Gold-medal psychology

Sport psychologists are helping elite athletes prepare for the 2012 London Olympic games.

By Rebecca A. Clay
Monitor Magazine
July 2012, Vol 43, No. 7
Print version: page 54

For an Olympic athlete who has dedicated years of training to his or her sport, the difference between success and failure can come down to just a few seconds, a few inches or a fraction of a point — slim margins that contribute to the intense pressure elite competitors face.

Fortunately, there has been growing acceptance among both athletes and coaches of sport psychology's role in helping athletes manage those pressures and enhance their performance. One sign of that growing commitment: The number of full-time sport psychologists hired by the United States Olympic Committee (USOC) has increased from just one to six over the last 20 years.
When senior sport psychologist Sean McCann, PhD, started at the USOC 21 years ago, his talks to teams would focus on trying to sell the idea of sport psychology. "Now we don't have to do that," he says. "They get it."

Today, McCann and other sport psychologists — within the USOC and beyond — are prescribing imagery, relaxation techniques, self-talk and other evidence-based interventions as they help prepare the nation's top athletes for the 2012 summer Olympics in London July 27 to Aug. 12.

Under pressure

Ideally, McCann starts working with teams two to four years before the next Olympics so he can build strong relationships with athletes and coaches as they compete in trials and pressure builds.
"You're like any other coach, except you're focusing on the mental domain," says McCann, who estimates that USOC sport psychologists spend 100 days a year on the road following athletes to training camps, matches and the Olympics itself.

Although he gives talks to entire teams once or twice a year, most of McCann's time is spent working with individuals.

Many just want help maintaining their focus or finding other ways to boost their performance. "It's not so much that there's something going wrong," says McCann, a former "serious amateur" bike racer who is preparing the shooting and equestrian teams for this summer's games. "It's like strength conditioning; it's part of what they do to get ready for competition season."

Other athletes need help with such concerns as low self-confidence or problems communicating with teammates or coaches.

Anticipating potential problems is another part of the job. At the Beijing Olympics, for example, American shooters were up against a Chinese shooter who was a national hero favored to win the gold. To prepare shooters for the distraction of a boisterous, home-country crowd cheering for an opponent, McCann urged athletes to listen to iPod files of crowd noises during workouts.
Sport psychologists also help athletes cope with the same kind of problems everyone has, whether it's a death in the family or a break-up. "You can't wait for issues to resolve themselves," says McCann. "The game schedule is the game schedule; they need to be ready to go and focused on July 26."
There are also sport-specific problems, says Karen D. Cogan, PhD, another USOC senior sport psychologist whose "sportfolio" includes acrobatic and combat sports.

With sports like diving and gymnastics, she says, one common issue is fear, as athletes confront "doing multiple flips in the air, twisting to land a certain way or jumping from heights that are more than most people can imagine jumping off of." In some cases, Cogan recommends that athletes practice envisioning themselves doing a difficult task. Other athletes are already thinking too much, so she urges them to use distraction techniques, such as feeling their movement rather than thinking about what they need to do.

"For the most part, the body knows what to do," she says. "They just have to turn off their minds."
Sports that require athletes to have direct contact with an opponent, such as boxing and fencing, bring other potential problems. "Then it's not just about them being mentally tough and focused — things that are under their control — but also dealing with how well someone else is performing," says Cogan. Combat simulations in which athletes either imagine or engage in mock fights can help them learn to focus on what they're doing rather than on their foes' actions.

When you're dealing with teams rather than individuals, says Cogan, the potential problems multiply. "The more people you have, the more different personalities and dynamics, the more complicated it can be to get them all working toward the same goals," she says. With teams, one critical focus is facilitating communication — helping teammates overcome disagreements or misunderstandings and work toward the same goal.

Visual learning

For Jim Bauman, PhD, the consulting sport psychologist for USA Swimming, the key to working with athletes is to make his suggestions as concrete as possible.

"Athletes tend to be a lot more visual and kinesthetic learners," says Bauman, who spends most of his year as a sport psychologist at the University of Virginia. "They're hands-on versus auditory learners."

Using props helps ensure that athletes remember Bauman's recommendations even under maximum stress, he says. To demonstrate the importance of being pliable, durable and resilient rather than mentally tough, for example, he shows how it's possible to break a piece of wood over your knee but impossible to do the same with a phone book. "Some athletes get into a routine that becomes ritualistic," says Bauman. "If they can't do that routine — if there's a surprise, distraction or delay — it's easy for them to be taken off track."

