Class 1-2: Exploring Wellness

Overview

Today's Class Overview

In today's class, you will explore the concept of wellness further by looking at seven areas life, as well as learning more about how we think, how we feel, and how these impact our ability to be well.

Today's Class Objectives

By the end of this module you should be able to:

1. Describe behaviors that contribute to wellness through various dimensions or areas.
2. Identify the major causes of death in the United States.
3. Evaluate your own wellness behaviors.
4. Recognize cognitive distortions and other irrational thought processes.
5. Describe emotional intelligence and how it benefits performance and wellness.
6. Apply the R.U.L.E.R. method to understand and manage emotions for well-being.

Outline of Today's Class

• Materials
  1. Overview
  2. Review
  3. Seven Dimensions of Wellness
  4. Wellness and Mortality
  5. Mortality: Reporting vs Reality
  6. Thinking Clearly
  7. Making Sense of Cognitive Bias
  8. Emotions and Cognition
  9. Building Emotional Intelligence
  10. How Many Emotions Do Humans Have?
  11. Summary

Review

Reviewing Last Class

Last class, you learned what to expect, the purpose of this course, and how to prepare for success. Review the highlights below to ensure you are ready to proceed.

• Course Policies
  • Learning is an on-going process; always strive to develop a more thorough and nuanced understanding.
  • Be sure to practice professionalism and appropriate etiquette throughout the course in preparation for your career.
  • Always keep in mind that "the expression of academic freedom requires civility."
  • Respect the innate humanity of all persons and the validity of their experience.
  • Operate in good faith throughout your participation in the course.

As well, you began learning about the concepts of wellness, needs, and metacognition.

• Wellness
  • The abstract idea of living one's best life.
    • Differentiate from:
      • health (absence of illness or injury)
      • fitness (the ability to meet the demands of a task, like keeping your heart healthy)
• Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs
  • Abraham Maslow's general theory that human behavior is based around needs.
    • When survival needs (food, water, air, shelter, safety) are not met, these are a person's priority. Their behavior is focused on obtaining these necessities.
    • When survival needs are less of a concern, behavior can be directed towards building relationships and connecting with others (psychological, social, and emotional needs).
    • When survival needs are met as well as the emotional, social, and psychological needs, a person can focus on developing themselves further.
• Metacognition is a skill and faculty that can be learned and developed by practice.
  • Metacognitive strategies can help you take control over your education, assist with navigating relationships and help, you understand and fulfill your needs.

Dimensions of Wellness

We can begin to understand the broad, abstract concept of wellness better by considering different areas (or dimensions) of our lives.

Visit this downloadable Wellness Dimensions Guide offered by Simon Fraser University to learn about the Dimensions of Wellness.

Wellness and Mortality

Applying the Dimensions of Wellness

On the previous page, you learned to consider the idea of "wellness" through seven categories, or dimensions.

As well, you read about some behaviors that can help develop or maintain well-being in each dimension.

Like Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, the idea of "Wellness Dimensions" is a tool that can help us think about our lives and make choices and decisions.

In today's activity, you will be asked a series of questions about these seven dimensions to help you think about your own wellness.

Morbidity and Mortality

While it can be unpleasant to think about, we know that our lifespan is limited and that we are likely to encounter at least a few illnesses, injuries, and diseases during our lifetime.

Though it isn't always pleasant to consider, we can learn a lot about the challenges to health looking by looking at the most common causes of death, called mortality.

Similarly, living well can be made more difficult by illnesses and diseases, referred to as morbidity.

Morbidities include diseases like diabetes, cancer. When multiple diseases are present, they are called co-morbidities.

Many morbidities do not cause death for many years, though they can negatively affect quality of life in many ways.

Exploring these can tell us a lot about what it means to be "well."

Visit the following link to explore an interactive visualization of causes of death statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Reporting vs Reality

Looking Further

Were you surprised to learn which causes of death are most common?

A group of students at the University of California San Diego were inspired by earlier researchers to compare the reality of the common causes of death with the reporting of death in major media outlets.

What do you think they found?

The following has been excerpted and adapted from Owen Shen's website Charting Death: Reality vs Reported under fair use:

Charting Death: Reporting vs Reality

Site and writeup by Owen Shen. Data collection and analysis by Owen Shen, Hasan Al-Jamaly, Maximillian Siemers, and Nicole Stone.

Background

How do people die?

How do people think we die?

And is there a difference?

Well, it turns out there's a fascinating study conducted by Paul Slovic and Barbara Combs where they looked at how often different types of deaths were mentioned in the news. They then compared the frequency of news coverage with the actual frequency of people who died for each cause.

