The goals of seeking happiness

Lots of targets are not to be pursued and happiness is one of them. If pursued, it will become a task that unconsciously decreases the influence of the result, the harder we work on something the bigger the result has to be to compose for the energy invested. Furthermore, the work itself to reaching this target gives a sense that happiness is difficult to achieve and so may bring about ideas that it must be hard to realize happiness in the long run, and so I’m sad. In the end, happiness might just be one of the targets that we have to let pursue us, by becoming open to experience happiness.

The pursuit of happiness in American is very common. Together with life and liberty, the pursuit of happiness is written into a book as being a basic right. Everybody I know wants to be living, free, and happy. So what could ever be incorrect with pursuing happiness to the fullest extent possible? The greater you value your happiness, the happier you can be, right?

Wrong, says compelling new research. In two studies to be published in the journal Emotion, the authors, led by Iris Mauss of the University of Denver found evidence for an alternative hypothesis: People who value happiness more are less likely to achieve their target of feeling happy.

In the first study, the authors administered a questionnaire designed to measure the extent to which people valued the experience of happiness as a fundamental goal. Women who valued happiness more were less happy in life than women who valued happiness less. Women who valued happiness more reported that they were less satisfied with the overall course of their lives and were more bothered by symptoms of depression. Strangely enough, valuing happiness seemed most problematic for women whose lives were low in stress–the people for whom happiness should have been within easiest reach.

In the second study, the authors performed an experiment where they tried to briefly increase the extent to which participants valued happiness. They did this by having one group of participants read a bogus newspaper article that extolled the importance of achieving happiness (the other group read an article that did not discuss happiness). Participants who read the happiness-extolling article later on reported less happiness in response to a happy film. Responses to a sad film were unaffected. Paradoxically, then, valuing happiness more may lead people to be less happy just when happiness is within reach.

Publications such as the one at the left suggest that reaching happiness is like other targets. If we only concentrate hard enough on the target we could lastly control happiness, just like how we can figure out how to use new computer software program, play the piano, or study Chinese. On the other hand, the target of becoming happier could be fundamentally dissimilar from these other targets.

It is my opinion one of the most important causes for this discrepancy is that people look externally for stimulants to make them happy, whether that is people or things. On the other hand, happiness is all about the choices you are making, not just where you’re employed and whom you hang out with and where you live, but also selecting how to respond to any given circumstance during the day. No matter what stage of live you are in, I’ve found the fastest way to be happy is to look around you and begin noticing the great things in life that are correct before you.

How To Have Lots of Good Friends

Either I find friends who are like me or who are nothing like me, most of the time I pull different kinds to me some times. To find friends, one must look for similar minded people, especially during youth. We are able to assume that having a best friend is somehow preferable to having several close friendships with no hierarchy of preference.
In any class of kids, you’ll see the uncommon bunch of outgoing children and people who prefer to play by themselves or in smaller groups. But being sociable in itself is not the only prophet of developing friendships, new investigation suggests that kids who are drawn to other people who are like themselves who are drawn to other people different from themselves) are tend to be more likely to have good friends and to have good friends if they don’t have them already.

The researchers observed fifth and sixth grade kids as they made, lost and sought friendships over the period of a little more than a year. One group of kids had best friends at the start and best friends at the end of the study period, a second group had no best friend at the start but a best friend at the end. A third group, for whom we may now shed a silent tear, had no best friends at either the beginning or the end of the study period.

The researchers found that compared to the kids who never had a best friend, the children who always had best friends and those who acquired best friends when they didn’t have one tended to be those who were drawn to others just like themselves or to use the lingo of the academics, these kids were drawn to “similar others.”
I speak at length in The Hidden Brain about how the friendship-formations of kids are one of the earliest examples of the hidden brain at work and how, without anyone intending it, friendships are shaped by unconscious biases. Having a close friend from another race, researchers have found, is one of the best predictors of a sympathetic worldview toward the other race in general, whereas not having close friends from another race tends to close the door to a generous view.

The fact that children who make friends easily are drawn to others like themselves is an example of how something that has clearly positive benefits, the ability to make friends also has a side to it that is less attractive. It also shows why we are stuck with many of the biases that dog us everyday. The same thing that helps us make friends (being drawn to other people like ourselves) can also prompt us to close our minds to those from other groups.

No one would advise that kids stop making friends, or end enjoying the corporation of people who share the same interests. The only approach to eliminate the bad with no removing the good is to supplement our unconscious bias to be drawn to other people who are like ourselves by consciously encouraging ourselves and our kids to create friendships with those who are different in all types of ways.

It also relies on where we are and what' s happening, kids are different than adults too, some kids have hard times making friends and when they become adults they have a lot of friends and a few best friends. Most of us want to hang with people like ourselves, and we don't want to spend our leisure time with people who are so different from us or argue all the time.

Copyright by Lucy, a beautiful girl who likes swimming, shopping online and has a shop with coach purses and oakley m frames.

Healthy Life with Positive Relationships

Different relationships bring about different life. We can have a beautiful life with positive relationships, positive relationships can let us make lots of friends, and surely, we can have a better life as we have more good friends in our life.

A vital relationship in my life just broken and I am going to forget it, I didn’t actually see how it was coming.  That result has sparked lots of thinking on relationships generally, and why I regard them as much as I do.  Having positive, productive relationships with my relatives and friends is an important thing to me in life. What I have come to more entirely know in recent times are the explanations why healthy relations with other people matter so much to me.

Optimistic, productive relationships demand the best of us. For a friendship or marriage to allow both people to flourish, each person is an active participant in helping create the other one’s positive future. Whether we are a friend, lover, daughter, or grandparent, each relationship gives us a chance to invest our energy in making another person’s reality better. Each of us needs to fully show up, be present, listen, express ourselves, and care for the other, and that requires time and attention.  When it all works out well, and we can see the happiness on the other’s face, that creates, at least for me, the best feeling of satisfaction in the world.

Relationships teach us about ourselves. Sometimes, for good or bad, the person standing in front of us can be a mirror showing us who we really are. If we don’t like something in them, there are chances we don’t like it in ourselves. Friendships also give us a chance to watch ourselves in action. We can, on a moment-to-moment basis, pay attention to what we are thinking, feeling, or doing in response to what is happening externally. We can plug into our life story anytime, and learn from it.

Best of all, we get a chance everyday to practice acting from love. This goes beyond doing something nice for someone. Acting from love requires us to recognize the times when fear arises within us, and work to overcome it so we don’t choose a course of action from a fearful place. That takes awareness, hard work, and courage, but in those moments, when we choose love, we grow as human beings.
For me, keeping these things at heart could have been extremely strong. It has propelled me to reconnect on an even deeper level with a few of the people I am close with on this world. I have been full of gratefulness every pace of the way, and my mind is open as I move forward. What would you do in making these relationships the strongest they might be?

I mainly value dependability and positivity in my relationships. What do I do in making these relationships be the strongest they might be? I practice what I preach (behave dependably and positively) and I allow people know what I appreciate about them as often as possible. I have three teenagers, and I have found that our relationships have grown stronger when I allow them to be who they are and they do the same for me. We really value and appreciate each other.

Why do men stalk women when a relationship ends?

Sometimes women end up dating adult males as they are no longer drawn to them or get creeped out or whatever. What's this crap about ladies always having another one in the wings? Looks like a male fantasy to me, which makes it sound like women are impulsive at best, deceptive and calculating at worst.

The other result of the spectrum from the disappearing man who never contacts for a second time is the fantasy man who won't go away after the relationship over.

Much of the current stalker phenomenon is according to ignorance. Mirage men do not know that popular and skillful women may cultivate several future beaus even as they date their current boyfriend. In our book we refer to this as the sine curve of dating.

Mirage men are encouraged by music, movies and television to put way too much emotional stock in a simple dating relationship. They are shocked and wounded by the fact that as the present relationship ends these women may have another man waiting in the wings, at the threshold of another dating relationship. This simple truth needs to be communicated to boys as they enter adolescence.

Mirage men don't understand that the purpose of dating is to determine compatibility. Instead they pretend they've found their soul mate for life. They are more interested in the thought of you than the real you. Women need to understand this concept so they can nip a stalking relationship at the bud. Rushing into a romance with a virtual stranger can lead to possessive relationships with men who might be mentally ill or simply believe the media myth that persistence will win them a mate.

Ladies ought to be free to date a series of adult men. Guys have to be educated to expect it and not resent it. If either partner is not pleased with an informal dating relationship, they ought to be free to leave it at any time with no guilt.

These stalking guys need to understand that dating a lady isn't equal to ownership and possession. Most stalker behavior is usually determined by a male mentality of ownership, possession and territory, and fueled by hormones and wish.

