Pink and Yellow

:)

Spring Baby Gift Collection 2011 - Coming Soon!

More serious brain injuries associated with more life satisfaction

Psychologists investigating the well-being of patients with an acquired brain injury (ABI) have documented a curious phenomenon, whereby the more serious a person's brain injury, the higher their self-reported life-satisfaction.

With the help of the charity Headway UK, Janelle Jones and her colleagues recruited 630 people (aged 9 to 81) with an acquired brain injury. Most had sustained their injuries from road accidents, with other causes including stroke and falls. Based on the time they'd spent in a coma, the majority of the participants' injuries were judged to be moderate to severe.

The participants answered a brief, 20-item questionnaire about their sense of identity (e.g. 'I think of myself as someone who has survived a brain injury'), their social support, relationship changes since their injury, and their life-satisfaction.

Having a strong sense of identity, seeing oneself as a survivor, having plenty of social support and improved relationships were all independently related to higher life satisfaction. These different factors also influenced each other. '...[I]t is likely that personal identity and social network support factors operate in a cyclical way,' the researchers said, 'whereby becoming personally stronger from effectively relying on social support also makes individuals more likely to continue to seek out social support and, in that way, to develop social capital.'

Perhaps the most curious finding was that participants who'd sustained more serious injuries tended to report being more satisfied with their lives. This association was mediated by the social and identity factors - that is, participants who'd sustained a more serious injury also tended to identify more strongly as a survivor, and to have more social support and improved relationships.

An obvious suggestion is that the more seriously injured participants might not have complete insight into their lives. Jones and her colleagues doubt this is the case, in part because of the logic of the results, with identity and social support mediating the higher life satisfaction among these participants.

'Sustaining a head injury does not always lead to a deterioration in one's quality of life,' the researchers concluded. '...[D]ata from this study serves to tell a coherent story about the way in which the quality of life of those who experience ABIs can be enhanced by the personal and social "identity work" that these injuries require them to perform. ... Nietzsche, then, was correct to observe that that which does not kill us can make us stronger.'
_________________________________

Jones, J., Haslam, S., Jetten, J., Williams, W., Morris, R., and Saroyan, S. (2011). That which doesn't kill us can make us stronger (and more satisfied with life): The contribution of personal and social changes to well-being after acquired brain injury. Psychology and Health, 26 (3), 353-369 DOI: 10.1080/08870440903440699

Top 10 Best Mother's Day Gifts for Your Special Mom

Top 10 Best Mother's Day Gifts for Your Special Mom

Mother's Day is May 8 in the U.S. and April 3 in the UK for 2011. Your mom is a special lady and deserves more than a card and candy this Mother's Day. Here is a list of best gift-giving suggestions for moms, in all price ranges starting at free.

Extras

Eye-catching studies that didn't make the final cut:

Local effects on people's belief in global warming. Can I call this the Daily Express effect? "Respondents who thought that day [they were surveyed] was warmer than usual believed more in and had greater concern about global warming than did respondents who thought that day was colder than usual"

Social relationships get better with age. Here's why.

Can you pay people to remember better? Only if the material is boring.

The experiences of psychologists from different countries in responding to crises, including natural disasters.

Children as young as five show a preference for other children of the same race. This new study shows the same is not true of infants.

Bad smells encourage condom use.

Frequent sex can stop neuroticism from harming marital satisfaction.

How metaphors affect our reasoning. "We find that exposure to even a single metaphor can induce substantial differences in opinion about how to solve social problems ..." Coverage from Ed Yong at Not Exactly Rocket Science.

An analysis of the role that different aspects of executive functioning play in student procrastination.

Believing more in chance or fate helps people cope with the death of a spouse.

The present research examined who tends to experience music-induced chills and why.

Available in all good toy stores (or maybe not) - the Implicit Association Test for kids.

A clinical study of those who utter threats to kill.

Whatever Happened to Counseling in Counseling Psychology?

People primed to feel more socially secure subsequently placed less monetary value on their possessions.

Creative people are judged as less suitable for leadership positions.

Crazy House, Dalat, Vietnam

Also called the Hang Nga Guesthouse, (introduction here)

Is one of the most bizarre boutique hotels in the world.

I first read about this particular boutique was in some random foreign online travel site, sort of like Times. There were a couple of photos and very fairy-tale like description of the place, very vague, but I was hooked.

So when my mom said she was interested to visit Vietnam, I leaped on the opportunity to embark on a journey to seek out this magical place.

First of all, this hotel was built and designed as a house by the daughter of the former president of Vietnam, who has a doctorate in Architecture, namely Hang Viet Nga (hence the house name).

She's an old lady with poise, albeit very bizarre attitude towards the world, indifferent one may call her.

I wanted to meet her after hearing bits and pieces of stories of her. So I asked for an interview.

It took her nearly an hour to walk down from her room, which she hardly came out, to meet me at the reception. We adjourned to her living room (well, it was supposed to be her house) and chatted.

Despite the obvious old age, she dressed rather stylishly due to her aristocratic upbringing, can you believe she is 71 years old this year?

