Perform an act of kindness

If I need to, I'll go through you I put in hour after hour Let's be crystal clear I'm gonna get there if it takes a day or fifty years. So, my friend. I'm ready if you are. Let's do work. Put your imagination hat on, because we are going back to prehistoric times. These results support the terror management analysis by showing that when people are led to think about their own deaths, rather than just any negative topic, they are especially attracted to a charismatic leader who boldly espouses the greatness of the group. The Effects of Mortality Salience and Leader Characteristics on Liking for a Leader When reminded of mortality, participants' attitudes toward a charismatic candidate for governor who promotes the greatness of the state became more favorable. A double bar graph shows positive rating on vertical axis ranging from 2. There are two vertical bars, out of which green shows exam salient and purple colour shows mortality salient. The approximate values of exam salient and mortality salient for charismatic are 2. SOCIAL PSYCH OUT WORLD Death in the Voting Booth Although research has shown that people's awareness of death can influence decisions in hypothetical elections, would reminders of death affect voting in a real political context? Landau and colleagues (Landau, Solomon, et al. The founder of this therapy is the American psychologist James McCullough, who published the first edition of his CBASP treatment manual in 2000 [21]. The target group: patients with chronic depression.

The central idea of this approach is that it's difficulties in dealing with other people that makes depression a permanent condition. He or she who can't overcome their own inhibitions in social life, constantly gets into fights with others, or experiences rejection all the time, often feels like being unable to control the own fate, and loses hope about a better future. The therapy follows a concept that actually has its roots in psychoanalysis: transference. This is similar to an expectation about how other people will probably react to me if I behave in a specific way. For example, someone could tend to always hold back his own opinion because his choleric father always freaked out and beat him up when he was a kid and said what he thought. Even now being an adult, he still suspects getting very negative reactions from others - he transfers the father's behavioral pattern in his imagination to other people. Of course, without clearly recognizing this process. In CBASP, influential early experiences like these are called stamps, and are searched for right from the beginning. I don't know if you are a dude, a chick, or somewhere outside the binary, but for simplicity's sake, let's pretend that you are a caveman. You've got yourself a nice little cave with some sick stick figure paintings and a partner who can light a mean fire with some twigs and stuff. Well one day you are out in the plains looking for some food or doing whatever the hell you cavemen do all day and you decide to drop back by the crib to rest for a bit. You roll up to the cave and notice some other dude's loincloth outside. Aw, hell no. You peek your head in and see that asshole Grock from down the street about to make your mate reproductively unavailable for 9 months. Are you just gonna take that? No way, man. Evolution's got your back. As soon as you realize what's going on, your brain prompts a neurochemical cascade that kicks your sympathetic nervous system into overdrive. Bush and his policies following the deadly terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, suggested that it would. On September 10, 2001, polls showed that President George W.

Bush's approval rating was at a dismal 49% (Pyszczynski et al. On September 13, his approval rating soared to 94%. Why did the events of 9/11 have such a powerful effect on support for Bush? Landau and colleagues (2004) proposed that the dramatic spike in support for President George W. Bush and his policies following the deadly terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, could be traced in part to the massive reminder of mortality the attacks caused and people's corresponding need for a charismatic leader. Bush fit the characteristics of a charismatic leader in that he exuded calm self-confidence and espoused the greatness of America and the importance of vanquishing evildoers. Landau and colleagues posited that the attacks heightened Americans' awareness of death on a mass scale and that people sought to avoid death-related fears by supporting Bush's message of triumphing over evil and ensuring America's legacy. To assess the role of mortality threat in support for Bush, Landau and colleagues examined whether reminders of death or reminders of the 9/11 attacks would increase Americans' support for President Bush and his political policies prior to the 2004 presidential election. The therapy aims at the realization that people in this world differ very much in their reactions, and therefore it's possible to try out new behaviors. Another idea in CBASP is that a specific disturbance in the psychic development contributes to becoming chronically depressive later on. This disturbance shows itself in a mental filter through which the depressed person isn't able to see how their own behavior affects the behavior of others. In this subjective perspective, the social world appears to constantly act hostile from within itself. The special term for this is preoperational structural functioning. However, observing people in everyday life suggests that this kind of selective perception is not totally exclusive to the chronically depressed. A unique feature of CBASP is that the social interaction between psychotherapist and patient is a big topic in itself, that is discussed in great detail. The therapist regularly reveals his or her emotions which were recently triggered by a specific behavior of the patient, like when making a very hostile comment. This is supposed to guide the attention on to how the own actions impact the feelings of other people. Another specific technique is asking a patient to compare a recent therapist's reaction with the typical reaction of a harmful person from the past - the interpersonal discrimination exercise. Your heart pumps massive amounts of blood to your muscles so you can dash across the room like the Flash, your pupils adapt to make your vision sharp as a hawk, and before he knows it, you have that scrawny idiot by the neck. This is an example of the infamous fight or flight response.

