Psychological violence in marriage: France takes steps to make it illegal
French lawmakers intend to pass a controversial bill that will ban “psychological violence” in marital (or cohabitation) relationships. This bill is controversial because on the one hand “psychological violence” is a difficult concept to define (and may be even more difficult to prosecute). On the other hand, a number of studies have linked psychological violence to physical abuse, post-traumatic stress disorder, and behavioral problems in children. Thus, proponents argue that prosecuting psychological violence may reduce or prevent the occurrence of physical violence in relationships.
Psychological violence (intimidating, threatening, insulting, verbally abusing) in relationships has been found to significantly contribute to PTSD symptoms in victims (Basile et al, 2004). Psychological violence also correlated positively with physical violence. Relevant to France’s recent decision, Basile and colleagues argue that it is important for policy-makers and public health officials to consider various types of intimate partner violence (IPV) — physical violence, psychological violence, stalking, and sexual violence — and the heightened effects of a combination of these on the PTSD symptoms of victims. Further complicating the picture, Clarke et al (2007) report that psychological aggression in marriages contributes to a variety of behavior problems in children.
The recent move by the French government can serve as a reminder of the difficult nature of bringing social scientific research into the legal setting. What counts as “proof” in one setting (statistical relationships and narrative accounts, for example) differs from the other (prosecutable evidence). While the detrimental effects of psychological abuse may have growing support in psychological literature the transferral of this finding into the court setting is far from straightforward. Much of the difficulty arises from the lack of a clear definition of “psychological violence.” Further, the evidence of such harm is not as clear as the evidence of physical harm. Sheehan (2006) documents the difficulties of arguing “emotional abuse” cases of children in courts and it will be interesting to see if future cases in France will parallel this struggle.
Basile, Arias, Desai, & Thompson (2004). The Differential Association of Intimate Partner Physical, Sexual, Psychological, and Stalking Violence and Posttraumatic Stress Symptoms in a Nationally Representative Sample of Women. Journal of Traumatic Stress.
Sheehan (2006). Emotional Harm and Neglect: The Legal Response.
When something changes in our visual field, it seems obvious that the bigger the change the more likely it is that we would notice. However, much research has shown that in fact, we are often blind to large changes when we don’t know to focus on them. An interesting video posted on Boing Boing demonstrates the change-blindness effect well. In this experiment, participants walk over to a desk and are given a consent form to sign by an experimenter. When the experimenter bends down to “put the form away”, a completely different experimenter (wearing a different colored shirt) stands up and continues the instructions. Over 75% of participants fail to notice that the man who stands up is not the same man with whom they had just been conversing.
According to Simons and Ambinder (2005), most research on change blindness has shown that when a major change occurs outside of a person’s visual field (as opposed to a change that is visible as it happens) or in a situation where they are distracted, people are particularly bad at noticing any change. The failure to notice change seems to occur not because of an inability to represent visual information but because we aren’t very good at comparing information from before with information presented after the change. Change blindness is important to understand because people assume that they notice major changes when they actually do not. For example, in witness identification, people might not be accurate spotting differences between people coming and going. Another example, cited by the authors, is in driving safety; people assume they would notice a pedestrian crossing the street even if distracted by talking on a cell phone. The change-blindness effect shows us that we are not as capable of noticing changes in our visual environment as we think we are.
People finding themselves in a job where a boss or supervisor is aggressive should consider the reasons for the boss’ behavior. A survey from NPR news revealed several anecdotes describing how bosses abused their employees. The “double-dealing” supervisor, for instance, is said to be one of the worst type of bosses; this type of boss will threaten (perhaps with insults) an employee, then at a later time compliment the employee and completely ignore previous behavior. “The User” is said to be an aggressive type boss who has other individuals to assert his authoritative position. Basically telling others to be aggressive toward their peers. When this person receives negative feedback from their peers the boss turns on the individual.
Driving these behaviors, according to Fast & Cheng (2009) is the perception of incompetence on the part of the boss. However, when perceived competence has been restored, via self-affirmation, the aggressive behavior is reduced. The show “Talk of the Nation” discussed the psychology of the boss and speakers talked about culture as a contributing factor to the boss’ aggressive behavior.
