Shallowness:

Years spent at the surface. Why? And for what purpose?

Die Wildheit der Dichtung:

"Soviel ist auch mir bei meinen wenigen Erfahrungen klar geworden, dass man den Leuten, im Ganzen genommen, durch die Poesie nicht wohl, hingegen recht übel machen kann, und mir deucht, wo das eine nicht zu erreichen ist, da muss man das andere einschlagen. Man muss sie inkommodieren, ihnen ihre Behaglichkeit verderben, sie in Unruhe und in Erstaunen setzen. Eins von beiden, entweder als ein Genius oder als ein Gespenst muss die Poesie ihnen gegenüberstehen."

Friedrich Schiller

-> Die Kunst, Anspannung und Aufregung in das Leben der Menschen zu bringen.

Functional and Dysfunctional Forms of Impulsivity:

"Dickman (1990) proposed the existence of both “functional” and “dysfunctional” forms of impulsivity, suggesting that impulsivity may be beneficial in some circumstances. The scale he devised to measure functional impulsivity assesses comfort with acting, talking, and making decisions quickly, with little or no deliberation, when the situation calls for it, such as in fast-paced conversation or sport, or in the presence of fleeting opportunity. Block (2002) has similarly argued that some degree of “undercontrol” is not detrimental because it allows spontaneous exploration and utilization of unforeseen opportunities. Although impulsivity has typically been considered only as a dysfunctional tendency, the possibility of an adaptive form or level of impulsivity is worth keeping in mind when examining the association of impulsivity with other personality traits."

Personality and Self-Regulation, Colin DeYoung

Commitment:

Randolph M. Nesse:

"In a world without commitments social exchanges arise mainly from helping relatives and trading favors. In such a world individuals can reliably be expected to act straightforwardly in their own interests. The advent of commitment changes everything. As soon as one individual finds a way to convince another that he or she will act other than in simple self-interest, social life is transformed. Now, individuals must consider the possibility that others may fulfill promises and threats."

Only those people who can fulfill both promises and threats are trustworthy allies.

You can tell when someone is truly committed to a course of action. He is decisive and serious. He continues on his chosen path even when it demands effort, discomfort, or sacrifice.

Blogs:

A blog that adds real value to a reader’s life is one he will gladly return to.

So when readers don’t come back, it’s usually because the blog 

hasn’t yet given them a reason to.

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"If you want to know what truly adds value to a person’s life, look at the activities they willingly return to."

"If you want to understand what adds value to someone’s life, pay attention to what they choose to come back to again and again."

"What adds value to a person’s life is revealed by what they return to without being pushed."

"People vote for what matters with their time. What they return to is what they value."

"Value is not what people claim to cherish, but what they repeatedly choose to spend their time on."

Drawing Inferences:

If a person is repeatedly exposed to the co-occurrence of a specific value of feature A and a specific value of feature B in the same object, he may infer that the two features are related. Consequently, when the person later observes a particular value of feature A and knows about this relationship, he can draw inferences about the likely value of feature B.

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Human cognition is organized around the detection of co-occurrence: what repeatedly appears together is treated as related. The mind does not passively register isolated facts but continuously scans experience for patterns of joint occurrence ... 

Ambivalenzen / Ambivalence:

Wikipedia:

"Ambivalenz (lateinisch ambo „beide“ und valere „gelten“) bezeichnet einen inneren Zustand, der wesentlich geprägt ist von einem inneren Konflikt. Dabei bestehen in einer Person sich widersprechende Wünsche, Gefühle und Gedanken gleichzeitig nebeneinander und führen zu inneren Spannungen.

