Category: Social Psychology

Bottling up emotions can make people more aggressive, according to new research from The University of Texas at Austin and the University of Minnesota that was funded, in part, by a grant from the U.S. Army.

The study, published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science, could have important implications for reducing violence and helping people in professions such as law enforcement and the military better cope with long hours and stressful situations.

The psychologists used a pair of classic movie scenes in their research. They found that subjects who were asked to suppress their emotions and show no reaction to a notoriously disgusting scene in the 1983 film "The Meaning of Life" and another in the 1996 film "Trainspotting" were more aggressive afterwards than subjects who were allowed to show their revulsion.

The research reinforces scientists' understanding of the "ego depletion effect," which suggests people who must keep their emotions bottled up — not reacting to a difficult boss at work, for example — are more likely to act aggressively afterwards — by yelling at their children, perhaps.

Subjects in the experiment who were deprived of sleep before watching the scenes reacted no differently than those who were well rested. This suggests that fatigue does not make people more aggressive, as some previous studies have suggested.

"Our research suggests people may become more aggressive after they have to control themselves," says co-author Arthur Markman, a psychology professor at The University of Texas at Austin "Whatever psychological mechanisms are at work when people deal with stress and then have to exercise self control later are not the same thing that happens when you're tired."

Markman wrote the study with Todd Maddox of The University of Texas at Austin and Kathleen Vohs and Brian Glass, both of the University of Minnesota.

Subjects in the study included U.S. Army soldiers, cadets at the United States Military Academy at West Point and other college students.

Half of the subjects were asked to remain awake for 24 hours before watching the overeating scene from "Monty Python's The Meaning of Life" and the toilet bowl scene from "Trainspotting." The others were permitted to sleep. Some of the subjects were then asked to watch the scenes without visibly reacting (monitors made sure they didn't cheat) while the others were able to watch the scenes with no restrictions.

All subjects were then placed in a computerized competition in which they could blast an online opponent with noise. (In reality, there was no opponent and no one was blasted, though subjects thought they were doing so.) Those subjects who had suppressed their emotions while watching the movie scenes began the competition by setting the noise level at between 6 and 7 on a scale of 10 while the others set the noise level at between 4 and 5, on average.

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Journal Reference:

1. K. D. Vohs, B. D. Glass, W. T. Maddox, A. B. Markman. Ego Depletion Is Not Just Fatigue: Evidence From a Total Sleep Deprivation Experiment. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 2010; 2 (2): 166 DOI: 10.1177/1948550610386123

Toddlers who played with a limited number of toys showed more improvement in their communication skills following parent-guided treatment than those receiving other community-based treatments.

The report is the first to examine this autism treatment — called Hanen's More Than Words — for children younger than 2 showing early signs of an autism spectrum disorder. Caught early enough and treated with the right behavioral therapy, autism symptoms can improve dramatically.

The paper appears online March 22 in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry.

"This report adds to our emerging knowledge about which interventions work for which kids. It will help match children with the right intervention and not waste time enrolling them in treatments that are not well-suited for them," said co-author Wendy Stone, director of the UW Autism Center.

Stone said that parents often detect autism symptoms when their children reach about 17 to 18 months old. At this age, typical signs of autism include the child using fewer gestures and facial expressions to communicate, and being less likely to initiate social exchanges, such as pointing out something of interest, than other children the same age.

One in 110 children has autism spectrum disorders, which include autistic disorder, Asperger's syndrome and pervasive developmental disorder-not otherwise specified. More boys, one in 70, than girls are affected.

Few autism interventions focus on toddlers — children aged 1 to 3 — and those that do can be time-intensive and expensive. Stone and her collaborators wanted to study the effectiveness of a short-term, relatively low-cost intervention for toddlers showing warning signs.

"Our ultimate goal is to catch the symptoms early and find effective preventive interventions so that these children can attain their full potential," Stone said.

Sixty-two children (51 boys and 11 girls) younger than age 2 and meeting criteria for autism disorders, participated in the study with their parents. The researchers measured the toddlers' baseline social and communication skills during a pretest in which parents and their children played with toys and read books while a researcher observed.

