Self-Compassion Can Protect You From Feeling Like A Burden When You Mess Things Up For Your Group

By guest blogger Itamar Shatz

It feels bad to know that you’ve messed up, especially when other people have to pay a price for your actions. Unfortunately, this feeling is something that most of us end up experiencing at one point or another — when we’re placed on a team with other people at school or at a job, for instance, and make a mistake that forces our team members to do more work as a result.

However, recent research, published in Social Psychology by James Wirth at Ohio State University and his colleagues, shows that there is a trait that can reduce those negative feelings, called “self-compassion”.



Self-compassion is composed of three components: self-kindness, which involves showing kindness to yourself, mindfulness, which involves keeping your emotions balanced, and common humanity, which involves recognising that everyone experiences challenges. Past work has shown that self-compassion can be beneficial from an emotional perspective, for example by protecting people who write about their emotional pain, and by helping people with chronic pain lead happier and more active lives.

To see whether self-compassion could also protect people from the negative feelings that occur when they perform poorly in a way that hurts their group, the researchers conducted a series of online experiments, each with around 160 to 300 participants.

In the first experiment, participants imagined playing a trivia game as part of a team. Some imagined that they performed as well as their team members, while others imagined that they performed poorly, and thus reduced the team’s number of correct answers.

In the second experiment, participants actually engaged in a team task, in which they saw three words, and had to find a fourth word that linked them together. Some participants were told that they performed as well as their team members (who were actually computer agents), while others were told that they performed worse and that as a result, the team did not get enough answers correct and would have to answer more questions as a penalty.

In both cases, when people performed (or imagined performing) poorly, they experienced more negative emotions, suffered from lower self-esteem, felt more burdensome and ostracised, and expected more exclusion from other group members.

However, self-compassion significantly reduced these negative outcomes: participants who were high in self-compassion did not experience as many negative emotions and concerns over being a burden as those who were low in self-compassion.

In two further experiments, the researchers attempted to untangle the effects of poor performance from those of harming one’s group. In one experiment, participants were either asked to recall a time when their poor performance harmed members of their group, or when they performed poorly but not in a way that harmed their group. In the other, participants engaged in the same word creativity task as before. This time, however, all participants were told that they performed worse than their team members, but some were told that their team would be impacted by this, while others were told that there would be no harm to their team.

These studies showed that when their poor performance also harmed other members of their group, participants felt more negative social consequences, such as feeling burdensome. Again, self-compassion seemed to buffer against these negative effects.

The study does have some limitations, as the researchers themselves note. For example, the experiments were conducted in an online setting, where participants did not directly experience the in-person social interaction that plays an important role in these kinds of situations. Still, it’s encouraging that most of the study’s main findings replicated across all of the individual experiments.

Overall, these findings help explain why some people feel crushed when they make mistakes, while others manage to cope well. Furthermore, they suggest that practising self-compassion might help you cope with difficult situations where you feel you are being a burden on others. For example, if you’re part of a group project and you make a mistake, you could benefit from reminding yourself that everyone makes mistakes sometimes, and that you shouldn’t be too hard on yourself if you do so. If you’re someone who’s not naturally self-compassionate, this may be difficult, but as the researchers note, with enough practice, it might be possible to increase your self-compassion over time.

SOURCE:

https://digest.bps.org.uk/2020/07/02/self-compassion-can-protect-you-from-feeling-like-a-burden-when-you-mess-things-up-for-your-group/(accessed 6.7.20)

Memory Complaints Are More Common Among Older Adults With Particular Personality Traits

By Emma Young

Memory complaints are fairly common among elderly people. Together with low participation in cognitively demanding activities, such as reading or doing crosswords, they can predict future declines — including the risk of developing dementia.

It might seem likely, then, that people with poorer cognitive functioning may report more problems, and may be less able to engage in (and so benefit from) reading or other stimulating activities. However, a new paper, published in Psychology and Aging, suggests that another factor is more important in predicting both these complaints and engagement in stimulating activities: personality.

The researchers, led by Patrick Hill at Washington University in St Louis, analysed data from 136 Swiss older adults, with an average age of about 70. (The data came from a bigger study into how the everyday behaviour of older people is linked to maintaining or improving wellbeing and health). The participants first completed a series of lab-based cognitive tasks, including memory tests, and self-report questionnaires, which included an assessment of the “Big Five” personality traits. Then, at the end of each of the next ten days, they used smartphones to report on any cognitive complaints during that day (e.g. “I misplaced or lost an object such as keys or glasses”), and also instances of cognitive engagement (e.g. “I enjoyed thinking about a complicated problem”).

