Donald Doherty's blog

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  • Not Being Present in the Moment Takes Emotional Toll

    Perhaps you’ve heard about being mindful from practitioners of meditation or maybe you try to be mindful in your everyday life. Then you know that being mindful is about being present in the moment. New research suggests that those who are mindful are happier.

    Research described in the paper “A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind” (published November 12, 2010 in Science) utilizes an iPhone application to accumulate experience sampling data to an online data repository at TrackYourHappiness.org. According to the authors, experience sampling is the most reliable method for investigating real-world emotions. The technique involves randomly contacting people as they engage in their everyday activities and asking them to report their thoughts, feelings, and actions at that moment.

    The team reported three findings from their research based on data from 2,250 adults living in the United States. First, people’s minds frequently wander (46.9% of samples). Second, they found that people were less happy while their minds were wandering than when they were not. This was true during all activities. Third, they found that what people were thinking about was a better predictor of their happiness than was what they were doing.

    Our ability to think of things that are not presently happening seems to take an emotional toll. Why is mind wandering apparently the brain’s default mode of operation? Stimulus independent thought is apparently what enables people to reason and plan.

    Would you like to track your personal happiness and find out what factors are associated with greater happiness for you personally? You can become a participant at TrackYourHappiness.org. When you do you’ll also contribute to studies like the one reviewed here and help to increase our scientific understanding of happiness.

    Other related blog posts:

    How Happy? Well-Being Research and Online Data Repositories

  • Emotional Response Best Predicted by Response of Others

    If I’m told about a future event I may take part in, I feel that I’m the best estimator of what my own emotional response will be to that event. Experimental psychology results described in “The Surprising Power of Neighborly Advice” (published March 20, 2009 in Science) show that not only is this what we all typically think but also that it’s false.

    Each participant in the experiments was either given information about an event that they’d take part in or was provided the opinion of another participant on how much they thought the individual would enjoy (or not) the future event. Each participant was then asked to rate how much they were likely to enjoy (or not) the future event. After providing a rating the participant was exposed to the other set of information (the opinion of another participant or information about the future event) so that, by the time of the event, all participants were exposed to the same set of information. After the event, each participant stated how much they enjoyed (or not) the event.

    The researchers then compared the emotional response each individual predicted with the response they reported at the end of the event. The results showed that those who heard the opinion of another participant on how they may respond to an event were significantly more accurate in predicting their final response than those who simply knew details about the upcoming event.

    The results are intriguing. Nevertheless, I wonder if unconscious influence (priming) may be at work here even in those who did not get the neighborly advice before estimating their future emotional response (see my blog post “Is the Conscious Decision an Illusion? Pursuing Goals Unconsciously“). That is, not only is the input from another participant influencing the individual’s estimate of their emotional response to a future event but it’s influencing their perception of the event itself (while it happens). In this case, the influenced perception of the event itself would happen to both those who got advice before and those who received advice after they predicted their future emotional response. That would explain the good predictions of the former and the poor predictions made by the latter.

    Other related blog posts:

    Is the Conscious Decision an Illusion? Pursuing Goals Unconsciously

  • Explosive Change in Network Connectivity and Catastrophic Information Loss

    Do the links in a Facebook account with thousands of “friends” mean the same thing as those in an account with tens or even hundreds of friends? Probably not.

    What happens as more and more links are made in a network of a given size? The network moves from sparsely interconnected towards fully connected. A sparsely connected network embodies a large amount of potential information (high entropy). A link in a fully connected network has no potential information (no entropy). Therefore networks that form internal connections faster than their overall growth are in danger of becoming less informative. In the worst case scenario they may become entirely connected up and lack any useful information at all.

    The movement from sparse connectivity towards fully connected graphs is generally thought to be continuous over time for random networks. The paper “Explosive Percolation in Random Networks” published March 13, 2009 in Science shows that the transition can be abrupt like when water turns into ice at zero degrees centigrade.

    The paper’s result is important since it suggests that networks, from ontologies to social networks, may be in danger of suddenly transitioning into a highly connected and information poor state under certain circumstances. We need to understand what these circumstances are so we may steer our networks clear of explosive transformations (phase transitions) to information poor states.