Please support the blog via Swish (Sweden), MobilePay (Finland) or Wise.
How do emotions affect people's minds when the future is uncertain and does valence play a role?
During my longstanding tenure as an expert in leadership – organization, > 100 000 hours, I have seeing ~10 000 athletes, students, and business executives passing by. In some of these cases, I have experienced situations where individuals and organizations have issues, one way or the other.
Humans' are the only species who can elaborate intentions and scenarios forward in time – apply Prospective thinking (Atance and O'Neill, 2001, 2005; Galistel, 2017; Gilbert och Wilson, 2007; Kaku, 2014 ; Locke and Latham, 2002; Moulton and Kosslyn, 2009; Österberg, 2012; Pluck, Cerone and Villagomez-Pacheco, 2023; Schacter och Addis, 2007; Suddendorf, Bulley, and Miloyan, 2018; Szpunar et al. 2014).
Prospection is part of something called the executive functions, a palette of 15-18 mental capacities which explains performance, learning, as well as creativity for problem-solving and innovation (Ardila, 2008; Ardila et al. 2018; Adornetti, 2016; Barkley, 2001; Coolidge and Wynn, 2018; Elliott, 2003; Lezak, 1982), and which unpacks at an early age (from 10 months) (Barkley, 2001; Baumrind's (1966; Liu et al. 2017; Tomasello et al. 2005).
There's a known father-effect; children who grow up with both parents or their father, have better executive functioning compared to children who grow up with a single mother (LaFlamme et al. 2012; Rolle et al. 2019; Sethna, 2017; Vieno et al. 2009, 2014; Österberg, 2004)
We also know from Swedish psychological scientist Anders Eriksson’s (1947 – 2020) work that deliberate practice will improve your skill in any field. Significantly. (Some people recognize that this resembles the so called 10 000 hour rule (Gladwell, 2008), which is a misinterpretation of Dr. Eriksson's work; there is a 10 000 hours level, but before that, there's a 4000 hour level).
The use of our executive functions can be interrupted by motivational and emotional PRIMEs (Buck, 1985; McDougall et al. 2005) which have been the dominant mental abilities, at least since the starting point for our lineage 7 to 6 million years before the present (Pickford och Senut, 2001; Pickford, 2006). And the emotional valence seems to play an important role. According to (Shuman et al. 2013):
“The distinction between the positive and the negative is fundamental in our emotional life” ... “This multifaceted conceptualization of valence is highly compatible with the frequent observation of mixed feelings in real life” (Abstract).The outcome can be called a bad apple.
“A single “bad apple” can reduce team performance by 30 – 40%. That's not a typo – one negative person can slash your team's effectiveness by nearly half” (The Leaders Guide).My involvement as coach, manager, and eventually lecturer and researcher, concerning individual and organizational performance, learning, and creativity for problem-solving and innovation, started in my teens.
First, being lucky to experience the important father-influence, by working side-by-side with my father in our family’s business. That included having business related conversations with my father (who also was the executive).
In parallel, I was assigned dual roles: (1) manager and (2) head coach for a smaller sports operation. As a manager, I mainly negotiated investments and personnel matters (like today's financial officer's and HR), which caused the inventory to increase by more than 100% and the organization to grow 1400 % to 14 assistant coaches.
I asked one of those Large Language models (LLM) to translate 'organizational size', based on the premise that the manager were of more typical age, that is, 35-40. The response: ~150 people.
As a coach, I mainly applied goal-setting theory (Locke and Latham, 2002) and Baumrind's (1966) research on parenting styles (because her model is consistent with leadership models), biomechanics and physio stuff, which together proved to improve the athletes performance. Significantly.
When I stepped down as the head coach/manager, I was offered the role of head of education for a sports association. I developed courses and traveled Sweden to deliver these courses. I taught what I knew best: goal-setting theory, research on parenting styles, biomechanics and physio stuff.
In the midst of all that, I was asked to work for a couple of days in a company to clean up their business administration (mainly accounting). I stayed for two years, solving the problem, and significantly improving my financial skills.
Then I started my own educational company; I kept travelling in Sweden to teach goal-setting theory, parental styles, biomechanics and physio stuff. And sometime around this time, I also became a so-called executive coach (years of training with my father kicked in). That means I advised managing director's and CEO's, by answering questions about things concerning leadership and organization from a perspective of business administration and prospective psychology.
Eventually, after studying marketing at a private institution, I received my bachelor's thesis in experimental emotional psychology (Österberg, 2001), and master's degrees in business administration (Österberg, 2002), and and social psychology (Österberg, 2004).