Then the youngsters were randomly assigned either to the Hanen's More Than Words program or to a treatment-as-usual control condition. The program is intended to stimulate mature communication, language development and social skills.

The parents in the treatment group learned strategies to help their toddlers communicate, such as practicing taking turns, encouraging eye contact and modeling simple sentences from the child's perspective. For instance, when the child pointed to crackers, the parent wouldn't just hand over the food. Instead, the parent would get down at eye-level with the child and say, "I want crackers."

"By age 2, most kids have already learned how to interact and communicate with others," Stone said. Children showing early signs of autism spectrum disorders don't seem to learn basic social interactions without coaching, she said.

To the researchers' surprise, the intervention did not make a difference in communication skills when they compared the 32 children in the intervention group and the 30 children in the no-treatment group.

But they did find that the intervention helped a subset of the children. Kids who played with fewer toys during the pretest showed more improvement if they received the treatment than if they didn't. They showed more instances of making eye contact, pointing to or reaching for objects of interest and showing or giving the experimenter a toy.

The effect lasted for at least four months after the intervention ended. To Stone, playtime is a logical time to help children develop communication skills. "Playing with toys provides great opportunities for teaching social and communication skills," she said. "It enables children and caregivers to share a focus of attention."

The advocacy organization Autism Speaks and the Marino Autism Research Institute funded the research.

Co-authors are Alice Carter, professor of psychology at the University of Massachusetts Boston; Paul Yoder, professor of special education at Vanderbilt University; Daniel Messinger, associate professor of psychology at the University of Miami; Seniz Celimli, postdoctoral researcher at the University of Miami; and Allison Nahmias, a psychology graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania.

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Journal Reference:

1. Alice S. Carter, Daniel S. Messinger, Wendy L. Stone, Seniz Celimli, Allison S. Nahmias, Paul Yoder. A randomized controlled trial of Hanen’s ‘More Than Words’ in toddlers with early autism symptoms. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 2011; DOI: 10.1111/j.1469-7610.2011.02395.x

— Mashed potatoes, macaroni and cheese, meatloaf…they may be bad for your arteries, but according to an upcoming study in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, they're good for your heart and emotions. The study focuses on "comfort food" and how it makes people feel.

"For me personally, food has always played a big role in my family," says Jordan Troisi, a graduate student at the University of Buffalo, and lead author on the study. The study came out of the research program of his co-author Shira Gabriel, which has looked at social surrogates — non-human things that make people feel like they belong. Some people counteract loneliness by bonding with their favorite TV show, building virtual relationships with a celebrity or a movie character, or looking at pictures and mementos of loved ones. Troisi and Gabriel wondered if comfort food could have the same effect by making people think of their nearest and dearest.

In one experiment, in an attempt to make participants feel lonely, the researchers had them write for six minutes about a fight with someone close to them. Others were given an emotionally neutral writing assignment. Then, some people in each group wrote about the experience of eating a comfort food and others wrote about eating a new food. Finally, the researchers had participants complete questions about their levels of loneliness.

Writing about a fight with a close person made people feel lonely. But people who were generally secure in their relationships — something that was assessed before the experiment — were able to rescue themselves from loneliness by writing about a comfort food. "We have found that comfort foods are foods which are consistently associated with those close to us," says Troisi. "Thinking about or consuming these foods later then serves as a reminder of those close others." In their essays on comfort food, many people wrote about the experience of eating food with family and friends.

In another experiment, eating chicken soup in the lab made people think more about relationships, but only if they considered chicken soup to be a comfort food — a question they'd been asked long before the experiment, along with many other questions, so they wouldn't remember it.

"Throughout everyone's daily lives they experience stress, often associated with our connections with others," Troisi says. "Comfort food can serve as a ready-made, easy resource for remedying a sense of loneliness. Keeping in mind this new research, it seems humans can find a number of ways to feel like we're connected with others."

 A report into the legal risks associated with the use of social networking sites (eg. Facebook, Myspace) has found that while 95 per cent of Victorian students in years 7 to 10* use social networking sites, nearly 30 per cent did not consider social networking held any risks.

