The authors test the hypothesis that low-effort thought promotes political conservatism. In Study 1, alcohol intoxication was measured among bar patrons; as blood alcohol level increased, so did political conservatism (controlling for sex, education, and political identification). In Study 2, participants under cognitive load reported more conservative attitudes than their no-load counterparts. In Study 3, time pressure increased participants’ endorsement of conservative terms. In Study 4, participants considering political terms in a cursory manner endorsed conservative terms more than those asked to cogitate; an indicator of effortful thought (recognition memory) partially mediated the relationship between processing effort and conservatism. Together these data suggest that political conservatism may be a process consequence of low-effort thought; when effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases.

The full-text .pdf is free!

Some of the studies are done on a small sample of undergraduates, but the results do suggest that there is a lesser cognitive load involved with politically conservative viewpoints. In other words, quick low-effort thinking promotes conservatism, not the other way around. The researchers suggest this may have to do with the conservative preference for closure — needing quick, simplistic, certain answers to problems.

Of course, if you’re like me and you realize that the solutions to sociopolitical problems are never so cut and dried, you start to realize the problem with this line of thought.

Seven studies using experimental and naturalistic methods reveal that upper-class individuals behave more unethically than lower-class individuals. In studies 1 and 2, upper-class individuals were more likely to break the law while driving, relative to lower-class individuals. In follow-up laboratory studies, upper-class individuals were more likely to exhibit unethical decision-making tendencies (study 3), take valued goods from others (study 4), lie in a negotiation (study 5), cheat to increase their chances of winning a prize (study 6), and endorse unethical behavior at work (study 7) than were lower-class individuals. Mediator and moderator data demonstrated that upper-class individuals’ unethical tendencies are accounted for, in part, by their more favorable attitudes toward greed.

The authors think that all kinds of factors probably contribute to this finding. Here are a few:

• Upper class people are more insulated from ordinary society and tend to think the rules don’t apply to them.
• Upper class people have the resources to make problems ‘go away’, so they are less exposed to the adverse consequences of their unethical behaviour.
• They care less about what other people think.

(Source: redaccion.nexos.com.mx)

I was looking through some older journal articles I collected over the course of my graduate school tenure when I came across one in particular that I enjoyed. This paper has to do with the relationship between self-focused attention and anxiety.

Dr. Nolen-Hoeksema’s research on rumination has elucidated this link between attention and dysphoria, albeit in a specific form. Rumination has to do specifically with an attentional fixation on the symptoms of personal distress, be it mental illness or otherwise. An interesting aside: Women tend to ruminate more than men, who are more likely to distract themselves from their distress rather than mull over it. Of course, the form of that distraction may take a variety of forms — drug abuse & completed suicides are more common amongst men. I’ll discuss this concept of distraction a little more a bit later on.  

This paper (Muraven, 2005) has to do more with self-focused attention in two different forms: public vs. private.

• Private self-consciousness has to do with egocentrically focused thoughts; the self considering the self
• Public self-consciousness has to do with the perception of the self as seen by others

Now, normally, thinking about yourself isn’t that bad. We all do it to some extent. Self-focused attention after positive events does not seem to lead to depression, anxiety, or anything nasty. However, self-focus after negative events seems to deepen whatever baseline dysphoria one experiences following a failure or other depressing event.  

“Well, why not try to distract your self-focus following a negative event?” Ah-hah. Therein lies the problem of distractibility. Some individuals simply find it easier to distract themselves from themselves, whereas others have more difficulty disengaging from this self-focus. People will occasionally go to great lengths to forget themselves (hence: drug use, suicide, behavioral addictions, etc). Think of it like a train wreck: you think it’s horrible, but you somehow cannot bring yourself to look away. It is your life after all. Self-focus is evidently aversive in certain circumstances, but “shifting attention away from the self is not a trivial or easy endeavor.” And of course, it’s more unbearable the more chronic and inescapable this self-focus is.

Anyway, back to the paper.

Muraven (2005) hypothesizes that there is an interaction effect that occurs amongst individuals high in self-focused attention and low in self-focus flexibility. In other words, the more dysphoric and anxious the individual, the more self-focused the individual will be, and this effect will be heightened by the individual’s attentional inflexibility. The main distinction in this effect is that between generalized anxiety and social phobia: those who have generalized anxiety & depression will have more private self-consciousness, whereas social phobics will tend to have higher levels of public self-consciousness.

