Stronger Family Ties Linked to Longer Life

-Janice Wood

For older adults, having more or closer family members decreases the likelihood of death, according to a new study.

But the study, presented at the 111th Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association (ASA), found that having a larger or closer group of friends does not impact that likelihood.

“We found that older individuals who had more family in their network, as well as older people who were closer with their family were less likely to die,” said James Iveniuk, Ph.D., the lead author of the study and a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Toronto’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health. “No such associations were observed for number of or closeness to friends.”

For the study, researchers used nationally representative data from the 2005-2006 and 2010-2011 survey waves of the National Social Life, Health, and Aging Project (NSHAP), to investigate which aspects of social networks are most important for postponing mortality.

Mortality of wave one respondents, who were 57 to 85 years old, was assessed at wave two.

In the first wave, these older adults were asked to list up to five of their closest confidants, describe in detail the nature of each relationship, and indicate how close they felt to each person. Excluding spouses, the average number of close confidants named was 2.91, and most older adults perceived high levels of support from their social contacts, the researchers reported.

Most of the respondents were married, in good physical health, and reported not being very lonely, the researchers added.

Older adults who reported feeling “extremely close” on average to the non-spousal family members they listed as among their closest confidants had about a six percent risk of mortality within the next five years. That figure is compared to approximately a 14 percent risk of mortality among those who reported feeling “not very close” to the family members they listed, according to Iveniuk and co-author L. Philip Schumm, Ph.D., a senior biostatician at the University of Chicago.

The study also found that respondents who listed more non-spousal family members in their network — no matter how close — had lower odds of death compared to those who listed fewer family members.

“Regardless of the emotional content of a connection, simply having a social relationship with another person may have benefits for longevity,” Iveniuk said.

Iveniuk said he was surprised that feeling closer to one’s family members and having more relatives as confidants decreased the risk of death for older adults, but that the same was not true of relationships with friends.

“Because you can choose your friends, you might, therefore, expect that relationships with friends would be more important for mortality, since you might be better able to customize your friend network to meet your specific needs,” Iveniuk said.

“But that account isn’t supported by the data — it is the people who in some sense you cannot choose, and who also have little choice about choosing you, who seem to provide the greatest benefit to longevity.”

Besides comparing friendships to relationships with family members, the study examined the characteristics of social networks in general and their association with mortality.

The four factors most consistently associated with reduced mortality risk were:

  1. being married;
  2. a larger network size;
  3. greater participation in social organizations, and
  4. feeling closer to one’s confidants.

All four factors mattered to about the same degree, according to the researchers.

Factors found to be less important included time with confidants, access to social support, and feelings of loneliness.

“I expected the association between participation in social organizations and mortality to diminish in size considerably once we controlled for other aspects of peoples’ social worlds, but that didn’t happen,” Iveniuk said.

Interestingly, marriage was found to have positive effects on longevity, regardless of the quality of the marriage.

“We observed no association between measures of support from the spouse and mortality, indicating that the presence of a marital bond may be more important for longevity than certain aspects of the bond itself,” Iveniuk said.

The findings underscore the importance of family relationships for longevity, according to Iveniuk.

“Going back to the very first sociological theorists, many different thinkers have noted that there is some kind of special significance that people attribute to family ties, leading people to stay close to and support people who wouldn’t necessarily be individuals that they would associate with if they had the choice,” Iveniuk said.

Source: American Sociological Association

Cyberbullies Likely to Be Former Friends or Romantic Partners

-Janice Wood

Cyberbullying is more likely to occur between current or former friends and dating partners than between students who were never friends or in a romantic relationship, according to a new study.

“A common concern regarding cyberbullying is that strangers can attack someone, but here we see evidence that there are significant risks associated with close connections,” said Dr. Diane Felmlee, the lead author of the study and a professor of sociology at The Pennsylvania State University.

“The large magnitude of the effects of close relationships on the likelihood of cyberbullying, even after controlling for many other factors, was particularly surprising.”

The study found that the likelihood of cyberbullying — which the researchers also refer to as cyber-aggression, defined as electronic or online behavior intended to harm another person psychologically or damage his or her reputation — was approximately seven times greater between current or former friends and dating partners than between young people who were not friends or had dated.

