Why Justin Bieber is the perfect narcissist

Why Justin Bieber is the perfect narcissist

 

I have been researching and writing quite a bit lately on Narcissism. I am particularly interested in how to recognize them from their nonverbal behavior and how those behaviors may assist them in becoming successful.

 

Why Justin Bieber is the perfect narcissist

Beliebe in the academic research on self-infatuation

By Keith Wagstaff | October 8, 2013

 

 

Consider the Bieber. The 19-year-old pop star has repeatedly engaged in reckless behavior with little consideration for those around him, regularly pairs tank tops with gold chains, and once said that if Anne Frank were alive today, she "would have been a Belieber."
In other words, he is a massive narcissist. (Also in this category: Miley Cyrus). But how did he get that way?
Luckily, there is a wealth of academic information that explains the self-absorbed media sensation that is Justin Bieber. Let's look at the four qualities researchers have recently linked with a high probability of narcissism.
Creativity
In a new study published in the journal Thinking Skills and Creativity, British researchers found that people who think of themselves as creative and who engage in creative activities are more likely to display narcissistic tendencies.
First, subjects were asked to rate how creative they were, and how many creative activities (like writing a poem or choreographing a dance) they had participated in over the last year. Then they were asked to answer questions from the Narcissistic Personality Inventory.
It turns out that agreeing with statements like "I am more capable than other people" was "the variable that most strongly predicted not only self-assessed creativity (no surprise there), but also engagement in creative activities," according to Tom Jacobs at Pacific Standard.
In a previous study, Cornell researchers found that narcissistic people were better at selling their creative ideas — in this case, movie concepts. Ideas were accepted more often when pitched by a narcissist, even when judged unimpressive on paper. Jacobs sums up the link between narcissism and creativity thusly:

There's no evidence at this point that narcissists are more creative than the rest of us. But there is evidence that they think they are, and that that belief drives them to try their hand at various creative pursuits. [Pacific Standard]

Wealth
Another sign of narcissism: Wealth. This summer, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, published a study that showed that people who were wealthy scored higher on a series of four tests meant to measure narcissism. One them involved a mirror, which moneyed subjects were more likely to use before getting their picture taken.
Not only that, the effects scaled up, meaning that "the wealthier you were, the more entitled and narcissistic you were," according to PBS.
Obsession with social media
Research has also shown that narcissists are more active on social media. The young and self-absorbed especially prefer Twitter, which one study called a "means of amplifying one's own perceived superiority to others."

Facebook, on the other hand, was used by narcissists to curate a positive image of themselves. Science has yet to determine where Instagram selfies rank against other social media phenomena, but considering the top hashtag on Instagram is #me, there is a good chance there is a link to narcissistic behavior.
Youth
Speaking of young people, a study by San Diego State University professor Jean M. Twenge found that millennials scored 30 percent higher on the Narcissistic Personality Inventory than young people from the 1970s. More college students today, according to Twenge, rank themselves as "above average" and use more first-person singular pronouns in their writing.
Not everyone agrees with her research. Some critics point out that young people are intrinsically more self-absorbed than older people, no matter the generation, while others note that she only talked to young people from elite colleges, who don't represent millennials as a whole.
Of course, any of these academic studies could be overturned in the future. Like IQ tests, many question whether the Narcissistic Personality Inventory is flawed.
Still, the research over the past few years does paint a pretty convincing picture of what makes a person narcissistic. A millennial singer with a huge social media following who has enough money to crash his Ferrari into a photographer? Yeah, that sounds like this guy:

Patti Wood, MA, Certified Speaking Professional - The Body Language Expert. For more body language insights go to her website at www.PattiWood.net. Check out Patti's website for her new book "SNAP, Making the Most of First Impressions, Body Language and Charisma" at www.snapfirstimpressions.com. Also check out Patti's YouTube channel at http://youtube.com/user/bodylanguageexpert.

Why We Like Round Curvy Shapes, Attraction

Why We Like Round curvy Shapes, Attraction


It not only effects the way we look at art, but it effects and may be because of what we find attractive.


Do our brains find some shapes more beautiful than others?

And what exactly is happening in our brains when we look at these shapes?

