The Secret to Raising A Well-Behaved Teen

This is a vital cause of low mood, poor health and lacklustre learning in teenagers.

This is a vital cause of low mood, poor health and lacklustre learning in teenagers.

Failing to get enough sleep causes low mood in teenagers, along with worse health and poor learning, a new review of the psychological evidence finds.

Although hormonal changes are partly to blame for teenage angst, being short of sleep significantly contributes to lack of motivation and poor mood.

Due to changes during puberty, teenagers require more sleep than adults and most find it hard to get to sleep before 11pm, with many staying up until 2 or 3am.

It’s not all down to late night video gaming or TV: the part of the brain which regulates the sleep-wake cycle — the Suprachiasmatic Nucleus — changes in puberty.

Teenage brains also secrete less melatonin so their ‘sleep drive’ reduces.

As a result, being forced to rise the next day at 6am for school or college means teens find it hard to get the 8 to 10 hours sleep that they need.

While educators and some parents seem to believe that teens are lazy, the problem is actually down to the adolescent biological clock.

The review of 30 years of research on this subject, published in the journal Learning, Media and Technology, finds that…

“…studies of later start times have consistently reported benefits to adolescent sleep health and learning, there [is no evidence] showing early starts have a positive impact on such things.” (Kelley et al., 2014)

Teenagers who are short of sleep consistently get worse grades in school, are more likely to be depressed and have more health problems, the research shows.

The study comes hot on the heels of calls by the American Academy of Pediatrics to delay start times to no earlier than 8:30am.

It’s not surprising: the evidence is overwhelming.

For example, one recent study, published in the Journal of Developmental & Behavioral Pediatrics, delayed the waking up time of adolescents at a boarding school by just 25 minutes.

They found that afterwards the number of students getting more than 8 hours sleep a night jumped from 18% to 44%.

Students experienced less daytime sleepiness, were less depressed, and found themselves using less caffeine.

Change?

Some changes in the US have already begun, with the ‘Start School Later’ campaign and the National Sleep Foundation.

The United States Air Force Academy in particular have found much improved academic results with a new late start policy introduced for their 18 and 19-year-olds.

The study’s authors conclude:

“Good policies should be based on good evidence and the data show that children are currently placed at an enormous disadvantage by being forced to keep inappropriate education times.”

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Could Playing Immoral Video Games Promote Good Behaviour in The Real World?

Could violent video games make you a more caring person, at least initially?

Could violent video games make you a more caring person, at least initially?

Breaking your moral code in a virtual environment may counter-intuitively encourage more sensitivity to these kinds of violations in the real world, a new study finds.

The study, which is published in the journal Cyberpsychology, Behavior and Social Networking, suggests violent video games make their players feel guilty for their moral indiscretions (Grizzard et al., 2014).

Matthew Grizzard, who led the study, said:

“Rather than leading players to become less moral, this research suggests that violent video-game play may actually lead to increased moral sensitivity.

This may, as it does in real life, provoke players to engage in voluntary behavior that benefits others.”

Participants in the study played a first-person shooter video game in one of two conditions:

“…participants in the guilt condition played as a terrorist soldier, while participants in the control condition played as a UN soldier.

The game itself informed participants of their character’s motivations to ensure that the experimenter did not bias result.” (Grizzard et al., 2014).

The researchers expected that people would feel guilty when playing the game as a terrorist, but not when they played as a peacekeeper.

Grizzard said:

“…an American who played a violent game ‘as a terrorist’ would likely consider his avatar’s unjust and violent behavior — violations of the fairness/reciprocity and harm/care domains — to be more immoral than when he or she performed the same acts in the role of a ‘UN peacekeeper.'”

Afterwards players were given tests of their moral feelings and how guilty they felt.

Grizzard explained the results:

“We found that after a subject played a violent video game, they felt guilt and that guilt was associated with greater sensitivity toward the two particular domains they violated — those of care/harm and fairness/reciprocity.”

This is not the first study to reach these conclusions.

