Guess What Today Is...

 Today is my Grandmother’s 72^nd birthday. In honor of that, I am going to share some things I am grateful for today that relate to my Mam-maw.

1.     Mam-maw is more pop-culture savvy than my beautiful mother. Thus, when I referenced the hump day camel to her, she laughed with me :)

2.     Both of my grandmothers had children ridiculously young (by today’s standards). Why am I grateful for this? Because I have had the blessing of knowing all of my grandparents and several of my great-grandparents. Mam-maw was a decade younger than my mother was when each had their first child, and as a result, Mam-maw was spry enough to play with me when I was growing up.

3.     Every time I think my Mam-maw is ready to depart from this life, she doesn’t. She has had medical issues since before I was born, and yet, here she is. When she lost her right leg to arterial disease the summer after my freshman year of college, I really thought she wasn’t going to live long. Two year later, she went on a trip to Israel and walked up mountains on her prosthetic leg because she had always wanted to visit the places where Jesus walked. Like a boss. 

4.     She and my Pap are farmers. Not only did I get to run around all over a farm when I was a kid, but do you have any idea how many cats they've had? Their excuse is that the cats keep down the rodents around the barn, but I know that deep down, they just like cats, too. And I have gotten to play with and name so so so many kittens. (Also, they consistently conspire with me to convince Mom to let me bring home kittens. I got two cats this way).

According to the caption under this picture I found, I named the white cat
Precisoca. But I didn't bring cats home until my debating skills became as creative
as my naming skills... Mam-maw and I just played with them at her house.

(gratuitous kitten shot)

5.     There are brave men and women who fight to protect us, and keep fighting when they come home. I am grateful for their sacrifice and courage. (How is this related? Shortly before losing her second leg, Mam-maw confided in me that they had shown her a Wounded Warrior video that showed how the double amputees put on their prostheses, and that she was pretty sure she couldn’t do it. Until she explained it to me, I didn’t realize how much harder it was to put on two prostheses instead of one, or just how much strength was required. Somehow knowing that makes me appreciate our service-men and -women even more.) 

(more gratuitous kitten shots)

6.     Mam-maw is generous, hardworking, and cares for others in her life sacrificially. I have learned from her example to value life, even if the life in question isn’t given much value in our society, like my mentally and physically handicapped aunt. My Mam-maw loves people in her life for who they are, not for what they can do, and I am exceedingly grateful for her example. 

Ready to Mingle? NO.

There are, occasionally, times when I wish that I weren’t single. I am not going to enumerate all of those here, but one such time is during my weekly (or sometimes more frequent) efforts to settle in to my new church[i]. This is not because I feel uncomfortable as a single person at my new church, or that all of the young married couples make me wish for what I don’t have (although there are many cute young couples... some of them with even cuter babies). The main reason is actually that I wish I had a companion and a teammate in all of this 'being the new person' business.

In my mind (in some part that I apparently don’t pay much conscious attention to, since I only just noticed this recently), I feel like it would be easier to reach out and get to know people if I had a base to reach out from instead of feeling adrift in a sea of 300 people I don’t really know yet.  This is true from both (1) an emotional energy perspective as well as (2) a behavioral perspective.

(1) I don’t know about you, but I find it emotionally draining to socialize with a ton of people that I don’t know well. The reverse is true of my close friends; spending time with them is relaxing and rejuvenating. I also find that it’s less draining to socialize and meet new people when I am with someone I am already comfortable with. I suspect that this is partially due to acceptance/approval and having a base of support. When you are meeting people and making new friends, you want them to like you (that piece of genius comes to you thanks to an expensive college education. You're welcome). Thus, when you are around new people, you are monitoring acceptance/rejection cues with more sensitivity, and I believe it makes a difference emotionally to have someone with you who is a solid base of acceptance. It's comforting and refreshing to know there’s already someone in the room who definitely likes you :)

(2) When you are around your friends, you act like yourself. When you are making friends, you want to do this, because if they don’t like who you are when you're comfortable, the friendship isn’t going to go far. However, you don’t act like yourself completely when you first meet people, because you want to make a good impression and, lets face it, deep down you are a weird, quirky, socially awkward person and you don’t want to overwhelm people the first time they meet you ;) I think that having a good friend with you when meeting new people acts as a behavioral buffer... you end up acting more like yourself because you are more comfortable, and people get to know you more easily.

Basically, going in pairs to a place where you are the only new people probably makes life easier.

Need more reasons why two are better than one? Ecclesiastes 4:9-12. And my cats.

