A Taste for Mastery

Fans of the old British TV series The Avengers will remember the classic wine cellar “duel” scene. Foppish secret agent John Steed and villain Henry Boardman face off in a tasting of rare wines, each one-upping the other with his impressive expertise about vineyards and vintages. After some minutes of sparring, Steed summarily ends the contest with this pinpoint identification of a wine: “1909,” he states drily. “From the northern end of the vineyard.”

Even wine connoisseurs will laugh at this caricature. Nobody understands wines at that level of detail. But the bit is funny precisely because experts do in fact think of wines in much finer categories than the rest of us: Some truly know grape varieties, vineyards, and specific harvests, while others of us settle for much coarser categories, like red and white.

Why is that? Why do some people see nuance where others see gross oversimplification? I know, because they’re the experts—but that’s really not a helpful answer. What is going on in the expert mind when it slices and dices a corner of the world into fine-grained distinctions? What is the engine that drives nuanced thinking?

Psychologists have been studying thinking styles for some time, and one emerging idea is that such thinking is driven by emotions. Forget wine for a second, and think about something you are an expert on—beach volleyball, Alaskan politics, the early novels of Joseph Conrad, whatever. Chances are you don’t get paid to be an expert on this; it’s probably a hobby, a passion. With enough effort, you could probably make yourself an expert on something you don’t like, but why bother? Curiosity and interest not only drive mastery, they make it effortless.

Or at least that’s the theory, which psychologists Rachel Smallman and Neal Roese decided to test in their University of Illinois laboratory. They suspected that the act of liking actually molds the brain’s thinking, opening it to nuances that are unapparent to others. Put another way, preference and taste pave the way for more textured thinking. They ran this experiment to test the idea.

They started by artificially creating preferences in the lab, using hobo symbols. These are the crude symbols that hobos once scratched on to walls and trees to warn other hobos of dangers in particular neighborhoods. This one, for example, meant “unfriendly police here,” but the psychologists assumed that few people would know those meanings anymore. They showed volunteers a collection of these symbols, pairing them with either pleasant or unpleasant scenes. The idea was that they would learn preferences for some hobo symbols and aversion to others.

Then the volunteers sorted a deck of 20 cards, each card picturing one of the hobo symbols. They were told to sort the cards into “meaningful” categories of any size, and to label the categories. When the psychologists crunched the data, this is what they found: Those who had been conditioned to have positive feelings about the symbols sorted them into much finer categories than did the others. In other words, liking influenced thinking. What’s more, the volunteers were clearly guided by their emotions in sorting the symbols, labeling the piles with adjectives like “inspiring” and “ominous.”

These findings, reported in the December issue of Psychological Science,
may explain the power of hobbies. But more than that they sound a warning to those choosing jobs and careers. Hard work and mastery may give us a measure of satisfaction, but pleasure also drives mastery and expertise. There may be good psychology beneath that old saw: Do what you love.

For more insights into the quirks of human nature, visit “We’re Only Human” at www.psychologicalscience.org/onlyhuman. Selections from the blog also appear regularly in the magazine Scientific American Mind and at http://www.sciam.com/.

Ode to Joy and Serenity and Curiosity and . . .

Young patas monkeys love to play tag on the savannahs of West Africa, and they have an odd play habit. When they are being chased, they fling themselves on to saplings, which bend and catapult them in unexpected directions. This exuberant and quirky behavior disappears as the speedy red monkeys grow into adulthood, with one exception: When fleeing a predator, adults will fling themselves on to saplings, which bend and catapult them to escape.

University of North Carolina psychologist Barbara Fredrickson uses the antics of patas monkeys as both an example and metaphor for her “broaden and build” theory of positive emotions. The young monkeys are engaging in pointless fun, just for the sheer joy of it—or so it seems. In fact, their joy and play are creating a reserve of body memories that—way down the line—could keep them alive.
Positive emotions are life savers. That is Fredrickson’s answer to a question that has perplexed psychologists for years: What are positive emotions for? The survival value of negative emotions is obvious: Fear helps us avoid attackers, and disgust alerts us to poisons, and so forth. But what possible good are joy, contentment, gratitude, and curiosity? Fredrickson believes that these emotions increase cognitive flexibility, trump harmful negativity, and create a reservoir of resilience that helps us cope with life’s travails. She pulls together some of her most provocative and convincing studies in a new book, Positivity (Crown Publishers).

Consider this deceptively simple experiment. Fredrickson used lab techniques to “prime” the emotions of a large group of volunteers. Some were primed for amusement, some for serenity, still others for anger or fear or nothing at all. Then she asked them simply to make a list of things they would like to do at that moment. Those who were amused or serene listed significantly more possibilities than the others, suggesting that their minds were more open to ideas, more exploratory. She ran a similar experiment with abstract shapes, and found that the positive thinkers were more apt to see hidden patterns, to make connections. Those who were angry or fearful were too narrowly focused on details to see the big picture.

This is what Fredrickson calls “broadening,” and she had shown this cognitive benefit time and again in a variety of studies. But what is the value of such openness beyond the moment? This is where it gets really interesting. Fredrickson has shown that these moments of serenity or amusement have an accumulative effect over time. They break down the barriers between self and others, and build trust. In short, positivity creates open-mindedness, which sparks even more good feelings, creating an upward spiral of emotions. This is the “building” for the future: Over time, those with the most positive moments become more mindful and attentive, more accepting and purposeful, and more socially connected.

And healthier. This is the hidden and unanticipated benefit of laughter and peacefulness and thankfulness, according to Fredrickson’s studies. Positive emotions apparently work as an antidote to negativity. Fredrickson proved this by stressing people out with a public speaking task; this task made them predictably anxious, and also pumped up their heart rate, their blood pressure, and other signals of stress. Then she had them watch movies: some joyful or serene, others sad. She found that the positive emotions literally trumped the anxiety, undoing the body’s stress response, and returning the joyful and serene viewers to a steady state much more rapidly than the others. Since elevated heart rate and blood pressure can cause a range of serious health problems over time, Fredrickson concludes that positivity is literally life-saving.

Fredrickson has been building her theory for many years, and broadening it with new ideas and rigorous laboratory evidence. Positivity is an accessible and inspiring version of this project.

For more insights into the quirks of human nature, visit “We’re Only Human” at www.psychologicalscience.org/onlyhuman. Selections from the blog also appear regularly in the magazine Scientific American Mind and at http://www.sciam.com/.