It Pays To Be Optimistic

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optimism, psychology, Science Daily, University of Illinois

The moment you speak of psychology, in which subject, by the way, I have a deep interest, people will say, “Yeah, we know, the glass half full or half empty stuff!” We often speak of friends and relatives being either optimists or pessimists. Over time optimists have been described as being people who see the positive side of things, people and situations. They are the ones likely to see the glass being half full.

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On Dreams

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dreams, psychology

Come to think of it, I don’t dream too often. I mean in my sleep, not during the day. Yet there are dreams that I still vividly recall days, months and years after they have taken place. Why is this so? I was interested in researching more about dreams in general. What fascinates me is that dreams have an almost meaningless juxtaposition of people, places and events across different time periods. In a recent dream, I recall interacting with professional colleagues whom I haven’t spoken to for two decades and in the same dream featured some folk from my school days which dates back to five decades.

Roles- At Work & At Home

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displacement, family and office roles, psychology

Sarah Kershaw has an interesting article in the New York Times called ” Family and Office Roles Mix “. It speaks of how our position in a family influences the way we approach issues at work. There have been studies to show these differences in the first born of a family as distinct from the second born and so on. The very environment in which we were brought up does to a large extent influence the way we look at things. The roles we have at home make us, in a sense, adopt those very roles at work.

Steven Pinker on the Moral Instinct

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moral right, psychology, Steven Pinker

The New York Times magazine has one of the finest articles I have read in a long time. It’s called “The Moral Instinct” by Prof. Steven Pinker, the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University.

While the article itself is rather long, it gives those interested in the way we behave interesting insights into definitions of right and wrong. How are these formulated in our minds? What’s the thin line dividing what is right and what is moral? How is it that one set of behaviours may be ok in a context but not in another?

Which of these 3 people, starts the article is the most admirable? Mother Teresa, Bill Gates or Norman Borlaug? Which of these 3 is the least admirable? If this gets you interested, read the rest of the article here.

The starting point, writes Pinker, for appreciating that there is a distinctive part of our psychology for morality is seeing how moral judgments differ from other kinds of opinions we have on how people ought to behave.