Thinking and Feeling'

UC Santa Barbara researchers studying empathy in relationships find that in the absence of caring, understanding alone doesn't cut it when stressful situations arise

Newswise, March 9, 2016 — So you had a terrible day at work. Or the bills are piling up and cash is in short supply. Impending visit from the in-laws, perhaps?

When stress sets in, many of us turn to a partner to help us manage by being a sounding board or shoulder to cry on. Your odds of actually feeling better are much improved if they're both those things.

New research by psychologists at UC Santa Barbara reveals that simply understanding your partner's suffering isn't sufficient to be helpful in a stressful situation; you've got to actually care that they're suffering in the first place.

The findings, published in the journal Psychological Science, provide the first evidence that cognitive and affective forms of empathy work together to facilitate responsive behavior.

"When people were empathically accurate -- when they had an accurate understanding of their partner's thoughts and feelings -- they were more responsive only when they also felt more empathic concern, more compassion and motivation to attend to their partner's needs," explained lead author Lauren Winczewski, a graduate student in UCSB's Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences.

"People might assume that accurate understanding is all it takes to be responsive, but understanding a partner's thoughts and feelings was helpful only when listeners were also feeling more compassionate and sympathetic toward their partner.

When listeners had accurate knowledge but did not feel compassionate, they tended to be less supportive and responsive."

Responsiveness has become an important line of study in social and health psychology because research evidence increasingly suggests that feeling understood, validated and cared for by other people is crucial to relationships and personal well-being. But exactly what enables one to be responsive to others?

In the study, Winczewski and fellow graduate researcher Jeff Bowen, working with UCSB psychology professor Nancy Collins, argued that responsiveness requires not only accurate understanding but also compassionate motivation.

Specifically, they hypothesized that understanding another person's thoughts and feelings -- a cognitive skill known as empathic accuracy -- would foster responsive behavior only when paired with benevolent motivation, or empathic concern.

They tested their theory by asking couples to discuss a previously identified personal or relationship stressor -- jealousy, say, or, as in one case, one partner's extreme fear of flying.

By videotaping the conversations,­ the researchers were able to gauge empathic accuracy and empathic concern, as well as responsiveness, both in real time and after the interaction had concluded.

And as it turned out, they were right. When a listener's concern for their partner was high, their accuracy bolstered responsiveness; but when compassion was scant, understanding did little to aid responsiveness.

According to Winczewski, the findings suggest that empathic accuracy facilitates responsive behavior only when one is motivated to use that insight for benevolent goals.

"You can know very well what your partner is thinking and feeling -- maybe you've heard this story 17 times, the fight with the boss and so on -- but if you don't care?" said Winczewski.

"Having accurate knowledge in the absence of compassionate feelings may even undermine responsiveness."

The researchers speculate that everyday support conversations, like the ones they observed in their lab, inform people's more enduring perceptions of their partners' responsiveness over time.

"People use these kinds of interactions as diagnostic of their partner's motivation and ability to respond to their needs," she continued.

"'If that's how you're responding to me now, is that how you'll respond to me again in the future?' Over time, you may build trust in your partner's responsiveness or you may start to wonder if your partner is even willing, let alone able, to respond to your needs."

Said Collins, who leads UCSB's Close Relationships Lab: "Having an accurate understanding of our partner's inner world, combined with compassionate feelings, enables us to provide the kind of support that is wanted and needed by our loved ones. But in the absence of compassionate feelings, cognitive empathy alone is not enough.

"In this way," Collins added, "our study shows that 'thinking and feeling' work together to help us be as supportive as possible to those we love."

Researchers ID Risk Factors That Predict Violence in Adults With Mental Illness

Newswise, March 3, 2016 — Researchers have identified three risk factors that make adults with mental illness more likely to engage in violent behavior.

The findings give mental health professionals and others working with adults with mental illness a suite of characteristics they can use as potential warning signs, allowing them to intervene and hopefully prevent violent behavior.

