Self-esteem and our perception of the world around us

Norman Swann, Australia Broadcasting Company, 11/19/2007

Research at Rutgers University in New Jersey has investigated how our self-esteem influences the way we perceive our environment. They also looked at self worth and the perceived closeness of threatening objects.

Transcript

Norman Swan: Welcome to the program. Today on the Health Report, rather than doing an election special, I thought it'd be handier for you - and certainly less boring - to get some insight into what influences how you think and feel about your place in the world.

You'll find out what political opinions men hold when you undermine their male identity; you'll find out what it takes to be competitive about altruism when you're giving things away; how hills literally look steeper when you're feeling down or isolated; and how attachment to our parents plays out when we become adults ourselves.

Let's start though with getting things off our chest and an effective way of doing that - it's called emotional disclosure.

Associate Professor Kent Harber is a Social Psychologist at Rutgers University in New Jersey.

Kent Harber: Many of your listeners have pRobbably had the experience of being mildly offended by someone in their world, they are starting to fire off the angry email, composing scud after scud and then they pause and take a drink of water, they come back to their computer and suddenly they don't feel quite so infuriated any more. Forgiveness is largely an emotional pRobblem, reasoning itself doesn't seem to do the trick you need to deal with the emotions that underlie the feelings of outrage. Jamie Pennebaker who's a social psychologist has done an amazing line of research looking at the power of disclosure on physical health. He finds that when people just write their thoughts and feelings about whatever major event is going on in their life they literally get sick less often.

Norman Swan: So it's basically admitting to how you feel.

Kent Harber: Admitting but also developing it and expressing it. It's not simply purging or a matter of venting, it's actually taking dictation from your emotions to make sense of the event. And when people do that they are able to get a kind of clarity and a perspective that helps them sort of move forward but it's important that the disclosure needs to be both your thoughts and your feelings. Thoughts alone won't do it and according to Pennebaker feelings alone is the combination of a full disclosure, how I feel and how it's affecting my thoughts and my opinions.

Norman Swan: Kent Harber and his colleagues have tried to measure the extent to which getting emotion off our chests changes our attitudes to people. One of the experiments got participants to imagine three people - one who had been good to them at sometime, someone who was neutral to them and someone who'd done the dirty on them. Then they were either allowed to disclose in writing their thoughts and feelings about the person or some non emotional facts about them.

Kent Harber: OK just to disclose your thoughts and feelings it didn't change how you felt about a positive or a neutral person but for that negative person you made a movement towards feeling more close. You made the first step, and that first step is the crucial one towards launching a full fledged forgiveness.

Norman Swan: What utility does that have in real life?

Kent Harber: That's a good question.

Norman Swan: Sometimes forgiveness isn't appropriate.

Kent Harber: That is a very key point, on the other hand there are times when there's someone in your past with whom we have no opportunity to reach a rapprochement. At the same time we contain within us the negative, hostile feelings that become a burden for us now.

Norman Swan: So it's a grudge and you can barely remember what originally caused it.

Kent Harber: Or you might remember it very well, the pRobblem is a lot of your life gets anchored on something that is no longer of utility for you to persevere on. This process of disclosure is not going to change your attitude from this person from being a very, very bad person to them being a good person, but it might alleviate the amount of psychological energy and potency that it has in your day to day life so you can move forward. Benjamin Franklin used this technique strategically, he had lots of people who he was very, very angry at.

Norman Swan: It didn't take much with Benjamin Franklin it would have to be said.

Kent Harber: Apparently not but he knew this, he was a diplomat. He couldn't afford to always lash out to the degree that he wanted to so what he would do is he would write incredibly angry virulent letters and never sent them - it took care of the business.

Norman Swan: The major focus of Kent Harber's research though is the difference how we feel about ourselves makes to our perceptions of very tangible things like pain, threats and physical challenges like a hill.

Kent Harber: What I'm interested in is what I call psychosocial resources, things like social support, feelings of self worth.

Norman Swan: So that's things like the number of people you come in contact with each day, can you call somebody when you're in trouble, how do you feel about yourself.

Kent Harber: Yes, so social support is to have people in your world who you can count on when you're experiencing a challenge or having a hard time. Self worth or self esteem is do you feel that you yourself are a good, capable, able person. So what I'm interested in is if you feel you've got sufficient resources does that affect the way that you literally see these stressful things, do they seem to be less large, less close, less intense.

Norman Swan: Anybody listening to this would say well it's obvious isn't it, you obviously are going to react more if you're isolated and feeling lousy about yourself.

Kent Harber: One of the experiences that we have in psychology is yes, our grandmother told us this is all true. Our job is actually to show how accurate grandma was in ways that maybe would even surprise her. So what grandma might not expect is if a person feels they have good resources and they're standing at the base of a hill they're going to see that hill is literally less steep.

