Career analyst Dan Pink examines the puzzle of motivation, starting with a fact that social scientists know but most managers don’t: Traditional rewards aren’t always as effective as we think. Listen for illuminating stories — and maybe, a way forward.

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In essence Maslow postulated the following ‘pyramid’ of needs.

At the base of the pyramid we find our ‘Physiological Needs’.  Meeting these needs leads us to the search for Safety and Security, the need to Belong, which leads to a development of Self Esteem and eventually Self-Actualisation.

Maslow developed the Hierarchy of Needs model in 1940-50s USA, and the Hierarchy of Needs theory remains valid today for understanding human motivation, management training, and personal development. Indeed, Maslow’s ideas surrounding the Hierarchy of Needs concerning the responsibility of employers to provide a workplace environment that encourages and enables employees to fulfil their own unique potential (self-actualization) are today more relevant than ever. Abraham Maslow’s book Motivation and Personality, published in 1954 (second edition 1970) introduced the Hierarchy of Needs, and Maslow extended his ideas in other work, notably his later book Toward A Psychology Of Being, a significant and relevant commentary, which has been revised in recent times by Richard Lowry, who is in his own right a leading academic in the field of motivational psychology.

In my work on Motivation I have described a series of MOTIVES which DRIVE our behaviours at a very basic level. I have called these Biological, Physiological, Emotional, Social and Aspirational Drivers.

What ever we call them,  these needs or drives sit at the core of our being forming the basis for our behaviours – our motivations.

It follows then that Personal Happiness is a measure of how well we, as individuals, feel we have had these basic needs met.

If NLP does one thing well it does help us turn ideas into questions or statements and these formulations into behaviours.

So over to you….

WHERE are you NOW in terms of satisfying these needs (drives) and how are you expressing this in your life?

WHAT needs (drives) are still to be satisfied and WHAT can you do about changing your behaviours to acquire them?

HOW will you know when you have satisfied a particular need (drive) and having done so what will it enable you to do next?

Alan

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Past studies have revealed that encountering negative events interferes with cognitive processing of subsequent stimuli. The present study investigates whether negative events affect semantic and perceptual processing differently. Presentation of negative pictures produced slower reaction times than neutral or positive pictures in tasks that require semantic processing, such as natural or man-made judgments about drawings of objects, commonness judgments about objects, and categorical judgments about pairs of words. In contrast, negative picture presentation did not slow down judgments in subsequent perceptual processing (e.g., color judgments about words, size judgments about objects). The subjective arousal level of negative pictures did not modulate the interference effects on semantic or perceptual processing. These findings indicate that encountering negative emotional events interferes with semantic processing of subsequent stimuli more strongly than perceptual processing, and that not all types of subsequent cognitive processing are impaired by negative events.

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One of the key differences between Hypnotherapy approaches and NLP is that the later tends to be ‘now’ and ‘future’ solutions focused – traditional Hypnotherapy can be focussed on the Initial Sensitising Event, hence have a historic – cause focus.

Of course both approaches are valid and are part of an effective therapists toolkit.

Milton Ericksons genius, however, was his use of therapeutic metaphor – stories if you like.

Telling transformational stories to the unconscious mind can have powerful and life changing effects.

As a working practitioner I would heartily recommend those unfamiliar with Erickson to track down a copy of “And my voice will go with you” – an inspiring read.

The next Inspire MLP training is in Cornwall (Penzance) and starts on the weekend of the 8th and 9th October. It is a Diploma in Therapeutic Hypnosis.

Contact alan@aljones.net for information

Well here’s an interesting article..

If you’re trying to cut back on junk food like potato chips, you could try a tactic as simple as switching hands.

Using the non-dominant hand seems to disrupt eating habits and cause people to pay attention to what they were eating, University of Southern California researchers found during a series of experiments in movie theaters.

“It’s not always feasible for dieters to avoid or alter the environments in which they typically overeat,” said Wendy Wood, a psychology and business professor at USC. “More feasible, perhaps, is for dieters to actively disrupt the established patterns of how they eat through simple techniques, such as switching the hand they use to eat.”

The study, appearing in the current issue of the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, has important implications for understanding overeating and the conditions that may cause people to eat even when they are not hungry or do not like the food.

The experiments involved giving people about to enter a movie theater a bucket of either just-popped, fresh popcorn or stale, week-old popcorn.

Moviegoers who didn’t usually eat popcorn at the movies ate much less stale popcorn than fresh popcorn. The week-old popcorn just didn’t taste as good.