Bauman also scours junkyards for car tachometers to help teach athletes how to manage anxiety. Tachometers, which measure an engine's revolutions per minute (RPMs), offer a useful analogy for athletes' anxiety levels, he says. At one extreme, he shows athletes, the tachometer indicates the engine is idling. As a driver shifts gears and heads down the highway, the tachometer settles around the middle as the car cruises comfortably. On the far right side of the dial, the tachometer is typically colored red or orange — a warning not to put the engine under so much stress.

"What I'll see is that a couple of days before a race or the night before, athletes' tachometers — their emotional revolutions — are just redlining," he says. The tachometers provide a visual lesson in inefficiency and wasted energy and the need to cruise rather than redline.

To underscore that message with the swimmers he's working with, Bauman suggests that they put together their own music playlists, with slower music that represents idling or resting, medium- to faster-paced music that offers a beat-per-minute pace similar to their competition stroke-per-minute rate and very fast music to represent "redlining" or excessive anxiety.

"Using these playlists makes it easier for them to remain aware of their psychological and physiological energy levels, or RPMs, as they relate to various stages of getting ready to compete," he says.

Cues can also help during competition, says Bauman. "It's good for us to sit and talk in the office, on the sidelines or on the pool deck during practice, but it's so easy for them to go back to their old ways as soon as they're back in a competitive environment," he says. "You can't depend on memory, because the emotions are so high."

When Bauman worked with ski jumpers, for example, he noticed that they all looked down to check their bindings before jumping. Putting a relevant word or symbol on each ski helped remind them to do whatever they needed to do. A simple letter "P," for example, can remind athletes to keep a healthy perspective and focus on their assets — skills, strength and great support staff — rather than negatives — inadequate preparation, tough opponents and the high stakes of competition.

Coaching connections

Working with coaches is another way to make sure sport psychology messages get through to athletes, says Steve Portenga, PhD, chair of the psychological services subcommittee at USA Track and Field.

Portenga has helped develop educational programs that teach coaches basic sport psychology principles and help them understand the needs of special populations, such as younger athletes. The programs also teach coaches interventions they can use to help athletes hone such skills as relaxation.
"You can get to hundreds of athletes through coaching education," says Portenga. "It's much more difficult to get to athletes directly." Plus, he says, coaches usually have more influence over athletes than sport psychologists do, for good or bad.

Portenga recalls working with a college team several years ago. Just before a match, the coach announced that the opposing team was one he used to work for and urged his current team to go out and beat them. "It took only 30 seconds for the coach to undo the great progress we'd made over the course of four or five months," says Portenga. "We had been focusing on the process — being able to perform at your best regardless of the outcome — and had been getting good outcomes." The result of the coach's message? Distracted players and one of the season's worst meets.

Once the Olympics begin, Portenga will urge coaches, medical staff and others to be "his eyes and ears," watching for signs of trouble.

"There's a tremendous amount of nervous energy and boredom," Portenga says of the Olympic Village. "Given enough time to sit and stew, people who normally handle pressure well sometimes struggle."

The pressure doesn't just get to athletes and coaches, adds McCann. Psychologists have to take care of themselves, too.

"As a sport psychologist, you need to make sure you've got good skills so you're not freaking out at the games," says McCann. "I try to be a positive presence and be someone who doesn't look terrified, because that can be contagious."

TIME MAGAZINE - Choking

The Science of Choking

Check out the article in TIME Magazine about "Lolo's No Choke". This article talks about the Science of Choking and how ti has affected previous athletes at the Olympic games and how current athletes - including Lolo Jones will have to overcome their fears and anxieties to bring home gold.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

TIME Magazine - July 30, 2012

www.time.com

Choke. The word just sounds so noxious, really. Never mind its ties to suffocation and death. Just say it: choke.

Athletes in particular would like to strangle the scribe who first applied such an ugly term to their most spectacular — and public — failures.

Count Lolo Jones among them. Jones, the telegenic American hurdler, lived through a nightmare in Beijing. With a commanding lead in the 100-m event, on the verge of taking the gold and winning Americans’ hearts with her good looks and homeless-to-heroine story, she clipped the ninth hurdle. There are 10 of them. She stumbled across the line to finish in seventh place, then tumbled to the ground in a pool of tears.

Jones is reflective about her failure. “So many people have said they saw my story in Beijing — they’re inspired, they picked themselves up,” says Jones, who handled the aftermath of her disaster with incredible grace. “I just want to have this story for all of us.”