The results are what one might cynically expect:

"Although all diseases claim almost 1,OOO times as many lives as do homicides, there were about three times as many articles about homicides than about all diseases. Furthermore, homicide articles tended to be more than twice as long as articles reporting deaths from diseases and accidents."

Since 1979, when the original Combs and Slovic study was conducted, there have been several more empirical analyses which have found largely similar results. (Notably, here and here)

For our final capstone project for the fantastic Bradley Voytek's COGS 108 course at UCSD, we thought it would be interesting for us to have our own go at examining potential disparities between actual deaths and their corresponding media attention.

For anyone curious about any of the steps throughout this project, the original data and code we used to do all this analysis is available here on GitHub.

Data: The Gathering

For our project, we looked at four sources: The Center for Disease Control’s WONDER database for public health data (1999-2016). Google Trends search volume (2004-2016). The Guardian’s article database (1999-2016). The New York Times’ article database (1999-2016).

Data Analysis

Here's a graphical representation of the Average News Proportion/Average Deaths Proportion factors.

[In other words, a ratio of coverage vs actual death rates, with a taller line representing a greater difference between how often something is mentioned and how many people die from that cause.]

The most striking disparities here are that of kidney disease, heart disease, terrorism, and homicide. Kidney disease and heart disease are both about 10 times underrepresented in the news, while homicide is about 31 times overrepresented, and terrorism is a whopping 3900 times overrepresented. Kidney disease is a little surprising; we had guessed at the other three, but it was only by calculating the factor here that this disparity became visible.

Conclusion

We set out to see if the public attention given to causes of death was similar to the actual distribution of deaths. After looking at our data, we found that, like results before us, the attention given by news outlets and Google searches does not match the actual distribution of deaths.

This suggests that general public sentiment is not well-calibrated with the ways that people actually die. Heart disease and kidney disease appear largely underrepresented in the sphere of public attention, while terrorism and homicides capture a far larger share, relative to their share of deaths caused.

Though we have shown a disparity between attention and reality, we caution from drawing immediate conclusions for policy. One major issue we have failed to address here is that of tractability; just because a cause of death claims more lives does not mean that it is easily addressable.

A more nuanced look at which causes of mortality to prioritize would likely be with an evaluation framework.

Thinking Clearly

Thinking Clearly

Do you ever feel like there is too much information out there?

Do you ever struggle to make sense out of the world around you?

Do you ever find that there just isn't enough time to figure everything out?

As you learned in the previous page, the types of threats we often fixate on - violence, terrorism, etc. - are far less likely to injure or kill us than commonplace things like vehicular collisions, heart disease, and bathroom slip-and-falls.

Just like lifting weights or running makes your muscles tired, thinking uses a lot of energy.

This leads to a tendency to take mental shortcuts: often resulting in illogical, false, or otherwise inaccurate conclusions.

We call these shortcuts cognitive biases, errors, or distortions.

Watch this brief video (~ 2 minutes) from the University of Texas to learn more about cognitive biases, how they can affect our judgment, and what we can do about them.

Metacognition and Biases

As you learned in the video above, everyone is susceptible to biases and errors in thinking - even highly skilled medical professionals.

While it isn't possible to always recognize and prevent them, being aware of cognitive biases can help us prevent them from skewing our judgments or taking actions based on bias, stereotypes, or flawed logic.

How can we become aware of these mental mistakes?

Making Sense of Cognitive Bias

Three Conundrums

On the previous page, you were asked three questions: Too much information? Too little sense? Too little time?

These three questions were developed by author Buster Benson, who realized that there are too many cognitive biases to ever be aware of at all times.

Until recently, the Wikipedia.org list of cognitive biases and effects was a mess, with over 175 listings and little order.

Wanting to make this information more accessible and digestible, Benson categorized these biases into three main problems (what he calls "conundrums") that our minds are trying to solve:

The following has been excerpted and adapted from Buster Benson's Pocket Biases and Cognitive Bias Cheat Sheet under fair use:

• CONUNDRUM 1: Information Overload
  • There seems to be too much information in the world, so our minds filter out a lot of it.
• CONUNDRUM 2: Need for things to Make Sense
  • The world seems very confusing and we have limited knowledge of it, but we need to make some sense of it in order to survive, so we connect the dots, fill in the gaps with stuff we already think we know, and make sure new information fits right in.
• CONUNDRUM 3: Limited Time
  • We have limited time, energy, and resources to learn and think, so we jump to conclusions and make choices based on them.