But moviegoers who indicated that they typically had popcorn at the movies ate about the same amount of popcorn whether it was fresh or stale. In other words, for those in the habit of having popcorn at the movies, it made no difference whether the popcorn tasted good or not.

“When we’ve repeatedly eaten a particular food in a particular environment, our brain comes to associate the food with that environment and make us keep eating as long as those environmental cues are present,” said lead author David Neal, who was a psychology professor at USC when the research was conducted and now heads a social and consumer research firm.

“People believe their eating behavior is largely activated by how food tastes. Nobody likes cold, spongy, week-old popcorn,” said Wood, a corresponding author of the study. “But once we’ve formed an eating habit, we no longer care whether the food tastes good. We’ll eat exactly the same amount, whether it’s fresh or stale.”

The researchers controlled for hunger and whether the participants liked the popcorn they received. The researchers also gave popcorn to a control group watching movie clips in a meeting room, rather than in a movie theater.

In the meeting room, a space not usually associated with popcorn, it mattered a lot if the popcorn tasted good. Outside of the movie theater context, even habitual movie popcorn eaters ate much less stale popcorn than fresh popcorn, demonstrating the extent to which environmental cues can trigger automatic eating behavior.

“The results show just how powerful our environment can be in triggering unhealthy behavior,” Neal said. “Sometimes willpower and good intentions are not enough, and we need to trick our brains by controlling the environment instead.”

In another movie theater experiment, the researchers tested a simple disruption of automatic eating habits. Once again using stale and fresh popcorn, the researchers asked participants about to enter a film screening to eat popcorn either with their dominant or non-dominant hand.

Using the non-dominant hand seemed to disrupt eating habits and cause people to pay attention to what they were eating. When using the non-dominant hand, moviegoers ate much less of the stale than the fresh popcorn, and this worked even for those with strong eating habits.

Source : Summit County Voice

A Modern Tool That Changes The Forces That Drive You!

SAR is a fun, interesting and powerful system for helping you understand, review and possibly change those unconscious patterns which drive you.

Unlike NLP, which is a formalised therapeutic intervention, SAR is a playful, yet powerful system through which aspects of your unconscious can be explored in order to bring about personal change.

SAR is fairly new to the UK and Alan Jones is one of a few UK based SAR ‘technicians’.

As it is unlikely that you have heard about SAR, here’s a short FAQ.

Q: “What is the S.A.R. system, and how does it work?”

A: “It is a method based upon existing psychological and personal exploration tools, including Colour Psychology and Symbolism. By directly communicating with the subconscious mind, this system can create dramatic personal changes that will benefit you in countless ways.”

Q: “What will this do for me personally?”

A: “This simple and powerful technology has the ability to improve your self image, create more
confidence, release negative patterns, and focus your mind towards positive and supportive
actions and goals.”

Q: “How much effort does this take on my part?”

A: “Very, very little. Basically, you make a few simple doodles on a piece of paper. Then your
S.A.R. Technician will do all the work, as you enjoy what is revealed!”

Q: “Does it take long to complete this process?”

A: “No. Minutes actually. Some people will want to take a bit more time to discuss the insights
that are indicated. The reprogramming sequence takes mere minutes.”

Q: “Is this reprogramming guaranteed to work?”

A: “How well it works depends on you. We can guarantee that you will visibly see changes, and
that the process will be an informative and entertaining experience.”

Your SAR session is best considered as being part of a journey of self-discovery and could possibly lead you greater understandings of the patterns that drive you and how any limiting patterns can be changed.

It is not a structured therapeutic intervention, but perhaps best considered as a way of gaining personal insights. In many ways it is best considered as being for personal research and entertainment and that should in no way detract from the potential power and impact of your SAR session.

You can find out more about SAR or talk directly to Alan Jones via The Mind Alignment Website – Transforming Minds

Can psychology explain God?

The need to know a higher being that some of us call God has been a long lasting one. It does not seem to go away but only gets more profound. What we call this higher being — God, Allah, the all-powerful, the first being, the wholeness or the lord — is not the concern but, instead, how we define and relate to it.

Going back to the concept of God and how psychology might explain it — It does not seem that psychologists can claim to have or will be able to explain God entirely. They need other areas of science and research to come together with wisdom to be able to give us a concept that we can grasp and practice. A concept that diminishes the sense of uncertainty about the truth. All scientists, whether physicists, astronomers, statisticians or biologists, can each act as a piece of the puzzle to bring more understanding by providing information. Psychologists can add to this information and encourage people to apply it by encouraging them to self reflect, become self-aware and self-develop. This being needs a totalistic explanation that only comes with collaboration.

