Specific Ways to Savor Your Life More

As you speed-click through your emails, consider this: are you acting or reacting to life? To make more sane, satisfying choices and savor your life more, take five minutes or less to learn the highlights of recent research, so you can "Say It Better" in more ways.

In this article you'll discover more about the effect on you of…
Multi-tasking
Remembering & Reacting
Interrupting
Sensing
Lying
Attracting
Loving

"Specific Ways to Savor Your Life More"
As you speed-click through your many emails, consider perusing this one for specific research-based ways you can "Say It Better" in your life by gaining some new insights about how you are affected by how you are leading that life.

Multi-tasking
People who try to do more than one thing at once tend to be less happy and more error-prone according to a study release this month by Marcel Just, co-director of the Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pa.

He found that while people can feel they are multitasking well, habitually dividing their attention makes them exhausted, stressed and more forgetful. For example, pilots who juggle excessive amounts of information have faster heart rates, higher blood pressure and slower reaction times to new events, according to research at the Air Force and federal Aviation Administration Labs.

Remembering & Reacting
Daniel Schacter, a Harvard University psychology professor says that if you read a book while watching tv there's a good chance what's read will be deleted from long-term memory. Further task-jugglers are slower to respond to a new situation or to surprize such as noticing your toddler opening the medicine cabinet.

Interrupting
People get more confused trying to remember a shopping list if they are interrupted with questions about the list. If the interruption was unrelated, such as asking the person about another topic, people went back to their list with little problem.

Sensing
Federal Aviation Administration officials found cockpit warming signals, for instance, don't have to be only visual. Warning bells, digitized voices and even vibrations on the stick-shift device appeal simultaneously appeal to more than one sense and thus improve pilot's ability to notice and respond.

Think of the ways you can apply this finding to your daily life. For example, if the person shaking your hand has an attractive scent, your positive response is gros over that which you would experience from only shaking hands without the scent or only smelling the scent.

By the way, vanilla and citrus combinations are among the scents most universally well-liked.

Lying
When a person lies, her or his true emotional state is betrayed by expressions in the upper part of the face - eyes, brows, forehead -- while the area around the mouth projects the intended fake emotional state, according to Elliott Ross, professor of neurology at the University of Oklahoma. Earlier research has suggested that across most culture people learn at an early age to control their facial expressions to conceal their unhappiness or unease, particularly in awkward social situations.

Brain-injury victims who lose the ability to understand speech develop a talent that could come in handy during this election year . .. or as a poker player or police interrogator: an uncanny ability to tell when someone is lying. T

hat's what Nancy Etcoff, a psychologist at Massachusetts General Hospital, announced in a study published in last month's journal Nature. She studied patients with aphasia, that is the loss or impairment of the power to use or comprehend words due to damage in the brain's left hemisphere. Non-aphasics had only about a 50-50 chance of spotting those liars while aphasics could watch the person talk, and tell 73 percent of the time.

Attracting
Just as you suspected, beauty does influence destiny according to psychologist Nancy Etcoff, in her new book, Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty. Some findings:
*Across cultures, everyone seems attracted to women with delicate jaw lines, large eyes (relative to the length of the face), and short distances between the mouth and the chin.

* If two women, one pretty and one less attractive, are standing by a road with a flat tire, the pretty one is rescued first 87% of the time.

* Homelier children are more likely to be abused and mothers talk and play more with beautiful babies.

* Teachers pay more attention to taller boys than shorter ones

* Teachers expect good-looking children to be smarter and more sociable; judges, juries and police officers go easier on the betterlooking and attractive people have an easier time getting a job and high pay. But are they happier? "A bit," but not as much as we might imagine, given all their advantages, Etcoff said on an NPR interview. "Some people just seem to be born optimistic and happy; others aren't. There's not a strong correlation between life events and how happy you are."

Loving
More than anything, the key to compatibility with a romantic partner is whether they share the same love stories, according to Robert Sternberg, a professor of psychology and education at Yale University and author of "Love is a Story". "To change the pattern of our relationships, we must become conscious of our love stories," he says. In 1995 Sternberg and one of his students,

aurie Lynch identified some of the most commonly held love stories by asking people to rate, on a scale of one to seven, the extent to which a group of statements characterized their relationships.

Their highest-ranked statements indicated their personal love story.

They labeled some of the most common stories as "Humor", "Travel", "Horror", "Partnership" "Garden" and "Sacrifice." In his book, "Love is a Story" Sternberg includes the list of questions which help you determine your love story.

Women are more likely to prefer "Travel", as in the shared adventure of love and men "Sacrifice", what one must give up to make it work, which surprised Sternberg because he thought the reverse would be true.

When people have different love stories, he found, they also have different stories about the break-up, almost as if they were separate, unrelated experiences. To end this article on an optimistic note, Sternberg believes that, once we understand the ideas and beliefs behind our love stories, we can change the script, characters involved, future scenes and more – just by asking ourselves what we like and don't like about our current story.