From these conundrums, he came up with 12 flawed strategies (shortcuts) that the cognitive biases tend to take to try to solve the problems:

• Shortcut 1: We have a limited capacity to notice and remember things, so we use the current context to help inform what we should be paying attention to.
• Shortcut 2: Things that we've recently thought about or been exposed to are primed in our heads and easier to access than things we haven't thought about in a while.
• Shortcut 3: Our brains boost the importance of things that are unusual or surprising, because they are more likely to be important. The bizarre things could be threats, or opportunities.
• Shortcut 4: When something new shows up, or something changes, our brains call that out to us because it might be important. In addition to the change, we get the direction of the change, which helps us figure out if it's good or bad.
• Shortcut 5: Another way to reduce the amount of information we have to think about is only paying attention to the parts that we think we'll need to remember later.
• Shortcut 6: We are really good at filling in gaps with generalities, stereotypes, and guesses to turn sparse data into meaningful stories. But we often can't tell which parts were the dots and which parts we filled in after the fact.
• Shortcut 7: We imagine things and people we are familiar with or fond of as intrinsically better than things or people we aren't familiar with or fond of.
• Shortcut 8: We simplify probabilities and numbers to make them easier to think about.
• Shortcut 9: We generally assume that our experience is an objective view of reality, and will project our current mood, mindset, assumptions onto everything else.
• Shortcut 10: We need to be confident in our ability to make an impact and to feel like what we do is important.
• Shortcut 11: We're motivated to complete things that we've already invested time and energy into rather than change course.
• Shortcut 12: When our beliefs are challenged, we'll often automatically react by defending them rather than questioning them.

Instead of Trying to Avoid Bias, Develop Honest Bias

In today's discussion, you'll look through his listing of cognitive effects and choose one to learn about in depth and share with your classmates.

For now, consider Buster's conclusions on what to do about the inherent human tendency toward bias:

These biases existed first in our brains, but you can also find them in the technology we use, in the institutions we've built, and the cultural norms we practice.

They're everywhere.

The best we can do is develop "honest bias".

I think of this as a dedication to remaining open to our own limitations, listening to evidence that contradicts our own beliefs, inviting diverse perspectives to the table, and begin willing to be uncomfortable with the fact that the universe is big, we are small, and there's no ultimate solution to any of this.

Our best hope is to reduce the time and energy we expend trying to maintain our blind spots when they're challenged.

Emotions and Cognition

Thinking and Feeling

As we explored, thinking is complex, with much happening in our minds without our knowledge.

We as humans can easily be misled by errors or shortcuts in thinking, although we can limit how this affects our lives through awareness and metacognition.

While thinking is our most powerful tool for wellness, we have to use knowledge, awareness, and practice to ensure we are thinking logically and not acting based on irrational judgments and conclusions.

Is the same true of emotions?

Why do we have emotions?

Emotions are complex physiological processes that can often be overwhelming, unpleasant, or confusing.

Emotions have persisted throughout generations for a reason: perhaps because they are deep, instinctual tools that helped early humans navigate a difficult world.

Emotions appear to originate in deeper (older) regions of the brain than the more recently-developed regions that process thought.

Though there is much debate among scholars, one framework explains emotions as autonomic reactions to external stimuli - meaning they happen in response to things we sense and without our knowledge.

Later in the course, we will explore nutrition more.

For now, think about how people tend to crave salty, sugary, and fatty foods - even though broccoli and spinach are much better for us!

In a survival situation, salty, fatty, and sugary foods offer greater sources of energy and were therefore extremely desirable.

Though vegetables and other nutritious foods are now plentiful (if not always accessible, as we'll explore later), our instincts still seem to encourage us to eat salt, sugar, and fat in excess.

Being aware of this tendency, and how emotions relate to our instincts and thought processes, can help us make better choices about our wellness behaviors.

Though emotions offer us valuable information around the world around us, the signals aren't always clear.

For example, when presented with a new food they've never seen before, many people feel the emotion of "disgust."

This emotional response of disgust may have been helpful in the past, since it allowed early humans to avoid eating unfamiliar foods that might be dangerous.

Today, the emotion of 'disgust' still helps us determine if the week-old milk in the fridge is safe to drink, but it can also prevent us from trying new foods we may end up liking!

Just as we can be metacognitively aware of our thought processes to recognize and manage distortions, we can apply metacognition to our emotions.

Continue reading to learn questions and skills you can use to manage and benefit from your emotional experiences.

Building Emotional Intelligence

The RU.L.E.R. method is a quick, reliable tool for practicing and developing emotional intelligence.

Review the following article linked below to learn how to practice R.U.L.E.R.:

Psychology Today: Building Emotional Intelligence Isn't as Hard as You Think

How Many Emotions Do Humans Have?

