Raising an Optimistic Child: A Proven Plan for Depresion-Proofing Young Children--for Life
(McGraw-Hill, 2006) by Bob Murray and Alicia Fortinberry

Creating Optimism:
A Proven Seven-Step Program for Overcoming Depression
(McGraw-Hill, 2004) by Bob Murray and Alicia Fortinberry

Written and researched by Bob Murray, PhD

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• Video Games Desensitize People to Real-Life Violence
  What parents feared about violent video games is proven to be true.
• Tyranny Arises From Powerlessness, Not Power
  When people refuse to exercise what power they have tyranny is the inevitable result.
• Unhappy Marriages Detrimental to Self-Esteem and Health
  Long-term, low-quality marriages have significant effects on overall well-being, according to a recent study.
• Women Who Cohabit Have Daughters Who Do Likewise
  When it comes to living together with a man, daughters often follow the lead of their mothers.
• Violent Behavior a Self-Protective Strategy
  Startling new research shows boys in violent neighbourhoods who use violence to stay in control are less depressed.
• Better Care for the Elderly
  Loneliness and depression seldom addressed in retirement communities.
• Ideals of Physical Beauty Harm Kids
  Researchers show parents give unattractive children less attention.
• Youth Caught in Between
  For young people the transition from adolescence to early adulthood is a long and rocky road that requires patience and support.
• Happiness Helps Keep Us Together
  Positive emotions innoculate against race bias, and help people see the big picture.
• Parents Economic Problems Cause Problems For Kids
  Families' financial woes can foster child depression and disobedience.
• Wellbeing of the Nation: Gauging Healthy Social Values
  Wealth does not create happiness and it doesn't build a strong nation, either.
• Ageing Positively
  Social and environmental factors play important role in how ageing affects our health, happiness and competence.
• Maxed out: Why Do Some People Get into Debt?
  Psychologists are investigating what underlies Americans' ever more burdensome credit card debt, but answers remain elusive.
• People Spending More Time At Home
  And socializing less at home.
• Yes It's True: Dogs and Their Owners Look Alike!
  A new study suggests people choose canines who resemble themselves.
• Cohabiting Couples Not Likely To Marry
  A new study suggests that couples who live together before marriage may be less likely to eventually marry than previously believed.
• The Boy Bias
  In rural China people have been known to murder their female new-borns, but this is just the most glaring example of a pervasive world-wide boy-bias on the part of prospective parents.
• Socializing: A Recipe for Good Health and Fertility!
  More evidence of the beneficial effects of good relationships, especially same-sex (but not sexual) friendships.
• Overweight Linked to Poor Community Environment
  Maybe where you live makes you fat.
• Alcoholic Blackouts
  Fragmentary blackouts help some drinkers remember the good times that weren't.
• Happy People Live Longer
  Study finds "don't worry, be happy" the best prescription.

Childhood Experience Influences Mood

Sep 17, 2006

Despite all the research that has been done over the last decade showing the prime importance of early childhood experience, there are still those, even in the psychiatric ands psychological professions who remain doubters. There are still parents who ignore the warning signs and give their children over to too-early childcare or insist on pursuing two full-time careers at the expense of their offspring.

Indeed there are still professional therapists telling parents that their own mood and the way that they interact with each other has no real influence on their children. To be frank, this is dangerous nonsense!

Not only their overall relationship, but also their prevailing mood and outlook can be a powerful life-long influence on the way their children view the world and can affect their life-chances. A new study published in the recent issue of the Journal of Personality finds a correlation between adult pessimism and childhood in a low socioeconomic status (SES) family.

By connecting socioeconomic status to pessimism, which in turn has in earlier studies shown to be related to physical and mental health, the current study provides critical information for policy makers and parents concerned with preventing the development of bad coping strategies of children.

Researchers compared optimism and pessimism levels of participants from different socioeconomic backgrounds and found that persons of high SES had a more optimistic outlook on life. This is hardly surprising. Further, it was discovered that the effect of childhood socioeconomic status on pessimism tended to remain in spite of socioeconomic fluidity.

A person from a low SES childhood who moved upwards in status was less likely to be optimistic as an adult than someone from a high SES childhood who remained in high SES. The inverse also held true, as people from a high SES childhood who moved downwards in socioeconomic status were more optimistic than those who remained in low SES.

"Children from the higher SES classes who are subsequently downwardly mobile may have learned successful coping strategies during childhood and consequently developed a sense of mastery and control that protected them in adulthood from the adverse effects of lower SES, whereas children from lower SES backgrounds who are subsequently upwardly mobile may not have had the opportunities to develop those psychological resources, and thus are not able to benefit as much as possible from the later success experiences," concludes the study's lead author.

Our own experience confirms what the researchers have found. However we would emphasize that children from a high-income home where one of the parents was pessimistic or depressed can also suffer from life-long depression or pessimism.

Read more in Journal of Personality

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Tyranny Arises From Powerlessness, Not Power

May 25, 2006

Tyranny is not the result of giving people too much power in groups. Rather, it results from a lack of power or an unwillingness to use power effectively. That is when people become unable to create a society based on their own values and when they become more willing to let others dictate the nature of society for them.

That is the conclusion of a major study conducted by Professor Stephen Reicher of the University of St Andrews and Professor Alexander Haslam of the University of Exeter. The results are published in the March 13 edition of British Journal of Social Psychology. It also forms the basis of an upcoming BBC program.

'The Experiment' revisits the landmark Stanford Prison Study of the late 1960s, which concluded that, if you put people in groups and give them power they will inevitably abuse it. Reicher and Haslam randomly divided a group of men into 'prisoners' and 'guards' and placed them in a specially constructed institution for eight days to monitor the interactions between groups of unequal power and privilege.

Contrary to the findings of the Stanford Study, at first both Guards and Prisoners were uncomfortable with the inequality between groups. This eventually led to the collapse of the 'prison' regime. The participants then spontaneously decided to form an egalitarian self-governing commune. At first the commune worked well, but members were unwilling to exercise their power against those who wouldn't pull their weight, so the system began to collapse. In a savage twist to the tale, people became more and more authoritarian. So, at the end, when some of the participants proposed a new and overtly tyrannical regime, it encountered virtually no resistance.

