You’re Not Alone in Feeling Alone

Believing you have fewer friends than your peers can contribute to unhappiness

Feel like everyone else has more friends than you do? You’re not alone— but merely believing this is true could affect your happiness.

A new study from the University of British Columbia, Harvard Business School and Harvard Medical School has found that new university students consistently think their peers have more friends and spend more time socializing than they do. 

Even when that’s untrue, simply believing so affected students’ wellbeing and sense of belonging.

“We know the size of your social networks has a significant effect on happiness and wellbeing,” said study lead author Ashley Whillans, assistant professor at Harvard Business School who carried out the research while a PhD candidate at UBC. “But our research shows that even mere beliefs you have about your peers’ social networks has an impact on your happiness.”

The researchers used data collected from a survey of 1,099 first-year students at UBC. Students were asked how many friends they had made and to estimate how many friends their peers had made since starting school in September.

The researchers found a greater proportion of students (48 per cent) believed other students had made more close friends than they did. Thirty-one per cent believed the opposite.

A second survey tracking 389 students across their first year found students who believed their peers had more friends at the beginning of the year reported lower levels of wellbeing.

However, several months later, the same students who thought their peers had moderately more friends than they did at the beginning of the year reported making more friends compared to students who thought their peers had many more friends.

“We think students are motivated to make more friends if they think their peers only have one or two more friends than they do,” said Whillans. “But if they feel like the gap is too big, it’s almost as if they give up and feel it isn’t even worth trying.”

Frances Chen, the study’s senior author and assistant professor in the UBC department of psychology, said the public nature of social activities is likely why students feel their peers are doing better socially.

“Since social activities, like eating or studying with others, tend to happen in cafes and libraries where they are easily seen, students might overestimate how much their peers are socializing because they don’t see them eating and studying alone,” said Chen.

The findings could help inform university initiatives to support students’ transition to university life, possibly through an intervention to correct social misperceptions and promote friendship formation, said Chen.

More research is needed to determine whether the same pattern emerges among new immigrants, or people moving to a new city or starting a new job, said Chen.

“These feelings and perceptions are probably the strongest when people first enter a new social environment, but most of us probably experience them at some point in our lives,” she said.

The study, co-authored by Chelsea Christie and Sarah Cheung at UBC and Alexander Jordan at Harvard Medical School, was published today in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.


Ashley V. Whillans, Chelsea D. Christie, Sarah Cheung, Alexander H. Jordan, Frances S. Chen. From Misperception to Social Connection: Correlates and Consequences of Overestimating Others’ Social Connectedness. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. First published date: September-14-2017 DOI:10.1177/0146167217727496

News Release courtesy University of British Columbia Public Affairs

Media contact: Thandi Fletcher, UBC Public Affairs, thandi.fletcher at ubc.ca

 

 

Looking for Similarities Can Bring Marginalized Groups Together

When African American NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick refused to stand for the national anthem in August 2016, he said it was in protest of “a country that oppresses Black people and people of color.” Soon after, National Women’s Soccer League player Megan Rapinoe became the first non-Black professional athlete to also kneel during the national anthem in solidarity with Kaepernick. She explained her support by highlighting commonalities between her own experiences as a gay woman and the experiences of racial minorities.

“We need a more substantive conversation around race relations and the way people of color are treated,” Rapinoe told ESPN. “And quite honestly, being gay, I have stood with my hand over my heart during the national anthem and felt like I haven’t had my liberties protected, so I can absolutely sympathize with that feeling.”

Rapinoe’s support for Kaepernick may not seem surprising. People do tend to expect members of different disadvantaged groups to support one another. Researchers have also found that if people from one racial minority group (e.g., Asian Americans and Latino Americans) read about discrimination faced by their group, they then generally expressed that they felt more similar to and more positively toward another racial minority group (e.g., Black Americans). And there are certainly examples of different disadvantaged groups expressing support for one another in many situations. For example, Reverend Jesse Jackson’s “Rainbow Coalition” was a political organization created after his 1984 presidential campaign with the primary goal to advocate for people of all different disadvantaged groups.

“I have stood with my hand over my heart during the national anthem and felt like I haven’t had my liberties protected, so I can absolutely sympathize with that feeling.”