“We believe that competition for status and esteem represents one reason behind peer cyberbullying,” Felmlee said. “Friends, or former friends, are particularly likely to find themselves in situations in which they are vying for the same school, club, and/or sport positions and social connections.

“In terms of dating partners, young people often have resentful and hurt feelings as a result of a breakup, and they may take out these feelings on a former partner via cyber aggression. They might also believe they can win back a previous boyfriend or girlfriend, or prevent that person from breaking up with them or dating someone else, by embarrassing or harassing him or her.”

For the study,  published in Social Psychology Quarterly, researchers analyzed survey results from nearly 800 eighth- to twelfth-grade students in 2011 at a public school in a suburb of New York City. The survey collected data about the students’ social networks, dating history, and cyberbullying experiences.

Felmlee and co-author Dr. Robert Faris, an associate professor of sociology at the University of California-Davis, found that approximately 17.2 percent of students had been involved with cyberbullying within a week of their having been surveyed — 5.8 percent were purely victims, 9.1 percent were solely aggressors, and 2.3 percent were both.

In most cases, the cyber-aggression occurred over Facebook or text message.

The researchers also found that certain types of students were much more likely than others to be victimized. For example, girls were twice as likely as boys to fall victim to cyber-aggression.

“In spite of societal progress regarding gender inequality, there remains a tendency to attribute lower levels of esteem and respect to females in our society, including within schools,” Felmlee said.

“Males tend to dominate powerful positions within schools, and traditional, male sports often gain greater attention than those in which females participate. Cyber-aggression towards girls may be in part an attempt to keep girls ‘in their places.’”

The survey results also showed that LGBTQ youth were four times as likely as their heterosexual peers to be victims of cyberbullying.

“We were not surprised that non-heterosexuals were more likely to be victims than heterosexuals,” Felmlee said. “However, the size of the effect was alarmingly high. The finding reflects the social norms in our society that continue to stigmatize non-heterosexuality, norms that are likely to be reinforced within the walls of middle and high schools.”

In a section of the survey that allowed students to describe the nature of their cyber aggressive interactions, LGBTQ students reported being called homophobic slurs and, in at least one case, unwillingly having their sexual identities revealed to others.

Overall, incidents of cyber-aggression ranged from threats and the posting of embarrassing photos and nasty rumors to criminal activities, such as identity theft and physical relationship violence that the attacker posted about online.

“Our study calls attention to the role of cyber-aggression within close relationships, and we hope that bullying prevention programs will incorporate these findings into their curricula, particularly through the development of interventions to help heal or resolve toxic, abusive relationships among teens,” Felmlee said.

In addition to efforts in schools to stop cyberbullying, Felmlee said parents can also take steps to mitigate cyber aggression in their children’s lives.

“Many people may be unaware that current or former friends and romantic partners are the most likely perpetrators of cyberbullying, at least among school-aged teens,” Felmlee said. “We hope parents turn a watchful eye to their teenager’s closest associates, and pay attention to his or her online activities for signs of abuse.”

Source: American Sociological Association

How Complaining Rewires Your Brain For Negativity (And How To Break The Habit)

-Annie Wood

“Spending today complaining about yesterday won’t make tomorrow any better.” ~Unknown

When I was about sixteen or so, one of my parent’s friends got into some trouble with the law. When we’d visit him he’d often shake his head from side to side and mumble, my life is in the toilet.

He said it many times, for many years, even when things seemed to have gotten better for him.

My life is in the toilet was his mantra.

At the time I thought it was funny, so I adopted it for myself, until one day I started to believe it. I’ve since dumped that charming phrase and gotten a new mantra.

Things haven’t magically become ideal for me since I did that. I mean, there’s this pinched nerve in my neck and those construction sounds across the street, and I could really use some more work, and…

Type of Drains

Everyone complains, at some point, at least a little, says Robin Kowalski, PhD, a professor of psychology at Clemson University.

There are different types of complainers, according to Kowalski, such as The Venter. The Venter is a “dissatisfied person who doesn’t want to hear solutions, however brilliant.”

Venting. We’re just letting off steam, right? Maybe not. I’ve personally found that the complain drain can be soul draining, not just for the complainer, but for all within earshot.

