Ray Williams

People value pleasant experiences more than worldly possessions, a new study has found. 

According to the new study led by University of Colorado at Boulder psychology Professor Leaf Van Boven, individuals who pursue happiness through material possessions are liked less by their peers than people who pursue happiness through life experiences. ”We have found that material possessions don’t provide as much enduring happiness as the pursuit of life experiences,” Van Boven said. The “take home” message in his most recent study, which appears in this month’s edition of the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, is that not only will investing in material possessions make us less happy than investing in life experiences, but that it often makes us less popular among our peers as well. 

“The mistake we can sometimes make is believing that pursuing material possessions will gain us status and admiration while also improving our social relationships,” Van Boven said. “In fact, it seems to have exactly the opposite effect. This is really problematic because we know that having quality social relationships is one of the best predictors of happiness, health and well-being. ”So for many of us we should rethink these decisions that we might make in terms of pursuing material possessions versus life experiences,” he said. “Trying to have a happier life by the acquisition of material possessions is probably not a very wise decision.” 

In the study, Van Boven and his colleagues conducted five experiments with undergraduate students and through a national survey. They sought to find out if people had unfavorable stereotypes of materialistic people and to see if these stereotypes led them to like the materialistic people less than those who pursued life experiences. In one experiment undergraduates who didn’t know each other were randomly paired up and assigned to discuss either a material possession or a life experience they had purchased and were happy with. After talking for 15 or 20 minutes they were then asked about their conversation partners by the researchers. 

“What we found was that people who had discussed their material possessions liked their conversation partner less than those who had discussed an experience they had purchased,” Van Boven said. “They also were less interested in forming a friendship with them, so there’s a real social cost to being associated with material possessions rather than life experiences.” 

In another experiment using a survey, the researchers told people about someone who had purchased a material item such as a new shirt or a life experience like a concert ticket. They then asked them a number of questions about that person. They found that simply learning that someone made a material purchase caused them to like him or her less than learning that someone made an experiential purchase. 

“We have pretty negative stereotypes of people who are materialistic,” Van Boven said. “When we asked people to think of someone who is materialistic and describe their personality traits, selfish and self-centered come up pretty frequently. However, when we asked people to describe someone who is more experiential in nature, things like altruistic, friendly and outgoing come up much more frequently.”

Some of us need regular amounts of coffee or other chemical enhancers to make us cognitively sharper. A newly published study suggests perhaps a brief bit of meditation would prepare us just as well. While past research using neuroimaging technology has shown that meditation techniques can promote significant changes in brain areas associated with concentration, it has always been assumed that extensive training was required to achieve this effect.

Though many people would like to boost their cognitive abilities, the monk-like discipline required seems like a daunting time commitment and financial cost for this benefit.

Surprisingly, the benefits may be achievable even without all the work. Though it sounds almost like an advertisement for a “miracle” weight-loss product, new research now suggests that the mind may be easier to cognitively train than we previously believed. Psychologists studying the effects of a meditation technique known as “mindfulness” found that meditation-trained participants showed a significant improvement in their critical cognitive skills (and performed significantly higher in cognitive tests than a control group) after only four days of training for only 20 minutes each day.

“In the behavioral test results, what we are seeing is something that is somewhat comparable to results that have been documented after far more extensive training,” said Fadel Zeidan, a post-doctoral researcher at Wake Forest University School of Medicine, and a former doctoral student at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, where the research was conducted.

“Simply stated, the profound improvements that we found after just 4 days of meditation training – are really surprising,” Zeidan noted. “It goes to show that the mind is, in fact, easily changeable and highly influenced, especially by meditation.”

The study appears in the April 2 issue of Consciousness and Cognition. Zeidan’s co-authors are Susan K. Johnson, Zhanna David and Paula Goolkasian from the Department of Psychology at UNC Charlotte, and Bruce J. Diamond from William Patterson University. The research was also part of Zeidan’s doctoral dissertation. The research will also be presented at the Cognitive Neuroscience Society’s annual meeting in Montreal, April 17-20.

The experiment involved 63 student volunteers, 49 of whom completed the experiment. Participants were randomly assigned in approximately equivalent numbers to one of two groups, one of which received the meditation training while the other group listened for equivalent periods of time to a book (J.R.R. Tolkein’s The Hobbit) being read aloud.

Prior to and following the meditation and reading sessions, the participants were subjected to a broad battery of behavioral tests assessing mood, memory, visual attention, attention processing, and vigilance.

