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The worst way to defend our freedom is to let our leaders start taking away our freedoms!
It is exactly during times like these that we need more freedom of speech,
a strong and critical press, and a citizenry that is not afraid
to stand up and say that the emperor has no clothes.
- Michael Moore

Wardrobe Market Share, Size, Trend, Demand, Analysis by Top Leading Player and Forecast Till 2030
The global wardrobe market size was valued at USD 59.97 billion in 2022. The market is projected to grow from USD 62.97 billion in 2023 to USD 94.59 billion by 2030, exhibiting a CAGR of 5.98% during the forecast period. A wardrobe/cabinetry/closet is a piece of furniture equipped with shelves, hanging spaces, and drawers for storing clothes, accessories, and shoes.
Information Source:
https://www.fortunebusinessinsights.com/wardrobe-market-104634

When Sexual Assault Victims Are More Likely to Be Blamed.
Research examines why some sexual assault victims are blamed for their own victimization.
Reviewed by Tyler Woods

KEY POINTS-
Victim-blaming means ignoring the offender’s role and instead holding the victim responsible for the harm they have suffered.
In a recent study, participants blamed females dressed in red for being sexually assaulted more than those wearing green.
Women with strong just-world beliefs are more likely to blame a victim of assault dressed in red and to believe she deserved the mistreatment.

Whenever something goes wrong, we look for someone to hold responsible, someone to blame, whether others or ourselves.

Sometimes this results in victim-blaming, which means holding a victim at least partially responsible for their mistreatment—based on the assumption that he or she somehow caused the event or deserved the harm.

One example is claiming that a woman’s rape allegations are false. Or to say a rape victim was asking for it because of her revealing dress or flirtatious behavior.

Indeed, research shows that women who have a long history of sexual activity, wear sexy and provocative clothes, or drink heavily are often viewed as more culpable for the assault.

But might blame attribution also be affected by the color of a woman’s clothing?

An answer is provided by Brown and collaborators, whose research was published in the April 2023 issue of the Scandinavian Journal of Psychology.

Their investigation explored the link between victim-blaming and the color of the victim’s clothing (green versus red).

Investigating Victim-Blaming and the Color of Clothing
Sample: Two hundred twenty-one undergraduate students (155 women) from the Northeastern U.S.; the average age of 20; 45 percent Caucasian.

Methods and Measures
Target attire: Participants were instructed to read a vignette describing a woman who “experienced an attempted sexual assault from a man she met at a party after ‘flirting passionately’ with him and leaving the party together.”

They were also presented with the individual’s picture, which showed a young Caucasian female with her face blurred (purportedly to protect her identity).

About half the sample saw her wearing a red shirt; the other half saw her wearing green.

Target evaluation: The pictured woman was evaluated regarding her interest in sex (i.e., sexual receptivity) and blameworthiness for being sexually assaulted.

To assess just world beliefs, the Belief in a Just World Scale was used (e.g., “I feel that people get what they deserve”).

Blaming the Rape Victim Dressed in Red
Blame attribution, the results showed, “was higher when the target wore red.” Interestingly, this was true “only among female perceivers.” Why?

One explanation involves competition and intrasexual rivalry.

Namely, other women may perceive the choice of red clothing as a show of sexual intent. Therefore, they see the woman in red as a potential competitor or threat to their own intimate relationships and behave with hostility toward her.

This hostility can take many forms, such as trying to damage the woman in red's reputation or, if she experiences assault, engaging in victim-blaming.

The data also suggested victim-blaming attributions were “most apparent among women with heightened just-world beliefs.”

Just-world beliefs may “serve to maintain women’s sense of control in group living based on the implicit assumption that sociosexually unrestricted women are more likely to be victimized.”

Note: Unrestricted sociosexual orientation refers to having a greater interest in casual sex.

Another finding was that men’s just-world beliefs did not influence their tendency to find the woman in red at fault. Why?

Perhaps men are already more likely than women to blame a rape victim and believe she “was asking for it” or “should have expected it, dressed like that.”

Or maybe the extent of just-world beliefs plays a smaller role in victim-blaming than intrasexual competition.

