In defense of humor.

Do you love to laugh? For decades, psychologists have studied the role of positive emotions in health and well-being. So far, it’s pretty clear that positive emotional experiences, including those that make you laugh, are related to better emotional and physical health. Yet, very few of those studies can make causal claims. In other words, they don’t really tell us whether healthier people seek out humor or whether laughter causes better health. Recently, Sarah Wellenzohn, University of Zurich, and colleagues set out to test the causal role of humor in the emotional health of individuals. In short, they designed an experiment to answer the question:  

Does humor increase happiness and decrease symptoms of depression?

To do this, they randomly assigned 632 adults to 1 of 6 interventions to complete daily for 1 week. The interventions were:  

Three funny things: Write down the 3 funniest things you experienced during the day and your feelings during those experiences.

Collecting funny things: Remember 1 of the funniest things you have experienced in the past, write it down with the most possible detail.

Counting funny things: Count all of the funny things that happen throughout the day and write down the number.

Applying humor: Notice the humor experienced throughout the day and add new humorous activities, such as reading comics, telling jokes, watching funny movies.

Solving stressful situations in a humorous way: Think about a stressful experience today and think about how it was or could have been solved in a funny way.

Early memories (placebo control): Write about early memories.

Before starting the intervention, participants completed questionnaires measuring their authentic happiness and symptoms of depression. Authentic happiness is measured using participant agreement to 24 statements such as “My life is filled with joy.”  Depressive symptoms include sad or low mood, loss of interest or pleasure, appetite and weight change, sleep problems, worry, difficulty concentrating, or feelings of hopelessness. Participants also received training in the intervention and were instructed to do their intervention activity each day for one week.

At the end of the 1-week intervention, and then 1-, 3-, and 6-months after completing the intervention, participants again completed the happiness and depression questionnaires. This enabled the research team to look at whether humor interventions led to increases in happiness and declines in depressive symptoms, and also look at how durable those effects are over time.

At the end of 1 week, all of the humor-based interventions were associated with increases in happiness and decreases in depressive symptoms compared to the placebo group. So one important take home message is that humor helps, no matter how you incorporate it into your life.

With respect to increasing happiness, Counting funny things and Applying humor were the most effective, and those effects lasted for up to 6 months! The effects of the Three funny things intervention also lasted through the 6-month time period, but were not as robust. There are a number of reasons that these humor-based interventions had such long-lasting effects on happiness. Most likely, it was because participants continued to engage in the behaviors for longer than just the initial week. Positive emotions are addictive in the same way food and drugs are. So it’s possible that these 1-week interventions were enough to promote a humor-addiction, so to speak.

The effects of these interventions on depressive symptoms were not as durable. Despite all of the humor-based interventions being leading to reductions in depressive symptoms at the end of the 1-week intervention compared with the placebo group, none of these effects remained 3-months after the intervention. This finding isn’t too surprising since there were no individuals with depression in this study. In fact, 250 people were excluded from the study for having elevated symptoms of depression at the baseline assessment. This means that there was very little range in depressive symptoms in the sample to begin with, and thus very little chance that the intervention could have an effect at all. That being said, humor on its own is unlikely to be an effective treatment for depression. Depression is an illness; often initiated in the wake of a major life stressor. With the exception of Solving stressful situations in a funny way, none of the humor-based interventions offered skills that help manage the source of that life stress.

The authors argue that one of the important, active ingredients in humor is the focus on increasing positive emotions in the present moment. Each intervention, particularly the durable ones, accomplished that through increasing daily experiences that involved humor but also increasing individuals’ attention to those experiences over time. You can imagine that just a few days of Counting funny things would cause you to pay more attention to, and enjoy, when funny things are occurring.

Until next time, keep on laughing! Here’s a compilation of funny videos of kids learning about physics: https://youtu.be/-TjtoP6-mcQ

Wellenzohn, S., Proyer, R. T., & Ruch, W. (2016). Humor-based online positive psychology interventions: A randomized placebo-controlled long-term trial. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 11(6), 584-594.

*Many thanks to Unsplash.com for the gorgeous photos. 

Does your personality fit your city? Does it matter?

Where do you live? Why do you live there? For most people, choice of where to live comes down to a few obvious and important factors: family, job, money. Have you ever wondered whether your self-esteem takes a hit when you live in a city that doesn't jive with your personality? Psychologists have. 