Several studies have found that immoral virtual behaviours elicit real-world feelings of guilt — how long this guilt lasts, though, is not clear.

These studies can’t tell us what the long-term effects of these types of games are.

It may be that…

“…guilt resulting from playing as an immoral character may habituate from repeated exposures.

Under these conditions, we might expect that repeated play would not lead a gamer to become more sensitive to fairness or become more caring overall…”  (Grizzard et al., 2014)

So while playing Grand Theft Auto — a game attacked for glamourising violence — may make you feel guilty the first couple of times, you may soon get used to to it.

Image credit: Steven Andrew

Get Motivated to Exercise: Here’s a Simple Mental Trick You Can Do Right Now

First study to test the effects of activating autobiographical memory on exercise habits.

First study to test the effects of activating autobiographical memory on exercise habits.

Thinking about the last time they exercised helped encourage people to exercise again, even if the last time wasn’t much fun, a new study finds.

The research from the University of New Hampshire asked some participants to think back to a positive memory of exercise, while others recalled a negative memory (Biondolillo et al., 2014).

They found that those who thought about a positive exercise memory were more likely to exercise in the future.

This was in comparison to a control condition in which participants were given no instruction about recalling a memory.

Even people who recalled a negative memory about exercise were more motivated to exercise in the future than those in the control condition.

These results held even after the researchers took into account people’s exercise satisfaction, prior levels of motivation and prior levels of exercise.

The authors explain:

“Students responded only to a single request to describe a personal motivational memory, and this request was embedded in a broader survey.

They were not asked to use the memory in their daily lives as motivation to increase their exercise activities.” (Biondolillo et al., 2014).

They continued:

“Without explicit direction or encouragement, our sample of college students, amidst the innumerable distractions afforded by life at a large, public university, increased their reported exercise activities from their habitual levels.

These results provide the first experimental evidence that autobiographical memory activation can be an effective tool in motivating individuals to adopt healthier lifestyles.”

Given the modest nature of the memory intervention, these results are surprising.

Imagine what might be possible with a little more mental effort…

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Automatic Drive: How Unconscious Cognitive Biases Help Fire Our Motivation

A trick of the unconscious is responsible for spurring us on to difficult goals.

A trick of the unconscious is responsible for spurring us on to difficult goals.

It feels daunting when we draw the bow across a violin for the first time or start learning to samba, or pick up our first stuttering words in a foreign language. The ultimate goal of being able to dance, speak French or play the violin seems a long way off.

There is a strong temptation to give up and try other goals, perhaps less challenging ones. So how do we motivate ourselves to keep going?

Consciously we can use these 11 goals hacks described in a previous article. But our unconscious also chips in to change our perceptions and help us on our way, as revealed by an ingenious new study (Huang et al., 2012).

Collect 1,000 t-shirts

In the study participants were told they were going to be involved in an ongoing effort to collect 1,000 t-shirts to send to refugees in Haiti. They were told about the desperate state of refugees there, including their lack of basic clothing.

Then they were split into two experimental groups* by being shown two different pictures of the project’s progress so far:

  • Some were shown two full boxes of t-shirts, suggesting there was lots more work to do and,
  • The others were shown 10 full boxes of t-shirts, suggesting they were much nearer their goal.

Crucially, each group was asked to estimate how many t-shirts had already been collected in these boxes.

The group that were shown the two boxes simulated the feeling we get at the start of a big project, i.e. that there is still a lot of work to do.

So how did the participants cope with this? It turned out that they over-estimated the number of t-shirts that had already been collected. In fact, in comparison to an unmotivated control group who thought there were, on average, 92 in the box, those who were committed to the task estimated there were 220 t-shirts.

This over-estimation made them feel that the goal was more attainable.

Almost there?

The group that were shown the 10 boxes were simulating the experience of being close to achieving our goal.

So how did participants keep themselves motivated when there was much less work to do? You guessed it: they under-estimated the number of t-shirts in the box. The control group guessed an average of 617, while the motivated participants guessed 424.

By under-estimating their progress when they were near the end of the task, highly motivated people are able to push themselves on harder towards the end when the temptation is to slack off.