From an evolutionary perspective, relationships with sexually assertive and promiscuous women may also threaten men's power and control. For instance, such a relationship increases paternity uncertainty (i.e., not knowing if a child born to their female partner is their own).

Takeaway
The color red tends to make women more attractive to men, but it appears to affect blame attribution in sexual victimization as well.

Specifically, the study by Brown et al. found:
Female victims dressed in red (rather than green) are more likely to be blamed for experiencing sexual assault.
Both men and women perceive female individuals who wear red clothing as signaling sexual receptivity.
Victim-blaming is most apparent among women who believe in a just and fair world.

One explanation of victim blaming is female intrasexual competition (e.g., mate attraction, mate guarding).
It is important to be aware of the effects of a woman’s attire on culpability judgments in cases of sexual assault and rape so that we can treat all victims with fairness, sensitivity, compassion, respect, and dignity. And not to excuse or justify criminal conduct.

ANXIETY-
What’s the “Anxiety” in “Test Anxiety”?
Let’s stop training students to run away from challenging situations.
Reviewed by Michelle Quirk

KEY POINTS-
Most test-takers are in a “fight-or-flight” state.
Turning on the parasympathetic nervous system is the key to learning, memory, and thinking.
Learning how to face life’s tests calmly should be standard curriculum.

Jasmine is on my Zoom screen, and her session is about to begin. She is twirling her hair. As she starts talking, the rate and intensity of the twirling increases. “My psychology AP exam is on Friday,” she tells me, “And I’m freaked out about it. There’s so much material! I’ll never learn it all. What happens if I get a question I can’t answer? And if I don’t get a good grade, it’s going to mess up my college application.”

Past, Present, and Future
Jasmine has just enumerated the three-fold nature of “test anxiety”: past, present, and future. Past: I didn’t study enough. Present: I won’t be able to answer the questions. Future: A low score is going to be a disaster.

All of these have a common root: The word “anxiety” derives from the Latin cognate, angustus, meaning narrowing or constriction. In all three cases the “narrowing” or “constriction” describes what’s happening in Jasmine’s nervous system. Basically, the sympathetic branch—fight-or-flight—has switched on, her blood vessels have constricted, and her muscles have contracted as if she’s preparing to do battle or run away. This is exactly the opposite of what will be required of Jasmine when she’s taking the test: She’ll be sitting in a chair, reading and answering questions. Hard to do when her whole nervous system is screaming, Get me out of here!

To transform Jasmine’s test anxiety I trained her to turn on her parasympathetic nervous system.

Commonly known the “rest and digest” branch, the parasympathetic nervous system plays an important role in thinking and learning by promoting a state of relaxation and calmness that is conducive to cognitive functioning. When the parasympathetic nervous system is activated, it reduces stress and anxiety, which can help to improve focus, attention, and concentration. It also promotes the release of acetylcholine, a neurotransmitter that is essential for learning and memory.

Breathing, Grounding, and Sensing
There are three simple tools for engaging the parasympathetic branch: breathing, grounding, and sensing. Breathing means a steady flow of inhale and exhale (more directed to the belly than the upper chest); grounding means feeling the chair and the floor supporting you; and sensing means turning on and tuning in to one or more of the five senses.

In more than 40 years of coaching test-takers, I have observed how often they hold their breath, how tense and ungrounded they are, and how unaware they are of feeling the touch of clothes on their own bodies. No wonder people are exhausted by the end of a long test! They’ve been fighting the most important requirement for taking the test: to be present. They just want to escape. When they use the three calming tools, they create the state necessary for sitting still, thinking, remembering, reasoning, and, ultimately, answering questions.

Students—and other test takers—need to practice using the calming tools while they are studying and taking practice tests or question samples. Practicing using the tools replaces the old habit (of constricting, tensing, and wanting to flee) with the new habit designed to stay calm and get the job done. I have seen students raise their SAT scores by 200 points, and ACT scores by 3 composite points, simply by regularizing their breathing through the course of the test!

We all face countless tests in everyday life. Unexpected, unwanted things happen to everyone. Wouldn’t it be a whole lot better—and wouldn’t we live a whole lot longer—if we faced the tests by being calm? In case you’re wondering, the answer is “Yes!”