But examples can also be found in U.S. history of times when an injustice instead triggered conflict among minority groups. For example, White women feminists often face criticism for purportedly focusing their support on the experienced injustice of White women and largely neglecting issues facing women of color—a criticism that recently spurred the Twitter hashtag: #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen. Conflict like this is consistent with social scientific theorizing: Feeling that one’s social group is under threat can elicit a defensive reaction in which people derogate groups to which they don’t belong and show preference for their own groups (i.e., intergroup bias). For example, if White women evaluate racial minorities after sexism is made salient, they may report feeling more relative pro-White/anti-minority bias. Similar patterns hold if straight racial minority group members evaluate sexual minorities after racism is made salient.

So, what predicts when minority groups are more likely to support each other? 

Continue reading the post by visiting Behavioral Scientist.


Clarissa Cortland is a postdoctoral research fellow at INSEAD (Singapore). She earned her Ph.D. in social psychology at the University of California-Los Angeles.

Maureen Craig is a professor of psychology at New York University. Her research explores the ways in which demographic trends toward increased diversity may have implications for individuals’ relations with people from different social groups. She received her Ph.D. from Northwestern University.

So Many in the West are Depressed Because They’re Expected Not to Be

Depression is listed as the leading cause of disability worldwide, a standing to which it has progressed steadily over the past 20 years. Yet research shows a rather interesting pattern: depression is far more prevalent in Western cultures, such as the US, Canada, France, Germany and New Zealand, than in Eastern cultures, such as Taiwan, Korea, Japan and China.

This shows that depression is a modern health epidemic that is also culture-specific. Yet we mostly continue to treat it at the individual level, with anti-depressants and psychotherapy. This assumes treatment lies in correcting individual biological and psychological imbalances.

Public health experts know living in an environment where fast food is readily available is a large contributor to the modern epidemics of diabetes and heart disease – we need to understand the context, not individual behaviour alone. In the same way, as depression reaches epidemic proportions, the sole focus on individuals no longer makes sense.

We have been investigating whether Western cultural values play a role in promoting the depression epidemic for several years now. In a series of experiments, we found the high value we place on happiness is not only associated with increased levels of depression, it may actually be the underlying factor.

Cultural ideas of happiness

That happiness is a highly prized emotional state in Western culture is not hard to defend. Whether it is the smiling faces on billboards, television, magazines or the internet, advertisers are constantly pairing their projects with feelings of happiness. This makes their products seem desirable and the associated positive feelings appear ideal.

Social media – or more accurately the way we have learnt to use it – is also a constant source of idealised happy faces. This leaves us with the distinct impression that what counts as an indicator of success is whether or not we are feeling happy.

Valuing feelings of happiness or wanting others to be happy is not a bad thing. The problem arises when we come to believe we should always feel this way. This makes our negative emotions – which are inevitable and normally quite adaptive – seem like they are getting in the way of an important goal in life.

From this perspective, sadness is no longer an expected feeling you have when things go wrong. Rather, it is interpreted as a sign of failure; a signal something is wrong emotionally.

To examine the downside of culturally valuing happiness, we developed a questionnaire to measure the extent to which people feel others expect them not to experience negative emotional states such as depression and anxiety. Our first studies showed people who scored higher on this measure had lower levels of well-being.

In follow-up studies, we found when people experienced negative emotions and felt social pressure not to, they felt socially disconnected and experienced more loneliness.

While these studies provided evidence that living in cultures that value happiness, and devalue sadness, is associated with reduced well-being, they lacked clear causal evidence these values might be playing a role in promoting depression.

Do cultural values of happiness cause depression?

Next, we selected around 100 participants who met the clinical cut-off score for depression to take part in a month-long daily-diary study. They were asked to complete a survey at the end of each day about their depressive symptoms that day, as well as whether they had felt socially pressured not to experience such feelings.

We found perceived social pressure not to feel depressed reliably predicted increased depressive symptoms the next day. However, this perceived social pressure was not predicted by prior feelings of depression. This provided evidence it was not that depressed people thought others expected them not to feel that way, but that this felt social pressure itself was contributing to symptoms of depression.

