Mental Construal: Production of Thoughts Manifested

The university experience exudes the phrase ‘knowledge is power.’ In contrast to K-12 public education, university classes allow for in-depth coverage of topics across an array of academic departments. In psychology, students learn about competing to justify the same psychological phenomena. These competing theories naturally expose mental construals by recognizing more than one perspective exists.

An alternate perspective from the foundational logic of Buddhism eradicates mental construals through meditative contemplation on the ‘exchange of self and other’, there by eliciting an empathetic perspective of other human beings. Schwarz (2009) suggests mental construals are congruent with an individual’s current situation and goals, affecting perceived objective judgments about new information and memory recollection. Understanding mental construals provides an opportunity for conceptual autonomy by turning a perceived problem into a solution. Reattribution of experiences is utilized in modern cognitive therapies derived from Eastern Buddhist perspectives that seek to eradicate mental construals built within Western culture that may diminish individuals’ happiness.

Before being aware of this similarity between psychological findings and Buddhist teachings, I sought to further my education in the practice of Buddhism—an honest teacher with direct lineage from the Buddha was a necessity so as to follow ‘the path’. I learned that there was a Zen Buddhist Temple in Ann Arbor. Ecstatic by the presence of an honest teacher I inquired about residency at the Temple; soon I was signing a lease and agreeing to the rules and regulations as a resident of the Temple a month later. Being aware of the requirements and imagining a more restrictive but still satisfactory lifestyle was a poor predictor of the actual experience of living in a Temple.

The head monk suggested I frequently visit before deciding whether to live at the Temple. I went to three Wednesday morning practices, which start at 5:30am, before deciding to live there. Wednesday morning practice consists of 35 prostrations, a 15 minute mediation, 5 minutes of chanting, check-in, and breakfast. The feelings felt during those practices strongly guided my judgment to live at the Temple, before putting down a security deposit. Those feelings were formed from the exciting introduction to a sacred practice that also corresponded with my own personal beliefs. Not knowing the meaning of the prayers, chants, and gestures, I was forced to alertly observe the customs in order to adapt more quickly.

The inability to accurately imagine the experience of living in a Temple is explained by Wilson and Gilbert’s (2005) concept of affective forecasting, individuals’ “overestimating the intensity and duration of their emotional reactions to…events” (p. 131). I did not consider that after a month of 5:30am morning practices I would no longer feel excited in the morning. The experience was no longer new, nor did I have to be alert to adapt; ceasing to be a novel experience, morning practice became a mundane daily responsibility.

Allowing one aspect of a decision, my feelings, to guide the decision leads to an overestimation in the perceived importance of my feelings, diminishing the importance of other everyday factors. Wilson and Gilbert define this as focalism, “the tendency to underestimate the extent to which other events will influence our thoughts and feelings” (2005, p. 131). When considering living at the Temple I failed to judge aspects other than projecting how it felt to be there, not the change in emotions felt after living there for two months.

When considering other aspects, I judged them quickly and independently: work, school, Temple life, and volunteer activities; not how these many aspects interact together and compete for time. This happened because my most recent experiences of each of these aspects were experienced independently. Before my decision, I finished winter semester focusing on just school and volunteer activities, and acquired an internship to fill the summer months. Having more free time in the summer I became more involved at the Temple. When considering all of these activities together, I recollected the amount of strain each aspect added to my life when experienced, allowing all these aspects together to seem manageable.

Remembering the stress of each activity in the specific context it was experienced contributed to misattributions when imagining the future. Schacter and Addis (2009) write that “imagining possible future events depends on much of the same cognitive and neural machinery as does remembering past events” (p. 108). Therefore the emotion elicited by remembering the lack of stress experienced by each activity individually, was the same emotion used to reconstruct my imagined experience of the future.

Furthermore, remembering the past or imagining the future is also affected by an individual’s state of being when considering a decision. Schwarz (2009) purports that “information brought to mind by a given context is…relevant to the person’s current situation, thus facilitating adequately contextualized responses” (p. 124). Recollecting my past experiences as low-stress, in conjunction with my feelings being relaxed when considering the decision primed accessible future projections to be considerably more low-stress and relaxed.

Despite neglecting to consider many varying aspects of living in a Temple, my housing lease expired in three months. After a month of searching for affordable housing and running out of time, the Temple was the best solution for housing meeting all of my listed requirements and more: driveway parking, laundry, utilities, food, and rent under $600, within walking distance to campus and a close drive to work, likeable housemates, and most importantly a flexible month-by-month lease—as I’m still unsure of my plans after graduating in December.

