The regulations were intended to help curb troubling obesity rates. But Justice Tingling called the prohibitions “arbitrary and capricious,” essentially agreeing with critics who had complained about a “nanny state” intruding on personal liberty—including the liberty to eat poorly and to be overweight.

Proponents saw the regulations differently, as a form of “soft paternalism.” That phrase comes from economist Richard Thaler and legal scholar Cass Sunstein, who argued in their 2008 book Nudge that governments can and should structure citizens’ choices to encourage sensible decision making and healthier lives. Mayor Bloomberg’s proposed ban, according to supporters, would not have taken away citizens’ freedom of choice—they could have purchased as many 16-ounce sodas as they chose—but it would have arranged the “choice architecture” in such a way that it made it more difficult to choose badly.

This behavioral economics theory is based on sound psychological science, specifically decades of work on cognitive heuristics and biases. For example, the “default heuristic”—or what Thaler and Sunstein label the “status quo bias”—describes the powerful human tendency to continue a course of action once it’s been chosen, even when it’s harmful. Changing course requires cognitive work, so it’s easier to stick with the status quo. Banning extra-large sugary drinks would merely make consuming 20 or 32 ounces more effortful, thus diminishing the likelihood of that choice. The ban would alter people’s habits and customs over time.

Another powerful bias—called the “unit bias”—describes the strong human preference for a single portion of anything. Left unregulated, most people will eat only one of whatever they are offered, but they will finish one serving regardless of the size. So in theory, the New York City prohibition would have diminished the likelihood that people would actually go back for a second 16-ounce soda. Over time, such choice architecture would have reduced overall consumption of unhealthy and fattening beverages—and addressed the runaway obesity epidemic, supporters say.

Mississippi lawmakers have passed a bill—mockingly nicknamed the Anti-Bloomberg Bill—that would prohibit localities from trying to regulate citizens’ food choices. Mississippi has one of the highest obesity rates in the nation.

Excerpts from Wray Herbert’s blogs—“Full Frontal Psychology” and “We’re Only Human”–appear regularly in The Huffington Post.

The post A Salvo in the Soda Wars appeared first on Association for Psychological Science.

I’m not alone in this. Everyone I know has a story about the quirkiness of memory, and scientists have been fascinated and perplexed by these oddities for years. Why isn’t memory a better system, more efficient and organized, if remembering is so crucial to daily functioning and future planning? Why do we remember so many trivial and irrelevant things?  Why this and not that?

Why this and not that is really the foundational question about memory, and a group of psychological scientists at Purdue University have been exploring one possible answer. James Nairne and colleagues believe we should look at memory as an evolved system, much like the digestive system or the circulatory system. These bodily systems evolved the way they did to help our ancient ancestors adapt—to solve problems of survival. From this perspective, it makes sense that the brain—and human cognition, including memory—would also have evolved to serve certain survival functions. If our memories today seem spotty and irrational at times, perhaps the quirks are artifacts of an earlier era, when they did make evolutionary sense.

At least that’s the theory, which Nairne and his group have been trying to demonstrate in the laboratory. They reasoned that, if a certain kind of information was once privileged because of its survival value, it should still be more memorable today—even though recalling this information is no longer adaptive.  They reasoned further that animate objects fit this description. For our early ancestors, it was crucial to survival to recognize and remember living things, because they might well be life-threatening predators, such as snakes. Or, on the other hand, they might be potential sexual partners. Either way, remembering animate objects was purposeful—more purposeful than recognizing and remembering rocks and stars—so memory for living things should still be keen today.

The scientists tested this in a couple simple experiments. In the first, they had volunteers look at a long list of nouns, to see which ones were easily recalled later on. Some were clearly animate; others unquestionably inanimate, and the rest ambiguous—menace, for example. The scientists controlled for other factors that might also make the words memorable—concreteness and meaningfulness, for instance—so they could zero in on animacy as the recall-enhancing trait.