After taking a number of participants (N = 112) through a battery of psychological tests (e.g. Spielberger Trait Anxiety Inventory, Self-Consciousness Questionnaire, Beck Depression Inventory), participants were tasked with a two-part experiment where they were 1) asked to indicate what words flashed on a computer screen referred to themselves and 2) asked to indicate what words described a separate person, specific to each individual. During the two portions of this task, the computer would beep 6 times during the initial self-focus component, 6 times during second external focus component. Participants were told to click the mouse as quickly as possible following this audible prompt. This was a reaction time task meant to judge attentional flexibility, unbeknownst to the participants.

Lo and behold, Muraven finds his hypothesis confirmed: individuals high in private self-consciousness with slower reaction times also rated themselves high on the Beck Depression Inventory and the Trait Anxiety Inventory; individuals high in public self-consciousness with slower reaction times also rated themselves high on the social anxiety subscale of the Self-Consciousness Questionnaire.

This study offers one possible clue as to the source of the mental sluggishness and discombobulation depressed and anxious individuals occasionally experience. Think about it: the more cognitive effort you are expending thinking about yourself (or thinking about how others perceive you), the less attentional capacity you have to expend on other matters. 

This extreme, inflexible self-focus is how a benign hiccup, gaffe, faux pas, or failure can spiral into a full-blown major depressive episode and/or panic attack. The self-focus is fed by negativistic and overly critical automatic thoughts, and cause the depressed or anxious individual to shrink inside themselves. It is unclear as to which comes first (i.e. inflexible self-focus leading to mental dysfunction, or the mental dysfunction leading to the inflexible self-focus), but it is clear that obsessive self-focused attentional processes play a strong role in the maintenance of dysfunction.

I suppose the take away point from this article is to develop some healthy habits that help to distract or distance you from yourself. Ideally, this would be something tangible that confronts or treats some of the roots of your anxiety or depression. Of course, sometimes the best way to distract yourself from yourself is to reach out to others and give yourself to them.

Thoughts on this? Do you find it difficult to distract yourself from yourself when you’re anxious/depressed? What are some things you to do distract yourself from yourself?

As usual, the ‘ask’ box is always open.

        

I wrote the following to an acquaintance, and some of this information may be helpful to my Social Anxiety-afflicted comrades. Any emphasis added is mine:

There are a couple of things to be said about social anxiety and anxiety in general and I apologize in advance if this gets a little long-winded or preachy.

The first step is understanding that any anxiety has a physiological and a psychological component. Anxiety in general activates the same autonomic systems in the body that are responsible for the fight-or-flight response, which explains the increased heart rate, the shakes, the sweats… when you get that palpable feeling of unease (or whatever you consider to be your main physical cue), it’s just your brain telling you you should probably consider running for your life. Hence, an anxious person engages in avoidance behaviors (i.e. the “flight” in fight-or-flight), and you get an opiate-like rush once you’ve fled because MAN does it feel good not to be eaten alive! Except of course in the case of social anxiety, where you’re running from your run-of-the-mill human. 

If that sounds silly to you, then you’ve got the right idea. The brain isn’t perfect, just functional. Nevertheless, it’s a part of you, and like any part of you, it’s not completely infallible and will occasionally act on its own.

The part where it gets out of hand is when you fixate and ruminate on reasons for why you’re feeling what you’re feeling. For some people, anxiety has this obsessive component to it. You may have heard of what is know in the psychological parlance as “automatic thoughts”: negativistic beliefs about yourself or what others think of you that come to mind without much effort or thought. These can be triggered by (and cause) anxiety. 

Either way, once these thoughts start, they lead to a vicious cycle. For example, let’s say you go to a party where you don’t know anyone. You may be nervous already, your heart pounding, feeling like it’s hard to breathe, so you think to yourself “If they notice, they’ll think I’m a spaz” or “I hope my voice won’t sound weird when I introduce myself”. This provokes more anxiety, and maybe you end up have an awkward introduction to the host or a fellow guest, which ends up provoking more negative thoughts (“Oh god, I really botched that. I’m going to go hide in the corner now.”) Anxiety has the nasty habit of building upon itself, and some of the worst cases of social anxiety end up being largely self-fulfilling. 

The biggest challenge for me and for anyone with SA is to deliberately try to break this cycle. As you probably know, it’s really REALLY hard, especially because you probably have a catalog of past experiences telling you that you’re a terrible conversationalist, and anxiety has a way of lowering your guard so you end up reminding yourself of this. 