The project was established to investigate the legal risks of social networking as experienced by Victorian secondary school students, teachers and parents. Survey and interview data was gathered from over 1000 Victorian middle school students (years 7-10), 200 teachers and 49 parents.

The report, Teenagers, Legal Risks and Social Networking Sites, found that Facebook is the most popular social networking site, with 93.4 per cent of students using it. The majority of surveyed students update information on their social networking sites at least every day, with a quarter updating their profile several times per day.

The majority of parents (80.4 per cent) said they had seen their child's social networking site profile at least once. Parents and teachers were particularly concerned with issues of cyber-bullying, grooming or stalking, with a lesser number expressing concerns about identity theft and disclosure.

Surveyed students felt that social networking sites were safer than did their teachers and parents. While 48.8 per cent of students felt there was some element of risk, more than one quarter (28.3 per cent) thought social networking sites were safe. Moreover, 19.6 per cent of students were ambivalent about risk, essentially reporting the degree of risk was irrelevant to them as social networking is 'just what everyone does'.

Despite this, the majority of surveyed students (72.4 per cent) indicated they had received unwelcome or unpleasant contact by strangers via their social networking profile.

A minority of students (13.8 per cent) were concerned about security risks, such as identity theft. A very small group of students identified concerns relating to privacy or unwelcome disclosure of data.

"While risks posed by forms of abusive behaviour such as cyber-bullying and grooming have been emphasised both by the media and policy responses, comparatively little attention has been given to the potential legal risks that children and young people may face when using social networking sites," Dr Michael Henderson, one of the co-authors of the report and Senior Lecturer at the Faculty of Education said.

"Such risks exist in the areas of privacy, breach of confidence, disclosure, defamation, intellectual property rights, copyright infringement and criminal laws including harassment and distribution of offensive material, and this report recommends that education about the full range of legal risks potentially encountered via social media should be part of a fully integrated school curricula," Dr Henderson said.

Chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) is characterized by unexplained and debilitating tiredness and is associated with headaches, disrupted sleep, muscle pain and difficulty in concentrating. New research published by BioMed Central's open access journal BMC Medicine shows that ethnicity, depression, lack of exercise or social support, and social difficulties are major risk factors for CFS.

A multi-institute study funded by the Medical Research Council (UK), involving researchers across London and Manchester, looked at data from over 4000 adults living in England. The result of this study showed that, on average, there is a 2.3% risk of suffering from CFS and that risk increases with age by 2% per year from the age of 35. When the researchers compared the occurrence of CFS with medical factors and exercise they found that, while both depression and anxiety were associated with a much higher risk of CFS, moderate exercise halved the risk.

Social status and adversity were also major risk factors along with cultural and ethnic background. The incidence of CFS was highest amongst people who had the most difficulties with housing, finances, or had family problems, but this was balanced by levels of support within the community. Perceived cultural discrimination and insults in the workplace, or in society, along with racial and religious discrimination, were also much higher for CFS sufferers. Overall people with Pakistani, Indian or Black Caribbean backgrounds had a greater risk of CFS than the white population.

Professor Bhui from Barts and the London School of Medicine and Dentistry, Queen Mary, University of London said, "Earlier studies, based on attendance at clinics, indicated that CFS is a disease of white, middle class people. Our results show that CFS is more common amongst the physically inactive, those with social difficulties and with poor social support, and ethnic minorities, especially in the Pakistani group studied, and that they are silently suffering."

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Journal Reference:

1. Kamaldeep S Bhui, Sokratis Dinos, Deborah Ashby, James Nazroo, Simon Wessely, and Peter D White. Chronic fatigue syndrome in an ethnically diverse population: the influence of psychosocial adversity and physical inactivity. BMC Medicine, 2011; 9: 26 DOI: 10.1186/1741-7015-9-26

What could you do for an hour in the first year of college that would improve minority students’ grades over the next three years, reduce the racial achievement gap by half and, years later, make students happier and healthier?  The answer, Stanford psychologists suggest, involves an exercise to help make students feel confident they belong in college.

Along with the excitement and anticipation that come with heading off to college, freshmen often find questions of belonging lurking in the background: Am I going to make friends? Are people going to respect me? Will I fit in?