By Megan Gambino, Smithsonian | November 19, 2013

 

A century ago, a British art critic by the name of Clive Bell attempted to explain what makes art, well, art. He postulated that there is a "significant form" — a distinct set of lines, colors, textures, and shapes — that qualifies a given work as art. These aesthetic qualities trigger a pleasing response in the viewer. And that response, he argued, is universal, no matter where or when that viewer lives.
In 2010, neuroscientists at the Zanvyl Krieger Mind/Brain Institute at Johns Hopkins University joined forces with the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore to conduct an experiment. What shapes are most pleasing, the group wondered, and what exactly is happening in our brains when we look at them? They had three hypotheses. It is possible, they thought, that the shapes we most prefer are more visually exciting, meaning that they spark intense brain activity. At the same time, it could be that our favorite shapes are serene and calm brain activity. Or, they surmised, we very well might gravitate to shapes that spur a pattern of alternating strong and weak activity.
To investigate, the scientists created ten sets of images, which they hung on a wall at the Walters Art Museum in 2010. Each set included 25 shapes, all variations on a laser scan of a sculpture by artist Jean Arp. Arp's work was chosen, in this case, because his sculptures are abstract forms that are not meant to represent any recognizable objects. Upon entering the exhibition, called "Beauty and the Brain," visitors put on a pair of 3D glasses and then, for each image set, noted the their "most preferred" and "least preferred" shape on a ballot. The shapes were basically blobs with various appendages. The neuroscientists then reviewed the museum-goers' responses in conjunction with fMRI scans taken on lab study participants looking at the very same images.
"We wanted to be rigorous about it, quantitative, that is, try to really understand what kind of information neurons are encoding and…why some things would seem more pleasing or preferable to human observers than other things. I have found it to be almost universally true in data and also in audiences that the vast majority have a specific set of preferences," says Charles E. Connor, director of the Zanvyl KriegerMind/Brain Institute.

"Beauty and the Brain Revealed," an exhibition now on display at the AAAS Art Gallery in Washington, D.C., allows others to participate in the exercise, while also reporting the original experiment's results. Ultimately, the scientists found that visitors like shapes with gentle curves as opposed to sharp points. And the magnetic brain imaging scans of the lab participants prove the team's first hypothesis to be true: these preferred shapes produce stronger responses and increased activity in the brain.
As Johns Hopkins Magazine so eloquently put it, "Beauty is in the brain of the beholder."
Now, you might expect, as the neuroscientists did, that sharp objects incite more of a reaction, given that they can signal danger. But the exhibition offers up some pretty sound reasoning for why the opposite may be true.
"One could speculate that the way we perceive sculpture relates to how the human brain is adapted for optimal information processing in the natural world," reads the display. "Shallow convex surface curvature is characteristic of living organisms, because it is naturally produced by the fluid pressure of healthy tissue (e.g. muscle) against outer membranes (e.g. skin). The brain may have evolved to process information about such smoothly rounded shapes in order to guide survival behaviors like eating, mating, and predator evasion. In contrast, the brain may devote less processing to high curvature, jagged forms, which tend to be inorganic (e.g. rocks) and thus less important."
Another group of neuroscientists, this time at the University of Toronto at Scarborough, actually found similar results when looking at people's preferences in architecture. In a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences earlier this year, they reported that test subjects shown 200 images — of rooms with round columns and oval ottomans and others with boxy couches and coffee tables — were much more likely to call the former "beautiful" than the latter. Brain scans taken while these participants were evaluating the interior designs showed that rounded decor prompted significantly more brain activity, much like what the Johns Hopkins group discovered.
"It's worth noting this isn't a men-love-curves thing: Twice as many women as men took part in the study. Roundness seems to be a universal human pleasure," writes Eric Jaffe on Co.Design.
Gary Vikan, former director of the Walters Art Museum and guest curator of the AAAS show, finds "Beauty and the Brain Revealed" to support Clive Bell's postulation on significant form as a universal basis for art, as well as the idea professed by some in the field of neuroaesthetics that artists have an intuitive sense for neuroscience. Maybe, he claims, the best artists are those that tap into shapes that stimulate the viewer's brain.
"Beauty and the Brain Revealed" is on display at the AAAS Art Gallery in Washington, D.C., through January 3, 2014.
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Patti Wood, MA, Certified Speaking Professional - The Body Language Expert. For more body language insights go to her website at www.PattiWood.net. Check out Patti's website for her new book "SNAP, Making the Most of First Impressions, Body Language and Charisma" at www.snapfirstimpressions.com. Also check out Patti's YouTube channel at http://youtube.com/user/bodylanguageexpert.