The next step is really self-acceptance: “I have a problem doing this, I admit it, but I don’t need to apologize for it. Instead, I need to accept that I have this problem, and try to do better. If other people do not like me or do not have the patience for me as a result of my anxiety, are they the kind of people I want to be hanging out with in the first place?” 

Once you accept that, then you can start the real work, which is exposure therapy. It entails doing things to challenge your anxiety in order to desensitize yourself to it. This can be anything from making eye contact with strangers, to chit-chat on a checkout line, to outings with acquaintances, to public speaking, to just being outside and amongst people. It’s not important HOW you do it, but that you do it, period, without resorting to avoidance behaviors, and that you keep doing it. Put yourself in situations where there is no easy escape, and try to have conversations about something, ANYTHING (the weather, politics, sports, technology, art, booze, etc.) 

You may not succeed every time, but the times you do, you will start to build a catalog of positive self-guided social experiences which will make you feel more confident about doing it in future, and will allow you to bounce back faster when you’re in a slump. 

The other thing to practice is careful evaluation of any and all automatic thoughts that jump into your head. Question them, break them down, ask yourself if you really have sufficient reason to believe them. I guarantee you’ll find most to be irrational, based more out of fear than logic. 

I personally started by just reading outside, in order to get comfortable being around people. From there, I shrank the proximity between myself and others by going to a small gym and working out. Most recently, spending time at Occupy Wall Street was immensely helpful, as I was around tons of people, standing on the picket lines, and getting interviewed by random bloggers and journalists. I wouldn’t say I’m cured by a long shot, and I won’t say I was successful every time I tried, but I’ve definitely improved compared to how I felt in college. 

tl;dr: your brain can be silly sometimes and it’s not your fault. go make yourself as uncomfortable as you can without running away, and keep trying!

…Here are some further pointers w/r/t social anxiety & psychological dysfunction from another correspondence:

I do have situationally specific spikes in anxiety, yes. In general, they crop up in performance situations where you’re acutely aware you’re being judged or scrutinized (i.e. a workplace, an oral presentation, a date). This activates those nasty self-critical negativistic automatic thoughts, even when there is little reason to believe that others have begun to think negatively of you or your character. 

(Some people have more generalized social anxiety where their anxiety level is high across social situations, while others have situations where it is more benign and easier to deal with. I have the more generalized subtype that spikes in specific situations…situations that I can expand upon if you’re particularly curious.) 

There’s a theory about anxiety and psychological dysfunction in general that depends on the interplay of structured environments vs. ambiguous environments. I’ll explain by juxtaposing two of your examples: OWS vs. the Bar. 

At OWS, even if you don’t know most of the people, it’s a protest movement where you’re more likely to agree with and share the opinions and mindsets of some of the people there. There’s a certain comforting structure there, because you’re all talking about similar things, and you’re all there for similar reasons. As a result, it requires less cognitive effort to think of things to talk about, even if you’re anxious. 

At the Bar, you’re faced with an opposite situation. The structure is more ambiguous than it is at OWS. The only structure that exists is that you have a set number of duties to do in a timely fashion. The workers are there primarily to make money, presumably, and may not necessarily share beliefs or opinions, but are forced to get along in order to do their jobs. Since there is more ambiguity about your coworkers, you experience more anxiety, which increases the cognitive effort you have to expend thinking about what you could possibly say or discuss with them. 

Lots of people with psychological difficulties go under the radar because there are certain things that people with mental disorders do that are adaptive in certain social contexts. For example, being social anxious meant I had few friends and an anxiety about reaching out to make new ones, so I plunged myself headfirst into my schoolwork, an area where I knew how to achieve success with minimal anxiety. Some people with bipolar disorder are successful artists because their manic episodes give them bursts of energy and expansive thoughts that they apply to their work. Some people with narcissistic personality disorder are CEOs of major corporations because they have the stubbornness and exploitativeness necessary to succeed in cutthroat business environments. 

My point here is that everyone finds a niche, and that mental disorders (anxiety or otherwise) are deviations from normal behaviors that can only be termed “disorders” proper when they come into conflict with society OR they cause significant personal distress. That’s why in the Diagnostic & Statistical Manual (the DSM, the holy diagnostic bible for psychologists/psychiatrists) there is always the requirement that the disorder “cause clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning.”

As for controlling bitterness towards the self and self-criticism, you should try employing a little Socratic scrutiny. Ask yourself two questions: “What is it about myself that I dislike so much?” and “What about my person do I enjoy and find valuable?” Write down a couple of positive and negative traits you think you have. 