Norman Swan: Really?

Kent Harber: Yes.

Norman Swan: It's not just the psychological mountain that's less when you're feeling stressed and feeling the world's against you, it's the physical mountain?

Kent Harber: Exactly, when we are feeling that we have more resources the mole hill will stay a mole hill, it does not elevate into a mountain.

Norman Swan: That's incredible because you're used to people saying having cognitive behavioural therapy because you know I'm a lousy person and everything is hopeless, nothing works for me but not something that's sitting there in three dimensions before you.

Kent Harber: Exactly. And there might be a connection that one of the reasons that people who are feeling that they have fewer resources, or feeling bad about themselves, that life could be so difficult and stressful is that they live in a world where subjectively hills are steeper, creepy things are closer, people appear to be more hostile than is actually the case. So you live more constantly in a threatening world.

Norman Swan: So let's move up to the various studies that you've done. You've done one on social support and the perception of pain.

Kent Harber: Yes, to what we call manipulate feelings of social support. We had people think about either the best person in the world, it's an imaging task, the psychosocial warm bath. You think about the person who makes you feel the best about yourself and how good they make you feel and how comfortable you feel around them. And you spend like five minutes immersing yourself in these kinds of thoughts and feelings, or you think of a neutral person, somebody you see every day, you don't like or dislike. Or you think about someone who you used to like but who betrayed you. Betrayal is a particularly potent kind of negative event for people. The next thing they do is that they experience what is called the heat pRobbe which can vary from they feel nothing to they feel some moderate discomfort. What we found is that the overall ratings of these heat pRobbes was rated most intense if you thought about being betrayed, least intense if you thought about a positive person in your life.

Norman Swan: Does that bear any resemblance to real life though?

Kent Harber: What we did was very short term; we had our participants think about someone for only a few minutes. You can imagine someone who chronically has someone in their life who is very good, or chronically someone who is very bad could have potentially more profound effects.

Norman Swan: That's pain but what about these mountains out of mole hills? Kent Harber again.

Kent Harber: There's a researcher at University of Virginia named Dennis Proffitt who is a vision researcher not a social psychologist and his interest is how people perceive physical challenges like how steep a hill is because you're going to hike it. And what he finds is that the physical state or the physical burden of the person shapes and affects their perception of how steep that hill is.

Norman Swan: Is it a physical or psychological burden?

Kent Harber: Well his interest is in physical so if a person is in very good shape they see a hill as less steep than if they are not in so good shape. Older people see the hill as steeper than younger people, someone wearing a heavy back pack sees a hill steeper than someone not wearing a heaving back pack. What our interest was OK if physical burdens effect how we see hills what about psychological burdens or the alleviation of them. So what we did is we had our participants standing at the base and we just got people who happened to be in the vicinity who are either all alone or with a friend and they estimated how steep was the hill. They gave us a verbal estimate - how steep is it in degrees, they gave us what's called a visual estimate, we had a device that looks like a pizza pan that you can open up or shut and then there's a third estimate which is called a haptic, where you put your hand at the angle you think the slope is, that's how your body sees the hill. Proffitt always finds that people's haptic measures are always accurate, your foot knows where to place itself on the hill but the visual estimates are those that tend to be exaggerated. What we found is that our subjects who were with their friend saw the hill as less steep than those who were not with a friend and the longer they knew their friend the less steep the hill became.

In the second stage we thought, well, you've got people here who show up with friends, people -

Norman Swan: It could be an accident of fate that they've turned up by themselves.

Kent Harber: Or maybe socially isolated people............

Norman Swan: Don't even go to the hill.

Kent Harber: Exactly, so the participants either thought about, as in the pain study, they thought about a very good person, a neutral person or a negative person, they went to the hill. People who thought about a positive person saw the hill as less steep, the closer they felt towards the person they thought about, the less steep the hill became; same hill, different social context.

Norman Swan: You've also done stuff on baby crying, you really don't like your subjects do you?

Kent Harber: I love my subjects, I don't know how my subjects feel about me. Another question is how does our psychosocial state, our resources affect the way we perceive another person's emotional and psychological experience. In this study we had our participants listen to a series of infant cries and these are very disturbing infant cries, in fact the infant cries came from infants undergoing surgical circumcision without anaesthesia. I got these recordings from a very, very heroic researcher at Washington University who developed those studies in order to convey to MDs -

Norman Swan: So they spent a whole year going to Jewish circumcisions.

Kent Harber: That's right. We used these recordings in this study to see how would a person's feelings of either having good social support or bad social support affect the way they interpreted these baby cries and they rated each one for how much upset was the baby conveying. And what we found is that people with positive support overall heard these babies as conveying less distress than those with negative support.

Norman Swan: It's not a very good thing though is it?

Kent Harber: I knew you were going to ask that question. So you wouldn't want a parent to be -

Norman Swan: Galloping to every whimper.

