NOTE TO SELFJOY

A way to enjoy more positive mental images

A person drinking next to a large poster depicting steaming coffee cups on a green background.

I spotted an old beach ball in my shed the other day and I was suddenly transported to a joyful memory of running and splashing with my children on the sand at low tide. Psychologists call this ‘positive involuntary mental imagery’ – and they’re testing out ways to deliberately seed more such images (not least because experiencing them is associated with being more optimistic and less depressed). It’s early days for the research, but there’s no reason why we can’t try out one of the methods for ourselves.

To give it a go, take some photos from your daily life, such as what you see when you first get up in the morning; your trip to work; or from a typical evening out. Next, for each photo, combine it in your mind with a positive word, such as ‘pleasant’, ‘success’ or ‘triumph’, to create a completely new imagined scene. For instance, say you took a photo of your morning coffee cup. You’d look at the photo and, to combine it with the word ‘pleasant’, you could create a mental image of yourself sitting by a campfire with friends, savouring a hot chocolate from the mug. The idea is that when you encounter the real objects in the photos – such as your morning coffee cup – it serves as a trigger for the associated imagined scene while you go about your daily life.

A team led by Mahdi Bagheri at Ruhr-Universität Bochum in Germany – and including the Psyche author Simon Blackwell – enjoyed modest success with this very approach in a recent study published in the journal Memory. They think one trick to boosting the technique’s effectiveness is choosing the right photos – distinct enough to create a memorable association with the positive mental image you created (for the example above, try photographing your mug from an unusual angle), but not so unusual that you never actually encounter the trigger in your daily life.

by Christian Jarrett

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Simon Blackwell’s Psyche Idea ‘It’s Possible to Help More Positive Images Pop into Your Mind’ (2021) provides more background on the science of positive involuntary mental images and ways to induce them.

For a broader overview, this article in The Psychologist looks at the research into involuntary autobiographical memories.


A little Japanese trick for saying ‘no’

People in a small, well-lit Japanese restaurant or bar, with a menu on the wall and beverages on the counter.

As I’ve got older, I’ve got better at saying ‘no’ to requests I don’t fancy, but I regularly fail. Usually, I feel the urge to give a socially acceptable reason – busyness, or a clash. But, without an excuse, sometimes I lie (which feels wrong), or I people-please and agree (which also feels bad… for me).

So, during a recent trip to Japan, I was intrigued to learn a new word for ‘no’. In Japanese, saying chotto is a way of declining without offence. According to the newsletter Japan or Die, chotto translates directly as ‘a little’, but its meaning is more subtle: ‘If someone asks you if you want to go to a party tomorrow and that’s not something you want to do … all you have to say is Ashita wa chotto (‘Tomorrow is a little…’) and the meaning is conveyed.’

Chotto is an example of a conversational tactic called an ‘implicature’. As the philosopher of language Nikhil Mahant explained in a recent Aeon essay, it allows us to ‘convey meaning without breaking social norms’.

All languages have implicatures, but it turns out that cultures disagree on how to use them. One 2011 study, for example, explored the contrasting refusal strategies of American and Japanese participants. The Americans were more likely to give a direct ‘no’, or cite alternative plans (‘I’m busy that weekend’), whereas Japanese speakers would use chotto, or postpone an answer (‘Right now, I don’t know my schedule’). Interestingly, Japanese participants found the American strategies rude; the Americans found the Japanese tactics frustrating.

The language of implied refusal, it seems, is delicate, and sometimes you might offend without realising. Has learning this made it easier for me to say no? Well, a little…

by Richard Fisher

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If you’re an occasional people-pleaser (like me), learn the techniques of healthy, confident refusal in the Psyche Guide ‘How to Say No’ (2023) by Shayla Love.

The British philosopher Paul Grice argued that implicatures arise due to the desire to maintain cooperation and helpfulness during conversation. Learn more in his Aeon Idea ‘What We Say vs What We Mean: What Is Conversational Implicature?’ (2018).


NOTE TO SELFMUSIC

The beats that make us want to move

People dancing at an outdoor festival, colourful tents in background, clear blue sky overhead.

Some musical rhythms are like magic spells: when we hear them, many of us can’t help bobbing our heads, swaying in time, animating our arms and legs. The feeling we have in that moment has a scientific name: the ‘pleasurable urge to move to music’ (PLUMM).

I learned about PLUMM from a paper on why some rhythms incite that feeling more than others. It has a lot to do with the complexity of a rhythm. Previous research has shown that very simple or very complex rhythms provoke relatively little urge to move – likely they seem too predictable or too unpredictable, respectively. People tend to feel the most PLUMM when they hear rhythms of medium complexity (ie, those with a moderate amount of syncopation, or off-beat emphasis).

According to the researchers Alberte Seeberg, Tomas Matthews and colleagues, moderately complex rhythms hit a ‘sweet spot of predictability’, and the effect has been interpreted in light of the predictive processing framework in neuroscience. Recently, these researchers found that when a rhythm contains more than one drum sound (such as a combo of bass drum, snare and hi-hat), the advantage of medium complexity is more pronounced.