With only two months left to find housing, the Temple not only fit all my requirements, but also allowed for the acquisition of Buddhist knowledge and experience. Schwarz (2009) notes that “people’s decisions are more likely to be based on their general goals than on a consideration of specific means and ends when the act is in the distant rather than the near future” (p. 132). Therefore the decision to live at the Temple was more heavily influenced and considered by fulfilling short-term housing needs, than the more amorphous acquisition of knowledge and experience fulfilled by living there.

I begin adjusting to Temple life during the first week of classes but was disappointed to discover living there became a source of many problems. However, the required reading by Wilson and Gilbert (2005) within the first few weeks of class assured I would adapt to Temple life, stating “people fail to anticipate how quickly they will cope psychologically with such events in ways that speed their recovery” (p. 131). Developing this hypothetically: I wrote down my frustrated thoughts about morning practice upon first moving in, expecting my thoughts to be more adapted when writing about the same experience after living at the Temple for two months.

The two descriptions rarely match in detail, however descriptions of breakfast are somewhat similar in detail and the differences between the experiences reveal how I adapted.

9/14: “I hate eating out of bowl, why was it decided for me what I eat out of anyways? Filling food into a bowl forces it to be mixed together; I try to only put foods that combine well in my bowl—limiting my food intake yet again. I actually dislike eating.”

11/14: “The past couple of days I’ve noticed that despite consistently layering my bowl with the same proportions, my chopsticks account for the different taste each morning; actually forcing the foods to mix differently even with the same ingredients. I’ve started adding all foods present on the table to my bowl, just to experience the juxtaposition of taste.”

There is an enormous difference between the two reflections. In September the experience was overwhelmingly experienced as new; however, in November the event was no longer perceived as a new experience, but as “making sense of events, [to] adapt emotionally to them” (Wilson & Gilbert, 2005, p. 132). For example, my chopsticks were the attributed cause to the different taste of breakfast each morning. There are many alternative reasons other than my chopsticks as to why the food might taste different. However, “people tend to construct a single, or very small number of scenarios, for any given judgment situation” —like chopsticks—to ‘make sense’ of events. This suggests that individuals choose their adapted perceptions wisely because it may affect the level of mental construal in a perception (Ross & Buehler, 2001, p. 527).

After rereading my first journal entry, I expressed feeling a greater distance from my peers, watching them shotgun beers during welcome week. Seeing seniors guzzle down cheap beer over their porches with likeminded friends, I started to consider that I rushed my college experience by graduating in three and a half years; nor did I expect or want my senior semester to be the most difficult semester yet. There was going to be limited, if any, amount of drinking with friends, a full semester of classes and homework, and I still had not even been to a football game intoxicated. My college experience seemed cheated, and I felt like I had made a huge error in judgment.

Constructing a mental representation of the typical college experience simultaneously constructed the mental construal of the perceived ‘greater’ distance from my peers. Exacerbating the construed difference between me and my peers was the limited amount of information (college drinking) used to represent my standard of the ‘college experience’ in comparison to Buddhist-like behavior (Schwarz, 2009). I also failed to consider occasional drinking done independently of Temple property as acceptable, suggesting that “apparent differences in ethical judgment may arise from…differences in construal” (Ross & Ward, 1996, p. 113). The mental construal between my peers—prior to accepting drinking elsewhere—was produced by perceived ethical differences and a contrast effect, strengthened by using a limited amount of information to construct a standard of the ‘college experience’.

I personally attribute the positive outlook distinctly different from the first cynical journal entry, reflects my shift in perception from Western beliefs to Eastern-Buddhist beliefs to cope psychologically with events in order to find happiness (Wilson & Gilbert, 2005). Heavily influenced by Western religious traditions “that pit opposites against one another”, Western language developed meaning through understanding dichotomies (Wong, 2009, p. 8). However, Eastern perspective as built upon Buddhist perspectives is a frame work where “nothing exist independently or autonomously. The world is a vast flow of events that are linked together and participate in one another” (Gunaratne, 2009, p. 71).

