Lifestyle and Materialism

We live in a culture that relentlessly bombards us with messages extolling the virtues of things.  Have you reserved an IPhone 7?  Do you have an IPhone 6?  Well, then what type cellphone do you have?  Please don’t embarrass yourself by telling me if you have a flip-phone.

How about your house?  How many bedrooms and bathrooms?  Does your car have a rear-view camera?  Does it boast rain-sensing windshield wipers that automatically turn on whenever it “perceives” drizzle?

If you don’t have the latest and greatest, why not?  Don’t you deserve the best?  You are no less entitled than your in-the-know colleagues, friends, and relatives, are you?

If you are materialistic, you must be young.  After all, everybody knows that young people feel entitled.  Older persons have the wisdom to know what is and is not important in life.  Research undoubtedly would support the age-materialism relationship, wouldn’t it?

Maybe not.  At least that is what Esther D. T. Jaspers and Rik G. M. Pieters (2016) discovered.  Although they did confirm that people generally believe youngsters are more materialistic than oldsters, the carefully crafted research revealed more nuanced conclusions.  Materialism did decrease from younger to older ages, but it increased slightly again for persons approaching the oldest ages.  That is, materialism exhibited an age-sensitive curvilinear relationship, being higher among the younger and older subjects and lower among the middle-aged ones.  As to the specifics, the desire to acquire material goods declined from young adulthood to middle adulthood, with 55-year-olds as the least materialistic cohort.  Possession materialism, in which subjects defined success with reference to their material goods, also decreased with age, reaching its nadir at about age 62 and increasing slowly thereafter.

What are the implications then for materialism and life?  Those who relentlessly pursue material goods can become slaves to their acquisition avarice, and those who define success by their “toys” are enslaved as well.  The expression “everything that you own owns you” is worth your reflection.

Materialism encourages us to become item competitive with others in our reference groups, and it instigates stress by driving us to work excessive hours in order to buy goods that quickly lose their special appeal.  Moreover, those who covet material items become fixated on determining the items' economic values (Pchelina & Howella, 2014) and determining economic value often is a vexing and virtually impossible task.  The more item choice we have, the more overwhelming and even paralyzing choosing becomes (Swartz, 2005) —another stressor inherent in our preoccupation with things.    

Capitalistic culture promotes relentless materialism.  Everyone of course needs and wants material goods.  There is nothing wrong with that.  But when lives are built around materialism, serious problems result.  Regardless of our age, we need to refrain from acquiring for the sake of acquiring.  And we must resist the temptation to define ourselves by our possessions.  That can be a challenge for all, including me.

References

Jaspers, E. & Pieters, R. (2016).  Materialism across the lifespan: An age-period-cohort analysis.  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.   No Pagination Specified. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/pspp0000092.

Pchelina, P.  & Howella, R.  (2014).  The hidden cost of value-seeking: People do not accurately forecast the economic benefits of experiential purchases.   The Journal of Positive Psychology, 9, 4, 322-334.

Schwartz, B. (2005).  The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less.  New York: Harper.

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Do You Know How Much You Are Eating?

If you are like most people, when you try to decide how well you are functioning in virtually any area of life you compare yourself with some reference group of people.  And, generally, the people you choose for comparison are those with whom you identity—relatives, friends, and neighbors—or those of high status, such as celebrities.  Leon Festinger (1954) pioneered this “social comparison theory” long ago, and decades of research certify its continuing and contemporary relevance.  Social comparison exerts particular influence due to "social desirability," a natural tendency to report our behavior in ways that enhance our social standing (Milham, 1972).  When we and our reference group members portray ourselves as favorably as possible, we are inclined to set unrealistically high comparison standards.  What might be the implications for our health-relevant lifestyles?

Let's think about eating habits.  Aaron M. Scherer and his co-investigators (2016) were interested in exploring motivation for dietary change.  They specifically looked at the extent, sources, and methods of measurement by which people decide the foods to change, and how to change them.  In four experiments, the participants either directly or indirectly compared their own consumption with that of their peers.  The information relevant for our discussion was as follows.

First, when subjects compared their consumption of healthy, common foods (e.g., apples), healthy, uncommon foods (e.g., cauliflower), unhealthy, common foods (e.g., French fries), and unhealthy, uncommon foods (e.g., onion rings) with that of peers, they claimed to consume less food overall and considerably less unhealthful food than their peers.   Second, the motivation of subjects was important.  In some circumstances motivated bias (due to a person’s strong desire to achieve a certain goal, such as weight reduction) was a primary factor and in others, non-motivated bias due to an egocentric excessive preoccupation with oneself when others should have been considered.  Non-motivated bias, for instance, described a general tendency in which subjects erroneously thought that their behaviors were superior to those of others.  Thus, some persons confidently believed that that they ate fewer donuts than their peers when they clearly had not.  Third, motivated bias was most apparent both for foods widely perceived as healthful and for those widely perceived as unhealthful, overestimating consumption of the former and underestimating that of the latter. 