How We Should Wash Our Hands and Just How Bad We Are At Washing Them

How We Should Wash Our Hands and Just How Bad We Are At Washing Them

Shaking Hands with All Those Pesky Germs Out There Seems Like a Scary Thing to do
I am a body language expert and I wrote the book SNAP about first impressions. I tell my clients to shake hands to bond and create rapport with people quickly. I have done years of research on handshakes so I think you should read this article and learn how to properly wash your hands and you might want that that person in the rest room with your to wash their hands as well.
Here is the research on germs a
We are very, very bad at washing our hands, says science

A whopping 95 percent of people are doing it wrong

By Chris Gayomali | December 16, 2013

 

Let's talk about a very important and delightful subject: Washing your hands.
Your hands, as you've probably discovered by now, are very useful things. They help us tap keyboards, greet friends, and scratch itches. They also have the miraculous ability to hold stuff.
But because they're in a constant state of contact with the world and all its invisible ickiness, your hands can double as Petri dishes for bacterium like E. Coli and other fun diseases. One 2008 study, for example, identified more than 4,700 bacteria species spread across a rather narrow sample of 102 human hands. Hand-washing is in many ways our immune system's first and most powerful line of defense.

But the fact of the matter is that we are very, very terrible at washing them. One recent study from Michigan State University found what may be the most disgusting statistic available: After observing 3,749 people using public restrooms (don't ask), researchers discovered that just five percent — five percent! — of all men and women were washing their hands correctly.
To make matters worse, research suggests hot water might not do all that much to stave off pesky germs, unless you somehow possess the bizarre ability to withstand 212°F temperatures.
Furthermore, the FDA is calling the safety of our current crop of antibacterial soaps into question: Triclosan, a chemical used in more than 75 percent of antibacterial soaps, might interfere with how hormones affect the body, "messing with fertility and puberty and increasing one's risk of cancer," reports The Verge.
So as we approach Flu Season 2013-14, what's the best way to wash your hands and keep germs and other nastiness from invading your delicate immune system? For the time being, at least, it may be best to stick with regular, non-antibacterial soaps. Frequency is still key: Wash your hands when you get into the office, after you press an elevator button, after gripping a subway pole, anytime you're about to put food in your mouth, etc.
If you need a refresher, here's how to best wash your hands, per the CDC's official hand-washing page:

Wet your hands with clean, running water (warm or cold), turn off the tap, and apply soap.

Lather your hands by rubbing them together with the soap. Be sure to lather the backs of your hands, between your fingers, and under your nails.

Scrub your hands for at least 20 seconds. Need a timer? Hum the "Happy Birthday" song from beginning to end twice.

Rinse your hands well under clean, running water.

Dry your hands using a clean towel or air dry them. [CDC]

And remember: Do not touch the doorknob bare-handed on your way out.

 

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Patti Wood, MA, Certified Speaking Professional - The Body Language Expert. For more body language insights go to her website at www.PattiWood.net. Check out Patti's website for her new book "SNAP, Making the Most of First Impressions, Body Language and Charisma" at www.snapfirstimpressions.com. Also check out Patti's YouTube channel at http://youtube.com/user/bodylanguageexpert.

Is It Time for Doctors to Ditch the White Coat? First Impressions in Health Care

Is It Time for Doctors to Ditch the White Coat? First Impressions in Health Care

You go to the doctor and he or she walks into the room with that clinical white coat. How does that effect their first impression? And how does that effect you as the patient. You may know that I speak on body language and patient care so I particularly interested in the latest research on doctors white coats.


Is it time for doctors to ditch the white coat?

The traditional uniform is causing more problems than you think

By Andrew Park | December 17, 2013

 

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Anyone who has considered medicine as a career imagines walking into a white, clean exam room with the power to comfort and heal the sick. To add to this angelic fantasy, we do not forget to imagine ourselves wearing a freshly laundered white coat bearing what only many years of arduous education and sleepless nights can provide: First name, last name, M.D.

The white coat is a badge of perseverance, intelligence, empowerment, and authority — for new interns, a reassurance that they have what it takes to take care of the life of another. But this Victorian symbol of purity and sanitation may soon go the way of the lobotomy.

I recently returned from an interview at Mayo Clinic, where I was surprised to see so many business suits. As one of the world's meccas for medicine and health care, I expected a place that resembled, well, a hospital. Instead I encountered what appeared to be a fancy hotel with a curiously large number of wheelchairs.