The results supported the scientists’ idea. As summarized in an article to be published in the journal Psychological Science, words for animate objects were much more likely to be remembered than were words for inanimate objects. Indeed, animacy was one of the most potent influences on retention and recall—along with imagery. The scientists confirmed this in a slightly different, second experiment, in which volunteers were asked to memorize and then to recall words for animate and inanimate objects. Participants were much more likely to remember the animate words, even though animate and inanimate words had been carefully matched on other mnemonic dimensions.

The ability to recognize and distinguish animate objects appears early in infancy, further suggesting that the mind has been “tuned” for hyperactive detection and recall of animate beings, probably somewhere in our ancestral past. The mind may also be tuned for detection and memory of many other things that were once important to survival but no longer are. So our memories today may seem random, but the strengths and failings may in fact reflect the variety of ancient adaptations that made us human.

Wray Herbert’s blogs—“Full Frontal Psychology” and “We’re Only Human”—appear regularly in The Huffington Post.

The post Summoning the Past: Why This and Not That? appeared first on Association for Psychological Science.

We all experience some measure of social anxiety, but some people suffer much more than others, and not just with public speaking. Dates, job interviews, even idle cocktail chatter—any kind of social encounter can be a source of unbearable dread for people with a social anxiety disorder, or SAD. Millions are debilitated by the emotional and physical arousal associated with this most common of mental disorders.

Despite the prevalence of SAD, however, a lot remains unknown about the disorder. While the negative emotions are a hallmark of clinical anxiety disorder, there is conflicting evidence about the physiological symptoms. Do sufferers really have maladaptive bodily responses to social stress, or do they just perceive it that way? An answer to this basic question would be helpful in guiding clinical intervention.

A team of psychological scientists has been exploring the interplay of thinking, attention and physiology in SAD. Jeremy Jamieson of the University of Rochester, Matthew Nock of Harvard and Wendy Berry Mendes of UC—San Francisco designed two studies to sort out these aspects of the disorder and, beyond that, to test a simple intervention that might diminish the unpleasant symptoms of social anxiety.

Here’s the background that sparked the scientists’ inquiry. It’s a popular belief  that stressful arousal—heightened blood pressure, heart rate and so forth—accumulates over time, leading to poor health and disease down the road. But this is not entirely true. Stress can indeed be deleterious to people’s health, but only if they see the stressful situation as a threat—something they lack the inner resources to cope with. By contrast, if people see a stressful situation as a challenge to meet, their physiological response is different—and not as harmful to the body.

In the first study, the scientists wanted to see if they could clarify the psychological and physiological aspects of SAD. They recruited volunteers, some of whom met the clinical definition of SAD, and deliberately confronted them with their worst fear—speaking in front of judgmental strangers. They used a well-established social stress test, in which volunteers are required to prepare a short speech about their personal strengths and weaknesses, deliver it to an audience of two judges, and then recover from the experience. The judges were trained to give subtle but negative non-verbal feedback during the speech; they didn’t smile or nod or otherwise indicate any kind of affirmation of the speaker’s performance. Half of the volunteers—both with SAD and without—went through this stressful experience, while the remaining volunteers, the controls, gave their speech in private, without a judgmental audience.

During this experiment, all the volunteers were hooked up to monitors, which recorded their physiological reactivity. The scientists also measured the volunteers’ vigilance for signs of threat, their negative feelings, and their appraisal of their own stress—whether they saw it as a challenge or a threat. Then they crunched all the data together.

The most surprising finding was that there was no significant difference between SAD sufferers and healthy controls on measures of arousal. That is, when required to speak before a judgmental audience, both showed high vigilance and the harmful kind physical arousal, compared to those who did not have to speak in public. Those with SAD reported more subjective anxiety and negative feelings, but on objective measures they were no worse off than healthy people in a highly stressful social situation.

Since this finding was unexpected, the scientists wanted to double-check it, but they also wanted to capitalize on it. If SAD sufferers’ biological arousal is disconnected from subjective feelings of anxiety, would it be possible to ameliorate the disorder simply by thinking about physical arousal symptoms constructively? This is what the scientists explored in a second experiment.