"Our research shows that if a group becomes ineffectual, tyranny becomes psychologically acceptable," explained Professor Reicher. "The problem for our participants was not that they abused power, but rather that they weren't prepared to use it to make a democratic system work." Professor Haslam added: "The problem with the traditional view is not simply that it is wrong but that it sends out entirely the wrong signal: if you tell people to avoid power because it corrupts, you avoid crucial debates about how power should be exercised."

John Turner of the Australian National University, writing in the same journal, argues that The Experiment has profound social implications. It shows that groups and power are not bad for you. Indeed only through the use of collective power can we "re-fashion our identities, roles, personalities and beliefs."

Read more in the British Journal of Social Psychology

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Unhappy Marriages Detrimental to Self-Esteem and Health

May 25, 2006

According to researchers at Penn State University people who remain unhappily married suffer from lower levels of self-esteem, overall health, overall happiness, and life satisfaction along with elevated levels of psychological distress, in contrast to those in long-term happy marriages.

Their provocative conclusion is that unhappily married people may have greater odds of improving their well-being by dissolving their low-quality unions as there is no evidence that they are better off in any aspect of overall well-being than those who divorce.

Until now, the impact of remaining in an unhappy marriage for a number of years has received little attention. Social scientists have consistently found that married individuals have better psychological and physical well-being than those who are single or divorced. Similarly, research has demonstrated the detrimental impact of divorce on the well-being of individuals. However, the Penn State researchers expected that in long-term, low-quality marriages, the negative impact of marital unhappiness would outweigh the potential benefits that marriage would otherwise confer.

People in unhappy marriages were tracked over a 12-year period in a national study of married individuals who are representative of the U.S. population. To assess individual's marital happiness, specific aspects of marriage such as agreement, faithfulness, overall happiness, helping around the house, and whether the marriage was getting better or worse were measured. In order to be classified as unhappily married, individuals had to consistently score below the average marital happiness of everyone in the study.

"Given the findings of this study, unhappily married individuals do not reap benefits related to overall happiness, life satisfaction, self-esteem, and health, typically associated with marriage," the researchers said. "The social and emotional support available to individuals from marriage is not being obtained by those who are unhappily married."

In fact, despite the negative consequences of divorce that lower people's psychological well-being, there is some evidence that remaining unhappily married is more detrimental than divorcing. Individuals who divorce and remain unmarried have greater life satisfaction and higher levels of self-esteem and overall health than unhappily married individuals, according to the study.

Read more in Social Forces

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Women Who Cohabit Have Daughters Who Do Likewise

Nov 1, 2005

New research shows that young adult women whose mothers reported cohabitation were 57 percent more likely than other women to report cohabitation themselves. In addition, daughters of cohabiting mothers tended to cohabit at earlier ages than others.

"Women tend to model the behavior of their mothers when it comes to relationships," said Leanna Mellott, co-author of the study. Mellott described this study as just the first step in trying to determine how living together outside marriage may affect children who grow up in such an environment. "We need to further study both the number and type of relationship transitions - such as divorce or cohabiting - for mothers and their children," Mellott said.

The likelihood that sons would cohabit was not affected by whether their mothers lived with a man outside marriage, but there were other effects: sons were more likely to cohabit if their mothers were divorced or had their first child at an early age.

While there has been a lot of research on how divorce affects children, this is one of few studies on the impact of cohabitation, said Zhenchao Qian, another co-author and associate professor of sociology at Ohio State.

More than one-third of all births in the United States in 2003 were to unmarried women. "As more people enter into cohabiting relationships and have children, we have to recognize that this could have long-term effects on these children as they enter adulthood," Qian said.

Mellott presented the team's findings Aug. 16 in Philadelphia at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association.

Data for the study came from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, a nationally representative survey of people nationwide conducted by Ohio State's Center for Human Resource Research. Men and women aged 14 to 22 in 1979 were interviewed annually from 1979 to 1994, and once every two years from 1996 forward. The NLSY also interviewed these participants' children.

The researchers noted that the strong effects of cohabitation on adult children were consistent, even after taking into account factors such as race, education, and poverty, which all have their own strong links to cohabitation.

Other results of the study showed that young Black men were about 35 percent less likely than white men to report cohabitation, while Black women were 90 percent less likely to have cohabited than their white counterparts.

Education was another important factor, with higher levels of schooling consistently linked to lower levels of living together outside of marriage.

Young adults' relationships were also affected by the stability of their mothers' relationships, the study showed. Each relationship transition for the mothers - including divorce, widowhood or new cohabitation -- increased the likelihood of cohabitation by 32 percent for their sons, and 42 percent for their daughters.

The study is not available on the web.

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Violent Behavior a Self-Protective Strategy

Aug 5, 2005

Researchers have known for some time that violent adolescents tend to become more depressed over time than other adolescents. And young people living in violent neighborhoods also are more subject to depression. But violent adolescent boys who also live in unsafe neighborhoods where they witness violent acts do not appear to get as depressed.

A new Cornell University study seems to make sense of this. According to the researchers, being aggressive in the context of community violence could be an adaptive strategy that preserves adolescents' sense of control in a volatile and unpredictable environment. "This may seem counter intuitive, that violence in a violent context could be somewhat protective for psychological well-being among adolescent boys," said Raymond Swisher, assistant professor of policy analysis and management at Cornell.

To examine the interactive relationships among adolescent violence, street violence and depression, Swisher and his team analyzed data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, a nationally representative sample of 8,939 adolescents in grades 7 to 12; data on the adolescents was collected twice, once in 1995 and again in 1996.

The research is published in the May edition of the Journal of Community Psychology.

"The consequences of community violence are widespread," said Swisher. "Exposure to community violence destroys the notion that homes, schools and communities are safe places, and youths exposed to community violence have higher rates of emotional, behavioral and cognitive problems. Witnessing community violence has emerged as a risk factor for all kinds of problems, from depression and post-traumatic stress symptoms to suicidal behaviors, aggression and violence."

It was somewhat surprising, therefore, to find that acting violently could be protective against the effects of community violence, Swisher said. Violence was defined as getting into a physical fight, pulling a knife or gun, shooting or stabbing someone, seriously injuring someone or taking part in a group fight. However, the protective factor was found only among males, and the older the males, the stronger the effect.