Both groups performed equally on all measures at the beginning of the experiment. Both groups also improved following the meditation and reading experiences in measures of mood, but only the group that received the meditation training improved significantly in the cognitive measures. The meditation group scored consistently higher averages than the reading/listening group on all the cognitive tests and as much as ten times better on one challenging test that involved sustaining the ability to focus, while holding other information in mind.

“The meditation group did especially better on all the cognitive tests that were timed,” Zeidan noted. “In tasks where participants had to process information under time constraints causing stress, the group briefly trained in mindfulness performed significantly better.”

Particularly of note were the differing results on a “computer adaptive n-back task,” where participants would have to correctly remember if a stimulus had been shown two steps earlier in a sequence. If the participant got the answer right, the computer would react by increasing the speed of the subsequent stimulus, further increasing the difficulty of the task. The meditation-trained group averaged aproximately10 consecutive correct answers, while the listening group averaged approximately one.

“Findings like these suggest that meditation’s benefits may not require extensive training to be realized, and that meditation’s first benefits may be associated with increasing the ability to sustain attention,” Zeidan said.

“Further study is warranted,” he stressed, noting that brain imaging studies would be helpful in confirming the brain changes that the behavioral tests seem to indicate, “but this seems to be strong evidence for the idea that we may be able to modify our own minds to improve our cognitive processing – most importantly in the ability to sustain attention and vigilance – within a week’s time.”

The meditation training involved in the study was an abbreviated “mindfulness” training regime modeled on basic “Shamatha skills” from a Buddhist meditation tradition, conducted by a trained facilitator. As described in the paper, “participants were instructed to relax, with their eyes closed, and to simply focus on the flow of their breath occurring at the tip of their nose. If a random thought arose, they were told to passively notice and acknowledge the thought and to simply let ‘it’ go, by bringing the attention back to the sensations of the breath.” Subsequent training built on this basic model, teaching physical awareness, focus, and mindfulness with regard to distraction.

Zeidan likens the brief training the participants received to a kind of mental calisthenics that prepared their minds for cognitive activity.

“The simple process of focusing on the breath in a relaxed manner, in a way that teaches you to regulate your emotions by raising one’s awareness of mental processes as they’re happening is like working out a bicep, but you are doing it to your brain. Mindfulness meditation teaches you to release sensory events that would easily distract, whether it is your own thoughts or an external noise, in an emotion-regulating fashion. This can lead to better, more efficient performance on the intended task.”

“This kind of training seems to prepare the mind for activity, but it’s not necessarily permanent,” Zeidan cautions. “This doesn’t mean that you meditate for four days and you’re done – you need to keep practicing.”

New American research has found that people who engage in more deep conversations are likely to be happier than those indulging in small talk. 

Psychological scientists Matthias R Mehl, Shannon E Holleran, and C Shelby Clark from the University of Arizona, along with Simine Vazire of Washington University in St Louis examined whether happy and unhappy people had different types of conversations. 

For the study, participants were asked to wear an unobtrusive recording device called the Electronically Activated Recorder (EAR) over four days. This device periodically records snippets of sounds as participants go about their lives. For this experiment, the EAR sampled 30 seconds of sounds every 12.5 minutes yielding a total of more than 20,000 recordings. The scientists then listened to the recordings and identified the conversations as trivial small talk or substantive discussions. Also, the volunteers completed personality and well-being assessments. 

The analysis of the recordings revealed some very interesting findings. Greater well-being was associated with spending less time alone and more time talking to others: The happiest participants spent 25 per cent less time alone and 70 per cent more time talking than the unhappiest participants. Furthermore, the happiest participants had twice as many substantive conversations and one third as much small talk as the unhappiest participants. 

The researchers conclude that deep conversations may have the potential to make people happier. They say: “Just as self-disclosure can instill a sense of intimacy in a relationship, deep conversations may instill a sense of meaning in the interaction partners.” 

The findings of the study have appeared in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

A new study by Canadian scientists has shown that focusing on a pleasant image can ease pain . 

According to the study, negative and positive emotions have a direct impact on pain. ”Emotions – or mood – can alter how we react to pain since they’re interlinked,” says lead author Mathieu Roy, who completed the study as a Université de Montréal PhD student and is now a post-doctoral fellow at Columbia University. ”Our tests revealed when pain is perceived by our brain and how that pain can be amplified when combined with negative emotions,” Roy added. 