I love beats of many kinds, and this research got me thinking about why they make me feel the way they do. At the lower end of complexity, there’s a minimal techno rhythm like this one by The Field – great for focus, but it doesn’t inspire me to move. On the very complex end, a spiky, complicated rhythm by Autechre is something to get lost in, but good luck finding a way to dance to it. So what’s in that sweet spot? We all can think of dance-floor favourites, but try this track by Flying Lotus – a core pulse you can follow, seasoned with little surprises. Commence head-bobbing.

by Matt Huston

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The meaning of ‘syncopation’ is well demonstrated in this brief video by the musician Andi Rodhe. As he builds an increasingly syncopated beat, see if you find a ‘sweet spot’ partway through where the urge to move feels highest.

If you’d like to read about other ways that music grips the mind and why, check out the Psyche Idea ‘What Is It About Musical Hooks That Makes Them So Catchy?’ (2023) by Tim Byron and Jadey O’Regan.


NOTE TO SELFFRIENDSHIP

Our relationships, in five dimensions

Three people chatting at a rustic bar in a pub, with a brick interior and various decorations.

Let’s think about the various sorts of people we have some relationship with. I’ll start: there’s my wife, brother, parents, other family members, friends, coworkers. But there are also former coworkers, my doctor, the people I talk to only on social media, the owner of the vegan café…

Taking stock of my social life, I could sort these into crude groups such as ‘family’, ‘friends’ or ‘business’. But relationships are complicated, and there are surely more revealing ways to compare and contrast them. Much as personality models like the Big Five offer a distilled language for describing individuals – slightly introverted, highly conscientious, etc – a model for relationships might be useful for thinking and talking about the shades of difference.

So I was intrigued to read about a proposed ‘unified framework’ for capturing how people see relationships. Researchers asked people from 19 world regions to rate the features of various types of relationships, ranging from siblings to leader and follower to fans of opposing sports teams. They found that relationships could be described in terms of five main dimensions:

  • Formality: roughly, how formal and public a relationship is vs informal and private;
  • Activeness: how close and involved vs distant;
  • Valence: how friendly vs hostile;
  • Exchange: how much it involves trading concrete resources like money vs intangible things like affection; and
  • Equality: how equal each person’s power is in the relationship.

While the researchers say this model is ‘far from conclusive’, it does give scientists – and the rest of us – a new lens for considering our relationships and what they mean to us. Was the local bartender with whom I chatted about TV and movies for years a ‘friend’? Maybe, maybe not. But relationship traits like formality and exchange help me think about why there seemed to be more to it than ‘business’.

by Matt Huston

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In working out their model, the researchers considered some less common relationship types as well – such as Sugar Daddy and Sugar Baby, which you can read all about in the Psyche Idea ‘The Way Sugar Babies Navigate Two Roles: Lover and Employee’ (2024) by Brynn Valentine.

If there is anyone in your life who’s friend-adjacent or more of a stranger to you, but you’d like to be more sociable with them, check out the recent Psyche Guide ‘How to Strike Up a Friendly Conversation’ (2025) by Michael Yeomans.


As if

Pencil sketches of six faces and profiles on paper including bearded men and a woman with hair tied back.

Two puny words shoulder a substantial, if diffuse, philosophical outlook: as if. Epicurus was perhaps the first to put this unexceptional construction to good use. He felt that life was about attaining whatever passing happiness we might find, while avoiding as much pain and suffering as we can. In neither endeavour will we be very successful, but one strategy he suggested was to adopt values that increase our joy and diminish our sorrow, and live as if those values were actually true, though they may not be.

So began the history of as if, which flows through the Western tradition, intermittently emerging in the thought of thinkers from disparate schools. The idea, at bottom, that we should embrace beliefs or stories that may not be, strictly speaking, true but are to some extent useful or good. In the 18th century, Immanuel Kant held that we must act as if we have free will, even though science might one day demonstrate that we do not. The American philosopher William James’s pragmatism leans heavily upon living as if certain things were true, including meaningful human lives. The most prominent expositor was Hans Vaihinger, who attempted in his book The Philosophy of ‘As If’ (1911) to show that life is lived atop a teetering tower of ever-changing fictions.

All this resonates with my understanding of the way we tumble through existence. The phrase captures the latent but necessary hopes that get us over the numberless obstacles to living well and living happily – even if those hopes are, when we get down to it, preposterous. So, if it’s a question between truth and goodness, then I’ll take the latter and chuck the former. I’m satisfied to live as if it’s all worth something – whether or not, in the last analysis, it really is.

by Sam Dresser

FIND OUT MORE

Read Tereza Matějčková’s short but harrowing piece about the philosopher Emil Utitz, the Theresienstadt ghetto, and his reflections on ‘as if’.

For a contemporary take on the work that this philosophical outlook is doing today, this review by Thomas Kelly of Kwame Anthony Appiah’s book As If (2017) is a good place to start.

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