Then ask yourself (specifically about the negative traits):
Why do I believe this? 
Do I have sufficient reason to believe this? 
Is there an alternative explanation for why I think this? 
If I was to engage in this negative behavior/trait, what would be the worst thing that would happen? The best? The most realistic? Could I live through it if the worst happened? 
If I had a friend who had this negative trait, what would I tell them? 

As you do this, some themes may arise. Pay attention to these. Overall, throughout this exercise, BE KIND TO YOURSELF.

You’re only human; you’re not perfect, but you’re not some vile, evil, inept thing either. 

“Despite the fact that the siblings of those with autism did not have a diagnosis of autism or Asperger syndrome, they had decreased activity in various areas of the brain (including those associated with empathy, understanding others’ emotions and processing information from faces) compared to those with no family history of autism. The scans of those with autism revealed that the same areas of the brain as their siblings were also underactive, but to a greater degree. (These brain regions included the temporal poles, the superior temporal sulcus, the superior frontal gyrus, the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex and the fusiform face area.)”

From the article:

“…atypical neural response within these brain areas in autism and sibling groups specifically to happy faces may reflect the possibility that an implicit response to happy faces is driven by empathy—impairments of which have a central role within the phenotype of autism—whereas the response to fearful stimuli (found in this study to be intact in siblings but not individuals with autism) is likely driven by their role as indicators of threat.” 

M D Spencer, R J Holt, L R Chura, J Suckling, A J Calder, E T Bullmore, S Baron-Cohen. A novel functional brain imaging endophenotype of autism: the neural response to facial expression of emotion. Translational Psychiatry, 2011; 1 (7): e16 DOI: 10.1038/tp.2011.18

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The genesis of autism is shaping up to be strikingly similar to that of the endophenotypic development of schizophrenia. I can only imagine that scientists will start investigating genetic markers as well to see if there are a series of genes that contribute to the decreased activation in these cortical areas. Several of the areas they reference have been previously implicated in other neurological conditions involving distorted or abnormal facial perception, such as prosopagnosia. 

The only disagreeable notion that this article puts forth is the notion of a definitive set of biomarkers, hence why I changed the title to reflect what I feel is the article’s true gist, sans academic grandstanding.

“The larger the city in which a student lived, the more active their amygdala. The longer they’d lived in a city as a child, the more active their cingulate cortex. In other studies, the cingulate cortex has been described as especially sensitive to early-life stress, with alterations linked to adult psychological problems.

Communication between the cingulate cortex and amygdala also seemed to be less efficient in city dwellers. In a commentary accompanying the study, California Institute of Technology neurobiologists Daniel Kennedy and Ralph Adolphs noted that similar patterns are seen in people with genetic predispositions to psychiatric disorders.”

Citations: “City living and urban upbringing affect neural social stress processing in humans.” By Florian Lederbogen, Peter Kirsch, Leila Haddad, Fabian Streit, Heike Tost, Philipp Schuch, Stefan Wust, Jens C. Pruessner, Marcella Rietschel, Michael Deuschle & Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg. Nature, Vol. 474 No. 7352, June 23, 2011.

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Giving new meaning to “You’d have to be crazy to live in New York City!”

Swimmer synaesthetes study Stroop strokes. :D

“The students were randomly assigned to various advertisement conditions. Some subjects viewed low-imagery text ads, which described the delicious taste of this new snack food. Others watched a high-imagery commercial, in which they watched all sorts of happy people enjoying this popcorn in their living room. After viewing the ads, the students were then assigned to one of two rooms. In one room, they were given an unrelated survey. In the other room, however, they were given a sample of this fictional new popcorn to taste. (A different Orville Redenbacher popcorn was actually used.)

One week later, all the subjects were quizzed about their memory of the product. Here’s where things get disturbing: While students who saw the low-imagery ad were extremely unlikely to report having tried the popcorn, those who watched the slick commercial were just as likely to have said they tried the popcorn as those who actually did. Furthermore, their ratings of the product were as favorable as those who sampled the salty, buttery treat. Most troubling, perhaps, is that these subjects were extremely confident in these made-up memories. The delusion felt true. They didn’t like the popcorn because they’d seen a good ad. They liked the popcorn because it was delicious.”

Rajagopal, Priyali & Montgomery, Nicole Votolato (2011). I Imagine I Experience, I Like: The False Experience Effect. The Journal of Consumer Research, 38

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Not exactly a surprising result, considering the prior research on false memories done by Loftus, but surely a more convincing argument for why an individual purchases one product over another than the vaguely defined effects of “subliminal advertising.”