We then tried to recreate the kind of social environment that might be responsible for the pressure we observed as a central feature of depression. We decked out one of our testing rooms with some happiness books and motivational posters. We placed some study materials in there, along with sticky notes with personal reminders such as “stay happy” and a photo of the researcher with some friends enjoying themselves on holiday. We called this the happy room.

As study participants arrived, they were either directed to the happy room – and told the usual testing room was busy so they would have to use the room the researcher had been studying in – or to a similar room that had no happiness paraphernalia.

They were asked to solve anagrams, some sets of which were solvable while others were largely not. Where participants had solved few anagrams (because they had been allocated the unsolvable ones), the researcher expressed some surprise and disappointment saying: “I thought you may have gotten a least a few more but we’ll move on to the next task.”

Participants then took part in a five-minute breathing exercise that was interrupted by 12 tones. At each tone, they were asked to indicate whether their mind had been focused on thoughts unrelated to breathing and, if so, what the thought was, to check whether they had been ruminating on the anagram task.

What we found

Participants who had experienced failure in the happy room were three times more likely to ruminate on the anagram task – the cause of their failure – than those who had experienced failure in the room without any happiness paraphernalia. Participants in the happy room who had solvable anagrams, and therefore experienced no failure, did not ruminate on the anagrams at all.

We also found the more people ruminated on the anagram task, the more negative emotions they experienced as a result. Failing in the happy room increased rumination and in turn made people feel worse. Rumination as a response to negative events has been consistently linked to increased levels of depression.

By reconstructing a kind of micro-happiness-culture, we showed that experiencing a negative setback in such a context is worse than if you experience that same setback in an environment that does not emphasise the value of happiness. Our work suggests Western culture has been globalising happiness, contributing to an epidemic of depression.

As our understanding of depression begins to move beyond individual-level factors to include social and cultural value systems, we need to question whether cultural values are making us happy. We are not immune to these values and our cultures are sometimes responsible for our mental health. This is not to reduce individual-level agency, but to take seriously the growing body of evidence that much of what we do is often decided outside of conscious awareness.


By Brock Bastian, ARC Future Fellow, Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences, University of Melbourne.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Rejection, Volunteering, & Morality: Recently Published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin

Washington, D.C. – From rejection to volunteering and innocence, the following research recently published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. Media may contact press @ spsp.org for a copy of any of these studies.

Sebastian Deri, Emily M. Zitek

Across four studies of over 500 people, researchers from Cornell University show rejection feels worse when people are told it is due to someone else. Part of this “hurt” may be because such rejections lead to an increased sense of exclusion and decreased belonging. They also found that when no information is given, people assume, and react, as if they were rejected for someone else.

Stewart J. H. McCann

Community service represents billions of dollars in unpaid work hours that contribute to the well-being of communities. Examining personality traits and volunteer rates across the 50 U.S. states, research shows a correlation between neuroticism and state volunteer rates. States with higher numbers of neurotic people showed lower volunteer rates. This research is “the first to show that state resident neuroticism is a potent predictor of state volunteering rates,” writes personality psychologist and study author Stewart McCann.

Rajen A. Anderson, E. J. Masicampo

New research shows people's willingness to censor immoral acts from children comes down to a single moral value—sanctity. Rajen Anderson and E. J. Masicampo conducted a series of three studies to understand what motivates people to shield children from certain images and ideas. The more people valued sanctity, the more willing they were to censor from children, regardless of the types of violations depicted, from impurity, to disloyalty, and disobedience.


Keywords: rejection, exclusion, belonging, comparative, noncomparative; Big Five personality, neuroticism, volunteering, prosocial behavior, social capital, republican preference, well-being, socioeconomic status, population density; censorship, moral protection, sanctity, purity, moral values

Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin (PSPB), published monthly, is an official journal of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP). SPSP promotes scientific research that explores how people think, behave, feel, and interact. The Society is the largest organization of social and personality psychologists in the world. Follow us on Twitter, @SPSPnews and find us on facebook.com/SPSP.org.

Highlights from the Well-Being Conference

The first-ever University of California Well-Being Conference (UCWBC), sponsored in part by an SPSP Small Conference Grant, provided a unique opportunity for researchers across the University of California (UC) system to connect and share their latest findings and insights on the science of well-being.

