Your thoughts, emotions, and behaviors can form a vicious feedback loop, sending you into a downward emotional spiral. You get a bad review from your boss, and start to feel upset. This negative emotion brings on thoughts about when you've made mistakes at your job, and you feel even worse. You now start imagining your boss firing you, and your mood sinks into despair.
Let's dissect what's going on here. An event triggers an upsetting thought, and the thought causes negative emotion. With you...
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distortion
How Journalism Distorts Reality
Journalism provides us with important information about what's going on in the world. But when you consider the incentives that journalists have, combine that with their usual lack of scientific training, and add in the constraints of the medium in which they work, serious distortions of reality can result. Many journalists produce excellent work. But others leave you less informed after reading their articles than before you began.
What causes journalistic distortion?
1. Equal time to eac...
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The Interplay Between Your Reason and Emotions
It can sometimes be useful to think of yourself as consisting of multiple systems. You have an emotional system that constantly processes your sensory input and thoughts, and produces emotions like fear, anger, happiness and contempt based on this input. You also have a reasoning system, which is what you use when you are reasoning, planning, analyzing and consciously predicting. But the operations of these two systems are not independent. In fact, they each have the power to alter the operation...
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