Taking into account each participant’s age, education level and subjective health, the team then looked at how initial cognitive task results and personality trait scores might relate to the subsequent smartphone data.

They found that the number of daily cognitive complaints was significantly correlated with scores on all of the personality traits, but just one of the measures of cognitive performance (processing speed). Strikingly, scores on the two initial specific memory tests did not correlate with daily cognitive complaints. (This somewhat surprising observation is in fact supported by recent work that suggests our cognitive self-perceptions are relatively distinct from our actual performance).

When all of these variables were put into a model, however, only one factor emerged as being key. This was openness to experience, a personality trait that entails a liking for intellectual and artistic pursuits, and a willingness to try new things. Participants who initially scored higher for openness went on to report, on average, fewer cognitive complaints each day, and also more, and more varied, cognitive engagement.

There may be two reasons for this, the researchers suggest. Firstly, measures of openness tap into a person’s self-perceptions of their intellectual ability and creativity. People with a stronger belief in their intellectual capacities may perceive fewer cognitive issues in daily life. Secondly, people who are more open are of course more willing to engage in varied novel experiences. Because they enjoy intellectual activities, they may be driven to think more, and in more different ways — and this could protect against cognitive decline. In fact, there are other recent findings that diversity in cognitive activity, rather than total time spent in these kinds of tasks, may be more beneficial for cognitive performance in older age.

The work also suggests that in understanding why some interventions work better for some older people than others, personality traits should be taken into account. Also, interventions that encourage openness may potentially be more effective.

However, as the researchers themselves add, all of the personality traits, demographic variables and initial cognitive performance measures only account for a small amount of the differences in the level of cognitive complaints and engagement between people. The team would like to see more work to drill into potential links with personality in finer detail. But other factors that are yet to be well-characterised — levels of stress, perhaps — may well turn out to be far more important.

SOURCE:

https://digest.bps.org.uk/2020/05/20/memory-complaints-are-more-common-among-older-adults-with-particular-personality-traits/(accessed 22.5.20)

Here’s How Long-Distance Runners Are Different From The Rest Of Us

By Emily Reynolds

For many, running a marathon is seen as the ultimate amateur athletic achievement; for others, it’s just the start. Ultramarathon runners often take on courses of incredibly impressive length, running 50 or 100 kilometres at one time or over several days.

Clearly this is physically demanding, and only those in seriously good shape will be able to take on such challenges — ultramarathon running involves stress on muscles and bones, blisters, dehydration, sleep deprivation and mental and physical fatigue, so it’s really not for the faint of heart.

But what about the psychological traits that make someone suitable for long-distance running? What kind of person can withstand this kind of physical stress, and how? A new study in the Australian Journal of Psychology takes a look.

Gregory Roebuck from Monash University and colleagues recruited 20 ultrarunners and 20 control participants aged between 18 and 70; runners were matched with non-runners by gender and age. Participants were asked about their exercise behaviours and running experiences before completing a number of questionnaires. These included a 25-item scale designed to measure resilience (with participants rating how much they agreed with statements such as “I am able to adapt when changes occur”), and two questionnaires that looked at emotion regulation — the ways a person moderates or expresses their emotion. Finally, a 155-item questionnaire looked at a range of personality traits across domains like well-being, achievement, stress reaction, and, aggression.

Next, participants took part in an emotion regulation task, viewing 36 neutral images (e.g. a sofa or chair) and 36 negative images (e.g. a bloody medical scene). Before viewing each image, participants were asked to either respond naturally to it (a “look” trial) or attempt to not have a negative reaction to it (a “decrease” trial), before rating the strength of their emotional response. Heart rate and skin conductance were measured during this section of the experiment.

Ultrarunners scored significantly higher on the resilience questionnaire than non-runners, and were more likely to indicate they used positive reappraisal when regulating their emotions — in other words, they were better able to reframe a situation with a positive angle. This may be down to the need to maintain high levels of motivation during races, attaching positive meaning to negative events in order to keep running.

There was also a physiological difference between ultrarunners and non-runners in the emotion regulation task, with ultrarunners showing reduced skin conductance and heart rate even when viewing unpleasant images. However, they didn’t show any differences in their ability to decrease their response to negative images.

There was one measure on which ultrarunners scored lower, however — affiliative extraversion, which measures how socially warm people are, which the team puts down to the high levels of solitude involved in long-distance running. There was no significant difference in any of the other measures.