Held at UC Riverside from March 3–5, 2017, and co-hosted by Dr. Ye Li at the UC Riverside School of Business, the conference brought together approximately 70 faculty members, post-doctoral scholars, and graduate students from the Riverside, Irvine, Berkeley, LA, and Davis campuses. We teamed up to reflect on what contributed to the success of this conference, from the perspective of both an attendee (Jessie) and an organizing committee member (Megan).

The primary aims of UCWBC were to connect well-being researchers across the UC system, and to promote the work of young researchers. To make this happen, only graduate students and post-doctoral scholars were invited to submit talks, which were limited to 5–7 minutes, followed by 10–15 minutes of questions, feedback, and discussion. This format allowed a greater number of emerging scholars the opportunity to share their work with both their peers and more established researchers in a supportive and interactive environment. Reflecting the broad relevance of well-being research, a diverse range of topics and methods were featured, including personality, emotion regulation, culture, technology, close relationships, flow, awe, and affective forecasting.

The presentation sessions were complemented by three open-format discussion sessions centered on topics suggested by attendees: emotions and emotion regulation, opening the file drawer, and the future of well-being science. These sessions sparked critical discussion about big questions in the field of well-being research. For example, how can we create lasting changes in happiness? Should we work towards a consensus on which measures to use for specific well-being constructs? What do well-being self-reports imply about real-world functioning, and should we be measuring more substantive outcomes?

The formal sessions were interspersed with generous breaks and networking opportunities at meals and additional social gatherings. Attendees reported that the relatively small, discussion-focused conference format allowed them to more easily find common ground with other attendees, learn about research being conducted at other UC campuses, and foster new, promising research connections.  

In sum, this small conference provided the opportunity to implement strategic programming considerations (e.g., short talks, lots of discussion, networking breaks) to craft a unique and rewarding meeting that connected well-being researchers across the UC system and promoted the work of graduate students and post-doctoral scholars. We are grateful for the SPSP Small Conference Grant that made this conference both possible and successful, and strongly encourage others to apply for this grant.

Finally, we would like to acknowledge organizing committee members Julia Revord, Lisa Walsh, and Sonja Lyubomirsky, and additional funding from HopeLab and the College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, the Department of Psychology, and the Office of Research & Economic Development at UC Riverside.  

To see this year’s UCWBC program and presentations, click here.


Jessie Sun is a PhD student who works with Simine Vazire at the University of California, Davis. Her research explores the interplay between personality, self-knowledge, and well-being, with a focus on methods for studying dynamic processes in daily life (e.g., the Electronically Activated Recorder).

Megan M. Fritz is a PhD student who works with Sonja Lyubomirsky at the University of California, Riverside. Her research examines the effects of positive activities, such as performing acts of kindness and expressing gratitude, on biological indicators of health (e.g., decreases in pro-inflammatory gene expression), as well as improved health behaviors (e.g., healthy eating).

Religious Affiliation Impacts Language Use on Facebook

Washington, D.C. - Are you more likely to use words like “happy” and “family” in your social media posts? Or do you use emotional and cognitive words like “angry” and “thinking?” The words you use may be a clue to your religious affiliation. A study of 12,815 U.S. and U.K. Facebook users finds use of positive emotion and social words is associated with religious affiliation whereas use of negative emotion and cognitive processes is more common for those who are not religious than those who are religious.

The work replicates Ritter et al.’s 2013 results on religious and nonreligious language use on Twitter and appears in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science. Researchers from the U.S., U.K., and Australia conducted the work.

Just as Ritter and colleagues discovered in 2013, “We also found that positive emotion and social words are associated with religious affiliation whereas negative emotion and cognitive processes are more associated with non-religious affiliation,” says David Yaden (University of Pennsylvania), lead author of the study.

And they found some additional insight; “non-religious individuals make more frequent mention of the body and of death” than religious people, says Yaden.

The researchers collected data from the MyPersonality application, which asked Facebook users to report their religious affiliation (among other things), and asks them for consent to allow researchers to analyze their written online posts and other self-reported information (Kosinski, Stillwell, Graepel, 2013). They ran two analyses, to see what words each group (religious vs. non-religious) used more than the other group.