Super useful for bashing the skulls of would be prehistoric cuckolders or running for your life from that giant bear that thought you were going to steal its cubs. Not so useful when you are in the middle of an exam or taking a crowded elevator up to the 23rd floor of your office building. A bit of anxiety is helpful and adaptive. It's completely necessary, not only for fight and flight situations, but also as the force that will kick you in the ass and remind you that you need to get your report done before the deadline. Anxiety becomes a problem when it's triggered seemingly out of nowhere, when it causes you extreme discomfort, or when it prevents you from performing successfully in life. Do you have an exam or deadline at work coming up? First date? Anxiety is a totally normal reaction to those things. This was exactly what they found. Moreover, these effects of mortality salience and 9/11 reminders were found among both liberal and conservative Americans, indicating that Bush's charismatic leadership quelled death concerns for Americans, regardless of their political orientation. In a follow-up study, Landau and colleagues posited that making mortality salient to Americans would not afford the same benefit to John Kerry, Bush's opponent in the upcoming 2004 election. Kerry did not emphasize the need to triumph over evil, and he was painted by well-publicized political ads prior to the election as an untrustworthy waffler who continually changed his positions. Thus, Landau and colleagues predicted that whereas mortality salience would increase the appeal of Bush, it would decrease the appeal of Kerry. In a study conducted just one month prior to the election, this is precisely what happened (see FIGURE 7. This research suggests that the many reminders of the attacks of 9/11 and threats of additional terrorist attacks leading up to the election, including a video of Osama Bin Laden shown on television just one day before the polls opened, may have tipped the scales in favor of Bush, who won a second term as U. The Effects of Mortality Salience on Liking for the 2004 Presidential Candidates Reminders of mortality increased support and intentions to vote for George W. A double bar graph shows the support for leader on the basis of mortality. This kind of intense self-reveal clearly represents a big challenge to quite some psychotherapists out there. Especially to those who prefer to react to even simple personal questions with: I see that you a very interested in me, but .

HEY, LOOK - a squirrel! The main part of the therapy is the analysis of problematic social situations in daily life. For example, a wild argument with a colleague about whether emoticons on business documents are now trendy or unprofessional. The therapeutic discussion focuses on whether one's own thinking and behavior led to a personal success in this situation, or not - a very pragmatic approach. If the answer is no, it didn't, then, by means of therapeutic role playing, better ways of dealing with the situation are practiced. This all seems familiar? No wonder - this part is traditional CBT. Schema therapy However, if that anxiety is so crippling that you couldn't even go on the date because it felt like your heart was going to explode out of your chest or you couldn't stop crying long enough to take phone calls at work, then it's probably time to do something about it. This is the part where I tell you the same boilerplate message that's on my voicemail at work: If this is a psychiatric emergency, please hang up and dial 911. Seriously, though - if it's that bad, please please please get some immediate help. Stay safe, friend. If it's bad enough that's it's really distressing you or interfering with your life to a significant degree, then getting non-emergency professional help might really be useful. I'll talk more about that later in the Get Your Head Shrunk article. Feel free to skip ahead to that article if that is something that you want to pursue ASAP. Knowledge is power and you have taken the first step toward arming yourself with some real nuggets of wisdom. Actually, the sheer fact that you have decided to get off your ass (or stay on it) and read this article indicates that you are ready to make a change. You are ready to kick this thing in the balls. The vertical axis is labeled as Support for leader, ranging from 0 to 6 in increment of 1 while horizontal axis is labeled as Pain and Mortality. There are two vertical bars, out of which blue colour represents George W.