The results suggest that ultrarunners are pretty similar to the rest of us — with some important differences. While it’s clear that ultrarunners are indeed more resilient than non-runners, and use different emotion regulation strategies, the direction of those relationships is not yet clear. It could be that training for ultramarathons makes people more resilient, or, on the other hand, it could be that people with higher levels of resilience are more likely to be attracted to the pastime.

It would be interesting to further explore how ultrarunners motivate themselves through many hours of pain and effort. Because even though most of us will never run 100 kilometres in one go (and may have no desire to, either), understanding how to tolerate pain, and cope with physical and mental fatigue, is a lesson we all could benefit from.

SOURCE:

https://digest.bps.org.uk/2020/04/22/heres-how-long-distance-runners-are-different-from-the-rest-of-us/#more-39510(accessed 23.4.20)

How People Judge Your Personality Based On Your Name

Extraversion, thy name is Katie. And Jack. And Carter. But not, it turns out, Joanna, Owen, or Lauren: these individuals instead embody different traits, like emotionality and agreeableness.

At least, that’s how people rated the personalities of those names in a recent paper published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. According to the study, we associate the sounds in names with certain traits: names containing k and t sounds are judged as having quite different profiles than those with the more resonant n or l sounds. It will come as no surprise, however, that in the real world Katies are not actually any more likely to be extraverted than Laurens.

Past studies have found that people tend to associate particular sounds with certain shapes: the word “bouba” with a round shape and “kiki” with a spiky one, for example. And we may also instinctively associate shapes and sounds with particular emotional states.

But David Sidhu and colleagues at the University of Calgary were interested in whether people relate sounds to more abstract concepts, like personalities. In particular, the team wanted to know whether we judge people’s personalities differently depending on whether their names contain “sonorants” — resonant or nasal sounds like m, l and n — or “voiceless stops” — short sounds that are formed by blocking air flow in the vocal tract, such as t, k and p.

Across three studies, the team showed a total of 180 participants a series of traits that reflect different aspects of personality like conscientiousness (e.g. “hard-working”) or extraversion (e.g. “social”). At the same time, they displayed names that contained either sonorants (e.g. “Lauren”) or voiceless stops (e.g. “Katie”).

In one study, participants saw a pair of names, and had to pick which one best matched a given trait, while in another they saw a single name, and had to rate how well the trait described that person. In a third study, participants rated the personalities of made-up names with similar sounds: “Mauren” instead of Lauren; “Tatie” instead of Katie.

In all three studies, participants rated sonorant names like Lauren higher on agreeableness, and in two of the studies they also rated them higher in emotionality and conscientiousness. In contrast, voiceless stop names like Katie were rated higher in extraversion.

Why would people rate certain names as being more extraverted or more agreeable? Perhaps, reasoned the researchers, in the real world people’s names truly do reflect their personalities. So in another study, they asked more than 1,000 participants to complete online personality surveys — but found no real evidence for a link between the participants’ personalities and the sounds in their own names.

Another possibility is that people have already made associations between particular names and traits: perhaps they have a particularly agreeable friend called Lauren, for example. But the fact that the researchers saw the same effects even for made-up names suggests that this is not the case.

Instead, the researchers suggest, we may have learned to associate certain sounds with particular emotional contexts. For example, people may tend to use softer, sonorant sounds in calmer situations, and so we perceive those with sonorant sounds in their names — the Laurens and the Owens — as more agreeable and conscientious. Alternatively, the relationship between sound and personality could be more metaphorical: the short abrupt sounds in “Jack” and “Katie”, for instance, might bring to mind the quick, bouncy energy of someone with a more extraverted personality.

Whatever the reason, it seems unlikely that the information gleaned from the sounds in a name will have much impact on how we judge a person in the real world, where we usually have a lot of other information about them. But knowing how a sound brings to mind other characteristics could be useful in some situations. A company naming its product probably should consider whether the sounds in the name will affect people’s perceptions, suggest the researchers, while an author might want to give their protagonist a name that fits their personality.

SOURCE:

https://digest.bps.org.uk/2019/09/05/how-people-judge-your-personality-based-on-your-name/(accessed 11.9.19)

Should You Listen To Music While Doing Intellectual Work? It Depends On The Music, The Task, And Your Personality

People more prone to boredom performed better without background music


Given how many of us listen to music while studying or doing other cerebral work, you’d think psychology would have a set of clear answers as to whether the practice is likely to help or hinder performance. In fact, the research literature is rather a mess (not that that has deterred some enterprising individuals from making bold claims).

