June 14, 2017 at 10:17 am

I found an interesting article about our perception of the world:

“Recent studies suggest that personality traits don’t simply affect your outlook on life, but the way you perceive reality.”

Here is the link

June 17, 2017 at 6:02 am

Very interesting! Thank you for sharing this.

September 7, 2017 at 2:58 am

I agree, open minded people have different vision towards life. Really very interesting.

March 3, 2018 at 10:53 am

I am researching how dieting and exercise play a role in weight loss through a psychological lens and this article really helped me bring some ideas to light. The fact that having an open mind allows for different perceptions especially if they are open minded in creativity. I wonder if being open minded and having a different perspective on life has an effect on body image. Because if they are looking at everyday life in a different light then maybe they look at health and fitness differently as well. For example instead of abs and toned muscles as being healthy they see a happy, caring person as healthy.

Let me know if you have any thoughts!! Great find on this article.

March 7, 2018 at 5:14 pm

@ Becca, great question. That would be fun to research, and probably not too difficult…give someone the OCEAN to measure their openness, and then measure the degree of body image or body satisfaction, and then find the correlation (in SPSS or Excel, I think that would be called Pearson’s correlation or similar).

You wrote: “For example instead of abs and toned muscles as being healthy they see a happy, caring person as healthy.” This seems to get right to the heart of cultural expectations and ideal imagery. In a typical day, we see these ideal images all around us… beautifully toned and tanned abs…perfect bikini’d breasts…right there at the grocery check-out line. (Here it is easy to find fat-shaming as well…poking fun at a celebrity’s belly pooch or similar.) By the way, if you haven’t seen the Killing me Softly 4 (or 5?) documentary, I highly recommend it (though it is relatively hard to find) — it’s a powerful expose of how the advertisement industry at large has used dehumanizing and misogynistic imagery to promote products.

On another note in response to the quote above, I think of using a happiness scale rather than the worn-out economic scales (e.g., gross domestic product), in effect using a totally different lens. Example: http://worldhappiness.report/ed/2017/ 

Wishing you happy researching,

clark

June 2, 2021 at 11:10 pm

wow- really like a tunnel- makes me wonder how we will ever come to one common understanding of things,

esp quotable “visual phenomenon occurs when people are focusing so hard on one feature of a scene that they completely fail to notice something entirely obvious”