Stigma, His and Hers

Wednesday, February 25, 2009

By Wray Herbert

The mentally ill don’t get a fair shake in this country. Many employers don’t want to hire them, and health insurers don’t want to treat their illnesses. Even within their own communities and families, the mentally ill are often treated with contempt and disgust and outright anger.

All this has been known for a long time. There have been many efforts to combat the stigma of mental illness, but they inevitably fail. That’s in part because the stereotypes are so powerful, and so easy to conjure up, even if we don’t believe them: Mental patients are either violently dangerous or docile and incompetent. We fear the first and disdain the latter.

These are not equal opportunity stereotypes, however. The image of dangerous mental illness, including violent alcoholism, is much more often directed at men; we can always come up with exceptions, from the movies and real life, but they are exceptions. Similarly, women are much more likely to be caricatured as pathologically dependent and depressed.

Is it possible that these gender biases contribute to the harmful stigma of mental illness? Psychologists James Wirth of Purdue and Galen Bodenhausen of Northwestern thought that they might. Specifically, they suspected that when the mentally ill act “out of character,” violating the stereotype, they might arouse more of our sympathy and leniency; if it’s more uncommon, it's probably more authentic. By contrast, we might be more apt to blame and stigmatize the mentally ill when they conform to stereotype. In other words, we don’t like the broad caricatures and resent people when they act in caricatured ways.

The psychologists decided to explore this provocative idea with a national survey. They had a group of volunteers, mostly in their 40s, read a case history of a person with mental illness. Some read about Brian, who was a stereotypical alcoholic, while others read about Karen, who showed all the classical symptoms of major depression. Still others read switched-around versions of these cases, so that Karen was the one abusing alcohol and Brian was depressed. The idea was to see if the typicality of Brian and Karen’s symptoms (or lack of it) shaped the volunteers’ reactions and judgments.

And it did, without question. As reported in the February issue of the journal Psychological Science, the volunteers expressed more anger and disgust—and less sympathy—toward Brian the alcoholic than toward Karen the alcoholic, and vice versa for depression. They were also more willing to help Brian and Karen when they suffered from an atypical disorder. Most striking of all, the volunteers were much more likely to view the Brain’s depression (and Karen’s alcoholism) as genuine biological disorders—rather than character defects or matters of personal irresponsibility. What this suggests is that stigma-busting campaigns might profit by putting a different face on these mental disorders—and perhaps others as well.

For more insights into human nature, visit “We’re Only Human” at www.psychologicalscience.org/onlyhuman. Selections from the blog also appear regularly in the magazine Scientific American Mind and at http://www.sciam.com/.


posted by Wray Herbert @ 12:09 PM 3 Comments

The Perils of Ageism

Thursday, February 19, 2009

By Wray Herbert

When the AARP put Caroline Kennedy on its magazine’s cover last year, the retirees’ group was sending a message about aging in America: Growing old is not about decline and neediness and decrepitude. It’s about vibrancy and independence and creativity. The darling of Camelot joined the likes of Jamie Lee Curtis, Richard Gere and Katie Couric in combating the stigma of age.

Not everyone buys into this sanguine view of aging, however. Indeed, ageism is still rampant in America, and many old people themselves trade in unflattering stereotypes of the elderly, including helplessness and incompetence. Such caricatures are not only false and cruel, they are also unhealthy. Research has shown time and again that old people who believe in negative age stereotypes tend to fulfill them.

And it may not just be the elderly who are harmed by ageism. New evidence suggests that young, healthy people who stereotype old people may themselves be at risk of heart disease many years down the road. Becca Levy of the Yale School of Public Health examined data on hundreds of men and women who have been studied for almost four decades as part of the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging. Back in 1968, when scientists first began studying these volunteers, they ranged in age from 18 to 49 and were all in very good health. At that time, scientists gathered all sorts of information about the volunteers, including their attitudes toward the elderly. Their images of being old covered the gamut from very positive to very negative.

