Experiencing and Remembering

You arrived very early to the party and have been eating and drinking non-stop.   Suddenly it hits you.  Your stomach is churning and your head is pounding.  After wishing you were dead, you resolve never to get yourself into that position of excess again.  Two weeks later you see a friend who also attended the party.  She gushes about how much she enjoyed each succulent shrimp and savory sip of Scotch.  You heartily agree, adding that the host is planning another party on the 12th of the month, and that you too can’t wait to load up on the food and drinks.  Your previous experience of excess never enters your mind.  You have no intention of “depriving” yourself on the 12th.

How can a person go from resolving never to over-eat or over-drink at a party to again behaving in just that way? Daniel Kahneman (2011)  would answer by differentiating the experiencing self from the remembering self.  These selves are as their names suggest.  One experiences an event in real time that she responds to in real time, and the other recalls the experience later.  The experience and the memory never are precisely the same and, as in our example, the difference can be quite extreme.

The experiencing and remembering dichotomy has profound lifestyle and health implications.  It might lead one person continually to overeat at parties and another continually to practice unsafe sex. Positive change often begins with reconciling the experiencing and remembering selves.  That sounds easier than it is.  Our memories are abstractions, often self-serving abstractions that enable us to remember what we want and to forget the rest.  Because valid experiential feedback is essential for making corrective lifestyle adjustments, we must learn how to remember enough of the experiencing self impressions that we would prefer to forget.

Accurate memories start with a conscious intention to remember accurately.  But a global intention is not enough.  Since memory is built from abstracted impressions, we never will remember every single detail.  We typically remember what we already believe and/or what grabs us emotionally.  Therefore, we consciously must intend to remember the specific aspects of our experiencing self that we would prefer to dismiss.  If that intention causes us to focus on the uncomfortable features of our health-relevant experiences, we have a fighting chance to remember them and to learn from them.  And if our health-promoting intention and focus permit us to begin to behave more healthfully, we have a fighting chance to develop strong, enduring health habits.

To recall our specific health-relevant experiences we employ "autobiographical episodic memory."  And those memories have been shown to provide content for about 44 percent of our conversations   (Pasupathi & Carstensen, 2003). That means internal or external, conscious or unconscious self-esteem or social pressures can cause us to distort our recollection and/or report of experiences.  In either case, the distortion impairs our ability to learn from experience and causes us to repeat self-defeating habits.

My advice is for you to recruit a new form of the self to stand beside the experiencing and remembering selves.  I call this the "monitoring self,” a self who does its best to faithfully record and recall our experiences.  The monitoring self knows that we want to forget the uncomfortable features of our unhealthful experiences and that that predilection can sabotage our change implementation.  An effective monitoring self knows that when we deliberately or inadvertently program out from our insight or conversations information about our health lapses, we reinforce false and self-defeating health-relevant narratives as well.

References

Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow.   New York: Macmillan.

Pasupathi, M., & Carstensen, L. L. (2003).  Age and emotional experience during mutual reminiscing.  Psychology and Aging, 18, 430–442.

How Do You Feel About What You Think And Vice Versa?

Etymologically speaking, emotions “move” us, but where they move us depends on our appraisals—thoughts guiding emotions.  If you think that I deliberately stepped on your foot, you might become angry.  If you think that I stepped on your foot because I lost my balance due to a small brain seizure, you might feel pity.

Psychologists study how we appraise situations in order to better understand human emotion, thought, and behavior.  That effort has yielded some interesting insights that can guide us in making healthful lifestyle decisions.  Let’s consider a couple of them.

People often experience multiple simultaneous emotions.  When you are nervous, instance, you are more likely to be irritable as well.  And when you feel hopeful, you usually are cheerful.

Eddie Tong and Lile Jia (2016) explored the overlap among emotions in an attempt to determine why they co-occur.  Apropos our present discussion, they concluded that emotions occur together when a situation is appraised in ways that support both.  To return to our previous examples, you may be anxious and irritable because you perceive a situation as threatening and unfair.  And you may be hopeful and cheerful because you believe that something good will happen and you imagine its benefits.  So, appraisals explain why some emotions tend co-occur and why some do not, whether those emotions are positive or negative.

Emotions often exert their most powerful effects in interpersonal settings where one expression promotes contentment and/or goal attainment, and another does not.  In addition, our allies can facilitate our efforts and our enemies can stifle them.  Therefore, to get along and to reach our goals sometimes we must control emotions and controlling them is effortful.  Is the effort worthwhile?