Other types you may have met along the way (or may be yourself) are the Sympathy Seekers, the I got it worse than you do, and the habitual everything sucks folks.

The Chronic Complainers, those living in a state of complaint, do something researchers call “ruminating.” This basically means thinking and complaining about a problem again and again. Instead of feeling a release after complaining, this sort of complaining can actually make things worse. It can cause even more worry and anxiety.

No one is suggesting you be a peachy-keen-Josephine and pretend all is swell when it isn’t. What I’ve learned in my mindfulness practice is to aim to do the opposite.

In mindfulness meditation, we try to experience fully the truth of the situation, in this exact moment, and allow it to just be. Easier said than done (but what isn’t?) Still, with practice, the need to express our dissatisfaction for things not being how we’d like them to be lessens.

Can’t We Just Call Roto-Rooter?

Running with this drain analogy…

Call Roto-Rooter, that’s the name and away go troubles down the drain!

When I was a kid I loved singing along to those Roto-Rooter commercials. Wouldn’t it be cool if we could “away go troubles down the drain?” Well, maybe we can.

Most of us may have been unintentionally reinforcing the nasty habit of complaining, by virtue of… complaining.

There’s something called “experience-dependent neuroplasticity,” which is the continuing creation and grouping of neuron connections in our brains that take place as a result of our life experiences.

Neuroscience teaches us that neurons that fire together, wire together. Donald Hebb, a Canadian neuropsychologist, coined that phrase back in 1949. What this means is that whenever we think a thought or have a feeling or physical sensation, thousands of neurons are triggered and they all get together to form a neural network.

With repetitive thinking, the brain learns to trigger the same neurons each time.

So, if you keep your mind looping on self-criticism, worries, and how nothing is working out for you, your mind will more easily find that part of your brain and will quickly assist you in thinking those same thoughts again.

This shapes your mind into greater reactivity, making you more vulnerable to anxiety.

Imagine a truck driving down a muddy road. The wheels create a groove in the mud, and each time that truck drives down that exact spot, the groove gets deeper and deeper.

The truck might even, eventually, get stuck in that mud rut. But it doesn’t have to. Instead of repeating the same negative complaints, we can drive our thoughts on a different road so we don’t get stuck in that negative mud rut.

Throughout our lives we are wiring our brains, based on our repetitive thinking. We get good at what we practice.

If we worry, creating more unease and anxiety, we become stellar worriers since our brain is responding, making it easier for us to worry each time we do it, thus creating our default mode living.

Default mode living is our habitual way of going about our lives. It’s our reacting minds as opposed to ourresponding minds.

Our reacting minds are often knee-jerk reactions to something. We often say or do things that we’ve said and done in the past, as if we were in that default mode living, on automatic pilot. But our responding minds come into play when we give ourselves a pause before responding to a situation.

We ask ourselves what’s really going on and what the next best step is. It’s a clearer response in the moment that’s not linked to past responses. So, how do we respond instead of react?

4 D.I.Y. Tips – Stop The Drain!

You’re stuck in traffic and not only are you complaining out loud to the cars that are in your way, you’re imagining getting home and complaining to tell your significant other all about it. You’re practicing this conversation in your head while in the car. Your heart races, your forehead tenses up. It’s all so very annoying! What to do?

1. Catch yourself.

During meditation we soon find out that our minds will wander. The moment when we notice it wandering and we bring it back to our focus, our breath, that moment is what one of my teachers calls “that magic moment.”

The catching yourself is the practice. Also, the not judging or berating yourself for having a mind that thinks thoughts. All minds think thoughts. That’s their job.

So to stop the drain:

  • Catch yourself in a complaint.
  • Stop complaining.
  • Congratulate yourself—you’re aware!

2. Be grateful.

I’ve tried it; I simply can’t seem to complain and be grateful at the same time!

I’m stuck in traffic, but I’m grateful to have a car. I’m grateful for the song that’s playing on the radio and the sunny day.

It doesn’t matter what you’re grateful for; it can be the smallest thing, just notice. Complaining could very well be the evil twin of gratitude. Favor gratitude.

3. Practice wise effort.

In Buddhism, wise effort is letting go of that which is not helpful and cultivating that which is skillful.