The process of knowing and connecting with a God or spirituality seems to be a type of schooling which has distinct stages. As we move forward with these stages, our definition of what it means to be spiritual or religious redefines itself and expands. These spiritual stages are similar to Maslow’s stages of self-growth but are also a more transparent form of Maslow’s hierarchy.

One stage is not better than the other — we all can get to the top by going through the bottom, and it is just the matter of being aware that there is a top and then by moving forward by making a conscious choice. Here are the stages of spirituality or religiousness:

1) A God that helps with physiological needs: At this basic stage we need a God to help us with our basic needs mostly physiological ones for survival. We pray to gain rewards of having enough food and water. There is usually a basic concept of heaven and hell attached which is a reflection of our motivating force in life (to have enough to survive). Heaven being a good place with plenty of food and drink and hell being a place of deprivation. So, we need God to make sure our basic needs are met through the eternity. At this stage, there is likely to be an anxious attachment to God which may be based on a sense of fear rather than love.

2) A God that makes us feel safe: At this stage people have a need for a God to feel safe and secure. If they have enough food and drink and those basic needs are taken care of, then safety becomes important. People want to feel like they are safe and something is protecting them personally, financially and health wise. They want to feel safe against accidents in life, here and eternally.

3) A God that gives us a sense of love and belonging: At this stage, after basic survival and safety needs are met, comes a need to have a God that gives us love and a feeling of belonging to something beyond this limited humanness. Humans have a need to feel like they belong to something bigger, that they are internally accepted, and to feel like they are loved. They do not want to feel lonely and they want reassurance that even after they die, there is something to which they can be attached.

4) A God that helps with self esteem needs: At this stage, humans feel content with their basic survival, safety, and belonging needs and now find a need to be unconditionally valued. They feel like they need to make some changes to get some higher being’s recognition by contributing something good to the society. The reward for them is a feeling that something higher than them is recognizing them as being valuable.

5) A desire for God because of self-actualization: At this stage, the process of getting to know God becomes more personal and is based on a sense of individuality. At this stage, people do not want to be followers but to learn from their environment, gather information and knowledge based on facts and apply those to their uniqueness to get to a place of contentment. The person at this stage may become creative, a sense of creativity that brings something positive to this world and is meaningful. Also, people have peak experiences of connecting to something bigger, have a composed present, have a more efficient perception of reality and are comfortable with how it is unfolding rather than resisting it. They can accept good and bad, high and low, and are aware of the difference; they are accepting of self, others and connect to nature; they take responsibility for their actions; are moderately spontaneous and like simple things; have an evolved rational side and a fully functioning intuitive side. These individuals pause and then respond to their emotions, try not to hurt others intentionally; are honest; productive; and work to alleviate problems. It seems that in this era, about 1-2 percent of the population are getting to this stage, even though we all have the potential to do so but somehow get stuck at the lower ones.

6) A natural God inside and out because of self-transcendence: This is the final stage of a true spirituality. This is when the person feels like he is connected with a whole being and is living his life from a deeper place of being. A place including all but not limited to one aspect of life. This is more of a global soul and beyond. Many of who we consider prophets were highly evolved beings who reached this stage. It seems that in this era of life, less than 1 percent of the population gets here. Some of the characteristics of this stage are: continues peak experiences which create a sense of peace with life with all its ups and downs, speaking more easily and the language of poetry and mysticism becomes more easily comprehensible. People who reach this stage can find the positive in everything, are meta-motivated internally, are into wholeness, truth, beauty, goodness and unity as their source of motivation; they seem to recognize each other and connect flawlessly; they are more responsive to inner and outer beauty and see it in all; they function more globally; they are innovators; are composed, and are post conventional (having gone through all of Kohlberg’s moral development stages), have a healthy and balanced life style, and are connectors.

At the end, it is important to remember that the higher stages include all the lower ones and going back and forth is natural.

* * * * Author: Roya Rohani Rad, MA, PsyD
Self Knowledge Base & Foundation
A non profit dedicated to public education
www.SelfKnowledgebase.com

Neuroscientist Richard Davidson suggests that behavioral interventions can change brain circuitry more effectively than some medicines. He has shown that anxiety can cause changes in the prefrontal cortex, a brain region involved in working memory tasks. He suggests that through reducing anxiety, students will experience improved cognition during these tasks. So reducing your anxiety may improve your study skills and test performance!