“Our earlier work found that adults with mental illness are more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators – and that is especially relevant to this new study,” says Sarah Desmarais, an associate professor of psychology at North Carolina State University and co-author of a paper describing the work.

“One of the new findings is that people with mental illness who have been victims of violence in the past six months are more likely to engage in future violent behavior themselves.”

The researchers compiled a database of 4,480 adults with mental illnesses – including schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and depression – who had answered questions about both committing violence and being victims of violence in the previous six months.

The database drew from five earlier studies that focused on issues ranging from antipsychotic medications to treatment approaches. Those studies had different research goals, but all asked identical questions related to violence and victimization.

The researchers assessed the data to determine which behaviors, events and characteristics were most predictive of violent behavior over a six-month period. Violent behavior, in this context, ranged from pushing and shoving to sexual assault and assault with a deadly weapon.

The researchers found three risk factors that were predictive of violent behavior: if an individual is currently using alcohol; if an individual has engaged in violent behavior over the past six months; and if an individual has been a victim of violence within the past six months.

“We found that these risk factors were predictive even when we accounted for age, sex, race, mental illness diagnosis and other clinical characteristics,” Desmarais says.

In contrast, the researchers found that current drug use was not predictive of violent behavior, when age, sex, race, mental illness diagnosis and other clinical characteristics were considered.

“This is useful information for anyone working in a clinical setting,” Desmarais says. “But it also highlights the importance of creating policies that can help protect people with mental illness from being victimized. It’s not only the right thing to do, but it makes for safer communities.”

The paper, “Proximal Risk Factors for Short-Term Community Violence Among Adults with Mental Illnesses,” is published online in the journalPsychiatric Services. Lead author of the paper is Kiersten Johnson, a Ph.D. student at NC State. Co-authors were Kevin Grimm of the University of Arizona; Stephen Tueller and Richard Van Dorn of RTI International; and Marvin Swartz of Duke University. The work was supported by the National Institute for Mental Health under grant number R01MH093426 to Van Dorn.

Psychologist Examines the Profound Power of Loneliness

Newswise, March 3, 2016 — Loneliness is as close to universal as experiences come. Almost everyone has felt isolated, even rejected.

But the power of loneliness — its potential for causing depression and other serious health problems as well as its surprising role in keeping humans safe from harm — may be more profound than researchers had previously presumed, says neuroscience researcher John Cacioppo, the Tiffany and Margaret Blake Distinguished Service Professor in Psychology at the University of Chicago.

Cacioppo has spent nearly three decades exploring the social nature of the human brain, working to find the mechanisms behind traits such as loneliness, empathy, synchrony and emotional contagion.

Through his research, funded by the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences, and the National Institute on Aging, he’s helped turn loneliness from a curious afterthought in neuroscience to a serious area for research and explanation.

He and his collaborators have also incorporated new technology at each stage of their research, combining methods ranging from behavior studies to endocrinological testing, electrical and functional neuroimaging, and genetics. They’re using those tools to identify the neural, hormonal, cellular and genetic mechanisms underlying social structures.

Using what they’ve learned, Cacioppo’s team is evaluating therapies for loneliness, finding the most effective treatments and working to improve them.

The researchers’ collaborators include the U.S. Army, which turned to Cacioppo for help with studies that could be incorporated into training to help protect soldiers from isolation and related social problems.

During a visit to the NSF, Cacioppo took some time to talk about loneliness — what it is, where it comes from and how it affects people.

Q. How do you define loneliness, in terms of your work?

A. It's defined as perceived social isolation. People can feel like they’re on the social perimeter for a lot of different reasons. If you’re the last one chosen on a high school team, that can feel really unpleasant. It’s also clearly an evaluation of your net worth to that group. If that’s a valued group, it matters to you. If it’s not a valued group, it’s no big deal. That has effects on not just emotions but cognition. Research at Rush University has shown that older adults are more likely to develop dementia if they feel chronic loneliness.