In the book Awakening the Buddha Within, Lama Surya Das breaks down wise effort into four aspects, the first one being, restraint: “the effort to prevent unskillful thoughts and actions.”

Make the effort to pay attention and catch your complaining, negative thoughts before they become words.

Try it out and see how it feels. You might be surprised as to where you habitually have been putting your energy. Everything takes a certain amount of energy.

Next time you find yourself caught in a complaining loop, pause and regroup. Make the choice to put your energy elsewhere. The more you do this, the easier it gets.

4. Make a new groove.

Just the way our thoughts created that groove to make negative thoughts easier to replicate, we can create a brand new groove for pleasant feelings.

The more often we allow our minds to remember the good stuff, the easier that kind of thinking becomes.

Do you want to be the person who’s never satisfied and can always find fault in others, yourself, and the world at large? Or would you rather be someone who sees things as they are and finds a way to make peace with it? Let’s pretend it’s up to you. Oh, wait, it is up to you.

So, what do you say? You don’t need Roto Rooter to flush your troubles down the drain. Just make a new groove.

Mismatch Of Personal Needs, Work Duties Can Fuel Burnout

-Traci Pedersen

A new study shows that burnout occurs when there is a mismatch between unconscious needs and the demands you experience at work.

For example, burnout may happen to an outgoing accountant who seeks to make new friendships but whose job offers little opportunity to do so, or perhaps to a manager who does not enjoy taking center-stage or being in a leadership role. In both of these examples, there is a mismatch between the employees’ individual needs and the requirements on the job.

Burnout is defined as a state of physical, emotional, and mental exhaustion from work, which leads to a lack of motivation, low efficiency, and a feeling of helplessness. Its health effects include anxiety, cardiovascular disease, immune disorders, insomnia, and depression.

“A motivated workforce is the key to success in today’s globalized economy. Here, we need innovative approaches that go beyond providing attractive working conditions,” said Dr. Beate Schulze, senior researcher at the Department of Social and Occupational Medicine at the University of Leipzig and vice-president of the Swiss Expert Network on Burnout.

“Matching employees’ motivational needs to their daily activities at work might be the way forward. This may also help to address growing concerns about employee mental health, since burnout is essentially an erosion of motivation.”

For the study, researchers from the University of Zurich in Switzerland and the University of Leipzig in Germany recruited 97 women and men between 22 and 62 through the Swiss Burnout website, an information resource and forum for Swiss people suffering from burnout.

Participants completed questionnaires about their physical well-being, degree of burnout, and the characteristics of their job, including its opportunities and demands.

The study focused on two important motives: the power motive and the affiliation motive.

The power motive is defined as the need to take responsibility for others, maintain discipline, and engage in arguments or negotiation, in order to feel strong and effective. The affiliation motive is the need for positive personal relations, in order to feel trust, warmth, and belonging.

To assess these implicit motives — which can’t be measured directly through self-reports since they are mostly unconscious — the researchers used an inventive method: They asked the participants to write imaginative short stories to describe five pictures, which showed an architect, trapeze artists, women in a laboratory, a boxer, and a nightclub scene.

Each story was analyzed by trained coders, who looked for sentences about positive personal relations between persons (thus expressing the affiliation motive) or about persons having impact or influence on others (expressing the power motive). Participants who used many such sentences in their story received a higher score for the corresponding implicit motive.

The researchers found that a mismatch in either direction is risky: employees can get burned out when they have too much or not enough opportunity for power or affiliation compared to their individual needs.

“We found that the frustration of unconscious affective needs, caused by a lack of opportunities for motive-driven behavior, is detrimental to psychological and physical well-being,” said lead author Dr. Veronika Brandstätter, professor of psychology at the University of Zurich.

“The same is true for goal-striving that doesn’t match a well-developed implicit motive for power or affiliation, because then excessive effort is necessary to achieve that goal. Both forms of mismatch act as ‘hidden stressors’ and can cause burnout.”

The greater the mismatch between someone’s affiliation motive and the scope for personal relations at the job, the higher the risk of burnout. Likewise, adverse physical symptoms, such as headache, chest pain, faintness, and shortness of breath, became more common with increasing mismatch between an employee’s power motive and the scope for power in his or her job.