The experimenters checked this finding using other tasks. They got the same types of results again. When people are highly motivated to achieve a task, they over-estimate their progress at the beginning and under-estimate it at the end. This helps provide us with the psychological energy to keep us going through the task.

This effect has been most noticeable to me towards the end of large projects. Even when I’m nearing the finish line, it feels like I’ve still got a fair way to go. Then when I’m finished it takes me by surprise.

Automatic motivation

This finding is heartening because sometimes these subtle cognitive biases work against our best interests, like in the Dunning-Kruger effect and the worse-than-average effect, but here they’re working for us.

In both cases participants’ minds were warping what they were seeing to give them extra motivation. Although strictly speaking they were less accurate, it’s all in the service of achieving something more important: reaching that vital goal.

This is one great example of the way our cognitive biases can be extremely handy for us.

This finding is fascinating because it’s demonstrating how sometimes getting precise information about our progress can actually reduce motivation.

For example if you’re on the running machine at the gym and you’ve just started your workout, then the fact that the display tells you exactly how far you’ve got to go leaves no room for these helpful unconscious biases to operate.

Sometimes it really is better not to know. Instead let your unconscious give you a helping hand on towards your goal.

[*Please note that I have simplified the design of the study for clarity]

Image credit: kelsey_lovefusionphoto

Destructive Daydreams: Why Wishful Thinking is Dangerous

How fantasies can get in the way of achieving your goals.

How fantasies can get in the way of achieving your goals.

They say that if you can believe it and dream it, then you can make it come true.

It’s clearly not that easy. Indeed psychological research shows that wishful thinking can damage our drive to reach goals:

“The problem with positive fantasies is that they allow us to anticipate success in the here and now. However they don’t alert us to the problems we are likely to face along the way and can leave us with less motivation—after all it feels like we’ve already reached our goal.” (From: Success! Why Expectations Beat Fantasies)

Now a new study has found that:

“…fantasies about an idealized future may indeed lead to poor decisions. Such fantasies create a preference for information about pros rather than cons, particularly when people are not yet serious about pursuing the realization of the future.” (Kappes & Oettingen, 2012)

This creates a problem:

“Turning away from contradictory information allows idealized fantasies to be enjoyed untarnished, but may lead to shunning potentially helpful resources for decision making. Simply dreaming it, then, is not the key to making dreams become true.” (Kappes & Oettingen, 2012)

Worse, daydreaming can actually sap your energy:

“The present four studies indicate that positive fantasies about an idealized future diminish energy, which should hamper achievement on such tasks.” (Kappes & Oettingen, 2012)

That’s why if you’re serious about reaching a goal, indulging your fantasies too much is dangerous. There’s nothing wrong with a little positive thinking within certain boundaries:

“Fantasies that are less positive–that question whether an ideal future can be achieved, and that depict obstacles, problems, and setbacks–should be more beneficial for mustering the energy needed to attain actual success.”

This is just as true of individuals as it is of society in general:

“If you dream it and believe it, it becomes reality. [That philosophy] contributes to the economic bubble that we just saw explode in enormous ways” (Cohen, 2009)

As Barbara Ehrenreich says in her book Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America:

“We need to brace ourselves for a struggle against terrifying obstacles, both of our own making and imposed by the natural world. And the first step is to recover from the mass delusion that is positive thinking.”

Image credit: Robert Couse-Baker

4 Ways Benign Envy is Good For You

Feeling green with envy? If it’s the right type of envy, maybe it’s no bad thing…

Feeling green with envy? If it’s the right type of envy, maybe it’s no bad thing…

We all know about the destructive forces that envy can unleash because it’s…

“…a hostile emotion that often prompts aggressive behaviors. Its antagonistic nature is exemplified by the many publicized crimes and intergroup conflicts attributed to it; the countless literary tales of assassination, murder, and sabotage provoked by it…” (van de Ven et al., 2011)

But psychologists have identified two types of envy, which I explained in a previous post on why envy motivates:

“We tend to feel malicious envy towards another person if we think their success is undeserved. This is the type that makes us want to strike out at the other person and bring them down a peg or two. However when another’s success feels deserved to us, we tend to feel a benign envy: one that isn’t destructive but instead motivates.”