Morals and Motives: Why conservatives can’t see eye to eye

I always have my political beliefs and reading everything politically emotional could make me directly aggressive and defensive. On the other hand, if any one group in this country is going to begin swallowing their self-importance and setting a great example (if even on a tiny, local, community level), it's people who really think about thinking.
I think myself a moderate liberal; so moderate I've considered registering as Independent (or, in infrequent moments - generally after a particularly uncomfortable PETA ad - Republican). I like the job that lesser nanny states like Sweden and Denmark do in providing ample service income on taxpayer cash, but I have a harder time keeping confidence in big government where our sprawling economy is concerned. I take disturbing chunks of time fantasizing on what life could be like if my partner and I got to hold all of our newly minted post-graduate paychecks. If it were just a matter of value-neutral fiscal conservatism, I'd make a good applicant for the grand old conservative party, but as a quick purview of the nightly reports or talk-show circuit reveals, in politics, it's never a matter of value-neutral anything.

Research in the field of political ideology has shown that liberals and conservatives are likely to differ in their explanations of social problems. Latest opinion poll government department data reveals that almost 3.9 million people joined the ranks of the poor last year. Liberals would likely attribute these numbers to situational factors like the poor economy, seeing the impoverished as victims of unfair situation (perhaps even corporate corruption and malfeasance), deserving of public aid. Conservatives would more likely attribute the slide into poverty to character deficits like lack of inspiration, or at the very least argue that aid disincentivizes the person, creating a bevy of unintentional results and an atmosphere of motivational lack.

The conservative tendency to attribute social ills like poverty, obesity, aids, crime, homelessness, even disaster victimization, to character deficit has been well documented and is known as the ‘ideo-attribution effect.' I can attest from my days of teaching college freshmen that this fundamental cleavage in attributional orientation is one of the most intractable forces in reaching consensus on political and social debates, even with that otherwise malleable age group. In real-world terms, moral values and politics are deeply intertwined, and ideo-attribution plays a huge role in where we allocate our hearts and minds (as well as our dollars and votes). Examining the motivations behind moral reasoning (that of others and ourselves) can help us better understand the political process and hopefully bypass the endless rounds of the reason-starved liberal/conservative impasse that has consumed political life in recent memory.

Until recently, it was widely believed that the ideo-attribution affect (attributing outcomes to character rather than circumstance) was ‘a conservative thing.' Some researchers even dubbed conservative thinking and reasoning styles more cognitively rigid and inflexible. To get a more robust picture of why liberals and conservatives often arrive at different conclusions about social ills and misconduct, researchers Scott Morgan, Elizabeth Mullen and Linda Skitka set out to test whether the ideo-attributional affect could apply to liberals if the context was changed.

The researchers used three different contexts and manipulated them to highlight values with varying degrees of salience to liberals and conservatives to see how they would react. The first scenario asked liberal and conservative participants to evaluate a situation where marines had accidentally killed innocent civilians. As predicted, the marines scenario primed security and patriotism values, leading conservatives to conclude that circumstance (rather than faulty character) accounted for the killing of the civilians. The liberals, generally more concerned with egalitarianism, multiculturalism and humanitarian concerns, were more likely to find fault with the soldiers' character. The second scenario was exactly the same, but replaced marines with Halliburton employees.

The study showed that people of both parties are motivated by salient core concerns and tend to make assessments that are consistent with their values --authority, security, patriotism, self-reliance among others for conservatives, and humanitarianism, environmentalism and tolerance for liberals. We respond to the world with basic moral intuitions and then set about rationalizing our intuitions after the fact. Others do the same - just with different moral intuitions. We shouldn't be so surprised when our well-honed reasoning opposing the death penalty because of the sanctity of human life fails to convince a hard-core right-to-lifer using the same reasoning to oppose abortion.

What if pushing one innocent in front of a trolley would prevent a whole group of people further down the track from being killed? It is a tricky area of moral reasoning that routinely plays out in everyday political scenarios. The most obvious instance is civilian deaths during wartime. Due to salient conservative core values of security and patriotism, ‘collateral damage' tends to be more widely accepted as a necessary evil by conservatives than liberals.

"The Motivated Use of Moral Principles" paper placed a racial twist on traditional trolley morality studies (yes there's a whole subfield of trolleyology in the morality research world) by naming the sacrificial trolley-lamb either Tyrone Peyton (who dies to save the London Philharmonic) or Chip Ellsworth III (who dies to save the Harlem Jazz Orchestra). The authors found that liberals, who generally have a harder time accepting social and racial inequality than conservatives, were less willing to throw the black man in front of the trolley to save several white people, making them more "deontological" moral reasoners in these cases, and more "utilitarian" reasoners in the opposite condition.

In both documents, we see people taking whatever moral reasoning "route" results in their ideologically-predetermined preferred outcome. This means that up or down, liberal or conservative, our ethics not just dictate what conclusion endpoint we'd want to finish up, but what types of psychological procedures we take so as to end up there. This seems like the type of bias we're fast to note in our opponents, but never see in ourselves. Politicians will keep pushing the ethical buttons of the party faithful so long as it garners votes (no matter how legislatable the problems involved might be). Maybe the evolving social and moral self-knowledge offered by these findings can help us be better ‘consumers' of political ideology and campaigns, and bridge greater understanding between the parties.

It really is my wish that more reports, posts, and deliberations along these lines come about in the near future, and that it permits more and more people to try and know those that view the world in a different way from themselves as opposed to hurling insults and writing them off.

Copyright by Lucy, a beautiful girl who likes collecting things, shopping online and playing computer, has a coach outlet store with lots of fashion things.

Choking under Pressure: From the Boardroom and the Bedroom

Everyone have pressure, especially for the people who have a family. All of us might have a feeling that choking under pressure from the boardroom to the bedroom, and then from the bedroom to the boardroom.


Just planning to have a speaking that will be evaluated by other people could be enough to send nearly everybody's worry skyrocketing. Thomson's students were informed that they would be presenting the speeches to a panel of specialists in law and business and that a computer analysis program used to grade college-level essays would also achieve what they said. Actually, and to the students' relief, they never had to give the speeches, but they didn't know this until they exited the scanner.


While lying in the fMRI machine preparing their speeches, students' heart rates were continuously monitored and they were asked to report, about every 19 seconds, how much anxiety they were feeling at that time. Not surprisingly, the researchers found that the anticipation of giving a speech changed people's heart rates and reported anxiety levels. Moreover, activation in areas of the prefrontal cortex explained the link between speech anticipation and anxiety (especially so for those who viewed the speech preparation task as most anxiety-provoking in the first place). When getting ready to give a speech, the more activity in these prefrontal regions, the more anxious people were.


One interpretation of Wager's findings is that the more people dwelled on what others would think the more they anticipated the panel of experts' reactions, the more anxious they became. Keep in mind that these brain changes occurred before students had done anything. This suggests that the anticipation of an event, and specifically the anticipation of others judging you, is enough to up the pressure before you have even arrived at the performance stage. If the end result is a flubbed performance, then we have somewhat of a recursive cycle on our hands. Your worry about how others will judge you, which may lead to poor performance, which leads to more worry the next time you are in a public speaking situation, and so on.


Performance anxieties that stem from how others may judge you are of course not limited to public speaking. High expectations for success and the possibility that you will be evaluated poorly can lead to disastrous consequences not only in the boardroom, but in the bedroom too. As we have seen from Tor Thomson's work, even when students are merely preparing to give speech, a variety of brain and body reactions occur that can send people down a path to failure. These sorts of anticipation effects likely happen in the ultimate performance situation, sex, as well.


A friend of mine told me about a long-distance relationship he once had with a woman in college. They liked each other a lot but unfortunately lived in different cities and were only able to spend one weekend a month together. My friend awaited the monthly encounters with his girlfriend with trepidation: knowing how little time they could spend together, he wanted every second of this time to be amazing. In the bedroom, all the anticipation translated into pressure to perform, which needless to say, immediately backfired. Sometimes, his brain and body would just shut down and sex became the last thing in the world he desired, while other times he was so worked up that the "amazing time" only lasted a couple of seconds.


Although poor performance in the bedroom is clearly undesirable and unpleasant, my friend might have been interested to know that his problem has a long evolutionary history and that, for much of this history, it wasn't a problem at all. It turns out that the relationship between anxiety and premature ejaculation is not unique to human males but is experienced by some monkeys as well. In a monkey species called rhesus macaque, males at the bottom of the social hierarchy have to hide from the alpha male while they mate because if they get caught, they will be attacked and beaten up mercilessly. As a result, when low status males approach a female who looks available, they look very nervous and constantly glance at the alpha male to check if he is looking. If the alpha male happens to be turned the other way, the low status male can mount the female, ejaculate, and disappear from the scene - all in a couple of seconds. This is in contrast to the dominant males who can take quite a long time to finish. So, these rhesus macaques show us why premature ejaculation really happens.


Certainly, if your target isn't procreation, you might not really care whether your trouble has an evolutionary history or not. You may just want to fix it. In this instance, knowing some of the factors that result in poor act may help. Interestingly, lots of the same factors that influence public speaking success are also at work in the bedroom. For example, as Thomson's research shows, considering it ahead of time and worrying about the result, might have dire consequences for performance. Furthermore, stress from other points of life can seep in and distract people from the task at hand. At last, spouses could be supportive in the sack and increase the chance of victory or be unsupportive and, just like before a big speech, this lack of support can backfire.


