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Why We Struggle to Say No—And How to Get Better at It
As children many of us are taught that being “good” means being obedient: doing what we’re told by parents, teachers and authority figures. But that conditioning can make it incredibly difficult to speak up when we know something is wrong, whether that means correcting a mishandled coffee order or standing up against injustice. How can we learn to overcome these instincts when it really counts? My guest today is Sunita Sah, a professor of management and organizations at Cornell University and the author of Defy: The Power of No in a World that Demands Yes. She thinks we could all stand to be a little more defiant, and she’s here to tell us why.
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New Content From Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science
A sample of articles on whether truth pays, questionable research practices, the DECIDE Framework, and much more.
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Music Could Help Ease Pain From Surgery or Illness. Scientists Are Listening
... Researchers know music can draw attention away from pain, lessening the sensation. But studies also suggest that listening to preferred music helps dull pain more than listening to podcasts. “Music is a distractor. It draws your focus away from the pain. But it’s doing more than that,” said Caroline Palmer, a psychologist at McGill University who studies music and pain. Scientists are still tracing the various neural pathways at work, said Palmer.
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Are You Too Hard on Yourself?
When something disappointing happens — you got a lower grade on a test or project than you were expecting, you had a lackluster performance in your sport, you didn’t get the part you wanted in the school play — what sort of things do you say to yourself or about yourself afterward? ... Finally, self-compassion is sometimes confused with self-care, but it’s not just about soothing, said Steven C. Hayes, a clinical psychologist and the creator of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, which emphasizes the types of skills that are useful for building self-compassion, like living in the moment and focusing on values rather than imposed expectations.
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How Childhood Relationships Affect Your Adult Attachment Style, according to Large New Study
We come into the world screaming and vulnerable—entirely dependent on adult caregivers to keep us safe and teach us how to connect with others. The nature of these earliest relationships influences how we behave towards others and see the world long after we’ve grown—but in more complex and nuanced ways than researchers previously thought, according to the results of a large, decades-long study examining how the quality of children’s interactions with parents and close peers went on to influence their relationships in adulthood.
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Study Finds Evidence That Text-Based Therapy Eases Depression
One of the most popular mental health innovations of the past decade is therapy via text message, which allows you to dip in and out of treatment in the course of a day. Say you wake up anxious before a presentation: You might text your therapist first thing in the morning to say that you can’t stop visualizing a humiliating failure. ... “We were pleasantly surprised to see that it was as good as weekly video therapy,” said Patricia A. Areán, a former professor at the University of Washington School of Medicine and a co-author of the study, of text-based psychotherapy. “We didn’t really find any differences in the outcomes.”
