Why am I always so slow to learn?

Learned associations with positive stimuli The need to maintain consistent ideas about related people or things Positive mood Use of fear to avoid negative consequences if paired with strategies to reduce the negative consequences Thoughts of death, although unconscious thoughts of death create the need to boost self-esteem and may result in unhealthy behaviors Characteristics of the Audience Learning Outcomes Identify who is likely to be most persuadable. Trying to avoid failure is a familiar but ineffective strategy. Failure, it turns out, is an essential prerequisite for success, according to a massive study of three-quarters of a million grant applications to the National Institutes of Health published in Nature in 2019. Yian Yin and his colleagues at Northwestern University set out to create a mathematical model that could reliably predict the success or failure of an undertaking. In addition to the grant applications, they also tested their model on forty-six years' worth of venture capital startup investments. The result? Every winner begins as a loser. But the old proverb if at first you don't succeed, try, try, again only works if you learn from your previous failures. You need to keep doing what works and focus on changing what didn't. Plus, you should get right back up and try again. The more time you leave between attempts, the more likely you are to fail again. If it goes on for too long it starts to be downright unpleasant. I'm not talking about your favorite song here.

I'm talking about when you get some stupid commercial jingle stuck in your head and you only know one line from the whole song and no matter what you do you can't get it out and you are thinking about getting a spoon and carving the goddamn song straight out of your brain! Okay that was a bit dramatic, but I think most people will understand what I'm getting at. Now if you can get that person to imagine that intensity of thought and couple it with negative thoughts and worry, they might be able to comprehend just a little more how messed up the experience of anxiety can be. So that's it for my bonus article about ways that you might be able to better talk to those who just don't understand your anxiety. I will go ahead and put a printable of that letter up on my website at duffthepsych. Just like everything else in this article, the information and tips contained in this article will not fix the entire situation for you, but I hope that these were some different and interesting ways of approaching the task of trying to explain your experience to someone who has never been there. I'm not sure why you picked up this article. I am so thankful that you did and I owe you a mega sized hug for it, but I don't know your particular reasons. Give an example of a situation in which you would use a two-sided argument over a one-sided argument. Explain the difference in persuadability between people with a high need for cognition and those with a need to make a good impression. Compare audiences with a promotion focus to those with a prevention focus. In addition to the source of a persuasive message and the nature of the message itself, a message's impact on an audience also depends on the characteristics of the audience members. Whether a given audience member responds favorably or unfavorably to a message is influenced by his or her age, sex, personality, socioeconomic status, education level, and habitual way of living, as well as the events and experiences of his or her life. For example, we discussed earlier that whether a person processes a persuasive message through the central route or the peripheral route depends in part on his or her motivation to attend to the message. So we would expect that individual differences in interests, values, and prior knowledge will influence who finds certain messages worthy of attention or not. Let's consider how audiences differ according to a number of characteristics. Persuadability People differ in their overall persuadability, their susceptibility to persuasion. Rather than trying to avoid failure, what matters is what we learn when we fail, the changes we make based on that learning, and how quickly we try again. Fear can manifest as anxiety and hopelessness, which keeps us from being productive.

Hopeful action, on the other hand, breeds confidence, happiness, and freedom to experiment--emotions that are tied to better performance and a better sense of well-being. Fear alone is not an effective strategy Despite the well-documented ill effects of creating cultures of fear, I often meet people who believe fearmongering is necessary to spur environmental action. In fact, they tell me that the real problem is people aren't scared enough. Hope, they say, creates complacency at the very time we most need people to be scared into action. Clearly, that's the sentiment David Wallace-Wells channeled in his 2017 essay The Uninhabitable Earth. The article delineates the effects of the worst-case scenarios of climate change, crafting a horrifying, dystopian vision of a near future destroyed by runaway climate change. There's no doubt fear makes a deep impression. However, I do bet that there are quite a few of you out there who bought this article because you wanted to see what you could figure out on your own without the help of the therapist. Well, good on you. You're a badass and I hope that this totally works out for you. I want to at least mention psychotherapy, though. After all, it is my full-time real person job. People have a lot of different expectations and impressions of therapy, so I want to just talk a bit about what it looks like and how it can help you. First of all. Therapy is not a club. You don't have to be an A-lister with co-existing OCD and PTSD to get in. Therapy is for everyone. People high in persuadability are more likely to yield to persuasive messages, whereas low-persuadability individuals are less likely to be influenced. There are three key determinants of persuadability:

Age: Between the ages of 18 to 25, people are usually in the process of forming their attitudes, and so they are more likely to be influenced by persuasive messages. As they move into their late 20s and beyond, their attitudes tend to solidify and become more resistant to change (Koenig et al. Krosnick & Alwin, 1989). Self-esteem: People with low self-esteem are more likely to be influenced by persuasive messages than are those with high self-esteem (Wood & Stagner, 1994; Zellner, 1970). People with low self-esteem are less confident and view themselves as generally less capable, so, as you might expect, they do not regard their own attitudes very highly. As a result, they are more likely to give up their current attitudes and go along with the position advocated in the message. People with high self-esteem, however, generally are more confident in their attitudes, and they are therefore less likely to yield to influence. Yet a 2014 meta-analysis that looked at the effectiveness of fear campaigns across sixty years of studies concluded that increasing people's confidence is a more successful approach than just trying to scare folks straight. Fear alone doesn't help us to address broad, complex, emotion-laden, societal-level issues, like the ones we face with climate change. Indeed, Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, describes what he calls a hope gap between people's fear about climate change, and their feelings of powerlessness to do anything about it. Even those people identified as most concerned about climate change in research studies don't really know what they can do individually or collectively, he says. It's a serious problem. As Leiserowitz puts it, Perceived threat without efficacy of response is usually a recipe for disengagement or fatalism. The hope paradox We find ourselves, therefore, in a paradox. As I described in article one, climate change communication to date has overwhelmingly relied on negative emotions. One could argue it's been a highly successful tactic. There are also different types of therapy. The most common model in the United States is talk therapy.

Depending on who you see, this could be as frequent as once per week or as infrequent as a monthly check-in. Therapists vary quite a bit in their approaches as well. A more behaviorally oriented therapist will look into the circumstances surrounding your anxiety. What situation provokes the symptoms and where did you first learn to respond that way? They will then work to help you unlearn those responses. A cognitively oriented therapist will really dig deep into your thought patterns (we did a little of this earlier). You will be collaborative scientists together and test your thoughts to get to the bottom of whether it makes any sense for you to feel this way. Psychodynamic or insight oriented therapists will take things a bit further and look deep for the origins of your anxiety. Education and intelligence: Audience members who are more educated and intelligent are less persuadable than those with normal to low intelligence (McGuire, 1968). We can interpret this finding in a similar way as the self-esteem finding: People who are highly intelligent are more confident in their ability to think critically and form their own attitudes. Initial Attitudes Another important audience characteristic is the attitude that audience members already have toward the position advocated in the message. Imagine that you are trying to persuade your parents that you should be allowed to study in Spain for a semester through a foreign exchange program. Would you be more effective if you presented only arguments favoring a semester abroad and ignored any arguments opposed to your position--a one-sided message? Or would you be more persuasive if you brought up and then refuted arguments opposing the trip--a two-sided message? If you mention reasons that you should not go abroad and then refute them (One could say that this trip is too expensive, but I have some savings. However, simply by mentioning those opposing arguments, you run the risk of bringing them to your parents' attention and giving them more reasons to say no. Whether a one-sided or a two-sided message is more effective depends in large part on the audience's initial attitudes toward the issue at hand. American concern about climate change is higher than ever before, jumping 9 percent between 2018 and 2019. Increasing numbers of people believe climate change poses a severe risk to themselves and the countries where they live, according to a survey of twenty-six nations conducted by the Pew Research Center in the spring of 2018.