Q. So just the perception, not whether or not someone is actually isolated, can trigger a physiological reaction?

A. Much of what goes with loneliness — behaviorally, physiologically — is so deep that we’ve got it in our genes. It’s just like if I were to provide a painful stimulus to your arm, you would withdraw and complain of being hurt. That’s not something you learn. The pain withdrawal reflex is in place due to your genetic endowment. And that mechanism is in place because it protects your body from tissue damage.

Loneliness is a mechanism that’s in place because we need, as a social species, to be able to identify when our connections with others for mutual aid and protection are being threatened or absent. If there’s no connection, there could be mortal consequences. Those are threats to our survival and reproductive success.

Q. Does that make loneliness almost like a fever — unpleasant, but there's a purpose to it?

A. That’s exactly right. You would not want to eliminate the temporary feeling of loneliness. We’ve argued there’s a benefit to that response to perceived isolation. But, like many individual variations of these kinds of states, there are pathologic extremes. I might be so sensitive to feeling connected or isolated as to be a complete wreck, or I can be so insensitive as to be a psychopath. That’s just part of the normal distribution of individual differences that, for the most part, helps to protect our social body just as pain helps to protect our physical body.

Q. How does loneliness affect our social behavior and interactions?

A. When you feel lonely, you get more defensive. You focus more on self-preservation even though this is not done intentionally. Completely unbeknownst to you, your brain is focusing more on self-preservation than the preservation of those around you. This, in turn, can make you less pleasant to be around. Over time, this can increase the likelihood of negative social interactions. Thus, the focus on self-preservation can have short-term survival benefits but — if not reversed — can have long-term costs.

Q. It seems that loneliness can serve a useful purpose but — almost like an immune system that starts attacking things that aren't actually threats — it can go out of control.

A. That’s exactly right. It’s also very much like our stress system. Our stress system emerged in a different time of human history, and now we get stressed when we’re in traffic. There’s no saber-toothed tiger attacking; there’s no person with a spear coming to get me. I'm sitting in a safe car, but there’s still that level of stress and hostility that a traffic jam can engender. Our stress response contributed to survival across human history, but in contemporary society chronic stress also contributes to morbidity and mortality.

Stress has an adaptive value, even today, although not to the extent we’re expressing it. But knowing that does not mean we can simply turn it off when we wish. It’s the same thing with loneliness. We’re trying to educate the public about this, to say that loneliness isn’t something that only certain individuals have. It’s something we all have, we can all fall into, and nearly all of us experience at some point in our lives.

Q. Does this type of research into loneliness tell us anything about humans as a species?

A. The perception of loneliness is exacerbated by the feeling that one doesn’t have anyone on whom he or she can depend or who can depend on him or her. As children, we’re dependent on adults. When we grow to be adults, we think we’re supposed to become independent — the king of the mountain. But in social mammals -- not just humans — becoming an adult means being the individual upon whom others can depend. Our Western cultural notion of human nature does not capture our actual social nature particularly well.

Q. When you were starting your research into isolation decades ago, behavioral science and brain science weren't as closely linked as they are today, correct?

A. There were a number of people trying to put them together, but we didn’t have the neuroimaging technologies we have today that have really transformed what we can ask. Today, someone can really look at the working, normal brain.

I was doing electroencephalography (EEG) 40 years ago, and we looked at very broad questions. I was doing it 20 years ago, and we looked at relatively sophisticated questions compared to 20 years prior, but not very sophisticated compared to today. I’m now asking questions about the whole brain in action rather than a single region in isolation. And genetics and genomics are also increasingly integrated into investigations of the social brain.

Q. The questions that you started asking at the very beginning of your research — have they led you on a linear path to where you are today? Or has your research taken you in unexpected directions?