But the real question is: Instead of amping students up through endless comparison and competition, why don’t we teach them how to stay calm?

SELF-HELP
The Life Hack That Will Help You Declutter.
Use a product purgatory to part with your unwanted possessions.
Reviewed by Lybi Ma

KEY POINTS-
Although many consumers have more stuff than they want and need, getting rid of unused items is difficult.
A product purgatory is not merely a convenient storage space that puts the product out of sight and out of mind.
Purgatory can serve a larger psychological function.

We all have more and more stuff. Not only do we live in larger and larger houses to accommodate our stuff, but recent years have also seen massive increases in consumers’ rental of personal storage units. That means that consumers are paying with their hard-earned cash to store things they are currently not using, and might in fact never use again. But if having to live with boxes of unused things in their home or having to pay for expensive storage is not enough to get consumers to throw out what they don’t need, what will help?

A new paper provides such help to consumers. The authors (Isaac & Vinoo, 2023) investigate what happens when consumers use a so-called product purgatory: This is a place where consumers store items that they consider discarding. You might have such a product purgatory in your own home without knowing. Maybe you have a space in the attic where you store the clothes and toys that your children have grown out of. Maybe you have a box in the garage for your own no-longer-wanted clothes that you haven’t quite had the heart yet to donate.

The research shows that such a product purgatory is not merely a convenient storage space that puts the product out of sight and out of mind. Instead, it can serve a larger psychological function. By placing an item in this product purgatory, consumers can mentally simulate – or imagine in vivid detail – what it would feel like to get rid of the product entirely. The authors conducted several experiments to test this. For example, they asked consumers to take an item from their own kitchens that hadn’t been used in a while to either leave it where it is or move it to a storage location (in the garage or basement). Consumers who had moved the item to such a product purgatory afterward felt readier to dispose of the item than those who had kept the item in their kitchens. This happened because it was easier to imagine disposal when the item was already in purgatory.

I find the role of mental simulation here especially interesting. In my own work (Steinmetz et al., 2018) I have found that mental simulation goes much deeper than simply thinking about something. For example, I asked volunteers to simulate in depth what it’s like to feel cold, and they actually felt colder as a result. This is why I find it really exciting to see that consumers can also simulate parting with unused objects, simply by putting them in a designated space where they store things to be thrown out or donated. Maybe consumers can anticipate the sometimes difficult emotions that arise when parting with an object: maybe some nostalgia, buyer’s regret, relief, or a mix of all of these emotions. Getting a taste of these emotions and feeling that they will pass might allow consumers to take the leap and throw out the object. This might not only relieve consumers of the mental and financial costs of storing unused items but also give them space to appreciate the objects they want to keep and truly love.

BURNOUT-
"Is This It?": 4 Key Reasons for Midlife Languishing.
2. What we wanted may not be what we needed.
Reviewed by Gary Drevitch

KEY POINTS-
Life satisfaction often hits bottom in our forties as we have to come to terms with the reality of getting what we want.
People also tend to stop learning in mid-life.
Most importantly, we become so busy that we tend to neglect connections.

It is a truth widely acknowledged that happiness is a U-shaped curve. Starting at an optimistic, youthful high, it begins to decline in our twenties and hits rock bottom in midlife. In our fifties, it gently climbs upwards again, reaching similar heights at the beginning and end of our lives. The movement of the curve has generally been interpreted as reflecting a transition from idealism to realism to acceptance.

The stage-of-life-related fluctuation of our happiness levels has not just been measured by numerous psychologists, but has also been observed by writers and philosophers. Dante famously opens The Divine Comedy with the lines: "Midway through life’s journey, I found myself alone and lost in a dark forest." Dante’s main character is lost both in a literal and a metaphorical sense. What is more, he is also grappling with the consequences of loss at numerous levels: He has lost Beatrice, the love of his life, as well as his faith, his passion, his care for others and his energy. The dark woods in which he finds himself are the thorny undergrowth of his psyche.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s polymathic Faust figure is another deeply dissatisfied mid-lifer. At the beginning of Goethe’s tragedy, the outwardly successful and acclaimed German scholar has studied and mastered everything there is to study. But all the knowledge he amassed yields him no insights, no wisdom and no pleasure.