The team conducted both a “top-down” and a “bottom-up” analysis. The top down approach, Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC), uses groupings chosen by researchers, and is useful in making sense of the data in terms of theory. The “bottom-up,” or Differential Language Analysis (DLA), approach allows an algorithm to group the words and can provide a more “transparent view” into the language.

Unsurprisingly, religious people used more religious words, like “devil,” “blessing,” and “praying” than do non-religious people. They also showed higher use of positive words like “love” and family and social words such as “mothers” and “we.”  The non-religious individuals used words from the anger category, like “hate” more than did religious people. They also showed a higher use of words associated with negative emotion and cognitive processes such as “reasons.” Other areas where the nonreligious dominated: swear words (you can figure those out), bodies, including “heads” and “neck” and words related to death including “dead.”

The Role of Religion

While secularism is increasing in the west, “over 80% of the world’s population identifies with some type of religion – a trend that appears to be on the rise” write the authors. “Religion is associated with longer lives and well-being, but can also be associated with higher rates of obesity and racism.”  For the researchers, understanding language use is part of the bigger picture of understanding how religious affiliation relates to these life outcomes.

Yaden and his colleagues do not know if the different linguistic behaviors between religious and non-religious people reflect the psychological states of those in the group, or if the language use reflects the social norms of being part of that group, or some combination of the two. They hope further research will offer more insights.

Originally Yaden and colleagues hoped to “compare different religious affiliations with one another. That is, how do Buddhists differ from Hindus? Christians from Muslims? Atheists from Agnostics?,” but they did not have enough specific data to conduct these analyses. “We hope to do so once a larger dataset becomes available to us,” says Yaden.


Media may request a copy of the paper at [email protected].

Yaden, David; Eichstaedt, Johannes; Kern, Margaret; Smith, Laura; Buffone, Anneke; Stillwell, David; Kosinski, Michal; Ungar, Lyle; Seligman, Martin; Schwartz, Andy. The Language of Religious Affiliation: Social, Emotional, and Cognitive Difference. Social Psychological and Personality Science. Online before print August 22, 2017.

Social Psychological and Personality Science (SPPS) is an official journal of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP), the Association for Research in Personality (ARP), the European Association of Social Psychology (EASP), and the Society for Experimental Social Psychology (SESP). Social Psychological and Personality Science publishes innovative and rigorous short reports of empirical research on the latest advances in personality and social psychology.

Additional references:

Ritter, R. S., Preston, J. L., & Hernandez, I. (2014). Happy tweets: Christians are happier, more socially connected, and less analytical than atheists on Twitter. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 5(2), 243-249.

LIWC: Pennebaker, J. W., Francis, M. E., & Booth, R. J. (2001). Linguistic inquiry and word count: LIWC 2001. Mahway: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 71(2001), 2001.

Differential Language Analysis: Schwartz, H. A., Eichstaedt, J. C., Kern, M. L., Dziurzynski, L., Ramones, S. M., Agrawal, M., ... & Ungar, L. H. (2013). Personality, gender, and age in the language of social media: The open-vocabulary approach. PloS one, 8(9), e73791.

Beyond the Bystander Effect

Imagine a rural Texan who commutes in an F-150 truck to a distant job in the oil industry. Given the cost of gas, he is considering trading in his truck for a vehicle with better mileage. Take a guess: will he choose a Prius® hybrid? It's an economically rational choice. However, the Prius® is less popular in rural Texas than hybrids that look like normal cars (Sexton & Sexton, 2011). Emerging research from my lab and other groups suggests that consumers and citizens care about more than just economic utility when considering pro-environmental behaviors such as alternative transportation or conservation. Beyond price signals, people also deeply care about what their choices display about their beliefs, traits, and groups, and these findings show how social influence affects pro-environmental behavior. I'll explain why this research is important, and then tell you about our new study on how people behave when others can see them.

Our biggest environmental problems are no longer issues of knowing what to do. The key barrier is getting people to join the green energy future and transform their behaviors and societies. Individual behaviors are crucial, particularly voting for politicians that prioritize conservation, but household choices also have a large impact. We already have the household technology to slow and reverse catastrophic climate change (Gardner & Stern, 2008). Now we need to make lifestyle changes feel accessible, such as using alternative transportation, eating more plants, and choosing efficient appliances.

