After what was a grueling year for so many of you, you now find yourself with time on your hands. Oddly, just when you feel so great that you can finally relax with no exams to study for or papers to write, you might discover that you feel a bit down. You might even be getting over a cold or some over ailment that comes with the end-of-semester let-down. This kind of temporary let-down is common. It likely will pass as you come to structure your summer and get busy with your new commitments and routine.

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.

School’s just about out now, and many of you will soon have time on your hands. If you decide to use your summer to beef up your poker game, pleease get yourself financially and emotionally ready for the inevitable swings of the game. This means making sure that you are not in a game that is too big for you. And when you do find yourself in a big downswing, perhaps you can be comforted by the following (I wrote this after my own gut-wrenching downswing 2 years ago):

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.

This week I showed my Personality class some data (from Jean Twenge and her colleagues) that the students already knew about. It turns out that college students’ narcissism, as measured by the Narcissism Personality Inventory, has been steadily rising since 1982.

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.

I was at work late this past Wednesday. In honor of Holy Week, there was a sermon on the lawn just outside my office. In it, the priest emphasized the idea that we should transcend superficiality in our lives.

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.

After much anticipation, I finally heard back from a big literary agent in New York about my newest idea for a book (incidentally, it’s called, The Unpopular Child: How to Help Your Kid Fit in). She wrote, ”This one really rubbed me the wrong way.”

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.

This week I happened to catch part of a Biography channel’s special on Howard Schultz, the super-successful entrepreneur behind Starbucks’  becoming a coffee-house sensation. The show detailed how Mr. Schultz had come from extreme poverty to become a multi-millionaire. A key to his rise was the usual story: An optimistic entrepreneur persisting in the face of long odds to obtain extreme success. The message is one we Americans hear over and over about how if we try hard enough, we can reach any goal.

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.

I just got back from a psychology conference in Las Vegas. The most interesting thing about my trip was not my coming back from a $5000 loss at the poker tables to losing only $800. No. It was a great talk by leading psychologist Jennifer Crocker on building self-esteem.

Professor Crocker explained that many college students try to build their self-esteem by showing their peers how great they are. But these attempts to look good don’t work. What she has found that DOES work is being responsive to your peers’ need for self-esteem. You build them up, and then your self-esteem goes up.

Professor Crocker studied college students and found that their responsiveness to their roommates was followed down the road by elevations in their own self-esteem.

So try making your friends feel particularly good about themselves this week and let’s see what happens!

The following question came yesterday from Brittany, a student in my upcoming Personality class:

“What are some good techniques that can be used to avoid procrastinating and to get studying and assignments done more efficiently?”

Well, Brittany, let me start by noting that procrastination is extremely common among college students. You have so many assignments and activities competing for your time. Plus, you are young, and thus need more sleep than you will later in life. This combination means you are frequently tired and feeling guilty about not getting more things done. I myself was a huge procrastinator in college, but now my husband calls me “the non-procrastinator.”

Some experts on procrastination say that the key to organizing your time and getting things done on time is to make a list of all the things you must do. You can make the to-do list for the next day before you go to bed. Then, when you wake up you can begin to tackle the items on the list. You keep reviewing the list and checking off items as you complete them. It’s a simple trick that might work.

But perhaps you don’t want to make lists and force yourself to organize your time. If that’s the case, you can decide right now that you know you a procrastinator and plan your procrastination. You can say at the beginning of the semester that you are only going to give yourself 2 nights to write any paper and 2 nights to study for any major exam. Through planning your procrastination, at least this way you won’t always feel guilty about not getting to your assignments (because it’s part of your plan for the semester). Do give yourself at least 2 nights for a big paper, though, because you will get insights on the paper in between the times you work on it.

If you think that these recommendations are too simplistic for your personal form of procrastination, then you could try reading the book Awaken Your Stronger Self: Break Free of Stress, Inner Conflict, and Self-Sabotage by Neil Fiore, PhD. It is well-reviewed and can be ordered at http://www.amazon.com/Awaken-Your-Strongest-Self-Self-Sabotage/dp/0071470263/ref=sr_1_11?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1262968117&sr=1-11

If you try any of these recommendations, please let us all know how it works for you!

On the way home from kindergarten last week, my daughter Jade complained, “Muriel says that her mommy is prettier than my mommy.”

My first thought was, of course, competitive. “Who is that prettier mommy?” “What does she look like?” And then, “It’s too bad that I’m not prettier for my daughter.”

My second thought was more constructive, “How can I make this a good learning experience for Jade?” So I said, “Which is more important, to be pretty or to be smart?” Without hesitation, 4-year-old Jade responded, “To be smart!”

What does all of this have to do with you as you prepare for your final exams and try to keep from getting the latest flu strain wiping out your dorm? If you are like many college women, you struggle with not feeling adequate about your face or body. You barely appreciate how smart you are and how far that can take you in life. These worries can put a huge dent in your learning.  

If you are dealing with an eating disorder or constantly feeling bad about your looks, please see a counselor at your university. Eating disorders can be treated successfully. Act now so that you can put your energy in developing your potential for advancing science, starting a business, heading a corporation, or whatever you want to do with your life. Later, you won’t have any regrets about having wasted your college years. (Besides, being powerful and successful is downright sexy!)

p.s. I showed this post to a particularly Clever student from my personality class. She reminded me that what men say about our attractiveness can keep us mired in thinking about our looks. For example, 2 weeks ago at a poker session at the Horseshoe casino, a regular player said, “See the woman at that table, Anita? She is the most beautiful woman who has ever been in this room.” I smiled inside thinking that I must look like part of the woodwork to this guy.

But instead of checking out this superior woman, I quite naturally starting talking about how gorgeous my own husband is. I discovered that the conversation turned to this man’s own insecurities. That was a pretty nice trick that I wish I had been Clever enough to use in college.