The 'new york times' Tag Archive

Below you'll find all my writing tagged with the word new york times. The posts are listed in chronological order. Click the post title to read more.

December 2nd, 2008

The Cool Kids Will Live Forever

Calm, per se, doesn’t appear in the taxonomy of those who study personality and temperament. People we might colloquially describe as calm are classified as low on the scale of neuroticism — a scale everyone is measured on, to a greater or lesser degree.

How much neuroticism anyone gets is determined largely by genetics. But it is also within our control. Psychiatrists and psychologists talk about emotional regulation — the ability to manage neuroticism so that even the most nervous of people can go through life appearing and feeling more in control than those genetically predisposed to calmness. [...]

Efforts to classify temperament go back to the four humors of the ancient Greeks (black bile, yellow bile, phlegm and blood) and run through modern self-help shelves and quizzes in women’s magazines. Today, those who study personality tend to rank people on several scales, often called the Big Five: openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeability and neuroticism (some theorists identify them by different terms, but these offer the advantage of an acronym, Ocean). [...]

Of these, conscientiousness is often considered the least dependent on genes, and extroversion and openness the most. Neuroticism, the closest barometer of calmness, is also highly determined by inheritance. [...]

People tend to think that the confrontation produces the reaction; if you’re faced with an irrational rant, who can blame you for falling apart? But researchers in emotional regulation tease out a factor in between: how we think. Between the “a” of the antecedent and the “c” of the consequence, they argue, is the crucial “b,” for belief, which in the case of the person melting down might sound something like: my boss hates me, everyone hates me, I’m a total failure.

That is the opportunity for emotional regulation.

Professor Gross, at Stanford, outlines five methods. They are situation avoidance (steer clear of the boss); situation modification (turn your desk so you don’t have to look at the boss); attention deployment (when the boss invites you in for a chat, look at the wall, a picture, anything but his face); cognitive change (he’s a jerk anyway, what do I care what he thinks?); and finally, repression (concentrate on keeping your face still instead of blinking furiously or twitching in anger).

Link to The New York Times, The Cool Factor

October 28th, 2008

Dramatic increase in reported infidelity rates. most people still not sluts.

Surveys conducted in person are likely to underestimate the real rate of adultery, because people are reluctant to admit such behavior not just to their spouses but to anyone. [...]

But a handful of new studies suggest surprising changes in the marital landscape. Infidelity appears to be on the rise, particularly among older men and young couples. Notably, women appear to be closing the adultery gap: younger women appear to be cheating on their spouses nearly as often as men. [...]

The researchers also see big changes in relatively new marriages. About 20 percent of men and 15 percent of women under 35 say they have ever been unfaithful, up from about 15 and 12 percent respectively. [...]

But it is the apparent change in women’s fidelity that has sparked the most interest among relationship researchers. It is not entirely clear if the historical gap between men and women is real or if women have just been more likely to lie about it.

“Is it that men are bragging about it and women are lying to everybody including themselves?” Dr. Fisher asked. “Men want to think women don’t cheat, and women want men to think they don’t cheat, and therefore the sexes have been playing a little psychological game with each other.” [...]

“I see a changing landscape in which the emphasis is less on the sex than it is on the openness and intimacy and the revelation of secrets,” said Dr. Pittman, the author of “Private Lies: Infidelity and the Betrayal of Intimacy” (Norton, 1990). “Everybody talks by cellphone and the relationship evolves because you become increasingly distant from whomever you lie to, and you become increasingly close to whomever you tell the truth to.”

While infidelity rates do appear to be rising, a vast majority of people still say adultery is wrong, and most men and women do not appear to be unfaithful.

The Changing Landscape of Infidelity at the New York Times

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