Those concerns are trickier for black students and others who are often stereotyped or outnumbered on college campuses. They have good reason to wonder whether they will belong — worries that can result in lower grades and a sense of alienation.

But when black freshmen participated in an hour-long exercise designed by Stanford psychologists to show that everyone — no matter what their race or ethnicity — has a tough time adjusting to college right away, their grades went up and the minority achievement gap shrank by 52 percent. And years later, those students said they were happier and healthier than some of their black peers who didn't take part in the exercise.

"We all experience small slights and criticisms in coming to a new school" said Greg Walton, an assistant professor of psychology whose findings are slated for publication in the March 18 edition of Science.

"Being a member of a minority group can make those events have a larger meaning," Walton said. "When your group is in the minority, being rejected by a classmate or having a teacher say something negative to you could seem like proof that you don't belong, and maybe evidence that your group doesn't belong either. That feeling could lead you to work less hard and ultimately do less well."

Walton's paper, co-authored by psychology and education Professor Geoffrey Cohen, reports that the grade point averages of black students who participated in the exercise went up by almost a third of a grade between their sophomore and senior years.

And 22 percent of those students landed in the top 25 percent of their graduating class, while only about 5 percent of black students who didn't participate in the exercise did that well. At the same time, half of the black test subjects who didn't take part in the exercise were in the bottom 25 percent of their class. Only 33 percent of black students who went through the exercise did that poorly.

Walton and Cohen split about 90 second-semester freshmen at a top American university into "treatment" and "control" groups. About half of the students in each group were black; the others were white.

All the test subjects — who were unaware of the full purpose of the exercise — were told the researchers were trying to understand students' college experiences.

Those in the treatment group read surveys and essays written by upperclassmen of different races and ethnicities describing the difficulties they had fitting in during their first year at school. The subjects in the control group read about experiences unrelated to a sense of belonging.

The upperclassmen had reported feeling intimidated by professors, being snubbed by new friends and ignored in their quest for help early in their college careers. But they all emphasized that, with time, their confidence grew, they made good friends and they developed strong relationships with professors.

"Everybody feels they are different freshman year from everybody else, when really in at least some ways we are all pretty similar," one older student — a black woman — was quoted as saying. "Since I realized that, my experience . . . has been almost 100 percent positive."

The test subjects in the treatment group were then asked to write essays about why they thought the older college students' experiences changed. The researchers asked them to illustrate their essays with stories of their own lives, and then rewrite their essays into speeches that would be videotaped and could be shown to future students. The point was to have the test subjects internalize and personalize the idea that adjustments are tough for everyone.

"We didn't want them to think of difficulties as unique to them or specific to their racial group," Walton said of the black test subjects. "We wanted them to realize that some of those bad things that happen are just part of the transition that everyone goes through when they go off to college."

The researchers tracked their test subjects during their sophomore, junior and senior years. While they found the social-belonging exercise had virtually no impact on white students, it had a significant impact on black students.

Along with improved GPAs by their senior year, the black students who were in the treatment group reported a greater sense of belonging compared to their peers in the control group. They also said they were happier and were less likely to spontaneously think about negative racial stereotypes. And they seemed healthier: 28 percent said they visited a doctor recently, as compared to 60 percent in the control group.

Despite the impressive outcomes, Walton and Cohen say the social-belonging exercise isn't a quick fix to closing the academic race gap — a problem fed by a host of issues tied to diversity, socioeconomics and public policy. But their research shows how addressing feelings of belonging can improve student performance. And similar exercises may succeed in addressing concerns about belonging among other groups, like first-generation college students, immigrants and new employees.

"This intervention alone is not the answer, but we know more about what types of things help," Cohen said. "The intervention is like turning on a light switch. It seems miraculous when the lights go on, but it all hinges on the infrastructure that's already in place."

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Journal Reference:

1. G. M. Walton, G. L. Cohen. A Brief Social-Belonging Intervention Improves Academic and Health Outcomes of Minority Students. Science, 2011; 331 (6023): 1447 DOI: 10.1126/science.1198364

A polite act shows respect. But a new study of a common etiquette — holding a door for someone — suggests that courtesy may have a more practical, though unconscious, shared motivation: to reduce the work for those involved. The research, by Joseph P. Santamaria and David A. Rosenbaum of Pennsylvania State University, is among the first to combine two fields of study ordinarily considered unrelated: altruism and motor control.