We know there’s a problem, we know what to do, and we’re not doing it. Decades of environmental messaging are being met with relative indifference by the public. Even climate scientists and conservation psychologists like me still organize conferences that depend on long-haul flights (Aschwanden, 2015). Despite the increasing threat and severity of climate change, Americans are worrying less about the environment in recent years.

Graph of Americans' Worry About the Environment Over Time

Source: http://www.gallup.com/poll/167843/climate-change-not-top-worry.aspx

The green energy future is in trouble. We need to appeal to non-environmentalists' existing motivations, not just tell them what to value. One strategy we’re neglecting is using existing identities to spur behavior change. Scientists are beginning to explore social influence, social identities, and how they explain why the truck-driving Texan might be hesitant to choose a car that benefits both his wallet and the climate. Does the Prius® signal certain identities? Do individuals really care what groups they appear to be part of? Take a look at this vehicle I saw outside a conference in Austin, TX. The bumper stickers signal valued groups, and critically, notice that this driver carefully signals what he is NOT.

Image of truck with political bumper stickers

Source: Cameron Brick

Along with scientists David Sherman & Heejung Kim, in a new paper in the Journal of Environmental Psychology I explored how people might use pro-environmental behaviors to signal valued group memberships (“Green to be seen” and “brown to keep down”: Visibility moderates the effect of identity on pro-environmental behavior; Brick, Sherman, & Kim, 2017).

We know that people in certain groups engage in more pro-environmental behaviors: liberals and environmentalists are more likely to compost, cycle to work, and save water. If a woman considers herself an environmentalist, she’ll be more likely to engage in frequent conservation behaviors than her peers who do not identify with environmentalists.

The main point of the paper was to test whether individuals engage more or less in behaviors based on how visible those actions are to other people. When others see us, we are particularly vigilant about how we behave. We tested whether this would extend to pro-environmental behaviors like saving water and carrying reusable bags.

Illustration of a park with a man sitting on a bench between a recycling container and a trash container

Source: Daniel Landman, used with permission

We measured how much people did a wide range of pro-environmental behaviors, and how visible each behavior was to other people. Some behaviors like carrying reusable bags to the grocery are very visible to others. As hypothesized, being watched was associated with more frequent or less frequent behavior depending on the person’s valued group memberships. If the person identified as an environmentalist, being watched was linked to MORE pro-environmental behavior. If a person did not see themselves as an environmentalist—consider the friends and family of the driver whose vehicle is pictured above—then being watched was associated with LESS pro-environmental behavior. Doing green behavior to look good to others is “green to be seen,” and avoiding green behavior to not look like an environmentalist is “brown to keep down.”

Many people might care about the environment and want to help but are repeatedly choosing harmful behaviors in order to fit in. These findings have the potential to explain why people avoid pro-environmental behaviors, even when they value the environment. We must understand social relationships, groups, and contexts. Otherwise, campaigns might fail. For example, imagine you were designing a cloth bag to encourage people to reuse their grocery bags and reduce plastic waste. What do you think about this product?

Image of a reusable canvas bag with the world in the shape of a heart and the words "Mother Earth: I'm With Her"

Source: Emily Caven; Blue Jay Bay, LLC, used with permission (link to product)

The design looks great. It’s well-drawn, clever, and the images of earth and heart are consistent with environmentalist and caring values. However, it may not appeal to everyone. Did you recall that "I'm With Her" was also a popular campaign slogan for Hillary Clinton? Imagine you found this bag on a chair and looked around the room for the owner. What kind of person bought this bag? If you thought of an environmentalist, a hippie, or a woman, you are aware of stereotypes around environmentalism (Bashir et al., 2013). When the goal is to advertise a pro-environmental behavior to NON-environmentalists, we need to consider what group memberships they do not want to signal.

How can we make it easier for non-environmentalists and political conservatives to engage in pro-environmental behavior? One implication of our work is that these individuals may engage more in helpful behaviors when the actions are less visible.

There are exciting opportunities here for reducing climate change, but also for profit and market share. Like building hybrid cars that look like normal sedans, new products such as the Tesla Solar Roof look like a typical product while delivering financial and ecological benefits. At the level of daily behavior, movements like Meatless Mondays and the growth of plant-based diets may be more successful when they distance themselves from stereotypes of liberals, hippies, and activists. How else can we promote and encourage pro-environmental behaviors by making those behaviors less visible and more consistent with existing identities?


