You have read it in black and white: the economy is improving: Factories are hiring. Adding 200,000 jobs in December cut the unemployment rate to 8.5 percent. Consumer confidence is rising, and cars are selling again.

Meanwhile, corporate profits hit a record $2-trillion a year, and since the cataclysm in 2008, real gross domestic product, the broadest measure of goods and services, has grown for more than two years.

These economic measures are broad, ubiquitous and reliable, but there are other ways to measure the economy. If you poke around, you’ll find economists — on Wall Street and Elm Street alike — with their own idiosyncratic economic indicators.

Like the GDP and unemployment rate, many are less forecasting tools than measures of the current economy. That may diminish their prognostic value, but not their human-humorous-interest value.

To stay or to vacate?

Vacations, however necessary, can be expensive, and so when the economy tanked in 2008, we began to hear about the cost-cutting “staycation.” By taking time off from work (assuming we had a job…) without leaving home, we could enjoy friends, family and local attractions: parks, museums, lakes and beaches.

We could, in other words, enjoy many of the benefits of a vacation while ducking the hefty price tag. Staycations can have pizazz: would you rather be taking off your shoes in a frenetic airport or building a tree house with the kids?

We failed to find anybody who studies staycations, so the best we can say about their merit as economic indicators is that past performance is no guarantee of future success; read the full prospectus before investing!

Vacant at home

It doesn’t take a Rhodes scholar to deduce from foreclosure stats or photos of abandoned houses that housing remains a black hole in the American economy. But like the staycation, a foreclosure boom follows a sour economy, and is more informative about the immediate past than about the immediate future.

We were, however, intrigued to learn that foreclosure could be a disease vector. Clouds of mosquitoes are breeding in abandoned ponds and swimming pools at foreclosed homes in Arizona.

That gives us another reason to hate skeeters, even if their whine is the sound of love.

Sports: No rush to the finish line

Pro-sport tickets are not cheap, so a full stadium must signify a healthy economy. But it ain’t necessarily so, says Andrew Billings, who studies broadcasting and sports at the University of Alabama. “People often get a flawed picture from simply going by attendance figures. It depends on the sport.”

In the National Football League, he notes, “the majority of stadiums sell out, and demand far exceeds supply.” Before a sick economy leads to empty seats, he says, it deflates ticket prices on resale markets, “but you will still see a full stadium, and may think the economy must not be too bad, even if the demand is cut in half.”

And don’t bother counting duffers at a private golf course, either, Billings says. A full golf course “is not always a straight-off indicator of prosperity,” because the major expense is the cost of membership. “For many people, once they have bought the membership, the costs are sunk, and golf becomes the cheap option for entertainment.”

When money is tight, he says, “They may be playing twice as frequently because it’s already paid for.”

Big screen, big sales, bogus economic indicator?

You might think sales of pricy electronic goods, including those “mine-is-bigger-than-yours” TVs, would closely track prosperity, but Billings says they “may be another misleading measure.”

Many of those giant video screens, more suited to aircraft hangers than living rooms, are bought to watch sports, and looking at the full economic picture reveals the folly of the sales = prosperity equation, he says.

Consider the cost of season tickets for big-league sports — up to $20,000 for a seat behind home plate at the New York Yankees. When times get bad, Billings says, “The buyer may think, ‘Why don’t I get a $2,000 TV and the major-league baseball package? Once you add in parking and food, sports can be very expensive, and that makes the flat screen look pretty cheap.”

Although another flat-screen sale may contribute to the image of prosperity, Billings says, this fan “has really cut their budget to avoid going to the stadium.”

Pretty Byzantine?

How do we get a measure of economic activity in the long, dark epoch before the invention of the GDP or the flat-screen television? In the 14th century, during the death throes of the Byzantine empire, the church was an economic engine and a wealth center. If you bought a marriage license, you paid the church, which also owned buildings, even entire communities.

Because churches hold some of the best documents from the period, some scholars have proposed using records of church wealth as a proxy for economic development — or decline — during this benighted epoch before the spreadsheet was envisioned.

Garbage everywhere

With the possible exception of unwrapped broccoli from a local farm, everything you buy creates garbage, and the garbage disposal system is always affected by economic slowdowns.

Duh.

But we were surprised to hear that garbage can offer almost a real-time economic readout. According to Edward Humes, author of the forthcoming book Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash, “Until the housing bubble burst, the largest landfill in the country, by intake, was Puente Hills in Los Angeles County, which was taking up to the legal limit, 13,000 tons per day. This was cut in half after the housing bubble burst. Home construction and demolition debris fell as construction stopped, and people started buying less stuff.”

Construction fell so quickly, Humes says, that “Landfill operators probably saw [bad economic] things coming ahead of a lot of the rest of us.”

Even “durable goods” can quickly start bulking up the garbage stream, he says. “So much of what we buy is pretty ephemeral, even the stuff defined as durable goods must last just one year. A lot of it is designed to be thrown away; not fixed. The age of the TV repairman is long behind us.”

Garbage tells us about more than just economics, Humes adds. “It’s a little scary, one of our greatest exports is trash. We used to make things, and now we make trash.”

Although high garbage flows correlate to prosperity, Humes says the linkage cannot last forever. “Every culture figures out” that wasting resources is not a long-term solution, he says. “Suddenly, when resources are scarce, humans get more conscious of how much they have wasted, but by then it’s too late.”

Night lights, big city

Can lights at night, as seen from space, measure a region’s economy? After all, lighting requires bulbs, generators, energy and wires, so the argument has face validity. But a 2011 study returned mixed results. Night lights were a useful gauge in 25 percent to 33 percent of counties in the United States (excluding Alaska and Hawaii). In India, night lights gave a useful picture of local GDP in a “very small number” of districts.

And in China, fewer than 10 percent of districts showed a significant correlation between night lights and GDP. One reason: light from the intense coastal urbanization overwhelmed the satellite’s sensors and could not be measured accurately.

Underwater underwear

Alan Greenspan, who ran the Federal Reserve for oh-so-many years, was said to favor sales of men’s underwear as an economic indicator. His theory: When times get tight, men decide to forgo the pleasure of a new pair of briefs or boxers.

We were unable to unearth evidence for this notion, but wish to ask two follow-up questions: Do sales of women’s underwear convey an economic message? And how do you know?

Stick with lipstick?

If men can withstand the urge to buy boxers and briefs, women apparently can’t cut back on “small indulgences” like lipstick. In 2001, the chair of Estee Lauder coined “lipstick index” to explain why lipstick sales rise during a bad economy.

Going to war

For some, the military is a job of last resort, and so the number and quality of new recruits offers a proxy for economic conditions.

But military recruiting ads may be just as telling as the numbers. In 2009, the New York Times described a new Marines ad showing “men crawling through mud and under barbed wire, being smacked in the head with padded fighting sticks, vomiting after inhaling tear gas and diving, boots and all, into a swimming pool.”

With so many potential recruits in the job market, the ad didn’t bother soft-selling the rigors of Marine life.

Recouping the coupons

When pressed for coins, why not cash in on those coupons that clutter mailboxes and newspapers? In hard times, coupon redemptions do rise, according to a company that processes them.

Skirting the economic reality?

If we can believe QI, a quiz show from the United Kingdom, long hair and short skirts are both signs of prosperity. Hey, we tried, but failed, to track this revelation back to a legit study, but still give thanks to reader “St Ga” for the suggestion, and for an elegant mix-mastering of cause and effect: “If the government makes short skirts & long hair compulsory for EVERYONE will the economy improve? :)”

We wish.

Forget that secret childhood crush, forget those teenage indiscretions you posted on Facebook and cannot escape.

Is this your deepest secret — that you actually look forward to the holidays?

Lucky you. For the rest of us, we’re stuck on those holiday-stress media fretlines: over-drinking, under-sleeping and indecent exposure to idiotic in-laws.

Not to mention getting mauled at the mall.

These “Beware: awful-holidays ahead” warnings make little sense to us. Sure, there’s relentless pressure to consume — material goods, foods and alcohol alike. And even if the buy! pressure has intensified (did 24/7 coverage of Black Friday mean it was more important than killing Osama Bin Laden?), those holiday-stress headlines are nothing new.

And if the holidays are so horrid, why do we still have them?

In other words, what have Christmas, Hanukah and New Year’s and Kwanzaa done for us lately?

Maybe not so awful after all?