Benign envy is the kind which raises you up rather than making you want to pull the other person down. Here are four ways that this type of benign envy can be useful.

1. Benign envy motivates

Benign envy can motivate, as long as you compare yourself to the right person. If he or she is in your league, then they can push you on to greater achievements:

“Relevant superstars provoke self-enhancement and inspiration when their success seems attainable but self-deflation when it seems unattainable.” (Lockwood & Kunda, 1997)

So stick to being envious of people who are doing a bit better than you. For motivation envy beats admiration (see: why envy motivates).

2. Benign envy feels good

Benign envy is the norm: most people automatically compare themselves with people doing better than themselves. And when we see other people doing better than us, it can give us hope, which makes us feel good.

Here is what Simon Latham says in his book “The Science of Sin: The Psychology of the Seven Deadlies (and Why They Are So Good For You)“:

“…comparison can provide information on how a task is done. If you have the good fortune to observe a skilled performer, you watch, you learn and so you perform better […] Envy can change your expectations about what it is possible to achieve. In other words, it can change your perceived likelihood of success.”

3. Benign envy makes you more creative

People who are doing better than us can spur us on to be more creative. In one study on creativity:

“…participants were exposed to comparison targets who either threatened or boosted self-evaluations and then completed a performance task. Participants exposed to the threatening target performed better than those in a control group, whereas those exposed to the nonthreatening target performed worse.” (Johnson & Stapel, 2007)

4. Benign envy makes you smarter

In the same way as it can make you more creative, being envious can make you smarter. Blanton et al. (1999) found that students who compared themselves with others tended to do better in school.

Similarly, these sorts of upward social comparisons can make women better at maths:

“…women’s math test performance was protected when a competent female experimenter (i.e., a female role model) administered the test.” (Marx & Roman, 2002)

Envy can change your perspective

So envy isn’t all bad, as long as it isn’t destructive. It’s natural and beneficial to compare ourselves upwards with people doing a bit better than ourselves as long as we don’t let the green monster out of its cage.

Image credit: Daniel Horacio Agostini

Self-Handicapping: Why Making Excuses Hurts You

It’s natural to make excuses for poor performance but they can be dangerous…

It’s natural to make excuses for poor performance but they can be dangerous…

Most of us have a strong fear of failure.

It’s partly because we don’t want to look bad in front of others but it’s also about how we see ourselves. We are afraid to fail because it damages our view of ourselves, our self-esteem.

To protect our self-esteem, psychologists have found that people use all sorts of self-handicapping strategies (from McCrea, 2008):

  • Not trying very hard.
  • Procrastination.
  • Listening to music or using another type of distraction.
  • Drinking alcohol and taking drugs.

The beauty of not trying too hard is that, should we fail, we can always say that it doesn’t reflect our ability. In some ways it’s a rational strategy. If you succeed you look especially gifted, if not then your excuse is already there.

Indeed people with high self-esteem seem to be more prone to self-handicapping (Tice & Baumeister, 1990). If you can succeed without really trying then you must be super-talented. So the more a person is convinced of their own talent, the more they like to prove how easy it all is for them.

The problem with self-handicapping is pretty obvious, i.e., you don’t give yourself the best chance, so you don’t get the best result. Sure enough self-handicapping behaviours are associated with lower motivation, less persistence at difficult tasks, less self-guided learning and lower performance in general.

Dangerous excuses

The methods of self-handicapping above are pretty obvious, but there is also a more insidious type of mental gymnastics that will cause problems. This is when you make excuses for a poor performance afterwards.

In a series of experiments McCrea (2008) tested the effect of these explanations on participants’ future motivation. What they found was that making excuses made people feel better about themselves because they were shielded from lowered self-esteem. But, on the other hand, the excuses reduced the motivation to prepare properly in the future.

