Showing posts with label negatives. Show all posts
Showing posts with label negatives. Show all posts

Saturday, March 24, 2018

PROS AND CONS

Some people use horoscopes and astrology signs to determine whether they are compatible with other people, especially in relationships. The positive and negatives of each sign are mere generalizations. However, some people are comforted by those general attributes.

Likewise, you can always put together the pros and cons of characters with each other in their potential relationships.

JACK and KATE.

Pros: Both have lost Daddy issues so they have a common focus.

Cons: Jack tries to fix his problems to gain his father's favor, while Kate runs away from her problems.

SAWYER and KATE.

Pros: Both have a reckless, wild and manipulative to criminal mindset.

Cons: Both have a reckless, wild and manipulative to criminal mindset.

SAYID and SHANNON.

Pros: Both feel abandoned by their families but for different reasons.

Cons: He is sentimental while she is too selfish.

LOCKE and HELEN.

Pros: Both longed to have their own family.

Cons: Locke was obsessed with his past to not see a hopeful future with Helen. Helen was too naive and supportive of Locke to tell that he would never change.

HURLEY and LIBBY.

Pros:   Both tend to be introverted followers with an easy sense of humor.

Cons: Both have hidden emotional and psychological scars that block them from opening up to others.

CHARLIE and CLAIRE.

Pros: Youthful spirits that are trying to run away from their personal faults and failures.

Cons: Charlie's addictive personality traits and Claire's psychological paranoia to the pressure of family life.

JIN and SUN.

Pros: They share the same culture but from different parts of the social spectrum. They are both rebellious against their position in life. They share a similar goal.

Cons: Their personal ambitions lead to personality conflicts with other people. Personal goals outweigh relationship goals.

DANIEL and CHARLOTTE.

Pros: An analytical and practical mind tend to work well together as a team.

Cons: Daniel's sheltered life with his dominant mother makes it difficult for him to communicate, while Charlotte's personal drive stifles other people around her.

As in real life, the LOST characters' relationships had their strong points and their weaknesses. In the eight relationships noted above, five failed. One was a dubious affair and the other two bonded apparently in the after life.

Monday, August 24, 2015

HAPPY NEWS TO MARRIED COUPLES

The reaction of happy married couples to news is now news.

New York Magazine report sunder the heading of this question:

Have you ever waited with excitement to share some amazingly good news with your partner, only to experience a surge of frustration and resentment when he or she barely reacts to your announcement?

As a society, we place a huge amount of emphasis on being there for each other when we’re in need, but past research has actually shown that relationship satisfaction is influenced as much, if not more, by how we react to each other’s good news. Whereas emotional support from a partner when we’re down can have the unfortunate side-effect of making us feel indebted and more aware of our negative emotions, a partner’s positive reaction to our good news can magnify the benefits of that good fortune and make us feel closer to them.

An unusual brain scan study,  published recently in Human Brain Mapping, has added to this picture, showing that the relationship satisfaction of longtime married elderly women is particularly related to the neural activity they show in response to their husbands’ displays of positive emotion, rather than negative emotion.

Psychologist Raluca Petrican at the Rotman Research Institute in Toronto and her colleagues at the University of Toronto recruited 14 women with an average age of 72 who’d been married for an average of 40 years. The researchers scanned these women’s brains as they watched some carefully prepared videos.

The silent ten-second videos showed each woman’s husband or a stranger displaying an emotion that mismatched the way the video clip was labeled in a one-sentence description on the screen. For example, the clip might show the husband smiling or laughing about a happy memory (such as the first house they bought), but the video was labeled misleadingly to suggest that the man was showing this emotion while talking about a sad memory (such as the time he got fired). Other videos showed the reverse mismatch: a negative emotional display, ostensibly shown while talking about the memory of a happy event.

Essentially, the videos were designed to make the women feel like they were seeing their husband or the stranger display a surprising emotional reaction that didn’t match their own feelings. The real-world equivalent would be a situation in which a husband is happy about something that his wife doesn’t “get”; and the questions are whether she will notice, and whether she is she more sensitive to this in congruent emotion in her husband than she would be in a stranger.

The first important finding to emerge from this setup was that the women showed enhanced overall brain activity — which suggests more mental and emotional neural processing  — when watching the videos of their husbands compared with videos of the strangers, but only when the videos showed displays of surprisingly in congruent positive emotion. During the other types of videos (when the men appeared to display strangely negative emotion), the women’s brains showed just as much overall activity when watching a stranger as when watching their husband. In other words, their levels of whole-brain activity betrayed a special sensitivity to their husband’s (versus a stranger’s) unexpected positive emotion.    