Because holidays are not (yet?) considered psychological disorders, they get less study than, say, post-traumatic stress disorder or autism. Still, The Why Files rounded up some experts — mainly positive psychologists — to discuss the upside of the holidays.

Holidays can be a spur to beneficial changes, says Robert McGrath, coordinator of student mind/body wellness services at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  ”The disruption to routine that they create can serve as an opportunity to change.  For example, if you’ve been meaning to catch up with a friend for months, the holidays may help bring that deeper priority to the surface.”

The tradition of cooking and distributing sweets can serve as an excuse to walk over to see neighbors we always intend to visit. And New Years resolutions can become a socially sanctioned reason to make beneficial changes to diet, exercise, social involvement or volunteerism.

Rituals, religious and otherwise

However, much of the power of holidays is embodied in things that don’t change, says Lee Ann de Reus, an associate professor of human development and family studies at Penn State University in Altoona. “One thing we know about healthy families is that they incorporate rituals, and that certainly comes with holidays, no matter what your tradition.”

Rituals, she says, can range all over the map, from attending religious services like midnight mass to holding ceremonial feasts at the same house, or eating the same foods, prepared by the same family cooks.

De Reus solicits examples from her students, and says, “Some open all their gifts on Christmas eve, some open one on Christmas eve and everything else next morning. Families may have traditions about who they invite for Hanukah or who takes part in ceremonies around the dinner table.”

Many traditions are unique and whimsical, de Reus adds. “In one family, everybody gets a new set of pajamas, and wears them to open gifts. They may watch a specific film or stay up all night playing Trivial Pursuit. And a lot of traditions revolve around food preparation.”

Reading ritual

Rituals are not just about repetition, de Reus says. “We know that ritual gives multiple things. It’s a way to transmit values, it’s a way to reconnect in a meaningful way, and it brings families together, even families that don’t necessarily get along outside the holidays.”

After a divorce, she says, tradition can temporarily trump animosity. “The parents may put their differences aside; they may come together for the sake of the children.”

College students from families that have split up “often can work it out, spending Christmas eve with one part of the family, and Christmas day with the other part,” says McGrath “But when it has not been worked out, they must choose to be with one parent, and the other one can feel very hurt.”

Ritual also provides a chance for a family to reconnect with its history, de Reus says. “If I ask college age students about their favorite memories about growing up, you can bet the majority are going to talk about some sort of event, memory, probably involving a ritual, often around a holiday or a birthday.”

Ritual, de Reus says, “tells us what are we about, helps a family to regain its center. Maybe they have strayed from these values, are too caught up in consumerism, materialism. It takes an assertive parent to push back against the larger societal pressures that exist around holidays: drinking, overindulgence, mass consumerism. I think we totally underestimate the value and importance of ritual in family life.”

Total togetherness

Holidays bring together many of the most important people in our lives, and, as McGrath points out, researchers regularly find a strong relationship between happiness and time with family and friends, “especially if the gathering is for positive reasons rather than to deal with problems. In terms of the positive experience, just being with people is the key. I don’t know that people come back from the holidays and say, ‘I did not get a good present.’”

The good-will that comes from these gatherings need not end with the holidays, McGrath says. “A positive note is to realize that you can enjoy those same activities daily: eat meals mindfully and enjoy them, have fun with friends and family, share stories, and practice giving often.”

What do you expect?

Part of the holiday-blues problem may exist in excessive expectations, says Leaf Van Boven, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Colorado. “There are very clear cultural stereotypes for what ought to happen at the holidays, for how people will behave, for gifts that will be exchanged. For most people, the holidays don’t meet that expectation, so there can be a sense of disappointment, but that is very different from saying we don’t actually enjoy ourselves.”

And while holidays can be times of reduced stress, “That’s not to say no stress, which is often the expectation,” says Van Boven. “For most people, holidays involve spending time with close others, family and friends.” Sure, those relationships can carry their own challenges, “but most people enjoy spending time with friends and family more than they do spending time at work.”

Money can’t buy me love

The pressure to buy, Buy! BUY!! can be a major source of holiday stress, but a growing body of evidence shows that ’tis truly “better to give than to receive.” In a 2008 study, Elizabeth Dunn, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, gave college students either $5 or $20, and directed them to spend it on themselves, or on a charitable donation or a gift by 5 p.m.

That night, the students who gave away the money reported a higher level of happiness, and the real kicker was being with the beneficiary, Dunn adds. “We did not say you have to give it and walk away. A lot of people took a friend for lunch or bought a toy for a younger sibling.”

The curious thing is that this preference does not operate at the conscious level, Dunn says. Most people think that it make them happier to receive $20 to spend on themselves, she says. “It’s not that they love to give, but when we give them those amounts to spend on someone else, they are more happy.”

For a 2010 study,¹ Dunn put players through a game that allowed them to donate money to another player, and found that the stingy players had less positive emotions, more negative emotions, and higher levels of both shame and stress hormones.

Not so bad after all?

If we’re getting the picture that giving reasonable gifts and hanging out with friends and family make the holidays less painful than medieval dentistry, that’s the message we got from a rare study of Christmas happiness. In 2002, Tim Kasser of Knox College (Illinois) found that a 57 percent of a small sample said Christmas was not stressful.

That, Kasser told us by email, is still a “reasonably high level of stress … around the midpoint of the scale.” Women and people who focused on spending had higher levels of stress.

Yet Christmas may still be “merry,” Kasser wrote. “While levels of life satisfaction and negative emotions were more or less the same as what people report at other times of the year, people do report somewhat higher levels of pleasant emotions during Xmas.”

The study² found more satisfaction among people who focused on family time and took part in religious activities, and less among those who focused on consumption.

“It seems that connecting with others and with something ‘bigger than yourself’ promotes higher levels of well-being; that’s consistent with past research, as is the finding the materialism undermines well-being,” Kasser wrote. “It is not much fun to be fighting the crowds and most research shows that shopping is rarely an inherently engaging and interesting activity.”

(You’ve got to) Accentuate the positive

All of these observations seem to explain why the winter holidays have survived the headlines about holiday horrors. “The big three holidays are good ways of maximizing those things that we tend find most enjoyable, and probably go a long way toward explaining why they are so powerful emotionally, why they persist,” says Van Boven.

One way to cut holiday stress, Van Boven says, “Is to think about what we value in the holidays, what really matters, and then try to behave in way that reflects those values. Often that kind of exercise can be extremely transformative, will get you out of the gift-giving rat race, and more toward the development of social engagement.”

Dunn adds that giving can be more emotionally satisfying when it involves personal contact. “When you have the opportunity to give so you can see the positive impact, that’s when the potential happiness benefit of Christmas giving is greatest. If your mother-in-law loves pedicures, you could buy her a gift certificate, but I think the research shows that it’s better to make the appointment and go with her. That’s the critical piece. If you can turn the gift into an opportunity for social connection, that’s going to maximize the benefit.”

What causes your brain to switch from the quiet focus needed to read (or write) these words to the frantic, goggle-eyed arousal needed to confront a frothing dog or rabid boss?

That hyper condition, popularly called the fight-or-flight response, is a hormonally inflicted surge of stress that puts all systems on alert, raises the heart rate and blood pressure, and shifts blood from the gut to the muscles.

This is not when you want to be translating Latin or solving equations, but fight-or-flight certainly fulfills its evolutionary role of allowing the body and brain to survive threatening circumstances.

After the transition, the brain regulates attention differently: A person studying Japanese woodcuts is unlikely to notice someone prowling on the other side of the art library. A person cranked up on stress hormones is unlikely to miss the lurker.

Neuroscientists long ago fingered two “stress” hormones — cortisol and noradrenaline — as playing key roles in fight-or-flight and today, a study in Science helps confirm that noradrenaline, not cortisol, triggers the transition to a different level of attention. “Many people thought cortisol would have an effect on the attention process in the early phase, but our study shows cortisol probably is not as important” as noradrenaline, says first author Erno Hermans, of the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour at Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Center in Holland.

Putting the stress on stress

Image: Irréversible

According to some film critics, Irréversible was one of the most disturbing films of 2002. No wonder it stressed-out the study subjects!

To study the mental effects of stress, Hermans and colleagues put 80 subjects in a magnetic resonance imager and tracked the usage of oxygen in the brain to show which structures were active at any moment. Then the subjects watched parts of a French movie containing what Hermans calls “particularly horrific” scenes of violence.

The scans revealed changes in what’s called the salience network, which “is active in a general state of hyper-arousal, vigilance,” Hermans says. “It scans the environment for things that might be important, and allows you to redirect your attention.” The result is not just a change of focus, “but a switch to a state where a change of your focus becomes more likely.”