Importantly, the findings show that interventions that prevent or repair such mismatches could increase well-being at work and reduce the risk of burnout.

“A starting point could be to select job applicants in such a way that their implicit motives match the characteristics of the open position. Another strategy could be so-called ‘job crafting,’ where employees proactively try to enrich their job in order to meet their individual needs. For example, an employee with a strong affiliation motive might handle her duties in a more collaborative way and try to find ways to do more teamwork,” said Brandstätter.

The findings are published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology.

Source: Frontiers

Sleep Can Impact Relationship Satisfaction

-Rick Nauert, PhD

New research discovers that when husbands and wives get more sleep than on an average night, they are more satisfied with their marriages — at least the following day.

In the study, Florida State University psychology professor Dr. Jim McNulty and graduate student Heather Maranges hypothesize that sleep is linked to self-regulation or self-control, which influences how married couples feel and think about their partner.

“The universality of our findings is important,” Maranges said. “That is, we know all people need sleep. Regardless of the stage at which a couple is in their relationship or the cultural context in which they’re embedded, each member of the couple can be adversely affected by not getting enough sleep.”

The paper appears in the Journal of Family Psychology.

The researchers believe sleep influences self-control. Self-control requires energy that can be replenished when our bodies are in the resting period known as sleep. In other words, sleep offers self-regulatory benefits to relationships.

“Up to one-third of married or cohabiting adults report that sleep problems burden their relationship,” the researchers wrote in the paper.

Other sleep studies have indicated that even partial sleep deprivation can have harmful effects on processes that require self-regulation, like evaluating how you feel about your partner.

However, results in this study revealed that differences between couples’ sleep durations was not associated with differences in marital satisfaction. Because one couple gets more sleep than another does not mean that the couple that experienced more sleep viewed their marriage more favorably.

Maranges and McNulty conducted their research with 68 newlywed couples. Over a seven-day period, couples recorded the number of hours they slept and then responded to two sets of questions on a scale of one (not satisfied at all) to seven (extremely satisfied).

The first set measured overall relationship satisfaction, asking husbands and wives to respond to questions such as, “How satisfied were you with your marriage today?” The other set focused on relationship experiences in nine areas including chores, the amount of time spent together and conflict resolution.

Researchers discovered husbands especially were less negatively affected by bad experiences in those nine areas when they got more sleep. That is, sleep buffered the effects of specific negative events and evaluations on their broader, more general satisfaction with their marriages.

Although the study appears to have several important messages, a replication of the study among a wider variety of couples is necessary for universal acceptance of the findings.

For instance, the couples examined were primarily white, had been married less than six months and on average were 24 years old. They also said measures of sleep quality would provide more rigorous tests of the association between sleep and martial satisfaction.

Source: Florida State University

The Science Behind a Successful Single Life

-Janice Wood

A new study has found that single people have richer social lives and more psychological growth than married people.

“The preoccupation with the perils of loneliness can obscure the profound benefits of solitude,” said Bella DePaulo, Ph.D., a scientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and a regular Psych Central blogger.

“It is time for a more accurate portrayal of single people and single life — one that recognizes the real strengths and resilience of people who are single, and what makes their lives so meaningful.”

DePaulo, who presented her research at the American Psychological Association’s 2016 Annual Convention, cited longitudinal research that shows single people value meaningful work more than married people, and another study that shows single people are also more connected to parents, siblings, friends, neighbors, and coworkers.

“When people marry, they become more insular,” she said.

However, research on single people is lacking, according to DePaulo. She said she searched for studies of people who had never married and, of the 814 studies she found, most did not actually examine single people, but used them as a comparison group to learn about married people and marriage in general.

The studies that did focus on single people revealed some telling findings, she said.

For example, research comparing people who stayed single with those who stayed married showed that single people have a heightened sense of self-determination and they are more likely to experience “a sense of continued growth and development as a person,” DePaulo said.

Another study of lifelong single people showed that self-sufficiency serves them well: The more self-sufficient they were, the less likely they were to experience negative emotions. For married people, the opposite was true, according to DePaulo.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are more unmarried people than ever before in the United States. In 2014, there were 124.6 million unmarried Americans over age 16, meaning that just over 50 percent of the nation’s adult population identified as single.