So am I here to whine about how I don’t have a partner?  Nope. Been there, done that. I realized this week that I had been subconsciously resentful at God for sending me to church on my own, and then I reasoned out why (see above). And after allowing me my five-minute pity party, God shifted my perspective:

I have loved you with an everlasting love… (Jeremiah 31:3)

…I will never leave you nor forsake you. (Joshua 1:5)

Accept one another then, just as Christ accepted you… (Romans 15:7)

How easily I forget that I already have a base of support.  

Then, God reminded me that he uses seasons of life for a reason, and I realized that it is probably really good for me to learn to be myself around people that don’t know me without the benefit (or perhaps in my case sometimes... crutch?) of having a friend around. That seems like a good skill to learn, even if I find the alternative to be more comfortable. And even in this desire, it's not as if God has never blessed me with companionship. I went to college with my best friend, for goodness' sake, and half of the reason I know why it’s easier being new with a friend is because I can analyze my freshman year and the way we got involved in things together. 

So yes, I am getting involved by myself this time. And I am going to trust God’s timing and that he knows what he is doing with this. I don’t feel particularly more keen to go mingle, but maybe when I do it anyway, I will be a bit more like myself and less like that nice, shy girl that recently started going to Sovereign Grace. 

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[i] I found one, isn’t that great?!?! I am attending Sovereign Grace Church of Frederick, and I love the people, and the doctrine, and the worship style, and the preaching style, and the pastors, and the vision… basically, I am as happy as my friend Allison’s cat, Lilly, who got ALL the attention and cuddles she wanted when I visited last week.

 

Book Nerds and People Lovers Unite

This post brought to you by: Research I am not being paid to do

Hopefully someday I will tell you about my current unpaid research. But as I can’t do that right now, I wanted to tell you about some exciting research, which is tangentially relevant to my work, and was just published in Science by Kidd and Castano.

We read social cues all the time, pretty much without being deliberate or being taught to do so. Basically, humans have built in tools to help us get along in a social environment (and I think that is super cool, since we happen to live in a social environment). One of the major skills we have is inferring what people are thinking or feeling from their facial expressions. Now, there are a lot of ways that we do this (I’m not even going to start on how much I enjoy the show Lie To Me, which is loosely based on the life and work of psychologist Paul Eckman[i]) but a main source of information is the eyes.

Practicing reading Lilly from her eyes. In case
 you were curious, I scored a 30, so I'm
average. I think Lilly would have done better
than me, but she had trouble with the
trackpad on my laptop ;) 

“Reading the Mind in the Eyes” is a psychological task designed by Simon Baren-Cohen that is used to determine how well an individual can read other people’s emotions. How good are you at this? You can take a modified version of the test here. Some people really struggle with recognizing facial expressions; a marked inability to read facial expressions is common in disorders such as autism[ii], asperger’s, social anxiety disorder, PWS, etc. But even among people who can read facial expressions, there is a range of ability... in the task adaptation above, people with “average” ability fall between 22-30 correct out of 36.

“Yes, this is all very logical,” you are thinking to yourself. “I know some people who are more sensitive to the emotions of others around them than others. It makes sense that some people are better at this reading the eyes thing than others. But what’s the big deal?” 

Well, other than the fact that I think this is intrinsically cool, Kidd and Castano found out that you can manipulate this by reading. In their study, they had participants read literary fiction (think Jane Austen, Mark Twain, etc), popular fiction (think Hunger Games, Harry Potter, etc), serious nonfiction, or nothing for five minutes and then complete several tasks, including Reading the Mind in the Eyes. They found that people who read literary fiction performed better compared to all other groups. Reading for only 5 minutes improved recognition of facial expressions! The researchers suggested this might be because literary fiction, with its rich descriptions and complexity, leaves more to the imagination and causes the reader to make their own assumptions about characters’ emotional states.

Basically, reading well-written books is a good work out for the part of your brain that interprets people in real life. And it never hurts to be better at that. :) 

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[i] I am going to ramble about Lie to Me a bit, though. It is a very interesting show (which, alas, only ran for three seasons) about a man who is an expert in the science of facial expressions and body language. Not only is the show’s lead charachter, Cal Lightman, based off of the professional and personal life of Dr Eckman, but Eckman actually critiqued each episode on his blog, which I find both fascinating and hilarious.

[ii] There is some interesting speculation about a lack of theory of mind/inability to read other's emotions and an absence of eye contact in people with autism. They haven't established a causal relationship yet, but there are early intervention strategies that involve training kids with autism/aspergers to make eye contact or look at people's faces.