In fact, Faust’s life is sterile and lacking in meaning. He is so disillusioned and exhausted that he is ready to commit suicide. Instead, however, he makes a deal with the devil, who promises him wealth, women, forbidden knowledge, wild hedonic pleasures, and power. Crucially, though, none of these things end up curing Faust’s meaning crisis, either.

The mid-life crisis is not a cliché. For many of us, it is a deeply felt, painful reality. Many of my coaching clients grapple with an acute sense of loss of meaning and an absence of joy and passion in their forties. This affects both men and women. The mid-life crisis has long ceased to be the terrain of men only. And neither do most people react to it by buying shiny fast cars and too-youthful clothes and ditching their partners for younger models.

The mid-life slump of my clients takes a more existential, searching, often philosophical form. Like Dante, they wonder: How did I even get here? And where are all the things I lost on the way? Like Faust, they ask: Is this it? What lies beyond the boundaries of what I know already? They question their choices, seek to reconnect with what really used to matter to them, and wish to explore what fulfilment may look and feel like. A surprisingly large number of them wonder whether they are in the right job. Quite a few conclude that they aren’t.

Why is it that so many of us embark on this deeper meaning quest in mid-life? Our low life satisfaction in our forties seems both paradoxical and counterintuitive. In that period, many of us tend actually to have achieved most of our goals: statistically speaking, we tend to have finished our professional training and secured good jobs and incomes, we tend to own property, be married or in stable partnerships, and often have children. Many of us have reached positions in our professional lives that we desperately wanted to reach in our younger years.

So what is going on? Why does everything we have strived for suddenly taste like ashes when we hit our forties? I think mid-life languishing has 4 main causes. All are related to getting what we want.

1. The reality of getting what we want can be disappointing.
First and foremost, getting what we want is simply not always as great as we imagine it. In our forties, we are confronted with the experiential reality of what the fulfilment of many of our longer-term aims actually feels like. And it feels, well, just not as amazing as we hoped it would. Achieving our external aims, such as being successful in our careers, owning property, or having children, does not deliver the bouts of joy and deep satisfaction we thought it would.

Parenting is beautiful and sacred and intrinsically meaningful at a deeper level, but it is also hard work, exhausting and often challenging on a day-to-day basis. Long-term partnerships, too, can at times feel like they are more work than joy. When sexual passion becomes less central or fizzles out completely, we may have to contend with other, less shiny and potentially more irritating things.

2. What we want may not be what we need.
Secondly, we may find that what we want is not what we need. Wealth, status and power can feel profoundly empty. They seldom manage to fill any of our deeper needs—as Faust finds out the hard way. What is more, they cannot compensate for childhood suffering. They do not make us feel loved or connected or genuinely appreciated. They cannot ever make us feel truly whole.

3. We may have stopped learning new things.
Thirdly, in mid-life we often become stuck in our routines and stay in our comfort zones. We may lack learning, excitement, adventure, challenge, and variety both in our professional and our private lives. But learning is a basic human need. When we cannot learn we stop growing and developing. Similarly, we also need new experiences and variety to feel stretched and alive.

4. We may neglect connection.
Fourthly, I was really struck by one of the key results of the Harvard Study of Adult Development. Started in 1938, it is the longest study on happiness ever conducted. It followed a group of men, both from privileged and underprivileged backgrounds, through every stage of their lives, from youth to old age, to explore what factors allow people to flourish in life.

The key finding of the researchers was that what truly makes people thrive across their life spans is connections. The quality and depth of our relationships predict not just our overall mental well-being, but also impact significantly on our physical health and even our success in the workplace.

The researchers also offered an explanation for why our happiness declines so dramatically in mid-life: In our forties, we tend to neglect our relationships. Because our professional lives have become more demanding, we spend a large amount of our time at work. We may also be very entangled with the complexities of parenting. As a result, many of us spend less time connecting with others. We may lose touch with old friends and feel too busy or too exhausted to make new ones.

But here is the good news: We can turn our mid-life languishing into truly empowering experiences. Above all, they are opportunities to ask deeper questions about our life’s purpose and about what genuine fulfilment may mean and look like for us.