It is to be published in a forthcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

"The way etiquette has been viewed by Emily Post — that you're being proper by following social codes — is undoubtedly part of it," said psychology professor Rosenbaum. "Our insight is there is another contributor: the mental representation of other people's physical effort. Substantial research in the field of motor control shows that people are good at estimating how much effort they and others

expend," Rosenbaum continued. "We realized that this concept could be extended to a shared-effort model of politeness."

The researchers videotaped people approaching and passing through the door of a university building. The tapes were analyzed for the relationships among several behaviors: Did the first person hold the

door for a follower or followers and for how long? How did the likelihood of holding the door depend on the distance between the first person at the door and whomever followed?

"The most important result," Rosenbaum said, "was that when someone reached the door and two people followed, the first person at the door held the door longer than if only one person followed. The internal calculation on the part of the first arriver was, 'My altruism will benefit more people, so I'll hold the door longer.'"

Another finding: the followers who noticed the door-holder hastened their steps, helping to "fulfill the implicit pact" between themselves and the opener "to keep their joint effort below the sum of their individual door-opening efforts," the authors write.

A more common explanation of why we extend a physical gesture of courtesy is what the researchers term the "critical distance" model: we do something for someone if she is simply near enough. But the researchers found that model insufficient. "We need a way of describing why there is a change of probability" both of doing the task and of expending more time at it, said Rosenbaum. Is the critical distance 10 feet? Why not 50 feet? What is "near enough?" And why wait longer if more people are following? "You still come back to the question of what the individuals are trying to achieve."

Rosenbaum sees the shared-effort model as enhancing, not detracting from, our appreciation of good manners: "Here are people who will probably never see each other again," he says, "but in this fleeting interaction, they reduce each others' effort. This small gesture is uplifting for society."

A review of 35 years of scientific medical studies confirms that the social and emotional context of the doctor-patient relationship have yet to be incorporated into the equation when it comes to health care.

In spite of its strong endorsement over a decade ago by the influential Institute of Medicine report, "Crossing the Quality Chasm: A New Health System for the 21st Century," which highlighted the benefits of care that is respectful of and responsive to patients' needs, values and concerns, patient-centered medicine has not become part of the mainstream.

A review of the medical literature from 1975 to April 2010 found that less than one percent of the 327,219 randomized controlled studies published in peer-reviewed journals over the past 35 years included patient-centered care trials. "Behaviorally-Defined Patient-Centered Communication — A Narrative Review" appears in the February 2011 issue of the Journal of General Internal Medicine.

"We are only at the water's edge in terms of availability of patient-centered care studies because they aren't being done. We need to encourage researchers to implement clinical trials that evaluate care that focuses on communication between physician and patient. Ultimately, we need processes that have been tested and proven," said Richard M. Frankel, Ph.D., Regenstrief Institute investigator, professor of medicine at the IU School of Medicine, and a senior scientist in the Veterans Affairs Center of Excellence for Implementing Evidence-Based Practice at the Richard L. Roudebush VA Medical Center. He is the senior author of the JGIM paper.

Dr. Frankel uses an analogy from aviation where safety is given the highest priority. "When the air traffic controller gives an instruction to the pilot, the pilot's response must be phrased to indicate understanding of the air traffic controller's message. We don't have that in medicine. The doctor speaks to the patient and generally does not solicit a response that clearly indicates the patient understood what the doctor wished to convey."

As with the cockpit and control tower exchange, the exchange at the hospital bedside or in the doctor's office requires communication of complex information in stressful circumstances. In both aviation and medicine, good communication is critical to safety.

"What we have found repeatedly is that medical care succeeds when there are stable and enduring relationships," said Dr. Frankel. "Successful outcomes lie not simply in the mechanics of medical care, but in the social and emotional context of the doctor-patient relationship."