But when I ask her for her gut reaction to the word choke, she runs from it at world-record pace. “Choking is going out there and having just a terrible performance from start to end,” she says while picking at swordfish in a Baton Rouge, La., restaurant. “I was winning the race.” But the word was still gnawing at her the next day as she stood on her front lawn waiting to be photographed, visibly stressed out from her demanding training and media obligations. She had spent 10 minutes or so in tears. “Nobody has ever asked me that question,” she says. She sticks to her conviction that if she had truly choked, she would not have been a few ticks away from gold. But now she offers an addendum: “I really just put too much pressure on myself. If people want to consider that choking, if they want to use that terminology for me, I completely understand. I’m not going to argue with them.”

(LIST: 50 Olympic Athletes to Watch)

No sporting event puts more mental stress on its participants — or cultivates more choking — than the Olympic Games. They’re a quadrennial pitchfork to the brain. The rare spotlight shines on athletes in barely visible sports: Grab that gold, or call us in 2016. Elite athletes need gold-medal brains to operate their Olympian bodies. And scientists are beginning to understand an athlete’s brain under the intense pressure of the Olympics and why some athletes handle it while others don’t. Performing under pressure demands proper allocation of resources — training the cerebral cortex to filter out the billion distractions available, leaving the body free to perform. Or as Yogi Berra famously said, “How can you think and hit at the same time?”

Jones could use some tips. You’d be hard-pressed to find an Olympic athlete under more strain. “I’m worried,” says her mother Lori. “Lo is so hard on herself.” Constant reminders of her Olympic mishap aside, the world will be wondering if Jones, 29, is worth the hype. She’s stolen pre-London buzz despite clocking underwhelming times going into these Games. She’ll contend with curiosity about her bedroom behavior — or lack thereof: a devout Christian, she said in a May HBO interview that despite her ability to attract pretty much any guy she wants, she remains a virgin. The Internet swilled this news like cheap champagne, instantly expanding her fame.

Behind her lighthearted public personality lies a lifetime of mental aches at home, in love and on the track. An Olympic victory would soothe all that pain. A future of adulation and marketing dollars awaits — Lolo! It just rolls off the tongue — if she can survive a 12-sec. race. Beijing, and her sad eyes, would disappear. “I’ve carried that burden so long,” says Jones. “I’m tired of carrying it.” On your marks.

Hungry-Man Heists

Growing up in Des Moines, Iowa, jones was a five-star prospect — as a thief. Jones pilfered food for survival. She was fast, which helped during getaways. And she didn’t have a larcenous profile. “My dad would always say they’re never going to suspect me because they never look at a cute young girl,” says Jones. Her father shuttled in out of prison but tutored her in the fine art of snatching TV dinners. “There was definitely shame for sure, but looking back, I was able to eat,” she says. “There’s a Hungry-Man — steak and potatoes and a little brownie — you’re like, I’m all over that.”

Jones’ mother worked low-paying clerical and housekeeping jobs to support Lolo and her four siblings. The family bounced around apartments, and Jones went to eight schools in eight years. Given such upheaval, she struggled to keep friends. “The hardest thing was not having those conversations with a girl pal, like when you’re talking hours on the phone,” she says. “I don’t remember those moments.”

When Lolo was in third grade, the family became homeless and bunked in the basement of a Salvation Army church. “That was the dark place where the kids just would not go,” Jones says. “And all of a sudden, we’re living there. I just remember the open showers and coldness to it.” To hide her dismal plight from other kids, she would wake up early to play in the church gym before children arrived for camp. That way, it appeared that someone had dropped her off.

Jones was always running: when the family car broke down, she would jump out and sprint to the store. The practice paid off. She picked up the hurdles in high school and showed so much promise that in her junior year, when her mother moved to Forest City, Iowa — about 125 miles (200 km) north of Des Moines — Lolo stayed behind to pursue a college scholarship. She lived with three different families before leaving for college, still struggling to fit in. “Think about her situation,” says former Des Moines Register editor Randy Essex, who took Jones in for 16 months. “Her dad is in and out of her life, her family moved a lot, and all of a sudden she moves in with these people who are pretty much strangers.”

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Jones kept quiet, poured herself into hurdles and homework and earned a ride to Louisiana State University. “My first year, I was quite miserable,” she says. “But I couldn’t say, ‘Oh, I’m homesick,’ because there was no place for me to go back to in Iowa.” Jones spent her breaks and holidays on campus and eventually found her stride, winning three national championships. The Olympics were in reach.