On the other hand, adolescent girls who act violently tend to become more depressed, and the more violent their environments are, the deeper their depression, said Swisher, who noted that American adolescents are increasingly exposed to violence. "While U.S. crime rates have declined steadily in recent years, adolescents comprise one segment of the population that continues to be plagued with the problem of violence," said Swisher. "So much so, that some consider violence a public health epidemic for today's youth."

Read more in the Journal of Community Psychology

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Better Care for the Elderly

May 1, 2005

Our whole concept of "retirement" is absurd from a hunter-gatherer perspective. Our ancestors viewed older members of their band as fonts of wisdom and the repository of traditions and lore. They were highly valued members of the community, senior members of the council of elders. They were not shuffled away out of sight as an inconvenient reminder of our own mortality.

As our society's population ages, greater numbers of people are moving into assisted living and other retirement communities. While these facilities may offer many advantages to the elderly, a recent article in Aging & Mental Health by researchers at Case Western Reserve University concludes that they should consider doing more to alleviate the loneliness and depression that their residents often experience.

In the article the authors write, "With the number of older adults steadily increasing, greater attention must be given to the factors that contribute to loneliness, social isolation and depression among those who live independently or as members of a long-term care or retirement community."

The authors surveyed residents in the independent living sections of two retirement communities to determine what personal and situational characteristics are associated with loneliness and depression, what proportion of people who are lonely are also depressed, and how loneliness and depression differ. They found that loneliness is a strong risk factor for depression among residents of the institutions, and that loneliness is associated with factors such as the size of a social network, grieving the loss of a loved one and having fewer visits from friends.

Depression is also associated with grieving, but in contrast, is more closely associated with lack of participation in activities and having more chronic health conditions (which, of course, can be caused by depression).

Given these differences, the authors say, gerontologists need to recognize the differences between loneliness and depression and develop methods of helping their clients cope with each. For example, retirement communities might develop specific strategies to encourage residents to maintain relationships with outside friends and family, or to send reminder notes to those outside to encourage them to call or visit.

They should also consider forming support groups for those most likely to experience loneliness, such as the recently bereaved, those who have recently moved to the facility or individuals who are shy, or lack social skills.

Our Ancestors Cared For the Elderly

Separate research has provided proof that our remote ancestors did indeed look after the older members of the community. Palaeoanthropologists working in the Causasus have found striking evidence for the care of the elderly. They found the fossilized remains of an ageing individual who had lost his teeth some years before death. The 1.77 million-year-old specimen, which is described in Nature magazine, was completely toothless and had lived to a grand old age.

This may suggest that the human-like creature lived in a complex society which was capable of showing compassion. The researchers claim that these hominids may also have valued the old for their years of acquired knowledge. "It is pretty amazing that [hominid] society fostered this kind of thinking nearly 1.8 million years ago," said co-author Reid Ferring, of the University of North Texas. "Almost any way we cut it, this is very unusual and it is a totally new insight into the social relations of this early hominid."

Although these early people had no fire and only used very basic chopping and cutting tools, the new discovery does hint at a new level of sophistication. "My personal opinion is that they were remarkably human in a lot of ways," said Professor Ferring. "These were tiny people living in a very harsh environment. I think we can only compare them to modern humans in their social skills and behaviors, which allowed them to survive against all these odds."

The ageing individual--who lost his teeth some years before death, palaeoanthropologists estimate--would not have been able to chew the raw meat or fibrous plants which made up his normal diet. For most animals--other than humans, and their now extinct cousin the Neanderthal--this would have been a death sentence. But, Professor Ferring believes, this old man must have been kept alive by being fed the choice soft morsels like brain, marrow and succulent berries.

"This person might have had a function similar to old people in human hunter gatherer societies- his experience and knowledge may have given him high status."

Read more in Nature

Read more in Aging & Mental Health

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Ideals of Physical Beauty Harm Kids

May 1, 2005

Society's obsession with physical attractiveness in adults, and even young children, is becoming all-pervasive. A recent University of Alberta study demonstrates that, despite their best intentions, parents are more likely to give better care and pay closer attention to good-looking children compared to unattractive ones.

Dr. Andrew Harrell presented his findings recently at the Warren E. Kalbach Population Conference in Edmonton, Alberta. His findings are based on an observational study of children and shopping cart safety. With the approval of management at 14 different supermarkets, Harrell's team of researchers observed parents and their two to five-year-old children for 10 minutes each, noting if the child was buckled into the grocery-cart seat, and how often the child wandered more than 10 feet away.

The researchers independently graded each child on a scale of one to 10 on attractiveness. Findings showed that 1.2 per cent of the least attractive children were buckled in, compared with 13.3 per cent of the most attractive youngsters. The observers also noticed the less attractive children were allowed to wander further away and more often from their parents. In total, there were 426 observations at the 14 supermarkets.

Harrell figures his latest results are based on a parent's instinctive Darwinian response: we're unconsciously more likely to lavish attention on attractive children simply because they're our best genetic material. "Attractiveness as a predictor of behavior, especially parenting behavior, has been around a long time," said Harrell, a father of five and a grandfather of three. "Most parents will react to these results with shock and dismay. They'll say, 'I love all my kids, and I don't discriminate on the basis of attractiveness.' The whole point of our research is that people do."

Note: this research paper is not available on the web.

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Youth Caught in Between

April 1, 2005

While middle age doesn't officially begin until 60, a Case Western University researcher claims adulthood for today's kids doesn't really start until 30. "Although pinpointing the onset of adulthood is not easy, it's most certainly not the magic legal ages of 18 or 21," according to Richard Settersten Jr., chair of Case's department of Sociology.

Caught between adolescence and adulthood, Settersten and his colleagues say young people are navigating a new life phase. And to reach adulthood, they need greater help getting there from their families or other support systems.

"Adulthood no longer begins when adolescence ends," Settersten said, especially where the "big five" traditional markers of adulthood are concerned-leaving home, finishing school, starting a job, getting married and having children. In prior generations, these transitions were completed by the mid-20s.

Today, this set of transitions is often not completed until well into the early or late 30s for many people. And what we might think about as a neat "three-box model" of life--with education up front, work in the middle and retirement or leisure at the end--is crumbling.