How Many Different Human Emotions Are There?

Review the following article to learn about the researchers' findings about the complexity of emotion.

You may choose to open the interactive video map by clicking on the image below to see the videos used in the study and the emotional responses that the researchers found for each.

Note: Be aware that some of the videos linked on the interactive map may include graphic, violent, or otherwise intense content.

You are not required to visit the interactive map.

The following has been excerpted and adapted from Greater Good: How Many Different Human Emotions Are There? under fair use:

A new study identifies 27 categories of emotion and shows how they blend together in our everyday experience.

BY YASMIN ANWAR | SEPTEMBER 8, 2017

Using novel statistical models to analyze the responses of more than 800 men and women to over 2,000 emotionally evocative video clips, Keltner and his colleagues at UC Berkeley created a multidimensional, interactive map to show how feelings like envy, joy, pride, and sadness relate to each other.

“We found that 27 distinct dimensions, not six, were necessary to account for the way hundreds of people reliably reported feeling in response to each video,” said study senior author Keltner, whose findings recently appeared in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Moreover, in contrast to the notion that each emotional state is an island, the study found that “there are smooth gradients of emotion between, say, awe and peacefulness, horror and sadness, and amusement and adoration,” Keltner said.

“We don’t get finite clusters of emotions in the map because everything is interconnected,” said study lead author Alan Cowen, a doctoral student in neuroscience at UC Berkeley. “Emotional experiences are so much richer and more nuanced than previously thought.”

Through statistical modeling and visualization techniques, the researchers organized the emotional responses to each video into a semantic atlas of human emotions. On the map, each of the 27 distinct categories of emotion corresponds to a particular color.

“We sought to shed light on the full palette of emotions that color our inner world,” Cowen said.

The 27 emotions include admiration, adoration, aesthetic appreciation, amusement, anger, anxiety, awe, awkwardness, boredom, calmness, confusion, craving, disgust, empathic pain, entrancement, excitement, fear, horror, interest, joy, nostalgia, relief, romance, sadness, satisfaction, sexual desire, surprise.

Summary

Major Points

During today's class, you have learned:

• The Seven Dimensions of Wellness
  • Physical - Making healthy decisions related to basic needs.
  • Emotional - Experiencing, expressing, and learning from the range of human feelings in a healthy way.
  • Intellectual - Engaging in life-long learning, developing critical thinking and seeking knowledge.
  • Spiritual - Having a core set of guiding principles that orient oneself to the world, respecting the core principles of others, and recognizing the shared humanity of all individuals.
  • Social - Building and maintaining healthy relationships based on trust and respect that are supportive and nurturing.
  • Environmental - Respecting and maintaining one's surroundings.
    Occupational - Finding fulfillment and satisfaction through work, continually developing one's abilities.
  • Financial - Having an awareness of financial literacy, managing one's finances in a way that provides peace of mind, and setting short- and long-term goals related to that aim.
  • Cultural - Understanding and appreciating one's own cultural background, recognizing how the experiences of all individuals may differ based on their cultural backgrounds, and respecting the diversity and perspectives of those individuals, their cultures, and their experiences. Sometimes viewed as part of Social or Spiritual Wellness.
  • As well, you have identified behaviors that support well-being in each category.
• Major Causes of Death
  • Heart disease is the leading cause of death for all Americans.
  • Other major causes are unintentional accidents, cancer, and suicide.
  • Media reporting often focuses on relatively rare instances of sensational causes of death.
• Cognitive Biases
  • Human thinking is bioenergetically expensive (it uses a lot of energy), creating a tendency for shortcuts.
  • These shortcuts can be unconscious (without our knowledge), often resulting in taking action based on false information.
  • Biases can present as false logic, stereotypes, generalizations, and other errors in logical thinking.
  • All humans are liable to experience cognitive biases and other forms of cognitive distortions.
  • Being aware of biases does not prevent them from affecting you, but to avoid allowing the bias or distortion to affect your judgment or action.
    • Metacognitive skills allow for better recognition and remediation (dealing with) of cognitive biases.
• Emotional Intelligence
  • Emotions appear to be primal, instinctual reactions to stimuli in our environment.
  • Emotions are often complex, can be unpleasant, and seem to arise without our control.
  • Ignoring or disregarding emotions does not appear to support long-term well-being.
  • Unrecognized emotions appear to affect perception, judgment, and behavior (without one's knowledge).
  • The R.U.L.E.R. method is a tool you can use for monitoring and addressing your emotional well-being.
    • Recognize
    • Understand
    • Label
    • Express
    • Regulate
  • Emotions may often be multilayered, with multiple emotional experiences occurring simultaneously.