While shame and guilt are both negative emotions, they have important differences, he says. “Guilt is more adaptive. When you feel guilty, you can make amends or decide to do something differently next time,” he explains. “Shame is more about feeling like a bad person. It can make you feel helpless or powerless.” And those feelings of helplessness can lead a person to revisit their shameful secrets over and over. Being situated in a business school has practical perks: For one, the school fully funds his lab, so he doesn’t have to seek outside grants. He advises one primary graduate student, but he also co-advises graduate students and mentors postdoctoral fellows across the division. The multidisciplinary business perspective also means that Slepian keeps one eye turned toward the practical applications of his research.

post producer / post producer/post production producer: Cutting Edge / post production producer: Cutting Edge (12 episodes, 2020-2022) Wendy Tremont King has now established herself as the quintessential Shelby Nichols. In fact, Wendy's voice is SO Shelby at this point that if I heard another actor I would say, "That's not Shelby!" The power and finesse of Ms. King is her understated realism. When she does Ramos's voice, or Uncle Joey's voice, you get the downplayed shift to a deeper more masculine voice, but more importantly you get the menace, the coldness, and the intonations that come with the different personalities. In a narrated audio book, I believe that there must be a symphony between the writer and the narrator. If the voices are not real and believable, the listener's attention could wander. With Wendy King and the Shelby Nichols Adventures, Wendy IS Shelby, and the depth and breadth of Wendy's capabilities makes this audio book incredibly real to the listener. I classify this as "not to be missed". Some of his ongoing research, for example, is exploring the effects of having to keep secrets on behalf of an employer. Early results suggest that work secrets, like personal secrets, can be both good and bad. On the one hand, it can feel good to be entrusted with important information about one’s company. On the other, keeping that secret can feel like a burden. We all keep the same kinds of secrets,” Slepian says. “About 97% of people have a secret in at least one of those categories, and the average person is currently keeping secrets in 13 of those categories.”

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Secrets are a universal human phenomenon. Almost everyone has something to hide (though, of course, not all secrets are of the deep, dark variety). Yet until recently, psychological scientists hadn’t spent much time exploring how keeping secrets affects us. Slepian got his start studying secrets indirectly. He had been researching metaphor—looking at the ways people use language about physical experiences to describe abstract concepts—and he became intrigued by the metaphor of being “weighed down” by a secret. “I wondered if it was just a linguistic thing that people do, or if it reflected something deeper,” he says.

Usually, I am in real trouble with a Shelby Nichols book (for exceeding my reading budget, and losing sleep!) and this audio book is no exception. As I have been travelling for a living for over four years, normally I need good books to keep me company on long airplane flights. With Secrets That Kill, I was looking for some more long flights, just so I could spend more time listening to the book! Preliminary results from the research hint that people who score high on neuroticism, for instance, are less likely to confess to immoral activities they’ve engaged in. Ward and Slepian are also finding that particularly polite people may be more reticent to divulge the skeletons in their closets. By holding on to secrets, Ward says, such people “might be missing out on an opportunity to get comfort or relief from other people, which could alleviate their negative emotions.” Can I tell you a secret?” The next time someone asks you that question, you may not want to say yes. Being confided in is a double-edged sword, says social psychologist Michael Slepian, PhD, an associate professor of leadership and ethics at Columbia Business School who studies the psychology of secrets.Slepian’s next goals include using his research to design possible interventions to help people unburden themselves to improve their well-being. In an extension of that work, he’s beginning to explore how to reduce shame around secrets. “We know the secrets people feel ashamed of hurt them the most. So how can we reduce the shame? Talking to another person might make all the difference,” he says. The burden of secrecy On the bright side, those shared confidences can be a boon to bonding, he’s found ( Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Vol. 78, 2018). “When people confide in us, we take it as an act of intimacy that can bring us closer,” he adds. head of post production : Cutting Edge / head of post production: Cutting Edge (12 episodes, 2020-2022)