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

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

Admit it: You love your dog, your cat, even your white rat.

And so you’re planning to lavish a platter of filet mignon on your doggy-love… a plank of sushi-grade tuna on kitty numero-uno, and some aged cheese on your rodent.

But do our dogs, cats and rats love us back?

Sure, parrots are endlessly uttering “I love you” on You Tube, and some bereaved dogs seem to grieve for their dead owners.

And yes, some animals “love” to spend time together.

But that doesn’t answer our nagging question: Can animals really love?

Or are we projecting our own feelings of affiliation, closeness, and passion on beasts that don’t have the mental machinery to love?

Almost like being in love?

More than half a century ago, Harry Harlow, a research psychologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, performed experiments that forever changed our view of human and animal emotions. At a time when academic psychologists explored learning and behavior by studying rats, when low-grade learning in a “Skinner Box” was considered high-grade science, when hospitals limited contact between mothers and their newborns, Harlow focused on maternal touch and the emotional life of monkeys.

Harlow removed infant macaques from their mothers, then raised them with a mother surrogate made of cloth or wire. In some experiments, both surrogates were present.

Monkeys with the cloth mommas grew up fairly normal, but infants raised with only the wire monkey became fearful and desperate. Their behavior was so bizarre that they seemed psychologically broken by the lack of a loving — or at least a cuddly-if-inanimate — mother.

Infants that had access to both types of bogus mother still relied on the cloth mother for reassurance even if the wire monkey held their bottle.

Harlow interpreted the lifelong devastation of maternal deprivation as proof that infant monkeys need love, and that became early, influential evidence that animals can love, says his biographer¹, Deborah Blum, a professor of journalism at UW-Madison. “Up until that point, people were arguing that these animals were not capable of having emotions. Harlow led the way in demonstrating that these animals loved, had affection, mattered to each other. He used the word ‘love’ very deliberately,” Blum adds, even though his fellow psychologists were highly skeptical, not to say scornful, of that notion.

It didn’t take popular psychology, aided by Harlow’s humorous, down-to-earth approach, long to realize that the then-current “scientific” preference for antiseptic infancy would deprive young people of necessary contact, Blum notes. The instinctive desire to hug an infant, it turned out, gained support from the most rigorous scientific experiments.

My romance

Scientists who say that primates need maternal love are no longer mocked by their peers. But what is love? Charles Snowdon, a UW-Madison professor of psychology who has explored primate behavior for 35 years, offers this definition: “a preference for one other individual that is more or less exclusive and long-lasting, and that transcends other relationships.”

Animal love is evident in behavior when animals are separated from their mates, Snowdon says. “In species that form lifelong attachments, if a mate dies or disappears, often the remaining mate does not form a new pair bond at all.”

Snowdon says the cotton-top tamarin he studied form strong attachments. “If they were separated, they would begin long calls, at a rate much higher than they would give when together. These plaintive calls would last for the entire 30 minutes of separation. When they were reunited, they cuddled and often had sex.”

As if that did not sound human enough, Snowdon next floored us by discussing “romantic love.” Decades ago, psychologists worked overtime to avoid being accused of anthropomorphism — projecting human qualities onto animals. Now it’s kosher to talk about an emotion once restricted to the primates that buy heart-shaped tchotchkes each February.

Snowdon says romantic love supports the bond in a mated pair, and it’s not just about primates. “Albatrosses and geese appear to form lifelong pair bonds, and robins, blue jays and cardinals might form relationships that last for at least one breeding season; these are strong attachments.”

Snowdon adds that experiments with titi monkeys belie the notion that the sole goal of animal attachment is to nurture the next generation. “If you separate the mother, father and infant from each other, and give them a choice, mothers and fathers choose to be with each other and ignore the baby. It is clear that pairs want to be with each other, to the exclusion of the baby.”

Like someone in love

While Harlow relied on observing behavior, today scientists study the brain chemicals that mold the Valentine’s heart. One key subject is the hormone oxytocin, which plays a critical role in social bonding and love, both animal and human.

Oxytocin, originally identified for its role in helping mothers bond with newborns, also rises in men and women after sex and other close, emotional encounters. In the big picture, oxytocin enables attachment in humans and other animals, Snowdon says. “You don’t find oxytocin elevated in animals unless they form an adult attachment with one other individual.”

The brain responds to dopamine, a feel-good chemical that is released during many pleasurable activities, including drug-taking. Dopamine also plays a role in animal love – and “marital” fidelity. Mated prairie voles have a higher level of a specific dopamine receptor in a brain region called the nucleus accumbens, says Karen Bales, an associate professor of psychology at the University of California at Davis. “When these are turned on, that prevents them from forming a second pair bond.”

When owners interact with their dogs, both sides have surges in oxytocin, says Bales, who studies primates at the California National Primate Research Center. “That puts a check in the ‘dogs can love’ box.”