As part of the study, 13 subjects were recruited to undergo small yet painful electric shocks, which caused knee-jerk reactions controlled by the spine that could be measured. During the fMRI process, subjects were shown a succession of images that were either pleasant (i.e. summer water-skiing), unpleasant (i.e. a vicious bear) or neutral (i.e. a book). Brain reaction was simultaneously measured in participants through functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The fMRI readings allowed the scientists to divide emotion-related brain activity from pain-related reactions. 

“We found that seeing unpleasant pictures elicited stronger pain in subjects getting shocks than looking at pleasant pictures,” says Dr. Roy. The discovery provides scientific evidence that pain is governed by mood and builds on Roy’s previous studies that showed how pleasant music could decrease aches. ”Our findings show that non-pharmaceutical interventions – mood enhancers such as photography or music – could be used in the healthcare to help alleviate pain. These interventions would be inexpensive and adaptable to several fields,” he said. 

The study has been published in the latest edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Researchers have stated that our faith in the slogan which says that good things come to those who wait comes from a brain circuit that informs us to decline immediate fulfillment.

This study lets us peep inside the competence of psychological time journey, which is also identified as periodic future reflection, which helps humans to draw choices with high long-term advantages.

Usually, humans prefer to be rewarded with lager rewards rather the smaller ones, however, this situation can change when the bigger award is linked with delays and postponements.

Dr. Jan Peters from the Department of Systems Neuroscience at the University Medial Center at Hamburg-Eppendorf in Germany explained that, although, there is no denying of the fact that humankind discount the worth of rewards over time, in common, persons display a mainly noteworthy ability to holdup the sense of fulfillment.

Numerous models have been projected to clarify the neural basis of classifying relative value to manifold rewards at dissimilar points in humans but many questions still remain unanswered. Based on the experiment carried out , the data submitted by them suggests that vividly picturing the future lessened the degree of making reckless choice.

In central Florida, a 21st century American boomtown defies economic gravity. It’s called The Villages. The 2000 census counted around 8,000 residents in the retirement community — now there are 80,000. At The Villages, there are no permanent residents under age 19. Children who visit are unwelcome after three weeks. Every household is home to at least one person over 55 — and they keep coming.

New residents buy homes that range from under $150,000 to more than $1 million. One of the huge attractions is golf, according to Don Hahnfeldt, a 65-year-old retired submarine captain who is head of The Villages Homeowners Association. In The Villages, when you speak about being convenient, that means golf-cart accessible.” The allure of sunshine, low taxes, golf, bowling, dancing, mah-jongg, and the ease of shopping and meeting people has fueled the phenomenal growth of The Villages — and it keeps growing.

Another striking thing about The Villages is that the developer owns just about everything. He owns the local radio station, which of course plays oldies and is piped by loudspeaker to the two downtowns. He owns The Villages Daily Sun, a full-size newspaper with multiple sections. The developer also owns a golf-car store, which advertises in the paper and on the local radio station, and sells carts that look like actual cars with headlights. Andrew Blechman, who wrote about The Villages in his book Leisureville, calls The Villages an age-segregated community — something unprecedented in history. But history means something different in The Villages.

The whole place was built in a year or so, Blechman says. But it has made-up history, including a man-made lake, which is supposed to be 100 years old with a lighthouse, and two manufactured downtowns that were themed by entertainment specialists from Universal Studios, he says. Blechman says people are gladly trading a more diverse, complex environment for life with a simple, benign and powerful developer. EnlargeCourtesy of jdanvers via Flickr The nondenominational church at The Villages. “Everything’s owned by the developer,” he says. “The government is owned by the developer. Everything’s privatized — and they’re happy with that. You know, they’ve traded in the ballot box for the corporate suggestion box.” The lines between public and private, civic and commercial, real and fictional, are being blurred in The Villages, and it doesn’t seem to bother the villagers at all. Jill Rustici and Joan Jordan, while playing scrabble in one of dozens of recreation halls, say that people in The Villages are busier now than when they worked. The Villages is a great place to retire, they say. Retirement at one time just meant no more work. But in The Villages, it means no more school buses holding up traffic, no more loud teenagers, no more local government intruding into your life, and no media full of bad news about your community. In short, a life free of irritation.

Is this the kind of life the 80 million Baby Boomers aspire to–segregated, isolated from other age groups, cocooned?  I’d like to hear your views.