I think the answer in both cases being letting go of whatever we imagined ourselves as before we were confronted with having to perform the act, speech or bedroom physical exercises. Plus learning compassion towards ourselves, and talking our wish for the speech or act to go well to our audience to speak our fretfulness; which in itself leads to only optimistic support and our own confidence.


Copyright by Lucy, a beautiful girl who likes collecting things, shopping online and playing computer, has a coach outlet store with lots of fashion things.

9 Ways to Tell if Your Dog is Annoyed with You

Dogs are loyal to their master. Dogs would alive and kicking to please their master. But to be a master, do you know if your dog is annoyed with you? Here are 9 ways to let you know.

1. You give your pet an old clothes to chew on, and then you tell him for chewing on your newer clothes. Same thing with stuffed animals, your dog cannot tell the difference between a stuffed animal you give him for play, and then the stuffed animals in your children's space.

2. You don't listen to the paw smack on your leg or side of your head. Your dog is trying to tell you something. While you would prefer to not be smacked on the side of the head with a smelly dog paw, dogs usually use this as a last-resort measure. He wants something. Figure out what it is, or you may have an accident on your hands.

3. Your dog walks off while you are giving him/her a long soliloquy as to why he should not have peed on the carpet/chewed up your old 8-track tapes/etc. It's over. The damage is done. Don't leave that stuff around again. Plus, all a dog hears when you are giving a long speech is "Fluffy, blah bla bla." Spare your dog the speech. Just practice prevention (not leaving stuff laying around on the floor, letting your dog out to go potty right before you go to work, leaving your dog a toy to play with while you are not home) so these behaviors don't happen again.

4. Your dog has seen you be mean to or otherwise mistreat someone they love. Just give it up. You're really in the doghouse. This can also make your dog afraid of you, because who will you turn your wrath on next?

5. Your dog rolls his eyes at you. Don't tell me this can't be done. I've seen it happen. This is can be translated as: "Oh, so I'm the one without thumbs and can't walk upright. This makes so much sense now."

6. Your dog is bored out of his mind. Homes are luxurious prisons for dogs. Like the Springsteen song, Baby, dogs were born to run. Walk your dog. I'm not talking a casual sniff and pee on a tree (the dog, not you) really walk your dog. Like you are getting some exercise. Yeah, exercise. When you leave your dog to go to work, have a toy that they can "work" on - like a toy where they can work on getting treats out of a ball. Dogs like having a job, just like people do. Your dog can't take the train into the city to get a desk job, so at least give it something to do at home. You know what it feels like to get bored at work.

7. You let your dog get teased or harassed. No one and I mean no one should be allowed to treat your dog unfairly or cruelly. Even so called "I'm just teasing" games can lead to your dog getting extremely frustrated. If you hold a hot dog in front of your dog, and you take it away, you've got five other hot dogs on the end of your hand. See where I'm going with this? Don't tease your dog, and don't put up with other people that do. At least set some ground rules for people that come into your home. And never leave your dog alone with someone you don't completely trust.

8. You ask your dog to do a trick, and the dog does not do it. You punish the dog. Good luck getting out of this one. You've pretty much guaranteed your dog will never attempt the trick again. Always reward, never punish. Be the bearer of all things wonderful. Your dog wants to make you happy and wants to please you. Look at how you are training your dog, are you expecting him to do something that is way above his level or against his breed type?

9. You force your dog to interact with people or pets that it doesn't like. There is a reason they are feeling uncomfortable or scared. Even though you know this person or dog is just fine and nothing to be scared of, listen to your dog. The greater you force, the greater timid your dog will become. Relieve your dog into societal interactions.

These are some ways to let you know if your dog is annoyed with you, but not all of dogs or animals would be like that, and I also think different kinds of dogs are different. If we love our pets, we should be more careful of them.

Learn how to keep the love in your life

Having been a tomboy growing up, I’ve always tended to get along with guys more than the girls and can’t imagine losing these relationships. On the other hand, I had been part of a talk group with so-called relationship specialists, and the guys in the group seemed to suggest that from the male perspective, there is always a lingering consideration of there being a few possibility of taking the friendship to one that includes other benefits.


The saddest thing I know on the treatment couch is somebody telling me that they’ve killed their relationship all the way through what they have or haven’t done.


In reality, some actions are relationship killers. Here are some areas where action or inaction will make all the difference.


It’s the Top 9 Relationship Killers


1. Money. It is the number one cause of separation. If a partner has been unprincipled, getting the trust back can be a challenge. You can start over, but you have to be eager to make up for what was lost and make sure the business side of your relationship is tuned-up.


2. Disrespect. If you call your partner names, belittle him or her, threaten to leave, or use insulting language and yell, research shows that your relationship has a very low chance of survival.


3. Sex/infidelity. A sexless marriage or unfaithfulness can extinguish love quicker than blowing out a candle. Don’t let the flame burn out when keeping things warm is much easier than you think.


4. Children. To some, children are bipedal germ carriers; to others, they are a reason for living. When families blend or go through difficult changes, the kids can become the entire focus of your relationship. Make sure to keep things in balance with your partner, so you have the energy to deal with any child issues.


5. Opposite-sex friends. Would you want your mate to hang out with a member of the opposite sex, having lunches, texting, etc.? If the answer is no, then you need to follow the same guidelines and talk with your partner about keeping appropriate boundaries.


6. Resentments. When you are holding pain, hurt, or anger in your heart, there is little room for love. If you are harboring some resentment (and who isn’t?), talk it out and put it to rest, so you can enjoy your relationship.


7. Discomfort/remodeling. If you are living in a construction zone, it’s pretty hard to feel comfortable. Injury or illness can create a similar situation. Your home should be a place of serenity, so if you are remodeling or are dealing with physical issues, make your comfort a priority.


8. Lying/broken promises. Once you have been caught in a lie or break a promise, things change-and not for the better. Even if you’re afraid of “getting in trouble,” tell the whole truth and don’t break promises, and find a way to make up for past mistakes.


9. Laziness. All good relationships require work. If you are unwilling to do it, your connection will diminish and you will begin to resent your partner. Talking about the kind of work your relationship needs is a good start.


It’s not very complex. Keep away from these relationship killers, and keep the love alive in your life.


We couldn’t be involved with somebody romantically who has issues with us having opposite sex friends. And I think, in particular while you are elder you might have been friends with opposite sex friends for decades, and now you are thought to not be friends with them? No. The new partner needs to know these friendships，which is the key here. I am upfront about my opposite friends at the start of any romantic relationship.

Which is the biggest regret of your life

Religion. Had I kept away from the credulous twaddle which is religion, I would have gotten a greater teaching sooner. That education would have been in one of the regions in which I used to be very interested but abandoned due to religion. I would have gone to a better university. I would have traveled more. I would have true friends at this time. I would have had a better life. One of my friends told me.
Think of you might have a dream tonight in which you time travel into the future, to a degree next to the end of your life. In this future, you meet the older version of yourself, and shortly find yourself asking this question: "So, if you can live your life once more, what's the one thing you would do in a different way?"

Your older self considers this and looks off in the distance, thinking. Then, just as you're about to get your response, you wake up from the dream.

How do you think your future self would answer this question? Could you benefit from knowing what your biggest regret might be?

In real life, the closest we can get to this kind of information is by asking someone else about their regrets, we love hearing revelations like these. Better yet, what if you could ask hundreds of people about their biggest life regret, to see which ones get mentioned most.

Some psychologists addressed this issue a few years ago by reviewing a number of earlier studies which all asked people to describe their biggest life regret. To simplify people's responses, each regret was categorized into one of the following domains: Career, Community, Education, Family, Friends, Finances, Health, Leisure, Parenting, Romance, Self, or Spirituality.

Starting with the most common domain, here's what they found:
1. Education. These regrets came in one of two forms. People regretted either: a) not getting enough education, or b) not applying themselves more in school. Many confessed that they didn't take school seriously enough, spending their time with friends who also didn't study much.

At first glance, it's surprising that regrets about education were more common than regrets about relationships, family, or health. But when you think about it, education improves a person's prospects in all these domains. More education generally means more money, and marriages tend to be stronger and family life more stable when people aren't burdened by financial worries. And in terms of physical health, many studies have shown that a person's education level is one of the best predictors of how long they'll live, even more important than income or type of occupation. So when people reflect on their life, many recognize that more education would have provided greater stability and more opportunities.

2. Career. As the second most common domain, people regretted that they didn't pursue the career they really loved. Instead, they chose a career path that was more practical, or one that would pay better. They knew early on what kind of work they felt passionate about, but it just seemed too risky to pursue.

3. Romance. These regrets took a variety of forms, such as marrying the "wrong" person, not putting more effort into their marriage, doing something to hurt their partner, or letting someone special slip away.

4. Parenting. One of two kinds here: For the first, some parents wished they had spent more time with their children while the children were young. These parents felt they had put too much time and energy into other pursuits, like work.

A second, very different kind of regret was that parents wished they'd postponed having their first child for just a few years longer-they regretted having children too early. This regret was more common among women, who have a shorter window of time in which to have children, and are more likely than men to make tradeoffs between having children vs. investing time in their education, career, and leisure activities. Many wished they had put off starting a family in order to build their career or get more life experiences.