It was basically the same experiment, except that this time some of the volunteers were urged to reappraise their symptoms in a more positive way. Specifically, they were told this just prior to the speaking task: “In stressful situations, like public speaking, our bodies react in very specific ways. The increase in arousal you may feel during stress is not harmful. Instead, these responses evolved to help our ancestors survive by delivering oxygen to where it is needed in the body.” They were explicitly encouraged to reinterpret their arousal as an adaptive response. The idea was that changing perceptions of arousal might mitigate anxiety.

And that’s just what they found, and detail in a forthcoming article in the journal Clinical Psychological Science. Both socially anxious and healthy volunteers, when encouraged to see their bodily arousal as functional, improved on a number of measures. They still saw public speaking as stressful and personally demanding, but they saw themselves as more resourceful—better able to cope with the social stress of speaking. What’s more, their physiological response actually improved as well; it came to resemble the more adaptive, healthier kind of arousal. Finally, they were not so preoccupied with threatening cues in the world. This shift in attention, away from negativity, could be protective, diminishing the likelihood of reacting to new social threats in the future.

Wray Herbert’s blogs—“Full Frontal Psychology” and “We’re Only Human”—appear regularly in The Huffington Post.

The post Feeling anxious? Think again. appeared first on Association for Psychological Science.

Two cognitive psychologists now offer an intriguing explanation for this philosophical puzzle. Nicolas Baumard of the University of Pennsylvania and Pascal Boyer of Washington University in St. Louis argue that beliefs result from the interplay of two distinct human thinking processes that make up the human mind. Years of research have demonstrated that we all have a powerful intuitive system of thought—fast, automatic, largely hidden—as well as a slow and analytical system of thought. According to Baumard and Boyer’s theory, religious beliefs originate in deep-rooted intuitions about things completely unrelated to gods and afterlives—intuitions that were once adaptive but no longer are. Beliefs are not simply intuitions, however. They are the slow, deliberate mind’s attempt to explain these vestigial gut feelings.

Here are some of their illustrations:

• It made sense for our ancient ancestors to be keenly on guard for signs of peril in the world—a predator’s tracks or natural poisons, for instance.  As a result of this hypervigilance, humans learned to respond emotionally and defensively to threats and contagion, a response that continues today—even though those old threats are largely irrelevant to most of us. Other people were one source of dangerous contagion, and we still respond—on a gut level—to our intuitive avoidance of others, especially the sick. But this lingering gut feeling leaves a lot unexplained, like the biology of how germs are actually transmitted, so it’s left to the slow reflective mind to make sense of these strong but mysterious impulses. Our modern mind elaborates on these old intuitions, creating beliefs about magical contagion, both good and bad. According to Baumard and Boyer, this may be why believers worldwide will ritualistically touch relics and kiss the likenesses of saints.  Modern belief in the protective power of these rituals “hitchhikes” on an ancient fear of germs.
• We all know that when someone dies, their “agency” dies, too. They are no longer active in the world in the same way they were. Even children get that when grandpa is gone, he’s gone. Even so, our intuitive sense of that person—the thinking, feeling grandpa—can still be activated by memories of the deceased. This intuitive discrepancy persists, and the rational mind steps in to make sense of it. The discrepancy become the dual nature of human beings—the body and soul.  This in turn leads to idiosyncratic thoughts—that dead people are “still around”—and especially to beliefs in ancestral spirits.
• The human mind craves synchrony. Acting in unison with others—whether it’s a military procession or a church choir—triggers a biochemical surge in the brain, which increases social bonding and cooperation. This ancient bias was probably crucial to the forging of early societies, but the modern reflective mind—unaware of the original link between congregation and pleasure—seeks a supernatural explanation for the urge to unite, in the form of angels and gods.
• We all have an intuitive sense of right and wrong. Moral intuitions likely originated in the need to have fair relationships with others because, if we didn’t treat others fairly, we were excluded from future interactions. One of these ancient moral intuitions dictates that we should compensate others whom we have harmed, and if we can’t for whatever reason, that we should redress the unbalance with self-inflicted suffering. This could take the form of flagellation, mutilation, fasting, or giving away money  to a third party—an orphanage or church, for instance. These actions seem intuitively to restore symmetry, yet to the reflective mind the reasons for such acts are mysterious. This mystery generates possible explanations, including divine justice and karma.