Just last month, Dr. Weibke Bleidorn, University of California Davis, and colleagues published a study looking at the whether a person's self esteem varies as a function of the fit between a their personality and the personality of their city  To do this, they used data collected online from the Gosling-Potter Internet Personality Project between December 1998 and December 2009. Participants in this study were between the ages of 16-60 and were included in the study if they lived in a city (based on self-reported zip code) that had at least 199 other respondents. The resulting sample included data from 543,934 individuals living in 860 cities in the United States. 

The online questionnaire included measures of personality and self-esteem. Psychologists typically measure personality across 5 dimensions: openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and emotional stability (also known as neuroticism). Click here for Wikipedia's definition of each of these domains of personality. Each participant answered 44 questions whose answers placed them on a continuum for each of these domains. If you're interested, you can take the test for free here. To measure self-esteem they asked participants to indicate the degree to which they agreed with the statement, "I see myself as someone who has high self-esteem," on a scale from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree). As simple as it sounds, self-esteem used to be measured in psychology research using more questions, but this single item tends to be all you need to ask. 

With this data, the research team was able to compute scores for the personality of each participant, as well as scores for each of the 860 cities represented. Using these scores, they were then able to disentangle the contributions of an individual's personality, their city's personality, and person-city personality match as predictors of self-esteem. Not surprisingly, the more emotionally stable (less neurotic), extroverted, open, agreeable, and conscientious a person was, the higher their self-esteem. Interestingly, individuals who lived in cites where the average person was higher in emotional stability, lower in openness, higher in agreeableness, and higher in conscientiousness, the higher their self-esteem. However, these weren't necessarily the question the researchers wanted to answer. The research team was more interested in whether fit between an individual and that of others in their city was important for self-esteem. 

As it turns out, it is, but only for openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. They found that individuals higher in openness have higher self-esteem when living in cities filled with open people, people higher in agreeableness report higher self-esteem when they live in cities filled with agreeable people, and people higher in conscientiousness report higher self-esteem when living in cities filled with conscientious people. But also, the other side of that coin may be true; less open people may have higher self-esteem in cities with less open people. 

So what might this mean for all of us wherever we live, by chance or by choice, and/or who may have to decide where to live in the future? Well, it means that there are many contributors to our self-esteem. First is our personality, but also the personalities of those around us. As a clinical psychologist, I can't help but point out that this means there are many pathways to higher self-esteem. One can practice emotional stability, conscientiousness, agreeableness, extroversion, and openness. One can seek out cities that promote emotional stability, agreeableness, and conscientiousness in their potential and current residents. Look to their elected officials, their mascots, their city-sponsored events. And as a result of this study, one can learn to appreciate his/her own personality strengths and seek out cities that are matched in those qualities (particularly openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness). 

There are limitations to the conclusions we can draw from this study. In particular, there is no way to rule out the possibility that having higher self-esteem influences a person's personality and also the cities they choose to live in. Nevertheless, self-esteem is an important psychological resource that psychologists want to understand how to cultivate in individuals and societies alike. So here it is sensible to try and understand what predicts self-esteem, rather than what self-esteem predicts. Hopefully, the next time you consider moving to a new city, you will think about more than just the practicalities of living there but also the personalities of its residents before you sign on the dotted line. It matters. 

Bleidorn, W., Schönbrodt, F., Gebauer, J. E., Rentfrow, P. J., Potter, J., & Gosling, S. D. (2016). To Live Among Like-Minded Others Exploring the Links Between Person-City Personality Fit and Self-Esteem. Psychological science, 27(3), 419-427.

Our gratitude to unsplash  for the beautiful photos. 

What works: Anxiety and Depression Treatments

Depression and anxiety are emotional disorders that reduce quality of life, increase suffering, impair our relationships, and endanger our long-term health. What's worse is that they are also extremely common. Depression and anxiety are known to affect 19 and 29% of individuals, respectively, not to mention that depression and anxiety co-occur at a rate of almost 50%. These statistics are particularly astonishing to me as a clinical psychologist because our field has developed a number of effective, non-invasive treatments that just don't seem to get into the lives of the people who need them most. In fact, a large national study recently found that most people suffer with anxiety and depression for about 10 years before they get treatment. A decade of unnecessary suffering. 

There are many reasons for this: some people don't live close enough to mental health providers, many people don't believe they have a problem (after all anything that sticks around for 10 years would just become the new normal), many people don't believe that seeing a psychologist would help, and many people can't afford the time or money it would cost. Luckily, how to effectively treat anxiety and depression is an active area of research, including questions such as what works for whom, and how can these effective treatments be delivered. 