Kent Harber: Exactly. There's a wonderful line of research by Daniel Stern it's called affect attunement and he says a lot of how we understand ourselves personally as our own sort of psychological selves is by these very early experiences with care givers, how attuned are they appropriately to our own emotions. If we are sort of conveying in our infant state handable but upset but our parents say you seem to be a little bit upset that's telling us that our emotions are coherently interpretable. If on the other hand a little bit of upset is responded as Oh my God, the baby's hysterically upset then we lack confidence that we can convey to others our own inner states. An emotion is in a sense a persuasive message from you to you. Who are you going to be persuaded by in the real world? You're persuaded by acquaintances. The classic research in social psychology we're persuaded by people who we see as attractive, intelligent, having moral rectitude, capable well those are the exact same qualities that make up self esteem. So if emotion is a message from me to me and you say well OK I'm feeling a certain way about this event should I go with that message. Well who's the messenger, it's me, if I feel good about myself -

Norman Swan: Do I trust me?

Kent Harber: Do I trust me, am I a good credible source for being persuaded or not. So once again the baby cries are coming in fierce, by the way all these babies are pRobbably now in their early 20s but in any case they have advanced science here and so what we did is we had our participants listen to those baby cries, we had them indicate how upset they were listening to the cries and then we related how upset was this participant hearing the cries to how extreme they rated the cries. And overall there's a positive relationship, the more upset a person is hearing it the more extreme they see the baby as being upset. It turns out though that for people with high self esteem that relation is very strong, that if they feel very upset they say that baby is really upset. If they say they're not upset at all they say the baby is not upset at all. For people with very low self esteem there's almost no relationship.

Norman Swan: They're all over the place they don't trust their own views?

Kent Harber: Apparently, it's not that they're any less upset but the relationship between how upset they feel and how they hear the cries there's almost no relationship at all. So it doesn't appear that those people are being informed by their own feelings in making this judgement. What that seems to be saying is how we feel about our emotions is affected by how we feel about ourselves.

Norman Swan: And it can affect how you make decisions in life presumably?

Kent Harber: Absolutely, if you know someone who has been very depressed you'll notice they have a very hard time making the simplest decisions.

Norman Swan: Let's go down and have a look at your threatening objects. So we're now down in your behavioural dynamics laboratory.

Kent Harber: Yes we are here almost in the basement. In this study we are interested in how a person's resources in this case their feelings of self worth affect their judgement of distance between themselves and a potentially threatening object. On this long table we have a model train track and on it there is a plastic train cart, wholly transparent and it's attached to a fishing line and the participant sits at the one end of this contraption.

Norman Swan: It's like an ophthalmologist's chin guard.

Kent Harber: Exactly and so here Doug is actually demonstrating. Using a fishing reel, they use it to move the train car towards a series of along the track, a series of flags. They would stop the car at each of these flags and then Doug would make a judgement estimate of how many inches the car is from his face.

Norman Swan: And what we haven't said yet is what is inside the car.

Kent Harber: We haven't said that yet because sometimes this car has a fuzzy cat toy which participants are not going to be upset with. The other half of the time it has a live tarantula and some of our participants find an actual live tarantula a little bit unnerving but there's another element to this. Before our participants make any of these judgement tasks they go through an imaging task where they either think about their own most laudable personal success, something they feel particularly proud of that they've done or they think about something that's generally neither good or bad, they think about doing laundry, or they think about their own personal failure, something that they most internally cringe as they think about it and they do that elaborately.

What we find is that thinking about your own personal success, doing laundry or failure doesn't affect your distance estimates for the cat toy but it does for the tarantella. If you think about your failure you see the tarantula as nine inches closer to you than it actually is. Feeling good about yourself is moderating how you are literally seeing a potential threat in the world. What this can mean cumulatively is for people who have either low self worth, lack social resources they live in a world in which creepy things loom closer, hills are steeper. Those people in the bar are looking more ominous, babies are crying louder and so if that's your subjective experience day to day, day in and day out your stress level is pRobbably going to be increased.

Norman Swan: What about the interplay with personality, people who've got antisocial traits often perceive threats when they aren't there.

Kent Harber: That's an excellent question and one of the things we will be looking at I would conceptually expect is what you're suggesting would be the case.

Norman Swan: So it could it even worse?

Kent Harber: Yes.

Norman Swan: Kent Harber is Associate Professor in Social Psychology at Rutgers University in Newark New Jersey.

References:

Harber KD and Cohen DJ The Emotional Broadcaster Theory of Social Sharing. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, December 2006;24;4:382-400
Harber KD and Wenberg KE Emotional Disclosure and Closeness Toward Offenders. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin June 2005;31;6:734-746
Kent D Harber Self-Esteem and Affect as Information. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin February 2005; 31;2:276-288

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