Nothing is normal in Hang Nga Guesthouse. Nothing is symmetrical, or round, or square, or anything; but loads of intertwines and curves, looping around defying dimensions.

You could find a skinny branch-like stairs leading up to the sky, elevating to the second/third floor amongst the trees, or some hidden chambers just around the corner.

The place was mysterious and enchanting.

Some said it's a fusion architecture of Disneyland and buildings of Antoni Gaudi's in Barcelona (whom I have strongly admired during my stay in Spain); though Madame Hang Viet Nga has never been to either of the place.

One of the most significant structure in the guesthouse has to be this five-story tree-house made of swirly staircase and different themed rooms, you'll be surprised at how many hidden entrances there were to enter this building.

There are 10 rooms of a different animal/forest item/insect with jungle and forest as their main theme, plus one more room which has been converted to souvenir shop. Though I should suspect one of the rooms (listed or not) was Madame Hang Viet Nga's own room.

We stayed in Tiger Room, consisted of two double beds.

oh hello

Land Eagle room which you have seen before in the previous post.

Among other animals and plant.

I thought the cutest room was the Honeymoon room, which was a tiny two storey space, made of bamboo-like stairs leading up to an attic-like bedroom. Very private, very small, very cosy.

The souvenir shop was originally a room made to look like Winnie the Pooh's owl's tree house.

love the window

The beds in Hang Nga, I'd soon come to realise, were a bit dusty due to lack of stays of actual guests, most were just visitors during the day; which was unfortunate for us because that meant the grounds of the hotel lack privacy for its guests.

But that also meant you have all the privacy to explore its garden at night, which was the prettiest thing.

"Walk through my door, and I'll bring you to another world, of giant spider webs and swirly stairs" *Cue theme song*

It's even more fun to roam the, albeit small, garden at night.

"So next time you think there's no more fairy tale in life, think of a secret garden and a Crazy house, tuck away in a far far away land." *cue end theme song*

*pull curtains* giggle

Some photos of me in Crazy House.

Here are a few details you might want to know if ever you're paying this mysterious place a visit.

Hotel Hang Nga / Crazy House

Address: 3 Huynh Thuc Khang Street, Dalat, 20000, Vietnam

Contact: (063) 822070

Room prices (in photo):

Photo album of Crazy House: here.

I know some of you already started marking your next destination d. Hehehe...

Is God always on the right?

This former Republican President claims to read the bible daily 

Holding conservative values tends to go hand in hand with being more religious, at least in the United States. Indeed, the idea that the US is divided between liberal atheists versus religious conservatives is at the heart of the country's so-called 'Culture Wars'. This has led some psychologists to suggest that there's a deep-seated link between conservatism and religiosity, such that the same innate attitudes and motivations that drive one also drive the other. A new study challenges this claim, providing evidence instead that the conservative/religiosity overlap is created largely by the contemporary political discourse, as peddled in the media. Among people who don't follow political news and commentary, Ariel Malka and his colleagues found that the typical conservative/religiosity link was largely absent.

Malka's team analysed data collected from 7,056 US citizens between 1996 and 2008. The participants answered questions about their degree and denomination of religiosity, their favoured political party (Democrat or Republican), their position on various political issues such as gun control and immigration, and their level of political engagement - for example whether they read the newspaper or followed political news.

The usual link between religiosity and conservatism was found. But crucially, this association was strongly moderated by political engagement. So, for those who were highly politically engaged, religiosity tended to go hand in hand with nearly every conservative characteristic that was measured, including party identification and views on gender roles, gun control and homosexuality. The only exceptions were immigration and the death penalty, for which religiosity predicted a more liberal view. In contrast, for people who weren't politically engaged, the religiosity/conservatism link was profoundly diminished, to just four of the twelve conservative characteristics that were measured.

Malka and his colleagues conceded that the remaining conservatism/religiosity link, even among those low in political engagement, suggests that there may be some truth in the idea of an organic link between the two belief systems. 'However,' they added, 'when considering the full range of preferences and values associated with "conservatism" nowadays, engagement with political communication seems to be the predominant factor that drives the alignment of religiosity and political orientation.'

What this suggests in simple terms is that politically engaged, religious Americans watch the news and listen to political commentaries and this leads them to shift towards more conservative values. Or, alternatively, it means politically engaged, conservative folk watch the news and listen to the commentaries, and this encourages them towards religion. Either way, or both ways, it seems these people are being swayed by the contemporary political discourse in the United States.

One final, alternative interpretation is that political engagement is affected by people's religiosity/political match-up, rather than affecting it. By this account, when people's politics and religion don't match, they choose to disengage from politics. Longitudinal research is needed to test this. 'We hope that the present analyses are supplemented with cross-national, time series, longitudinal, and experimental analyses to enhance understanding of how context of information influences the relation between these two socially significant constructs,' the researchers said.
_________________________________

Ariel Malka, Yphtach Lelkes, Sanjay Srivastava, Adam Cohen, and Dale Miller (2011). Religiosity, political engagement, and political conservatism. Political Psychology. In Press. pdf via author website.