In sum, company culture dictates whether the boss can get away with aggressive behavior. Also, the perceived competence on the part of the boss determines the likelihood of the boss being aggressive toward workers. It appears that complementing your boss is just as important as selecting where to work.
Read more: exploring the psychology of the boss
Read more: types of bosses
Fast, N., Chen, S. (2009) When the boss feels inadequate: power, incompetence, and aggression.
According to psychological professor Jean M. Twenge, Generation Me describes anyone born in the 1970s, 1980s, or 1990s — in the approaching 2010, this will mean people between the ages of 11 and 40. These are today’s young people, those who while remarkably diverse in many respects, share a unifying aspect: they are “unapologetically focused on the individual,” a trait inherited from their Boomer parents and fanned to extremes by the culture they engendered.
Is it true? Are we in a narcissism epidemic? Does the Generation Me really differ from their parents and grandparents? Social scientists have been interested in generational changes for decades. Questions about generational changes are of particular interest to psychologists who are interested in whether the broader sociocultural environment is linked with changes in personality attributes and attitudes. For example, Twenge (2008) has concluded that today’s young people have higher self-esteem, more inflated self views, higher levels of narcissism, and perhaps paradoxically, more misery than previous generations. Twenge has further tied these shifts in personality to shifts toward increased individualism and a focus on self-worth that she believes characterizes the culture of the United States in more recent decades. However, Donnellan and Trzesniewski’s (2009) most recent research led to suspicion about the strength of the evidence in support of Twenge’s broad ‘Generation Me’ claims. According to their opinions, there are two crucial issues about Twenge’s research on Generation Me: whether the evidence for generational differences is based on a sound methodology and how to best characterize the size of any generational differences. Instead they found more evidence for generational consistency than generational change in their studies and thus concluded that there are enough concerns to warrant caution and qualified statements about the evidence for ‘Generation Me.’
Based on these concerns, it might be better for social and personality psychologists to think carefully before drawing the blanket conclusion that today’s young people are much different from previous generations of youth. Whether today’s young people are more assertive, entitled, self-aggrandizement and miserable than ever before is still a question which deserves more research in the future.
Donnellan, M.B., & Trzesniewski, K.H. (2009). How Should We Study Generational ‘Changes’—Or Should We? A Critical Examination of the Evidence for ‘Generation Me’. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 3,775 – 784.
Twenge, J.M. (2008). Generation Me, the Origins of Birth Cohort Differences in Personality Traits, and Cross-temporal Meta-analysis. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 2, 1440-1454.
Will a new decade spell the end of Generation Me?
As the New Year approaches many people will be contemplating and setting New Year’s resolutions. Since many of those are likely to involve exercise programmes, I want to briefly cover some of the health attitude theories (Biddle and Nigg, 2000) that can provide us with important frameworks for understanding people’s motivations to undertake psychical activity and why ultimately, some people will succeed or fail to maintain those New Year’s resolutions.
Belief attitude theories tend to centre on the model of health belief (Becker et al. 1997), the theory of reasoned action (Ajzen and Fishbein, 1970) and the theory of planned behaviour (Ajzen and Madden, 1986). The health belief model suggests that a person’s beliefs about the health-enhancing value of exercise (physical fitness, psychological well-being) tends to be weighed against their perceived costs in participating in the activity (e.g. time, commitment etc) and the amount of social support (Kelly et al. 1991), which in turn will determine the person’s level of participation or subsequent withdrawal.
The theory of reasoned action and its successor the theory of planned behaviour focus primarily on the relationship between a person’s attitude to exercise and/or a person’s self-efficacy, social norms about exercise, and a person’s subsequent exercise behaviour. Both these theories suggest that a person’s intention to exercise reflects their personal beliefs about exercise (attitude), the social norms surrounding exercise (what their friends and families may think). Therefore a person’s attitude to their New Year’s resolution of beginning an exercise programme will predict the level of their participation, whether they commit to maintaining the activity long-term will also be influenced by other factors such as age and gender, (Motl et al., 2002).