Dr. Frankel and co-authors Robert C. Smith, M.D., Francesca C. Dwamena, M.D., and John Coffey. M.D., of Michigan State University, and Madhusudan Grover, M.D., of the Mayo Clinic, note that in spite of paucity of randomized control trials incorporating patient-centered care, indirect evidence of its effectiveness continues to be compiled.

People who feel more secure in receiving love and acceptance from others place less monetary value on their possessions, according to new research from the University of New Hampshire.

The research was conducted by Edward Lemay, assistant professor of psychology at UNH, and colleagues at Yale University. The research is published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

Lemay and his colleagues found that people who had heightened feelings of interpersonal security — a sense of being loved and accepted by others — placed a lower monetary value on their possession than people who did not.

In their experiments, the researchers measured how much people valued specific items, such as a blanket and a pen. In some instances, people who did not feel secure placed a value on an item that was five times greater than the value placed on the same item by more secure people.

"People value possessions, in part, because they afford a sense of protection, insurance, and comfort," Lemay says. "But what we found was that if people already have a feeling of being loved and accepted by others, which also can provide a sense of protection, insurance, and comfort, those possessions decrease in value."

The researchers theorize that the study results could be used to help people with hoarding disorders.

"These findings seem particularly relevant to understanding why people may hang onto goods that are no longer useful. They also may be relevant to understanding why family members often fight over items from estates that they feel are rightfully theirs and to which they are already attached. Inherited items may be especially valued because the associated death threatens a person's sense of personal security," Lemay says.

The research was conducted by Lemay; Margaret Clark, Aaron Greenberg, Emily Hill, and David Roosth, all from Yale University; and Elizabeth Clark-Polner, from Université de Genève, Switzerland.

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Journal Reference:

1. Margaret S. Clark, Aaron Greenberg, Emily Hill, Edward P. Lemay, Elizabeth Clark-Polner, David Roosth. Heightened interpersonal security diminishes the monetary value of possessions. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 2010; DOI: 10.1016/j.jesp.2010.08.001

Although Edith Piaf defiantly sang, "Non, je ne regrette rien," most people will have their share of regrets over their lifetime. Indeed, anyone who seeks to overcome disappointments should compare themselves to others who are worse off — rather than looking up to folks in more enviable positions — according to a new study from Concordia University. Published in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, these findings have implications for both young and old.

"Our study examined how younger and older adults cope with life regrets," says lead author Isabelle Bauer, who completed her PhD in Concordia's Department of Psychology and the Centre for Research in Human Development. "One common coping mechanism was through social comparisons, which can be both good and bad, depending on whether people think they can undo their regrets."

"Generally if people compare themselves to those who are worse off, they're going to feel better," continues Bauer, now a research associate at the Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre and a clinical psychologist at Cognitive Behavioural Therapy Associates of Toronto. "When they compare themselves to people who are better off, it can make them feel worse."

Physical health affected

Looking towards others who are worse off can also have a marked effect on physical health: Participants who used downward social comparisons reported experiencing fewer cold symptoms. Overall, they reported a positive effect on their emotional well-being over the months that followed.

"The emotional distress of regrets can trigger biological dysregulation of the hormone and immune systems that makes people more vulnerable to develop clinical health problems — whether a cold or other potentially longer-term health problems. In this study, we showed that downward social comparisons can improve emotional well-being and help prevent health problems," says senior author Carsten Wrosch, a professor in Concordia's Department of Psychology and a member of the Centre for Research in Human Development.

Older versus younger

The study recruited 104 adults of various ages who completed a survey about their greatest regrets — which ranged from not spending enough time with their family to having married the wrong person. Participants were then asked to report how the severity of their own regrets compared to the regrets of other people their age.

Unlike findings from previous studies on the same topic, age did not determine how effectively people reconciled their life regrets. "The effectiveness of coping mechanisms depended more on an individual's perceived ability to change their life regret than on their age," says Bauer. "Moving on and being able to maintain good emotional well-being depends greatly on an individual's opportunity to correct the cause of their regrets."

This work was supported by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

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Journal Reference:

1. I. Bauer, C. Wrosch. Making Up for Lost Opportunities: The Protective Role of Downward Social Comparisons for Coping With Regrets Across Adulthood. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2011; 37 (2): 215 DOI: 10.1177/0146167210393256