These are just a few examples of common religious beliefs and practices, drawn from an article to be published in the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science. There are many more. What they all have in common is that they all originate in intuitive beliefs, which “pop up” without deliberate thought, and demand an explanation. In that sense, Baumard and Boyer say, religious notions are not special. They are just one form of evidence that the human mind is motivated, as a result of evolution, to comment on its own gut feelings.

Wray Herbert’s blogs—“Full Frontal Psychology” and “We’re Only Human”—appear regularly in The Huffington Post.

The post Is Religion Just An Assortment of Gut Feelings? appeared first on Association for Psychological Science.

Every federal budget is, underneath those numbers, a set of values—many related to protecting Americans from harm. But the mandate to cut spending means choosing among those values and safeguards. Is it more important to protect Americans from another terrorist attack or the flu, from unhealthy pollution or computer hackers? Our choices are both political and moral judgments.

And perhaps psychological  judgments as well—or misjudgments, as new research out of Princeton University suggests. Psychological scientists Daniel Ames and Susan Fiske are reporting evidence that our judgments of harm may be badly distorted by deeply-rooted cognitive biases that operate out of our awareness. Specifically, we may be prone to exaggerate damage when we perceive it as deliberate and blameworthy, as opposed to unintended consequences or acts of nature.

Ames and Fiske ran several experiments to explore how intention shapes our seemingly objective judgments of harm. In one, for example, they had a large group of volunteers read a simple vignette about a small company. Employees shared in this company’s profits, but unhappily the CEO made a poor investment that ended up hurting the workers financially. Half the volunteers read a version in which the CEO truly believed he was investing wisely, but made a mistake. The others read that the CEO was secretly thinking that financial losses would spur the employees to work harder in the future. In other words, he harmed them intentionally.

So the only difference in the stories was the CEO’s intent. The harm was identical in both versions: anxiety about paying down debt, postponed family vacations, dips in credit ratings—personal loss, but not devastating loss. Plus, the workers in both versions were unaware of the bad investment and any malicious intent.

When asked to assess the harm resulting from the CEO’s misguided investment, the volunteers thought that the workers were hurt more when the harm was intentional. What’s more, this distorted judgment of harm resulted from a desire to blame the CEO. They saw the CEO, under these conditions, as morally culpable and deserving of punishment, and this judgment in turn made them exaggerate the workers’ suffering.

The scientists ran a couple other versions of this experiment, to rule out other interpretations of the data. As described in an article to appear in the journal Psychological Science, these studies verified the core finding that malicious intent triggers a desire to blame, which magnifies the perception of harm. But they wanted to look at this idea in a different context—this one much more directly relevant to current budget debates. This time the volunteers read a vignette about farmers who relied on a river for their water. But the river dried up, causing a water shortage that destroyed their crops.  As before, some volunteers read about an unintentional harm—the river was dry due to a lack of rain—while others read that a nearby landowner had deliberately diverted the flow of water—with the clear intention of damaging their crops.

Then all the volunteers were shown the same list of specific damages and costs: for example, medical costs at $80. They were shown seven itemized costs in rapid succession and asked to sum up the total damage in dollars. In other words, it was a completely objective arithmetic problem, yet the volunteers didn’t always see it objectively. Those who had read about a natural disaster summed up the total costs accurately: Their average tally was $2753, compared to the actual cost of $2862. But those who thought the farmers had been cheated by the landowner—those volunteers grossly overestimated the damage done, putting the figure at about $5100. That’s not even close.

This means that, when volunteers were primed to blame a culprit, they couldn’t even add a simple list of sums without distortion. They saw the same addition problem as the other volunteers—those not focused on blame—yet they came up with a wildly overblown estimate of personal damage. Ames and Fiske ran this experiment again, with incentives to be as accurate and objective as possible—and incentives not to assess punitive damages—yet the biased judgment persisted. In the volunteers’ minds, the landowner’s malintent literally added dollars to the farmers’ suffering.