Most of the life regrets fell into one of these four domains. Taken together, they do more than tell us what people consider their biggest mistakes; they also reveal what people come to value most in the long run.

But simply reading about these regrets doesn't guarantee that we'll avoid similar mistakes ourselves, when you consider that big mistakes don't usually result from conscious, one-time decisions (like choosing which school to go to, or whether to get divorced or not). Regrets that loom larger often grow out of a series of behaviors (or lack of behaviors) over a long period of time. For example, continually neglecting to call the brother you're holding a grudge against; or the hundreds of times you could have spent with your children but didn't; or the thousands of times you put off schoolwork to do something else.

Only later do we learn that lost opportunities have a way of sneaking up on us before we realize they're lost, before we realize the opportunities really meant something to us.

Every so often, then, it pays to slow down and re-assess what you're actually doing, to question whether your behavior isn't part of a larger pattern you'll someday regret. Do I really want to be the kind of father who misses his daughter's birthdays? How come I always start pushing someone away as soon as our relationship gets serious? How will I feel about myself if I spend the next 20 years in this dead-end job?

It's really easy to obtain wrapped up in comfortable rhythms of our routines that sometimes we have to face unsettling problems like these, just to remind ourselves of the larger picture.

To some degree, even though divorce is very common, this doesn't necessarily mean it will probably be a people's most common life regret. For instance, if somebody has kids with the partner they eventually divorced, it might be hard to say that the marriage was the biggest regret of their life, since this would imply that they also regret having the kids they did. As bad as many marriages end up, a great many of them are perceived as bittersweet, especially f children resulted from the marriage.

Copyright by Lucy who likes shopping online, going fishing, often searches coach bags and coach handbags on the Internet.

Mid-Autumn Festival

Do you know something about the Mid-Autumn Festival? It is a very important festival in China.

The cheerful Mid-Autumn Festival was celebrated on the sixteenth day of the eighth moon, round the time of the autumn equinox. Lots of referred to it just as the “Fifteenth of the Eighth Moon”.

This day was also regarded as a harvest festival since fruits, vegetables and grain had been harvested by this time and food was abundant. Food offerings were placed on an altar set up in the courtyard. Apples, pears, peaches, grapes, pomegranates, melons, oranges and pomelos might be seen. Special foods for the festival included moon cakes, cooked taro and water caltrope, a type of water chestnut resembling black buffalo horns. Some people insisted that cooked taro be included because at the time of creation, taro was the first food discovered at night in the moonlight. Of all these foods, it could not be omitted from the Mid-Autumn Festival.

The round moon cakes, measuring about three inches in diameter and one and a half inches in thickness, resembled Western fruitcakes in taste and consistency. These cakes were made with melon seeds, lotus seeds, almonds, minced meats, bean paste, orange peels and lar. A golden yolk from a salted duck egg was placed at the center of each cake, and the golden brown crust was decorated with symbols of the festival. Traditionally, thirteen moon cakes were piled in a pyramid to symbolize the thirteen moons of a “complete year,” that is, twelve moons plus one intercalary moon.

The Mid-Autumn Festival is a traditional festivity for both the Han and minority nationalities. The custom of worshipping the moon can be traced back as far as the ancient Xia and Shang Dynasties (1999 B.C.-1065 B.C.). In the Zhou Dynasty(1065 B.C.-222 B.C.), people hold ceremonies to greet winter and worship the moon whenever the Mid-Autumn Festival sets in. It becomes very prevalent in the Tang Dynasty(617-906 A.D.) that people enjoy and worship the full moon. In the Southern Song Dynasty (1126-1278 A.D.), however, people send round moon cakes to their relatives as gifts in expression of their best wishes of family reunion. When it becomes dark, they look up at the full silver moon or go sightseeing on lakes to celebrate the festival. Since the Ming (1369-1645 A.D. ) and Qing Dynasties (1645-1912A.D.), the custom of Mid-Autumn Festival celebration   unprecedented popular.

Along with the celebration there appear some particular customs in different parts of the nation, such as burning incense, planting Mid-Autumn trees, lighting lanterns on towers and fire dragon dances. On the other hand, the custom of playing under the moon isn’t so popular as it used to be these days, but it is not less popular to enjoy the brilliant silver moon. Whenever the festival sets in, people will look up at the complete silver moon, drinking wine to celebrate their happy life or considering their family members and friends far from house, and lengthening all of their best wishes to them.

What would you do during the festival? Eat moon cake or just stay home with families? I think stay with friends is a good choice.

Hanging a Clothesline and Hanging Your Couch Backpacks

I live in upstate New York, where the winters could be extreme. When I have not yet hung clothes during a winter, my neighbors have. I intend to take advantage of the sunny time, while keeping a supporting rack by our wooden stove. As for who does the laundry, it looks like it is an issue that it has to be answered family by family, with a fit doubt of all inherited gender-coding.

It has been two months from the time when I did it: I hung a clothesline. In the end, it was simple. I took the cotton cord Geoff purchased at the local hardware shop, went into the house, and strung the line between three old trees. It was completed about six minutes later.

I had been waiting to hang the line, however, for months. Despite my best intentions, I couldn’t manage to get out the door. On the one hand, I was so tired of the queasy disease that erupted in my belly every time I pushed the “on” button of our electric dryer. I know too much about how much electricity my dryer consumes (up to 13% of the household tally), in order to do the work that sun and wind can do for free, without cost to the environment, just steps beyond the wall.

However, I was hemmed in by habit, and by lingering doubts as to whether or not line drying would be as cool or as convenient as plug, press, and spin. Finally, the resistance overrode the ruts, and pushed me out the door with cord, clothespins, and hamper in hand. My kids came along, cheering me on, eager to participate. I wondered how long this festive air would last.

As the line fills with clothes, niggling doubts flood my mind. I should be using a dryer. I smile at my cultural conditioning. It wasn’t so long ago that everyone hung clothes to dry. Then came the marketing campaigns of the 1950s, urging people to Live Better Electrically. The meaning of a clothesline shifted. No longer a useful implement for drying laundry, it became a waving flag alerting all who could see that those living here were poor, behind the times, and unable to keep up.
Since 2008, Susan Taylor has been fighting her homeowner's association for the right to hang a line. On July 26, 2008, a man died in Verona, Mississippi when his neighbor, tired of asking him not to hang his clothes, shot him.

Yet, as I make my way down the line to the second birch tree, I remind myself. Times are changing, and so is the meaning of the clothesline. Increasingly, the clothesline is a sign of the freedom to resist patterns of consumption that are fueling our ecological crisis. It is a sign of a commitment to reduce the energy we use to wear and wash, and its attendant costs. I want to stay in touch with my freedom.

I empty the laundry basket and step back to survey the array. Shirts of assorted sizes hang shoulder to shoulder; pants jog in the breeze. Sheets flutter, socks flap, and towels hang heavy. There is pleasure in the patterns of shape and color, and in the movement that reveals the movement of the breeze I now sense blowing against my cheeks. The sun is warm.

Now, as I do laundry, I can move. I reach and twist, bend over, sink down, and rise again, folding and unfolding a bodily self that has spent more than enough of the day sitting at a computer. It is the movement of walking outside, of responding to the whims and whorls of nature, of being present to this place. It is the movement of aligning my efforts with the rhythms of day and night, sun and rain, heat and cold, in ways that pace my efforts and nourish my sensory self.

This clothesline and my unexpectedly enthusiastic response to it have got me thinking. So many of our labor and time saving devices work to save us labor and time by reducing our opportunities for moving our bodily selves. Yet in the name of granting us pleasure, they deprive us of a primary source of it moving our bodily selves. In the name of protecting us from the inconveniences of the natural world, they separate us from its nourishing effects.

When we move we breathe; when we breathe we feel; when we feel we have resources for thinking and feeling in new ways. We bring our senses to life. We bring sense to life.

However, the reality is that once we separate our immense capacity to move our bodily selves from our requirements for living, our bodily movement no longer carries the same significance it once had. Movement is then about entertainment or recreation or physical health; we no longer perceive it or value it as essential to our mental and spiritual well being, or as a key to creating a mutually enabling relationship with the natural world. Movement drops as a priority in our lives, falling in rank below the “necessary” tasks of school and work, screen time and the effort of maintaining all of our time and labor saving devices. We find it difficult to motivate ourselves to move, and cannot figure out why.

I have been looking over my blog entries for the past two and a half years. I see a pattern. Every fall, I have made a new move, reinventing my blog to focus on a different aspect of my project. I spent the first nine months laying out the structure of What a Body Knows, before devoting a year to telling Farm Stories, and another to Making Connections between my work in What a Body Knows and cultural conversations in the news.

It's time to string a new line. The sense of needing to make a difference is overriding my habitual approach. In the following few months, I will be focusing more specifically on movement human movement, bodily movement.