To confirm that the violent movie clip was triggering the stress response, the researchers measured heart rate and chemicals in the saliva.

Counting on cortisol

Long-term stress can lead to many problems, including the disabling post-traumatic stress disorder, and cortisol, which makes memories more vivid and plays a major role in the constant arousal and intrusive memories of PTSD, has long been considered a major player in stress in general.

“Stress research in humans has been very focused on cortisol for very good reason,” says Hermans, “as it’s linked to a number of very important features of stress in the body and also in the brain.”

In a second phase of the experiment, Hermans and his colleagues used drugs to block either cortisol or noradrenaline. Blocking cortisol did not prevent the changes in brain networks, but blocking noradrenaline did. “Because blocking noradrenaline results in a reduction in the salience network, this shows that noradrenaline is important for this reorganization of the brain,” Hermans says.

Courtesy Erno Hermans

This animation shows which areas of the brain are switched on by a stressful situation.

Stress or distress?

The new study helps explain our world, says Christopher Coe, a professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an expert in cortisol and stress. “As we all have subjectively experienced, a fearful stimulus can exert a galvanizing influence on us. It can reorient our attention and, when sufficiently provocative, make us feel more alert, energized and focused. This change in state is facilitated by the type of coordinated brain reaction described in this Science paper. We and our brains are mobilized in order to better analyze the situation, to quickly interpret and utilize incoming information … and to respond adaptively.”

Coe adds that although “it is reasonable to conclude” that cortisol is not initiating the change in salience, “nevertheless, because of cortisol’s widespread effects and potency, if its release into the blood stream is sustained, it may ultimately exert a more protracted effect on both the brain and other physiological functions.”

Changes in the mode of attention are a fact of life, Hermans says. “We are really selective about accepting information while doing a focused task,” but a threat “requires a switch so your brain can respond to significant things in the surroundings. The brain becomes more responsive to stimuli, the eyes are wide open, the pupils become larger, everything is focused on having more sensory intake.”

– David J. Tenenbaum

Almost four years after the economy started sliding into the Great Recession, unemployment in the United States is still at 9.1 percent. On Sept. 1, the White House announced that it expected a 9 percent rate at least through the presidential election.

And on Sept. 13, the Labor Department revealed that the poverty rate had reached 15.1 percent, a rate not seen since 1993. A family of four must have income below $22,314 to qualify as poor.

Those numbers hide even more grievous problems: Among blacks, the rate is 16.7 percent, and among all Americans under age 24, it’s 18 percent.

And if you count discouraged workers, who have quit looking for a job, and part-time workers who would prefer full-time work, the rate soars to 16.2 percent — or 14 million Americans.

All this, and the average period of unemployment has stretched to 22.9 weeks.

Who is looking for work? It’s easier to ask who isn’t…. According to new research from the Carsey Institute at the University of New Hampshire, men, single parents, young adults, and people with less education have been hit harder. Marybeth Mattingly, a research assistant professor of sociology who directs research on vulnerable families, says, “Jobs in manufacturing and construction have disappeared in the recession and they may or may not be coming back, and these tend to be jobs held by men and the less educated.”

Beyond the numbers

Unemployment is not just about economics. Psychologist Maria Jahoda argued in the 1930s that employment provides latent byproducts, hidden things,” says economist Arthur Goldsmith of Washington and Lee University. “She said people always see the explicit benefit — the wage — but employment also organizes your day, gives you a way to connect to other people, status; there are many other things associated with work. If all you do is say, ‘We have a lot of unemployment, the GNP is down 1.4 percent,’ you don’t capture the potential psychological and social costs.”

Goldsmith adds that developmental psychologist Erik Erikson said “your sense of self is undermined by an incapacity to become a self-sustaining member of society.”

In 2011, the psychological effects of unemployment are compounded by a devastating surge in foreclosures: Millions of families are confronting poverty and being forced to find a place to live. “Foreclosure has been an enormous part of this narrative that does not always happen with a wave of unemployment,” says Goldsmith.

And so we got to wondering. Beyond the obvious — and ominous — economic harm from unemployment, what does it do to self-esteem, psychological health, the willingness to get up and face the world with diminished prospects? In a time when so many people identify themselves by their occupation – what does it mean to be out of work?

Suffer the children

Being laid off, even when you are one of millions with the same problem, can lead to “why me?” questions, and to doubts about your self-worth, about your role and utility in society.

When the story ends with a well-paid, fulfilling job, these doubts usually answer themselves.

Otherwise, these doubts can easily lead to brooding, depression, despair, isolation and anxiety – even apparently to child abuse. A study presented in April¹ found that the incidence of shaken baby syndrome had doubled in the Great Recession (December 2007 through June 2010), compared to a prior period of prosperity.

Babies have weak neck muscles, so severe shaking can cause violent head movement and serious, even fatal brain injury. Shaking, often by angry, frustrated care-givers who cannot stop the baby’s crying, causes an estimated 1,300 such head injuries each year. Surviving children can have varying degrees of visual, motor or cognitive damage, or even end up in a permanent vegetative state — a coma.

Beyond a doubling of the rate of such abuse, the researchers also saw trends toward graver injury and a higher death rate, though they were not statistically significant.

Suffer the teachers!

In a study of school behavior among children of single mothers that started in the 1990s, Heather Hill, an assistant professor at the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration, found a higher level of problems among children of mothers who had been out of work years earlier.

The study was intended to explore the effects of welfare reform, which mandated that welfare mothers find jobs, and was performed when their children were 8 to 10 years old, five years after some of their mothers had been unemployed for at least three months.

The teachers reported a rise in both “external” problem behavior, such as acting out or disobedience, and “internal” behaviors, such as seeming depressed or anxious. “Problem behavior captures how they are coping, processing, as they have to sit in class, pay attention, stay on task, and do what they are told,” Hill told us.

Both categories of behavior were much more prevalent among the children of mothers who had been unemployed years earlier. The delayed reaction reflects the fact that early childhood sets the stage for future achievement and adjustment, Hill says. “The early years, prior to starting school, are very important for the developmental process.”

Life on the line?

The stakes in unemployment may be even greater, however. A new analysis of 42 studies, mainly performed in western nations, found a 63 percent increase in deaths (78 percent for men) among those who had been unemployed.

Although this deadly impact probably reflects financial and physical roots, not just emotional ones, “Our study results clearly indicate that unemployment is not just bad for your pocketbook; it’s also bad for your health,” said Joseph E. Schwartz, professor of psychiatry and behavioral science at the Stony Brook University School of Medicine in New York, in a press release. “The results suggest a causal relationship between unemployment and higher risk of death, as well as the need to identify strategies to minimize the adverse health effects of unemployment.”

Map: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics

The analysis of unemployment and mortality data, which covered 20 million people, showed that a significant history of job loss raised the risk of death by 75 percent among people younger than 50. The elevated risk of mortality was 25 percent among older people.

Bright spots in a dark picture

Could the woes of unemployment be temporary? In a study of 774 Germans who lost their jobs between 1984 and 2003, psychiatrist Isaac Galatzer-Levy of the New York University School of Medicine found that most people had regained their emotional equilibrium within a year.

The participants were divided into four groups based on how satisfied they with their lives. The largest group, 69 percent, reported a relatively high and stable level of life satisfaction before job loss, and although they were affected more severely by unemployment, a year later their life satisfaction was restored to its pre-unemployment level.

Although life satisfaction scores were less positive among the other subjects, the results tend to refute the standard view of unemployment, says Galatzer-Levy. “There’s a real concern that [unemployment] will have long-term implications on the mental well-being of a large portion of the work force. But this analysis suggests that people are able to cope with a job loss relatively well over time.”

We tried to reach Galatzer-Levy to ask how well results from Germany, where unemployment is lower than in the United States, apply to the United States, but we could not connect. But by looking at the same people before and after they lost their jobs, the study sidestepped a basic pitfall in understanding the psychological outcome of unemployment: the problem of causation.

A word on method

In science, an experiment is the cleanest way to establish cause and effect, but this technique does not apply to studying the psychology of persistent unemployment. Instead, researchers try to correlate unemployment and health, behavior or psychological well-being.

They ask, are people with jobs healthier, happier, or more stable than those without?

But finding that two things go together — are correlated — cannot distinguish cause and effect. To take an obvious example, unemployment could cause psychological depression, or depression could cause unemployment.

