Faulty thinking

Our thoughts are constantly helping us to interpret the world around us, describing what’s happening, and trying to make sense of it by helping us interpret events, sights, sounds, smells, feelings. Because of our experiences, life story, culture, religious beliefs and family values, we often make very different interpretations of situations than others.

Cognitive therapy was developed with the belief that a person's experiences result in thoughts. These are connected with schemas or core beliefs developed from early life to create our view of the world and determine our emotional states and behaviours. Disorders are sometimes maintained by negative attitudes and distorted thinking. We must of all, at one point or another held views, or patterns of thoughts that might be seen as thinking errors, fantasies, fallacies and faulty thinking. And faulty ways of thinking are often more likely to occur when we are stressed.

Cognitive therapy focuses on altering faulty thinking patterns. The father of Cognitive therapy, Aaron Beck proposed six types of faulty thinking

1. Drawing conclusions about oneself or the world without sufficient and relevant information. For example a man not hired by a potential employer perceives himself as totally worthless and believes he probably will never find employment of any sort.
2. Drawing conclusion from very isolated details and events without considering the larger context or picture. For example a student who receives a C on an exam becomes depressed and stops attending classes even though he has A's and B's in his other courses. The student measures his worth by failures, errors, and weaknesses rather than by successes or strengths.
3. Holding extreme beliefs on the basis of a single incident and applying it to a different or dissimilar and inappropriate situation. For example a depressed woman who has relationship problems with her boss may believe she is a failure in all other types of relationships.
4. The process of overestimating the significance of negative events. For example a runner experiences shortness of breath and interprets it as a major health problem, possibly even an indication of imminent death.
5. Relating external events to one another when no objective basis for such a connection is apparent. For example a student who raises his hand in class and is not called on by the teacher believes that the instructor dislikes or is biased against him.
6. An "all-or-nothing," "good or bad," and "either-or" approach to viewing the world. For example at one extreme, a woman who perceives herself as "perfect" and immune from making mistakes; at the other extreme, a woman who believes she is totally incompetent.

Why Women Want Tall Men

Altezza mezza bellezza, as the Italians say—height is half of beauty.

Ours it seems is a culture that valorizes the tall and belittles, as it were, the short.  Being tall is also associated with career success: in fact it has been estimated that a person who is six feet tall is likely to earn around $166,000 more over the course of a 30-year career than someone who is five foot four. The taller you are, for instance, the more likely you are to go on to higher education. This is true even after controlling for cognitive ability, suggesting that some kind of subtle—indeed unconscious—bias may be operating among educators.

For males in particular, height seems to be linked to greater happiness and self-esteem. With psychological advantages stemming in part from the pervasive tendency to associate height with power. That tendency is embedded in our language: we look up to people we consider superior; those without influence are the little people.

Evolutionarily speaking, one might argue that a tall man would be preferred by women because, if you follow the argument, he’ll be stronger and better able to ward off physical treats to his family. In the beast-eats-man world of primitive civilizations, this argument might have a rationale. However, unless taller equals stronger, faster, and smarter even in this scenario, height wouldn’t seem to offer any particularly unique advantage.

In an intriguing 2013 study, Dutch psychologists Gert Stulp, Abraham Buunk, and Thomas Pollet followed up on some of their earlier work on male height to find out more about what leads women to prefer those lanky guys. They were also curious to learn how and why people are satisfied with their own height.

Stulp and his colleagues sought to understand not only who prefers whom in terms of height, but also how people feel about their own height. The participants in this study were 650 first-year heterosexual psychology students who received course credit for completing the survey. They estimated their own height, and reported on their sex, ethnicity (most were Dutch or German), and reported on their sexual orientation. The rest of the questions, simply enough, asked them to report on their relationship status, the height of their partner, the satisfaction with their own height, and their satisfaction with the height of their partners.

The results on partner preferences are a bit discouraging if you’re a short man. In general, women were more likely than men to think that the man should be taller and they didn’t want to be in a relationship in which they were taller than their male partners. Men liked being taller than their partners, but they didn’t care about the height difference as much as women did.

As it turns out, people do tend to partner with people of similar height due to a phenomenon known as assortative mating.  However, no one seemed totally happy with their partner’s actual height. Men were most satisfied with women 

Empathic and Analytic Thinking are Mutually Exclusive

Empathic and Analytic Thinking are Mutually Exclusive

A study, led by researchers at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, in the US reported in the Journal NeuroImage, explains why some business leaders sometimes overlook the public relations consequences of their cost-cutting exercises.

The study is believed to be the first to show that humans have a built in neural constraint that stops us thinking empathically and analytically at the same time.

Our brains switch between social and analytic networks when we’re not doing anything in particular. But, when working on a goal-directed task, our brains engage the appropriate neural pathways.

Lead author Anthony Jack, an assistant professor of cognitive science at Case Western Reserve explain, "this is the cognitive structure we've evolved":

Before this study, from previous research, scientists already thought there were two large networks in the brain that were in tension, one called the default mode network and the other called the task positive network. However, there are different views on what drives them.

One view proposes that one network is deployed in goal-directed tasks, and when this happens, the other one allows the mind to wander.

Another view proposes that one network engages in external attention, while the other is for internal attention. The new study suggests a new explanation: both networks focus on external stimuli, but one is for social problems and the other is for analytical problems, and when the one concerned with one type of problem is engaged, the neural pathways for the other type are repressed.

The importance of friendships - people with intellectual disability

Jack Dikian

November 2011

Aristotle in 384 BC talked about friendships and saw a friendship as the most important kind of relationships one can be involved in. A reason - you can choose your friend, unlike family. He goes on to say “In poverty and other misfortunes of life, true friends are a sure refuge. They keep the young out of mischief; they comfort and aid the old in their weakness, and they incite those in the prime of life to noble deeds.”

His discussions on friendship reveal his fundamental view of human beings as social beings. Even if a man had everything else wealth, fame, virtue, and so on he still could not lead a happy life without friends. Today, we see friendships providing us with numerous important functions including companionship, stimulation, physical support, ego-support, social comparison and intimacy, and affection. It is, therefore, concerning when we contrast this with findings of studies reporting the degree of contact people with intellectual disability have with friends, and, in some cases family.

A CeDR Research Report (2008) by Eric Emerson and Chris Hatton, which was commissioned by Mencap1 analyzed information available from nationally representative data sources on the life experiences and services used by people with learning disabilities in England.

The report provides analysis on survey results for key factors such as accommodation, employment, education, families, friends, etc. for people with mild/moderate intellectual disability, severe intellectual disability and people with profound and multiple intellectual disability.

The survey collected information on the frequency of contact people had with their families, friends who themselves had intellectual disability and friends who did not have intellectual disability. Because the survey used items from the Millennium Poverty and Social Exclusion Survey14 it was possible to compare results with those of people who do not have an intellectual disability.

The table below shows the frequency of social contacts for people with mild/moderate, severe and profound multiple intellectual disability and people who do not have an intellectual disability.

The table from the original report uses the terminology “learning disability” as used in England.

1. Mencap is the leading voice of learning disability and works with people with a learning disability to change laws, challenge prejudice and support them to live their lives as they choose.