A languishing crisis can help us reconnect more strongly with what truly matters. It can motivate us to get out of our default mode and design our lives more consciously. It can be a powerful catalyst for taking stock and making courageous, deliberate choices to live value-led lives. It might mean changing some external things, or maybe it means changing our attitudes toward what we already have.

Finally, remember Dante, lost all alone in the woods? He did not find his way out on his own. He had Virgil, a wise guide who showed him how to get on the right path again and who let him into the realm of the divine. Find your own Virgil. It can be a friend, a mentor or a coach. Coaching is a powerful tool for helping you to reconnect with your deeper purpose. It can help you climb out of the lower regions of the happiness curve faster, stronger and with renewed clarity of vision.

Academic Achievement Isn’t the Only Way to Succeed.
The real road to success is wide open.
Reviewed by Tyler Woods

KEY POINTS-
An increasing number of students feel pressure to get straight A's.
The pressure to excel turns toxic when students feel their self-worth is contingent upon constant academic achievement.
Kids are happier and healthier when they are motivated by their own interests.
I’ve been a lot of things in life.

Afraid of the dark. A war reporter. A jilted bride. A military wife. A mistress. A party-school student. An Ivy League professor. A mom on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

I love to listen. I have a lot to say. But when I meet a mom, the first question she asks is often the only one.

“Where does your son go to school?”
Marty goes to a Montessori school. Most kids who apply get a spot. The only thing that’s wrong with the school is other people’s perceptions.

"The school doesn't seem academic," one mom said.

“Kids play, but what do they learn?"
Source: Becky Diamond
Marty showing us a book he wrote on different species of hawks. At Marty's school, academic demands increase slowly each year.Source: Becky Diamond
It’s not a sought-after school that parents think will put their kid on the path to Harvard or Yale.

Many parents think that the only way their child will succeed is if they go to an elite school, said neuropsychologist Bill Stixrud, an assistant professor at the George Washington University School of Medicine and co-author of the best-selling book The Self-Driven Child.

“There is this message that there's one path to being successful. It's a narrow path and if you [veer] off, you're screwed,” he said. Many parents “are imprisoned by this psychotic thinking that is out of touch with reality.”

But competitive schools are in style.
What seems significant might not matter
When I was in sixth grade, in the 1980s, the popular kids wore the coolest clothes. I wanted what they had.

“Mom,” I said. “I need Gloria Vanderbilt jeans.”
Trendy items were pricey. My mom was a social worker whose clients paid on a sliding scale. My dad was a scientist, not a CEO. We went to Macy’s in the mall. I tried on the $35 designer jeans.

“They’re too expensive,” my mom said. I walked home with $15 Levi’s that felt comfortable. But I cried because they didn’t have the right label.

“Becky,” my mom said. “What matters is how you feel on the inside, not how people judge your outsides.” She was right. But I still wished that my dad worked on Wall Street.

Forty years later, motherhood feels like middle school. When I tell moms the name of Marty’s school, they look at me like I’m wearing Levi’s. I’m surprised at how much I care.

There’s a reason.
“We’ve evolved to go after the wrong stuff,” said Yale Psychology Professor Laurie Santos in this podcast. “Craving is a brain function,” but it doesn’t do us any favors when it comes to feeling satisfied. According to Santos’ research on success, people seek what their mind perceives will make them feel powerful and strong, not necessarily happy.

Maybe that was well-made weapons in the Middle Ages or designer jeans in middle school. Today, it’s selective schools.

Education is a journey, not a brand destination
My dad was a rocket scientist, but I couldn’t care less about calculus. When I got B's in high school, I didn't feel like a failure.

For college, I went to the nation's top party school, the University of Colorado at Boulder,

“You love the outdoors,” my Ivy League-educated dad said. “Follow your passion. You’ll succeed.”

I hiked, biked and learned to rock climb.
“I’m scared!” I said to my partner on a 300-foot route in Eldorado Canyon.
“Trust yourself!” He shouted. "You’ve got this!”
I got comfortable stepping into the unknown and became unafraid of feeling fear. I touched granite so often that my grades weren’t great.

“Find subjects you love," my mom said. I took history classes and got A’s.

