I’ve posted this quiz before, but because I think it’s such a very helpful thing to know about yourself, I’m posting it again. Recognizing this distinction has been one of the most important insights that I’ve had into my own nature — more helpful, say, than understanding that I’m an under-buyer, not an over-buyer.

A piece of advice I often see is, “Be moderate. Don’t have ice cream every night, but if you try to deny yourself altogether, you’ll fall off the wagon. Allow yourself to have the occasional treat, it will help you stick to your plan.”

I’ve come to believe that this is good advice for some people: the “moderators.” They do better when they try to make moderate changes, when they avoid absolutes and bright lines.

For a long time, I kept trying this strategy of moderation — and failing. Then I read a line from Samuel Johnson, who said, when someone offered him wine: “Abstinence is as easy to me as temperance would be difficult.”

Ah ha! Like Dr. Johnson, I’m an “abstainer.”

When I completed Elaine Aron’s Highly Sensitive Person Self-Test, I checked 24 statements. Out of 27.

I checked everything from being bothered by bright lights and loud noises to getting startled easily to trying to avoid mistakes to not watching violent movies or TV shows.

Maybe you can relate.

While there are many differences among highly sensitive people (HSPs), we have one thing in common: HSPs have a sensitive nervous system that makes it harder to filter out stimuli and easier to get overwhelmed by our environment.

For instance, the sound of sirens and other loud noises might reverberate like nails on a chalkboard through your head. (They do in mine.)  Crowds might make you especially uncomfortable, while strong smells make you feel sick.

Attachment styles form the basis for a psychology theory about how people interact with others in their life, and the world around them. While it can be traced back all the way to some of Freud’s writings, it was John Bowlby who devoted significant effort and research into expanding upon and demonstrating attachment theory.

“Attachment” refers to the emotional relationships we share with others in exchange for the things we most need out of life — comfort, care, and pleasure. Our attachment style is primarily formed in early childhood, according to this theory.

Bowlby identified four characteristics of attachment…

I’m pleased to introduce Character Strengths — a blog about positive psychology and figuring out how to …

We have dozens of quizzes here at Psych …

Last week, more than a few news agencies and blogs picked up the story that “one out of every 10 Wall Street employees is a psychopath.” This immediately caught my attention, because as a researcher, I found the statistic intriguing because it was so out of whack with the incidence of psychopathy in the general population.

But in trying to research where this statistic came from, I stumbled upon a symptom of what’s wrong with a lot of journalism today.

I can summarize the problem in one word — laziness. Many (most?) journalists nowadays take “experts” words for whatever claims they make, without ever bothering to check them out independently.

In his insightful book, The Addictive Personality: Understanding the Addictive Process and Compulsive Behavior, author Craig Nakken explains why, even after an addict has given up the bottle or the weed, she will never be done with recovery:

Addiction is a process of buying into false and empty promises: the false promise of relief, the false promise of emotional security, the false sense of fulfillment, and the false sense of intimacy with the world….Like any other major illness, addiction is an experience that changes people in permanent ways. That is why it’s so important that people in recovery attend Twelve Step and other self-help meetings on a regular basis; the addictive logic remains deep inside of them and looks for an opportunity to reassert itself in the same or in a different form.

Nakken brilliantly explains the addictive cycle that I merely call “the exploding head phenomenon”: the process by which I continually seek relief from uncomfortable feelings, a “nurturing through avoidance — an unnatural way of taking care of one’s emotional needs,” as he says. The addict, he clarifies, seeks serenity through a person, place, or thing.

This guest article from YourTango was written by Virginia Clark. 

This question haunts even the most confident women. You’re not alone. It comes up when you’ve spent years in and out of failed relationships and you finally reach the point wanting to give up on love.

If you ask this question in the form of a complaint, like “why me?” you won’t get a satisfactory answer. But if you ask it with an open mind and in the spirit of wanting to know the truth, it can make the difference between finding the love of your life — or being alone.

Here are three possible reasons why you might ask “Why am I still single?”

I started psychotherapy for the wrong reasons.

A few people had suggested throughout the past couple years that I do it, and I thought I’d go to one session to say I’d done it and be done with it. Well, I went to that one session and told the counselor I needed help with stress. She talked to me about stress, but in ending the session, rather than asking “Do you want to come back?” asked “When do you want to come back?”

I have difficulty saying no to anyone, so I agreed to a time. The next session went nearly identical to the first, but during the third session she redirected the goal of our sessions toward me talking more. She had me take some tests (MMPI-2 and MCMI) and I wrote out a list of my goals for her.

She never directly told me, but eventually I picked up that she thinks I have social anxiety disorder. She started having me write down situations in which I felt anxious and what I was thinking and feeling at those times, but I didn’t really understand the point of it. I started realizing just how much anxiety had controlled my life, but I didn’t feel like doing this was helping me.

What this work did do, however, was make me really want to be able to do the things I was so terrified of doing.

In his fascinating book Situations Matter: Understanding How Context Transforms Your World, psychology professor and researcher Sam Sommers, Ph.D, reveals the big impact context has on public behavior — how we think about others and even how we think about ourselves.

According to Sommers, “Even the most private of perceptions — our very sense of self — is shaped by where we are and who we’re with, though we may resist this notion.”

Our Iffy Introspection

Complete this statement five times: “I am _____________.” This is a short version of the “Twenty Statements Test.” If you were given this same test tomorrow or a few years from now or in a different place, do you think your answers would be the same?

Sommers doesn’t think so. He says that how we view ourselves actually changes over time and location. Even small changes in context can affect our responses in a big way.

Recently, when I was rereading Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, I was very struck by this observation about the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire:

The death of Guillaume Apollinaire at this time made a very serious difference to all his friends apart from their sorrow at his death. It was the moment just after the war when many things had changed and people naturally fell apart. Guillaume would have been a bond of union, he always had a quality of keeping people together, and now that he was gone everybody ceased to be friends.

The “quality of keeping people together” seems an important and rare attribute, and although it doesn’t come naturally to me, I’m trying to do a better job of it myself, and also to appreciate more the work of the Apollinaire-ish types whose efforts benefit me.

This quality has been on my mind since the sad occasion of a memorial service of a friend. I knew her in a work context, but at the service, I realized from the tributes of her college friends that, along with many other wonderful traits, she had the “quality of keeping people together” from that time.

My sister is this way, too, and from watching her in action, I know how much energy and time it takes to act like glue, to make the efforts that allow people to stay close.

I am often told that I should grow a thicker skin. I’m too sensitive. I let things get to me too much. Most people who struggle with depression are the same. We are more transparent and therefore absorb more into the gray matter of our brain than our thicker-skinned counterpoints.

In his book, Your Emotional Type, Michael A. Jawer and Marc S. Micozzi, Ph.D. examine the interplay of emotions, chronic illness and pain, and treatment success. They discuss how chronic conditions are intrinsically linked to certain emotional types.

I found the boundary concept they explain in the book — first developed by Ernest Hartmann, MD, of Tufts University — especially intriguing.