In der Allgemeinsprache gebräuchlicher ist das Adjektiv ambivalent (zwiespältig, doppelwertig, mehrdeutig, vielfältig, zweideutig). Eugen Bleuler verwendete den Begriff erstmals 1910 während eines Vortrags. Für ihn war Ambivalenz ein Hauptmerkmal der Schizophrenie. Im heutigen Sprachgebrauch, auch im klinischen Bereich, versteht man unter „Ambivalenz“ aber kein Symptom einer Krankheit, sondern das Erleben einer konflikthaften, von gegensätzlichen Aspekten geprägten Bewertung der Situation oder eines Objekts. Dieses Erleben basiert auf der erworbenen Fähigkeit, auf Abwehr durch Spaltung zu verzichten und gegensätzliche Erlebniszustände zu ertragen. Die Fähigkeit, Ambivalenz auszuhalten, spricht für eine gesteigerte emotionale Reife.

Bedeutung

Bei der Ambivalenz handelt es sich um das simultane Bestehen sich eigentlich ausschließender Einstellungen und Handlungstendenzen. Der Begriff „Hassliebe“ ist ein Beispiel für eine solche Verknüpfung gegensätzlicher Wertungen. Auch in der Physiologie sind antagonistische Funktionen bekannt. Die Ambivalenz betrifft psychologische Funktionen.

Dass jedes Ding zwei Seiten haben kann, ist keine Ambivalenz, solange dadurch kein innerer Konflikt hervorgerufen wird. Ambivalenz ist eine Dichotomie von Sichtweisen, die gegensätzliche Reaktionen bedingen und letztlich die Fähigkeit zu einer Entscheidung hemmen können."

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"Ambivalence is a state of having simultaneous conflicting reactions, beliefs, or feelings towards some object. Stated another way, ambivalence is the experience of having an attitude towards someone or something that contains both positively and negatively valenced components. The term also refers to situations where "mixed feelings" of a more general sort are experienced, or where a person experiences uncertainty or indecisiveness.

Although attitudes tend to guide attitude-relevant behavior, those held with ambivalence tend to do so to a lesser extent. The less certain an individual is in their attitude, the more impressionable it becomes, hence making future actions less predictable and/or less decisive. Ambivalent attitudes are also more susceptible to transient information (e.g., mood), which can result in a more malleable evaluation. However, since ambivalent people think more about attitude-relevant information, they also tend to be more persuaded by (compelling) attitude-relevant information than less-ambivalent people. Explicit ambivalence may or may not be experienced as psychologically unpleasant when the positive and negative aspects of a subject are both present in a person's mind at the same time.  Psychologically uncomfortable ambivalence, also known as cognitive dissonance, can lead to avoidance, procrastination, or to deliberate attempts to resolve the ambivalence. People experience the greatest discomfort from their ambivalence at the time when the situation requires a decision to be made. People are aware of their ambivalence to varying degrees, so the effects of an ambivalent state vary across individuals and situations. For this reason, researchers have considered two forms of ambivalence, only one of which is subjectively experienced as a state of conflict.

Felt ambivalence

The psychological literature has distinguished between several different forms of ambivalence. One, often called subjective ambivalence or felt ambivalence, represents the psychological experience of conflict (affective manifestation), mixed feelings, mixed reactions (cognitive manifestation), and indecision (behavioral manifestation) in the evaluation of some object.  Ambivalence is not always acknowledged by the individual experiencing it. Although, when the individual becomes aware to a varying degree, discomfort is felt, which is elicited by the conflicting attitudes about a particular stimulus.

Subjective ambivalence is generally assessed using direct self-report measures regarding one's experience of conflict about the topic of interest. Because subjective ambivalence is a secondary judgment of a primary evaluation (i.e., I'm conflicted of my positive attitude towards the president), it is considered to be metacognitive. The point of these measures is to find out how much a person experiences ambivalence in a particular evaluation. Their report may be provided in a number of ways. Priester and Petty,for example, utilized a rating system where they had subjects rate the level of conflict they were experiencing on a scale from 0 (as in the subject experienced "no conflict at all") to 10 (as in the subject experienced "maximum conflict"). However, people do not like to experience the negative emotions associated with ambivalence and therefore may not acknowledge, or report, their level of conflict as accurately as possible. This makes the measure of felt ambivalence a bit less reliable than a researcher may desire."