Do metaphors shape people’s emotional states and mindsets for dealing with hardship? Natural language metaphors may act as frames that encourage people to reappraise an emotional situation, changing the way they respond to it. Recovery from cancer is one type of adversity that many people face, and it can be mediated by the mindset people adopt. We investigate whether two common metaphors for d...

Asserts that in dealing with change the mindsets of an enterprise's managers are key to its viability. States that by developing a learning organization an enterprise attempts to avoid the mindset problem by fostering a climate of learning; however, claims that over the last decade such development has not in general been successful and contends that this has been largely because of impractical...

BACKGROUND Intelligence theory research has illustrated that people hold either "fixed" (intelligence is immutable) or "growth" (intelligence can be improved) mindsets and that these views may affect how people learn throughout their lifetime. Little is known about the mindsets of physicians, and how mindset may affect their lifetime learning and integration of feedback. Our objective was to de...

The prefrontal cortex (PFC) plays a crucial role in cognitive control and higher mental functions by maintaining working memory representations of currently relevant information, thereby inducing a mindset that facilitates the processing of such information. Using fMRI, we examined how the human PFC implements mindsets for information at varying levels of abstraction. Subjects solved anagrams g...

To investigate how people anticipate and attempt to shape others’ self-regulatory efforts, this work examined the impact of abstract and concrete mindsets on attention to goal-relevant aspects of others’ situations. An abstract (relative to a concrete) mindset, by making accessible the cognitive operation of considering activities’ purpose (versus process) was predicted to focus attention on ho...

This article describes 3 studies that explore the role of mindsets in the context of stress. In Study 1, we present data supporting the reliability and validity of an 8-item instrument, the Stress Mindset Measure (SMM), designed to assess the extent to which an individual believes that the effects of stress are either enhancing or debilitating. In Study 2, we demonstrate that stress mindsets ca...

We examine whether people are more honest in public than in private. In a laboratory experiment, we have subjects roll dice and report outcomes either in public or in private. Higher reports yield more money and lies cannot be detected. We also elicit subjects' ethical mindsets and their expectations about others' reports. We find that outcome-minded subjects lie less in public to conform with ...