Until they weren’t. At the U.S. Olympic trials in 2004, Jones failed to even make the finals — a foreshadowing of harder times ahead. Back in Baton Rouge, she watched the Athens Olympics in tears, unsure of her future. With an economics degree, should she get a real job? She conferred with Dennis Shaver, her coach at LSU. “I told her, You never want to wake up seven, eight, nine, 10 years from now and wonder, What if?” says Shaver, who still trains Jones today.

So she stuck with the sport, though she could barely support herself. At work at Home Depot, she sweltered at the gardening-department cash register. “They were like, Oh, put her outside,” Jones says. “She trains, she runs outside.” She also worked as a restaurant hostess and later in a gym, where she would bump into former classmates who knew her as Lolo Jones, hurdling star. Now they saw her taking out the trash. “It was a little bit more embarrassing,” she says. “They were like, ‘Oh, did you graduate?’ Yeah, I graduated.”

Jones’ hurdling technique sharpened, and she started winning races in Europe. In 2007 she took the U.S. indoor title. That success led to sponsorship deals with the likes of running-shoe brand Asics and eyewear maker Oakley. The Baton Rouge doctors and lawyers working out at the gym would see races replayed on the TVs and wonder, Hey, isn’t that the girl from the front desk? They started asking her for training sessions. Jones turned them down. By then she could afford to quit and prep full-time for the 2008 Olympic trials. She won her 100-m race. She was bound for Beijing.

The Science of Choking

When the gun went off, the Australian girl got out on me. She beat me to the third hurdle. You know, I was cool and calm about it. She had been doing that all year, and I would always get her in the end.

Sure enough, I passed her, and from hurdles three through five, I was just in an amazing rhythm. I started turning it over, and then I knew at one point I was winning the race. It wasn’t like, Oh, I’m winning the Olympic gold medal. It just seemed like another race.

And then there was a point after that where I was like, Wow, these hurdles are coming up really, really fast. You have to make sure you don’t get sloppy in your technique. I was telling myself to make sure my legs were snapping out. So I overtried. I tightened up a bit too much. That’s when I hit the hurdle. Honestly, I should have relaxed a little bit and just run. Instead, I was just so paranoid because they were coming up so fast, I snapped it down too fast.

You know, when I hit it, I thought I would still be able to get a medal. But when I crossed the line, I knew how bad it was. I collapsed on the track, and I couldn’t stop thinking, I just wish the next Olympics were tomorrow.

Jones can recall that night in the Beijing Bird’s Nest — Aug. 19, 2008, the night she lost the 100-m-hurdles gold — with surprising clarity. And that might be why she choked. “Often, athletes can tell you exactly what they are doing when they screw up,” says Sian Beilock, a psychology professor at the University of Chicago who wrote the book on blowing it — Choke: What the Secrets of the Brain Reveal About Getting It Right When You Have To, published in 2010.

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Beilock and other scientists who study choking — there are more of them than you might think — suspect that athletes under stress choke when too many thoughts flood the prefrontal cortex, the area of the brain that houses informational memory. Worry, and the brain becomes too busy. It’s a misallocation of resources. The motor cortex, which controls the planning and execution of movements, should be doing most of the work for experienced athletes.

When athletes talk about being “in the zone” or “unconscious” when winning, their prefrontal cortex is quiet. They often can’t tell you what was happening. They have no memory.

In experiments, scientists have shown that when top athletes start thinking about details of their technique instead of just letting muscle memory run the show, they tend to mess up. In the University of Chicago’s Human Performance Lab, for example, Beilock instructed skilled college soccer players to dribble a ball around cones and indicate which side of their foot was making contact with the ball. Those players who were asked to exercise their prefrontal cortex and focus on the details made more errors than the players given no instructions. Similarly, while he was teaching at Arizona State University, psychologist Robert Gray, now a senior lecturer in motor control at the University of Birmingham in England, put college baseball players through a hitting simulation. Gray told them to identify whether the bat was moving up or down at certain moments. Their swings suffered.

Jocks should be dumb and not think too much. Jones’ recall of her Beijing race suggests that her working memory, rather than her muscle memory, was too engaged. She talks about technique. Notice that she was “telling myself to make sure my legs were snapping out” rather than just letting her motor cortex do it.