A. Yes to both. The question we started with wasn’t about loneliness and continues to not be about loneliness. It’s about who we are as a species. What, fundamentally, are our brains doing? What are the factors that influence brain function? Partly, we’re showing that the brain is organized in part to deal with and to promote salutary connections to other people. The fundamental question was “what is the social nature of our brain?”

One of the things that surprised me was how important loneliness proved to be. It predicted morbidity. It predicted mortality. And that shocked me. When we experimentally manipulated loneliness, we found surprising changes in the “personalities” of people. There's a lot more power to the perception of being socially isolated than any of us had thought.— Rob Marietta, National Science Foundation

Testosterone Treatment Improves Sexual Activity, Physical Function and Mood in Men Over 65

Newswise, February 19, 2016 – As men age, their testosterone levels decrease, but prior studies of the effects of administering testosterone to older men have been inconclusive.

Now, a new study shows testosterone treatment for men age 65 and older improves sexual function, walking ability and mood, according to findings published in the New England Journal of Medicine by a team of researchers from 12 medical centers, including Cora E. Lewis, M.D., of the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

The Testosterone Trials, or TTrials, are a coordinated group of seven trials, and researchers have analyzed the results of the first three — sexual function, physical function and vitality. They found that testosterone treatment increased the blood testosterone level in the study subjects to the mid-normal range for younger men.

Testosterone treatment led to modest improvements in all aspects of sexual function, including sexual activity, sexual desire and the ability to get an erection. It also resulted in small improvements in indexes of mood and depression and some but not all measures of physical function. Treatment did not improve overall energy level.

With 51,085 men screened and 790 who qualified, the TTrials are now the largest trials to examine the efficacy of testosterone treatment in men 65 and older whose testosterone levels are low due seemingly to age alone.

Lewis, a professor in the UAB Division of Preventive Medicine and co-author on the testosterone study, says this new research fills a prominent gap in the evidence for the possible benefits of testosterone in men in this age group, a gap identified by a 2003 report from the Institute of Medicine. Additional evidence will come from the studies in other trials on cognitive function, bone health, cardiovascular disease and anemia.

“We now have some evidence on the specific symptoms that seem to respond, or don’t respond, to testosterone therapy in men 65 years old and over,” Lewis said. “However, there are still big questions about overall benefits and risks. The negative effects of testosterone treatment are still unclear.”

Across the three trials, adverse events including heart attack, stroke and prostate problems were similar in men who received testosterone and men who received placebo. So, while the TTrials did not find harmful effects, Lewis says a larger and longer clinical trial comparing testosterone therapy to placebo to definitively assess the risks is needed.

Lewis says men considering testosterone treatment should consult their doctor.

“Men should discuss their symptoms and their health history with their doctor since testosterone treatment seems to affect some symptoms and not others,” she said. “Men should have their testosterone levels checked to be sure they have low testosterone.”

She also adds that it is important to have levels checked in the morning since testosterone levels naturally change over the course of a day.

The TTrials were supported by a grant from the National Institute on Aging of the National Institutes of Health and funding from other institutes of the NIH. 

Anonymous Browsing Hinders Online Dating Signals

Newswise, February 10, 2016 — Big data and the growing popularity of online dating sites may be reshaping a fundamental human activity: finding a mate, or at least a date. Yet a new study in Management Science finds that certain longstanding social norms persist, even online.

In a large-scale experiment conducted through a major North American online dating website, a team of management scholars from Canada, the U.S. and Taiwan examined the impact of a premium feature: anonymous browsing. 

Out of 100,000 randomly selected new users, 50,000 were given free access to the feature for a month, enabling them to view profiles of other users without leaving telltale digital traces.

The researchers expected the anonymity feature to lower social inhibitions -- and apparently it did. Compared to the control group, users with anonymous browsing viewed more profiles. They were also more likely to check out potential same-sex and interracial matches.

Surprisingly, however, users who browsed anonymously also wound up with fewer matches (defined as a sequence of at least three messages exchanged between users) than their non-anonymous counterparts. 