There’s the largely discredited “Mozart Effect” – the idea that listening to classical music can boost subsequent IQ, except that when first documented in the 90s the effect was on spatial reasoning specifically, not general IQ. Also, since then the finding has not replicated, or it has proven weak and is probably explained as a simple effect of music on mood or arousal on performance. And anyway, that’s about listening to music and then doing mental tasks, rather than both simultaneously. Other research on listening to music while we do mental work has suggested it can be distracting (known as the “irrelevant sound effect”), especially if we’re doing mental arithmetic or anything that involves holding information in the correct order in short-term memory.

Now, in the hope of injecting more clarity and realism into the literature, Manuel Gonzalez and John Aiello have tested the common-sense idea that the effects of background music on mental task performance will depend on three things: the nature of the music, the nature of the task, and the personality of the person. “We hope that our findings encourage researchers to adopt a more holistic, interactionist approach to investigate the effects of music (and more broadly, distractions) on task performance,” they write in their new paper in Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied.



The researchers recruited 142 undergrads (75 per cent were women) and asked them to complete two mental tasks. The simpler task involved finding and crossing out all of the letter As in a sample of text. The more complex task involved studying lists of word pairs and then trying to recall the pairs when presented with just one word from each pair.

Each task was performed while listening to one of two versions of a piece of elevator-style instrumental music – composed for the research – or no music. One version of the music was more complex than the other, featuring additional bass and drum tracks (both versions are available via the Open Science Framework). Also, depending on the precise experimental condition, the music was either quiet or louder (62 or 78 decibels). The participants also completed part of the “boredom proneness scale” to establish whether they were the kind of person who likes plenty of external stimulation or not (as measured by their agreement with statements like “it takes a lot of change and variety to keep me really happy”).

Participants’ performance was explained by an interaction between the task, the music, and their preference for external stimulation. When performing the simpler task, participants not prone to boredom did better while listening to complex music than simple music or no music, whereas boredom prone participants showed the opposite pattern, performing better with no music at all or simple music. In terms of volume, the low boredom prone were better with quiet complex music, whereas the boredom prone did better with louder complex music.

The researchers’ explanation is that for low boredom people who aren’t so keen on external stimulation, the quieter, more complex music provided just enough distraction to stop them from mind wandering from the simple task, thus boosting their task focus and performance. In contrast, the more boredom prone participants who like external stimulation tuned in too much to the complex music and were overly distracted by it, thus performing worse than when working in silence.

For the more complex task, the precise nature of the music (its complexity and volume) made no difference to results. But people low in boredom proneness benefited from having any kind of music in the background (the researchers aren’t sure why, but perhaps there were mood or arousal-based benefits not measured in this study), whereas once again the boredom prone folk with a preference for external stimulation again actually performed better with no music.

Though these findings may seem counterintuitive, the researchers’ explanation is that, for boredom prone people, the complex task provided adequate stimulation and background music interfered with this productive engagement. Supporting this interpretation, the more boredom prone participants outperformed their less boredom prone peers at the task in the no-music condition (and at an earlier, baseline cognitive test), suggesting they engaged better with the tasks (the researchers additionally noted that this result challenges the way that boredom as an emotion is usually seen as a bad thing, suggesting “it can predict constructive outcomes, such as better complex task performance”).

If you consider yourself as prone to boredom and craving of external stimulation, a tentative implication of these findings – bearing in mind they are preliminary – is that you might be better off studying or do other cerebral work without music in the background, at least not music that is too complex. On the other hand, if you are less craving of stimulation, then paradoxically some background music could boost your performance. As the researchers stated: “we offer evidence against the commonly held belief that distractions like music will always harm task performance.” They added, “our findings suggest that the relationship between music and task performance is not ‘one-size-fits-all’. In other words, music does not appear to impair or benefit performance equally for everyone.”

Part of the problem with interpreting the results is in the ambiguity of the aspect of boredom proneness that the researchers looked at – “preference for external stimulation”. Past research has generally considered boredom proneness to be associated with less desirable aspects of personality, such as having less self-control and being more impetuous, and this could fit with the idea that boredom prone participants in this research were more distracted by background music. However, as mentioned, the participants scoring higher on “preference for external stimulation” generally performed better at the tasks, thus raising questions about what aspect of personality and/or mental aptitude was really being tapped by this measure. It doesn’t help matters that there was no direct measure of attentional control and focus in the study. (In terms of other relevant personality traits, prior research has found that introverts are more distracted than extraverts by highly arousing music).