Having studied 115 Swiss employees who reported their social encounters over one full week, Elena Wong and her colleagues (2016) answered in the affirmative.  They found that while emotional self-control exacted a well-being price in short-term, the workers’ longer term well-being was facilitated if self-control was rewarded by goal attainment.  Here the appraisal was not an appraisal of emotion, but an appraisal of desired outcome.

Since the workers in Wong’s study were mostly in lower power positions, it is reasonable to expect that their well-being was sensitive to interpersonal pressures as well as to goal achievement.  How about work leaders?  Conventional wisdom is that persons having objectively greater power experience more positive and less negative emotions.  However, studies have yielded mixed results, and that inconsistency inspired the Bombari group (2016) who structured experimental situations to induce “position power” or “felt power.”  As the names suggest, the former referred primarily to a job title whereas the latter concerned the individual’s actual feeling of power in their given situation, regardless of their title.  After analyzing their data, Bombari and his group discovered no significant relationship between an individual’s position power and their good or bad feelings.  However, their felt power did correlate positively with both positive and negative emotion such that, in general, those with greater felt power experienced more good feelings and less bad feelings even if they lacked position power. 

Your health then is “moved” by your emotions and thoughts.  You continually appraise your feelings, ideas, and situations.  When you appraise feelings, ideas, or situations as being similar, they tend to occur together, for you either in fact or in your mind.  And your behavior will be influenced by the “felt” similarity rather than by the exclusively objective similarity.  For instance, if you feel that a particular person causes you to fail, the person and failure become fused in your mind, reinforcing your felt similarity between them.  Should that person be a co-worker, you need to expend additional energy to control your emotions in order to reach goals influenced by that co-worker.  Finally, whether at work or at home, your well-being is affected by the amount of power you feel, rather than by some hierarchically defined symbol of power.  You therefore benefit when you appraise situations in ways that provide you some measure of felt power.

Imagine receiving a cancer diagnosis.  Almost everyone feels weak initially.  You need to find authentic strength in the face of the illness.  For instance, you correctly might feel that you have the power to take your medications and other therapies, to maintain healthful diet and exercise, and to associate with other optimistic cancer patients for mutual support.            

References

Wong, E., Tschan, F.,&  Semmer, N. (2016).   Effort in Emotion Work and Well-Being: The Role of Goal Attainment.  Emotion, July.  No Pagination Specified.  .http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/emo0000196

Tong, E. & Jia, L. (2016).   Positive Emotion, Appraisal, and the Role of Appraisal Overlap in Positive Emotion Co-Occurrence.  Emotion, July. No Pagination Specified. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/emo0000203

Bombari, D., Schmid M., & Bachmann, M.   Felt Power Explains the Link Between Position Power and Experienced Emotions.  Emotion, July.   No Pagination Specified .http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/emo0000207

Health and Wealth

We often hear and believe that wealthy people tend to be physically and mentally healthier than less wealthy ones.  A common rationale for that belief is that people with money can buy better healthcare, better food, and other resources.  And that rationale undoubtedly is correct regarding some aspects of health pertaining to some people some time.  However, there is an additional explanation by Michael Daly and Alex Christopher (2015) contained within their English study that raises some interesting and informative issues.

What Daly and Christopher did that was innovative was not merely to consider an individual's absolute wealth, but wealth relative to those in his reference group.  For instance, the individual's wealth was compared to others within his region within the United Kingdom, within his educational group, and within his/her gender group.  In so doing, the investigators discovered that one's social rank was a primary determinant of their health.  That is, within one's wealth, educational, and gender groups, those with higher social standing were healthier physically and mentally than those of lower standing.  So, whether of low, middle, or high wealth, persons of higher rank had fewer chronic illnesses, body pain, functional deficits, and obesity. 

In support of their findings, Daly and Christopher mentioned a previous paper by Rablen & Oswald (2008) claiming that even such high status individuals as Nobel Prize winners evidenced a health-social rank relationship such that the Noble winners lived longer than non-winning Nobel nominees matched  for country of origin and year of birth.  (You can decide how much credibility to attribute to the Nobel Prize information.)  More convincing was their referencing the fact that studies of populations from poor countries also show the health-social rank relationship, implying that it is not just an artifact relevant to affluent nations.

If it is true then that relative social rank is a more powerful factor in determining health than is absolute wealth, what could account for that finding?  I agree with Michael Daly and Alex Christopher's implication that social rank is associated with stress levels such that those of high rank are generally more insulated from stress.  They point to the robust finding that prediction and control help mitigate the most damaging stressors.  If a person can predict stress it is reasonable to expect that she can better control it and vice-versa.  Since high rank persons have more power to within their situations, they are better equipped both to predict and to control.