In contrast, only just over 37 percent of the population was unmarried in 1976.

Married people should be doing a lot better than single people in view of the number of laws that benefit them, DePaulo said, but in many ways, they aren’t.

“People who marry get access to more than 1,000 federal benefits and protections, many of them financial,” she said. “Considering all of the financial and cultural advantages people get just because they are married, it becomes even more striking that single people are doing as well as they are.”

Despite the advantages of staying single, DePaulo doesn’t claim one status is better than the other.

“More than ever before, Americans can pursue the ways of living that work best for them,” she said. “There is no one blueprint for the good life. What matters is not what everyone else is doing or what other people think we should be doing, but whether we can find the places, the spaces, and the people that fit who we really are and allow us to live our best lives.”

Source: The American Psychological Association

Future Focus Can Help Couples Ease Conflict

-Rick Nauert, PhD

New research finds that thinking about the future helps couples focus on their feelings and reasoning strategies.

“When romantic partners argue over things like finances, jealousy, or other interpersonal issues, they tend to employ their current feelings as fuel for a heated argument. By envisioning their relationship in the future, people can shift the focus away from their current feelings and mitigate conflicts,” said researcher Alex Huynh.

Huynh is a doctoral candidate in psychology and lead author of the study published online in Social Psychological and Personality Science. Drs. Igor Grossmann from the University of Waterloo, and Daniel Yang from Yale University also contributed to the research.

Previous research has shown that taking a step back, and adopting a distanced fly-on-the-wall-type of perspective can be a positive strategy for reconciliation of interpersonal struggles.

For example, prior research by Grossmann and colleagues suggests that people are able to reason more wisely over issues of infidelity when they are asked to do so from a third-person perspective. Huynh and his collaborators investigated whether similar benefits in reasoning and relationship well-being can be induced by simply stepping back and thinking about the future.

Study participants were instructed to reflect on a recent conflict with a romantic partner or a close friend. One group of participants were then asked to describe how they would feel about the conflict one year in the future, while another group was asked to describe how they feel in the present.

The team examined participants’ written responses through a text-analysis program for their use of pronouns such as I, me, she, he.

These choices of pronouns were used to capture participants’ focus on the feelings and behavior of those involved in the conflict. Written responses were also examined for beneficial reasoning strategies; for example, forgiveness and reinterpreting the conflict more positively.

The researchers found that thinking about the future affected both participants’ focus on their feelings, and their reasoning strategies. As a result, participants reported more positivity about their relationship altogether.

In particular, when study participants extended their thinking about the relationship a year into the future, they were able to show more forgiveness and reinterpret the event in a more reasoned and positive light.

Responding to conflict is a critical skill for relationship maintenance.

“Our study demonstrates that adopting a future-oriented perspective in the context of a relationship conflict — reflecting on how one might feel a year from now — may be a valuable coping tool for one’s psychological happiness and relationship well-being,” said Huynh.

The research also has potential implications for understanding how prospection, or future-thinking, can be a beneficial strategy for a variety of conflicts people experience in their everyday lives.

Source: University of Waterloo

Your Relationship’s Personality

-Mark B. Borg, Jr, Ph.D., Grant H. Brenner, MD, & Daniel Berry, RN, MHA


How does a relationship go about “self-improvement?”

Every relationship has its own personality, that is, a “quality” or “character” distinct from the traits each individual brings to the table. Though this idea may seem strange, it’s a straightforward concept from the field known as complexity science, specifically the model of “self-organizing systems”. The upshot is that living systems require balance between change and stability to maintain their core identity, while simultaneously developing and expanding, and that this process cannot be directed beforehand but must happen with the important element of the spontaneous emergence of new experiences.

Besides the consciously shared work of connection-building, relationships require their members to surrender (to an extent) to the new thing their partnership is becoming—by which we mean, accepting that their joint dynamic is going to pull them in directions that neither party would have planned or predicted. As with raising a child, a point is reached at which couples must allow their relationship autonomy, novelty, and space for risk-taking, all the while maintaining open communication. Problems develop, however, if they’re unable to tolerate the anxiety that comes with uncertainty—what might happen—putting their connection at risk for fading away. For some, this also makes them try control the shape the relationship takes, causing major problems.