Coaching is the second-fastest growing profession in the world, rivaled only by information technology, as I reported in a National Post article. The profession owes its success both to the personal development movement and the huge global economic restructuring since the 1980s. Competition within and among companies, flattened management structures, shrinking talent pools and ineffective leadership have all contributed to the demand for executive coaching.

Executive coaching is an outgrowth of leadership development programs. An article in The Economist concluded executive coaching had become a significant human resource strategy. Recently, the Harvard Business Review noted executive and business coaching is worth US$1-billion a year.

Coaching pre-dates Anthony Robbins, Stephen Covey, Tom Peters and Ken Blanchard. It is rooted in a range of philosophies and practices that can be traced back to Aristotle, Buddhist thought, Gestalt theory and various management and business gurus. It reappeared in the late l950s, but did not receive much attention until the early 1990s. Although coaching gained widespread acceptance by organizations in the 1990s, it has only flourished in recent years.

When executives and professionals, with predominantly analytical training, look at coaching from an investment perspective, they often want theory-based, evidential criteria. Behavior based coaching, as practiced and advocated by programs such as Dr. Skiffington’s 1to1 Coaching, have focused on behavior change as the basis for effective coaching.

Brain science research in the past decade has significant implications for coaching practices. David Rock, author of Quiet Leadership, and Jeffrey Schwartz, author of The Mind and the Brain, addressed the issue of brain research and coaching in an article in The Journal of Coaching in Organizations. They argue that a brain-based approach to coaching may provide more legitimacy to the coaching profession, which would require coaches to have deeper understanding of brain functions and behavior.

The focus of coaching is often individual change and transformation, including dealing with fear, motivation, successful performance, relationships and a myriad of other behavioral and attitudinal issues. Brain science research in recent years has provided key findings that should inform coaches regarding the focus of coaching and their methodologies. So too, are the implications for coaches in organizations, such as executive coaches, who work with leaders.

Rock and Schwartz argue that getting people to change is important, because life–both individual and organizational life–is rapidly changing in our world. The traditional view of change management has focused on two levels. The first, at the individual level has traditionally focused on changing people by providing critical feedback and judgment, or through the work of professional help, on analyzing peoples’ problems. The second, at the organizational level, has focused on introducing leader-led organizational change initiatives –structural or process changes–which assumes by their nature, are expected to create employee buy-in, or alternatively, focuses on increasing employee motivation to increase productivity through the traditional “carrot-and-stick” approach, with a particular emphasis on financial rewards. The evidence is clear that those approaches have failed to produce meaningful and productive changes.

Brain science research, Rock and Schwartz argue, tells us a lot about why change is difficult and what approaches can work best.

Schwartz argues that our brains are built to detect changes in our environment and are more sensitive to negative change. Any change that constitutes a threat can trigger fear causing the brain’s amygdala to stimulate a defensive emotional or impulsive response. Altering our reactions to change is very difficult for the brain, even though logically we may want to. Rock cites a study of 800 HR professionals in which 44% of them preferred to not follow new directions from the boss and 15% were actively obstructionist. The lesson for coaches and leaders here is the harder you push people to change, the harder they will push back.

So, how can coaching work effectively with the brain? First, brain research reveals that focusing on problems or negative behavior just reinforces those problems and behaviors. Therefore, the best coaching strategies focus on the present and future solutions. This requires the development of new neural pathways in the brain and learning new thinking patterns.

Schwartz has identified five main areas of brain research than can inform coaches:

•            Because the brain operates in a quantum environment, our perceptions and self-talk alters the connections and pathways in our brains. Whatever we focus our “attention” on changes or creates new brain connections;

•            The connections in our brains form mental “maps” or reality. Whatever we expect to experience, is what we actually experience. The implications for coaches is to encourage people to record their experiences and talk about them;

•            Focusing our attention on solutions or new thinking is a better strategy than focusing on analyzing existing problems because the latter will only reinforce the problems;

•            If leaders want to become more effective coaches themselves, they need to learn to stop giving advice to people, or if it is given, to be unattached to their ideas and present them as options to people. The implications for coaches is obvious, and most coaches are adept at having the clients take responsibility for their own journey or choices;

•            Coaches need to be adept at reading peoples’ body language, particularly when they have “insights” about their behavior. These insights are visually accompanied by changes in facial expressions. Schwartz has developed a four-part model of facial expressions that indicate emotional states from awareness to illumination. Leaders too need to be sensitive to facial changes as an indication of employees’ mental state.