So how can Jones calm that part of her mind? Some shrinks think she should go to the videotape. After the 2004 Olympics, Hap Davis, a psychologist for the Canadian swimming team, conducted a novel experiment. He asked a group of swimmers to watch videos of their failures at the Olympic trials or at the Games, then peeked inside their minds using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a technology that measures blood flow to specific areas of the brain. Rewatching failure triggered relatively high levels of activity in the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala, the emotional center of the brain, and low levels of activity in the motor cortices, where movements are executed. This brain snapshot likely mirrored the athletes’ physiological state of mind when they choked.

But after asking the athletes to view their terrible moments, Davis did a “cognitive intervention,” in which he asked the athletes to share their feelings about the race and discuss ways to correct their errors. After working through their emotions, the athletes rewatched the video, and the fMRI showed that the athletes’ brains were much healthier for competition: prefrontal-cortex activity declined, while blood flow to the motor areas increased. “Watching the failure washed out the negative emotion,” says Davis. “Now I can discuss it with you, and it’s no big deal.”

The Canadian swimming team religiously watches its mistakes. Steve Portenga, a psychologist for USA Track & Field, has also adopted immersion-therapy methods; though he cannot name specific patients, he says U.S. track athletes who watch videos and talk through their low moments improve their performances. “The general practice of addressing failure is absolutely vital,” Portenga says.

Dan O’Brien, a former decathlon gold medalist, viewed so much footage of his famous choke at the 1992 Olympic trials that he became desensitized to it. That year, the reigning world champ failed to make the U.S. team, leaving Reebok’s ubiquitous “Dan and Dave” marketing campaign, which promised a Barcelona Olympics showdown between O’Brien and fellow American Dave Johnson, in tatters. (“I don’t think you can call a rookie a choker,” O’Brien says.) Going into the 1996 qualifiers, he anticipated endless questions about his gaffe on the pole vault. He used the tape as motivation. “I’d watch it, watch it, watch it, then go jump,” O’Brien says. He won Olympic gold in Atlanta that year.

So when O’Brien bumped into Jones some six months after Beijing, he advised her to go to the video. She blanched at the idea; she couldn’t stomach it. Jones says she’s not living in denial. In fact, she sees the race all the time — just not on a screen. “I don’t need to watch it, because I remember every bit of that race,” she says. “I’ll have flashbacks quite often.” The trick will be to shut it off at the starting blocks in London.

Practicing under pressure can help Jones quiet her nerves. Raoul Oudejans, a researcher at VU University in Amsterdam, has repeatedly shown in studies involving free-throw shooters, dart throwers and armed police officers that people perform better in tense situations after creating stress for themselves in practice. In one experiment that appeared in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology in 2009, for example, dart throwers who practiced hitting a target while they were suspended 17.5 ft. (5.3 m) in the air on a climbing wall — a situation that caused considerable anxiety — later outscored those who didn’t receive such frightening training.

Although it’s impossible to set up hurdles in midair, coaches can create stresses in practice. They can, say, invite a set of critical eyes, like the media or even a real or imagined talent scout, to a practice. They can punish practice failure — if you miss this free throw, the whole team sprints — to turn up the heat. They can offer financial rewards for success and penalties for falling short.

Jones isn’t making side bets with her coach to up the ante in practice. But she’s trying to re-create the big moments the best she can. “I do a lot of visualizing at practice to increase the pressure,” she says. “A lot of times, when I’m in the blocks, I’m visualizing I’m at the Olympics, even though I’m just in Baton Rouge.” She pictures the crowds, imagines the cameras hovering, the millions watching. “If you can practice at that level,” says Jones, “when it comes to the actual meet, you’ll be prepared.”

“Stab Wound. Stab Wound. Stab Wound.”

Even as Jones gets mentally ready for London, her physical ability has now come into question. A year ago, Jones underwent surgery for a tethered spinal cord, a congenital neurological condition that left her unable to feel her feet. For weeks after the operation, she could barely walk.

The pull of the Olympics helped hasten her recovery. Jones has sprinkled her house with reminders of London. Olympic rings are sculpted into the flower-pots in front of her garage. She also purchased a set of London 2012 dinner plates, which keeps her diet in check. “It’s hard to eat ribs off a plate when you have the London logo looking at you,” Jones says. And in 2010, she bought a London 2012 sweatshirt for her niece, who lives nearby with Jones’ sister. “Randomly, she’ll come home from school and have this sweatshirt on, and it’s like, Yeah, this is what you’re working for,” Jones says.