The correlation between unemployment and psychological harm dates to the Great Depression of the 1930s, Goldsmith says. To get a better picture of causality, researchers began to follow individuals over time, as the German study did. Having evidence of mental-health and job status in 2010 and again in 2011 helps pinpoint cause and effect, Goldsmith says, but “Unfortunately, many things could also happen during this period,” and some could override employment status.

A grimmer picture

In an effort to refine the methodology, Goldsmith and colleagues are completing a study on the psychology of unemployment, using data from 2002 and ‘03. The first step was to exclude people with a history of psychological difficulties.

“We focused on people who have never had a psychological problem, or had a first bout of poor mental health in the past year,” Goldsmith says. “We all lose girlfriends, dogs, our surfboards get dented, but these are pretty tough people.”

Among subjects who were fully employed and then were unemployed, the researchers statistically controlled for education, work experience, marital status, having children, and church membership, all of which can buffer assaults on mental health.

The goal, Goldsmith says, was to tease out the psychological effects of unemployment from the other slings and arrows of unfortunate fortune. “Suppose you were unemployed last year, and had your first ever bout of poor emotional well-being. It’s hard to believe that caused your unemployment, because we know you are resilient.”

The study, which has not yet passed peer review, included contributions from Tim Diette, Darrick Hamilton and William Darity Jr. The results, Goldsmith says, show that long-term joblessness has an especially severe emotional impact among those with more education. “This is not surprising, those are the kind of people who have an internal locus of control, a lot of self efficacy, have always had the sense that they could govern the things that happen to them.”

Similarly, a study of 9,570 people found that those who were conscientious — and likely to fulfill their obligations — had a 120 percent greater decrease in life satisfaction during unemployment. “Thus the positive relationship typically seen between conscientiousness and well-being is reversed: conscientiousness is therefore not always good for well-being,” the authors wrote².

Although Goldsmith found a small detriment following unemployment of less than 15 weeks, people with longer unemployment were almost twice as likely as employed people to evince depression, anxiety, or post-traumatic stress disorder. “These are not trivial diagnoses, they are very serious, can be long lasting,” Goldsmith says. “They can spill over and have effects on people around you.”

Thus the emotional fallout is not restricted to the 16 percent of Americans who are unemployed, discouraged, or involuntarily working part time, Goldsmith contends. “These people have spouses, children, grandchildren, and former coworkers. This says to policy makers that the cost of joblessness is more than financial, there is a substantial social consequence, and while we are having this debate about budget deficits, we ought not to forget that putting people to work does not just produce output, but also greater well-being as a society.”

— David J. Tenenbaum

In a world studded with intractable conflicts, none seems more nettlesome than he one between Israelis and Palestinians. In this and many other conflicts, people are often trained to believe the worst about the other side, who are variously stereotyped as immoral occupiers or immoral terrorists.

These conflicts, as history has shown, are not ideal for peacemaking based on compromise, and yet the conflicts in Northern Ireland and South Africa have come to peaceful resolutions.

But during the conflict, even mentioning the opposing side can backfire, says Eran Halperin, a professor of political psychology at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya Israel. “When you try to tell an Israeli something positive about a Palestinian, or vice versa, the immediate reaction is defensive. In many cases, they are not willing to hear positive information about the other side.”

A sideways approach, however, may be more effective at changing attitudes and creating a willingness to compromise. In a study just published in Science¹, Halperin and co-authors demonstrated that simply reading a few sentences about the successful resolutions of historic conflicts elsewhere made Israelis and Palestinians more amenable to compromise.

“There are positive pieces of information that the parties could absorb, that could lead to a change in positions,” says Halperin, “but people in almost every group involved in a conflict are not willing to hear it. But if you try to go more indirectly … to talk in a general way, you hope they will apply these beliefs to the other group, and this is what our results show.”

Testing tolerance

In a series of experiments, Halperin and colleagues asked Palestinians and Jewish and Arab Israelis to read a few paragraphs in a supposed “reading comprehension” test. Then, as part of a supposedly different study, the same people were asked about their attitudes toward the opposing side.

The tested paragraphs that contained a more positive interpretation of history strongly affected willingness to compromise to resolve conflicts.

Instead of confronting the subjects by stressing that the other side could change its views, Halperin says, the test paragraphs “say that people in other conflicts went through meaningful change in their positions and behavior, and we expect people to understand by themselves that this can happen here.”

The study opens a crack in the despair aroused by prolonged conflicts, says Halperin. “We have now the first indication of what kind of message we should convey to people, to make them more open to the other side. And we already have preliminary data showing that the exact same pattern occurs in other long-term intractable conflicts around the world.”

Still to come, he acknowledges, is “the biggest challenge, using a larger scale intervention to make these changes.” Using the education system and mass media, he proposes a “simple message: Groups change, and behavior that is violent and immoral is a result of a specific situation, leaders and economics. They are not the result of a long-term culture with a fixed character.”

The intervention was focused on hope, Halperin says. “One of the biggest barriers to peace is because people don’t have hope, they don’t believe that the other group can change. If you don’t believe the other side can change its attitude, and as a result its behavior, there is no reason to offer a gesture or compromise, to take a risk in negotiation, and then you can’t make any progress in any intergroup conflict.”

– David J. Tenenbaum

No duh.

Year after year, the greeting card and flower industries goad us to honor our mothers, and we Whyfilers are glad to comply. This year, we celebrate by exploring what we learned about mothers at the February, 2011, meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science — the AAAS.

It may sound obvious, but understanding mothering helps us understand our world!

In early life, your mother is likely to be your most important person, emotionally, cognitively and behaviorally.
Photo: Din Jimenez

Mothers make us better people (Duh?)

More than 50 years ago, when University of Wisconsin psychologist Harry Harlow separated infant monkeys from their mothers, they grew up anxious, jittery, emotional wrecks. It’s amazing to think somebody needed to prove the value of mother’s love, but during Harlow’s time, behaviorism — a psychology rooted in the study of rats — was ascendant.

Academic psychologists focused on stimulus and response, not on the intricacies of the heart.

Today, Harlow’s findings seem like simple common sense, but they made him a rock star to the public — and eventually to his academic colleagues.

Stephen Suomi, one of Harlow’s last graduate students, has continued this line of research at the National Institute of Child Health and Development, again using rhesus macaque monkeys to model human behavior.

Genes don’t equate with destiny.

Back in Harlow’s day, genes were seen as destiny. Now, scientists like Suomi are finding a more interesting and flexible interaction among genes, environment, behavior, hormones and brain structure.

Suomi says that like people, “Between 5 and 10 percent of macaques are unusually impulsive; they do stupid things that most monkeys would not try. They will confront a dominant monkey. Most monkeys know how to back off, but when these monkeys are in an aggressive encounter, somebody can get hurt.”

Similarly, by age 2, some children “are identified as highly aggressive and likely to stay highly aggressive as they grow up,” Suomi says. “At school, they cause classroom disruptions. By their teens, many can be found in prison or the morgue.” In both monkeys and people, “these features show up very early and are remarkably stable.”

Aggression shows up early in some people, often leading to time behind bars.
Photo: Washington State Legislature

Stay close, my baby

Psychologically and physically, the infant monkey is reliant on its mother. Infant macaques “are almost always in physical contact or within arm’s length of their mother,” says Suomi, “which forms a strong, enduring attachment bond that is the functional equivalent of the one that human infants form with a caregiver.”

After a couple of months, that bond is established and the infant starts to explore, using mother as a “secure base,” Suomi says. “If they lose access to her, any motivation to explore will disappear; they get unhappy.” As these developing monkeys spend hours playing with peers, “every behavior pattern for normal functioning is established.”

Harlow raised infant monkeys with inanimate replacements for the mother and saw a range of deranged behavior. These days, Suomi removes young monkeys from mother and raises them with other youngsters. These “peer-reared” monkeys (are you thinking Lord of the Flies?) — develop what Suomi calls “hyper attachments. They spend excessive amounts of time clinging to each other when they should be exploring their world.”

Under these circumstances, play never reaches the normal “intensity and complexity,” Suomi adds.

Peer-reared monkeys spend more time clinging to one another than being Curious Georges.
Photo: Noneotuho

I’m afraid. Why aren’t you?

To understand why this is of more than theoretical interest, we need to meet serotonin, a key chemical for communication among neurons. Some variants of the serotonin genes are linked to high rates of suicide, depression and incarceration, and serotonin metabolism is affected by Prozac and other drugs.