This jibes with the past research that’s shown it’s our response to our partners’ positive news that is all-important for relationship satisfaction. Remember that these women had been married for decades, so it’s likely that they and their husbands have been doing something right relationship-wise. The brain-imaging data suggest part of the reason might be that the women are acutely tuned to when their husbands are showing happiness that’s personal to them (rather than common to both partners).
This specific interpretation trips up a little with another main result: The women’s levels of marital satisfaction (according to a questionnaire) correlated with the amount of neural processing they showed in response to their husbands positive and negative emotion.

However, the special importance of how we respond to our partners’ positive emotion was supported by another key finding. Namely, women who scored higher on relationship satisfaction showed more brain activation in regions thought to contain mirror neurons (neurons that are considered important for empathy) when watching their spouses than they did when watching a stranger. Moreover, this enhanced mirror-neuron activity was especially present for the videos showing their husbands’ positive, rather than negative, emotion. Again, this appears to support the idea that marital happiness goes hand in hand with sensitivity to our partners’ positive emotion (though the researchers acknowledge a different or complementary interpretation that people in happy relationships have a suppressed response to their partners’ in congruent negative emotion).

We need to interpret these preliminary and complex findings with caution. And the exclusive focus on wives’ reactions to their husbands’ emotions does lend the study a slightly retro ’70s vibe — what about the way that husbands respond to their wives’ emotions, and the importance of that for the marital happiness of both parties? But that said, the results are tantalizing in suggesting that at a neural level, people in a long-term, committed relationship are especially sensitive to their partners’ positive emotion, and particularly so when this emotion is different from their own. This neatly complements other research showing, for example, that people who are unable to differentiate their partners’ emotions from their own (they assume they’re the same), tend to be viewed by their partners as more controlling and smothering.

As a whole, this entire body of research gives pause for thought. How do you react when your partner arrives home on an emotional high? Would you only notice if you were feeling happy too?

Positive responses to positive emotions makes a married couples more positive toward each other. It also goes to show that when a partner is "indifferent" to their significant other's news or needs, the relationship can quickly turn toxic. There is a probability of negative reinforcement that will gradually build between couples because they think since they are together, they should each feel the same toward each other. In most cases, that is probably true. But in every relationship, there is a roller coaster ride of highs and low points. Listening, respect and trust are the most important factors to get through any rough times. If one can try to mine a nugget of positive out of a negative situation, it is better for everyone.

Tuesday, November 11, 2014

NEGATIVE SMARTS

Here is an odd bobble from the interwebs of social media culled by WIRED:

it seems the more negative in one's comments, the more intelligent the commentator appears to others.

The reason is"hypercriticism." When we hear negative statements, we think they're inherently more intelligent than positive ones. Teresa Amabile, director of research for Harvard Business School, began exploring this back in the 1980s. She took a group of 55 students, roughly half men, half women, and showed them excerpts from two book reviews printed in an issue of The New York Times. The same reviewer wrote both, but Amabile anonymized them and tweaked the language to produce two versions of each—one positive, one negative. Then she asked the students to evaluate the reviewer's intelligence.

The verdict was clear: The students thought the negative author was smarter than the positive one—“by a lot,” Amabile tells me. Most said the nastier critic was “more competent.” Granted, being negative wasn't all upside—they also rated the harsh reviewer as “less warm and more cruel, not as nice,” she says. “But definitely smarter.” Like my mordant tweets, presumably.

This so-called negativity bias works both ways, it seems. Other studies show that when we seek to impress someone with our massive gray matter, we spout sour and negative opinions. In a follow-up experiment, Bryan Gibson, a psychologist at Central Michigan University, took a group of 117 students (about two-thirds female) and had them watch a short movie and write a review that they would then show to a partner. Gibson's team told some of the reviewers to try to make their partner feel warmly toward them; others were told to try to appear smart. You guessed it: Those who were trying to seem brainy went significantly more negative than those trying to be endearing.

Why does this bias exist? No one really knows, though some theorists speculate it's evolutionary. In the ancestral environment, focusing on bad news helped you survive.

Some may say this site has had more negative LOST posts, but not really if you consider there still are posts long after the series has concluded, so that must be a positive.

If LOST was truly a character study, does one pointing out the negatives in a situation appear to be smarter?

The cursory results are mixed.

Jack quickly became the leader because of his positive outlook, demeanor and his known important medical skills.

Locke was more visceral against Jack's positions, pointing out flaws or different ways of doing things. Other castaways did not find Locke "smart," more like crazy in some of his viewpoints.

There is an irony here because when Flocke and Jack are helping Desmond re-set the cork, Jack admits that the real Locke was right about everything associated with the island.

Hurley was always upbeat and positive. He tried to keep his friends happy and entertained. No one called Hurley a genius. At the same time, Sawyer was constantly a negative, counterproductive presence in the camp. Most people knew he had some street smarts, but he never wanted to let anyone in past his personal firewall.