I wish to explore how we're moving and what we are making when we do. I need to research what actions we evolved to build and why we could; what movements we have the possibility to make and why we ought to. I wish to explore how vital our practices of movement are for creating a mutually enabling connection to the ordinary world. I would like to write about dance.

I love the design and action and smell of line-drying clothing. My mom never used a dryer, and I have not used one since 1975 except when we have a very long wet spell and I use one at the Laundromat. Admittedly, when I live in sunny California, lots of people do and much more of us could possibly be line-drying if we didn't have this prejudice that it was low-class to do so.

Copyright by Lucy, a beautiful girl who likes collecting things, shopping online and playing computer, has a coach outlet online and coach purses outlet with lots of fashion things.

Freedom to Love just like wearing a juicy couture easily

If you can’t expect at least some level of accomodation and if your friend in a committed relationship refuses to try to accomodate needs, for long periods of time, what comes about followed by? The other side of that coin is that the refused companion seeks getting their requests met elsewhere. The refuser is certainly free to refuse, but needs to be made conscious of the results of the sustained refusal.

To be free to do something, you have to be free not to do it. We're free to love only to the level that we aren't forced into it by guilt, embarrassment, fear of abandonment, or, worst of all, the interpretation of vulnerable emotions as emotional needs. Regardless of how seductive "I need you," may sound in popular songs.

If someone needs you, he or she is more likely to abuse you than to give freely of love and support. Most painful conflicts in committed relationships begin with one partner making an emotional request motivated by a perceived "need" that the other, motivated by a different "need," regards as a demand. Any disagreement can feel like abuse when the perceived "need" of one party to be "validated" crashes headlong into the "need" of the other not to be manipulated.

The problem is not in the language the couples use or even the content of their arguments, which is why communication and problem-solving techniques rarely help over time. As long as they perceive themselves to have emotional needs that their partners must gratify, their desire to love is reduced to "Getting my needs met," which the partner often perceives as, "You have to give up who you are to meet my needs."

An emotional need is a preference or desire that you've decided must be gratified to maintain emotional equilibrium. The sensation of need begins with an increase in emotional intensity you feel more strongly about doing this or having that; as intensity increases, it feels like you need to do or have it.

The perception of need falsely explains negative experience. If I feel bad in any way for any reason, it's because my needs aren't met. It doesn't matter that I'm tired, not exercising, bored, ineffective at work, or stressed from the commute and the declining stock market, or if I'm mistreating you or otherwise violating my values; I feel bad because you're not doing what I want.

Once the mind becomes convinced that it needs something, pursuit of it can easily become obsessive, compulsive, or addictive and almost certainly self-reinforcing. Obsessing about the preference or object of desire increases emotional intensity and the perception of need the more I think about what you should do for me, the stronger the perceived need grows. Failure to control behavior regarding the desired object has the same effect continually criticizing you for not meeting my need increases the perception of need. In terms of motivation, emotional needs are similar to addictions, without the stimulation of reward centers in the brain when gratified and the cellular contraction in various parts of the body during withdrawal. While the body contributes to an addiction, the mind decides exclusively that you have an emotional need.

Over time, perceived emotional needs in relationships tend to be motivated negatively, to avoid guilt, shame, or anxiety; whatever well being results from getting your needs met is short-lived but better than the bad feeling of not getting them met. I may not even notice when you do what I want, but I'll be angry or depressed when you don't.

Perceived emotional needs come with a sense of entitlement I have a right to get you to do what I want, because I need it, and my right is superior to your right not to do what I want. They also include a coercive element if you don't do what I want, you'll be punished in some way, at least by withdrawal of affection.

Relationships driven by perceived emotional needs are likely to produce power struggles over who has to do what to meet whose needs. If you seek to get your needs met in a relationship, you will become as demanding and manipulative as a toddler, but, unlike a toddler, you're almost guaranteed to get depressed or chronically resentful.

In contrast to perceived emotional needs, desires are positively motivated; if what you desire is based on your deeper values, the act of desire makes you a better person. For example, the desire to love makes your more lovable, i.e., more loving and compassionate.

Desire is thankful, not entitled; if I desire something I am more likely to feel appreciative of it than if I feel entitled to it. Much of the distress in relationships stems from the worsening of desire into prerogative, which is what people mean by feeling "taken for granted." In distinction, relationships driven by desire and values create a sense of meaning and purpose.

I would believe that the reason for the aversion to intimacy needs to be clarified and put into the larger picture of the present status of the relationship. Whether or not it is of a physiological reason, then that can be worked out with the appropriate health care practitioners. If it because of desire lost and a change in the nature of the relationship where one or both spouses do not feel motivated to be a participant in the relationship for whatever reason. At last, the solution won't spring from a psych board, but rather by introspection of what your own personal needs are telling you at this time.

Learn some things from the blacksmith

How much do you know about the blacksmith? Maybe most of us just know a little about them. Blacksmith’s work is hard, they usually don’t have enough time to rest. What is more, they often work all a day.

The hardworking blacksmith Jone used to work the entire day in his store and the child of Mr. Smithson, a rich neighbor, used to come to see the blacksmith every day and for hours and hours he would enjoy himself watching how Jone worked.

“Young guy, why don’t you try your hand to learn to make shoe tacks, even though it is only to kill the time?” said the blacksmith. “One day, it might be of use to you.”

The idle boy began to see what he could do. But after a little practice he found that he was becoming very skilled and soon he was making some of the finest tacks.
Young Mr. Smithson, who was finding it hard to earn his daily bread, remembered that once he had learned the art of making tacks and had the unexpected thought of making a discount with the shoemakers. He told them that he would make the tacks if they might help to get him settled in his workshop. The shoemakers were just too happy of the offer. And after some time, Mr. Smithson found that he was soon making the finest tacks in the village.

Old Mr. Smithson died and the son lost all his goods because of the war. He had to leave home and was forced to live in another country. It happened that in this village there were many shoemakers spending a lot of money buying tacks for their shoes and sometimes even when they paid high prices they were not always able to get what they wanted, because in that part of the country there was a great need of tacks for soldiers’ shoes.

He used to say that how funny it looks, even making tacks can bring me a luck . My ability is more useful to me than all my earlier riches.

Just as he said, we can know that Mr. Smithson is optimistic for his life, and he has a happiness family. In my opinion, no matter what we work, we can have a happy life if we love the work we do.

Family in the Lives of Adults: 3 Creative Lines of Thought

I think the thing that gets me most is that you would expect the most bias to be in the civilization or in politics. However, it is in Science; it is in an area where specialists are supposed to know how to take an un-biased example of the population.

I've been reading a lot of the specialized books and journals, and for the best part, I've been annoyed by how neglected this group of people has been in the large investigation literature on people. Joyfully, I've had four exceptions.

In 2008, the Journal of Family Issues devoted all of the November and November issues to research and theory about people who have no children. The topic was called, "Multiple meanings of childlessness in late life: Findings from 7 societies."

"This issue is about a sizable category of older people those who have no children. Even though they currently represent around one in five persons older than age 66 years, and even though 31% of the U.S. population age 71 to 86 years in 2031 will be without a spouse and without children, they have been rendered invisible, relegated to the dark corners of the literature on adult development, aging, life course, and family. Pick up handbooks, textbooks, and journals in these fields and chances are high that you will not find childless in the index."

"It is common to hear young adults being asked, ‘Do you have a family?' and responding,‘not yet.' Seldom does the person who posed the question follow up with the query,‘So you have no parents, no brothers and sisters, no aunts and uncles, and no cousins?' We tend to disregard the fact that everyone is someone's child, and the parent-child ties from the family of orientation may last for more than 60 years!"

Along with other students who worked on the 7-nation study, take on the belief that adults without children "don't have anyone" and attack it with data.

The second source of unconventional thinking about what counts as family are some of the students of gay and lesbian life. A number of them were on the vanguard of recognizing that mainstream family scholars have been going nuclear way too long, and that we need to think beyond the unit of mom, dad, and the kids to understand the important people in our lives.

A related point of view has been offered by feminist students studying lone moms. Relatives, they suggest, is not about who we are but what we do. "Doing family" is doing the types of things that family members do, regardless of your biological or lawful relationship with the folks involved.

What I concern about is that it seems as if people avoid introducing me to their children. They really have an consciousness that people outside the baby cult may be delay by people who push their children on other people. And, I had really told one of the more aware and considerate moms that I wasn't averse to children and would fine with partaking in the child-holding ritual. My not putting on the baby-obsessed display does not mean that I'm against them; I'm just not interested in joining the baby cult. And, I am happy to play the role of an uncle who adores his nieces and nephews, even though it looks like I tend to do it from a distance.

How to Accept it When a Relationship Ends

My spouse has been disloyal, and I can not end sending texts and emails calling him all kinds of terrible names and telling him over and again and again how disappointed, hurt I am. I think it's a great weakness and so extremely immature, and it takes place only during the daytime while he's at work or away on business.

One of the most confusing aspects of the unwanted end of a relationship is that when your previous partner has moved on, you end mattering much to him or her. Even though you might be parsing through every moment of each event that came about during the past two months, the person you're obsessing about is most likely not even considering you.