When star-psychologist Daniel Kahneman (1934 – 2024) was nominated to receive The Sweden's Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred, for Amos Tversky's (1937 – 1996) and his work on “natural stupidity”, I was recruited to the only fully financed position at a faculty for business administration and economics, to write my doctorate (and to tutor researchers on method). I was also assigned by various university colleges in Sweden to be the expert lecturer on matters concerning leadership – entrepreneurship, and creativity. As the crowning touch, I was recruited to the University of Helsingfors to become a research leader.
If the PRIMEs interrupt our intentional prospective thinking, we may fall victim of mental fallacies, for example, “natural stupidity”, to rely on information which is either:
- prototypical (Kahneman och Tversky, 1972).
- often repeated (Tversky och Kahneman, 1973)
- easy to access (Kahneman and Tversky, 1977).
Mental fallacies may interact in a reinforcing loop.
Sometimes when we encounter a challenging situation with negative valence, cortisol levels increase, blocking hippocampi in favor of amygdalae, which triggers fight-flight behavior (Goleman, 2006). If intentional prospection does not kick in, that's when we abandoned reasoning – talking without winning – in favor of argumentation – talk to win – and polemics – verbal war and guilt by association.
Besides, early upbringing, there's at least two ways to improve your executive functioning/prospective thinking:
- Eat real food. 3.6 million years before the present, our ancestors added animal fat (bone marrow) to their diet (Mann, 2018; McPherron et al. 2010; Thompson et al. 2019). That started a reduction of their gut and an expansion of their brains – from the occipital lobe and forward (Aiello och Dunbar, 1993; Aiello och Wheeler, ; 1995; Hublin et al. 2014; Ponzter et al 2016). After our genus was established, they added meat to their diet Kimbel och Villmoare, 2016; Pobiner, 2016; Villmoare, 2018; Villmoare et al. 2015). A plethora of studies show that animal source food, meat and fat, is crucial for children's physical and mental development (Adesogan et al. 2020; Allen, 2003; Balehegn et al. 2019, 2023), as well as to sustain adults physical and mental health (Calabrese et al 2024; Dobersek et al. 2023, 2024; Ede, 2019, 2022, 2024; Itkonen et al. 2020; Margara-Escudero et al. 2022; Pan et al. 2024; Tong et al. 2020; Ylilauri et al. 2019).
- Leadership. According to me and other researchers, a leadership style which which focus assigning goals and decentralization of decision making about about strategies, will influence organizational performance, learning, and creativity (Ekvall, 1996; Ekvall och Ekvall och Ryhammar, 1998, 1999; Österberg, 2012).
Also. Read about bad apple's. June 30, 2023. Bad apple #1 AgendaPride: All straight panel. Ted Uhros påstående om transidentitet är falsk. The bad Apple effect
March 2, 2025. Bad apple #2 How I, despite living it the "happiest country in the world", became a victim of the bad Apple effect
July 7, 2025. Bad apple #3. Finlandssvenska barnrättsdagar 2025. Estlander förbjuder & bjuder in? mig – experten – från att delta. Chat Gtp: don't take it personally (it’s often more about them than you)
July 21, 2025. Bad apple #4. On the risk of meeting Finnish people with mental health issues. Another sad case.
November 1, 2025. Bad apple #5. Vad händer på en arbetsplats när inte alla drar åt samma håll? Om bekräftelse-bias, naturlig dumhet och dysrationalia.
November 12, 2025. Bad apple #6 Another encounter with a 'Bad apple' in Finland. Will there soon be enough to fill a whole basket?
November 26, 2025. Bad apple #7. God Jul på Språkambassadörernas verksamhetsadministratör Jaan Siitonens vis. Ytterligare ett möte med ett '. Är korgen snart full?
March 31, 2026. Bad apple #8 "Finlands vägval: När värdfärdsstaten krackelerar" (von Kraemer). Förklaringen är snarare stamtänkande
April 11, 2026. Bad apple #9 Another encounter with a 'Bad apple' in Finland.
Please support the blog via Swish (Sweden), MobilePay (Finland) or Wise.
Mer om min expertis:
Executive coaching for CEOs/managers and workshops to facilitate Organizational Performance, Learning, and Creativity for Problem Solving | Lectures: Nutrition for physical and mental health | Course/lecture: children's emotional and social adjustment and cognitive development | Language training - Swedish | Academy Competency | CV | Teaching skills and experience | Summary of research project | Instagram | Linkedin | YouTube-channel | TikTok | X
No comments:
Post a Comment