Motivation
Sport Psychology
In just a few days we’ll have a resolution double-whammy. Not just a new year, but a new decade. Seems like a perfect time to be jotting down those resolutions (or publishing them online), right? Making resolutions is one thing…but what about keeping them? What can social psychology tell us that will help increase the odds that this time next year we’ll be proud of ourselves for the changes we’ve made?
In a recent study Lally et al. found that it can take anywhere from 18 to 254 days for a new habit to become automatic. While 254 days of gym trips and healthier eating may seem daunting, there’s small comfort in their finding that missing one day did not seem to influence the habit formation process. Weidemann et al. found that action-planning and coping-planning also affect behavior change, particularly in behaviors related to health. Additionally, developing an action plan early on and preparing mentally for the obstacles you may confront as you try to keep your goal (coping-planning, further explained here) can also help you keep your goal.
So,
- stick with your resolution for the long haul
- don’t beat yourself up too much if you miss a day
- develop a plan to help you reach your goal or keep your resolution
- mentally imagine yourself overcoming any obstacles
- and, while you’re at it, tell your friends, since that seems to help too!
(2009) Lally et al. How are habits formed: Modelling habit formation in the real world
(2009) Burkeman. This column will change your life, The Guardian
Photo by ~BostonBill~
A recent poll by the New York Times and CBS has highlighted the link between being jobless and a number of mental health issues including depression, anxiety, and insomnia. Unemployment is undoubtedly linked to one’s self-esteem and personal happiness during the period of joblessness but how does unemployment affect people after they return to a job?
Most research on how people perceive their own well-being (subjective well-being) has suggested that people have a relatively stable baseline level of happiness, which, although it can be temporarily altered by a traumatic event, is unchanged in the long-run. However, according to work by Lucas and colleagues (2004), our set points of well-being can actually be changed permanently, at least in the case of unemployment. After conducting a 15-year longitudinal study, the authors found that periods of unemployment lowered people’s baseline levels of life satisfaction long after they returned to a job, even when controlling for income. In fact, the larger the drop in life satisfaction during unemployment, the more likely that one’s set points of happiness remain drastically lower than they were pre-unemployment, even many years later. Furthermore, the researchers suggest that those whose life satisfaction suffer greatest during unemployment are also more likely to face unemployment later in life. So, not only does having lost your job hurt right now, being unemployed can alter your long-term life satisfaction; and a drastic drop in your long-term subjective well-being can lead to further incidents of unemployment.
Read more: Lucas, R., Clark, A., Georgellis, Y., and Diener, D.,(2004). Unemployment Alters the Set Point for Life Satisfaction. Psychological Science, 15, 1, 8-13.
New Year’s Resolutions and Memory: Self-protection and the Use of Negative Information
During the holiday season when surrounded by friends and family it is difficult not to reflect on the year gone by. As 2009 draws to a close many are contemplating what resolutions they’ll attempt to keep in the upcoming year. We spend a lot of time envisioning the hopes, dreams, and goals we’d like to achieve in 2010. Doing so requires us to reflect on the things about us or our lives that we aren’t very happy with. Memory with regard to the self is complex and often self-enhancing making it difficult to be realistic about negative feedback that will allow us to identify what needs to change. Recent work has demonstrated some flexibility in dealing with negative feedback (Sedikides & Green, 2009). The results include the already well-established self-protective effects that include simply avoiding negative information. In addition, Sedikides and Green (2009) have demonstrated the tendency to deal with negative feedback by channeling it into one’s goals (e.g., improving a skill) but only under specific circumstances like when feedback is provided by close others. Hopefully, we can all turn any negative aspects of our selves or our lives into positive goals and the motivation to achieve them and make the most of the fresh start this January 1st.
