An enlightening read for anyone who wants to learn more about joy and related emotions.
In this debut nonfiction work, an academic, clinical psychologist, and psychotherapist reviews the scholarship on joy and attempts to define what it is and how it comes about.
Meadows studied the phenomenon of joy in depth while teaching at Nashville, Tennessee–based Vanderbilt University, where he gathered subjective accounts of joyful experiences from 300 students. Joy, he writes, is “one of the most over-used and under-valued words in the English language.” A “kind of happiness industry has developed,” he says, causing a flood of self-help books and use of “joy” as a marketing buzzword. Psychologists and other scholars have paid far more attention to negative emotions, he notes; nevertheless, positive ones, including joy, have come in for their share of scrutiny, and he covers a lot of ground reviewing literature in the field, starting with Aristotle and working his way through contemporary studies. Joy is not just a feel-good emotion, he writes, but an important mental armament that “serves crucial evolutionary functions,” helping to ensure that infants receive proper care and spurring couples to reproduce, for example. Meadows compares and contrasts it with other, similar emotions, such as happiness, ecstasy, pleasure, transcendence, and even the manic phases of bipolar disorder. Despite its importance, though, joy “comes to a person on its own schedule,” unbidden, Meadows notes, and it’s as fruitless to pursue it—although one may better accommodate it by using philosophy, religion, one’s work, and other channels. Overall, Meadows has written a fascinating book that’s rich in scholarship and detail yet also accessible to general readers. He writes clearly and backs up his work with abundant, intelligently analyzed sources. However, he does fall prey to occasional glitches, such as writing “pedals” instead of “petals” and placing a contemporary scholar just two and a half centuries after Aristotle. That said, he makes a solid case for the evolutionary and emotional importance of joy—providing not only a description of it, but also hints as to how one might approach it, if not necessarily attain it.
An enlightening read for anyone who wants to learn more about joy and related emotions.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-415-84123-8
Page Count: 308
Publisher: Routledge
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
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These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.
A helpful guide to working effectively with people from other cultures.
“The sad truth is that the vast majority of managers who conduct business internationally have little understanding about how culture is impacting their work,” writes Meyer, a professor at INSEAD, an international business school. Yet they face a wider array of work styles than ever before in dealing with clients, suppliers and colleagues from around the world. When is it best to speak or stay quiet? What is the role of the leader in the room? When working with foreign business people, failing to take cultural differences into account can lead to frustration, misunderstanding or worse. Based on research and her experiences teaching cross-cultural behaviors to executive students, the author examines a handful of key areas. Among others, they include communicating (Anglo-Saxons are explicit; Asians communicate implicitly, requiring listeners to read between the lines), developing a sense of trust (Brazilians do it over long lunches), and decision-making (Germans rely on consensus, Americans on one decider). In each area, the author provides a “culture map scale” that positions behaviors in more than 20 countries along a continuum, allowing readers to anticipate the preferences of individuals from a particular country: Do they like direct or indirect negative feedback? Are they rigid or flexible regarding deadlines? Do they favor verbal or written commitments? And so on. Meyer discusses managers who have faced perplexing situations, such as knowledgeable team members who fail to speak up in meetings or Indians who offer a puzzling half-shake, half-nod of the head. Cultural differences—not personality quirks—are the motivating factors behind many behavioral styles. Depending on our cultures, we understand the world in a particular way, find certain arguments persuasive or lacking merit, and consider some ways of making decisions or measuring time natural and others quite strange.
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.Pub Date: May 27, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61039-250-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
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