People suffer harm every day. If it’s not a farmer’s crops, it’s the hurricane victims on the Jersey shore, or the victims of a food-borne illness, or a firefighter who has lost his job, or the innocent people who died in the World Trade Center. The federal government cannot protect every citizen from every bad thing. But lawmakers and budget officials add up columns of numbers much the same way as these irrational volunteers, and should at least know that their bottom lines are being distorted by a powerful urge to blame and punish wrongdoing.

Wray Herbert’s blogs—“We’re Only Human” and “Full Frontal Psychology”—appear regularly in The Huffington Post.

The post Budgets and Biases: Summing Up American Values appeared first on Association for Psychological Science.

I’m not alone in this fascination. Millions of viewers have tuned into every episode of Ice Road Truckers since its premiere in 2007. And if hazardous driving is not your cup of Joe, how about Ax Men or Dance Moms, Chef School or Bikini Barbershop, Sister Wives or Biggest Loser? Reality TV dominates small-screen viewing these days. Viewers have literally hundreds of choices in vicarious viewing every day, 24 hours a day. And so what if they’re not exactly real.

What explains this trend? Well, it’s in part simple economics. These shows are cheap to make. But it’s more than that. There is something compelling about people’s stories, something that taps into a deep human need for narrative. The pull of Deadliest Catch and Here Comes Honey Boo Boo can really be traced back to ancient story telling traditions, which exist in every world culture. We see parts of ourselves in these modern-day folk tales, just as we construct stories about our own personal realities.

Psychological scientists have in recent years begun to examine this deep human yearning for story—in particular our need to create a coherent narrative identity. They have been using narrative identity as both an indicator of psychological health and a possible tool for enhancing well-being. Much of this work has been done by Northwestern University’s Dan McAdams and Western Washington University’s Kate McLean, who describe their and others’ research in a forthcoming issue of the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science.

We all construct a coherent narrative identity, according to the emerging theory, from the accumulated particulars of our autobiographies as well as our envisioned goals. We internalize this story over time, and use it to convey to ourselves and others who we are, where we came from, and where we think we’re heading. Consider the example of redemption. McAdams and other scientists have been asking people to narrate scenes and extended stories from their past, and then they code the accounts for key ideas like redemption and self-determination and community. They have found that people who include themes of redemption in their stories—a marked transition from bad to good—are less focused on themselves and more focused on community and the future. They’re more mature emotionally.

This is just one example of how people make narrative sense of the suffering in their lives. Others have studied how people narrate life challenges, such as a painful divorce or a child’s illness, and they have found that those who produce detailed accounts of loss are better adapted psychologically. Their narratives often strike themes of growth and learning and transformation. Importantly, the stories of the well-adapted have endings, positive resolutions of bad experiences.

Psychotherapy is largely about personal narratives. Therapists help their clients to “re-story” their lives by finding more positive narratives for unhappy experiences. Indeed, when scientists asked former psychotherapy patients to describe how they remembered their therapeutic experience, the healthier ones told heroic stories, tales in which they bravely battled their symptoms and emerged victorious. This narrative theme of personal control was also and by far the best predictor of therapeutic success: As patients’ stories increasingly emphasized self-determination, these patients’ symptoms abated and their health improved. The stories themselves created an identity that was mature and well-adjusted.

Wray Herbert’s blogs—“Full Frontal Psychology” and “We’re Only Human”—appear regularly in The Huffington Post.

The post Who Am I? The Heroes of Our Minds appeared first on Association for Psychological Science.

So it came as a surprise to me to read recently about “singlism.” Apparently, some people do feel judged, and unfairly, for their status. And intriguingly, this subtle form of discrimination appears to cut both ways. That is, people who are single by choice claim that they are treated unfairly for not tying some kind of knot, while married people—especially in large urban centers—feel that they are marginalized in a predominantly singles culture. Why would this be?

Well, the answer may be rooted in human psychology, specifically in our powerful tendency to idealize whatever life choices we have made. A well-established psychological theory—known as cognitive dissonance theory—argues that humans cannot tolerate the discomfort that comes from making an irreversible and regrettable choice. A team of psychological scientists, headed up by Kristin Laurin of Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, thought that this dynamic might apply to relational prejudice as well.  Not that all relationship choices are not necessarily regrettable, but they are either/or, so these scientists reasoned that people would tend to idealize their own choices and situations as correct and preferable—not just for themselves but for everyone. They decided to explore this possibility with a few simple laboratory experiments.

