As regular readers of this blog will know, I have taken up a real interest in psychology related things in the last three or four months. That interest was somewhat stinted by my exams but since they finished I have been able to explore some stuff in more depth. This post represents the beginning of what will hopefully be an interesting 'hobby' over the summer for me that should produce some (hopefully interesting) posts for you to peruse as your pleasure.
The topic of this post comes from a lecture that I found on the iTunes U service that comes with the iPad. I have found some great content on there and I recommend anyone who has access to it to spend a while looking through the catalogue to see if anything grabs your interest. Since I started looking through the content with this interest in anything related to psychology, you can imagine why series of lectures entitled 'How to Think Like a Psychologist' caught my attention. The only one I've watched so far is by a professor from Stanford University called James Gross who was talking about emotion regulation.
You should read the set of notes that I took from the lecture, which are available though my Dropbox - note that I've never done this before so if it doesn't work then I apologise. I also apologise if there are any mistakes in those notes; they are only there to serve as an outline of what Gross was saying.
Hopefully you'll have taken a few minutes to look through what I took from the lecture and are familiar with some of the ideas in there. The basic idea is that there are two primary ways in which to regulate your emotions: suppression and reappraisal.
Everyone will be familiar with suppression. It is basically when you bottle your emotions up and ignore them. We do this for various reasons including being able to avoid confrontation, being able to remain composed or for more serious purpose of avoiding dealing with how we feel. This can be useful sometimes, such as Gross' example of when an unduly strict or harsh manager is talking to you at work and you feel rage building up inside you. It is best to suppress that angry emotion than to let the manager know how you feel, lest you lose you job.
Reappraisal on the other hand is taking the emotions that you feel in a particular moment and turn them into something else so that they are dealt with, but just in a different manner than expressing them directly as they are. This is different from suppression in that you do not hide your emotions and keep them inside, but rather you 'reappraise' how you are feeling so that you can express that emotion in a different way, thus letting it out.
I'll use the example of temptation that Gross gives in his lecture. When you are tempted to do something, such as play an internet game when you are meant to be studying, you have some options. You can either give in to the temptation and play the internet game - this makes us feel good momentarily but later we kick ourselves for wasting time. Another option is that you do not play the internet game by suppressing the temptation. Gross highlights that this makes the temptation even more attractive to us and actually results in us enjoying the feeling we get if/when we give in to that temptation eventually. The final option, and the one that Gross sees as being the healthiest, is that we reappraise the temptation as being a test of our will-power. By doing this you set yourself a task: the ability to prove that your will-power is strong. When you reappraise the urge to play an internet game like this you find that you are more focused and get less enjoyment out of giving in to the temptation than you would have had you suppressed that urge.
If you have read those notes that I linked you to above, you'll see that Gross feels that there are other applications of this ability to reappraise our emotions. For the sake of brevity here I'm going to stay on the temptation issue that he talks about but you should also consider how reappraisal might work in inter-group conflict, such as in the Middle East - it certainly has the ability, in theory anyway, to be a very powerful tool.
Procrastination is caused by temptation. If we were not tempted to go on Facebook or play internet games when we should be reading and taking notes then there would be no problem - but we do and there is. We all know how it feels when we start procrastinating: it's not a nice feeling, let's put it that way. It also doesn't help when we plow on through the urge to do something other than studying or working because we become less and less happy the more we suppress those urges, thus affecting the quality and quantity of work that we do. Therefore I see reappraisal as being a potential answer to the prevalent issue of procrastination and its impact on our work.
We do our best work when we are in the moment and have nothing on our mind but what is in front of us. This only comes in short bursts but it's a sliding scale and so when we are mostly concentrating on what is in front if us then we work better than if our minds are elsewhere. I see reappraisal of the urge to do something else or to think other thoughts as being a useful tool for refocusing.
If we consciously note that we are distracted or that our mind is wandering and tell ourselves that it is, for example, a test of our will-power, we will immediately be able to refocus to the state that we were in prior to the thing that took our attention away from the task at hand. As noted above, it also means that we will gain less pleasure out of giving in to the temptation or distraction than we would otherwise have because we have already dealt with those emotions through the reappraisal process.
If you find time I strongly recommend you either seek out this lecture (a brief Google search should be enough) or at least take some time to think about how this might help you. I'm personally trying to find some things that will help with focus and productivity and I can say for certain that I'm going to use reappraisal and see if it helps me.
Thanks for reading and hope you found this post interesting enough to explore further. We all have brains; I think it's about time we learned to use them properly.
Martin.