In behavior, Suomi says, the peer-reared monkeys resemble the 5 to 10 percent of normal monkeys that are naturally fearful, anxious and aggressive. Both groups have a defective use of serotonin, but in the peer-reared monkeys, “this is not a product of genetics, it’s a product of social experience.”

Certain variants of the serotonin gene — and also certain experiences — are associated with increased desire for alcohol, Suomi says. When adolescent monkeys attend “the monkey version of a happy hour, some consume more than others, and the peer-reared ones consume considerably more.”

Early experience, in fact, affects the activity of one-fifth of monkey’s entire genome, Suomi says.

Suomi’s studies also show that drinking behavior is crucially dependent on upbringing: a good “childhood” can cancel out the effects of “negative” genes. “If the monkey has a good mother, it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference. It does not matter which alleles [variants] are present; you have normal serotonin metabolism. A good mother protects those who carry this allele, and it’s the same story in aggression, the same story with alcohol. With a good mother, you drink less.”¹

Why does momma matter?

The role of genetics has been a highly controversial area in development. A century ago, genes were destiny: people were essentially robots acting out immutable genetic instructions.

Then the focus shifted to external factors, and autism, for example, was blamed on a “cold” mother. Within a few decades, the advances in analyzing the structure of genes returned genetic determinism to vogue, and researchers began to search, for example, for an autism gene.

That approach quickly faded, W. Thomas Boyce of the University of British Columbia told the AAAS, in favor of a more sophisticated “behavioral genetics” focused on gene-environment interactions.

Genetics is getting more complicated, less deterministic, and more interesting. In the new genetics, mommas matter, even after birth!
Photo: Jen Watson

Now, in recognition that chemicals that are modified by experience affect the activity of genes, that picture is being enlarged in a discipline called epigenetics. In this new view, genes affect our environment, and environment affects whether and how genes act.

“The old metaphor of the genome being a blueprint for constructing the developing brain is faulty in certain ways,” says Boyce. “It may be more accurate to say that we begin with a blueprint, and partly build the house, then the family moves in and the blueprint gets modified. There is a feedback that alters the expression of the blueprint, based on the experience of the individual living in the house.”

The long shadow of poverty

How does this play out in the real world? Unstable and unmarried families tend to be poor, and social class correlates with higher rates of asthma, disease and injuries, says Boyce. At birth, physicians routinely record measures like weight and gestational age as a rough gauge of health, but Boyce thinks they ought to add social factors to the mix.

In fact, a study² that tracked health and education in 4,667 infants born in Winnipeg, Canada, for 19 years showed that the traditional biological measurements were less predictive than social factors related to health and education.

Growing up economically poor could mean growing up with poorer health, too.
Photo: Bread for the World

Since “half the world’s children grow up in poverty,” Boyce says it would make sense to look more closely at social risk factors, rather than focus on physical measures. Given that “15 to 20 percent of the overall population is responsible for over half of medical, psychiatric morbidity, and physician and health care use,” understanding social risk factors could be a key step to ameliorating poor health, he says.

The fragile family

As the American family has changed — some would say disintegrated — social scientists have shifted their focus from divorce, to the “fragile families” formed by unmarried couples. In some fragile families, the mother is single; in others she and the father are cohabiting.

“About 40 percent of American children are born into an unmarried family now,” says Jeanne Brooks-Gunn of Columbia University, a principal investigator on the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing study.

The study is looking at the environments in which children are being raised, and which factors are most harmful to their health, welfare and education. “Some situations are stable, while others are not,” says Brooks-Gunn.

The Fragile Families study has followed about 5,000 children for nine years, with a focus on “stability and chaos, how they affect resources and investments in child well-being” Brooks-Gunn says. “Nobody will ever do this again; getting approval at 75 hospitals was a nightmare.”

Study personnel interviewed the mother within 24 hours of birth, and also a rather surprising 75 percent of the unwed fathers, Brooks-Gunn said. “Babies are darling, and everybody comes to the hospital to see them.”

The researchers then observed the children at home at ages 3, 5 and 9, to gather data on physical, social and psychological development, and they found the original optimism fading.

While rates have declined a bit, one quarter of all children, and half of black children, live with a single parent. Researchers continue to find high rates of physical, social and economic difficulties in non-married families.
Graph: The State of our Unions 2010, The National Marriage Project

“At birth, everybody expects things will go well; 75 percent of the [unwed] mothers believe they will marry the father,” Brooks-Gunn says, “but by year five, the relationship with the biological dad has ended for two thirds of these mothers. There is a huge increase in new partners, and in having children with a new partner.”

As a rule, the fathers who spent time with their children were those who had not had a child with another woman, says Brooks-Gunn. “And when the mother has a new partner, the father is out of the picture.”

The Fragile Family study³ found that:

• At age 3, children in stable families (whether married, co-habiting or a single mother), had better vocabulary than children of married or cohabiting parents in an unstable relationship.
• Children’s cognitive scores improved when their unwed parents marry.
• Each additional change in family structure increases the odds of behavioral problems. With more family and residential transitions, the mother becomes more likely to report stress and hitting her children.
• Conflicts in the parental relationship intensify behavior problems in children, regardless of the stability of the family structure.
• Having a single mother raises the odds of obesity, asthma, hospitalization and accidents.

Children of stable married couples scored best on the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-Revised, a standard intelligence test, implying better cognitive development. Beware: This does not prove that a stable marriage makes kids smarter; socioeconomic status and other factors still matter.
Data: FFCWS. Graph: J. Waldfogel et al, (2010). Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing. Future of Children, 20(2): 87-112.

This is not to say that simply being unmarried is the direct cause of all problems, given the many other factors in play, as Brooks-Gunn and colleagues noted. “While children born to unwed parents are at higher risk of low birth weight … women who are not married at the time of the birth are also more likely to smoke cigarettes and use illicit drugs during pregnancy, and less likely to receive prenatal care in the first trimester of their pregnancy, all of which are associated with low birth weight.”

Many factors may explain how a parental relationship affects children, Brooks-Gunn indicated:

• Parental resources: How much time, money and education?
• Parenting quality: How do the parents interact with the child?
• Father involvement: How present is he?
• Parental relationship: Are the parents stable and loving? Do they interact well with the child?
• Parental mental health: How well are the parents, psychologically?

Child-rearing outside of marriage is increasing among all women, especially among those with the least education.
Graph: The State of our Unions 2010, The National Marriage Project

The Fragile Family studies “add to a large body of earlier work that suggested that children who live with single or cohabiting parents fare worse as adolescents and young adults in terms of their educational outcomes, risk of teen birth, and attachment to school and the labor market than do children who grow up in married-couple families,” Brooks-Gunn and colleagues concluded.

Overall, the findings are distressing, Brooks-Gunn told the American Association for the Advancement of Science in February. “Our findings are more negative than I would expect. There is a lot of instability, and that affects this incredible disparity in how children are doing. This has incredible consequences for society. Forty percent of all kids are born into a non-married household. We are talking about diverging destinies.”

Ecuadorian mother and child
Photo: paggre

– David J. Tenenbaum

The prospect of peak coffee raises the menace of massive caffeine withdrawal, with hordes of headachy addicts rendered into grouchy slackers. Could a cut in coffee production also cost us the many health benefits that coffee seems to provide?

For ages, the bitter black brew has been scorned as jet fuel for jittery insomniacs, providing nothing more than a momentary surge of focus and energy.

But recently, some researchers are starting to see java as the juice of the gods: In some studies, coffee appears to be protective against dementia, type 2 diabetes and even several types of cancer.

Coffee, it turns out, is loaded with polyphenols, anti-oxidant chemicals that fight damaging free radicals, which are implicated in many of the diseases of aging.

Caveat quaffer

Before we fill our cup with a discussion of the health benefits of coffee, remember these cautions:

For all these reasons, we are not prescribing coffee as medicine. But then, do we drink coffee for medicine, or for the taste, the excuse to talk things over with a friend, the acceleration physical and mental energy?

So bottoms up, and let’s check some recent studies showing how coffee affects dementia, diabetes, cardiovascular disease and cancer

Coffee: Good for your brain?

Many studies over the past decade have suggested that coffee can partly block Parkinson’s disease, a movement disorder that afflicts millions of elders. In 2006, ² researchers reported on a 22-year study of Finns – who boast Earth’s highest average coffee consumption – and found that people who drank more than 10 cups a day had about one-quarter the risk of Parkinson’s as non-drinkers. (Do Finns ever finish guzzling? While only 5 percent of the sample abstained, about 10 percent drank at least 10 cups a day!)

