What motivates you? One of the finest discoveries of that lump of unnecessary reflection, that social psychology was in the 1950s, is Bandura’s concept of ‘self-efficacy’. Of course the concept had a history in less flashy theory and experimental work – on regulation of behaviour and so on – but Bandura has always made his … More Engagement trumps motivation

What positive emotion do you feel most often? Our culture is a strange one. It tends to fear emotion, or at least the expression or display of emotion. It prefers to see ‘affect’ as psychologists dub it as an unnecessary excrescence or a survival from a more primitive state of human development either as a … More The fallacies of binary evaluations of emotion.

Create an emergency preparedness plan. Since nothing lasts but constant change be mindful still that the few chances for stasis range, except the pill that ends all, from nought to zero because body so wants to be its own hero never sorry For trailing mind through witless pain Defying hearts, Clear that cold flesh will … More For Joanne

What brings you peace? We tend as a culture to fetishise a notion of inner peace, precisely because we live in a world in which both what is good, bad or on some scale between them, are of necessity the product of a dialectic that is necessarily based on conflict. We feel that we have … More Peace in pieces: how searching for and overvaluing peace will always evade it.

What profession do you admire most and why? It is very difficult to admire a profession. Not least because some of the most undesirable aspects of some professions are those characteristics that are most usually given the name ‘professional’. It usually indicates taking a back seat on one’s own emotions or instincts and being driven … More It is still for me the ideal of social work that is most admirable in public life. But is public life itself doomed?

What is the most important thing to carry with you all the time? When I worked as an advisor on anxiety and depression in primary health care, people of all ages would claim that they would never go anywhere without their mobile (and I suppose the same may be said of cell phones in the … More Is my ‘Mobile phone’ the default answer to this prompt? Let’s not choose that, travel light and be truly mobile!

What change, big or small, would you like your blog to make in the world? I am never confident that writing of any kind changes things except in rare cases to change the ways writing itself is practiced. Nevertheless it’s clear that often very unambitious writing can often feel that it has the intention to … More To encourage others to know the desire and feel the will to change

Describe your life in an alternate universe. Human beings get horribly stuck in the notion of binary options when they think of themselves, yet the great thought experiments concerning the identity of things all have a clear message: Schrodinger’s cat is not either alive nor dead but on a continuum of potential states of being … More If there were alternative universes in which to live and describe your life, they would be, and indeed are, MULTIPLE.

What’s the most money you’ve ever spent on a meal? Was it worth it? This is a question you just have to undermine since its presumption is that there is a common starting point for people who answer it, but that is far from the truth, even if we take the fact the cost of … More Use value, exchange value and the sale of social appearances

Describe one habit that brings you joy. A habit, when it isn’t an item of clothing, is usually an action or sequence of actions that is repeated subconsciously because it has been overlearned. Repeated and without variation such sequences are thought to be stored in the cerebellum and are easily accessible without much consciousness that … More Are joy and the habitual really compatible?

What are you curious about? At the beginning of Chapter 2 of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, we read: ‘”Curiouser and curiouser!” cried Alice (she was so surprised, that for the moment she quite forgot to speak good English); …..’. We forget, at our peril, that, whatever his commitment to nonsense and queer adventures, the eminent … More Curiouser and curiouser! Being Alice in search of inverted worlds in lieu of Wonderland

Write about a random act of kindness you’ve done for someone. A hug, a smile, a giving up Flesh finding its kind in random touch Not seen, not even felt perhaps Except in that touching when Flesh answers in the same kind. And ‘we’ instead of ‘I’ flowers Aloft above its lonely fragile stems of … More Almost flesh, not kind … Akin in ‘we’.