An example of this is Judith and Ryan, whose relationship was almost ruined by anxiety. Judith reflected on how she underestimated what can happen when passions meet, or perhaps, collide: “I was sure that Ryan’s little ‘peculiarities’ were what had always caused the trouble between us. Nobody’d ever warned me that the way two people ‘meet’ in relationship becomes this unpredictable ‘third thing’—kind of a wild-card that nobody’s really to blame for. But that ‘thing’ caused some real trouble for us.”

Irrelationship is a defensive construct that forms as the scary wild-card of increasing intimacy develops in a relationship. Psychological defenses are survival mechanisms we create to help us navigate the anxiety of everyday life—usually by ignoring or dissociating from awareness of the anxiety.

“What was really weird was when I realized that my habit of scapegoating Ryan was part of undermining that ‘wild-card-thing’ which helps relationships really come alive. Oddly, I wasn’t doing it on my own: Ryan cooperated by actually accepting the scapegoat role.”

“Although,” Ryan jumped in, “it took awhile for me to see that I was going along with Judith’s tirades so she’d feel better. It didn’t really hurt me: I love Judith and felt sorry for her. I had this idea that letting her unload on me was helping her. I realize looking back that I somehow didn’t really believe that she believed what she was saying about me.”

“Yeah,” responded Judith. “And anytime you argued with me, I’d get so angry. I thought you were just being stubborn by not letting me ‘help you,’ and that if you’d just listen to me, everything would be better for you. I kind of knew you weren’t agreeing with what I was saying, but I thought I could force you to take it in.”

“Yeah, I know. And I thought I was helping you by letting you believe that. Funny, what we were really doing was stonewalling so that we couldn’t get closer to each other.”

The authors’ tool for identifying and treating this type of defense against intimacy is called the 40-20-40. It’s a technique that helps couples and others to name the thought patterns and behaviors that prevent closeness from developing, moving them toward relationship sanity. Using couples-specific conflicts and issues, the 40-20-40 sorts out the anxiety and unspoken needs that act as a barrier to intimacy by teaching the couple to articulate their fears both to themselves and each other.

“It wasn’t easy to see how my ‘helping’ Ryan was just a way of keeping my distance. But my insistence that I knew best was ruining everything,” said Judith. I kept telling myself he was ‘the bad guy,’ and even belittled him him in front of our friends. It was gross.”

“Yeah,” agreed Ryan. “And I was making nice by going along with it, which just made the whole thing worse.”

The irrelationship dynamic originates in families where expression of feelings and vulnerability are discouraged. Over time this develops into barriers that protect us from the anxiety and pain brought about by being close to each other. The unintended consequence is that family members are left in seemingly inexplicable isolation from one another.

“I don’t know how it happened, but one day I realized how far away you’d become. And for some reason, Duh! The no-brainer dawned: I’d created this by picking on you all the time—so much so that our friends noticed it and sometimes pointed out what I was doing. But I always brushed it off, telling myself you ‘needed it.’”

“Yeah,” Ryan answered. “And I just let it happen, though it sure made you look pretty bad to our friends.”

Working through irrelationship often starts when the pain of clinging to a defect is greater than the fear and discomfort of letting it go—a relationship character defense like emotional distance is similar to what psychologists call a “character defect” or “flaw” which can be addressed with psychotherapy. Through this process we can accept our past—and the ways in which it materializes defensively and defectively in our relationship—with compassion and step into our present with each other with a new image and experience of our relationship and ourselves. Relationship sanity—a process of giving and receiving, loving and accepting love—opens the door to new possibilities for healing, love, intimacy and growth.

“One day I woke up with a bad stomach ache,” Judith remembered. “You seemed so far away. I thought my life was ending. I’d hit a wall and could see no way around it. I can’t believe I was able to tell you that. But you listened, even though it had been a long time since I deserved to have you listen to me. Somehow, though, it was enough to begin changing everything.”

Facial Characteristics May Influence Perception of Honesty

-Rick Nauert, PhD

Can you look at someone and tell if they are honest? Many of us believe we can and a new Canadian study explains why we have this perception (accurate or not).