Coaching has evolved into a much more sophisticated profession based on knowledge from many other disciplines. Now brain science research has potential for having the greatest impact on coaching individuals and leaders in organizations.

Whether you’re a habitual list maker, make detailed written goals or keep your tasks and goals in your head, almost everyone pursues goals in an ever changing and sometimes chaotic environment. We are very aware of the conscious thinking that helps us achieve those goals (or not), but we rarely consider how the unconscious thinking in our mind contributes to the achievement of those same goals.

Most traditional approaches to goal setting are a deliberate, rational, logical and analytical process, complete with detailed steps. This process, a conscious mind activity, has been promoted by the scientific and professional community as the best method to set and achieve goals.

Maybe not. 

Recent brain research and psychological studies have pointed to the limitations of the conscious mind in effective decision making, and the importance of the unconscious mind in thinking processes.

Psychologists Baruch Eitam, Ran Hassin and Yaacov Schul at Hebrew University conducted a research study, published in the March, 2008 issue of Psychological Science, which examined the benefit of non-conscious goal pursuit (moving toward a goal without being of doing so), in new environments. Existing theory suggests that unconscious goal pursuit only reproduces formerly learned actions, therefore is ineffective in mastering a new skill. Eitam and colleagues argue the opposite: That unconscious goal pursuit can help people achieve their goals, even in situations where they’ve had no previous experience.

Eitam designed several experiments with subjects in which the experimental group were given visualized word suggestions for a problem they had never encountered before. The series of experiments demonstrated, according Eitam and his colleagues, that “powerful, unintentional, mechanisms of implicit learning are related to unconscious wanting and works towards attaining unconscious goals.”  They concluded that unconscious processes have both an advantage over conscious processing and an ability to serve a person’s goals.

Thomas Gilovich, professor of psychology at Cornell University, conducted research, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, that concludes that perspective can influence your interpretation of past events, and looking at your past from a detached, third person perspective, can give you more motivation to keep working on a personal goal. Gilovich pointed out that a third-person perspective accentuated perceived changes when people seeking self-improvement are focused on differences between their present and past selves. But when the test subjects were asked to focus on similarities from the past by visualizing a past event that was positive, such as something they were proud of, the third-person perspective tended to promote perceptions of continuity between the present self and the positive past self.

These findings reflect processes and strategies often used by coaches and NLP practitioners, who recognize that the conscious mind often inhibits the attainment of goals because of its nature–being at times over analytical, containing biases, and often exhibiting restraining forces of risk aversion and judgment. These insights also emphasize the importance of using a detached, third person perspective to give you a better chance of achieving those goals.

Most people, particularly those in scientific and professional fields, as well as a majority of the population, would like to believe that we make good decisions in our personal and professional lives based on deliberative, logical thinking. It appears that nothing can be further from the truth.

Alex Haslam, writing in Scientific American, cites the story of basic decision-making. In Gordium, Asia in the 4th century B.C., an oxcart was roped to a pole with a complex knot, and it was said that the first person to untie it would be king of Persia. Unfortunately, the knot proved impossible to untie. Legend has it that when confronted with this problem, rather than trying to untie it, Alexander the Great cut the knot in two with his sword, and then went on to conquer Asia. Ever since then the “Gordian Solution” has referred to the attractiveness of the simple answer to complex problems. Among researchers in the traditional scientific and professional disciplines, this solution has little appeal.

For example, in their conflict model of decision-making, published in their 1977 book, Decision-Making, Irving Janis and Leon Mann argued that complex decision-making is essential to guard against “group-think” and the decisions should involve an analytical and logical, detailed process. However, now there is a growing body of research that shows that there is little evidence to support a complex decision- making process over a simple one, as argued by Malcolm Gladwell, in his book, Blink.

One of the more enduring ideas in psychology, dating back to the time of William James, over 100 years ago, is the notion that human behavior is not the product of a single process, but rather reflects the interaction of different systems in the brain. Sometimes they work together seamlessly, and sometimes they conflict. The unconscious automatic is fast, affective, heuristic and relies on intuitive shortcuts. The other conscious system is slower, deliberate, rule-based, and logical.

These theories have been adapted in the social sciences, but do not provide an accurate description of human behavior. The major problem is controlled, conscious decision-making accounts for only a part of our overall behavioral tendencies, and often face strong competition from the unconscious system. Princeton University psychologist Adam Alter and his colleagues have studied how subtle changes in contextual clues can cause a person to switch from the conscious system to the unconscious and visa versa.