This article originally appeared at Psychology Today, shared courtesy of the author.

Cameron Brick, PhD
University of Cambridge, UK
@CameronBrick

References

Aschwanden, C. (2015, March 26). Nudging Climate Scientists To Follow Their Own Advice On Flying. Retrieved 20 July 2017, from https://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/nudging-climate-scientists-to-follow-their-own-advice-on-flying/

Bashir, N. Y., Lockwood, P., Chasteen, A. L., Nadolny, D., & Noyes, I. (2013). The ironic impact of activists: Negative stereotypes reduce social change influence. European Journal of Social Psychology43(7), 614–626. https://doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.1983

Brick, C., Sherman, D. K., & Kim, H. S. (2017). “Green to be seen” and “brown to keep down”: Visibility moderates the effect of identity on pro-environmental behavior. Journal of Environmental Psychology51, 226–238. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2017.04.004

Gardner, G. T., & Stern, P. C. (2008). The short list: The most effective actions U.S. households can take to curb climate change. Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development50(5), 12–25. https://doi.org/10.3200/ENVT.50.5.12-25

Sexton, S. E., & Sexton, A. L. (2011). Conspicuous conservation: The Prius effect and willingness to pay for environmental bona fides (No. 29). UC Center for Energy and Environmental Economic Working Paper Series.

 

Exercising Helps Us Bounce Back From Stress

We all know, or have at least heard the rumors, that exercise is good for us. There’s this intuition that says when we get moving we’ll feel mentally or emotionally stronger, quicker, and better. Research shows that regular exercisers do tend to report less depressed and anxious mood. Moreover, there are encouraging clinical trials showing that when people who have mood and anxiety disorders engage in exercise programs, they tend to have better mental health outcomes. But why? It’s unclear exactly how exercise changes people’s emotional experiences. In our study recently published in Health Psychology, we found evidence for one of many potential pathways.

A lot of people think about exercise as a tool for boosting mood– this is the “go for a run– you’ll feel better!” hypothesis. However, this theory is insufficient. Many studies—including ones in our lab— don't find consistent post-exercise improvements in mood. So instead of repeatedly picking you up, maybe exercise prevents you from getting pulled too far down or getting stuck in an emotional low– what we think of as preventing depressed or anxious mood. Importantly, negative emotions, such as sadness or anxiety, are not inherently bad. And people who exercise get just as upset as people who don’t. The problem occurs when people struggle to bounce back. We wanted to know if exercise before a person experiences something distressing can help them cope.

Ninety-five individuals came into the lab for three separate visits. At each visit, people completed one of three activities: cycling, resting, or stretching. Everyone was randomly assigned an order in which to complete these visits. After finishing their assigned activity for the day, participants then performed various computer tasks before undergoing a stressful experience. The stressor included serial subtraction tasks and challenging verbal puzzles, some of which were impossible to solve.

We found that individuals who ruminated more about the stressor, meaning repetitive, self-focused, passive negative thinking, tended to feel worse and worse for longer. This is unsurprising as rumination is strongly associated with lower emotional well-being and emotional disorders.  Interestingly, exercise lessened the negative effects this type of problematic thinking had on peoples’ moods. This means that a single session of exercise before a stressor had even occurred helped ruminators recover better than on days when those same people had either stretched or rested. Exercise helped them bounce back.

We hope that identifying specific psychological benefits of exercise will be useful for a few main reasons. First, with a better understanding of such specific effects, we can potentially use exercise in a more targeted, effective way for both prevention and intervention efforts. Knowing specific, immediate benefits of even single sessions of exercise can potentially help motivate people to be active, and do so better than more long-term or abstract benefits, such as reducing the likelihood of a heart attack later in life. And learning what specific processes are altered by exercise and account for its positive effects can give us insights into what processes go awry in emotional disorders. The takeaway from our study is that we can all benefit by being physically active. Exercise seems to make us more resilient or better equipped to weather what comes our way.