So she threw herself into rehab. Jones recovered faster than any patient her surgeon, Dr. Robert Bray of the DISC Sports and Spine Center in Los Angeles, had treated for a tethered spinal cord. “She took it to a whole other level you don’t see,” says Bray. She made a stirring return to competition in late January, winning the U.S. Open, a top-notch indoor event.

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On Twitter, Jones jokes about her unlucky love life. I wonder if this Liz Lemon vibe — the smart, pretty girl who can’t find Mr. Right — is a type of character she likes playing. It’s great Twitter fodder but hard to believe. But she insists it’s not a facade. “This is real,” Jones says. “There have been so many nights when I’ve cried, praying to God, like, Where is my future husband?”

Her chastity probably makes her the second-highest-profile virgin athlete, next to New York Jets quarterback Tim Tebow. Despite the best efforts of Tebow’s teammate center Nick Mangold to play matchmaker — Mangold led “Lolo” chants in the Jets locker room this spring and promoted the #Lobow hashtag on Twitter — this Christian dream pairing probably isn’t happening. “Everybody is like, You should date Tim Tebow, because, like, you guys are both virgins and Christians,” Jones says. “And I’m like, Yeah, but there’s still so much involved. Like, is he funny? On Twitter, he’s just a straight-up guy. You know, I want somebody I click with.”

Lolo’s cult will only grow in London, which peeves her competitors. They don’t appreciate being overshadowed, especially in a year when Jones has been far from dominant. She sensed hostility and resentment when she returned to the track in January. “For girls to get mad at me because I may get attention, because of the mishap or how I handle myself, I think it’s the stupidest thing ever,” Jones says. “I don’t think they realize that the fame I’ve had has not been the cool fame. It’s been the fame like” — here Jones summons a pity voice — “‘Ohhhhh, you’re the girl that messed up at the Olympics.’ Stab wound. Stab wound. Stab wound. Like, who wants that?”

Jones is not the favorite this time around. She finished third at the U.S. Olympic trials, and Australia’s Sally Pearson has run the fastest times this season. A spring hamstring injury, however, slowed Jones down. Is she on pace to peak in London? After her third-place finish in her preliminary heat at the trials, Jones seemed unlikely to even make the team. But she did, and she can certainly surprise again.

When Jones balled up, wailing, on the Beijing track four years ago, she somehow enjoyed a brief sense of comfort. She thought back to the 2004 Olympics, how she watched those Games in tears while sitting in Baton Rouge. Sure, she was again sobbing, but at least she was in the race. She was an Olympian. And then it hit her. She’d be crying four years later as well. On the London podium. “I know I will be,” Jones says. No choke.

Read more: http://olympics.time.com/2012/07/19/lolo-jones-olympic-hurdler/#ixzz21elJpMzI

Plan a Getaway this Summer!

New research as shown that travel helps to build vital neural pathways. So, this summer - consider taking an adventure vs. the same old vacation. Visit some place new, try a new activity. Navigating unfamiliar palces, tasting new foods, or learning even a few words in a another language delivers the brain a profound 'building effect'. Plus, life expereinces are worth more than trinkets! So, have fun planning and enjoying your summer getaway!!

Does Money Buy Happiness?

Check out the "Indiana Jones" of Positive Psychology answer the age old question...."does money buy happiness?" It's not a black and white issue - but there are some very interesting facts that have come from the research. The Social and Individual levels are discussed and how happy people are with money influencing their lives.
 
http://vimeo.com/45643899

Watch Dr. Robert Biswas-Diener in a brand new video as he discusses the science of money and happiness and challenges many commonly held assumptions. 

In a 2010 Psychology Today article - Positive Psychology Researcher Sonja Lyubomirsky talks about how money can impair our ability to savor life events.

Can Money Buy Happiness or Steal From It?

New research reveals that money can impair savoring ability.
Published on August 30, 2010 by Sonja Lyubomirsky, Ph.D. in How of Happiness
This is a piece I wrote for Scientific American's Mind Matters column:

Money can't buy you love. Worshipping Mammon foments evil ways. Materialists are shallow and unhappy. The greenback finds itself in tough times these days. Whether it's Wall Street bankers earning lavish multi-million-dollar bonuses or two-bit city managers in Los Angeles County bringing in higher salaries than President Obama, the recessionary economic climate has helped spur outrage and revulsion at those of us collecting undeserved lucre.

