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Originally posted by Onet Wosix
Interesting, but do the physical diseases cause the depression, or does the depression cause the diseases?
Does Positive thinking really work?
Originally posted by Xcalibur254
if I remember the Undoing study correctly, initially positive affect was no different from baseline. It was not until a person was induced into a negative affect that positive affect had an effect.
Originally posted by Psychoparrot
If you get thrown into deep water and you can't swim - think 'negatively' about it and panic will set it, resulting in drowning. Think 'positively' and you may keep floating long enough to be rescued.
Originally posted by Onet Wosix
Maybe this sounds a bit of a strange thing to ask, but does that so called great thing, 'positive thinking' actually work to improve circumstances/ health etc?
I often wonder if all is predetermined and we are in the hands of fate...
or...is trying to make your brain positive thinking a good thing or is it mildly self-hypnotising and / or self delusional?
how would you test this?
if anyone has any experiences they would like to share, I would be very interested to read about them.
Thanks ATSers.
Originally posted by Xcalibur254
reply to post by Antoniastar
Baseline is their heart rate, etc. when their mood is neutral. In these experiments you take a baseline reading before inducing them into a negative mood, and this is what you're hoping a positive mood will bring them back to.
For the cognitive task the problem was finding a task where a negative affect caused one kind of result, while a positive affect caused the opposite result. The task we ended up using was a global-local task. An example of this would be if you showed someone a picture of a square made out of circles. You then ask what shape they saw. If they choose square they are globally focused, which is found to occur more when you are in a positive mood. If they choose circle they are locally focused, which occurs more with a negative affect. Unfortunately we did not get this result, so we were unable to find evidence of the undoing hypothesis in relation to cognitive processing. We did find some other interesting stuff though, but unless you've read the literature it won't make much sense.