The line between an excuse and an explanation is a fine one, but generally excuses reduce motivation because they tend to:

  • Blame others rather than ourselves.
  • Make poor outcomes seem better in comparison.
  • Lower expectations for the future.

So the first step in avoiding self-handicapping is noticing and cutting out the most obvious self-defeating behaviours, like not trying very hard. On top of this it’s important to try not to make excuses as they will reduce motivation. It will mean taking a hit to your self-esteem, which will hurt in the short-run, but will allow better performance in the long-run.

Image credit: Matthias Weinberger

Why You Should Keep Your Goals Secret

Making a public commitment to your goals reduces motivation.

Making a public commitment to your goals reduces motivation.

Search around for advice on how to commit to a goal and one commandment comes up again and again. Apparently you should make your goals public and this will increase your commitment to them.

In theory when you tell your friends that you intend to, say, dig over the garden, or quit smoking, or take up carpentry, it should increase your accountability. You’ve told a friend, so in theory you are more committed to it.

Also people like to remain self-consistent; it gives us a stronger sense of self. So if you didn’t stick to your publicly stated goal it would damage your sense of self.

All these things are true in theory but what about in practice?

Motivation

Unfortunately the mind sometimes has a nasty habit of sabotaging our best attempts to control ourselves. Recent research by Gollwitzer et al. (2010) suggests that, in fact, making our goals public can have precisely the opposite effect from what we intend.

Across three experiments the link between making goals public and actually working towards them was tested. What they found in every study was that when participants had shared their goal with someone else, instead of increasing their commitment, it reduced it.

When they had shared their goals with another, participants put less effort into studying, trying to get a job and taking advantage of opportunities for advancement.

Illusion of progress

So, what’s going on? How can we explain the fact that publicly committing to a goal can reduce our striving towards that goal?

One possible explanation is that the very act of showing off our goal to others gives us some sense that we’ve taken the first step towards reaching it.

In a fourth study Gollwitzer et al. found evidence for just this psychological mechanism. Participants who had made public commitments towards a goal felt they had made more progress than those who hadn’t.

It seems that publicly committing to a goal has a similar effect to fantasising about reaching it (see: Success: Why Expectations Beat Fantasies). Both give us some sense that we have taken the first steps when really we’re going backwards.

So the next time you read this widespread advice about publicly committing to a personal goal, ignore it. Not only does it not work, it may well harm your chances of successfully reaching your goal. If you’re really committed to them, it’s probably better to keep your goals private.

Image credit: Frederic Poirot

How to Avoid Being Distracted From Your Goals

New research shows that making specific plans creates mental space, allowing us to avoid distraction.

New research shows that making specific plans creates mental space, allowing us to avoid distraction.

On average each of us has 15 personal projects ongoing at any one time. It might include planning a trip to Europe, spring cleaning the house, getting a new job or any number of other goals.

Plus there’s all the stuff we’re doing right at the moment like working, shopping or reading.

But, to what extent do all these thoughts about goals interfere with one another? Do you get distracted while working on your resume by thinking about your trip to Europe?

Psychologists have known for a century that incomplete goals rattle around in our minds until they’re done. It’s called the Zeigarnik effect.

Specific plans free the mind

The down side is that we can be distracted by incomplete goals while we’re trying to pursue another goal. And according to new research this is precisely what happens unless we have made very specific plans.

In a series of studies researchers found that while trying to enjoy reading a novel (amongst other tasks), participants were frequently interrupted by intrusive thoughts about an unfinished everyday task (Masicampo & Baumeister, 2011).

But when researchers told participants to make very specific plans about that unfinished goal, while reading they experienced less intrusive thoughts about the other activity. In fact the intrusive thoughts lessened to the same level as a control group. This finding was repeated in the lab with other activities.

Making plans helps free up mental space for whatever we are doing right now, allowing us to be more efficient in the long term.