Wealthy people have a bad rep. Sure, there are philanthropists like Warren Buffet and Bill Gates, who have given billions of their net worth away and have made the world a better, healthier, safer place. But, sadly, they are an exception. American families who make over $300,000 a year donate to charity a mere 4 percent of their incomes. The statistic should not be surprising, as studies by University of Minnesota psychologist Kathleen Vohs and her collaborators have shown that merely glimpsing dollar bills makes people less generous and approachable, and more egocentric.

Bottom of Form

Now come a new set of studies that reveal yet another toll that money takes. An international team of researchers led by Jordi Quoidbach report in the August 2010 issue of Psychological Science that, although wealth may grant us opportunities to purchase many things, it simultaneously impairs our ability to enjoy those things.

Their first study, conducted with adult employees of the University of Liège in Belgium showed that the wealthier the workers were, the less likely they were to display a strong capacity to savor positive experiences in their lives. Furthermore, simply being reminded of money (by being exposed to a picture of a huge stack of Euros) dampened their savoring ability.

Quoidbach and his colleagues' second study was even cleverer. Participants aged 16 to 59 recruited on the University of British Columbia campus were entrusted with the not unpleasant task of tasting a piece of chocolate. Before accepting the chocolate, however, they were obliged to complete a brief questionnaire. For half of the participants, this questionnaire furtively included a page with a picture of Canadian money (allegedly for an unrelated experiment), and for the other half, it included a neutral picture.

Although the ostensibly irrelevant photo was unlikely to have elicited more than a cursory glance, it had a pronounced effect on the volunteers' behavior. Those "primed," or subconsciously reminded, of money ended up spending less time consuming the chocolate and were rated by observers as enjoying it less.

How to explain these results? The researchers argue that because wealth allows people to experience the best that life has to offer, it ultimately undermines their ability to savor life's little pleasures. Once we've had the opportunity to drink the finest French wines, fly in a private jet, eat foie gras with edible gold leaf, and watch the Super Bowl from a box seat, coffee at Starbucks with a friend, a sunny day after a week of rain, or an unexpected Reese's peanut butter cup on our desks just doesn't provide the same jolt of happiness it used to. Indeed, a landmark study of lottery winners showed just that: People who had won between $50,000 and $1,000,000 (in 1970s dollars) were less impressed by life's simple pleasures than people who experienced no such windfall.

Of course, Quoidbach et al.'s findings may have alternative explanations. Maybe seeing banknotes triggers feelings of disgust (due to associations with greed or just with germs) or stirs up our money worries, and those feelings of disgust, anxiety, or unease may be enough to lose our appetites just a little and curb enjoyment of the chocolate bar.

Despite those possibilities, I find the researchers' arguments compelling. In a book I'm writing, I devote an entire chapter to the costs of materialism and wealth. The single biggest culprit, I argue, is that having money raises our aspirations about the happiness that we expect in our daily lives, and these raised aspirations can be toxic. They say you can never go back to holding hands, but it's also hard to go back to economy class (from business), to sleeping on a futon with a bunch of roommates (from your comfortable master bedroom in a split level), or to eating at chain restaurants (after regularly partaking of the cuisines of Mario Batali and Bobby Flay).

Unfortunately, raised aspirations don't only lead us to take things for granted and impair our savoring abilities. They steer us to consume too much, tax the planet's resources, overspend and undersave, go into debt, gamble, live beyond our means, and purchase mortgages that we can't afford. Not long ago, I read a newspaper article that quoted the shocking statistic that 20 percent of Americans trade in their automobiles every two years. Every two years! We acquire the new Toyota Camry or Lexus SUV or Jaguar, and for the first few weeks or months, the ride is thrilling. But, as we all know too well, the thrill wears off not long after the new car smell fades.

If attaining wealth or earning pay raises so unfailingly elevates our aspirations, are we doomed never to reap money's pleasures and rewards? Can people who make partner, write a best-seller, or invest wisely ever enjoy a simple piece of chocolate? Of course, they can. Indeed, in my mind, one of the biggest misconceptions about money is that it can't make us happy - or rather, that the joys it offers can be only faint and fleeting. As it happens, a growing social science of money is showing how we can compensate for some of its damaging effects by getting the most out of our spending. The conclusion is that if we want to buy happiness, we need to wring as many rewarding and stretching experiences from our purchases as possible. The most effective empirically-supported ways include

• spending our money on activities that help us grow as a person (taking guitar lessons, investing in an entrepreneurial venture), strengthen our connections with others (dinners with colleagues, car trips with friends, roller blades for mom and child), and contribute to our communities (catering a fundraiser, donating to the needy);
• shelling it out on activities and experiences (e.g., rock climbing expeditions, wine tasting family reunions) rather than material possessions;
• spending it on many small pleasures (e.g., regular massages, weekly delivery of fresh flowers, or frequent phone calls to our best friend in Europe) rather than on one big-ticket item (like a new car or flat-screen TV); and
• splurging on something that we work extremely hard to get and have to wait for (whether it's a concert, trip, or gadget) and relish the feeling of hard-won accomplishment and anticipation as we wait.