Memory as a Self-Protective Mechanism
F*** you, I won’t do what you tell me: Rage against the pop machine
Los Angeles band ‘Rage Against the Machine’ (RATM) has just secured the Christmas number one in the United Kingdom (UK) music charts. Following a viral social networking campaign, more than half a million people downloaded the seventeen year old expletive laden anti-authoritarian track ‘Killing in the Name’, in an orchestrated attempt to prevent an act from the ‘X-Factor’ television show becoming number one for the fifth consecutive year.
From a social psychology perspective, it is interesting to note how the two groups of supporters differed in terms of preferred purchase medium, namely download versus compact disc. Consequently, group membership can be seen to be polarised in terms of factors such as technically literacy, age, conservatism, and so on.
This ‘battle’ culminated in a live performance by RATM on BBC breakfast radio being abruptly faded out when the famously anti-establishment band embarked on the song’s climactic barrage of swearing despite, rather ironically given the lyrics, having “been told not to” by the BBC.
Whilst ’sticking it to the man’ in this way may be viewed as a triumph for anti-corporate ‘people power’, it is somewhat debatable who the real winner from from this ‘chart war’ actually was.
Since X-Factor champion Joe McElderry and RATM are actually both Sony artists, however, the multi-national mega-label will have benefited from the overall increased volume of sales irrespective of who became number one. Furthermore, corporations have previously exploited or created such apparent ‘grass-roots’ movements by means of ‘viral marketing campaigns’ and ’street teams’.
As a previous commentator on the strange relationship between the corporate music industry and bands purporting to subvert society once said, “ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?” (Lydon, 1978).
Alternatively, perhaps the real winners are, in fact, the homeless, since the charity Shelter that supports them received donations of around £70,000 through the RATM campaign. Interestingly, such pro-social altruism is typically not a characteristic that many would associate with young music fans, who are commonly stereotyped in the tabloid press as selfish and anti-social. Furthermore, RATM have also pledged to donate their royalties to the charity.
On that seasonally appropriate positive note, I wish you all “Merry Christmas!” *<|:{)}
Story in the Independent
Chamberlain , K. & Hodgetts, D. (2008). Social Identity Theory and Self-categorization Theory: A Historical Review
Hogg, M. A., Hohman, Z. P. & Rivera, J. E. (2008). Why Do People Join Groups? Three Motivational Accounts from Social Psychology
Hornsey, M. J. (2008). Social Psychology and Media: Critical Considerations
Iphone’s, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: Why lusting over cool technology and being immortalized may not be such a good thing after all
Remember when the iphone came out and people were paying exorbitantly high prices for it? Nevertheless, people made it clear that there was a demand and that they would pay the price deemed by the company selling it. While at first people were lusting for the object eventually some people began to abhor their previously prized technology and took action. One individual went as far as suing the company after the company significantly reduced the price because the object could not be sold or sold at a loss.
Take another story of a group of people wanting to fit in; for example, a rock band with a long history and influence that is nominated for the rock & roll hall of fame. However the band is denied several times after nomination. The band, who thought of themselves as outsiders, members would tell themselves, and others, that it was no big deal to not be inducted to the rock & roll hall of fame. Finally the band was accepted to the rock & roll hall of fame. While some might consider it a positive outcome there seems to be some debate on the importance to some band members with regard to their induction.
What do these two stories have in common? How do we make sense of the counterintuitive reasoning that first, we want something, but at a high cost or many failures, and when we get it perhaps we don’t care so much for it? Litt et al., 2009, reasoned that the mechanisms for wanting and the liking of, although not mutually exclusive, are being dissociated. Litt et al., 2009, noted that affect, how much the object was liked, moderates a person’s decision to pay more for and get rid of the object when given the chance. The researchers suggest that wanting is not necessarily affected by failure to obtain the object. On the other hand liking is more likely to be influenced by attainability. So perhaps paying a large sum of cash or being rejected several times may in turn influence how someone feels about what they wanted.
Read more: Iphone’s price cut 2007 story
Read more: Iggy Pop and the Hall of Fame Induction
Read more: Apple sued over dropping phone prices
Litt, A., Khan, U., Shiv, B. (2009). Lusting while loathing: Parallel counterdriving of wanting and liking.