Emily Bernstein is interested in the intersection of emotion regulation and information processing, and her research aims to identify transdiagnostic interventions for the prevention and treatment of affective disorders. Emily is currently working on studies examining how aerobic exercise influences emotional responses to positive and negative stimuli, and how exercise may benefit mood through enhanced attentional control and emotional resilience.

Supportive Relationships Linked to Willingness to Pursue Opportunities

Research on how our social lives affects decision-making has usually focused on negative factors like stress and adversity. Less attention, however, has been paid to the reverse: What makes people more likely to give themselves the chance to succeed? 

That’s the question Carnegie Mellon University psychologists recently posed. Published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, they discovered that people with supportive spouses were more likely to take on potentially rewarding challenges and that those who accepted the challenges experienced more personal growth, happiness, psychological well-being and better relationship functioning months later. 

“We found support for the idea that the choices people make at these specific decision points—such as pursuing a work opportunity or seeking out new friends—matter a lot for their long-term well-being,” said Brooke Feeney, lead author of the study and professor of psychology in CMU’s Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences. 

The researchers brought 163 married couples into the lab and gave one member of each couple a choice: either solve a simple puzzle, or they were given an opportunity to compete for a prize by giving a speech. The researchers then recorded the couples’ interactions as they decided whether to take on the challenge.

Participants with more encouraging partners were substantially more likely to decide to compete for the prize, while those with partners who discouraged them or expressed a lack of confidence more often chose the simple puzzle. Six months later, those who pursued the more challenging task reported having more personal growth, happiness, psychological well-being, and better relationships than those who didn’t. 

So what can one do to encourage a partner to embrace life opportunities? The researchers found that the most supportive partners expressed enthusiasm about the opportunity, reassured their partners, and talked about the potential benefits of taking on the challenge. 

“Significant others can help you thrive through embracing life opportunities,” said Feeney. “Or they can hinder your ability to thrive by making it less likely that you’ll pursue opportunities for growth.” 

CMU’s Meredith Van Vleet and Brittany Jakubiak also contributed to the study, as did Colgate University’s Jennifer Tomlinson. The National Institutes of Health funded this research.


By Patrick Monahan, Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences, Carnegie Mellon University

Psychologists Go to War

One hundred years ago, on April 6, 1917, the United States entered World War I by declaring war on Germany. When American psychologists heard the news, they dispatched Robert M. Yerkes, then president of the American Psychological Association, to Canada to confer with Carl C. Brigham of the Canadian Hospitals Commission to learn about the contributions that Canadian psychologists were already making to the war effortYerkes was a comparative psychologist at Harvard University, with a joint appointment as consulting psychologist at Boston State Psychiatric Hospital, where he helped develop a scale of intelligence.

He was also a born organizer. On his return to the United States, he set up a dozen committees to explore the useful roles that psychologists might play in the war. While most of these committees led nowhere, Yerkes successfully established the Committee on Methods of Psychological Examination for Recruits, which included Henry Goddard and Lewis Terman, two pioneers of intelligence testing in the United States (who had translated the Binet-Simon scale of intelligence into English). The committee had originally planned to implement a variety of tests for recruits, but they eventually restricted themselves to intelligence testing, with the aim of “segregating and eliminating the mentally incompetent”—or, to use the parlance of the day, the “feebleminded.” Their work initiated the largest program of psychological testing that had been attempted to that date, but also provided powerful impetus for two movements that had been developing since the turn of the century: the call for immigration quotas and the sterilization of the feebleminded.

Intelligence testing in the Army

In May 1917, realizing that it would be impractical to test intelligence individually, Yerkes’ committee spent two weeks developing tests that could be administered in groups and conducting trials of these tests at educational institutions and Army bases. Working through the National Research Council, Yerkes proposed group intelligence testing to the Army, which created the Division of Psychology under the Surgeon General. When Yerkes’ plan for the mass intelligence testing of Army recruits—the Army Testing Project—was approved, he commissioned a team of 400 Army personnel to administer group intelligence tests to all Army recruits. This included the Alpha written test for literate soldiers and the Beta pictorial test for those who could not read English. By the end of the war, close to 2 million soldiers had been tested.

Continue reading the post by visiting behavioralscientist.org.


By 

This article originally appeared on the Behavioral Scientist, a non-profit online magazine that offers readers original, thought-provoking reports from the front lines of behavioral science.