Love fur sale

Because dogs are the most glaring example of an animal that seems to love people, we phoned Patricia McConnell, an author³, and animal behaviorist at UW-Madison. She gave us two key reasons why dogs can love: “Their physiology for creating social attachment is so similar to ours, and they behave in ways that, if any human did it, we’d label it love, attachment.”

Like many other mammals, dogs respond to oxytocin: “It’s a huge part of social attachment, and physiologically it’s almost an exact replica of oxytocin in humans,” McConnell says.

Dogs appear to grieve, McConnell adds. “They get distressed when someone they are attached to is gone. There are lots of credible examples of dogs risking their lives to save a human. We are so different from dogs in so many ways, but in some ways, we are more similar to them than to other animals. What other species is obsessed with the fate of a ball?”

If dogs love us, what about each other? “Absolutely, yes,” says McConnell. “I have seen dogs behave as if they instantly fell in love: they are animated, their eyes were shining, they were extra playful. But I’ve also seen dogs that clearly took an instant dislike to each other.”

Dogs, like people, are picky, so it’s not always possible to replace a deceased member of a tight pair, McConnell says. “When people get another dog, they’re often surprised that the resident dog is not thrilled. We see the exact same thing in people: Personalities can clash or meld. When someone you know dies, it will not help if a stranger walks in off the street.”

You don’t know what love is

Still, animals can’t say what they are feeling, and so we must rely on measurements and observations. Interpreting animal behavior can be difficult, says Marga Vicedo, a historian of science at the University of Toronto who has written about Harlow’s experiments.⁴

Vicedo recalls members of an animal-behavior seminar who would “discuss, week after week, how you would interpret it when they look left — or right? You are seeing a behavior, and from the behavior, you have to hypothesize about the emotions, but there is not a perfect correlation between animal and human emotions.”

Interpreting the emotional basis of behavior is difficult enough with people, Vicedo observes. “We may laugh at a meeting, but inside we are depressed. You can only observe behavior, and have to figure out its relationship to emotion and feeling.”

Stephen Marc Breedlove, who studies hormones and behavior at Michigan State University, reiterated that problem. “Whether you think your dog loves you or your boyfriend loves you, there is the same problem: you see the behavior and from that, you infer these feelings. With a partner, you can ask, but since people do lie, that is not completely reliable.”

My one and only love?

Our improved understanding of what’s going on inside the brain provides more ways to analyze animal emotion, Breedlove says. “In certain species, there is neural circuitry that helps monogamous pairs stay attached to one another. We know the same systems can be present in humans — and although we don’t know they serve the exact same function, there is some danger in insisting we are absolutely unique in every way. Natural selection produces a continuum of traits, we can’t have something arise from nothing.”

Indeed, evolution is a great re-user of its own inventions, as Breedlove stresses. “What is the evidence that makes you think love arose absolutely de novo [without precedent] in our species? And then, when did it arise, in Mesopotamia?”

The notion that animals can love is part of a scientific sea change. Once upon a time — even after Harlow — identifying emotions in animals was considered anthropomorphism, a fatal fallacy that could ruin a career in psychology or animal behavior.

Now, we have seen a “change in the zeitgeist [the spirit of the time],” says Breedlove. “People are open to the possibility that animals have emotions, and I think that is a step forward, a sign of maturity of the field. Anthropomorphism is definitely a risky business, but people are less worried that they will be written off as cranks just because they say something that could be interpreted as anthropomorphism.”

As we’ve seen, many scientists are even willing to discuss parallels in animal and human love. Heresy!

Almost like being in love

In burying the old “animals are just beasts that cannot have feelings” mentality, nobody has been more influential than primatologist Frans de Waal of Emory University. When we asked whether animals can love, he responded, “Mammals are almost made for attachment, because of their maternal care obligations, the female is attached to her offspring and vice versa. There is a whole brain circuitry attached to that.”

Still, the subjective aspect is hard to know, de Waal admits. Even though studies find attachment, affiliation — and arguably love — in rodents, dogs and primates, “what they experience is not something we can know, but given that they show all the signs of attachment, they spend time together, are distressed if they are separated, and show what looks like happy behavior when they are reunited,” it’s unclear why we should deny the obvious explanation: these animals have emotions.

“If a chimp’s offspring dies,” de Waal says, “it usually keeps carrying it around until it falls apart, so even though the offspring is dead, the attachment stays intact; these are all signs of strong attachments.”

Comes love

We asked de Waal if we could summarize his view as, ‘It looks like love, but we’ll never know?’ but he said we had it backwards. “My assumption is the other way around, that if animals that are closely related to us, as monkeys and chimps certainly are, and do similar things under similar circumstances, we have to assume the psychology behind it is similar. It would be very inefficient for nature to produce the same behavior in different ways in a monkey and a human, it would have to create a different mechanism, a different psychology and neurology. From the Darwinist standpoint it does not make sense that monkeys would arrive at the same place via a different way.”

de Wall said his view is that “If chimps show strong attachment, we have got to assume the psychology is similar, and that would include the experience. That is not an assumption that is easily verified, but I think it is better than the opposite, that it looks the same, but is probably different.”

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?