There are several major takeaways from the Scherer study.  One concerns how to create an interpersonal environment that facilitates your healthful lifestyle goals: Knowing that you probably tend to establish objectives in sync with your reference group, you do well to identify with and to fraternize with persons who share your healthful objectives.  Another is taking care to develop as objective a progress-tracking system as possible.  Keep in mind the always-present temptation toward motivated and non-motivated biases that delude you into believing that you are progressing more than you truly are.  Beware of the related distortion that you are more likely to over-count your successes and to under-count your failures.  Finally, realize that the more you value your goal and/or the more competitive you are with members of your reference group, the greater the conscious or unconscious predilection to ignore uncomfortable shortcomings and to exaggerate minor achievements.

By following the aforementioned guidelines, you will know how much you are eating and what, if anything, to do about it.  And since social comparison and social desirability are likely to operate whenever you assess your health-related behaviors, you should take measures to resist its distortions.     

References:

Festinger L (1954). "A theory of social comparison processes". Human relations 7 (2): 117–140. doi:10.1177/001872675400700202.

Millham, J. The need for social approval: An evaluation. Coral Gables, Florida: Cognitive and Language Laboratory, 1972.

Scherer, A. M., et al. (2016). Sources of bias in peoples’ social-comparative estimates of food consumption. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, Vol 22(2), Jun 2016, 173-183. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/xap0000081.

Watch What You (and Others) Say

  Many of life's joys and sorrows are directly or indirectly attributable to what we say.  Our feelings typically result from what we say to ourselves.  If you have a 2010 Nissan and tell yourself you should have a 2016 Lexus, you might discount the benefits of your present car and obsess about the supposed wonders of the car that you do not have, resulting in brooding discontent.  Conversely, if you tell yourself that the Nissan is yours free and clear of a loan obligation and that it gets great gas mileage, the words can promote serenity  What we say also can cause interpersonal repercussions.  The old adage, “It’s not what you say but how you say it” is relevant here.  If you tell your spouse that he/she is "selfish" for eating the last two oranges in the refrigerator, you invite recrimination such as, "You are so greedy.  There were a dozen oranges in there last week; you ate the other ten!"  On the other hand, more carefully chosen words might elicit a constructive spousal response.  If you stated, "I have been eating a lot of oranges recently, we should buy a couple more next time," your partner might get your message without needing to rebut a criticism.

If you know that internal mental health and your external public relationship health are profoundly affected by the words you use, are you also cognizant of what you are saying in real time, and, more important, do you takes steps to correct maladaptive internal or interpersonal comments? "  To be cognizant in those ways, you must understand the relationships between words and emotions.

Research repeatedly has demonstrated that there are three major features of the affective/emotional meanings of words (Osgood et al., 1957): evaluation (from very positive to very negative), potency (from very strong to very weak), and activity (from very active to very passive).  For instance, saying to yourself or others, “I hate never having learned to ride a bicycle.  I just was born uncoordinated” is negative, weak, and passive.  By contrast, saying “I’m a very good bicyclist.  I got that way because I ride at least ten miles per day, rain or shine” is positive, strong, and active.

          What others say to you is no less rich in their affective influences.  Loftus and Palmer (1974) conducted a classic study demonstrating how the emotional valence of words influenced judgements.  After viewing video clips of motor vehicle accidents, subjects were asked, “About how fast were the cars going when they XXXX into each other?”  The missing verb varied across the five test groups, each fifth being given the verb smashed, collided, bumped, hit, or contacted.  The subjects estimates of car speed were:  smashed=40.8 mph, collided=39.3 mph, bumped=38.1 mph, hit=34.0 mph, and contacted=31.8 mph.  Clearly, the subjects verb-oriented emotional reactions “impacted” (pardon the pun) their speed judgements. 

The Loftus and Palmer study is an instance of “semantic prosody,” a somewhat arcane but very interesting feature of affective meaning that David J. Hauser and Norbert Schwarz (2016) believe influences our judgements.  In short, the idea is that some words tend to occur together almost exclusively in contexts that are either positive or negative, and in so appearing they promote within the listener an expectation of positivity or negativity that biases our evaluative conclusion.  In the study just reviewed, the fact that the word “car” appeared in contexts with “smashed,” “collided, “bumped,” “hit,” and “contacted” profoundly influenced our judgements in an affectively significant manner.  If in a cooking presentation one used the very same verbs to describe how potatoes were handled when making a stew, the emotional implications of the comments obviously would have been quite different.