If it’s true that people idealize their relational status, then this idealization should be especially strong in people who feel their status is unlikely to change. So Laurin recruited volunteers who were unambiguously coupled or single, and then used a standard tool to measure relationship stability—the perception that one’s status will be lasting. This is not the same as satisfaction or commitment. Indeed, people can be happy in a relationship they know is doomed, or discontent in a death-do-us-part relationship. The same applies to people who have opted to be single. Each volunteer also answered questions about how much they idealized their relational status. Did they see being in a couple, or living single, as a desirable norm for society? Or something unwanted? Or simply a personal choice?

Then they crunched the data, and they found that both coupled and single volunteers idealized their own status—and they were more likely to idealize their status if they saw it as unlikely to change. In other words, if you’re married and plan to stay that way, or single and plan to stay that way, you are apt to see your choice as the best choice for everyone. That’s singlism—no matter which direction.

Is this prejudice just a harmless form of self-delusion? Or does this tendency—to make everyone’s life choices for them—actually affect the way we judge and treat others? Laurin addressed this in another study, focusing on volunteers judgments of others. Figuring that Valentine’s Day intensifies the existing social division between singles and couples, she recruited young men and women on that romantic holiday, and measured their status and stability like before. All these volunteers then read about a hypothetical person of the same gender, either single or coupled, and wrote a short description of how they imagined that person spending Valentine’s Day evening. Finally, they rated that person’s happiness and fulfillment, and indicated whether that person would have had a better Valentine’s Day if they had a different status.

The results, described in a forthcoming article in the journal Psychological Science, reinforced the earlier findings. The more long-lasting the volunteers perceived their own status to be, the more positive they were about others who shared their status. These people were also more negative about those who made different choices. But interestingly, those who saw their own status as fragile—these people judged people with different status more positively. They didn’t feel the need to judge others because they weren’t all that invested in their own life choice—or perhaps they were anticipating switching sides.

Laurin and her colleagues ran two more experiments, with mixed but worrying implications. In one, people with stable status—either coupled or single—showed no favoritism toward same-status others in hiring decisions. But in another, they did show favoritism toward others with the same relational status in voting decisions. When all the studies were combined into one analysis, the results showed that perceived stability led both coupled and single men and women to treat others like them more favorably. Notably, this effect was even stronger for single people than for people in couples.

In short, singlism is indeed potent and double-edged. Because most people still do opt for marriage, this bias probably hurts more singles overall. But the intolerance that couple people feel is no less real or harmful.

Excerpts from Wray Herbert’s two blogs—“Full Frontal Psychology” and “We’re Only Human”—appear regularly in The Huffington Post.

The post It’s Complicated: The Psychology of “Singlism” appeared first on Association for Psychological Science.

Bittersweet. It seems like a contradiction, but in truth our emotional states are rarely simple or tidy. We don’t feel good this moment, bad the next. More discrete feelings like pride and excitement and frustration and shame spill over one another and mix, and it’s up to us to differentiate the nuances. What I was doing in those minutes as I drove away from campus—sorting out my welter of feelings and making sense of them—is what most people do in some way every day.

If they’re lucky, that is. Research has shown that people vary greatly in their ability to do this fine-grain emotional sorting, and the inability to do such emotional calibration may take a toll. Emotions are information to the human mind, and when we experience a discrete emotion like sadness, we try to process that emotion and conceptualize it in a meaningful way. In that way we can explain the feeling to ourselves in a reasonable way, and act appropriately. If on the other hand we experience an undifferentiated emotional mush, we’re likely to misconstrue the causes, and act in ways that don’t make sense, and may indeed be harmful.

At least that’s the theory, which has been pieced together in several labs over many years. It’s also the departure point for new work by Emre Demiralp of the University of Michigan, who with several colleagues decided to investigate whether people who suffer from serious depression might experience a disability in this kind of emotional parsing. The idea makes sense theoretically, because depression has long been associated with impoverished perception and memory and thinking. The scientists wanted to see if depressed people’s emotional states are also less rich and textured.