This was especially true for female users: those with anonymous browsing wound up with an average of 14% fewer matches. Why?

Women don’t like to send personal messages to initiate contact, explains Jui Ramaprasad, an assistant professor of information systems at McGill University’s Desautels Faculty of Management. 

In other words, she says, “We still see that women don’t make the first move.” Instead, they tend to send what the researchers call a “weak signal.”

“Weak signaling is the ability to visit, or ‘check out,’ a potential mate’s profile so the potential mate knows the focal user visited,” according to the study. 

“The offline ‘flirting’ equivalents, at best, would be a suggestive look or a preening bodily gesture such as a hair toss to one side or an over-the-shoulder glance, each subject to myriad interpretations and possible misinterpretations contingent on the perceptiveness of the players involved. 

"Much less ambiguity exists in the online environment if the focal user views another user’s profile and leaves a visible train in his ‘Recent Visitors’ list.”

Men often take the cue. “Men send four times the number of messages that women do,” says co-author Akhmed Umyarov, an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management. “So the anonymity feature doesn’t change things so much for men.”

Implications beyond online dating

Experiments of this sort could be used in a range of online-matching platforms to help understand how to improve the consumer experience – though it’s important that the experiments be done ethically, the researchers say.

“Even though people are willing to pay to become anonymous in online dating sites, we find that the feature is detrimental to the average users,” says Professor Ravi Bapna, co-author and the Carlson Chair in Business Analytics and Information Systems at Minnesota. 

”Professional social networks, such as LinkedIn, also offer different levels of anonymity, but user behavior and the underlying psychology in these settings is very different from that of romantic social networks.”
.
As with many academic research projects, the idea for this experiment stemmed partly from serendipity.

“I happened to know a senior guy at an online dating site,” Ramaprasad explains. 

“Since he knew that I studied online behavior, he suggested, ‘Why don’t you study this?’” The site, referred to in the study by the fictitious name of monCherie.com, is one of the largest online dating websites in North America.

The study could lay the groundwork for further academic analysis of online dating sites. 

“We expect future research to examine in more depth the issue of match quality and long-term outcomes as they relate to marriage, happiness, long-term relationships, and divorce,” the researchers conclude.

“One-Way Mirrors and Weak-Signaling in Online Dating: A Randomized Field Experiment,” Ravi Bapna, Jui Ramaprasad, Galit Shmueli, Akhmed Umyarov. Management Science, published online Feb. 2, 2016.
www.pubsonline.informs.org/doi/abs/10.1287/mnsc.2015.2301

UF/IFAS Researcher Says Some People Are Single on Valentine’s Day and Just Fine with It

 There are ways to short-circuit the “mind traps” that often accompany a day set aside for couples

Newswise, February 10, 2016--- With the most hyped romantic day of the year fast approaching, some people who are single are perfectly happy that way – and not buying into the all the ads, stuffed animals, candies or cards.

Assistant Professor Victor Harris, an Extension specialist with the University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences’ Department of Family, Youth and Community Sciences, said there are ways to short-circuit the “mind traps” that often accompany a day set aside for couples.

“Many people feel like Valentine's Day is manufactured and that the need to ‘have to be involved in a romantic relationship’ is imposed upon them by the media and the holiday's specific expectations,” Harris said. 

“Exposing the hype associated with these expectations and reframing the expectations into expectations that are more realistic are two ways to make it okay to simply ignore the holiday or enjoy it with friends, or choose do something you enjoy, such as working out or reading a good book, without the associated potential for anxiety or guilt.”

Harris said people can avoid the mind traps that can keep them from enjoying Valentine's Day. Recognizing these traps is the first step to short-circuiting them. 