The researchers suggested that since Parkinson’s may be caused by oxidative attack on neurons, coffee’s protection may arise from its anti-oxidants.

Several studies – the results are inconsistent but suggestive – have linked caffeine and coffee with a reduction in Alzheimer’s disease. In 2010, after a 21-year study, researchers from Finland and Sweden³ reported that “coffee drinking of three to five cups per day at midlife was associated with a decreased risk of dementia/Alzheimer’s disease by about 65 percent at late-life.”

Research using mice with a genetic tendency to Alzheimer’s shows that coffee and caffeine improve learning and memory while reducing the beta amyloid plaques that mark Alzheimer’s. In 2011, when Gary Arendash and Chuanhai Cao of the University of South Florida compared coffee, caffeine and decaf,⁴ coffee was most effective at stimulating chemicals that apparently defend against Alzheimer’s. The researchers wrote that “coffee may be the best source of caffeine to protect against [Alzheimer's disease]” because another coffee chemical acts with caffeine to enhance protection.

Arendash did not respond to our email but said in 2009 that he’s seen “evidence that caffeine could be a viable ‘treatment’ for established Alzheimer’s disease, and not simply a protective strategy. That’s important because caffeine is a safe drug for most people, it easily enters the brain, and it appears to directly affect the disease process.”

Coffee ‘n cancer

Can coffee help protect against cancer? Sometimes.

Photo Florida Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center

Caffeine removed harmful beta amyloid plaques from the brains of mice that simulate Alzheimer’s disease.

A study of coffee and liver cancer followed 60,323 Finns for a median of 19.3 years. After adjusting for factors like age, alcohol and smoking, the hazard ratio of those who drank four to five cups was 0.44.

Hazard ratio means the probability of an outcome, compared to the reference group (non-drinkers, in this case). All other things being equal, abstainers were three times as likely to get liver cancer as those who swilled eight cups a day.⁵

To decipher conflicting or inconclusive studies, scientists can pool data using meta-analysis, a technique that sets standards for acceptable studies and then statistically groups the results.

In 2010, Mia Hashibe, in the department of family and preventive medicine at the University of Utah re-analyzed⁶ nine studies and found a 39 percent reduction in mouth and throat cancers among people who drank at least four cups. “Since coffee is so widely used and there is a relatively high incidence and low survival rate of these forms of cancers, our results have important public health implications that need to be further addressed,” said Hashibe. With such a large sample, “We had more statistical power to detect associations between cancer and coffee.”

If we shift the focus to all cancers, a new meta-analysis⁷ of 59 studies showed that each additional cup of coffee reduced the incidence of cancer by 3 percent.

The results concerning breast cancer are less encouraging. A 2008 report⁸, based on data from 85,987 women, found no significant link to coffee, decaf or tea, except for a slight reduction in breast cancer among post-menopausal women who ingested a significant amount of caffeine.

Similarly, a 2009 study in the Netherlands ⁹ found no association between coffee and breast cancer.

Ironically, coffee contains a chemical that could stimulate the many breast cancers that respond to estrogen by growing, according to Clinton Allred, an assistant professor of nutrition at Texas A&M University. Allred, who has found large amounts of a plant estrogen called trigonelline in coffee, says, “This is one of the least studied compounds I have ever been around.”

In the lab, Allred showed that trigonelline can affect cells even when it is thousands of times more dilute than the effective concentration of isoflavone, a common plant estrogen found in soy.

Allred is not worried about trigonelline, since people have been guzzling coffee for a long time, and plant chemicals consumed in a whole food or beverage act differently than they do in isolation in the lab. “People with a healthy diet that is high in plant products are exposed to these kinds of compounds all the time.”

A diabetes connection?

Could coffee slow the epidemic of type 2 diabetes, which disrupts sugar metabolism, which raises blood sugar that harms small blood vessels in the kidney, eye and heart? A 2006 study¹⁰ of 88,259 American women showed that drinking at least four cups of coffee reduced the diabetes rate to 53 percent of the rate among non-drinkers. Although both coffee and decaf (but not tea), were beneficial, diabetes prevention was most closely linked to coffee intake rather than caffeine intake.

According to a meta-analysis¹¹ based on more than 450,000 people from Asia, North American and Europe, “Every additional cup of coffee consumed in a day was associated with a 7 percent reduction in the excess risk of diabetes type 2. … Drinking three to four cups of coffee per day was associated with an approximate 25 percent lower risk of diabetes… .”

If coffee reduces diabetes, could it deter cancers associated with diabetes? A 2007 exploration¹² of the soaring rate of cancer after World War II in Japan linked coffee to reductions in liver and pancreatic cancer in men, and liver, colon and endometrial cancer in women. The authors speculated that coffee could reduce resistance to insulin, “and may thereby reduce the risk of diabetes-related cancers such as colon, liver, pancreas and endometrium.”

A matter of the heart

A 2010 study¹³ of 37,514 Dutch people found a slight benefit for coffee in heart disease: People who drank two to three cups a day had only 79 percent the rate of heart disease as abstainers, but the reduction was not statistically significant. Above 4 cups per day, the rate returned close to the no-coffee rate. Coffee did not affect the rate of strokes.

However, Swedish researchers studied¹⁴ people after a heart attack, and found that drinking one to three cups of coffee reduced the odds of dying to 68 percent of the risk for abstainers.

We put down our coffee mug with a jittery hand, wondered whether swilling coffee could harm the heart, and phoned Richard Page, a professor of medicine at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Page, an expert in arrhythmias – the irregular heart rhythms that can cause deadly heart attacks – said, “It’s hard to demonstrate a relationship between caffeine consumption and arrhythmias, but there are case reports. I see a number of patients with arrhythmias, particularly atrial fibrillation, and occasionally we see some relationship with excessive consumption of caffeine.”

Although Page was not alarmed by coffee, he was not so sure about the mega-doses that were linked to health benefits in some studies. “I would be cautious; I have heard of a couple of adolescents developing atrial fibrillation (a hard-to-treat arrhythmia) after taking monster energy drinks; I don’t think such high doses of caffeine are good for people.”

The bottom line

If Captain C seems helpful against some cancers, dementia and diabetes, is it guaranteed to extend your life? No. A European study¹⁵, for example, found that “Neither coffee nor tea consumption was associated with stroke or all-cause mortality.”

A long American study, using data from 41,736 men (followed for 18 years), and 86, 214 women (24 years), found a slight, significant trend toward fewer deaths from all causes; those who drank at least six cups a day had a death rate just 80 percent (men) to 83 percent (women) of the non-drinkers. The main benefit was a reduction in cardiovascular disease.

However, coffee consumption did not affect cancer deaths, after adjusting for factors like obesity and smoking, and the authors concluded, ¹⁶ “The possibility of a modest benefit of coffee consumption on all-cause and cardiovascular disease mortality needs to be further investigated.”

Not exactly a ringing endorsement, but then, did we promise a simple answer?

Would you like your triple-espresso with soy milk?

Surveys show that 75 percent of Americans say they pray at least once a week. Studies have associated prayer with various social, economic and health benefits. But by what mechanism does an intimate “audience” with God confer those benefits?

Photo: flickr

A new study suggests how prayer may alleviate some of the distress caused by domestic violence.

Those questions are begging for answers, says Shane Sharp, author of a study published this week that looked at prayer among 62 past or present victims of domestic violence.

Using interviews, Sharp, a graduate student in sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, inquired about the impact of prayer. “I got into this sort of serendipitously,” he says. “I was looking at how religion influences the experience of intimate partner abuse victims, and I found that often prayer was helpful in managing negative emotions: anger, fear, depression. I looked at this as an opportunity to explain just how prayer was helping these individuals manage emotions.”

Power of interviews

Photo ca 1951, U.S. Dept. of Defense

A Marine prays for his unit just before an offensive against entrenched communist troops in Korea.

While sociologists traditionally rely on statistics to paint their pictures of modern lives, Sharp prefers in-depth interviews, a semi-journalistic approach that can take as long as two hours per person. “We try to understand social processes from the individual’s perspective,” he says. “I wanted to know how this was working through people’s eyes.”

Sharp contacted women in shelters in the Midwest, South, San Francisco and East Coast, and explored prayer in the context of the abuse experience. To those who wondered why a man might be interested in domestic violence, Sharp explained that he’d witnessed it as a child, and wanted to relate his interest in religion to the issue.

