Beingism: Rational Means to Emotional Ends, for the Benefit of All.

npr.org -- Jesse Bering's mother died of cancer on a Sunday, in her own bed, at 9 o'clock at night. Bering and his siblings closed her door and went downstairs, hoping they might somehow get some sleep.

It was a long, hard night, but around 7 a.m., something happened: The wind chimes outside his mother's window started to chime.

Bering remembers waking to the tinkle of these bells, a small but distinct sound in an otherwise silent house. And he remembers thinking that those bells carried a very specific message. ... Read more

ScienceDaily (May 31, 2009) -- People like to believe their actions are driven by their own free will and are not unduly affected by other people. Research, though, shows the way we act is often subconsciously influenced by what we believe to be ‘normal’ behaviour. Led by Kingston University with Swansea University and University of the West of England (UWE), a new £1.1 million research project is about to take this finding to the next level by investigating whether it is possible to nudge individual behaviour in a socially-desirable direction, simply by telling people what others are doing. ... Read more

ScienceDaily (May 19, 2009) -- If you think having loads of money, fetching looks, or the admiration of many will improve your life -- think again. A new study by three University of Rochester researchers demonstrates that progress on these fronts can actually make a person less happy.

"People understand that it's important to pursue goals in their lives and they believe that attaining these goals will have positive consequences. This study shows that this is not true for all goals," says author Edward Deci, professor of psychology and the Gowen Professor in the Social Sciences at the University. "Even though our culture puts a strong emphasis on attaining wealth and fame, pursuing these goals does not contribute to having a satisfying life. The things that make your life happy are growing as an individual, having loving relationships, and contributing to your community," Deci says. ... Read more

The Equality Trust -- The quality of social relations is worse in less equal societies. Evidence on inequality in relation to trust, community life and violence (see separate section on violence) all tell the same story. Inequality divides people by increasing the social distances between us and widening differences in living standards and lifestyles. By increasing residential segregation of rich and poor, it also increases physical distances.

Governments and policy makers are increasingly interested in "social capital" or social cohesion, trust, and involvement in community life. Everyone knows these are an important part of the quality of life and make a difference to what a society feels like to live in, but there has been little recognition that greater equality is an important pre-condition for strengthening community life.

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The Equality Trust -- Until recently it was hard to compare levels of mental illness between different countries because nobody had collected strictly comparable data, but recently the World Health Organisation has established world mental health surveys that are starting to provide data. They show that different societies have very different levels of mental illness. In some countries only 5 or 10% of the adult population has suffered from any mental illness in the past year, but in the USA more than 25% have.

We first showed a relationship between mental illness and income inequality in eight developed countries with WHO data - the USA, France, Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Germany, Italy, and Japan. Since then we've been able to add data for New Zealand and for some other countries whose surveys of mental illness, although not strictly comparable, use very similar methods - Australia, the UK and Canada. As the graph below shows, mental illness is much more common in more unequal countries. Among these countries, mental illness is also more common in the richer ones. ... Read more

ScienceDaily (Mar. 5, 2009) -- Believing in God can help block anxiety and minimize stress, according to new University of Toronto research that shows distinct brain differences between believers and non-believers.

In two studies led by Assistant Psychology Professor Michael Inzlicht, participants performed a Stroop task – a well-known test of cognitive control – while hooked up to electrodes that measured their brain activity.

Compared to non-believers, the religious participants showed significantly less activity in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), a portion of the brain that helps modify behavior by signaling when attention and control are needed, usually as a result of some anxiety-producing event like making a mistake. The stronger their religious zeal and the more they believed in God, the less their ACC fired in response to their own errors, and the fewer errors they made. ... Read more

[Editor's Note: This study uses an unfortunate dialectic of emotions vs. reason. I believe what this study shows is the importance of incorporating your feelings INTO your reasoning.]
ScienceDaily (Feb. 26, 2009) -- When choosing a flavor of ice cream, an item of clothing, or even a home, you might be better off letting your emotions guide you, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research.

"Our current research supports theories in evolutionary psychology that propose that our emotions can be conceived as a set of 'programs' that have evolved over time to help us solve important recurrent problems with speed and accuracy, whether it is to fall in love or to escape from a predator," write authors Leonard Lee (Columbia Business School), On Amir (University of California, San Diego), and Dan Ariely (Duke University). ... Read more