Does this mean that individuals of low wealth and low rank are doomed?  Not really.  If the key factor in wealth and health is the prediction and control of stressors, forewarned is forearmed  (praemonitus, praemunitus).  Some stressors have a minimal or no relationship to money, such as the quality of one’s interpersonal relationships.  Everyone can make it a point to maximize their time among supportive people and minimize their time among offensive ones.  Where money does influence stress, the situation can be trickier.  Not being able to meet the financial demands of day-to-day living will stress almost anyone.  However, strategies to manage money and bills better will “pay off” financially, physically, and mentally in both the short- and long-term.  Moreover, if you accept that the rank you hold relative to your reference group is important, you can attend to those features of reference group rank that are independent of wealth.  While the possibilities are endless, the most powerful ones again are likely to be interpersonally-oriented.  If you treat others with respect, egalitarianism, and kindness, your peers will rank you high in the human qualities that all people value, and you will reap the health rewards..

References

Daly, M. & Wood, Christopher (2015).  A social rank explanation of how money influences health. Health Psychology, 34, 3, 222-230.  doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/hea0000098

Rablen, M. & Oswald, A. (2008). Mortality and immortality: The Nobel Prize as an experiment into the effect of status upon longevity. Journal of Health Economics,27, 1462–1471. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhealeco.2008.06.001

Being Alone

 Some people claim that they don’t mind being alone, or even prefer it.  Others cannot tolerate one day of interpersonal isolation.  Loneliness, as most psychological conditions, is of course a state of mind.

Studies have suggested that persons who do regard themselves as lonely are less physically and emotionally healthy than the non-lonely.  Lonely individuals, for instance, tend have higher systolic blood pressure (Hawkley et al., 2006), putting them at greater stroke risk.  And lonely individuals, not surprisingly, are more susceptible to mental illness, especially depression (Cacioppo et al., 2006).

People, in general, are social animals.  We have evolved in groups and depend on others, to some extent, from birth to death; adverse effects of loneliness are not unexpected.  So what predisposes one to loneliness?

Michelle H. Lim and her associates (2016) looked into the issue by studying 1, 010 persons from the general community, aged 18 to 87, testing them three times over a six month period.  The single greatest predictor of loneliness was preexisting social anxiety.  That is, the lonely were lonely mostly because they historically had felt nervous around people.  The issue was one of fearfulness, for instance, rather than lack of opportunity for interaction per se.  The researchers made a state versus trait distinction worth your attention.  They specifically noted that the kind of social anxiety that we all experience periodically (state social anxiety) did not contribute to loneliness.  It was only trait social anxiety (social anxiety that is an enduring personality component) that promoted loneliness.  Lim also noted that trait-lonely people not only tended to be more depressed than their gregarious compatriots but also more paranoid.   Most important, the researchers speculated that loneliness per se most often preceded and aggravated paranoia rather than vice versa.

Most often, although not always, lonely people literally are alone.   Being alone yields predictable outcomes.  The lonely are alone with their thoughts.  Since we all have our anxieties, alone-persons are also alone with their discontents and fears; and being alone with them, the negative impacts are magnified.  So, if nothing else, one should seek interactions with others as alternatives to self-destructive ruminations.  Moreover, being with others helps activate you and provides a respite from physically unhealthful behaviors that you are more likely to perform in private, such as overeating.                  

If loneliness is a risk factor for physical and mental health problems then, reducing loneliness contributes to a more healthful lifestyle.  There is a time to be alone and a time to be with people.  Don’t let your social anxiety or suspicions limit your chance to derive health and pleasure coincident with interpersonal involvement.

References:

Cacioppo, J. T., Hughes, M. E., Waite, L. J., Hawkley, L. C., & Thisted, R. A. (2006). Loneliness as a specific risk factor for depressive symptoms: Cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses. Psychology and Aging, 21, 140–151.

Hawkley, L. C., Masi, C. M., Berry, J. D., & Cacioppo, J. T. (2006). Loneliness is a unique predictor of age-related differences in systolic blood pressure. Psychology and Aging, 21, 152–164. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0882-7974.21.1.152.

Lim, M., Rodebaugh, T.,  Zyphur, M.,  & Gleeson, J.  (2016).  Loneliness over time: The crucial role of social anxiety.  Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 125, 5, 620-630.

doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/abn0000162.