About 95 percent of the women Sharp talked to had experienced both physical and psychological abuse, he reported; the others had faced a single category.

Although there are, reputedly, “no atheists in foxholes,” Sharp did turn up a few atheists in the shelters. The others affiliated with a variety of Christian denominations, and “the vast majority” did pray in response to abuse, he says.

Sharp says one woman told him that prayer helped manage her sadness and depression. “When she prayed to God, she felt like there was somebody out there who cared about her, who saw her as someone of value.” In the words of a second woman, “When I pray, I feel like I am worth something. [Otherwise] I don’t feel like anyone values me.”

Sharp said prayer can help an abuse victim by allowing her to

The last example shows a negative side to prayer, Sharp says. “Forgiving might help her deal with her anger after she has left the relationship, but if it takes away the emotional motivation to leave, if she forgives and remains, prayer could be a double-edged sword.”

In a recent study of the wives of conservative Christian abusers, Sharp found, “They often remain in abusive marriages longer than they want to because of biblical prohibitions on divorce. But some reinterpreted scripture to develop a religious justification for divorce. There is good and bad here. Religion can keep you in an abusive situation longer than you’d like, or it can help you escape it.”

Photo: flickr

A new study finds that conversing with an “imaginary other” can explain many of the emotional benefits of prayer.

Who’s on the other end?

Sharp views prayer as interacting with an “imagined other,” which, almost paradoxically, requires that the person doing the praying believe that God is real. “I define prayer as an imaginary interaction with a deity; if people said they were talking to God, that was good enough for me,” he says.

The form of the prayer was irrelevant, Sharp adds. “Whether they held their hands up or were just lying down in bed, whether they were doing it in a community or in isolation, they were interacting with God. You believe there is somebody, some other, that is hearing you.”

An “imagined other” has advantages in the context of domestic violence, Sharp adds. “In a lot of cases, victims, because of the isolation tactics of abusers, don’t have anybody else. In the moment of conflict, when you need something to calm yourself down, to alleviate your fear, God is right there.”

There’s another benefit. “Because of the stigma of abuse, women are often ashamed and don’t want to talk to others, but they already think God knows everything, and so they can open up.”

– David J. Tenenbaum

Photo: Black Friday, 2010

Is this mob about to enter retail hell or retail heaven?

Christmas is pending, and it’s time for spending! Even if you flunked Black Friday and missed Cyber Monday, we expect you’ll be watching cashiers ring up stuff you want. Stuff you believe others want.

And stuff nobody in their right mind would want.

Marketing is focused on getting us to spend money. So how do marketers find new ways to poke holes in your wallet?

Courtesy Peter Kleppin

Feeling overwhelmed by marketing? So is the cynic lurking in the background.

One standby mechanism is simply the level of overall hype that attends the Christmas season, and if you’ve noticed an outsize share of retail hype this year, that may reflect our parlous times, says Lars Perner, an assistant professor of marketing at the University of Southern California. “This may be an extreme year. A lot of retailers probably banked on greater economic recovery than we had, so they brought in more goods than they did last year, when they anticipated the weak economy.”

Stocked with merchandise that will quickly de-value after Christmas, “They basically have become more aggressive,” says Perner. “We are even seeing pre-Thanksgiving sales, and many retailers have joined the trend of being open Thanksgiving day.”

The shopping compulsion

We asked Perner about Black Friday fever, and he agreed that compulsive bargain hunters do exist. “Some people get a psychological benefit from getting something on sale, quite aside from the product. They can end up buying things they do not need, that will end up in storage, just to get the good deal.”

1st photo: Cracker and Cheese. Rollover image: Just_[von]Bernard.

Attention Black Friday shoppers! We have deals to satisfy all your senses. Roll over to see store employees (in dark blue) guarding video games against desperate Black Friday shoppers.

That urge may be ancient, Perner added. “Some people get their arousal, enjoyment from sports. Some compete based on the best bargain, on getting something that is in short supply.” In the distant past, he says, “life was more difficult, we had to compete to get food. Now, when we live in a society where things are more affluent, they have retained much of the same instinct.”

Aggressive shopping, he says, “is a way to compete with other people, to get the satisfaction of getting these great deals, independent of any actual use you may have for the product.”

A touching moment

The Why Files

This manufacturer wants to show off the soft strap material; but touching also increases sales by creating a sense of ownership.

In their quest to stimulate the shopping imperative, scientists are turning to the five senses. Joann Peck, an associate professor of business at University of Wisconsin-Madison, noticed that little research had been devoted to the sense of touch in marketing, and she made that her specialty.

Obviously, touching conveys information about function, Peck acknowledges. “With a sweater, you get information on weight and texture.”

But touch does much more, Peck avers. In lab experiments, Peck asked student subjects to either play with a Slinky or simply touch its box, and then decide how much to pay for it. We figured playing with this classic toy would increase its value, but were surprised to learn that touching the box did likewise. Playing produced the biggest effect, says Peck, “but even if they just touched the box, that did more than not touching.”

Touching, Peck says, creates “psychological ownership, even if there are no product attributes related to touch. So you have to be careful what you touch.” The touch does not even need to occur, Peck says. “If you close your eyes and imagine touching a product, that can be as good as actually touching.”

Cultural differences affect the retail touchy-feelies, Peck adds. “In England, people are used to touching sheets, but here we use the thread count to measure softness. People who come over from England may rip open the package; they can’t believe they can’t touch the sheets.”

Package designers are busy putting tactile treats on razors, pens, pencils, even backpacks.

Touch can even operate through the mail, Peck says, noting that when a children’s museum solicited memberships using two versions of the same flier, the ones that carried a swatch of soft material elicited a better response.

The Why Files

Mail-order giant L.L. Bean had enough faith in the power of touch to paste a disk of touchy-feely material on a catalog last fall.

Because touching a soft object can improve mood, some stores place goods like sweaters near the entrance, with a placard encouraging customers to “Feel the softness.” But our touching tendency can result in finger smudges on fine clothes, so some stores have altered traffic patterns to fight unconscious product fondling en route to the kitchen or shoe departments.

The song of Christmas

You’re wandering, dazed but dogged, through retaildom, and the familiar holiday music hounds you through the aisles: Jingle Bells, Silent Night, O Come All Ye Faithful. The question of exactly how this music affects you fascinates Lisa Cavanaugh, an associate professor of marketing at the University of Southern California. “We often hear music but don’t know much about how it influence behavior,” she says.

Admittedly, minor-key music makes people sad and major-key music makes them happy. Because a rapid tempo causes us to move faster, Cavanaugh says fast-food restaurants like it, “because they need your chair for the next customer.”

Music can even be a defensive measure, Cavanaugh adds, describing a 24-hour convenience store that was worried that loitering teenagers would offend customers. “They started playing classical music in the parking lot, and the kids were annoyed: ‘This is not our music; this is not us.’ And they left.”

But Cavanaugh wanted to go deeper. For example, does in-store holiday music affect us differently if it’s religious (Joy to the World) or secular (Frosty the Snowman)? “Retailers often don’t distinguish religious from non-religious music, they just put it on,” she says. “I was interested in what type of music is playing, and how that may shape what people buy.”

Courtesy Lisa Cavanaugh.

Honey, would you snag a bottle of mouthwash and some soap — er, body wash — on your way home? Cavanaugh used this mock store to study consumer choices in the presence of different holiday music.

Cavanaugh found that secular music shifted people, particularly non-Christians, toward pricier brands: “They would buy Advil, or Dixie paper plates, over the store brand.” Why? Perhaps non-Christians are responding to holiday music because “even if you are not Christian and don’t celebrate the holiday, it’s as if knowing the script is enough, you know what you are supposed to do.”

When Cavanaugh allowed the subjects to donate money to a charity after the experiment, religious music increased donations by both Christians and non-Christians.

Sweet scent of spending success

We’ve known for years that the scent of fresh bread will boost home sales, but odor can also affect retail spending:

* A 1995 study in Las Vegas found a 45 percent boost in slot-machine take when odors were piped into the one-armed bandit section of a casino.

* A study from 2000 showed that a pleasant geranium scent made it easier to remember unfamiliar brands.

* A restaurant study from 2006¹ associated the odor of lavender, but not lemon, with a longer stay and a higher bill. The authors speculated that lavender works through relaxation.

Many studies show that pleasant scents improve attention, relaxation and generosity. But scents can also increase the all-important buying behavior.