Researchers determined that certain facial features, not the expression, influence whether people think someone is trustworthy. That is, some people may “look” honest.

University of British Columbia’s psychology professor Dr. Stephen Porter, and Ph.D. student Alysha Baker, recently completed two studies determining that people often make judgments of trustworthiness based solely on the face.

“Our findings in this and our past studies suggest that your physical appearance can have major implications for your assumed credibility and other character traits, even more powerful than the manner in which you behave and the words you speak,” said Porter.

“The implications in social, workplace, corporate, and criminal justice settings are enormous.”

In their studies, the researchers asked participants to watch a video, listen to audio-only pleas, or examine a photo of people publicly asking for the return of a missing relative. They then asked for their personal perceptions of general trustworthiness and honesty.

“A lot of information that feeds into our impressions about one’s trustworthiness is deduced from the face,” said Baker, who conducted much of the research.

“More specifically, there are certain facial features considered that make an individual look more trustworthy — higher eyebrows, more pronounced cheekbones, rounder face — and other features that are perceived to be untrustworthy-looking — downturned eyebrows, or a thinner face.”

The studies cited two real criminal cases, one with an 81-year-old woman and one with a father of a missing nine-year-old girl. People believed the elderly woman’s public appeal for justice, even though it was later determined she had killed her husband.

Many judged the father to be lying, based on his facial features, even though he later proved to be innocent.

“When encountering a person in any given situation, we automatically and instantaneously form an impression of whether a target is worthy of our trust because, evolutionarily, this kind of assessment has helped our survival. For example, assessing ‘friend or foe’,” said Baker.

“We’re typically not aware of this quick decision and it may be experienced as ‘intuition’, but this can be particularly problematic in the legal system because these first impressions are often unfounded and can lead to biased decision-making.”

Baker cautions that in some legal settings those who are untrustworthy-looking may be judged more harshly and receive different outcomes than those deemed to be trustworthy-looking.

This has occurred in the United States where untrustworthy-looking men are more likely to receive the death penalty than trustworthy-looking men convicted of similar crimes.

This study appears in the journal Psychology, Crime & Law.

Source: University of British Columbia/EurekAlert

While Cognitive Ability Varies, Prejudice Seems Universal

-Janice Wood

A new study finds that when it comes to prejudice, it doesn’t matter if you are smart or conservative or liberal. Each group has its own specific biases.

In fact, the study found that cognitive ability — whether high or low — only predicts prejudice towards specific groups.

“Very few people are immune to expressing prejudice, especially prejudice towards people they disagree with,” said lead author Dr. Mark Brandt of Tilburg University in the Netherlands.

For their study, Brandt and Dr.  Jarrett Crawford of the College of New Jersey analyzed data from 5,914 people in the United States that included a measure of verbal ability and prejudice towards 24 different groups.

Analyzing the results, the researchers found that people with both relatively higher and lower levels of cognitive ability show approximately equal levels of intergroup bias, but towards different groups.

For instance, people with low cognitive ability tended to express prejudice towards groups perceived as liberal and unconventional, such as atheists, gays, and lesbians, as well as groups of people perceived as having low choice over group membership, such as ethnic minorities.

People with high cognitive ability showed the reverse pattern, according to the study’s findings. They tended to express prejudice towards groups perceived as conservative and conventional — Christians, the military, big business.

“There are a variety of belief systems and personality traits that people often think protect them from expressing prejudice,” Brandt said. “In our prior work we found that people high and low in the personality trait of openness to experience show very consistent links between seeing a group as ‘different from us’ and expressing prejudice towards that group. The same appears to be true for cognitive ability. ”

While previous work has found that people with low cognitive ability express more prejudice, Brandt said his study found this was limited to only some target groups.

“For other target groups, the relationship was in the opposite direction,” he said. “For these groups, people with high levels of cognitive ability expressed more prejudice. So, cognitive ability also does not seem to make people immune to expressing prejudice.”

The researchers noted they would like to see if their findings will replicate in new samples, with new target groups, and additional measures of cognitive ability.

“We used a measure of verbal ability, which is essentially a vocabulary test,” Brandt said. “Although this measure correlates pretty well with other measures of cognitive ability, it is not a perfect nor a complete measure.”

The study was published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science.

Source: Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP)