Unrequited Interpersonal Relationships

Jim Tomkins loved Anne with a passion reserved for the steamiest Hollywood motion picture.  She was the woman of his dreams who intruded into his thoughts night and day.   He could imagine himself with no one else, and hoped one day to meet her in person.      

You might question the depth of Jim’s devotion to actress Anne Hathaway, a woman whom he never met, but Gayle S. Stever would not.  You see, Stever has spent 27 years studying unrequited love between fans and celebrities.  Jim's fanciful infatuation raises an interesting question: Can our irrational preoccupation with superstars and unattainable others undermine our opportunities for authentic, reciprocated real-life relationships?

Stever (2017) wondered whether there is something in our evolutionary nature rendering us vulnerable to imaginary, dead-end relationships with high profile mass media celebrities.  He suggested that these "parasocial relationships" are attractive because the afflicted person derives feelings of safe haven and security from the fancied interactions with the object of his/her affection. 

The explanation proffered by Gale Stever is that human beings have evolved to experience comfort from familiar faces and voices.  He reasoned that familiarity breeds attraction.  Psychological science has known for decades (Zajonc, 1968) that even a single previous, relatively emotionally neutral experience with someone biases us to like them better at the next meeting - "the mere exposure effect."  So, it is reasonable to conclude that all else being equal, we are inclined to like celebrities who come to us not once and not with the usual complement of human foibles, but repeatedly and in pristine condition.

In most situations, affection for celebrities is harmless.  However, Stever claims that 15% to 20% of celebrity devotees virtually "worship" their favorite stars.  That propensity can cause the extreme worshiper to be dissatisfied with real-life human interactions, undermining his/her access to authentic interpersonal satisfactions.

Although Gale Stever focused on persons consumed with unattainable celebrities, it is reasonable to imagine a different type of harmful parasocial relationship - a relationship with a real person who nevertheless is unattainable to us.  The person could be one who is so deeply attached to someone else that we intuitively know that we have no chance to satisfy our desire to become close to them.  Or, it could be someone whom we correctly understand would never find us attractive.  If you believe in the depth of your heart that the parasocial person truly is beyond your reach, but you continue to cling to and obsess about a relationship with them, you of course will suffer.  Worse would be a situation wherein you not only suffer, but obsesses so about the unreachable parasocial person that you also squander your daily opportunities to establish and maintain relationships with real, accessible people who truly want to be with you.

Parasocial relationships with every day, rather than celebrity, persons lie at the root of much interpersonal turmoil.  For instance, you might unconsciously compare your spouse or lover with the parasocial person of your dreams, and reject your spouse or lover.  The authentic relationship that you have is never enough, so you are always looking for someone else.  In that case, the problem is not so much with your spouse or lover, but with your inability to recognize and cope with your own debilitating, self-defeating feelings and thoughts.  Rather than turning inward to deal with your real-life interpersonal failure, you direct your attention outward to a fanciful relationship, attempting to bolster your self-esteem by finding someone who fits your excessively high standard of attractiveness.

Although we all aspire to find our ideal "soul mates," we, ourselves, are not ideal.  Whether you seek perfect love or perfect companionship, when you strike out with the superlative object of your affection, you would do well to pursue someone who offers you a real opportunity to create a genuine reciprocally satisfying relationship.  Don't waste your precious time on parasocial stars in Hollywood or in the neighborhood..       

References

Stever, Gayle S. (2017).  Evolutionary theory and reactions to mass media: Understanding parasocial attachment.  Psychology of Popular Media Culture, 6, 2, 95-102. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/ppm0000116

Zajonc, Robert B. (1968). Attitudinal effects of mere exposure.  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 9 2, 1–27

Was It Me or My Situation ?

How shall we understand human behavior?  Do people act as they do because of their personalities or because of the situations in which they find themselves?  Psychologists have observed that individuals evidence a strong tendency to cite their own personalities as reasons for their positive actions and their situations as reasons for their negative actions.  By contrast, individuals tend to regard the actions of other people in the opposite fashion, assuming that positive actions are situation-based and negative actions are personality-based.  The phenomenon is so common that it has its own term—the fundamental attribution error.

Given the importance of situations, one would expect that there is a well-established way to understand them.  Unfortunately, that has not been the case.  So Scott Parrigon, Sang Eun Woo, Louis Tay, and Tong Wang (2017) sought to remedy that deficiency by creating a taxonomy (classification system) specific to the psychological aspects of situations.  They approached the issue by using a lexical scheme, meaning one that relied on using the language by which people describe psychologically relevant situations.  To do so, they trained raters to evaluate situation descriptor words and then subjected the experts’ opinions to rigorous statistical factor analysis that “boiled down” 851 situation-describing adjectives to six major dimensions.  In effect then, Parrigon et al. used the same basic method to describe psychological situations as had been used successfully to create the widely celebrated Big Five system of personality description.

After analyzing data from four studies, the researchers concluded that there are six critical dimensions that describe psychologically relevant situations: importance, complexity, adversity, humor, positive valence, and negative valence.  Practically speaking, that means the most psychologically relevant features of any given situation would be explained by describing the extent to which the experiencing person regards it as important vs unimportant, complex vs simple, adverse vs favorable, humorous vs serious, and whether it has a positive or a negative emotional tone.

We can extrapolate loosely then that, psychologically speaking, the worst possible situation would be one that the experiencing person considers to be important, complex, adverse, serious, and with negative implications.  One could imagine, for instance, a situation in which one returns home from vacation to discover that their house has burned down, and they have no fire insurance.

Hopefully, your house has not burned down and you do have fire insurance.  So how does the situation classification system relate to your personality and to your health?  Let's take one simple example.

Suppose you want to create or enhance an intimate interpersonal relationship.  From a personality perspective, you might consider your own strengths and weaknesses and those of the person whom you seek.  You imagine what about you would be alluring to that individual and what about that individual would be alluring to you.  Having done so, you are ready to plan your relationship development strategy.  That is where the situation becomes central.

From a psychological perspective, your relationship situation clearly is important and serious. Recognizing that, you structure your behavior accordingly.  For instance, you make a mindful, concerted effort to speak and act in ways that facilitate the budding relationship.  You also accept that because relationship building is complex, you take the time to imagine how the parts of the process interrelate to each other.  You do your best to fashion the situation for maximum complementarity among it situational parts.  Next,  you ensure that you minimize all the potential negative emotional elements and maximize all the positive ones.  Finally, you review the total situation and make any adjustments necessary to ensure that you have created a psychological situation that is as favorable to your goals as possible.

The lesson here is obvious: You can avoid the fundamental attribution error by always looking to both personalities and situations simultaneously.  That is true whether you are scrutinizing your own behavior or that of other people.  If you want to make healthful changes - whether physical or mental - do not fall for the latest, most thoroughly advertised "this strategy works for everybody" approach. Look to your unique self and to your unique situations, find the strengths and weaknesses within them, and use those understandings to develop and implement a plan that is just right for you.



Reference:

Parrigon, Scott; Woo, Sang Eun; Tay, Louis; and Wang, Tong (2017).  CAPTION-ing the situation: A lexically-derived taxonomy of psychological situation characteristics.  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol 112, 4, April, 642-681.  http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/pspp0000111

      

Exercise and Coping

If you want to prevent yourself from exploding into anger, take a walk around the block instead.  That folk wisdom was promulgated regularly in pre-21st Century America.  People clearly believed that exercise could cool down a hot head.  What might cause that transformation?  Is it merely that incipient anger’s physical tension is discharged by the physical act of walking, or is it something else?

Emily E. Bernstein and Richard J. McNally (2017) wanted to understand more precisely the link between emotion and exercise.  To do so, they recruited 95 subjects, ages 18 to 36 who visited the psychology lab three times, and who had been instructed to refrain from all strenuous activity for at least 12 hours before arriving.  Baseline measurements were taken regarding the subjects’ physical fitness, demographics, moods, traits, emotional responses, and exercise habits.  They also completed several self-report questionnaires concerning their tendencies relevant to rumination, depression, anxiety, and stress.  At each visit, the subjects were assigned in a counterbalanced fashion to 25 minutes of resting, stretching, or moderately intense cycling.  After the activity, their attentional control was tested, they were administered stressors (having to solve verbal puzzles 30% of which were unsolvable and having to perform a serial subtraction task while being told that were erring), and they completed questionnaires about their emotional responses.  Finally, the subjects performed a number of cognitive tasks.  

As one would expect, Bernstein and McNally found that subjects who ruminated the most after being stressed, experienced more persistent and more intense negative emotion than did those who ruminated less.  But persons who fretfully ruminated much and who also had cycled were less negatively impacted.  Please note that cycling preceded the stressor, meaning that the moderately intense exercise amounted to a kind of stress inoculation against later upset.

The aforementioned folk wisdom about exercise and emotion really was not addressed by the study in question.  There certainly is a world of difference between sensing your own incipient anger and physically acting literally to distance yourself from it, compared to being stressed by being administered unsolvable verbal puzzles and being given negative feedback about your performance.  At minimum, in the former situation, you can act with full autonomy and in the latter, you are reacting to control exerted by someone else.  But the most important difference is that the folk wisdom implies that exercise during and just after the stress provides tension reduction.  By contrast, the Emily E. Bernstein and Richard J. McNally research suggests that exercise before stress is protective.

To my way of thinking, however, there is no significant contradiction here.  Exercise confers benefits to our physical and mental health regardless of whether the exercise occurs before, during, or after the stressor.  Physical fitness usually is achieved through a mindful approach to health.  In order to attain and maintain fitness, one must think through what needs to be done and actually perform the necessary behaviors consistently through the good and bad times.  That lesson is implicit in the Bernstein and McNally research just reviewed here.  Similarly, when stress mounts, the individual needs to physically act to reduce tension at that very moment — the folk wisdom with which we began this post.

Reference:

Bernstein, Emily E. and McNally, Richard J. (2017).  Acute Aerobic Exercise Hastens Emotional Recovery From a Subsequent Stressor.  Health Psychology, March 9th  , No Pagination Specified. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/hea0000482         

Emotional Preferences

Do you like to cry?  Do you like to laugh?  Would you prefer a “tear jerker” movie, or would you like to see a film that will make you laugh?  No one can force you to watch a particular kind of movie.  You just seem to gravitate toward some more than others.  Why?

Noam Markovitch, Liat Netzer, and Maya Tamir (2017) sought to determine what motivates us toward emotions of one valence (positive or negative) and away from others.  To do so, they conducted three experiments in which disgusting, joyful, and emotionally neutral images were presented to subjects who were allowed to decide whether to continue watching them or to discontinue.  They also completed questionnaires regarding their attitudes toward the emotions of disgust and joy.

One feature of the studies’ results, perhaps predictably, suggested that people differ in their attitudes toward a given emotion.  Some accept, for instance, that disgust and joy are both natural features of life, and they are unlikely to expend much energy to structure their lives to either experience or avoid those emotions.   On the other hand, another feature of the studies’ results was not so obvious.  Namely, some people restrict their lifestyles to avoid the possibility of experiencing a particular emotion while others seek out experiences likely to elicit the emotion.  That is, one might refuse to attend a movie due to expecting that it could include some disgusting scene, however brief.

 

Taken to the extreme, those who avoid situations that might elicit an avoided emotion run the risk of sensitizing themselves even more to that emotion.  In a sense, they become more “afraid” of the emotion and more afraid of finding themselves in situations that could leave them exposed to it.   This can result in a virtual phobia that need not have developed in the first place.  The converse also is true.  One might excessively seek situations that evoke desired emotions.  In that case, the individual could become “addicted” to certain situations, as might be true for some persons who love to be loved and become sexually promiscuous to elicit loving behavior.

One other implication from the research is worth considering.  Some people might have a negative attitude toward a positive emotion.  Think about the individual who does not love to be loved.  That cynical person, for whatever misguided reason, could regard love as a phony emotion in which he refuses to partake.  Believing that love is built on manipulation and deception, he would avoid situations that could make him susceptible to “falling” in love.  The more he avoids situations conducive to loving interaction, the more convinced he becomes that love is an illusion.

Since our health is highly dependent on our emotional well-being and on ways that emotion either facilitates or impedes healthful behaviors, there is implicit useful advice in the experiments of Noam Markovitch and his colleagues.  We should consider our attitudes toward our emotions—all of them, the positive and the negative.  Emotions are signals that alert us to situations that are helpful and harmful.  We all experience virtually all the emotions to some degree whether we are conscious of them or not.  Try to be aware of the emotions that you seek and those that you avoid.  Use that awareness to be sure that you are not cutting yourself off from situations that might involve some small amount of negative emotion that you must endure to reap a greater amount of positive emotion.  For instance, although all human relationships involve painful experiences, most have the potential for considerably greater joy.

And, by the way, both a good cry and a good laugh can be salutary.

Reference:

Markovitch, N.,  Netzer, L., & Tamir, M. (2017).  What You Like Is What You Try to Get: Attitudes Toward Emotions and Situation Selection.  Emotion, January.  No Pagination Specified. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/emo0000272

Healthful Interpersonal Attitudes

In his 1944 play, No Exit, Jean-Paul Sartre suggested that “hell is other people.”  And sometimes that definitely is true.  However, individuals who blindly accept Sartre’s assertion can create for themselves their own interpersonal hell.  People occasionally can be devils or angels, but mostly they merely are people with a variety of attractive and unattractive attributes.  The relative balance of their vices and virtues depends on how you interpret their traits and behaviors.

Hans Alves, Alex Koch, and Christian Unkelbach (2017) of the University of Cologne took a long hard look at how we evaluate others.  In eight studies they specifically explored how interpretation of interpersonal similarities and differences determine how we view our social environments.

In all eight of the studies, subjects were asked to compare the traits of two persons, some of whom they knew personally and others who were known only due to their celebrity.  Since some the experiments were refinements of other experiments, five major results applied to our discussion.  They were:

The subjects identified 2.6 more common positive traits than negative ones.

The subjects were quicker in their abilities to determine positive than negative traits when the determined traits were shared by the compared persons.  On the other hand, unshared positive and negative traits took longer to determine.

Subjects rated easy-to-retrieve traits more positively than difficult-to-retrieve traits.

When subjects liked the compared persons, the compared persons’ shared traits were more often evaluated as positive; the opposite happened for disliked compared persons.

When subjects liked the compared persons, there was a numerical advantage of shared positive traits to shared negative traits, but no such numerical difference for disliked compared persons.

The experimenters’ theoretical discussion of the findings was reasonable.  They framed their conclusions in terms of a psychological concept called, “the common good.”  Essentially, that concept claims that most people share positive attributes and, therefore, that differences are “uncommon.”  The concept further implies that differences among people tend to be perceived less favorably than do their similarities.  Since we usually judge others relative to ourselves, if someone is unlike us, we are even more inclined to view that difference unfavorably.  The theory proposes then that the more we attend to similarities between ourselves and others, the more we will judge them positively.  The converse also is true.

If you accept what Hans Alves and his co-investigators imply, you can improve your interpersonal contentment in a number of ways.  At one extreme, you can avoid anyone whom you regard as different from you.  That strategy almost certainly would contribute to your becoming extremely negative toward any out-group persons whom you encounter.  At the other extreme, you can avoid recognizing any differences between yourself and others.  That approach would leave you open to overusing the psychological defense of denial which would be maladaptive on its face. 

Obviously, there is a healthful middle ground.  If you know that you are likely to regard perceived differences as negative and similarities as positive, you might direct most of your attention to how you and your associates are the same, and limit your attention to the most critical differences between you. Moreover, merely knowing that the “same is good and different is bad” bias exists, you can ensure that you do not allow that tendency to preoccupy or stress you.  Angels are in heaven and devils are in hell.  Remember that we all live here together on earth.

Alves, Hans, A., et al.  (2017).  The “Common Good” Phenomenon: Why Similarities Are Positive and Differences Are Negative.  Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, February, No Pagination Specified.  doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/xge0000276

Sartre Jean-Paul (1944).  No Exit (a play)