Learn to pay attention to how you and others, especially physicians, use words to characterize matters that are important for your physical and mental health.  Know that the words will affect you.  Try to clarify both the objective and subjective features of those communications to understand what you are confronting and how to proceed in a way that is most health-facilitating.

Hauser, David J. and Schwarz, Norbert (2016).  Semantic prosody and judgment.

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, May 30.  No Pagination Specified. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/xge0000178.

Loftus, E. F., & Palmer, J. C. (1974).  Reconstruction of auto-mobile destruction: An example of the interaction between language and memory.  Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 13, 585-589.

Osgood, C. E., P. H. Tannenbaum, and G. J. Suci. (1957).  The Measurement of Meaning.  Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Busy ?

If you want to feel better, keep busy.  No!  Relax and take it easy, then you’ll feel better.  So which approach is correct?  As always, it depends on what are you doing when you are busy and on the outcome that you seek to obtain.

One can be busy in a positive or in a negative manner.  Kahneman et al. (2004) found, for instance, that women in their study spent more time being busy performing activities associated with negative than with positive emotion.   For instance, on a scale of 1 to 6 with 6 being most pleasurable and I being least pleasurable, the women reported spending most time in employment (6.9 hours with a negativity rating of .97), commuting (1.6 hours with a negativity rating of .89) and housework (1.1 hours with a negativity rating of .77).  That contrasted with their spending least time in intimate interaction (.2 hours with a positivity rating of 5.10), exercising (.2 hours with a positivity rating of 4.31), and praying/worshiping/meditating (.4 hours with a positivity rating of 4.35).

Suzanne C. Segerstrom and Daniel R. Evans (2016) wondered about those results, however, and decided to conduct a more thorough analysis of women’s time in pleasurable versus unpleasurable activities.  They concluded first the Kahneman results were misleading in that women spent most of their time at work, and it was work that accounted for most of the negative emotion ratings.  They showed that women were more likely to engage in activities that they considered pleasurable or that yielded the most resources, such as money or acclaim.  It was not just a matter of keeping busy, but keeping busy when busyness either provided its own intrinsic reward or an extrinsic reward that was prized by a specific individual.

Busyness also received a positive endorsement from Sara B. Festini, Ian M. McDonough and Denise C. Park (2016) who looked at its cognitive benefits.  They concurred with previous studies revealing that busier older adults (ages 50 to 89) also were more intellectually astute.  In this case, busyness was determined by asking study subjects questions such as: “How often do you have so many things to do that you go to bed later than your regular bedtime?” and “How often do you have too many things to do each day to actually get them all done?”

Since the Festini study relied on their participants’ self-report which was deficient in indicating the precise nature of their busyness, one cannot know which activities occupied them. Extrapolating from Segerstrom and Evans, we reasonably can assume, but not be sure that the preoccupying activities were ones that provided pleasure, resources, or both.

Gorry Aspen and associates (2015) also had something to say about activities, scrutinizing employment versus retirement.  They found retirement to be superior to employment in promoting both life satisfaction and health.  Moreover, they asserted that although the benefits were most obvious in the first four years after beginning retirement, they continued for at least four more years.

From my point of view, I say now what I said before in my Don’t Rest in Peace book: busyness and relaxation are equally important.  One only can be busy in a positive sense versus relaxed in a positive sense for so long before the two polarities must be switched.  A healthy body and mind will invariably exert their demands on us to maintain an adaptive balance.

References:

Aspen Gorry, Devon Gorry, and Sita Slavov (2015).  Does retirement improve health and life satisfaction?  National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper Number 21326, July.  Retrieved from online.

D. Kahneman, et al. (2004). A survey method for characterizing daily life experience: The day reconstruction method. Science, 306, 1776 –1780.  http://dx.doi .org/10.1126/science.1103572.

Sara B. Festini, Ian M. McDonough, and Denise C. Park (2016).  The busier the better: Greater busyness is associated with better cognition.  Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience, 17 May.  No pagination specified.  dx.doi.org/10.3389/fnagi.2016.00098.

Suzanne C. Segerstrom and Daniel R. Evans (2016).   Happy all the time?  Affect, resources, and time use.  Emotion, May 23.  No pagination specified.  http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/emo0000187.