• Shuffle
    Toggle On
    Toggle Off
  • Alphabetize
    Toggle On
    Toggle Off
  • Front First
    Toggle On
    Toggle Off
  • Both Sides
    Toggle On
    Toggle Off
  • Read
    Toggle On
    Toggle Off
Reading...
Front

Card Range To Study

through

image

Play button

image

Play button

image

Progress

1/44

Click to flip

Use LEFT and RIGHT arrow keys to navigate between flashcards;

Use UP and DOWN arrow keys to flip the card;

H to show hint;

A reads text to speech;

44 Cards in this Set

  • Front
  • Back

Hinduism

•Yogas–Breathing,postures–


Five Prohibitions (Yamas)


•Violence


•Greed


•Sex


•Stealing


•Lying

Buddhism

"Compassion, Right mind"


•Nirvana and the four noble truths


•1. Life as we live it is suffering, frustration


•2. Cause of suffering, clinging, grasping, ignorance


•3. Release: nirvana, disengage from grasping


•4. 8 fold practice/path: action,thought


–Friendship/Loving Kindness: Maitri


–Equanimity: Upeksha


–Compassion: Karuna


–Joy: Mudita


–Kind speech


–Nonjudgmental mindfulness

Utilitarianism

•Age of Enlightenment (Peter Gay): reason, individual rights, science, freedom, industrialization •Happiness is found in actions that promote happiness for the greatest number of people (Bentham: Greater Good)


•Happiness is an individual right: Thomas Jefferson and The Declaration of Independence on inalienable rights: “life,liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

Jen

Jen is the central idea in the teachings of Confucius, it is founded on the study of emotions such as compassion, gratitude, awe, embarrassment, and amusement, emotions that transpire between people, bringing the good in each other to completion.




Reverence for humanity, generosity of others

Taoism

Fascinating philosophy of Taoism. Taoism collection of teaching. In some sense, you can’t will happiness, you have to let it happen to you. - Our best access to happiness is found in acting spontaneously. We are not going to find happiness in intentional sthriving.

What distinguishes between experimental and correlational methods?

Correlational: natural variation in X explains variation in Y
–  Correlation =/= causation
–  Experimental: Manipulation of X (holding everything else constant) explains variation in Y.
•  Independent Variable: variable that is manipulated
•  Dependent Variable: variable that is measured •  Can conclude that change in IV causes change in DV

What are the primary measurement methods applied to the study of happiness?

Life data


Observation


Test data


Self-report

Be familiar with how happiness is measured by experts in the field like Ed Diener and Sonja Lyubomirsky.

Self-Report: What a person says about her or himself. –  This is how Lyubomirsky (and others) dene happiness: Subjective Well-Being.


–  happiness is, “inherently subjective and must be dened from the perspective of the person”

What are the limitations of self ­report?

Bias


People might want to report things that are not true


People tend to act "happier," so that they won't get judged.

What domains of happiness are measured by self­ report?

Subjective happiness.


The degree to which a person is happy or unhapy

What is the relationship between happiness and health?

Happy adds 7.5 years to life expectancy


•Happy at 70 adds 20 months to life


•Happiness associated with


–Fewer health symptoms


–Fewer strokes


–Fewer fatal accidents


–Reduced cardiovascular disease


–Reduced allergic reaction

What is the relationship between happiness and country­ level variables (e.g., national wealth, individualism, democracy)?

The American Paradox (Myers, 2000)– In spite of “economic strength” as measured by GDP, US seems to under perform in terms of happiness. happiness plateaus at $70K: Even if money could buyhappiness, its effects are offset

What is the relationship between happiness and person-level variables (e.g., personal wealth, personality, lifestyle)?

• Most cheerful college students make $25,000/year compared to least cheerful


• Happy workers more productive, better job performance


• Happiness leads to boost in creative thought, problem solving


• Happiness makes for more integrative negotiators, integrate both sides of negotiation


• Emotionally intelligent managers have more satisfied teams

Which philosophers believed compassion is


culturally constructed?

Thomas Hudley


Martha

Which philosophers believed compassion is


evolutionarily/biologically ingrained in humans?

Peter Singer


Darwin

How does compassion shift people’s sense of similarity to others compared to pride?

Perhaps more convincingly, participants’ experiences of compassion and pridewere, as James would have hypothesized, quite sensitive to fluctuations in the activity of the vagus nerve. Participants’ reports of their feelings of compassion increased as their vagus nerve activity increased; participants’ self-reports of pride decreased as their vagus nerve activity increased. With increasing vagus nerve response, participants’ orientation shifted toward one of care rather than attention to what is strong about the self.

What historical accounts claim that compassion is not a natural instinct of the human species? What evidence covered in the class may speak against these claims?

-The Spanish Civil War


- My Lai massacre


- Miklós Nyiszli, a medical doctor at a Nazi concentration camp


- Human history, Glover contends, can be thought of as a contest between cruelty and compassion, tellingly revealed in wartime sympathy breakthroughs, when the force of compassion overwhelms the edicts of war. You could make the same case about human nature.

How might a compassionate instinct have conferred an advantage over the course of mammal evolution (see Frans de Waal)?

Cognitive empathy, where one understands the other's situation, enables helping behavior that is tailed to the other's specific needs. In this case, a mother chimpanzee reaches to help her son out of a tree after he screamed and begged for her attention.Frans de Waal

What is the difference between the sympathetic and parasympathetic branches of the nervous system? Which has been found to be related to compassion?

The sympathetic nervous system prepares the body for intense physical activity and is often referred to as the fight-or-flight response. The parasympathetic nervous system has almost the exact opposite effect and relaxes the body and inhibits or slows many high energy functions.

What is the vagus nerve and how does it relate to compassion?

A bundle of nerves, which resides in the chest and, when activated, produces a feeling of spreading, liquid warmth in the chest and a lump in the throat. The vagus nerve originates in the top of the spinal cord and then winds its way through the body (vagus is Latin for wandering), connecting up to facial muscle tissue, muscles that are involved in vocalization, the heart, the lungs, the kidneys and liver, and the digestive organs.

In the empirical article by Simon­ Thomas, which area of the brains were related to different emotions? What are the implications of these findings?

Compassion induction was associated with activation in the mid brain periaqueductal gray (PAG), a region that is activated during pain and the perception of others pain, and that has been implicated in parental nurturance behaviors. Pride induction engaged the posterior medial cortex, a region that has been associated with self-referent processing. Self-reports of compassion experience were correlated with increased activation in a region near the PAG, and in the right inferior frontal gyrus (IFG). Self-reports of pride experience, in contrast, were correlated with reduced activation in the IFG and the anterior insula

Know the historical contributions that writers and philosophers have made that inform modern empirical work on awe

•Early conversion experiences, being in presence of God –St Paul’s conversion


–Vismaya in Hinduism


•Burke’s revolution (1757): A Philosophical Enquiry into Our Ideas about the Origins of The Sublime and the Beautiful: secularizes awe


–Patterns light, dark


–Ox vs. cow


–Not smells


–Power,obscurity


•Immanuel Kant (1764): An Essay on the Sublime and the Beautiful


–Aesthetic experience vs. awe


•Emerson (1860s): Transcendent self in Nature


•Max Weber (1905): political awe

What are inflammatory cytokines? How do they relate to awe?

inflammation is our body’s first line of defense against injury and infection. The inflammatory response is orchestrated by proteins called “pro-inflammatory cytokines”, which are shown here. Cytokines are secreted by immune cells such as macrophages and T-cells and are displayed . Today I’ll be focusing on onepro- inflammatory cytokine called interlukien-6 (or IL-6 for short). What I think is really interesting about inflammation is that we typically think of it as occurring locally, such as when you get a paper cut and the skin around it gets red, swells, and heats up. But inflammation can also by systemic, where it is more widely distributed through out the body, and systemic inflammation is implicated in a variety of major chronic diseases, especially those likely to afflict individuals lower in SES, including cardiovascular disease, diabetes,and major depressive disorder.Tendency to feel awe relates to lower IL6, a marker of inflammation response

What are the key appraisals that Keltner and Haidt assert (2003) are present in all experiences of awe? What are other appraisals that might be present that lend a different “flavor” to the awe experience?

We can find awe in different places, such as beautiful landscapes, favorite musicians, favorite foods, favorite restaurants.

In the Piff et al. empirical paper there are five studies presented. Be familiar with the methodological strengths and weaknesses of each study, how each study addresses the weakness and/or extends the findings of the previous study, and overall how the authors make the argument that awe promotes prosocial behavior.

Individuals higher in dispositional tendencies to experience awe exhibited more generosity in an economic game (Study 1). Experimentally inducing awe caused individuals to endorse more ethical decisions (Study 2), to be more generous to a stranger (Study 3), and to report more prosocial values (Study 4). A naturalistic induction of awe in which participants looked up at a grove of towering trees led to increased helpfulness, greater ethicality, and decreased entitlement (Study 5). These findings highlight that the experience of awe can influence prosociality in a broad fashion, and contribute to the growing literature documenting the centrality of emotions to human sociality

Which emotions besides awe are considered self­ transcendent emotions? How are they similar/dissimilar to awe?

Vastness and accommodation.


Vastness: takes us out of our human sized frame of reference.


Not necessarily tied to size, but can also be temporal or social dimensions (conceptual vastness).


Accommodation: awe-inspiring things are not able to be accounted for by existing mental structures and schemas


•  new info has to be accommodated by either updating schema or making new ones


•  stimuli that transcend the individual’s current beliefs and understanding of the world require the individual to restructure frames of reference, beliefs, causal understandings, and categories

What are the physiological/neurophysical effects of laughter?

•Own space in acoustic structure that predates language (Bachorowski)


•CNS correlates in brain stem, pons,which regulates breathing (Ruch)


•Laughter systematic exhalation(increased vagus nerve activation)


•Laughter involves muscle relaxation


•Reduction of cardiovascular stress


•Laughter enables quicker return to cardiovascular baseline during stress (Fredrickson & Levenson,1998)

What are the communicative and social functions of laughter?

Laughter = Humor? ProvineLaughter gatherers record laugs in dorms, mallsAbout 20% of laughs follow jokes, humorMost do not; laughter punctuates speechLaughter = cooperation? Laughter has a unique idiosyncratic acoustic signatureIt signals imminent rewards, sign of cooperationFriends engage in antiphonal laughter; the acoustic markers of their laughs begin to mimic, synchronize (Smoski & Bachorowski, 2003)Preuschoft, Van Hooff: pant hoots in primatesOwn space in acoustic structure that predates language (Bachorowski)CNS correlates in brain stem, pons, which regulates breathing (Ruch)Laughter systematic exhalation (increased vagus nerve activation)Laughter involves muscle relaxationLaughter signals safety, interaction not serious Relaxes body: Exhalation, relaxationBrings peace in face of conflictReduction of cardiovascular stressLaughter enables quicker return to cardiovascular baseline during stress (Fredrickson & Levenson,1998)Laughter cascades of shared humor and laughter of partners benefit marriage (Gottman, 2003)Sense of humor (self-reports of finding mirth in daily living) correlates with better health (Martin, 2004)

What are the functions of play?

Play routine teaches boundaries.


Language play teaches empathy


Play with language teaches multiple meanings of words, necessary for theory of mind, different perspectives, empathy


Playful teasing helps us navigate conflict (a linguistic analysis)

What do we know about the relationship between inequality and happiness?

•General Social Survey Data from1972 to 2008


•US Citizens Happier during times of greater equality


•This is due to perceptions off airness, trust in fellow citizens


•Mainly true for low income citizens

What do we know about the relationship between inequality and health?

•Harms the health & happiness of low SES

Who is affected by rising inequality? (i.e., poor, middle class, wealthy, etc.)