Other obvious limitations include the question of how much the featured tasks resemble real-life challenges, and the fact that people often listen to music they know and like rather than unfamiliar, instrumental music.

Still, it’s laudable that the current research attempted to consider how various factors interact in explaining the effect of music on mental performance. Gonzalez and John Aiello concluded, “we hope our research will serve as a starting point for more systematic investigation of music.”

SOURCE:

https://digest.bps.org.uk/2019/02/15/should-you-listen-to-music-while-doing-intellectual-work-it-depends-on-the-music-the-task-and-your-personality/(accessed 21.2.19)

What does your selfie reveal about your personality?

People who pull selfie "duck faces" are seen
as lazy and emotionally unstable

The rise of the selfie (and its widespread use on social media) has given people more control than ever over the impression they present to the world. But to date, without any scientific testing, the choices people make about how to present themselves are presumably based on instinct. Now that can change (maybe).

Lin Qiu and his colleagues recruited 123 users of the popular Chinese Sina Weibo microblogging website (similar to Twitter) who pictured themselves with a selfie*. The researchers asked the participants to complete a personality questionnaire, and then they asked 107 Chinese students to look at the selfies and make their own judgments about the owners' personalities.

The researchers rated each selfie based on 13 cues: whether the poser adopted a duck face; pressed their lips together or not; looked at the camera; amount of emotional positivity; camera height; camera in front or to the side; amount of face on view; amount of body on display; whether location information was shown; whether a public location was revealed; a private location; and whether there was evidence of photoshop editing.

Writing in Computers in Human Behaviour, the researchers found several of these cues correlated with the participants' personalities. Specifically, people who scored higher in agreeableness (similar to friendliness) were more likely to show positive emotion in their selfies and to hold the camera in a lower position; high-scorers on conscientiousness were less likely to reveal a private location in the background (presumably because of concerns about privacy); people who scored higher in neuroticism (suggestive of emotional instability) were more likely to pull a duck face; and finally, higher scores in openness-to-experience correlated with showing more positive emotion. Levels of extraversion were not correlated with any of the cues, perhaps because so many people attempt to appear outgoing in their selfies.

So these were the actual links between cues in the selfies and the participants self-reported personality scores, but did the Chinese students instinctively use these cues to infer the personalities of the selfie owners? Mostly the answer was "no". There was strong agreement among the students about the participants' personalities, suggesting that people tend to make similar assumptions about personality based on cues in selfie pictures, but these assumptions were mostly wrong or simply not sensitive enough. The only personality trait detected with any level of accuracy was openness-to-experience – the observers correctly assumed that selfie-owners who showed more positive emotion were more open-minded.

What cues did the observers rely on? They assumed that more positive emotion and a lack of pressed lips were signs of extraversion; that positive emotion and looking to the camera were signs of agreeableness; that duck face and editing indicated low conscientiousness and photos in public places meant higher conscientiousness; and that negative emotion, duck face and a partially hidden face or zoomed in face, and being alone, were signs of neuroticism. Some of these assumptions were correct, but not sensitive enough to make meaningful inferences; other assumptions were just wrong.

The stark lesson from this research is that if you don't want people to assume that you are lazy and neurotic, drop the duck face. This research isn't quackery, but it does have some notable limitations, most obviously that the results might not apply in other cultures, and that the owners of the selfies rated their own personalities. Nonetheless, it makes a novel contribution, with the authors claiming theirs is the first ever study of links between personality and selfies. "By identifying valid cues related to selfie owners' personality traits," they said, "our research provides important information for future work to improve the accuracy of human or machine prediction of personality from selfies."

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SOURCE:

http://digest.bps.org.uk/2015/08/what-does-your-selfie-reveal-about-your.html?utm_source=BPS_Lyris_email&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=%5Brd%5D+%3D?UTF-8?B?VGhlIExhdGVzdCBQc3ljaG9sb2d5IFJlc2VhcmNoIA%3D%3D?%3D+%3D?UTF-8?B?4oCTwqBEaWdlc3RlZA%3D%3D?%3D(accessed 21.8.15)

Qiu, L., Lu, J., Yang, S., Qu, W., & Zhu, T. (2015). What does your selfie say about you?Computers in Human Behavior, 52, 443-449 DOI: 10.1016/j.chb.2015.06.032