Email that ever so tempting medium of immediate gratification which often leads to lingering regret. How many times did you get up in the middle of a sleepless night with the absolute conviction that you must tell your estranged partner one essential thing right that minute? If only he knew this, either he'd feel enormous regret for his actions or perhaps, if you're lucky, you could make him feel a crumb of the hurt he's made you feel. He has his armor up and your attacks only make you look desperate, pathetic and maybe even unhinged and you know that. And because you never get the satisfaction you crave from having sent the message, you end up re-injuring yourself instead of making a dent in him.

It's like an addiction, a fix. You know it's not good for you in the long run but you can't resist because it relieves some built-up stress momentarily. At first, when your emotions are in a perpetual uproar, you may not be able to hold yourself back from trying to get the other person to connect with you, but as time goes on and you gain more control, you'll accept the fact that it is counterproductive and learn how to stop yourself. You will swallow the bitter truth that you will never get the acknowledgment of the magnitude of hurt done to you by the one who made it happen. You'll have to move on without it.

That's why, when I was in the midst of my own process, I came up with the following rule of thumb: don't press "send" while you're still in your pajamas! That means, don't send anything at all between the hours of midnight and 6 a.m., when all of our thinking is distorted anyhow, and hold off sending things between 6 a.m. and midnight until you've really thought it through.

While you can learn to send any file which you write with sweaty palms and a racing mind in "draft", you'll have turned the corner toward reducing the power your previous partner has over you. It's not so important to set the record straight, the person is just not so important in your life any more.

As I think, faithless males won't change their behavior just based on playing on their guilt emotions. We would succeed in making them feel guilty, sure, but that won't make them end seeing whoever else, or stop wanting to see them. And men will take a lot more notice of what you need to do than what you say. If you heap a load of insults on their head but you don't leave then they know they've got away with it, you'll complain like heck but they're not actually going to lose you and they might well do it again.

Copyright by Lucy who likes shopping online, going fishing, often searches nike air max ltd and fashion things on the Internet.

Try to Think Like a Kid In Sports

Even though a gimmick just like “count backwards by 3s” offers some original minor benefits like a distraction method for a few neophyte putters in a synthetic setting for a concocted test on pressure, the likelihood is that the gimmick would rapidly habituate for the person. What then? Count backwards by 4s? This is the problem with selling gimmicks instead of helping the performer make core lasting psychological change with regarding handling “pressure.”

Last month, Bill Penning, a sports reporter for a newspaper wrote about Alpenfel, who has spent thousands of minutes learning how run-of-the-mill golf players putt. What Alpenfel has observed is that children appear to sink most of their short putts while adults often struggle. Why is this? One reason, in accordance with Alpenfel, is that children practice putting while adults don’t, and practice helps ensure putting success.

Although practice is certainly important, there is some interesting scientific data that suggests that the ease with which kids hit their short putts is not only about practice, it’s about being a kid.

Brain science gives one root of this “innocence” and explains why thinking like a kid can be useful. Simply put, playing sports early in life can have its advantages. This is because performance is less dependent on the prefrontal cortex, which becomes more involved when the same activities are performed later in life. Because the prefrontal cortex develops with age (this brain area isn’t thought to reach full maturity until well into early adulthood), when kids perform, other brain areas like sensory and motor cortex often take a more prominent role.

Take music for example, early learning has been linked to the acquisition of skills like absolute pitch that are best performed with a heavy dose of input from sensory and motor brain areas. This is true with language accents, too. It’s no secret that we tend to have better accents for languages that we learned when we were young children. Scientists think this happens in part because the words we learn as kids are more closely linked to sensory and motor brain areas than words learned as adults.

Because these sensory and motor areas are involved in processing the sounds of the words and speaking the words, reproducing correct words and their accents is easier when these brain areas do a lot of the work.

Of course, it is somewhat of a leap from language to putting, but less so than you might think. Moreover, sentiments regarding lessening the input of the prefrontal cortex have been brought up in the sporting world too, especially when your goal is to sink a simple putt under stress.

As work in my Lab has revealed, under pressure, athletes sometimes attempt to control their performance in a way that disrupts it. This control, which is often referred to as “paralysis by analysis,” stems from an over-active working-memory. A way to circumvent this kind of paralysis is to use methods that minimize dependence on working-memory. Indeed, investigation suggests that getting adults to count backwards by 3′s or to concentrate on a one word mantra that encapsulates the whole swing while taking an easy putt under pressure helps ensure success under stress. These methods limit the involvement of the prefrontal cortex. In short, they get adults to think more like children.

On the other hand, I think the best elegant solution is for the person to know why they are experiencing too much pressure and thus over-rely on their working memory and thereby get in their own way. For instance, are they overly concerned with impressing others? Regardless, from a philosophical perspective, they incorrectly believe that making the putt at hand will make their life better or worse.

Holidays in Australia

Do you know how long does the student have for holiday every year in Australia? It is quite different from many of the other country, maybe you would like to have the holiday like that after you know it.

In the world, right now, the majority of the students are hard at work in class but their academic time might come in different types. College Students in Australia go to school for about 201 days a year. Their school time lasts from early Feburary to early December. As Australia is in the southern hemisphere, it experiences summer while it’s winter in the northern hemisphere. Summer holiday for Australian students is from late November to early Feburary. Their school time is divided into four terms, with each term lasting about 8 to 10 weeks.

Students then have two weeks of vacation between each term. The typical school day is from 9 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., and lunch is eaten at school. Students are required to attend school for at least nine years. The average class size is eighteen students and there are about six computers per classroom.

School grades in Australia are called years. Primary school is from year 1 to year 6; secondary school is from year 7 to year 12. A 6-year-old begins in year one, while an 18-yearold finishes school by year 12. From year 1 to year 6, students spend about 12 hours a week working on math and English.

Lots of secondary colleges integrate subjects, meaning they combine two or more academic subjects. For example, your class is learning a type of plant. A non-integrated method would have college students study this type of plant only in science class. An integrated way combines mathematics, by taking measurements, for instance, and language arts. College students would then use that information to write down a report about this type of plant.

Now you have known the holiday every year in Australia, how do you think of it? Compared to the situation of your school now, are you pleased or admire the situation in Australia?

Copyright by Lucy who likes shopping online, going fishing, often searches air jordan 9 and brazil soccer jersey on the Internet.

Jesse James is The Perpetual Adolescent

As we talk about on page 179 of a best-selling book, the fantasy guy ought to undergo a thorough physical evaluation to rule out medical circumstances like diabetes and hyperthyroidism that may have an effect on behavior. Then we recommend of the fact that the mirage man should undergo a psychiatric evaluation to rule out conditions like biploar or anxiety disorders, sadness and other mood problems that may be treated.

Famous person motorcycle maven Jame is back in the reports this week. You might bring to mind that after three failed marriages, Jess married an American actress Bulloc. Only weeks after receiving an Award for Best Actress this last March, Sandra was blindsided with the surprising reports that Jess had been carrying on a torrid ten month affair with a tattoo model.

Jesse James, like many mirage men, wants to live his life in the perpetual Honeymoon stage of Tiger Woods Syndrome. Men like Jesse think something is terribly wrong when reality comes crashing down on their fantasyland of love in the Resigned Compliance stage of Tiger Woods Syndrome and they realize they have bonded with a stranger. They run away from their problems and find another person to recreate the illusion of love. Author Jane Velez-Mitchell refers to this repetitive cycle as "chasing the high".

We see this type of behavior in adolescent children who are obsessed about themselves. All they care about is how life is going to serve them. They indulge themselves in addictive activities. They pursue crushes and  are devastated when they don't lead to true love. Then the next day they pick themselves off the ground and become infatuated with someone else. It's all innocent fun in 9th grade, but when adults behave in the same immature way it has devastating consequences to their partners and children they leave in their wake.

Today we've millions of American guys like Jess who have never transitioned from the teenager stage to maturity. They may work on bikes, host television shows, hold political office or win golf tournaments, but they've no real purpose in life. They will "chase the high" but have no real joy in their lives until they find out their real selves and their presents they have to contribute to society.

Perhaps it seems inaccurate to suggest that all psychologists live pampered and sheltered lives. I would suggest that psychologists, just like any other profession, are a really diverse group of people from all kinds of backgrounds.

Stories of Barbie dolls

What kind of toys do you like best when you are young? I think that most of us would remember that some Barbies we played with. As to me, I would never forget about the childhood when I played Barbies with my brothers and sisters.

2010 is the sixteenth birthday of Barbie. The doll first appeared at the toy fair in an American city in a spring time.

Its creator was an American businesswoman whose name is Hander. She and her husband Elliot along with Harold “Matt” Matson began the toy firm Mattel. She called the new doll after their daughter Barbara. She based the design on a German doll named Bild Lilli.

The first Barbie wore a black and white swimsuit and had her hair in a ponytail. She looked and seemed very grown-up, but any concerns that parents would not want to buy it for little girls were soon proved wrong. Mattel sold three hundred thousand Barbie dolls in the first year at a price of three dollars. Today, a fifty year-old Barbie in good condition may cost more than twenty-seven thousand dollars.

