to better communication, as well as greater inclusivity at work.
- The Spoon Theory written by Christine Miserandino butyoudontlooksick.com
Basically: be a nice human.
- TBM 315: The Self-Sealing Argument Trap cutlefish.substack.com
The punchline: We frequently get pulled into Catch-22 arguments and discussions. No matter what we do—at least the normal gut options—we lose. But awareness is a gift.
Do people understand the impressions they make on others or do their anxieties lead them to assume the worst? Across nearly 10 years of research and tens of thousands of observations, the authors have come to this answer: people underestimate how much others like them, and this bias has important implications for how people work together.
- Compelled to Blurt... - compulsion embarrassment | Ask MetaFilter ask.metafilter.com
As far as I am aware, I am a mentally healthy, well-adjusted, and sane person with no disorders. But I have a strange, fairly innocuous quirk which seems beyond my control and I'm curious about it...
Er, yeah, it me too.
Subcultures were the main creative cultural force from roughly 1975 to 2000, when they stopped working. Why? One reason—among several—is that as soon as subcultures start getting really interesting, they get invaded by muggles, who ruin them. Subcultures have a predictable lifecycle, in which popularity causes death. Eventually—around 2000—everyone understood this, and gave up hoping some subculture could somehow escape this dynamic.
- The Psychology Behind TikTok's Addictive Feed growth.design
- Beware of Being "Right" | Psychology Today UK psychologytoday.com
Much of the emotional suffering in the world comes from the substitution of power for value. The curse of our times is that so many people have developed the habit of seeking to feel temporarily more powerful when they feel devalued. This leads almost inevitably to power struggles and some degree of abuse of others, if acted out, or if held in, to some level of depression.
- Motivational interviewing - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia en.wikipedia.org
<blockquote>MI is a goal-oriented, client-centered counseling style for eliciting behavior change by helping clients to explore and resolve ambivalence. Compared with non-directive counseling, it's more focused and goal-directed. It departs from traditional Rogerian client-centered therapy through this use of direction, in which therapists attempt to influence clients to consider making changes, rather than non-directively explore themselves</blockquote>
<blockquote>Even if we don’t remember early events, they leave an imprint on the way we understand and feel about ourselves, other people, and the greater world, for better or worse. We have elaborate concepts about birds, dogs, lakes and mountains, for example, even if we can’t recall the experiences that created those concepts. ‘You can’t remember going ice-skating with Uncle Henry, but you understand that skating and visiting relatives are fun,’ Bauer explained. ‘You have a feeling for how nice people are, how reliable they are. You might never be able to pinpoint how you learnt that, but it’s just something you know.’</blockquote>
- Triangle of Happiness triangleofhappiness.com
<blockquote>The triangle of happiness is a simplification of the main factors that tend to drive most people in their jobs. Put simply, if you're not satisfied with at least 2 of the 3 points of the triangle, your overall job satisfaction is in real question.</blockquote>
- This column will change your life: just sit down and think theguardian.com
<blockquote>To sit comfortably with your thoughts first requires seeing that there's a sense in which they're not real. A less new agey way of putting it is simply that you don't need to believe your thoughts. Whereupon they become fun to watch, and the need for distraction subsides. To quote the title of a book by Sylvia Boorstein, a meditation teacher: don't just do something, sit there.</blockquote>
- Rozsika Parker, a psychotherapist and parent, speaks out about the flipside of maternity theguardian.com
<blockquote>"A mother needs to know herself, to own up to the diverse, contradictory, often overwhelming feelings evoked by motherhood. It doesn't matter whether she stays at home, goes out to work, is partnered or single. Only a mother who can face her own inner turbulence can make sense of her child's. It's only by accepting that at times you are a bad mother, that you can ever be a good mother." </blockquote>
- The Morality of Manipulation nirandfar.com
<blockquote>Creating a product that the designer does not believe improves the user’s life and which the maker would not use is exploitation.</blockquote>
Yuck. Dark patterns.
- This column will change your life: join the management theguardian.com
<blockquote>The internet makes it absurdly easy for marketers to harness the tiniest twinges of boredom or loneliness or desire, channelling them into sales via "variable rewards" – so much more addictive, as Skinner discovered, than predictable ones. A fascinating new book, Hooked, by Nir Eyal, presents itself as a guidebook for companies who want to create "habit-forming products". But it's also a cautionary manual for resisting them. Eyal urges businesses to think ethically. (Creating addictive products you wouldn't use yourself, he says, "is called exploitation".) </blockquote>
"Absurdly easy" may be overstating things. I like the "wouldn't use it yourself" part. Not a bad general guideline.
- The man who destroyed America’s ego - Matter medium.com
<blockquote>Self-esteem fits perfectly over the top of the traditional ideal of the free and noble individual, striving to achieve the American dream. The movement’s sin was making it sound easy. It removed the part about striving, replacing it with an unearned assumption of exceptionalism. The lesson became that simply wanting it is enough. You’re special. You deserve it.</blockquote>
The first part of this (at least) is really quite good.