The rationale behind the white coat restriction makes sense given Mayo's dedication to providing the best for patient care and comfort. The organization's philosophy: The white coat builds a barrier between patient and physician, increasing the chances for the patient to feel anxious.

And Mayo patients seem to like it. Surveys have found that patients felt most comfortable when physicians wore scrubs, followed by semi-formal/business attire, then followed last by white coats. In order to maintain its high standards of professionalism, Mayo went with the suit and eschewed the white coat. (The only ones who can wear white coats in public are those in scrubs coming from or going to the OR.)

In a separate 2005 report published in the British Medical Journal, researchers found that patients preferred doctors wearing semiformal attire — defined as dark pants and long-sleeved shirt with a tie for men, and dark-colored skirts or pants with a blouse for women. Those ensembles beat out the white coat, formal wear, and casual attire.

Mayo is not alone in recognizing the symbolic power of the white coat. As Jean-Phillip Okhovat, a UCLA medical student, puts it, "I think the white coat creates an immediate sense of hierarchy. Not wearing a white coat makes it less intimidating for the parent and child."

In psychiatry, the white coat can not only add to this patient-physician barrier, but also become a target of aggression for patients with a history of troubled visits to the doctor. Yang Yu, a University of California, Irvine, medical student, recalls, "Mentally ill patients can perceive the white coat as a threat. There have been instances of people in white coats who were attacked."

Inevitably, when the topic of white coats comes up, the issue of spreading infections is never far away. Even as someone who works in health care, the white coat can sometimes make me cringe. I have no idea how many hundreds of patients that coat rubbed up against, and sometimes I can tell that the coat has not been washed in weeks. The gloves get changed, the paper on the examination bed gets rolled out, and copious amounts of hand sanitizer are used, but none of that may matter if the biggest culprit is right on the doctor's clothes.

In one study, researchers found that doctor's white coats were contaminated with all kinds of bacteria, including Staphylococci resistant to penicillin, erythromycin, and clindamycin. The worst areas were the sides of the white coat, the cuffs, collars, and pockets.

The National Health Service in the U.K. has already banned the use of long-sleeved white coats, and instead adopted a "bare below the elbows" rule to reduce unnecessary infections. The NHS also requires that doctors leave their uniforms at the workplace, where it is regularly laundered to reduce cross-contamination. This policy has already shown a marked reduction in infections. (I should mention, however, that despite evidence showing that white coats harbor bacteria, many professionals remain unconvinced that this makes a difference in terms of nosocomial infections.)

Every July and August of each year, recently admitted medical students don fresh white coats to symbolize the beginnings of this arduous yet rewarding journey toward becoming a physician. But the tone is changing as physicians continuously ask themselves how best to serve their patients. As Don Berwick, a Harvard Medical School professor and former Administrator of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, put it at the commencement for the Yale School of Medicine in 2010:

Those who suffer need you to be something more than a doctor; they need you to be a healer. And to become a healer, you must do something even more difficult than putting your white coat on. You must take your white coat off.

When you take off that white coat in the sacred presence of those for whom you will care — in the sacred presence of people just like you — when you take off that white coat, and tower not over them, but join those you serve, you become a healer in the world of fear and fragmentation.

Is it time for doctors to ditch the white coat?

The traditional uniform is causing more problems than you think

By Andrew Park | December 17, 2013

 

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Patti Wood, MA, Certified Speaking Professional - The Body Language Expert. For more body language insights go to her website at www.PattiWood.net. Check out Patti's website for her new book "SNAP, Making the Most of First Impressions, Body Language and Charisma" at www.snapfirstimpressions.com. Also check out Patti's YouTube channel at http://youtube.com/user/bodylanguageexpert.

Is Norman Bates a Realistic Psychopath? How Movies Portray Psychopaths and Psychologist Define Them

Is Norman Bates a Realistic Psychopath?
How Movies Portray Psychopaths and How Psychologist Can Use Movies to Help with a diagnosis.
I have studied the movies and the creative career of Alfred Hitchcock with a fascination that help prepare me for my TV interviews on HLN analyzing suspected Murderers. I have written extensively about narcissism and find this research fascinating. If you like the article you may want to pick up the nonfiction book The Murder Room about a real life secret society of experts who solve cold case murders. But don't, absolutely don't read the book in bed and then try to go to sleep.

Is Norman Bates a realistic psychopath?