Speaking of restaurants, a 2010 study² in France showed that waitresses got tips from a higher percentage of male customers if they wore makeup. Although women’s tipping behavior did not change significantly, the average men’s tip rose from 1.1 euros to 1.4 euros. With appropriate academic caution, the authors speculated that “perhaps” the explanation lay in the “greater physical or sexual attractiveness of waitresses when they wore makeup.”

How grand is my brand?

In marketing, brands are the shots heard around the world. Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Apple. The brand — and its representation in a logo — may be a firm’s most cherished possessions. A brand “gives an image of a product or company,” and it creates a relationship with a potential buyer, explains Ira Kalb, an assistant professor of marketing at the University of Southern California.

Tania Liu

Do these ceramic shoppers have favorite brands?

Kalb says a good brand can make life easier for buyers: When you walk into a store with a strong brand, he says, “You trust it, so you don’t have to think so hard about what you are going to buy.”

Product brands can be equally effective at stimulating the buying decision, Kalb says, because it “creates a shortcut for the buyer and inoculates the product against the competition.” iPhone buyers, he says, “Are very loyal, and most would not look at an Android phone.”

If used incautiously, a strong brand can backfire, Kalb says. The Clorox Company, for example, produces salad dressing, “but it would be totally insane to brand the salad dressing as Clorox. The company has identified itself with a product line [chlorinated cleansers] that is so far from salad dressing. This is a clear case where separate is better.”

A strong brand can also confuse, Kalb says. IBM, the computer company, went into the copier business, and Xerox, the copier company, sold computers, but both efforts staggered. Although IBM and Xerox both dominated their original markets, “but the brand identity prevented them from succeeding in other areas.”

Photo: Jim Robinson

On your mark, get set, shop! How do marketers put your spending in overdrive?

Thus it sometimes makes sense to abandon a good brand, Kalb says, noting that Toyota, Nissan and Honda all created luxury spin-offs as their market aged and grew more affluent. In the 1980s, Kalb says, “Japanese cars were good, but ugly. As baby boomers got wealthier, the Japanese auto manufacturer knew they could not use those corporate names, and they came up with Lexis, Infinity and Acura.”

“Brand carries both baggage and positives,” Kalb says, “and smart marketing people know when to use the corporate brand and when to use a separate one.”

Death is my brand

Brands can convey unconscious negative associations, according to research³ from Holland, which found that the brand of an insurance company “may (unintentionally) induce the fear of death under various conditions.”

Wikipedia

Vance Packard wrote about “the large-scale efforts being made, often with impressive success, to channel our unthinking habits, our purchasing decisions, and our thought processes by the use of insights gleaned from psychiatry and the social sciences.” Although Packard argued that consumers were putty in the hands of science-enabled marketers, many now doubt that marketing’s “awesome tools” attain anything approaching absolute autonomy on our spending.

Ouch!

After seeing the insurance logo, the subjects “had more mortality-related thoughts than participants in the no-brand control condition,” the authors wrote. We would not predict this, but the participants then spent more on entertainment and food, and had a higher regard for products produced domestically.

Those intimations of mortality caused terror, the authors believe. “Individuals confronted with an insurance brand, are unconsciously reminded of their mortality and use spending as a means to regulate their experienced terror. The current research shows that brands can sometimes automatically trigger unconscious, hidden motives, desires, and fears that have a significant impact on consumer behavior.”

If that isn’t disturbing enough, the researchers added that “these findings empirically verify that reducing existential anxiety is conceivable through lavish consumption.”

Modern marketing = manipulation?

The prospect that we can be ruled by things we don’t even notice was raised in 1957 ago by journalist Vance Packard, who warned that unethical, coercive tactics based on science could turn Americans into free-spending robots. In The Hidden Persuaders, Packard argued that the unconscious mind could seize control of behavior.

A second event in 1957, at a New Jersey drive-in theater, raised further alarms about persuasion run amok. This “experiment” supposedly proved that on-screen text, flashed faster than the conscious mind could register, increased purchases of Coca-Cola and popcorn. The study was considered proof that marketers could beam messages directly into our unconscious minds.

But many observers now consider the experiment a fraud that could never be replicated, and many doubt that it was even performed.

To those who believe the planet is being consumed by consumption, the annual X-mas spend-a-thon amounts to a Shopocalypse.

Just_[von]Bernard

Maybe we aren’t shopping automatons, but something awful persuasive seems to be going on here.

Ask a marketer, and he’ll tell you that modern marketers do not have the power to unconsciously manipulate us. “A marketer’s job is to get people to want to buy the product,” acknowledges Kalb, “in order to convince people to buy their’s versus another’s. I don’t think anything is wrong with that. If I am marketing a product, it’s because I think it’s better than the others. If I don’t feel mine is better, I would not sell the product.”

This does leave a gray area, as Kalb admits. “You are going to have good and bad marketers. But the bad ones won’t last long, people will find out about anything. The market is a harsh critic, and you may deceive others for a little while, but not for very long.”

You may have heard the grim news: Psychologists who study human happiness have concluded, based on studies of identical twins who were raised separately, that people have a fixed level of happiness.

The supposed static nature of happiness was described as the individual happiness “set point.” For reasons related to genetics or early childhood, some people were happy, and others were not, and there wasn’t a whole lot you could do about it.

The set-point reminds us of a thermostat, so we’ll call it the “happo-stat.”

This dismal idea sounds like a creation of economics — the dismal science — but in fact it came from psychology.

Now, to the rescue we read a study based on a German economic survey that began in 1984.

The study, published this week in PNAS, debunks the happo-stat, and shows that our circumstances indeed affect our happiness, and that happiness does vary over time.
About time, we say.

Sabotaging the set-point

The PNAS study examined data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, which interviews about 25,000 people annually. First author Bruce Headey, principal fellow at Melbourne University in Australia, told us that what really exploded the set-point theory was finding that about half of the study population moved at least 25 percentiles in the happiness level at some time between 1984 and 2008.

That meant a shift, for example, from the 25th to the 50th percentile in happiness.

If the happo-stat was real — if people are programmed to a certain level of happiness — that shift should not occur.

The data correlated several factors with those changes in happiness, says Headey. Being forcibly unemployed was a major negative force, but the length of the workweek also mattered. “People who wanted to work a whole lot more or less hours than they did were less happy than people working the right amount of hours.”

Neurotic mates were also associated with a decline in happiness, but being in a stable relationship was not linked to an increase in happiness, even though it is often considered a key to happiness. Those who focused on money and success were less happy than average, Headey says.

Overall, life goals and choices were at least as important as extroversion and having a stable partnership in changing the level of happiness.

Photo: Deutsche Fotothek

It’s uncertain what got these Germans smiling back in 1954, but they likely led a life of fluctuating happiness.

Not so fast!

Except for repeated unemployment, the German data did not show that events like marriage, employment or the death of a loved one had much impact over the long term, Headey says. “Most of what you would think a major change in life circumstances affects you for a year or less.”

Much of the change in happiness, he says, is due less to life events than to “the nature of your partner, your social activity, changes in lifestyle and life goals.”

We asked the standard correlation cavil: When things happen simultaneously, how to distinguish cause from effect: The rooster’s crow does not cause the dawn. Dwelling on finances or acquiring a batty spouse could cause unhappiness. Or unhappy people may tend to focus on money or have a weak spot for marrying dunderheads.

Photo: zitona qatar

The personal happostat may not be set by DNA or early childhood, as previously thought.

Hounding the happo-stat

Headey conceded the correlational questions, but added that a long-term study helps unravel cause from effect. “If you follow people over time, you can, up to a point, see what comes first and what comes second. By asking the same questions over and over, we could see that a change in life goals led to life satisfaction.”

The results make sense to Robert McGrath, a clinical psychologist who treats college students at University of Wisconsin-Madison. “In my general experience, there is not a set-point, people can adjust their lifestyles and it does have an effect on the level of satisfaction and happiness.”

The study confirms the doctrines of positive psychology, McGrath adds: Most people can change their level of happiness with a healthy lifestyle, regular exercise and good social contacts.

Undermining the happo-stat should be considered good news, Headey and colleagues wrote: “Arguably, set-point theory has been stultifying in its implication that long-term change is improbable and that a person’s happiness is little more than a printout of the characteristics that he/she was born with … . It followed that neither individual goals, choices, strategies, and skills, nor public policy decisions, could do much to enhance happiness.”

– David J. Tenenbaum