According to Dr. Stixrud, when kids are motivated by their own interests, they feel more in control. They are happier, healthier, and work harder.

I graduated with honors and worked at a highly regarded think tank in Washington, D.C. and for top news networks. Now, I teach journalism at prestigious universities, and I write this blog for Psychology Today.

The name of my college has never held me back.

Achievement isn’t only academic
Marty excels, but not on someone else’s terms. Instead of studying for tests, he has other plans.

“Let’s go to the National History Museum and look at fossils,” he said after school recently.
He saw a docent near the dinosaurs.
“Excuse me,” he said. “Is a Stygimoloch a Pachycephalosaur?”
She googled it. “He’s a mini paleontologist!”
He’s a good friend, too. At a birthday celebration, Marty noticed a boy who didn’t get a party favor.
“You seem sad,” he said. “Take mine.”
And he gets people to giggle. One afternoon he wanted me to play with him.
“Stop texting!” he said. I was on a group chat with my besties from Boulder.
I put the phone down to answer the door. When I returned, someone had been added to the chat.
“Becky, who is this person?”
“Sh-t, Marty added my husband’s ex-wife!”

We howled and so did she. I saw her later at a family event. “Your son is really something. Where is he going to middle school?"

Pressure to get on the path
Marty’s school ends in fifth grade. He and his classmates applied to middle schools in a process that felt more like college.

For Marty, there was a snag. As I wrote in this blog, he was recovering from Celiac Disease, which caused debilitating fatigue and brain fog. Marty was catching up while his classmates raced ahead.

After school, kids went to test tutoring, squash, soccer, Russian math and chess. Friends missed birthday parties to practice violin.

“Childhood has been turned into a period of resume building,” said Boston College child psychologist and Psychology Today blogger Peter Gray, who co-authored a recent study published in the Journal of Pediatrics that found kids spend so much time studying and in adult-supervised activities that they aren’t building social and emotional skills.

Anxiety among kids is at record levels, said co-author David Bjorklund, a Florida Atlantic University Psychology Professor. “There has been a lot of pressure toward academic learning and to do well on tests, which is not in a child’s best interest.”

Marty wanted to play but I couldn’t find a friend who was free.
“Billy is busy. He has tutoring and test prep.”
“Sam can’t see friends until the ISEE test is over.”

The ISEE (EYE-see) is the Independent School Entrance Examination, a three-hour standardized test that kids take to get into private schools. Students who compete for spots at the most selective schools must learn 6th and 7th grade material by the middle of 5th grade, according to several educators involved in the application process.

“ISEE test preparation for most students requires a tremendous amount of new instruction,” said Brad Hoffman, a board-certified educational planner who runs My Learning Springboard, a tutoring and education consulting firm. “We remind families who are wading into a private school process [that] it needs to be handled with appropriate balance.”

It's hard to feel steady when parents feel their child’s future is at stake.

We’re giving kids the wrong message
I have nothing against Harvard. But there is a winner-take-all mentality that creates a distorted definition of success and even "winners" lose.

Psychologists who work with top-performing students say their self-esteem suffers. Suniya Luthar’s 2004 study, The High Price of Affluence found that teens attending selective schools were more at risk for anxiety and depression than the national norm.

“They feel a relentless sense of pressure,” Luthar wrote in this article for Psychology Today. Too many kids get the message that they aren’t good enough. When the ISEE was over, Marty and a friend played.

“Where are you going to middle school?” Marty asked.
“My mom wants me to go to a good school,” the child said. “But I’m not gifted.”
“You’re smart.” Marty said.
“No. I needed nines on the ISEE (the top score). I only got sevens."
Later, Marty said: “Mom, I want to go to a good school. What are the bad ones?”

Epilogue
Marty applied to three three middle schools that didn’t require the ISEE. He wrote five essays, took two math assessments, and answered questions about social justice, extra-curricular activities, and life challenges.

“Describe a difficult situation and what you learned,” an admissions director asked.
“Ramen is my favorite food,” Marty said. “But I can’t have it. I have Celiac Disease. I’ve learned that I can be happy when things don’t go my way.”

I don’t know what grades Marty will get in middle school but he’s getting a great education.