I myself am on a new summer schedule, working on a book and a paper. I won’t be posting regularly again until school is back in session at the end of August. However, I welcome your emails and will respond to them over the summer months.

It’s another night on-line playing Texas Hold’em, and you can’t believe you’ve dropped even more cash after you’ve been losing so much lately. Your slide has been so unbelievable that you bury your face in your hands and let out a muffled groan. Perhaps you feel some tears of frustration make their way past the corners of your eyes. “Why me?” you ask, wondering how such rotten players at your table seem to keep robbing you of pot after pot. It’s gotten to the point where you would gladly take a bit of luck over skill. To make matters worse, a close family member or friend expects to hear how you did. As a desperate young Hold’em player at the local casino once told another player at my table, “I would take a $30 win right now – anything.”

If you are in this spot, I know that it hurts. Research has shown that the brains of gamblers who are in the throes of chasing their losses look just like the brains of drug users coming down off a cocaine-induced high.

Chasing losses is so compelling because people would rather risk losing a lot more money than accept a certain loss. Years back, Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky set up a series of probability scenarios involving money and asked people which scenario they would prefer. Now using pure logic and probabilities, as opposed to emotion, you should just multiply the probability of an event and the amount of money gained or lost to see which option you should pick. For example, if asked whether you would rather have a 50% chance of losing 2500 dollars or a 100% chance of losing 1000 dollars, you should always pick the latter. This is because the expected loss of $1000 (1.00 X $1000) is less than the expected loss of $1250 (.50 X $2500).

But Kahneman and Tversky discovered that people routinely would pick the high probability of losing a lot of money over the certainty of losing less money. They concluded that it’s human nature to try run away from a certain loss. So, if you have recently lost a lot of money gambling, you are probably more anxious than ever to return to the tables and win it back.

If you are playing more and more because you simply can’t forgive yourself for wasting $500, $1,000, or even $20,000 or more at the tables, please consider the following. Instead of chasing your losses, you can put that energy into your career now so that later you will have such a huge bankroll that these early losses won’t seem so bad. You can be comforted later (and along the way) by the fact that your losses pushed you to maximize your earning potential with your career. Remember, even really good poker pros eek out only a meager living anyhow.

The reason I mention this now is that you are about to get the chance to express appreciation for your great professors, as well as to criticize the poor ones, on your Course Evaluation Forms (CIFs). But why should you stop there? If you want to applaud your professor, go ahead. If you want to give a small gift or leave a thank-you note, do it. You will feel really good about yourself for making your professor feel appreciated.

So what exactly does this mean? Have you youngsters watched one episode too many of Barney? Are you exploiting your roommates and friends more than your parents did back in college?

Jean Twenge has argued that this increase in narcissism is bad news because she has shown that when narcissists get rejected, they lash out aggressively against their rejecters AND innocent bystanders.

But maybe when you’re in college, you are supposed to be a little narcissistic. How else are you supposed to muster the energy to do important things with your life, like start a foundation or write a great book? Was Bill Gates a narcissist when he dropped out of Harvard to eventually head Microsoft and then start a foundation to save millions of children from dying of malaria?

Please let us know what your thoughts are about all this.

This made me reflect on how it might seem to students like psychology emphasizes exactly the opposite message. After all, psychologists have observed just how much weight people give to little things when deciding whether they want to be friends with us, date us, or even marry us. For example, something as small as your not giving a big enough tip to the waitress on a first date could turn your date off completely.

A solution that I have found for this seeming discrepancy between messages from the Church and from Psychology is as follows: Pay attention to the little things when it comes to other people, and keep the Big Picture in focus for yourself.

Ouch.

After feeling low about my prospects for getting a major book deal for a few days, I am now fired up and ready to work even harder on a new book idea.

It’s when we’re down and questioning our talents that we have the greatest opportunity to rise up and overcome our shortcomings. So, if you just got feedback on a paper or test and didn’t get the grade you were hoping for, keep in mind that you will have many opportunities to prove just how well you can do. One paper says little about how good a writer you are or how good you can be. Hang in there…you’ve still got your final papers and exams ahead of you.  You can figure out what went wrong and redouble your efforts to ace them.

It’s as if they don’t realize that professors can spot wording that is too professional sounding, too formal, or just plain too good to be the student’s own work. Then their professor can run the suspicious paper through a an Internet plagiarism detection service called TurnItIn. The service will tell the professor what percentage of the paper has been plagiarized.

The professor will then report the case to our Honesty Committee. The evidence from these TurnItIn reports can be so compelling that we are left with little choice but to find the student guilty and impose a hefty penalty to the student’s overall grade in that professor’s course.

So here’s a simple solution if you want to use written material from the Internet in your paper. Just rephrase everything — don’t take anything word-for-word unless you use quotation marks around it. And whether you paraphrase or put something in quotes, you must cite the source. Is that so hard?

Some will email me and tell me how bad they feel. They will ask what I think they should do. They seem surprised when I respond, “What prevents you from dropping my class?” It’s as if students believe that we professors think that you should stick it out no matter what. They think that things somehow will get better by the end of the semester if  they simply stick it out.

Here’s my advice: If your university gives you the opportunity to drop classes well into the semester, do it. Dump those classes that will hurt your GPA. There is no reason to feel guilty for dropping.

However, Lisa Aspinwall and Linda Richter (1999) discovered an interesting thing about optimists. Optimists, as compared with pessimists, are more likely to quit an unsolvable task if they can switch to a solvable one. Thus, it might not be so much that persistence is key to the success of optimists. Rather, it’s a combination of persistence plus staying only with efforts that are most likely to pay off.

So if you get rejected on some project that means a lot to you, maybe you should persist on it… Or maybe you should consider switching to something else that is more likely to get accepted.

The answer to this question isn’t really important. What is important is realizing that people — including your professors — put way too much weight on noteworthy events like showing up late the first day or surfing the Internet during class one time to decide what kind of student you are. A famous personality researcher named Walter Mischel discovered that indeed people weigh too heavily these “prototypical behaviors” that squarely represent the broader class of a given trait when judging others to have certain personality traits. This means that based on just one or two noteworthy events, the professor might label you to be an uncaring student.

But you can use this kind of information to help you make a great impression on your professor (or your friends for that matter). For example, you can be the one student who understands a particularly hard reading and offers an especially insightful comment about it.  Or you can be the one student who turns in her midterm paper early.

You knew all this already, didn’t you? After all, you go to the hospital for a sick friend or bring the chicken noodle soup to the sick friend in your dorm…you do these prototypical things, and your friend will never what a caring friend you are.