Levy and her colleagues examined the health histories of all the volunteers, focusing on cardiovascular disease: heart attacks, congestive heart failure, stroke, and so forth. There was a striking link between ageism early in life and poor heart health later on. That is, those who viewed old age as a time of helplessness were much more likely to experience some kind of cardiovascular disorder over the next four decades. The scientists also looked at a subset of volunteers who didn’t have any heart problems until after they were 60—at least 21 years later—and found that these people had been very negative about aging from early on. The episodes of heart disease could not be explained by smoking, depression, cholesterol, family history, or any of a myriad other possible risk factors.

What this suggests, Levy writes in the March issue of the journal Psychological Science, is that people are internalizing stereotypes of old age when they are still quite young—with far reaching consequences. This is the first scientific look at people maturing into the very people they have been unkindly caricaturing. It could be taken as a cautionary tale for those who think they’ll never grow old.

For more insights into human nature, visit “We’re Only Human” at www.psychologicalscience.org/onlyhuman. Selections from the blog also appear regularly in the magazine Scientific American Mind and at http://www.sciam.com/.


posted by Wray Herbert @ 2:53 PM 2 Comments

Coming of Age on the Internet

Tuesday, February 17, 2009

By Wray Herbert

Like many people of my generation, I was a latecomer to the Internet. In fact, I learned about cyberspace mostly from my kids, who embraced this emerging technology from earliest childhood. As a parent, I paid close attention to the sordid tales of Internet sleaziness, and I was also mindful of the more subtle psychological perils: the risk of social isolation and aberrant teenage obsession. The Internet seemed like a dark place.

This was in the mid-90s, and I was far from alone in my worries. Indeed, scientific studies from that time were documenting some real risks for teenagers, including fewer close friendships and more tenuous connections with family. It appeared that teens were sacrificing real relationships for superficial cyber-relationships with total strangers.

Is this still true? Has the Internet fulfilled the fearful vision of the early days? Social scientists are revisiting those early concerns, and some are coming to believe that the psychological benefits may now outweigh the detrimental effects. Psychologists Patti Valkenburg and Jochen Peter of the University of Amsterdam are among the newly optimistic. They took a look at a decade of research on these questions, and they believe two important historical changes have altered the psychological landscape.

First, the sheer number of teenagers now using the Internet has transformed the technology into a true social networking tool. Even in the late 90s, only about one in ten adolescents were online, which meant that kids actually had to choose between online relationships and real relationships. There was very little overlap, so it was very difficult to maintain flesh-and-blood relations while exploring cyberspace. Today, Valkenburg and Peter say, the vast majority of teenagers in Western countries have access to the Internet, and most appear to use the technology to nurture their existing relationships rather than to forge new ones.

Second, the newer communication tools also encourage building on existing relationships rather than isolating. In the 90s, the few teens who did spend time on the Internet tended to hang out with strangers in public chat rooms and so-called MUDS, multi-user dungeons. The appearance of instant messaging and social networks like Facebook has changed all that, according to the psychologists. Today, more than eight in ten teenagers use IM to connect with the same friends they see at school and work.

Recent studies document the positive effects of these technological changes. But what exactly is going on in the minds of the teenagers to produce this greater sense of well-being? Valkenburg and Peter have an idea about this. They believe that the 21st century Internet encourages honest talking about very personal issues—feelings, worries, vulnerabilities—that are difficult for many self-conscious teens to talk about. When they communicate through the Internet, they have fewer sounds and sights and social cues to distract them, so they become less concerned with how others perceive them. This in turn reduces inhibition, leading to unusually intimate talk. This emotionally liberating frankness is healthy and tonic.

The psychologists have shown these positive effects in their studies, which they describe in the February issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science. They’ve also shown that “hyperpersonal” Internet talk leads to higher quality friendships, and that these quality friendships buffer teenagers against stress and lead to greater happiness. By contrast, solitary “surfing” of the Internet has no positive effects on connectedness or well-being, and hanging around public chat rooms—though much rarer—still appears psychologically risky.

