A new meta-analysis in the Journal of the American Medical Association tells it like it is: television viewing damages our health.  The paper's title is "Television viewing and risk of type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and all-cause mortality" and its abstract reads:

(this post is downloadable as both a Word doc & as a PDF file.) 

About every three months I meet up with one of my oldest and dearest friends and we spend twenty four hours or so together checking in on how our lives are going and what our plans are - this "work" links to the post "Building willpower: the seven pillars"   Our friendship goes back nearly 30 years and we've been doing these check-in's for a decade or so.  We know each other pretty well!  I'm just back from one of these times and it leads me to think a bit about friendship.

(this post is downloadable as both a Word doc & as a PDF file.)  

(this post is downloadable as both a Word doc & as a PDF file.) 

"If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you ..."   "If" by Rudyard Kipling 

This blog post is downloadable both as a Word doc and as a PDF file.

I wrote a post yesterday introducing some of the ideas and research on implementation intentions.  Today I extend this in more practical how-to-do-it directions:

what are implementation intentions?
"Goal intentions" involve aiming for some desired future outcome.  They are of the form "I intend to attain goal X".  Unfortunately we know only too well that making such intentions does not necessarily mean that we will reach our goals.  As the old saying goes "There's many a slip between cup and lip".  A major review of 422 relevant research studies found that goal intentions accounted for only an average 28% of the variance in achievement of successful outcome (Sheeran, 2002).  Subsequent research suggests that even this figure of 28% is an overestimate (Webb and Sheeran, 2006).  The conclusion is clear - forming a strong goal intention to achieve some desired outcome in no way guarantees success. 

I routinely scan quite a few journals every month.  Sometimes it's disappointing and there's nothing in the issue of a particular journal that interests me much.  Sometimes a particular journal contains a bunch of stimulating articles.  January's edition of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology was a good find.  Below are four papers from it.  The DeWall et al study is on how social exclusion leads to hostility and aggression.  It adds to the large body of research on the very powerful effects of being socially rejected.  Putting "rejection (psychology)" into the top search bar of PubMed today and clicking on "Go" pulls out 2,741 papers.  Even after excluding the irrelevant references to liver transplants and other more biological forms of rejection, this is still an awful lot of interesting reseach on the topic of rejection and exclusion.  

Yesterday and today are a check-in time with my friend Larry.  I've written in a previous blog post how Larry and I have met every three or four months for many years specifically to review how our lives are going and to plan and prioritize our goals for the next few months.  "Taking charge" of our lives in this kind of way makes huge sense.  For example the self-determination literature (S-DT)  highlights the importance of making autonomous decisions about what we put our energy into.  This S-DT research and much other work (e.g. a recent study on goal-setting) also emphasises that this kind of approach is a core component of growing wellbeing in one's life.  Yeats wrote something like "A friend is someone who sees the potential in you and helps you to live it."  Meeting with an old friend in the way Larry and I have done, is certainly an example of what Yeats was talking about.