The problem with studying emotions is that they are very difficult to tap and measure. Feelings are subjective, so scientists can’t simply ask people what they are feeling and expect an accurate and meaningful answer. To circumvent this problem, the scientists used what’s called “experience sampling.” They recruited a group of volunteers—half healthy, half clinically depressed—and gave them Palm Pilots to carry with them for a week. Over this time, the scientists beeped the volunteers at random times, and asked them to stop what they were doing and rate how much—on a scale of zero to four—they were experiencing eleven different emotions at the moment—anxiety, disgust, guilt, alertness, happiness, and so forth.

Demiralp and his colleagues wanted to assess the richness of the volunteers’ emotional lives, and to do this they looked for patterns of correlation. For example, if a volunteer experienced fluctuations in anger over the week, and those fluctuations correspond closely with that volunteer’s fluctuations in sadness–this would suggest that this person does not differentiate much between anger and sadness. They are linked together into a vague sense of feeling bad. The scientists predicted that the depressed volunteers would show such a pattern, while the healthy volunteers’ emotions would not correlate closely. What’s more, because depressed people have a bias toward negativity, the scientists expected that depressed volunteers would parse their positive emotions just as finely as healthy volunteers.

And that’s exactly what they found. As reported in-line in the journal Psychological Science, the volunteers suffering from serious depression tended—much more than healthy controls—to lump all their bad feelings together; shame and frustration and sadness were all parts of a vague sense of feeling bad. They did not do this with positive feelings. Importantly, this inability to parse negative emotion works independently of emotional intensity or instability. In other words, it’s a fundamental characteristic of the depressed mind.

The scientists believe that finely discriminated emotions are more adaptive for mental health, because they are less likely to be attributed to the wrong cause. People suffering from clinical depression often have distorted thinking, blaming themselves for situations they can’t control, and it could be that mushy emotional states contribute to that harmful thinking. A vague undifferentiated unpleasantness is much harder to explain, and therefore much harder to regulate.

Excerpts from Wray Herbert’s two blogs—“We’re Only Human” and “Full Frontal Psychology”—appear regularly in The Huffington Post and in Scientific American Mind.

The post Is Depression an Emotional Mush? appeared first on Association for Psychological Science.

But people don’t always want to disclose their inner lives, even when they seek help, and one of a therapist’s most difficult challenges is to nudge clients who are guarding their privacy. It’s often a painstaking process to build rapport and foster openness. Indeed, the pace is a luxury that many patients cannot afford in the era of managed care and short-term interventions.

Might there be a faster, more efficient way to encourage reluctant clients to reveal themselves? Arcadia University’s Steven Robbins and his colleagues decided to turn to psychological science for clinical insights that might be useful in the consulting room. Specifically, the researchers wanted to explore an area of cognitive psychology called priming, which has shown that words can—outside of awareness—activate certain thoughts and expectations, and thus shape behavior. Robbins wanted to see if this well studied laboratory procedure might be used to promote openness in the early stages of therapy.

The scientists recruited a group of young adults, predominantly white women, to study the idea. The volunteers believed that they were taking part in a study of what makes a good candidate for therapy. Under cover of this ruse, they completed a scrambled word test, which unbeknownst to them, contained several priming words. Half the volunteers were exposed to words related to openness—candid, communicate, free, and so forth—while the other half saw words suggesting wariness—concealed, quiet, shy, restricted. The idea was that those exposed to words related to openness would subsequently act more openly, revealing more of themselves.

They tested this by having all the (now primed) volunteers write two short essays. The instructions for the first were: “Describe the best thing that happened to you in the past 30 days and how it made you feel.” The second read: “Describe what you like best about yourself.” Robbins wanted to see which volunteers revealed more of themselves, their private thoughts and intimate feelings. He had independent judges read and code every essay, tabulating how many words each volunteer wrote, and how many phrases were related to feelings and self-image.