Meditation and mindfulness practice, which both help in reducing my “monkey mind,” have been shown to change the brain as well. An eight-week mindfulness program made noticeable changes in the brain regions associated with “memory, sense of self, empathy and stress.” Other studies have shown the effectiveness of psychotherapy in treating anxiety disorders through changes in brain activity.

One of the world’s leading neuroscientists, V.S. Ramachandran, has studied this concept of neuroplasticity, or physical changes within the brain. For anyone interested in neuroscience or in the study of human nature, this is a shout out to you! Ramachandran will be visiting the University of Florida on Tuesday night in the Reitz Union Ballroom. Doors open at 7 p.m., and the event will last from 8 p.m. to 10 p.m. The title of his talk is “Emergence of Human Nature: A Neurological Perspective.” Come out and discover the mystery of human nature by learning about mechanisms within the brain!

(c) Monday, March 21, 2011 8:55 pm Shifting behavior can change your brain Tara Braun, Alligator Blogger

Women’s appreciation of their bodies is only indirectly connected to their body mass index (BMI), a common health measure of weight relative to height, according to recent research.

The most powerful influence on women’s appreciation of their bodies is how they believe important others view them, the study suggests. On the flip side, the more women are able to focus on the inner workings of their body – or how their bodies function and feel – rather than how they appear to others, the more they will appreciate their own bodies.

And the more a woman appreciates her body, the more likely she is to eat intuitively – responding to physical feelings of hunger and fullness rather than emotions or the mere presence of food.

“Women who focus more on how their bodies function and less on how they appear to others are going to have a healthier, more positive body image and a tendency to eat according to their bodies’ needs rather than according to what society dictates,” said Tracy Tylka, associate professor of psychology at Ohio State University and senior author of the study.

Other studies have suggested that about 50 percent of women appreciate their bodies. This work is geared toward examining how they arrive at their satisfaction with their bodies, and how they avoid any pitfalls that might interfere with their positive thinking.

Ultimately, the researchers say, it boils down to respect. If women are going to treat their bodies well – through nourishment, health screenings and exercise, for example – they first have to like their bodies.

“And it turns out we look to whether others accept our bodies to determine whether we appreciate them ourselves,” Tylka said. “It’s not our weight, but instead whether others in our social network appreciate us. That implies that people should be convinced to be less judgmental and to focus less on weight.”

Tylka performed the research with former Ohio State doctoral student Casey Augustus-Horvath, who is now at the Laureate Psychiatric Clinic and Hospital in Tulsa, Okla. The study is published in the current issue of the Journal of Counseling Psychology.

Tylka has created what she calls an acceptance model, which serves as a guideline to other researchers and clinicians about the factors that influence whether women appreciate their bodies and engage in intuitive eating. She first constructed the model with input from college-age women, and expanded it in this study after surveying women between the ages of 18 and 65.

The women she surveyed were separated into three groups: emerging adult women age 18-25, early adult women age 26 to 39, and middle adult women age 40 to 65. A total of 801 women participated in the survey.

The researchers asked the women about their perceived social support from a variety of different relationships; whether they believed their bodies were accepted by people close to them as well as by society and the media; whether they focus more on how their bodies function and less on their appearance; how they felt about their own bodies; and whether they engaged in intuitive eating.

For the most part, the pathways to body appreciation and intuitive eating are the same among all adult age groups. Women who perceive that they have strong social support in turn believe that others accept their bodies. This perception empowers them to be less concerned about their physical appearance and more concerned about how their bodies function, which encourages appreciation of their own bodies and a healthful approach to eating.

But some differences also emerged in this study, especially with the addition of BMI as an influence. BMI alone was not directly associated with how women felt about their bodies.

“It was a cool finding, that BMI’s association with body appreciation is mediated by how we view others’ acceptance of our bodies,” Tylka said. “So if women are heavy, they can have a good body image if they don’t perceive that important others are trying to change their body shape or weight and instead accept them as who they are. And vice versa, if women have a low BMI, they might have a poor body image if they perceive that influential people don’t accept their appearance, but not because of their weight.

“One clinical implication is to educate partners, family, friends and the media on the importance of accepting others’ bodies and to stop criticizing people about their bodies and appearance.”

BMI did affect eating patterns in the two older groups of women. For women age 26-65, those with a higher BMI were less likely to eat according to physical hunger and fullness cues. For the younger women, there was no relationship between BMI and intuitive eating.

“This could mean that people who are heavier feel pressure by others to lose weight so they go on a diet, taking them away from paying attention to those internal cues,” Tylka said. “Perhaps, over time, women who are heavier start to mistrust their bodies, including when they are truly hungry and full.”

