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.”

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

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

Whether it’s putting salt in the sugar bowl or a Whoopee Cushion on the boss’ chair, April Fools’ Day is to pranksters what Valentines’ Day is to lovers: an excuse to excel.

The whole point of the Day is to get some laughs at somebody else’s expense. And while nobody likes being the butt of the joke, for some people the fear of laughter goes much deeper. Psychologists have identified a small segment of the population who overhear laughter and believe it must be directed at them.

These are people who distrust a smile, and even have difficulty with joyful emotions, says Willibald Ruch, professor of psychology at the University of Zurich. He and his colleagues use a fearsome moniker for people who fear laughter: “Gelotophobia.” (“Gelo” is Greek for laughter.)

People who fear laughter can be identified by positive responses to questions like, “I would avoid a location where I have been laughed at repeatedly,” or “When I hear a stranger laughing, I assume it’s about me.”

In light of April Fools’, it’s tempting to scoff about fear of laughter, but the syndrome has a serious side, says Ruch, because people with an extreme case tend to isolate themselves to avoid the fear.

Laughter = threat?

Laughter can be happy or rueful, triumphant or submissive, mocking or menacing. But many people laugh while they enjoy themselves in a group, which exaggerates the social isolation that can result from fear of laughter.

» Learn More

evil laugh
The photographer called this an “evil laugh,” and we had to agree. We wonder how it makes her friends feel… Photo by katrinket.

In one case, Ruch says, a laugh-o-phobe could tolerate the giggling and laughing of people at a nearby table in a restaurant. But when the children joined it, he told the parents off: “Teach your children not to laugh at strangers!”

This kind of behavior may stem from ridicule during childhood, Ruch says, and it could play a role among criminals who complain that “everybody is laughing at me.”

The degree of laughter phobia varies from country to country, he adds, from a low of 2 percent in Denmark, to 20 percent or so in parts of Asia. “If your self-image depends more on what other people think of you, you would tend to be more worried, and more afraid of laughter,” he says.

They found

Ruch and colleagues have created tests to explore laughter phobia. In one test, study participants are asked to fill in blank speech balloons in cartoons showing a small group with some laughter. Comments such as “They are laughing at me” would indicate gelotophobia; “That’s a good joke” would indicate a more normal attitude toward laughter.

Early studies of gelotophobia had largely relied on such self-assessments. But a study published in 2009 showed that people who see themselves as afraid of laughter also show other signs of the fear. Study participants listened to 20 samples of laughter that was happy, silly, amused, mean-spirited, contemptuous, mocking or embarrassed, and tried to identify the laugher’s mood. As predicted, laughter-phobic people “heard” more negative emotions in the laugher.

» Learn More

Laugh as the Sun comes
Is this a shy smile, or an embarrassed one? What do you think? Photo by Arnett Gill.

For most people, laughter improves mood, and both the normals and those with slight fear of laughter did experience a boost in mood after hearing the laugh tracks. But the mood scores did not change for gelotophobes, and only 38 percent of them found the positive laughter to be pleasant.

Laughter phobia is not yet an official psychological diagnosis and is better seen as a “personality trait,” Ruch says. “We have the first data to show it overlaps with, but is distinct from, social phobia or social anxiety disorder. … We have considered it as an individual difference among people” that can share some features with paranoia.

Phobia about laughter is “definitely overlooked as a symptom” among psychologists, Ruch adds, yet for some people, it’s a real burden. “We’ve had Americans who say they would fly over [to Europe] if there were any treatment.”

No treatment has been proven to work, he says.

Humor me, now

We were intrigued to learn that some gelotophobes do have a sense of humor. “Many are as good as others at making up punch lines for cartoons,” says Ruch. An experimental humor training program did help “reduce the amount of fear of being laughed at,” he adds, “but for those who are intensely gelotophobic, it did not really help much.”

We have no idea what this horse is trying to say, but doesn’t it look like a mocking laugh? Horse Laugh by Bill Gracey.

The problem seems less related to humor and more to the emotions that laughter can trigger, Ruch says. “When the emotions get too high, if hilarity is there, they hate it. They don’t like laughter or smiles. Behind the smile, they would assume people are judging them negatively, thinking they are ridiculous. When they are in a situation where someone seems to be laughing at them, and they can fight back, the humor is not there. But if they are not feeling threatened, they are okay.”

April No-Fooling!

Bibliography

• How do gelotophobes interpret laughter in ambiguous situations? An experimental validation of the concept, Willibald Ruch et al, Humor 22, 2009, p. 63.
• Want to be an online lab rat for gelotophobia research?
• Suspect you are laugh-o-phobic?