Finally, our money will be even better spent if we take the time to appreciate the objects of our spending (the vacation, gadget, or smiles of the people we have helped); if we make efforts to inject novelty, variety, and surprise (e.g., buying activities that bring unexpected opportunities or adventures); and if we strive to compare less with others (e.g., focusing on how much I enjoyed the Paul McCartney concert rather than on how much better my neighbor's seats were, or recognizing that my roller blades give me no less pleasure even if my sister has an even fancier pair). As researchers (including Ken Sheldon and myself) have argued, these are all factors that slow down or pre-empt the process that leads us to take our purchases for granted and allow us to derive the maximal possible happiness from them.

What are your thoughts? What are your personal expereinces with money and happiness? And after reading the research, have your thoughts changed? Let me know - let's create a discussion around money and happiness.

Happy Birthday Title IX

“You educate a man; you educate a man. You educate a woman; you educate a generation.”   ― Brigham Young

Happy Birthday Title IX. Titel IX is celebrating it's 40th year. For those of you who forget what Title IX is or are too young to relize what groundbreaking this legislation was for it's time here is a quick recap:

No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance. (Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972).

Title IX covers all levels and areas of education, including athletics, vocational/technical education and sex discriminatory behavior impacting students and employees. Although Title IX protections against sex discrimination are not as extensive and durable as we would receive from a Constitutional Equal Rights Amendment, Title IX has helped women and girls and men and boys benefit from more equitable treatment and attain more equitable outcomes. However, gender disparities based on traditional stereotypes and subtle but damaging discrimination persist. There is much that all of us can continue to do to improve public policies and practices to build on Title IX triumphs and to stop the backsliding including increased purposeful sex segregated education.  (See “The Triumphs of Title IX”, PDF).

According to The Triumphs of Title IX: soon after it was written into law, Title IX was subjected to relentless attack—and Mink became the law’s greatest defender. In 1984, the Supreme Court during
the Reagan administration succeeded in virtually overturning the law for four years—until feminists and civil rights leaders fought back with the Civil Rights Restoration Act of 1987. Most recently, the Bush administration weakened Title IX with new rules allowing public, sexsegregated classes and schools—which critics say almost always disadvantage girls—for purposes other than to remedy discrimination.

How has Title IX helped you today as a woman or young girl?

·         GIRLS’ PARTICIPATION AND ACHIEVEMENT IN MATH AND SCIENCE HAVE INCREASED SUBSTANTIALLY.

·         DISCRIMINATION AGAINST GIRLS AND TEACHERS WHO BECOME PREGNANT HAS DECREASED.

·         ALL VOCATIONAL SCHOOLS AND CLASSES HAVE BEEN OPENED TO BOTH SEXES.

·         WOMEN EDUCATORS NOW EARN MORE, RANK HIGHER.

·         SEXUAL HARASSMENT IN SCHOOLS IS NOW CLEARLY ILLEGAL.

·         THE PSAT AND SAT HAVE BECOME LESS BIASED AGAINST GIRLS.

·         THE FIELDS OF SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, ENGINEERING AND MATH WERE AMONG THE MOST CHILLY TOWARD WOMEN, SO TITLE IX HELPED USHER IN MORE WOMENFRIENDLY TEACHING PRACTICES.

·         TITLE IX  HAS HELPED WOMEN FIGHT SEXUAL HARASSMENT IN ACADEMIA— SOMETHING FOR WHICH THERE WAS NO LANGUAGE IN 1970.

·         IN 1970, WOMEN EARNED ONLY 14 PERCENT, BUT TODAY EARN NEARLY HALF OF DOCTORAL DEGREES.

·       THE LAW’S IMPACT HAS BEEN ELEMENTAL. NOT ONLY HAS IT HELPED ELIMINATE BLATANT DISCRIMINATORY PRACTICES, BUT IT HAS HELPED ROOT OUT SUBTLER METHODS OF HOLDING WOMEN BACK.