I am a Prof at UCSC and am looking for people of a reflective bent to participate in a research study of a new smartphone (android) app. that supports remembering and reflecting on your life. Basically it helps you to privately microblog about and reflect on, events in your life to better understand how reactions to events affects your moods and longer term happiness. We are looking to recruit people for a one month trial. Of course if people want to use the app for longer that would be terrific.
If you would like to participate we would ask you to record at least 3 events per day of your choosing and reflect on those events later. We would also like you to complete some surveys and a short interview to better understand how you were using the application.
Just to reiterate, at the moment we have an Android app., we are working on an iphone version but that’s not there yet.
Thinking in terms of “emotions are to be greatly affected by” is not founded on observation but IMO by medical misinformation. Emotions are being treated as something psychological, by which is meant “something in your head”… brain activity. However if you are a meditator and thus a consistent observer of the mind, ie thoughts, then you will find that the medical view is gravely wanting. Where there are thoughts that point to issues, those thoughts act as directives to the body, which means they cause activity in the body.
The main emotions are:
fear, which is caused by issues of danger and readies the body for action
anger, which is caused by issues of injustice and readies the body for some action to address the problem that is causing injustices, eg violations.
sadness, which is caused by loss and helps release old responses (through actions such as crying) and create new ones (such as new pathways in the brain).
joy, which is caused by issues of gain and pleasure and are expressed though laughter etc
worry, which is caused by perplexing issues and while the brain is needed for thinking and resolution, the body has to be brought to rest so the brain doesn’t compete for fuels with the musculature.
So really emotions are the rational changes to body function because some job needs to be done in or by the body. They are extremely important for self-observation because they are the result of issues/ thoughts in mind. Thus they are pointers to the issues, which we can then address if need be. Observing the mind /ie thoughts is the single most important observation a person can do, not simply to improve their wellbeing but also to overcome disease and I am talking about overcoming diseases like cancer without medical intervention.
This is the ultimate means of maintaining health and returning the body back to health quickly and efficiently and more than that. I have been able to ward off disease through the observation of emotional responses, bodily conditions and primarily thoughts so that disease does not develop in the first place. If you are interested you can visit my blog at http://kyrani99.wordpress.com/ where you’ll find the focus of my work and the key to my discoveries about disease is on observing self. OBSERVING SELF IS KING!