This model of life, the study indicates, underlies the organization of many social institutions and policies, despite the fact that these old scripts of life no longer match the realities of the world today or how the lives of current generations of young people will unfold.

In some ways, the road to adulthood now more closely resembles that of agricultural times than it does the last few decades, where at the turn of the last century, it took young people a long time to reach self-sufficiency while working on family farms. Now other social institutions, especially educational ones, have replaced the farm in allowing youth to cultivate the skills needed to be self-sufficient.

The four-year college, in particular, serves to "bridge" adolescence and adulthood by providing shelter, planned activities, health care, adult and peer support, and entertainment. For young people who do not attend residential colleges, other institutions may serve as important bridges--community colleges, the military, national service and work organizations. But these settings, Settersten and his colleagues say, need to be "re-architected to provide stronger scaffolding for vulnerable groups of young people who do not have strong family supports in place." The Network is now conducting several large-scale demonstration projects to explore how this can be done.

According to Settersten, one of the new hallmarks of successful movement through early adulthood may be interdependence rather than independence. "A brand new challenge to understanding this period is how individuals develop a sense of autonomy amidst increasingly long periods of dependence on others, without strong or clear scripts to guide them, and when the institutions are based on models of early adulthood that no longer reflect the realities of the modern world," he said.

Because this is a period of "sink or swim" for American kids, those who manage to swim often do so only because they receive a great deal of family support or have other informal safety nets to prop them up as they make their way. "These circumstances put young people in a position where they now are more attached to their parents than ever before," Settersten noted.

The researchers find that sizable costs associated with childrearing now occur between 18 and 34, in both money and time, and that these percentages have increased dramatically in the last 30 years.

"When middle-class families are making such tremendous levels of investments in their children through their 30s, we must especially ask about the fate of young people who come from struggling or fragmented families that simply cannot assist their children in these ways," Settersten says.

This story comes from a Case Western University press release, not available on the web.

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Happiness Helps Keep Us Together

February 7, 2005

This is one of those studies that it's a joy to read! Apparently positive emotions like joy and humor help people "get the big picture," virtually eliminating the own-race bias that makes many people think members of other races "all look alike," according to new University of Michigan research.

"Negative emotions create a tunnel vision," said U-M psychology researcher Kareem Johnson. "Negative emotions like fear or anger are useful for short-term survival when there's an immediate danger like being chased by a dangerous animal. Positive emotions like joy and happiness are for long-term survival and promote big picture thinking, make you more inclusive and notice more details, make you think in terms of 'us' instead of 'them.'"

To simulate getting a quick glance of a stranger, scientists flashed photos of individuals for about a half second, finding subjects recognized members of their own race 75 percent of the time but only recognized members of another race 65 percent of the time, Johnson said. However, researchers found positive emotions boosted that recognition of cross-race faces about 10 to 20%, eliminating the gap.

The findings will appear in an upcoming issue of the journal Psychological Science.

Researchers asked a group of 89 students to watch a video either of a comic to induce joy and laughter, a horror video to induce anxiety, or a "neutral" video that would not effect emotions. They then looked at 28 yearbook style photos of college-aged people in random order for 500 milliseconds.

Subjects who watched the comedy tested for having much higher positive emotions, while those who saw the horror video had far more negative emotions. In a testing phase, more images flashed by and they were asked to push buttons to indicate whether they'd seen the pictures earlier. Those in a positive mood had a far greater ability to recognize members of another race, while their ability to recognize members of their own race stayed the same.

The researchers conclude that positive emotions bring with them a "broadening effect" that helps people see a bigger, broader picture of the world around them.

Article not yet published. Keep a eye on the Psychological Science website.

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Parents Economic Problems Cause Problems For Kids

November 6, 2004

Severe and prolonged financial hardship can cause adults' marriages and parenting skills to deteriorate, which in turn harms their children's mental health--even if the family is wealthy or lives in a country with generous economic welfare programs, according to a recent study in Developmental Psychology.

When Finland's economy fell into a four-year recession during the 1990s, Tytti Solantaus, MD, of the National Research and Development Centre for Welfare and Health in Helsinki, and her colleagues collected financial and mental health data on 527 Finnish families--each consisting of a married couple and their 12-year-old child--already participating in an ongoing longitudinal study that was testing the children's mental health before the economy nosedived.

Parents completed nearly 15 different psychological questionnaires about family situations, including fluctuation in income, employment history, spending on children, child-rearing practices, marital relations and their child's mental health. The children also rated their own mental health using a 112-item questionnaire.

Researchers analyzed the questionnaire results using the family economic stress model (FESM), a mathematical tool used in similar studies in the United States to evaluate the strength of correlations. Specifically, the FESM measures the extent to which economic hardship is both directly and obliquely responsible for causing a child's mental health problems. In the United States, the model has found that economic problems indirectly hurt children by causing parental pressures. Solantaus hypothesized that her data would not match the version of FESM seen in American studies because the two country's economies and social support programs are very different. Yet the data fit the FESM. Despite Finland's greater support systems, reports of unemployment and budget cutbacks correlated with spousal hostility and lack of support. These problems mirrored a sharp rise in adolescent depression, aggression and disobedience from their pre-recession levels. Remarkably, better socioeconomic status was irrelevant: Wealthier families showed the same problems during the recession.

Solantaus says. "Even in this population, where social classes aren't that far apart, the finding that a change in family economy would produce such a change in child mental health is very important clinically," she says. Solantaus adds that clear communication may be a family's best defense against discord during tough times. "Parents should talk about financial problems with their children and lay out what is happening in the family," she says. "That would ease the situation and help children understand what's going on."

Read more in Developmental Psychology

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Wellbeing of the Nation: Gauging Healthy Social Values

October 1, 2004

This month has seen a flurry of research papers about the relationship between wealth and happiness. Most have come to the conclusion that the relationship is somewhat inverse: once you have enough to meet your everyday needs more material wealth does not lead to more happiness on either a personal or a national level.

Take for example a study in the recent issue of Psychological Science in the Public Interest which addresses how economic status is no longer a sufficient gauge of a nation's wellbeing. The authors argue that the psychological wellbeing of its citizens is the greatest measure of a nation--not the wellbeing of its economy. "While wealth has trebled over the past 50 years... wellbeing has been flat, mental illness has increased at an even more rapid rate, and data, not just nostalgic reminiscences, indicate that the social fabric is more frayed than it was in leaner times," the authors state.