Kate's personality really lacked common sense because she continually compounded her mistakes in the real world as a fugitive. On the island, other women came to her for personal advice. Kate was neither smart or dumb; she was an independent survivor.

Ben was highly critical and negative towards his subordinates. In fact, so vicious that he would have them killed for disobeying him. As a result, people feared his evil genius.

In real life, people will gravitate toward upbeat and happy people. This may be instinctive to share positive emotional bonds with others. Negative people tend to drain the energy from a room and make people uncomfortable. It seems in the social media webs, the exact opposite happens. This touches briefly on the mirror theme: what is seen may be the opposite of reality.

Monday, March 4, 2013

LOST: THE NEGATIVES

Just after LOST ended, the negatives took center stage for those viewers who did not like the finale.

In a global retrospect, what were the big negatives when the show concluded?

1. Some viewers saw a gradual decline in the series as a whole (reflected in the decline in ratings from Season 2 through Season 6). Many viewers thought the first season was what the entire show should be about: the characters' psyches and intelligently developing character-to-character relationships but character-to-island (or setting) relationships. A real negative was that the show regressed from character survival relationships to one about a nebulous power struggle then less about the philosophical and mystical aspects of the characters and the island. In the last seasons, the show relied heavily on plot twists and action, rather than complete development of the subtle mystery and intrigue of the first season.

2. For a show that layered character development and mystery, the finale left more questions than answers. Some viewers were disturbed by the sideways finish as being the Big Reveal. The problem in many fans' minds was that the final 10 minutes and the resolution of the Sideways World ignored all the previous aspects of Lost mythology: the island, Dharma, the smoke monster, the temple, the Others, etc.

3. The final season forced upon the viewers an alleged epic battle between good and evil. However, the Jacob and MIB story line settled nothing. But The End preached only that the individual journey mattered;  there was no resolution of struggle between humanity's light and dark sides, as represented by Jacob and (MIB) in any of the characters in the church. In fact, a moral compass through the afterlife appears to be missing even though the religious overtones were present. Many viewers thought the rush up in Season 6 for an epic final battle was a lost opportunity. It was forced. It did not make any sense to kill an immortal smoke monster in order to awaken in an afterlife dream.

4. Who was special and why? Even in The End, Desmond was called special, but it was Charlie who awoke him. Walt was special, but he was written out of the series due to a natural growth spurt. Locke was special, but he was merely a corpse in the island plot lines. Many viewers thought that all the trials, moments, mysteries and "special' properties of the Island were totally disregarded in the conclusion in the sideways world. It really made little sense of that the most important part of their lives (the Island) did not have any impact in their own fantasy purgatory in the sideways world.

5. How children were treated in the series. So, the investment in Jack's relationship with his son David in the sideways world was nothing; David did not exist. Another problem is the Aaron and Ji Yeon issues; how can one be "born" in the afterlife after being allegedly born in real time on the island?

6. Many fans could not grapple with the increasing factual errors on legal and medical issues as the series wound down. The continuity errors within LOST's own past story lines was bothersome to those who thought that the writers had everything planned out in great detail to make such gross errors. In response to these viewer complaints, TPTB said that community show boards were "toxic" and the show was "just television."

7. There was a sense that the wild ride of the twists, turns and mysteries of the island turned out to be a long, useless con job. In some respects, an emotional ending may be fine for some people who liked the characters as TV friends; but for many the emotional ending was an 180 degree contrivance to avoid community debate on whether the presented answers to the shows deep questions were satisfactory or not. It was a cop out not to address the important matters the show itself presented for weekly to yearly debate.

8. Why did some people wind up in the church, while other characters did not? The excuse, "they were not ready" was meaningless when it was explained that time did not matter in the sideways world. And the open ended white wash of light was considered by some to white wash the story of the characters in the church - - - where were they really going? Were they redeemed or did they fail? And how were their short island relationships "the most important" of their lives? Many viewers thought the Sayid-Shannon reunion a farce compared to the endless pining for Nadia during the series. And where was Helen for Locke? And Boone was also left with no one (no parent? no friend?) So how can one really say everyone got what they wanted in the end?

9. Viewers also thought that the use of flashbacks and flash-forwards and time leaps were editing tricks to confuse the viewer so as to hide the inherent plot pitfalls. And once the writers squeezed all the juice out of the flashback device, they inserted the epic short story tangent of Richard's back story and Jacob & MIB. Those stories did nothing to add or explain the resolution of the series. And that was a major criticism of the final season: too much filler and not enough meat on the story bone.

10. As Charlie said in the pilot, what is The Island?  The first and foremost character in the series continues to be an enigma to this day.