<blockquote>There's one view of psychology according to which everything we do to make ourselves miserable – every dysfunctional behaviour, from minor to destructive – begins as an approach that once worked well, often in childhood, then passed its sell-by date. We're not idiots who choose unhappiness; rather, we develop coping mechanisms that make sense at the time.</blockquote>
- Psychiatrists: the drug pushers theguardian.com
<blockquote>One of my oldest friends is a consultant psychiatrist who I've actually seen practising in just this way, with preternatural flair and compassion.
In both their cases, however, I feel about them rather the way I do about the last archbishop of Canterbury: I consider Rowan Williams to be a wise and spiritual man mostly despite rather than because of his Christianity; and I think many psychiatrists are good healers mostly despite rather than because of the medical ideology of mental illness to which they subscribe.</blockquote>
- America the Anxious - NYTimes.com opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com
While the British way can be drainingly negative, The American approach to happiness can spur a debilitating anxiety. The initial sense of promise and hope is seductive, but it soon gives way to a nagging slow-burn feeling of inadequacy. Am I happy? Happy enough? As happy as everyone else? Could I be doing more about it? Even basic contentment feels like failure when pitched against capital-H Happiness. The goal is so elusive and hard to define, it’s impossible to pinpoint when it’s even been achieved — a recipe for neurosis.
- Trickle-Down Distress: How America's Broken Meritocracy Drives Our National Anxiety Epidemic - The Atlantic theatlantic.com
To the question of anxiety: Should we be thinking about ways to make America more of meritocracy in the hopes of quelling our stress? Says McNamee: "A pure meritocracy is not possible and may not even be desirable." (Just ask Harrison Bergeron.) Far more important, he argues, is debunking the myth of meritocracy, harmful "because it provides an incomplete explanation for success and failure, often mistakenly exalting the rich and condemning the poor."
- Semantic satiation - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia en.wikipedia.org
Semantic satiation (also semantic saturation) is a psychological phenomenon in which repetition causes a word or phrase to temporarily lose meaning for the listener, who can only process the speech as repeated meaningless sounds.
Tomato tomato tomato tomato tomato tomato tomato tomato tomato tomato tomato.
- The Perfected Self - The Atlantic theatlantic.com
- Impostor syndrome - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia en.wikipedia.org
- Tweetage Wasteland - Confessions of an Internet Superhero - by Dave Pell tweetagewasteland.com
- Discipline: Be The Machine « yield thought coderoom.wordpress.com
Rawr! Be the machine! Another version of "stop faffing about and just get on with it".
- The Data-Driven Life - NYTimes.com nytimes.com
In the cozy confines of personal life, we rarely used the power of numbers. The techniques of analysis that had proved so effective were left behind at the office at the end of the day and picked up again the next morning. The imposition, on oneself or one’s family, of a regime of objective record keeping seemed ridiculous. A journal was respectable. A spreadsheet was creepy. And yet, almost imperceptibly, numbers are infiltrating the last redoubts of the personal. Sleep, exercise, sex, food, mood, location, alertness, productivity, even spiritual well-being are being tracked and measured, shared and displayed.
- Anthropology in Practice: The Psychology of Liking anthropologyinpractice.com
- Less Talk More Rock- Boing Boing boingboing.net
An entire generation seems to have become used to experiences clogged with menus and text, spammed with awkward cutscenes, choked by voice acting, mangled by incongruent narrative, segmented by load times, stalled by informational messages. These elements serve to undermine the aesthetic coherence of the work -- they can dilute the magic, they can interrupt the flow, they can disrupt the basic audiovisual communication, they can break the spell.
- GDC 2010: Design in Detail: Changing the Time Between Shots for the Sniper Rifle from 0.5 to 0.7 Seconds for Halo 3 « Double Buffered doublebuffered.com
Some notes from the session Design in Detail: Changing the Time Between Shots for the Sniper Rifle from 0.5 to 0.7 Seconds for Halo 3 presented by Jaime Griesemer from Bungie.
"The unspoken premise of [Jesse Schell's] DICE 2010 lecture is that people are prisoners to external reward systems. "External reward" is practically a curse word to me, a thing I'm ever vigilant against. I don't need experience point systems giving me a false sense of mastery, or Xbox "achievements" for watching the opening movie of a game (that's a real one). But people absolutely are driven by external rewards. So much so that Schell doesn't even question it, he simply takes it as given."
Are some games intentionally designed to keep you compulsively playing, even when you're not enjoying it? Oh, hell yes. And their methods are downright creepy.
Why, then, did we throw everything we'd learned out the window when it came time to design achievements? I think that's what bothered me about early Xbox Live achievements more than anything — as goals, they violated too many game design guidelines. Too many of them wouldn't make any sense as in-game goals for progressing through content.
"A player's motivation is more complex than "to have fun." Think on it closely and you'll agree – everyone plays to scratch a particular itch, and some games serve some itches better than others. While plenty of the details are complex and subjective, it's possible to divide play motivations into four different groups."
Bad title, interesting points. "I learned that introverts prefer to think before they speak, while extroverts tend to think /as/ they speak. I also learned what energizes introverts (solo activities) versus extroverts (social activities) [...] They seek out allies as trusted sounding boards and champions who can help spread the word about their quiet strengths."
- Maslow's hierarchy of needs - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia en.wikipedia.org