Prosperity is neither the answer nor the cause of satisfaction. The study calls for an ongoing systematic set of national indicators of wellbeing to report on a society and aid in its policy-making.

It is often assumed that money increases wellbeing and, although money can be measured with exactitude, it is an inexact surrogate to the actual wellbeing of a nation. In a 1985 survey, respondents from the Forbes list of the 400 richest Americans and the Maasai of East Africa were almost equally satisfied and ranked relatively high in wellbeing.

The Maasai are a traditional herding people who have no electricity or running water and live in huts made of dung. It follows, that economic development and personal income must not account for the happiness that they are so often linked to.

"Scientists are now in the position to assess wellbeing directly, and therefore should establish a system... to supplement the economic measures," encouraged the report authors, Ed Diener, University of Illinois, and Martin Seligman, University of Pennsylvania.

The variables measured would include engagement, purpose and meaning, optimism and trust, and positive and negative emotions in specific areas such as work life and social relationships. The periodic assessment of a sample of the population would provide policy-makers with a much stronger basis to gauge the wellbeing of the nation. It would allow them to refocus. "After all, if economic and other polices are important because they will in the end increase wellbeing, why not assess wellbeing more directly," the authors ask?

I can personally attest to much of this data. As part of my PhD work I spent 6 months living with a band of hunter-gatherers in what is now Namibia. What struck me forcefully was the fact that there was no incidence of endogenous (ie long-lasting) depression amongst them. They were overall an extremely happy lot and their relationships were solid and supportive. This impression has been echoed by a number of other researchers. BM

Read more in Psychological Science in the Public Interest

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Ageing Positively

October 1, 2004

Why do some older people experience a rapid decline in their physical and functional health while some of their peers remain healthy and active? While your genes and overall physical health play a role, new research shows how psychosocial factors can also play an important role.

Two studies report on this in the September 2004 issue of Psychology and Aging. In the first study, researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston found a link between positive emotions and the onset of frailty in 1,558 initially non-frail older Mexican Americans living in five southwestern states--Texas, California, Arizona, Colorado and New Mexico. This was the first study to examine frailty and the protective role of positive emotions in the largest minority population in the United States.

Study authors Glenn Ostir, PhD, Kenneth Ottenbacher, PhD, and Kyriakos Markides, PhD, followed the participants for seven years and assessed frailty by measuring the participants' weight loss, exhaustion, walking speed and grip strength.

Positive affect (positive emotions) was measured during the study period by asking the participants how often in the last week "I felt that I was just as good as other people," "I felt hopeful about the future," "I was happy," and "I enjoyed life."

The overall incidence of frailty increased almost eight percent during the seven-year follow-up period, but those who scored high on positive affect were significantly less likely to become frail.

The precise reason for this happening was beyond the scope of the current study, but the researchers speculate that positive emotions may directly affect health via chemical and neural responses involved in maintaining homeostatic balance. Or a more indirect process may be at work, according to the authors, with positive emotions affecting health by increasing a person's intellectual, physical, psychological and social resources.

In the second study, researchers Thomas Hess, PhD, Joey Hinson, MA, and Jill Statham, BA, from North Carolina State University investigated how negative stereotypes about aging influences older adults' memory. Their study involved 193 participants and two experiments, each with a younger (17 - 35 years old) and older (57 - 82 years old) group of adults.

Participants were exposed to stereotype-related words in the context of another task (scrambled sentence, word judgment) in order to prime positive and negative stereotypes of aging. This involved either words reflecting negative stereotypes about aging (brittle, complaining, confused, cranky, feeble, forgot, senile, etc) or words reflecting positive views of aging (accomplished, active, alert, dignified, distinguished, knowledgeable, successful, etc).

Results show memory performance in older adults was lower when they were primed with negative stereotypes than when they were primed with positive stereotypes. In addition, age differences in memory between young and older adults were significantly reduced following a positive stereotype prime, with young and older adults performing at almost identical levels in some situations.

The study also provides evidence that older adults can control the effect of negative stereotype activation but only when the primes are relatively subtle. In contrast, when the stereotype primes are relatively blatant, memory performance tends to be negatively affected.

The results of this study add to a growing list of findings that implicate the importance of the social environment in how it affects older peoples' memory performance, according to the authors. If older people are treated like they are competent, productive members of society, then they perform that way too.

Read more in Psychology and Aging

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Maxed out: Why Do Some People Get into Debt?

June 26, 2004

Americans--and Australians for that matter--are deep in debt to the banks. Revolving consumer debt is rising--it increased from $554 billion in 1997 to $730 billion in 2002, according to the Federal Reserve Board. Now psychologists are beginning to see how consumers are getting hooked on credit at a younger age.

With "pre-approved" card offers rolling in through the mail and vendors hawking free T-shirts with Visa applications on college campuses, it's little surprise that a 1998 survey by student-loan provider Nellie Mae found that close to 80 percent of undergraduate students held at least one credit card.

Curious about the trend, Jill Norvilitis, assistant professor of psychology at Buffalo State University decided to investigate the factors--attitudes, personality variables and others--possibly driving some of her students' debt.

She is not alone. Several psychologists have for the past decade or so been investigating what makes some people--both within and beyond the student population--more prone to debt problems than others. For her part, Norvilitis found that none of the personality variables she investigated were significantly related to debt problems in a sample of 227 Buffalo State undergraduates.

She did, though, uncover other intriguing connections. For example, in the study published recently in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology she found that students who received their credit cards through on-campus solicitations had higher debt-to-income ratios than students who received their cards through other sources.

Other psychologists have also had some luck connecting debt-proneness--in students and in the general population--to people's individual characteristics. But they've found stronger links to demographic and attitudinal variables than to any particular personality variables, like self-esteem.

Some people, of course, pay off their credit card bills in full each month. But others spiral into unmanageable indebtedness, owing more than they can reasonably expect to repay. Psychologists examining the differences between these two groups' debt levels--on credit cards and beyond--have generally looked at such factors as:

• Demographics and Economics. Poor people are more likely to be in debt, according to Stephen Lea, PhD, who studies the psychology of debt, including credit card debt, at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom. "It's obvious," he says, "but you have to start there." Being poor, he explains, involves having both low income and high expenses--like young children to support.
  
