If a Kind Word Means So Much - Why Are We Afraid to Give One?

How do you react to being praised? How do you feel if you give a kind word or admiring comment to someone else?

An article in Psychology Today, reveals an interesting bit of research first published in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. They suggest that we tend to underestimate how well another person will feel about a compliment, and we overestimate the cost to us of giving one. The result is that we hold back the kind word or bit of praise we thought of uttering.

Yet praise or a kind word can mean so much to all of us at one time or another.

That could be anything like a comment of how well they looked, how well they'd done a job, through to how pretty their shirt was or how much their hairstyle suited them. You know, everyday compliments that we all give or think of giving - sometimes.

Following up on this, participants in research by a group of scientists were asked to offer a 'sincere' compliment to a stranger. The participants were asked how they felt about
approaching someone and giving them a compliment, what their own mood was like, and how they thought the stranger they were speaking to would react.
The researchers then looked at the results: The compliment recipients reported for the most part that they were happy, flattered, and pleased to receive the compliment.
It was a two-way street - the compliment givers reported that their own mood improved after giving the compliment or kind word, even though they had underestimated how pleased the people on the receiving end would be.
See? It was a win-win situation. Those who gave the sincere kind words or compliments felt in a much better mood, and those who received the compliments reacted positively.
So next time, when an opportunity comes up to say something nice about one of our fellow humans, maybe we should take a chance and not hold back.

So, thank you for being smart enough to read my blog :-)

Wednesday’s Writing: It Seems Not Everyone Could Love Another Man’s Son…The Things You Learn From Research.

 
Hard though that may be to imagine, it does seem that not everyone could love Another Man’s Son..
But no, I’m not talking about my newly released romantic suspense, Another Man’s Son. What’s not to love there? I suppose you could call this a story behind the story.
When I first came up with the title – sometimes titles come to me and bring the idea with them, rather than the other way around – I did some Googling to see what else was out there with that title. I’d hoped it was mine alone, but it turned out there was at least one other book with the same title: Another Man’s Son by Katherine Stone - a lovely book that has a completely different genre and storyline to mine.
As I was researching I couldn’t help but look at some of the articles that popped up on the subject. According to research (yes, there have been studies of this sort of thing) PD – Paternity Discrepancy – or PF – Paternity Fraud - is not uncommon. PD or PF is ‘the disconnect between what men think is true and the genetic reality’. And research shows that it's a lot more common than we might believe.
According to one study that pulled together 19 other studies, there are more than a million dads out there in the USA alone taking care of another man’s child. Whether they know it or not.
Sadly,  not every man who loved a woman was also able to love her child – if that child was another man’s. Some even suggested that the woman have her child adopted. In more than one heartbreaking case, the man sued his partner after finding out he’d been raising a child or children that weren’t his.
I can only imagine the hurt and sorrow that lies behind some of these stories.
I started out wondering about the whole paternity issue, and why a 21^st century woman would marry a man she didn’t love, just because she was pregnant with another man’s child?
In my novel, Another Man’s Son, Ket Morgan Junior knew he wasn’t the father of the son Kathryn Fitzgerald was carrying. But marrying her would give his father the grandson and heir he wanted, and that would mean more power in the Morgan companies for Ket.
For Kathryn Fitzgerald, being 19, pregnant and alone in Lobster Cove, a small Maine town, was terrifying. It seemed her lover had forgotten about her – he didn’t know about the child. Her father had been drinking heavily to cover the grief after her mother’s death. She had no-one to turn to for help.
When Ketler, her boss at the Morgan Bank, proposed a marriage of convenience to her, it seemed like the answer to her prayers. Ket would get the son and heir his father was pushing him to have, and Kathryn would get a safe, financially secure life and her child would have a bright future.
She was too innocent – and grateful – to question why Ket would want to marry a penniless nobody like herself when he could have his pick of the wealthy debutantes. 
What seemed like a miracle turned into a nightmare – and when her baby’s father came back to town on the day of her baby’s christening, he left believing she had betrayed him and had Another Man’s Son.
Seven years later he was back in town – could Kathryn make him understand her actions in passing off her child as Another Man’s Son?
See, there’s that title again. It seemed that my characters wanted their journey to be named Another Man’s Son, so off we went with the writing.
Excerpt:
There he was. Without conscious thought, her feet found a path through the crowd toward him and then he stood before her. She saw immediately that while he looked the same, there were subtle differences beyond the seven years that had passed since they’d last met. Back then, he’d had the gawkiness of youth with the foreshadowing strength of the man he might become.
And now—now he’d fulfilled that promise of manhood; the veiled glances of every woman in the room were testament to that. But there was the stamp of hard experience on his face, lines around his beautiful brown eyes. Ben Asher. The man she’d once loved so deeply she thought she’d die when he boarded the bus bound for the military training camp.