The stubbornness of thought

I've just come across the best explanation of the "Don't think of elephants" effect I've ever read:

Byrne is also right to emphasize the stubbornness of thought. Once you think something, it is very difficult to eradicate that idea from your mind. The late, brilliant social psychologist Dan Wegner described this as the great irony of mental control: in order to insure that you aren’t thinking about an unwanted idea, you have to continually turn your mind to that very idea. How do you know that you aren’t thinking of a white bear driving a red Ferrari unless you think about whether you’re thinking it?

FEBRUARY 19, 2014
THE POWERLESSNESS OF POSITIVE THINKING
POSTED BY ADAM ALTER

"The virtues of opaque prose"

ABSTRACT

Instructors tell their students to write clearly. This prescription meshes with our intuition, wins confirmation in scores of books on writing, and finds empirical confirmation in research on perceptual fluency: People like content that is easy to process. Nevertheless, in some circumstances people expect content to be difficult, and ease might be interpreted as a lack of quality. We investigate this possibility by asking people to judge the quality of written text which varies in fluency (through the manipulation of font and facial feedback). Across three studies, disfluent content was judged to be of higher quality when it was thought to come from a source focused on conveying information than one designed to maximize enjoyment.

The virtues of opaque prose: How lay beliefs about fluency influence perceptions of quality Jeff Galak, Leif D. Nelson Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 47 (2011) 250–253

I'm trying to decide whether Galak and Nelson's prose is opaque enough to make me believe them...

how to be hap-hap-happy like me

Being very happy does not seem to be a malfunction (Alloy and Abramson, 1979).
source: Very Happy People by Ed Diener and Martin Seligman

Good to know!

("How to be hap-hap-happy like me" is the title of a hilarious book by Merrill Markoe.)