The women in the two older age groups also were more likely to think that others didn’t accept their bodies if they weighed more. Tylka said that finding suggests that the weight gain that often accompanies aging for women causes women to perceive that others do not accept their body, whether it is accurate or not.

Women age 26 to 39 were most likely to achieve body appreciation by focusing more on how their bodies function rather than how they physically appear.

“Our thinking here is that women in early adulthood are in their childbearing years, and if they take that perspective of ‘look at what my body can do’ with regard to having children, they’re more likely to appreciate their body for more than just its appearance. But when they get past childbearing age and into middle adulthood, that appreciation is less strong,” Tylka said.

Efforts by friends and family to encourage a person to lose weight often backfire, Tylka noted, because they tend to place the focus on eating according to arbitrary calorie counts and portion sizes – external cues – rather than on what the body really needs – actual internal hunger and satiety cues.

“If you’re disconnected from hunger and fullness cues and someone makes you feel bad about yourself, you’ll be more emotional. And if you tend to eat for emotional reasons, voilà, you’re going to eat and likely gain weight,” she said.

Tylka added, however, that, “We are in charge of our attitudes, ultimately. We don’t want to send a message that the only thing that matters is that others accept our bodies. But others’ opinions do have an impact. And we need as a society to stop judging people based on their appearance and weight.”

Source: Contact: Tracy Tylka
tylka.2@osu.edu
740-725-6384
Ohio State University

A team of researchers has found that pursuing carefully planned goals and engaging in more automatic habits shows overlapping neurological mechanisms. Because the findings, which appear in the latest issue of the journal Neuron, show a neurological linkage between goal-directed and habitual, and perhaps damaging, behaviors, they may offer a pathway for beginning to address addiction and similar maladies.

The study was conducted by researchers at New York University’s Center for Neural Science and Department of Psychology, Princeton University’s Department of Psychology and Neuroscience Institute, and University College London’s Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging and Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit, University College London.

The brain is believed to engage in two types of decision-making processes—deliberative, in which the future consequences of potential actions are weighed in order to achieve a particular goal, and automatic or habitual, in which previously successful actions are repeated without further contemplation. While the mechanisms behind these behaviors are distinct—with goal-directed actions the result of planning and habitual ones, associated with addiction, produced more thoughtlessly—researchers have had difficulty separating them behaviorally as they both typically pursue common ends.

The researchers on the Neuron study sought to differentiate both types of decision making by studying how humans’ decisions and brain activity, measured using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), were influenced by previously received vs. potential future rewards in a gambling game.

In the experiments, subjects were asked to make two sets of choices, with a monetary reward given if they made certain selections. In the first set of choices, subjects were asked to make selections between different slot machines, represented by colored boxes. These choices led to the opportunity to choose between additional slot machines. If the subjects made certain choices in this second stage, they received a monetary reward. Each subject repeated this process 200 times, with the chance of winning a monetary reward varying in each round—in some rounds, certain selections were associated with a high chance of winning money; in other rounds, these same choices were much less likely to yield a monetary benefit.

By analyzing how subjects adjusted their choices based on winning, or failing to win, money, the researchers were able to distinguish goal-directed from habitual decisions. Since the chances of winning money for different choices were constantly changing, a habitual decision, which is based on repeating a previously rewarded choice, was distinct from a goal directed one, which is based on contemplating the future outcome expected for the action.

Having dissociated the two types of decisions, the researchers examined brain activity related to decision processes. Despite the distinctions between goal-directed and habitual behaviors, the subjects’ brain activity was similar for both types of action. Indeed, signals related to goal-directed plans were observed in an area of the brain known as the ventral striatum, which is normally associated with habits and drug abuse.

“This surprising result shows that the brain’s systems for different behaviors are more intertwined than previously thought,” explained Nathaniel Daw, an assistant professor in NYU’s Center for Neural Science and Department of Psychology, one of the study’s co-authors.

The authors added that the finding paves the way for seeking to understand how the brain regulates between goal-directed and habitual behaviors. By comprehending the mechanisms by which the brain controls these behaviors, subsequent research can begin to address how to curb habitual behaviors such as drug addiction or alcoholism. More specifically, because these decisions have a common neural target, there is a possibility that therapeutic methods could be designed and tested, targeting this locus, to enhance goal-directed behaviors while diminishing habitual ones.

Public release date: 23-Mar-2011

Contact: James Devitt
james.devitt@nyu.edu
212-998-6808
New York University