The results were unambiguous. As described in a forthcoming issue of the new journal Clinical Psychological Science, those volunteers who had been primed for openness were indeed more open and free. Not only did they write significantly more in general—nearly twice as many words as those primed for secrecy—they also wrote much more about their feelings. That is, the priming worked as hoped—nudging people to disclose more of themselves.

It’s not entirely clear from these preliminary findings whether general verbosity led the volunteers to reveal more personal feelings, or the other way around. But either way, the fact is that a simple priming exercise led these volunteers to express more of their feelings. This was the goal, and the laboratory evidence has therapeutic implications. Most obviously, therapists might be able to prompt greater openness simply through their word choice during the course of the initial therapy session—discussing the importance of openness and avoiding words suggesting guardedness and privacy. What’s more, therapists might want to be more mindful of the brochures and other written materials they leave lying around the waiting room. Materials that describe mental disorders and symptoms might have the unintended consequence of priming negativity and diminishing the therapeutic experience.

Excerpts from Wray Herbert’s two blogs—“Full Frontal Psychology” and “We’re Only Human”—appear regularly in The Huffington Post and Scientific American Mind.

The post Jumpstarting the Talking Cure appeared first on Association for Psychological Science.

America has a long tradition of public humiliation, dating back to stockades and pillories of the colonial era. But this recent upsurge in the use of scorn and shame is raising important questions about this practice, namely: Does it work? Does shame really motivate people to change? Or does it work the opposite way, further tarnishing people’s self-image and diminishing their sense of personal responsibility?

And how about addiction? Does the same psychological dynamic work with socially undesirable habits like drug use and alcoholism? Shame and addiction are deeply intertwined. Alcoholics may be prone to shame, by disposition, and on top of that, drinking helps numb these aversive feelings. Indeed, alcoholics may drink in part to cope with chronic shame and low self-worth, and the heavy drinking could in turn be causing shame, creating a vicious cycle of abuse.

These complex questions have never been sorted out scientifically—until now. Two psychological scientists at the University of British Columbia—Jessica Tracy and Daniel Randles—decided to see if alcoholics’ feelings of shame about their addictions might actually interfere with their attempts to get sober. They recruited about a hundred middle-age men and women from the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous, all with less than six months of sobriety. They measured their levels of shame and other emotions, along with personality traits, and then about four months later, they brought them back into the lab to see how they were doing in recovery.

One reason shame has gone unstudied is that it is a very difficult emotion to capture. People who are experiencing shame tend to hide the feeling, and escape it—not talk about it openly. For this reason, Tracy and Randles came up with a novel way to measure shame and assess its effect on behavior—body language. They asked the volunteers to describe the last time they drank “and felt badly about it” and videotaped their responses. Then later, they analyzed and coded their body movements and postures as a measure of their shameful feelings. People who are ashamed act very much like submissive animals, slumping the shoulders and narrowing the chest—the opposite of proud chest-beating. This physical display of shame may be universal: It has been observed in a range of species, and in both adults and children of many cultures.

So the scientists wanted to see if shameful body language correlated with mental and physical health—and especially with successful sobriety—four months later. This is the time window during which most newly recovered alcoholics will relapse, and indeed more than half of the volunteers never made it back to the lab. But with those who did, there was an unmistakable connection between shame and relapse. The alcoholics who were most ashamed about their last drink—typically a humiliating experience—these alcoholics were much more likely to relapse. Their relapses were also more severe—involving much more drinking—and they were more likely to suffer other declines in health. In short, as described in a future issue of the journal Clinical Psychological Science, feelings of shame do not appear to promote sobriety or protect against future problematic drinking—indeed the opposite.

This is the first scientific evidence to bolster what alcoholism counselors have long suspected: Shame is a core emotion underlying chronic heavy drinking. The findings raise hope that body language might serve as a diagnostic tool in the future. But for now they raise questions about the wisdom of shaming punishments for criminal alcoholics, and also about intervention as a strategy to nudge chronic alcoholics into recovery. By the time it comes to that, most alcoholics are already very familiar with scorn and shame on their own.

Excerpts from Wray Herbert’s two blogs—“Full Frontal Psychology” and “We’re Only Human”—appear regularly in Scientific American Mind and in The Huffington Post.

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