Facebook, the social networking tool invented for college kids five years ago, is now being taken over by those kids’ parents. That means it’s just a matter of time before the younger generation abandons this technology and move on to the next best thing. We’ll see what that is. Perhaps the connectedness and openness are now permanent features of a technology that has come of age.

For more insights into human nature, visit “We’re Only Human” at www.psychologicalscience.org/onlyhuman. Selections from the blog also appear regularly in the
magazine Scientific American Mind and at http://www.sciam.com/.


posted by Wray Herbert @ 1:15 PM 0 Comments

Try A Little Powerlessness

Friday, February 06, 2009

By Wray Herbert

Self-control is one of our most cherished values. We applaud those with the discipline to regulate their appetites and actions, and we try hard to instill this virtue in our children. Think of the slogans: Just say no. Just do it. We celebrate the power of the mind to make hard choices and keep us on course.

But what if we can’t just do it? What if “it” is too difficult or our strategy for success is misguided? Is it possible that willpower might actually be an obstacle rather than a means to happiness and harmony? Can we have too much of a good thing?

Two Tufts University psychologists believe there may be some truth to this. Evan Apfelbaum and Samuel Sommers were intrigued by the notion that too much self-control may indeed have a downside—and that relinquishing some power might be paradoxically tonic, both for individuals and for society. They decided to test this idea in the laboratory.

They explored the virtue of powerlessness in the arena of race relations. They figured that well-intentioned people are careful—sometimes hyper-careful—not to say the wrong thing about race in a mixed-race group. Furthermore, they thought that such effortful self-control might actually cause both unease and dishonesty, which could in turn be misconstrued as racial prejudice.

To test this, they deliberately sapped the mental powers of a number of volunteers. This is not as diabolical as it sounds. They ran the volunteers through a series of computer-based mental exercises that are so challenging that they temporarily deplete the cognitive reserves needed for discipline. Once they had the volunteers in this compromised state of mind, they put them (and others not so depleted) into a social situation with the potential for racial tension. Here it is:

Each white volunteer is left alone in a room. A black man enters and asks if the volunteer will consent to a brief interview on the issue of how universities should guarantee racial diversity. This is ostensibly unrelated to the self-control experiment, but in fact that’s a ruse. The interviewer asks the volunteer to share any thoughts he might have on this “hot topic,” and the conversation is recorded.

It’s that simple, though sometimes the interviewer was white. Afterward, the volunteers rated the interaction for comfort, awkwardness, and enjoyment. In addition, independent judges—both black and white—analyzed the five-minute interactions, commenting on how cautious the volunteers were, how direct in their answers—and how racially prejudiced.

The results were provocative. As reported in the February issue of the journal Psychological Science, those who were mentally depleted—that is, those lacking discipline and self-control—found talking about race with a black man much more enjoyable than did those with their self-control intact. That’s presumably because they weren’t working so hard at monitoring and curbing what they said. What’s more, independent black observers found that the powerless volunteers were much more direct and authentic in conversation. And perhaps most striking, blacks saw the less inhibited whites as less prejudiced against blacks. In other words, relinquishing power over oneself appears to thwart over-thinking and “liberate” people for more authentic relationships.

Race relations is just one arena of life where a little powerlessness may go a long way. Self-reliance is so deeply ingrained in us that it pervades our work lives, our relationships and our health choices, so it’s a real challenge to accept that it might sometimes be a character flaw. But remember that the volunteers here were not only perceived as fairer, they themselves felt happier. One wonders where else we might be acting too smart for our own good?

For more insights into the quirks of human nature, visit “We’re Only Human” at www.psychologicalscience.org/onlyhuman. Selections from the blog also appear regularly in the magazine Scientific American Mind and at www.sciam.com/sciammind.


posted by Wray Herbert @ 12:18 PM 6 Comments