  In general, researchers have also found that younger people--who tend to have low or no income--are more likely to have high debt levels than older people. Among college students, men generally have higher debt levels than women. And Lea has also found that having a low income relative to your social class, and knowing many other people who are in debt, are risk factors for being in debt yourself.

• Psychology. Researchers have examined a multitude of possible psychological factors, but have reached few conclusions about whether they can predict credit card debt.

• Attitude. Attitudes correlate more reliably than psychological factors with credit card debt. Generally, and not surprisingly, people with more debt-tolerant attitudes are more likely to be in debt.

One thing researchers do agree on is that more research is needed. "If I had a million pounds to throw at this issue, I'd be looking for people who are young, low income, have lots of children and are surrounded by others in debt, and yet somehow keep out of debt--and try to find out how they do it," says Lea. "I know from experience that such people are very hard to find, but there must be some out there."

Read more in Monitor on Psychology

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People Spending More Time At Home

June 26, 2004

People are becoming more isolated. According to a University of Toronto study, people are socializing less with their family and friends at home but, instead, are spending more time at home alone.

"As a result of social and demographic changes, the private dwelling is less of a context for social company," says Glenn Stalker, a PhD student in sociology and author of the study. "That is largely due to changes in the structure of the family, higher rates of separation and divorce, smaller households with fewer children, delayed marriages and more individuals living alone."

Stalker, under the supervision of sociology professor William Michelson, examined three sets of data from the Canadian General Social Survey from 1986, 1992 and 1998. He analysed where Canadians spent their leisure time (at home, in transit, outside the home) and with whom: themselves, friends and family and other members of the public.

Stalker found that in 1998, Canadians spent 34 per cent of their spare time alone at home, up from 28 per cent in 1986. In addition, time spent with friends and family at home dropped to 58 per cent of their leisure time in 1998, a decrease of five per cent from 1986. He also found that although people are spending slightly more time outside their home with friends and family in places like cafés or restaurants, this growth has not kept pace with the decline in home-centred social contact.

The study, was presented at the International Housing Research Conference in Toronto June 24 to 27, 2004.

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Yes It's True: Dogs and Their Owners Look Alike!

April 3, 2004

Long the subject of speculation, a new study says that dogs DO resemble their owners. At least this is the case with purebred canines, according to new research conducted at the University of California, San Diego, by social psychologist Nicholas Christenfeld and his UCSD colleague, Michael Roy.

The full study, Do Dogs Resemble Their Owners?, appears in the May issue of Psychological Science. The UCSD psychologists found that when people pick a dog, "they seek one that, at some level, resembles them, and, when they get a purebred, they get what they want."

Forty-five dogs and their owners were separately photographed and judges were shown pictures of an owner, that owner's dog, and one other dog, with the task of picking out the true match. The proof of resemblance was that a majority of the purebred dogs and their owners could be identified by the 28 judges called upon to examine the photographs, with the results showing 16 matches out of the 25 purebreds. There was no evidence of resemblance between the mixed breed dogs and their owners.

"This is a project in which I've been interested for a long time because you hear a lot of casual talk about dog-owner resemblance and we wanted to see what could be learned by formal research," said Professor Christenfeld.

Once the researchers were able to confirm, with randomized photo matching techniques, the high incidence of resemblance between owners and purebreds, and none for mixed-breeds, they went on to conclude that the similarity was due to owner selection at time of acquisition.

Resemblance only among the pure-breeds and their owners ruled out another possible explanation, that of convergence--the theory that likeness might grow with duration of ownership. Not only was there no correlation between how long a dog and owner had been together, as to similarity in appearance, but for convergence to be applicable the mixed-breeds would also have a resemblance to their owners. Since the similarity was only among pure-breeds, whose future appearance could be predicted, the study concluded that, in a majority of cases, owners select dogs who resemble themselves.

To examine whether people do look like their pets, and to explore the underlying mechanism, the researchers asked 28 judges (undergraduate college students) to examine photos of 45 dogs and their owners, taken at three dogs parks. Owners were approached at random and asked to help with a psychology experiment. The pictures were taken so that the background was different for dog and owners.

Triads of pictures were constructed with one owner, that owner's dog and one other dog. A dog was regarded as resembling its owner if a majority of judges (more than 14) matched the pair.

The findings do not reveal at what level the resemblance between person and pet exists. It could be a similarity of physical attributes or of personality traits. The matches seem to be based less on specific obvious characteristics--the connections were not, for example, between hairy people and hairy dogs or big people with big dogs. The data does not reveal how judges were able match dogs to their owners, but the study concludes, "it does appear that people want a creature like themselves."

Other recent research has shown that dogs tend to resemble their owners in other ways: as the level of obesity in Western societies has increased, so has the level of obesity in pets--especially pet dogs!

Read more in Psychological Science (for release in May, 2004)

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Cohabiting Couples Not Likely To Marry

February 18, 2004

We all know couples who lived together for some time before they married. Researchers now say that these people are the exceptions. In fact only about 40 percent of cohabiting couples studied ended up marrying within four to seven years. And 42 percent of cohabiting couples disagreed about the future of their relationship, the study found.

Moreover, contrary to popular belief, men with the best economic prospects and couples who were the most similar were not more likely than others to marry after living together. Overall, the study shows that living together is not necessarily a transitional period that leads to marriage, said Sharon Sassler, co-author of the study and assistant professor of sociology at Ohio State University.

"For growing numbers of couples, cohabitation is now becoming an alternative to marriage or being single," Sassler said. "Many couples seem to be living together longer without marrying or ending their relationship. Some studies show that cohabiting couples with the best economic prospects are the ones who get married. But we find just the opposite. Men who earn the most are least likely to marry, but also are less likely to break up with their partners."

The results of the study were published in journal Social Science Research.

The factor that best predicted whether cohabiting couples married was consensus regarding definite marriage plans, but Sassler said such consensus was relatively rare. Fewer than one-third of the couples (32 percent) concurred that they had definite plans to marry. Another 42 percent disagreed about the future of their relationship. Others either agreed they wouldn't marry or thought they would eventually marry.