Barbies have represented fifty different nationalities and are sold in one hundred and fifty countries. Mattel says ninety percent of children in the United States between the ages of three and ten own at least one Barbie doll. Barbie has faced recent competition from Bratz dolls. Barbie has also faced her share of critics.

A well-known example was that women’s education groups objected to a talking Barbie that declared “Math class is tough!” Mattel agreed to change it. Saudi Arabia has banned Barbie dolls. And a lawmaker in the American state of West Virginia would like to do the same. Last month, he proposed banning sales of Barbie and other dolls that influence girls to put too much importance on physical beauty.

Many people say Barbie is an unhealthy role model for little children. Robine Gerbe doesn't think like that. She wrote a book about Barbie pointing out dolls like scientist Barbie and race car driver Barbie. She says people who criticize Barbie should tell children the story of the businesswoman who created her. She says Ruth Handler wanted the dolls to help children think about what they wanted to do with their lives.

Do you know what was Barbie named after? I am not sure about the mainly reason for why some people criticize Barbie dolls, what I know is that I like Barbie dolls very much, for now and for ever.

I was surprised that she defriended me

I have defriended lots of people simply because they are on the very fringe of my life, and feeling uncovered to those with whom I’m not emotionally or socially invested makes me uncomfortable. However, I am amazed at the people who defriended me this time.

Last week, I received a message from another author who reminded me that he had once defriended me on a chat tool. We both belong to the same professional organization but we live in different places and have nearly no contact with each other. While I was shocked that I had been defriended, I had completely forgotten about the incident until I received his recent note. The subject line read I’m sorry.

My ex-Facebook friend wrote: I’m sorry that I defriended you last year after I felt hurt following some Facebook comments early last year. I’d like to think I’ve developed thicker skin since then, but I’m a human. Anyhow, I hope we can work beyond our differences.

I can’t remember the specifics of the incident but suspect we disagreed, like so many Americans, regarding the politics surrounding the last election. Frankly, I was taken aback that I was defriended by someone with whom I had only the most peripheral online relationship and who took my comments so personally.

Nonetheless, when someone defriends you it is like having a door slammed in your face and that’s how I felt. It left little room for dialogue unless I wanted to take the conversation elsewhere. Under these circumstances, I didn’t.

Why does defriending occur? Defriending is generally provoked by something you did or said, online or off, that has created distance and led to a breach of trust. As a result, your “friend” no longer wants you lurking or being privy to what she is saying or doing online. Here are some common examples of how it happens:
* You’ve had a misunderstanding or disagreement, online or off;
* You humiliated the person in some way;
* You used information against her or she fears you will;
* She’s learned information about you that is a deal-breaker;
* She’s annoyed that you post too often, are too self-centered or are too self-promoting.

How can I deal with being defriended?In an article in today’s NY Times called Defriended, Not De-Emoted by Austin Considine, I commented that the emotions sparked by suddenly being defriended aren’t too different than those felt when someone is dumped offline. It hurts!

While it’s hard to get back in someone’s good graces once you’re defriended, you may realize for one reason or another that you don’t necessarily want to repair the friendship either!

But when you do and you know what you did wrong, apologize. And apologize sooner rather than later because little misunderstandings can expand speedily. If you’re not sure why you were defriended and it matters to you, write the person offline to find out if you did something wrong or annoying. If the person doesn’t reply, you might want to allow for a cooling-off period and then try once more. Use common sense.

Maybe we should think it as a different way. The facebook friending or defriending ought to be considered irrelevant to the professional aspect of ones life. People shouldn’t mix their personal life with their professional life so readily. I know that people still do this regardless.

Copyright by Lucy who likes shopping online, going fishing, often searches air jordan 9 and brazil soccer jersey on the Internet.

The promise of autism

I was read a book, “Look Me In The Eye.” I have aspergers. I discovered it very touching. I read the first 6 chapters and couldn’t help to link lots of the stuff the author went through I as well have been through. I was very pleased to know I’m not alone.

This summer time, a project announced the discovery of some new genes which are implicated in autism. Their report is the culmination of a study that compared genetic data from 999 people with autism to a rather bigger number of non-autistic controls. The effects are fascinating.

The first interesting discovery is that a significant number of genetic errors in the autistic subjects were not present at all in their parents. Scientists call these spontaneous occurrences “de novo.” Are de novo errors a result of environmental factors that affected the developing fetus, or are they caused by an inheritance mechanism that we just don’t understand yet? We don’t know, but many scientists are working to answer this question right now.

Researchers have now identified a number of genes that are implicated in autism. Some of them are also implicated in other conditions, like intellectual disability. That leads scientists to the realization that a number of psychiatric conditions may have similar biological foundations.

The genes implicated in autism affect us in very different ways. Some genes change the balance of gray and white matter in our brains. Others affect the way our brain cells signal each other. Others affect the rate at which our brains grow and develop. Even if the observed result an autistic person looks similar, the biological causes of disability are not the same at all. We’re beginning to realize that autism is really a catchall phrase for a number of brain differences that happen to look similar when seen from the outside.

For one thing, it may explain why some autistic people have a combination of gifts and disabilities, while others are seen or see themselves as disabled; the underlying cause of their particular autism has conferred no discernable benefit. The autistic population may indeed consist of several distinctly different subgroups.

One group may indeed be best left alone. They can make great contributions to society vie their unique way of thinking. At the same time, we have another population who is profoundly disabled and in need of substantial help. If those two groups are separated by fundamental genetic differences it’s no surprise they would have totally different treatment or accommodation needs.

One group consists of people who are stable and potentially successful despite being “different.” Those folks need accommodation, behavioral counseling, and societal support. The other group is indeed in search of a cure for something that provides them no benefit and a substantial measure of disability.

We have made a huge step by learning that certain genetic defects cause profound autistic disability. What we need to figure out now is how to help the affected population. So far, we do not know how to repair damaged genetic data; we can only treat the results. For example, if a particular genetic defect causes the body to make too much or too little of a particular chemical the brain needs to function, we may be able to fix that situation with medication.

The biggest complication is that we have so many different genetic problems to deal with. Even though they produce a similar outcome, they work in very different ways at a biological level. None of the “autism genes” we identified so far are present in more than one to two percent of the autistic population. There is no such thing as a single “autism gene.” Rather, there are many genes that push us toward autistic outcomes when they go wrong.

That means we may have to develop ten or even a hundred different treatment strategies, to address the multitude of genetic errors that lead to autism. How do we begin?

Genetic testing may allow us to identify babies with gene defects that will lead to autism before their brains have developed on the autistic pathway. If we intervene early enough, we may be able to head off autism in those children. How would we do that? We might use drugs to speed or slow development, or replace chemicals the baby is not making for himself. We might use new therapies like TMS to change plasticity in the developing brain. There is tremendous promise, especially in the case of genetic errors that lead to the most severe autism.

In my earlier writing I have discussed the philosophical issues that surround treatment of autism in children. I used the example of a kid who was a social cripple, friendless; but a computer genius. If we had a treatment to turn on social awareness for that child, should we do it? He would surely be happier, but at what cost? Would we be turning the future Einstein or Newton into a jolly friendly sales manager?  What are the ethical and social implications of such a power?

That remains a valid question at the upper end of the autism spectrum. However, those kids won’t have the genetic errors that lead to profound disability. If we treat children who have a genetic abnormality that leads to an IQ or 50 and total disability, we do not make any ethical tradeoff at the other end of the range. Instead, we give a child who might have grown up crippled a chance to develop reasonably normally.

There are many “good sides” to autism like mine. That’s why I don’t need a “cure” for myself. At the same time, I know the autism spectrum is very broad, and people at different points on it might feel very differently, as might their parents.  If people like me represent one extreme of the spectrum, the other end comprises significant disability.  There isn’t a good side to a rare genetic defect that leads to an autistic child who can’t talk or look after himself.  An IQ of 49 does not confer any hidden benefit; it’s crippling, pure and easy.  The ability to tell our different types of autism apart will open the door to a lot of treatment choices in years to come.  Lots of gifted autistics will decide to stay as they are, but all of us share a duty to those who want help.

A friend suggested the book to me and I happened to be walking in my company library and saw the book. I want to go on to college after high school and become an architect. I want to own my very own firm. I found the book to be even more encouraging knowing how far you have gotten even with your struggle with aspergers.

How to Cut Your Losses with Bad People

I like my job. I am excellent at it and it offers me with a sense of adding to the world and making a difference in it. It also offers me with the support to pursue the furthering of my education.

But a few of the people I work with are very negative, judgmental and harsh people. They see my efforts to better myself as geared towards making them look bad. They react to me accordingly.

Here are three steps to cut your losses with negative people.

Step 1: Make a listing of the most positive, uplifting, low maintenance, people you admire and respect and know or would like to know.

Step 2: Do everything you can to develop a relationship with these people. One way to do that is to figure out what you can do for them that would make their lives better from their point of view, for instance one thing I do is write thoughtful, positive, heartfelt and sincere book reviews if they have one and because of who they are this may cause them to want to return your generosity with their own. For me, because they are indeed so special, just the gift of their very precious time is more than enough payment.