Cultivating an understanding of Buddhism, I no longer made deductive, dichotomous attributions of cause and effect, but learned to see the world as a series of resonating interactions instead. An article written by Wong, (2009) suggest the dichotomies of Western language “oversimplifies our view of emotional meaning and neglects its full richness and complexity” and “blocks from thinking and understanding the larger concept of affect” (Wong, 2009, p. 9). Suggesting Western language may actually inflict mental construals upon affective reasoning that limit individuals’ consciousness—cognitions, emotions, motives—from understanding its full richness (Brown & Ryan, 2003).

Western authority defines consciousness through awareness and attention; however, the Buddhist practice of mindfulness is “the state of being attentive to and aware of what is taking place in the present” (Brown & Ryan, 2003, p. 822). The difference between the cultures being that mindfulness is a practice indicating ‘consciousness’ to be an acquired skill. Mindfulness is thought to “contribute to well-being and happiness in a direct way” by adding clarity and vividness to experience (Brown & Ryan, 2003, p. 823). Exposure to Eastern philosophies, like Buddhism, provides an opportunity for conceptual freedom by allowing Westerners’ to change their perceptual world view; as a result individuals’ subjective experiences and memories are substantially more complex, vivid, and satisfying.

“The Buddhist view that knowledge derives from thinking critically” suggests mindfulness requires being attentive to the present to critically think about the surrounding environment, in an attempt to derive information from it (Gunaratne, 2009, p. 70). Once an individual adapts extracted knowledge about an experience, people tend to construct few other scenarios for any given judgment (Ross & Buehler, 2001). Similar to the focalism, individuals’ underestimate the extent to which the perspectives they construct, are simultaneously embedded in different levels of mental construal. Perceptions “are perceived and interpreted in terms of the individual perceiver’s own needs, own connotations, own personality, [and] own previously formed cognitive patterns” (Ross & Ward, 1996, p. 103).

Mindful individuals’ continuously extract knowledge from each moment of life—even habitual ones—to create rich meaningful experiences; adding depth to experiences allows for a vivid recollection of those experiences. However the positive affect attributed to mindfulness could actually be due to the “positive feelings that accompany the act of successful recall, rather than reflecting the true [emotional] nature of the past” (Leboe & Ansons, 2006, p. 596). Therefore mindfulness may not directly contribute to happiness, but indirectly elicit positive emotions do to the ease of perceptual fluency (Schwarz, 2002). Mindfulness or perceptual fluency, both “facilitate well-being through self-regulated activity and fulfillment of the basic psychological needs for autonomy” (Brown & Ryan, 2003, p. 824).

Partnerships between science and Buddhism that co-evolved as research apparatuses to probe the nature of reality and well-being advocate for “an alternate view of globalization is possible through the perspective of Eastern, particularly Buddhist philosophy” (Wong, 2009; Gunaratne, 2009, p. 60). Currently “Western philosophy assumes an emotion to arise from value judgments; Buddhist philosophy however assumes an emotion is a mental valenced state with no judgment involved” (Wong, 2009, p. 16). Adapting Buddhist beliefs I moved from the Western construction of emotions construed by value judgments—construals are embedded within any judgment—to simply experiencing emotions independent of attributional causes.

Buddhist concepts have structured some of the most recent cognitive-behavioral therapies using “attributional retraining techniques to influence people’s beliefs about their experiences” (Ross & Buehler, 2001, p. 519). These therapies, such as mindfulness-based cognitive therapy and contemplative psychotherapy, seek to rationalize emotions by reducing dichotomous happy or sad attributions that are embedded and constructed within Western philosophy (Wilson & Gilbert, 2005). “Remembering events that were initially unpleasant actually improve mood when people focus on beneficial, longer-term consequences of the episode, such as personal growth and change” (Ross & Buehler, 2001, p. 519). An experience that is not considered valuable can become valuable by constructing the opposite (positive) effect from a previously considered negative experience; structuring both allows individuals to develop a more complex emotional representation of events.

Whether implemented through psychological therapies or acquiring knowledge of Buddhist philosophy, individuals are provided the framework to re-conceptualize their emotions autonomously by attributing several perceptions and feelings to one event. Suppressing the need to rationalize an event dichotomously, individuals possess the conceptual freedom to develop more complex emotions that add depth and value to their recollected experiences. The ability to entertain more than one perspective to an experience demands that individuals are continuously alert and aware (mindful) during experiences; naturally building reflexive thinking skills that contribute to the extinction of various personal mental construals. Suggesting knowledge acquired through personal experiences or science, is in fact a power that transforms “ordinary living into a richer, more enhanced, more mature happiness” (Levine, 2009, p. 260).