A new study examines 400 movies to see whether Hollywood gets psychopathy right

By Matt Soniak | January 30, 2014   

 

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Pycho's psycho leaves a lot to be desired.
At least that's the conclusion of a new study that tried to determine realistic portrayals of psychopathic behavior on the silver screen. According to forensic psychiatrists Samuel Leistedt and Paul Linkowski, who led a team that studied hundreds of films, Norman Bates was too delusional and disconnected from reality to qualify as being a psychopath. The world's most famous mama's boy, if they had to diagnosis him, was more psychotic than psychopathic.
Bates isn't alone. Psychopathy isn't what most movies make it out to be, Leistedt and Linkowski say, and most psychos in film, especially in the medium's early days, are either caricatures or based on a poor or incomplete understanding of the disorder. And because the definition of psychopathy has changed over the years, movie psychos from one era might be diagnosed differently today.
To gauge the realism of movie psychos and see how their portrayals have evolved, Leistedt and Linkowski put together a team of forensic psychiatrists and movie critics to watch 400 movies dating from 1915 to 2010. The majority of psychopathic characters were ignored because they had magical powers, were nonhuman, or were otherwise way too unrealistic. The 126 characters that were left got a closer look from the team to find the most accurate psychopaths.
Aside from giving screenwriters and actors an idea of what they're doing right or wrong, the researchers hope that their work can be a useful teaching tool for psychology and psychiatry students. Diagnosing and recognizing psychopathy isn't easy, and very few students will get to see the real deal during their training. A library of the best movie psychos could be the next best thing — and a lot safer.
Here are a few of the movie psychopaths that the study deemed realistic, and those that were the stuff of fantasy.

Realistic psychopaths

(Facebook.com/No Country for Old Men)

1. Anton Chigurh, No Country for Old Men. The bolt pistol-toting hit man was called out for a frighteningly realistic portrayal of a damaged mind. Leistedt and Linkowski call him a "well-designed prototypical idiopathic/primary psychopath," who displays an " incapacity for love, absence of shame or remorse, lack of psychological insight, inability to learn from past experience, cold-blooded attitude, ruthlessness, total determination, and lack of empathy." Chigurh reminded them of real-life contract killers they've studied, like Richard "The Iceman" Kuklinski.
2. Gordon Gekko, Wall Street. "One of the most interesting, manipulative, psychopathic fictional characters to date," say Leistedt and Linkowski. "Successful psychopaths" and "corporate psychopaths" like Gekko are getting more attention from filmmakers and clinicians alike in the wake of global economic crisis, and the researchers expect to see more figures like this pop up in both movies and newspaper headlines.
3. Henry, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. The title character, inspired by real-life serial killer Henry Lee Lucas, shows a "powerful lack of empathy, emotional poverty, and a well-illustrated failure to plan ahead" that faithfully reflects the lack of stability in a psychopath's life.
4. Hans Beckert, M. "One of the first, rarest, and more realistic" portrayals before the 1960s, the character is an "outwardly unremarkable man tormented by a compulsion to murder children ritualistically, which is a substantially more realistic depiction of what would eventually be known today as a sexually violent predator (SVP)."

A little too crazy

(Facebook.com/The Silence of the Lambs)

1. Jason Voorhees, Michael Myers and other "slashers." On the whole, slasher films stray pretty far from realistic psychopathy. Even if you ignore the supernatural elements in some of the movies, the killers' sadism and "ability to predict the plan that the future victims will use to escape" left most of them excluded from serious analysis.
2. Hannibal Lecter, Silence of the Lambs. "Lecter is an exceptionally intelligent sophisticated socialite, whose disarming charisma, erudition, civility, and wit disguise his true nature," Leistedt and Linkowski say — and that's not a combination you'll often find in the real world. Lecter is not only an unrealistic psychopath, but also a poor depiction of a psychiatrist. He's "an extraordinarily astute clinician who can diagnose Jodie Foster's psychological conflicts by identifying her perfume and assessing her shoes and clothing with Holmesian accuracy." These abilities, Leistedt and Linkowski dryly note, "are not generally found in everyday clinical practice."

 

Patti Wood, MA, Certified Speaking Professional - The Body Language Expert. For more body language insights go to her website at www.PattiWood.net. Check out Patti's website for her new book "SNAP, Making the Most of First Impressions, Body Language and Charisma" at www.snapfirstimpressions.com. Also check out Patti's YouTube channel at http://youtube.com/user/bodylanguageexpert.