"Our results indicate that couples who use cohabitation as a trial period to test compatibility are far less likely to marry than couples who agree that there are definite marriage plans and a specific wedding date," Sassler said.

Also contrary to popular belief, when there was disagreement about future plans among couples, it was men as often as women who were pushing to get married. Neither men nor women had more success than the other in persuading reluctant partners to marry.

Read more in Social Science Research

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The Boy Bias

February 18, 2004

Often we think of the preference for male children as being a product of societies other than ours--Middle Eastern or African or Asian. Recent research has shown that this is far from being the case. What researchers call "boy-bias" is, in fact, widespread and pervades all cultures, including ours.

For example the latest study has shown that, by a large margin, American men say they would rather have a son than a daughter, and this boy bias subtly shapes such decisions as whether to marry, divorce and have another child.

The study's lead authors, economists Gordon B Dahl of the University of Rochester and Enrico Moretti of UCLA, have found that couples are more likely to stay married if they have sons, more likely to divorce if they have daughters and more likely to have another child if all their children are girls.

Dahl and Moretti analyzed US Census data collected from 1940 to 2000, as well as California birth records from 1989 to 2001. Using these massive data sets, they were able to isolate the effects of boy bias on dating, mating, marriage and child-rearing practices. They found some evidence of gender bias wherever they looked. In families with at least two children, the probability of giving birth to another child is greater in all-daughter than all-son families--a result that "would be hard to explain if parents were completely gender unbiased," they wrote.

The bias showed up in the divorce stats, too. "Over the whole study period, the divorce rate for a three-girl family versus a three-boy family is 5.7 percent higher," Dahl said.

Although the divorce effect appears to have diminished over time it has been replaced by what they called a "custody effect." In the past, fathers rarely had sole or joint custody of their children. That apparently made some fathers with sons think harder about divorce out of fear that they would lose contact with their sons. But since 1970, the number of children living with their fathers has quadrupled--giving rise to an apparent boy bias in matters of custody. "If you're the daughter of a divorced dad, you're much less likely to be living with your father than a son is," Dahl said. "Fathers with all-boy offspring are 11 to 18 percent more likely to have boys living with them, depending on how many sons they have, compared to all-girl offspring."

Perhaps the researchers' most compelling evidence for boy bias comes from an unexpected source: data relating to shotgun marriages. The California birth records note whether or not an expectant mother had an ultrasound, a procedure that is more than 95 percent accurate in predicting the sex of an unborn child. Slightly more than a third of all mothers in the California sample had undergone ultrasounds, which means that they and the father may well have known the gender of their child before the baby was born.

When Dahl and Moretti analyzed this group of mothers separately, they found this disturbing pattern: Those who gave birth to boys were more likely to be married than those who gave birth to girls. While the researchers don't know for sure, the circumstantial evidence strongly suggests that "fathers who find out their child will be a boy are more likely to marry their partner before delivery," Dahl said.

Of course something other than boy bias could be at work, the researchers acknowledged. Perhaps fathers fear girls will be more expensive to raise than boys--call it the "sticker shock" theory. Or it may be that boys are thought to need their dads more than their mothers--the "role model" theory.

The problem is that this doesn't explain why couples with daughters are more likely to try to have another baby. Kids are expensive, whether they're boys or girls. And while boys need dads, that doesn't explain why couples with girls disproportionately desire to have another child.

Boy bias fits all the data, Dahl asserts. Plus, there's direct evidence from polling that point to the source of this bias: men. Gallup surveys over the past two decades show that among American guys sons are favored 2 to 1 over daughters while women who have a preference are only slightly partial to daughters.

Read more in the Washington Post

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Socializing: A Recipe for Good Health and Fertility!

December 2, 2003

Primping and passing time with peers may serve a serious purpose, suggests a new study by a UCLA-led team of primate researchers. The more time wild female baboons spend in the company of other adult baboons, particularly while occupied with grooming activities, the more likely their offspring are to live until their first birthday, the team reports in Science.

"Until now, social scientists assumed that because females invest a lot in social relationships, they must gain a lot from those relationships, but we've never been able to make a direct link to reproductive success," said Joan B Silk, the study's lead author. "These findings provide the first evidence that there's a link between the amount of social involvement and having offspring who survive the critical first year of life."

The connection is noteworthy because "reproductive success is the gold standard in evolutionary biology," said Silk, an anthropology professor in UCLA College. "A trait can't really be determined to have an evolutionary advantage unless it has a positive impact on reproductive performance. Socializing and grooming are traits that help baboons pass along their genes."

Along with evolutionary biologists from Duke and Princeton Universities, Silk pored over 16 years of data collected in Kenya's Amboseli Basin, which is located at the foot of Mt Kilimanjaro. Since 1984, researchers have measured the social behavior of more than 100 wild savannah baboon females, recording daytime activities six days a week in 10-minute intervals. Among the resulting 34,000 records of discrete activities, Silk's team looked for examples of social behavior among female baboons, including the propensity to spend time within at least 15 feet of another adult and to groom other females or to allow other females to pick dirt, ticks and other parasites from their own hair.

The researchers then studied each baboon's reproductive history, including all pregnancies, births and deaths. The most social females enjoyed a reproductive success rate that was about one-third higher than the least social females, the team found.

"It's increasingly apparent that social skills are of great importance in the evolution of primates," said Mark L Weiss, a program director at the National Science Foundation, which helped fund the research. "These researchers have not only demonstrated just how important it is for mothers to be social, they also demonstrate the great importance of supporting long investigations of natural populations so that we can appreciate the long-term consequences of the animals' activities."

The gregarious primates live in large, mixed-sex groups with clearly defined dominance hierarchies, or pecking orders. In many primate groups, high rank enhances reproductive success. Nevertheless, the researchers found that strong social bonds improved infant survival, regardless of the mother's position in the pecking order.

"Social isolation increases the risk of disease, accidents and a range of mental disorders, and the disruption of social ties due to death, divorce or separation is a major source of stress," the study notes. Although infant survival rates in humans have yet to be linked directly with social factors, research has shown that low-income women with extensive social networks give birth to heavier infants--a key marker of viability--than their more isolated peers.