They include:

• All-or-nothing thinking: You see things in black-or-white. If a situation is anything less than perfect, you see it as a total failure;
• Overgeneralization: You see a single event as a never-ending pattern of defeat by using the words always or never when you think about it;
• Jumping to conclusions: You interpret things negatively when there are no facts to support your conclusions;
• Emotional reasoning: You assume that your negative emotions reflect the way things really are: “I feel guilty [because I don't have a date for Valentine's Day]. I must be a rotten person.”;
• “Should” statements: You tell yourself that things ‘should’ be the way you hoped or expected them to be.

Harris cites the popular line, “you complete me,” from the Tom Cruise movie “Jerry Maguire.”

“This expectation is unrealistic because the key to healthy relationships is to first learn how to meet your own needs so you can then help someone else learn how to meet their needs,” Harris said. “Two people getting together in a relationship, who don't know how to meet their own needs, is a sure-fire recipe for failure.”

Harris said research in the work, “Developing a healthy self-image,” identified eight categories of needs that we can work on to enjoy and value ourselves before we get involved with someone else in a relationship, including:
• Feel safe and secure;
• Develop a positive self-concept;
• Feel worthwhile (i.e., good self-esteem);
• Receive the respect of self and others;
• Develop close real-love relationships;
• Feel like we belong;
• Feel competent;
• And experience growth.

“Once you learn to take care of and nurture yourself, only then can you be in a healthy, positive relationship,” he said. “And it is perfectly fine to be by yourself on Valentine’s Day – or any day of the year.”

In Married Couples, Death May Not Entirely Do You Part

A person's quality of life at the time of their death continues to influence his or her spouse's quality of life in the years following the person's passing, according to new research by UA psychologists

Newswise, January 21, 2016 — As married couples spend day in and day out together, they begin to experience a level of interdependence in which one spouse's quality of life is very closely tied to that of the other.

This interdependence persists even after the death of one spouse, according to new research from the University of Arizona.

A person's quality of life at the time of their death continues to influence his or her spouse's quality of life in the years following the person's passing, according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

What's more, the association between a deceased and surviving spouse is just as strong as the association between partners who are both living, the researchers found.

"If your partner has higher quality of life before they pass away, you're more likely to have higher quality of life even after they're gone," said Kyle Bourassa, a UA psychology doctoral student and lead author of the paper.

"If he or she has lower quality of life before they pass away, you're then more likely to have lower quality of life."

In previous work, Bourassa and his colleagues found evidence that a person’s cognitive functioning and health influence not only his or her own well-being but also the well-being of his or her partner. They wondered whether this interdependence continues when one of the partners passes away.

To find out, they turned to the multinational, representative Study of Health, Aging and Retirement in Europe, or SHARE, an ongoing research project with more than 80,000 aging adult participants across 18 European countries and Israel.

Specifically, they examined data from 546 couples in which one partner had died during the study period and data from 2,566 couples in which both partners were still living.

The researchers were surprised to find no observable difference in the strength of the interdependence in couples' quality of life when comparing widowed spouses with spouses whose partners remained alive. They replicated these findings in two independent samples from the SHARE study, while controlling for other factors that might have played a role, such as participants' health, age and number of years married.

"Even though your marriage ends in a literal sense when you lose your spouse, the effects of who the person was still seems to matter even after they're gone," Bourassa said. "I think that really says something about how important those relationships are."

While it's not entirely clear why the interdependence persists, it's likely that the thoughts and emotions a person experiences when reminiscing about a lost spouse may contribute to the ongoing connection, the researchers say.

"Relationships are something we develop over time and they are retained in our mind and memory and understanding of the world, and that continues even after physical separation," said Mary-Frances O'Connor, UA assistant professor of psychology and a co-author of the paper who specializes in grief and the grieving process.

Bourassa said the findings could have implications for end-of-life care and for helping those who have lost their spouses. "If you can boost someone's quality of life before they pass, that might affect not just their life, but the quality of life of their partner and their family."

Other authors on the paper were David Sbarra, UA associate professor of psychology, and Lindsey M. Knowles, UA psychology doctoral student.