Specific goals include the how, what, where and when of whatever we want to achieve. For example if you’re planning a trip you might decided that during a quiet moment in the evening after supper you’ll draw up a list of hotels and flights to discuss with your partner. Then you can book them online on Saturday morning when you’re fresh (make sure, though, that you focus on the process and not the outcome).

If the plan is specific enough, it is automatically activated when the right circumstances arise. The rest of the time our minds should be freer from the other 14 goals that we’re not currently pursuing.

Image credit: Jacob Vance

The What-The-Hell Effect

What pizza and cookies can teach us about goal-setting.

What pizza and cookies can teach us about goal-setting.

Goal-setting can be a handy way of improving performance, except when we fall foul of a nasty little side-effect.

Take dieting as an example. Let’s say you’ve set yourself a daily calorie limit. You manage to keep to this for a few days until one evening after work, your colleagues drag you out to a restaurant.

Instead of your healthy meal at home you’re faced with a restaurant menu. But things have already gone wrong before the menu arrives. At a bar beforehand you were hungry and ordered a few snacks to share. These, combined with the drinks, have already put you near your daily calorie intake limit.

Then in the restaurant you eat some bread and have a drink while everyone chooses from the menu. You know what you should choose—a salad—but something is edging you towards the steak. You reason that seeing as you’re already over the limit it doesn’t matter now. What the hell, let’s have the steak.

So, just as we’re getting somewhere with reaching our goal, the whole thing goes out the window in a moment of madness.

The what-the-hell effect isn’t just a lack of self-control or momentary lapse; it is directly related to missing a goal. We know this because psychologists have observed the effect in carefully controlled experiments.

The pizza and cookies experiment

Recent research by Janet Polivy and colleagues at the University of Toronto is a good example (Polivy et al., 2010). They invited participants to a study, some who were dieting and others who weren’t. They were all told not to eat beforehand and then served exactly the same slice of pizza when they arrived, then asked to taste and rate some cookies.

Except the experimenters didn’t much care how the cookies were rated, just how many they ate. That’s because they’d carried out a little trick. Although everyone was given the same slice of pizza; when it was served up, for some participants it was made to look larger by comparison.

This made some people think they’d eaten more than they really had; although in reality they’d all eaten exactly the same amount. It’s a clever manipulation and it means we can just see the effect of thinking you’ve eaten too much rather than actually having eaten too much.

When the cookies were weighed it turned out that those who were on a diet and thought they’d blown their limit ate more of the cookies than those who weren’t on a diet. In fact over 50% more!

On the other hand, when dieters thought they were safely within their limit, they ate the same amount of cookies as those who weren’t on a diet. This looks a lot like the what-the-hell effect in action.

Avoid the what-the-hell effect

Although we’ve talked about the what-the-hell effect in dieting, it likely occurs quite often when we set ourselves certain types of goals. It could be money, alcohol, shopping or any other area where we’ve set ourselves a limit. If we blow that limit, it’s like we want to release all that pent-up self-control in one big rush by going way over the top.

So, is there any way around this? The research suggests the answer is recognising when the what-the-hell effect occurs, which is:

  1. When goals are seen as short-term, i.e. today or tomorrow compared with next week or next month,
  2. And you’re trying to stop doing something, like eating or drinking.

This suggests the what-the-hell effect can be avoided by having longer-term goals and transforming inhibitional goals into acquisitional goals. Changing short-term to long-term is obvious, but how can inhibitional goals be turned into acquisitional goals?

One famous example is Alcoholics Anonymous. Alcoholics are trying to avoid drinking (an inhibitional goal) but they transform this into an acquisitional goal by thinking about the number of days sober. It’s like they’re trying to acquire non-drinking days.

The same principle can be applied to any inhibitional goal. Dieters can think about the number of days they’ve been good. Procrastinators can forget about their idling and concentrate on producing a certain amount of work each day.

Reframing a goal in this way gives us a good chance of side-stepping one of the problems of goal-setting and keeping us on the straight and narrow.

[UPDATE: There is some very recent evidence the what-the-hell effect may not be as strong as previously thought in dieting (Tomiyama et al., 2009)]

Image credit: Howard Walfish