It's not clear whether social interaction provides baboons the same benefits as humans, the researchers said. But research has shown that social integration among male baboons in Amboseli reduces basal levels of the hormone cortisol, a key marker of stress. Grooming has also been shown to reduce heart rate in some monkey species.

Since baboons share a long evolutionary history with humans, their behavior is thought to provide a window into human nature, particularly among human ancestors. "In baboon social interaction, we see the roots of the human inclination to come together in families and stable communities. Being social seems to go back very far back in our evolutionary history."

Read more in Science

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Overweight Linked to Poor Community Environment

April 23, 2003

A study conducted jointly by the Saint Louis University School of Public Health and the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services finds that negative perceptions of safety and pleasantness of a community, as well having no outdoor exercise facilities, may be contributing to overweight people in the state and nation.

According to the report, Missourians who indicated in telephone surveys that they consider their neighborhoods unsafe and unpleasant were one-and-one-half times more likely to be overweight than individuals who said they considered their neighborhoods safe and pleasant. In addition, those who reported not having access to outdoor exercise facilities such as walking or running tracks, basketball or tennis courts, and swimming pools, were more likely to be overweight than those who had access to such facilities.

"We often think of overweight in individuals being caused just by people overeating and not exercising," said Bert Malone, Director of the Division of Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion at the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services. "But this study shows that some of the overweight problem may be due to the environment in which people live."

According to Ross Brownson, PhD, chair of community health and professor of epidemiology at Saint Louis University School of Public Health, more than 2,800 Missouri adults were asked about their specific concerns about crime safety, traffic safety, and "pleasantness" of their communities. The more negative characteristics an individual noted, the more likely that person was to be overweight.

"Crime, traffic, poor lighting, abandoned buildings and graffiti can all impact whether or not people feel safe to walk or participate in other physical activities in their neighborhoods," Brownson said. "This study, for the first time, links those perceptions of unsafe neighborhoods with increased likelihood of being overweight."

Brownson said that while most people realize the health benefits of physical activity and being at recommended weight levels, those messages are not having much impact. In fact, the prevalence of obesity in Missouri increased 65 percent from 1991 to 1998.

The study, titled "Environmental and Policy Factors Associated with Overweight Among Adults in Missouri," is published in the American Journal of Health Promotion.

Read more in the American Journal of Health Promotion

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Alcoholic Blackouts

April 23, 2003

Research shows that people who experience fragmentary blackouts (FBs) are more likely to misremember drinking experiences after alcohol is consumed. These same individuals report strong positive expectations about future alcohol consumption.

Researchers believe that some memory-impaired drinkers 'fill in the gaps' with information that conforms to an existing belief system, which may in turn lead to heavier drinking.

Although alcohol-induced amnesiac episodes, commonly known as "blackouts," are generally regarded as a warning sign of problem drinking. In fact, blackouts may contribute to problem drinking. A study in Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research has found that heavy drinkers who experience fragmentary blackouts are more likely to misremember drinking experiences while simultaneously reporting strong positive expectations about future alcohol consumption.

"There are two types of blackouts," said Kim Fromme, associate professor of psychology at The University of Texas at Austin "'En bloc' blackouts involve complete memory loss for all events occurring within a particular time interval during intoxication. 'Fragmentary blackouts' also involve the failure to recall aspects of drinking events; however, these may reflect just portions, or fragments, of experience for which memory is impaired.

Another key distinction between the two types of blackouts is that people can use cues or reminders to help access and recall the content of an FB, whereas the content of an en bloc blackout can never be recovered, regardless of the presence of cues or reminders."

"Many drinkers believe that they are at decreased risk when they begin to experience blackouts and eventually 'pass out' rather than vomit after drinking heavily. In fact, they are at higher risk because drinking to the blood alcohol level necessary for a blackout leads to increased tolerance to alcohol's effects. 'Increased tolerance' is among the diagnostic criteria for alcohol dependence. Thus, blackouts should not be ignored as a prognostic sign."

"Heavy drinkers, in general, are likely to develop memory structures for alcohol effects that are biased toward positive outcomes. The current study suggests that fragmentary blackouts may facilitate this process. When an individual cannot recall aspects of his or her experience after drinking, he or she is likely to 'fill in the gaps' with information that is consistent with their existing belief system. In other words, if you already believe alcohol has primarily positive effects, and you cannot recall what happened after a drinking episode, you are likely to assume that the outcome was positive. This may further bias the belief system, leading to heavier drinking and more alcohol-related problems."

Read more in Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research

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Happy People Live Longer

April 2, 2003

If cardiologists wrote "Stay cheerful" on their prescription pads, heart disease patients who followed the orders would live longer, a study suggests today. Adding to mounting evidence that emotions affect the heart, a large study shows that happy adults with heart disease are 20% more likely than equally ill, dour patients to stay alive for 11 years.

"People could potentially extend their life spans with positive emotions," says Beverly Brummett of Duke University Medical Center in Durham, NC. She reported on her study recently at the American Psychosomatic Society meeting.

There's nothing magical about the emotion-heart disease link, researchers say, because it makes sense biologically and also might be explained by habits and social contacts that affect health.

Brummett followed 866 adults with heart disease for about 11 years after they had diagnostic heart tests and filled out questionnaires about how much joy they typically felt. Even after taking into account how ill the patients initially were and key factors such as smoking that could shorten life, the cheerful patients had a 20% better survival rate.

Constant happiness isn't necessary, Brummett says, but avoiding emotional lows is vital to prolonging life. Happy people might be less likely to churn out a torrent of stress hormones, such as cortisol, says cardiologist Jerome Fleg of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. These hormone surges make blood platelets stickier, thicken the blood and prevent coronary arteries from dilating easily.

Depression induced higher blood pressure and steadily higher heart rates add to the risk, Fleg says. For more than 24 years, Fleg examined participants in the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging, which tracks adults from their 20s to old age. In the study, cheerful people complained less about chest pain, though all chest pain isn't from heart disease, he says.

Read more on the Duke Medical Center website

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About the Author

Dr Bob Murray is a widely published psychologist and expert on emotional health and optimal relationships. Together with his wife and long-term collaborator Alicia Fortinberry, he is founder of the highly successful Uplift Program, and author of Raising an Optimistic Child (McGraw-Hill, 2006) and Creating Optimism (McGraw-Hill, 2004).