Let’s take a look at some other research.

In a study by Hakwan Lau and Richard Passingham published in the Journal of Neuroscience demonstrated that the influences we are not aware of can hold greater sway than those we can consciously reject. We make countless decisions each day without conscious deliberation, a process called “biased competition,” in which we decide among many options. The best kinds of biased decisions that are unconscious are habitual choices such as driving a car. Other unconscious influences are generally emotional or motivational, and take place continuously in our unconscious mind. In making complex decisions, legitimate factors sometimes make choices influenced by prejudice, so bias is hard to detect. Recent research by psychologist Eugene Caruso at the University of Chicago shows that people are willing to sacrifice quite a lot to fulfill their unconscious biases.

University of Maryland psychologist Anastaysia Pocheptsova and her colleagues found that individuals who had to regulate their attention–often called executive control–made significantly different choices than people who didn’t. The researchers concluded that people who overtax their brains made inferior decisions. This insight suggests that the brain works like a muscle; when depleted it becomes less effective. If you’ve spent a lot of time focusing on a continuous series of choices, then you become less effective in making the next major decision.

In a recent Science article by researchers Ap Dijksterhuis and his colleagues, they argue that in order to be effective, conscious (deliberate) decision-making requires cognitive resources, and because that places increasing strain on those resources, the quality of our decision-making declines as complexity increases. On the other hand, unconscious decision-making, which does not require analytical-logical processes requires no cognitive resources; therefore, decision-making ability does not decline with frequency.

Research by John-Dylan Haynes and his team at the Center for Neuroscience in Berlin, Germany, demonstrated, using fMRI scans that they could tell what test subjects were going to do in a test experiment as early as 10 seconds before the test subjects were aware they had made up their minds. This study showed that unconscious predictive brain activity comes first and the conscious experience follows. Dean Sibata of the University of Washington reported in his study of brain functioning that when people make decisions that affect their lives, they would use the emotional parts of the brain as the driver, even though the task may not seem emotional.

These findings fly in the face of conventional management “scientific” theories of the past, which have argued for only one kind of thought process to support decision-making–logical, rational, analytical thinking in the conscious mind–totally ignoring our unconscious, emotional mind.

The implications of this research are significant for individuals in the personal lives and for organizations, particularly leadership behavior. It can summarize as follows:

• Unconscious thought processes can predetermine, without an individual’s awareness, decision-making bias and actual decision-making;
• The unconscious mind and conscious mind are two systems that interact with each other to make decisions; repeated complex decisions are more efficiently made by the unconscious mind;
• Emotions are the key driver to decision-making, not logical, analytical thought; our logical processes are often only rational justifications for emotional decisions.

Leadership training programs, and managerial practices need to be reexamined in light of these research findings, and approaches developed that more accurately reflect an understanding of the thinking processes that underpin decision-making.

Why do some people roll with life’s punches, facing setbacks, problems and failures with grace, while others dwell on their problems, criticize themselves or feel victimized? The difference in how people treat themselves can have a huge impact on their personal life and the lives of others. According to researchers at Duke and Wake Forest Universities, self-compassion, or the ability to treat yourself kindly, is a significant force. This research was published in the May, 2007 Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

 Self-compassion comprises three elements: self-kindness (being kind to yourself rather than self-critical), mindful acceptance and common humanity (seeing your negative experiences as a normal part of the human condition).The researchers argue that rather than focusing on your self-evaluation–as do many traditional cognitive psychotherapists–self compassion changes your relationship to self-evaluation. The researchers argue that only adding self-compassion on top of a pattern of self-recrimination will not improve your coping strategies.

 The research contained the following conclusions about self-compassion:

• People with high self-compassion had less negative emotional reactions to real, remembered and imagined bad events;
• Self-compassion allowed people to accept responsibility for a negative experience but to counteract negative feelings about it at the same time;
• Self-compassion can protect people from negative events better than self-esteem, in that self-compassion does not involve the hubris, narcissism or self-enhancing illusions of excessive self-esteem;
• Self-compassion is particularly important for people with low self-esteem, because they can simultaneously have low self-esteem and embrace self-compassion without causing cognitive dissonance;
• Self-compassionate people are less likely to see themselves as victims and they more easily develop acceptance for what occurs in life.

The bottom-line of this research seems to support much of the research that questions the value of unbridled self-esteem, which has very negative effects. On the other hand, there are clear benefits to self and others in developing self-compassion.