•AND in high SES people, hinders all the skills that motivate them to contribute to the greater good: empathy,compassion, altruism, desire to connect


•These are also the skills essential to happiness


•Helps explain why happiness plateaus at $70K: Even if money could buy happiness, its effects are offset

What are the societal costs of inequality?


Passion for fairness/justice: what is the evolutionary evidence?

•Egalitarianism in hunter gatherers,living in conditions of 200,000 years of our evolution (Boehm,1991)


–Collaborativechild care


– sharing of care


–Collaborativehunting


– sharing of meat from game


–Inequityaversion


– leveling mechanisms against inequality


•Modestyabout big kill


•Teasing,gossip about boasters, hoarders


•Celebratoryfood sharing


•Rise of hierarchies with expandinghuman settlements 8 to 12,000 years ago (Flannery & Marcus, 2012)

How does Sonja Lyubomirsky’s 40% solution explain the expression of the depression gene?

the potential of the 40 percent that is within our ability to control, the 40 percent for room to maneuver, for opportunities to increase or decrease our happiness levels through what we do in our daily lives and how we think.

What are the positive effects of writing a gratitude letter?

Measure the power of reflection on past memories as a factor for improving general well-being. Simply writing a gratitude letter was enough to produce substantial boosts in happiness.

Robert Emmons reviews his research program on Gratitude in the Compassionate Instinct. Be familiar with the different domains (e.g. emotional, social, physical health) on which he found that the cultivation of gratitude had an impact.

Robert Emmons defines it as “a felt sense of wonder, thankfulness, and appreciation of life.”By definition, the practice of gratitude involves a focus on the present moment, on appreciating your life as it is today and what has made it so.Expressing gratitude is a lot more than saying “thank you.”People who are consistently grateful have been found to be relatively happier, more energetic, and more hopeful and to report experiencing more frequent positive emotions. They are also less materialistic. The more a person is inclined to gratitude, the less likely he or she is to be depressed, anxious, lonely, envious, or neurotic.Investigations on gratitude show that expressions of gratitude are causally linked to mental and physical health rewards that we have seen

What’s the research methodology behind the app?

self-report

What main findings have emerged from the data collected through the app?

A wandering mind is an unhappy mind

In the Compassionate Instinct, Franco and Zimbardo review two studies that are commonly pointed to as evidence for the evil that everyday people are capable of. Be familiar with the authors’ counterpoints to this common interpretation of these studies.

Banality to heroism.


Just as it takes practice to cultivate some of the other behaviors and emotions we've examined in this book: forgiveness, compassion, empathy, we may have to work to overcome our tendency to sit on the sidelines. Our capacity for heroism is as natural to us as our inclinations toward apathy; nurturing heroism requires education, inspiration, and opportunities for reflection.

In the Compassionate Instinct Michael McCullough reviews how the desire for revenge and forgiveness may or may not be a component of human nature. What are his views on this issue? What recommendations does he make to make a more forgiving society?

The desire for revenge isn’t a disease that afflicts a few unfortunate people; rather it’s a universal trait of human nature, crafted by natural selection, that exists today because it helped our ancestors adapt to their environment. Forgiveness is also an intrinsic feature of human nature, crafted by natural selection.


To increase forgiveness in the world, it doesn’t make sense to try to change human nature. It makes a lot more sense to try to change the world us.

“Minds in the eye empathy score” by oxytocin receptor genotype

individuals with one or two copies of the A allele (AG/AA) exhibited lower behavioral and dispositional empathy

Prosociality Ratings of Target by oxytocin receptor genotype

homozygous for the G allele are more prosocial than targets carrying an A allele. In fact, of the 10 most trusted targets, 6 were homozygous for the G allele; of the 10 least trusted targets, 9 were carriers of the A allele. These results demonstrate that differences in rs53576 systematically predict outside observers’ judgments of the prosociality of carriers based on observations of 20 s of silent behavior.

What does it mean to measure something at the trait (or personality) level versus the state level?

Trait/personality is something that is more constant, while emotional happiness state would be something that changes based on the situation (like w/ experience sampling)