Step 3: The more you build up relationships with these special persons, who make you want to be a greater person, the more repulsed you'll be by the takers, whiners, excuse makers, bullies and high maintenance that is certainly easy to upset, hard to please people to the point where any contact with them will feel like nails on a chalkboard. That could drive you to break your relationship with the negative people. Another reason you will want to sever your relationship with them is because of the negative part of your individuality which is kept alive by continuing a relationship. Permitting that negative part of you to continue is really a method of dishonoring the wonderful people you are now bringing in your life and standing in the way of your becoming the better person who they create you want to become.

I will be actually presently going through this course with a long-time friend. I have made some new friends, got a fresh job and generally outgrew this friend and I no more wish to hear her excuses and self-absorbed stories.

Starting for Happiness, but Ending with Regret

A proverb from Navy days said, "A busy ship is a happy ship." A number of the things we want to do sometimes aren't the things that make us feel happy, or even make us sad. We thought the result would be happy before we start to do the things.

Why is it so difficult to get happy? One reason is that we're bad at predicting how our actions can make us feel. Doing "whatever we would like" often winds up making us less pleased than some other course of action that originally blush may appear quite unappealing.

In my case, I think about all those lazy weekends during which I've looked forward to lying around, doing nothing but an state of affairs that seemed very appealing when I got up on Saturday morning, but which by twilight on Sunday left me feeling like a pathetic sad potato.

Fortunately, this puzzling and irksome phenomenon has been addressed by science, as described in a blog post by the consistently thought-provoking and entertaining BPS Research Digest. Christopher K. Hsee at the University of Chicago gave his experimental subjects a choice between taking a completed questionnaire to a location 15 minutes away, or delivering it right outside the door and then sitting and waiting for 15 minutes. At the end of each task, they were rewarded with a tasty chocolate snack bar.

Here's the punchline: the students who walked for 15 minutes reported feeling happier than those who had stayed put. And it wasn't just because happier people self-selected to take a walk, even when the test subjects were told to wait or walk with no input into the choice, the walkers reported feeling happier.

Hsee concludes from his experiment is that people have an instinct for idleness. Given the choice between doing something that requires effort, and doing something that simply requires us to sit on our duff, most of us are going to choose the duff. What's fascinating is that the duff-sitters in his experiment made a conscious choice between two potential courses of action, and they chose the one that made them less happy.

One possibility is that we simply don't know ourselves very well, that the sitters honestly but mistakenly believed that sitting would make them happier. But I don't think that this is the case. Rather, most of us make decisions not based on what will make us happy in the future, but according to impulses that are entirely in the present tense. Right now, in this exact present moment, sitting seems easier and more pleasant than trundling off somewhere on a hike, and so I make the choice to sit.

Happiness, by contrast, is an emotion that occupies a much broader temporal landscape. We look ahead with anticipation at the good things that are going to befall us, or look back at the impressive things we've achieved. After a 15-minute walk, we feel good about the exercise we've just accomplished. We feel the blood flowing through our veins, the fresh air on our cheeks.

Somebody writes that procrastinators will tell you that the task they're facing is difficult, and it creates bad feelings like anxiety or general emotional distress. Putting off the task at hand is an effective way of regulating this mood. Avoid the task, avoid the bad mood. This is what Tice and Bratslavsky refer to as "giving in to feel good." We give in to the impulse to walk away in order to feel good right now. Learning theorists would even add that we have now reinforced this behavior as the decrease in anxiety is rewarding. Of course, this short-term strategy has long-term costs. If we focus on our feelings in the short term, we'll undermine ourselves in the long run.

And now we come to a twist in Hsee's experiment. When the students were told that they could get a different treat if they chose to walk, the majority got off their butts, even though the treat was objectively no better than the one they would get if they stayed. To Hsee, this is evidence that we all unconsciously crave busyness, and need only the mildest prod to undertake it, as he explains in a story on the website of the Association for Psychological Science:

Hsee believes we can use this principle, people like being busy, and they like being able to justify being busy to benefit society. "If we can devise a mechanism for idle people to engage in activity that is at least not harmful, I think it is better than destructive busyness." Hsee has been known to give a research assistant a useless task when he doesn't have anything for the assistant to do, so he isn't sitting around the office getting bored and depressed. "I know this is not particularly ethical, but he is happy," says Hsee.

I wonder, though, if it's possible to use this strategy ourselves. It's one thing to tell a subordinate to undertake a useless task; I would find it very hard to motivate myself to undertake a project that I knew was pointless busywork. On the other hand, doing the laundry, mopping the floor, or mowing the lawn are useful, if mildly unpleasant, tasks that I know will make me feel better than wasting an afternoon watching old movies and eating KFC, if I can just get myself to do them.

The deception might be different for each of us, but one method probably be this: to consciously attempt, during those important moments of decision, to bear in mind not only how our actions will have an effect on us in six seconds, but in sixteen minutes and more.

I have the same opinion that we drew lots of conclusions from a small amount of data. But what was most amazing for me, and most relevant to the point I was attempting to make, was that the participants either failed to predict how that 16 minute walk would make them feel, or weren't even considering the matter.

Copyright by Lucy who likes shopping online, going fishing, often searches coach rain boots and fashion things on the Internet.

Try to remember some good things

Everyone can have the hard or difficult time, and not everyone can go through the hard time thoroughly.

While times become hard, remember a moment in your life which is filled with joy and happiness. Remember how it makes you think, and you’ll have the power you need to get through any trial.

For most people, childhood is memorable, we can try to memorize our child time when we meet with some problems or stay in a hard time that we feel depression.
When life throws you one more obstacle, remember something you’ve achieved through perseverance and by struggling to the end. By doing so, you’ll find you have the ability to overcome each obstacle.

When you find yourself very tired, remember to find a place to have a rest.
Take the necessary time in your own life to dream your dreams and renew your energy, so you’ll be ready to face each new day.

When you feel tension, find something fun to do. You’ll find that the stress you feel will die away and your thoughts will become clearer.

Whenever you’re faced with so many depressing situations, realize how minuscule problems will seem when you view your life as a whole and remember the optimistic things.

Sometimes, misfortunes would not come single, if you memorize the time that your dreams or goals come true, you would feel better, and let’s believe that sunshine is always after stormy rain, and everything would be fine when you get up from your bed.

Boys, Girls, Emotions and Communication

In view of ladies in general suffer from Depression in more severe ways then men, perhaps men learn to keep calm when among their captors. One can criticize men for being passive and mildly depressed in this type of situation but perhaps they might be considered intelligent as well.

I overheard two ladies chatting in the market. One asked another, "Does your partner talk to you?" Her companion answered, "Of course he talks, he needs to ask me what's for dinner, doesn't he?"

I totally understand where they are coming from. Most men have a hard time communicating anything that remotely resembles an emotion. Why? Because emotions are scary to men, who think much more than they feel, and much of the time, many men don't even know what or how they are feeling.

It is interesting to note that women think and feel at the same time, while men can only think or feel. And based on most men's reluctance to embrace their feminine side, it's no wonder they do their level best to stay in their heads.

Guys figure that once they have said the fateful words, "I love you," and the relationship is in full swing there are only three reasons to have a real conversation: money and breaking-up.

So when a woman wants to talk and the guy realizes he has to think and feel at the same time, just the idea becomes a challenge. So it's easy to understand why men have a harder time talking about feelings, it's because they have to switch gears from their head to their hearts. Sometimes when they have to do it very quickly, they may feel like the life is being sucked out of them.

Most of the time, when a man wants to talk he's thinking, "What do you want to do this weekend?" When a woman says, "Let's talk" guys go to this place in their heads where they start to think, "Oh my God, what did I do now?" Many feel like their relationship is being threatened just because the woman in their lives wants to talk with them. I may be sticking my neck out here, but this could be described as a slight over reaction.

What men need to understand is that when a woman says she wants to talk, she's saying I want to be closer. Unfortunately, when a man hears that he thinks something's wrong.

There are some other interesting facts that can enlighten us as to why it seems that "men don't talk," for example women have twice as many words as men. Women speak at 250 words per minute and men speak at 125, and according to Gary Smalley, author of "Making Love Last Forever" in the course of a day women speak 25,000 words compared to a man who only uses 12,000. It seems that by the end of the day men are talked out and women still have a day's worth of conversation in them. So one of the reasons men don't feel comfortable talking is because most women can out talk them.

Women and men also have unusual conversational types. Ladies are likely to speak quicker when they get excited and may even interrupt their lovers who are struggling to find the right words. When this happen their male counterparts may lose track or shut down because they feel cut off and were unable to express what they were feeling. Men think it harder to connect words to feelings and getting back on track in an emotional discussion could be very hard for them.

Understanding how women and men differ when it comes to discussing will give everybody a bit more empathy in terms of talking emotional matters. And understanding one another is a great pace in terms of creating and keeping an emotionally fit and loving relationship.

Copyright by Lucy who likes shopping online, going fishing, often searches oakley sunglass and juicy couture watch on the Internet.