Social Engineering Blogs

An Aggregator for Blogs About Social Engineering and Related Fields

Incongruous Emotional Displays and Self Regulation

Image courtesy of Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/martinsphotoart/

Image courtesy of Flickr

Giggling at a funeral. Bawling at a wedding. These are both examples of incongruous emotional displays that are sometimes thought of as a little inappropriate. But are these behaviors just embarrassing slip ups? What psychological purpose could they serve?

Dr. Oriana Aragon of Yale University and her colleagues suspected that such displays might actually play an important role in overall emotional regulation. Perhaps when people are at risk of being overwhelmed by a certain emotion, having the opposite reaction helps restore emotional balance.

In a recent Huffington Post blog, author Wray Herbert explains, “Aragon and her colleagues believe that people have emotional limits. When we sense that our escalating sadness or joy is reaching an unmanageable limit — that our bodies are about to be overwhelmed physiologically — this perception triggers an incongruous emotion to balance things out. At least that’s the theory, which the scientists have been exploring in their studies.”

Aragon and her team of researchers ran a series of studies, described in a forthcoming issues of the journal Psychological Science. All of the studies supported the general idea that these incongruous emotional displays help with self-regulation but how it exactly works is unclear.

For more information on Aragon and these emotion studies, visit this link

Can Money Buy You Happiness?

It’s an age old question: can money buy happiness? It’s true to some extent: money does buy you happiness. People with higher incomes are, broadly speaking, happier than those who are struggling.

But new research digs a little deeper and suggests that happiness is determined not by how much money one earns, but rather, how one spends it. For example, giving money away makes people a lot happier than spending it all on themselves. But when they do spend money on themselves, they are more satisfied when they spend on experiences, like a vacation or music concert.

For more on this research, take a look at the video below and read the write up in the Wall Street Journal

For past blogs on money and happiness, take a look at the articles below:

Money does by Happiness?

Has the Money Tree become the Happiness Tree?

 

Emotions and the Brain

The Sentis Brain Animation Series takes you on a tour of the brain through a series of short and sharp animations.

The fifth in the series explains what is happening in our brains as we experience emotions – both the helpful and unhelpful ones! This empowering animation demonstrates that while sometimes our emotions can ‘hijack’ our rational thinking, we also have the power to manage our emotions with conscious thought.

Who is Sentis? They are a global team assisting individuals and organizations change their lives for the better and are the world leaders in the application of psychology and neuroscience to safety, leadership development, and well-being in the workplace.

Click here to view the embedded video.