(View entire post here)

It’s holiday time. Holiday time can be depressing. This is the time of the year when store windows sing with (commercial) cheer, house decorations insist we be HAPPY, and families flaunt their families. In turn, the “holiday blues” can set in just around now: From November to January, people who-are-often-loners-but-generally-feel-OK can get atypically depressed.

Holidays suggest we should be more joyfully social than a lot of us naturally are. So we doubt our simple love of solitude. A pressure for bliss can also make our (naturally imperfect) family or friendships annoy us all the more.

Who Parties?
Modern psychology makes a very cool distinction between people who thrive on stimulating environments and those who don’t. The distinction actually came out of research on pain thresholds: Some of us are more stoic about events like jamming our fingers or breaking our ankles than others are. In 1967, a researcher named Asenath Petrie defined two types of personalities: the “augmenter” and the “reducer.” The “augmenter” is sensitive to excitement: She feels pain more than most and dislikes other types of chaos, including heavy drinking and loud noise. In contrast, the “reducer” has a high threshold for action. She loves a party and is a social type; she has a bigger tolerance for pain, seeks crowds, and tends to turn her music up louder than others do. So: Different people have different relationships to stimuli. Some can’t get enough of the crowd; some like to shut it down.

» Amy Goldwasser discusses the essays—and the teenage girls who wrote them—featured in Red, on the Penguin Podcast.

» Listen to other Penguin Podcasts.

Other author podcasts:

» An interview with Nick Hornby about his latest book on the NPR: Books Podcast.

Amy Goldwater, Red, Nick Hornby, Slam, Penguin Podcast, podcast, Books, Penguin Books