An older approach to treating anxiety and depression was to identify which problem was more pressing and severe, and then treat the disorders sequentially. However, basic psychological science research suggests that underlying brain structures, symptoms, and behaviors for depression and anxiety are the same. This means that they can likely be treated with the same interventions. With this realization, clinical psychological scientists began to test the effectiveness of depression treatments on anxiety disorders, and anxiety treatments on depressive disorders. What emerged from these studies were "transdiagnostic" treatments for depression and anxiety. The transdiagnostic approach to treating emotional disorders is to identify and address the common maladaptive psychological, behavioral, and interpersonal processes that underlie psychological distress and impede well-being. But the million dollar question is, "Do they work?" 

Last year Dr. Jill Newby at the University of New South Wales and her colleagues published a meta-analysis examining the effectiveness across all of the existing clinical trials using transdiagnostic treatments for depression and anxiety. After scouring the published literature, they identified 47 studies that examined the effectiveness of transdiagnostic treatments for depression, anxiety, and quality of life for adults. The 47 studies varied in the type of treatment used (e.g., mindfulness vs cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT)), size (e.g., group vs individual), and delivery (e.g., internet-based vs face-to-face). The results of this meta-analysis represent effectiveness for transdiagnostic treatment for 1,109 patients compared to 992 controls. 

They found that transdiagnostic treatments had a large and significant overall effect on decreasing depression and anxiety symptoms as well as increasing quality of life. They also found that these benefits were maintained for up to 6 months following treatment completion. They also examined delivery characteristics for treatments and found that anxiety symptoms improved the most when treatment was delivered individually or over the internet compared with in a group format. Depression symptoms were most effectively treated over the internet, followed by face-to-face and group formats. They also looked at whether the content and approach to therapy influenced patient outcomes. They found that anxiety symptoms improved more in CBT-based treatments, while there was no difference in effectiveness between CBT- and mindfulness-based treatments for depression symptoms. In other words, both work just as effectively for treating depressive symptoms. 


To summarize, patients with anxiety and depression were better off if they received transdiagnostic treatment than if they didn't. Further, internet-based CBT is likely the best bet for how to effectively treat your symptoms. This is good news because internet-based treatments are wiping out many of the common barriers to getting treatment. They are flexibly scheduled, cost-effective, and accessible. It's not surprising then that internet-based treatments for depression and anxiety are becoming a topic of national discussion. We wrote about it at the launch of Maven, the future of health care, and UCLA's Raphael Rose Ph.D. was featured on the topic in Vogue magazine just this month. Based on the national statistics, one in three of you is struggling with depression and/or anxiety. Getting mental health services used to be nearly impossible and quite stigmatizing to navigate. All of that has changed. The only question now is what are you waiting for? 

Newby, J. M., McKinnon, A., Kuyken, W., Gilbody, S., & Dalgleish, T. (2015). Systematic review and meta-analysis of transdiagnostic psychological treatments for anxiety and depressive disorders in adulthood.Clinical psychology review, 40, 91-110.

Teens, Anti-depressants, and a bit of context

Recently, there has been increasing media attention toward use of antidepressant medications to treat depression in adolescents. On August 3, 2015 an article was published in the New York Times arguing that antidepressants are safe and should be used more widely in the treatment of depression in young people (here's the link). On September 16, 2015, an article was published, also in the New York Times, alerting the public that a recent study identified Paxil (an antidepressant) as potentially dangerous for young people based on a re-analysis of an old study (here's the link to that article). 

Both of these articles were well-written and convey interesting information and interpretations of the science involved in evaluating treatments for mental illness. However, neither article provides the context within which these findings should be interpreted.  As a result, we are being distracted from the real problem: Depression is a life-threatening illness.

Why would antidepressants be unsafe for youth? 

Currently, there is an FDA black box warning on antidepressant medications. This first sentence reads, "Antidepressants increased the risk compared to placebo of suicidal thinking and behavior (suicidality) in children, adolescents, and young adults in short-term studies of major depressive disorder (MDD) and other psychiatric disorders." Let's unpack this. This warning was developed following publication of a study that examined changes in suicidal thoughts and behavior for more than 100,000 youth undergoing antidepressant treatment trials for depression across more than 300 studies. They found that 2% of youth taking the placebo medication, but 4% in people taking the antidepressant, reported suicidal thoughts or behaviors. 

There are two important points to be made about the result of this study. First, the term suicidal thinking and behavior is misleading. Thoughts about suicide are common in depression, and more common among young people than the world likes to acknowledge. There were no differences in suicide completions between the two groups, only increases in thoughts related to suicide. Thoughts can be addressed in therapy. The truth is that a person with depression should see a mental health professional once per week during treatment, regardless of whether they are on antidepressants or not. For this reason, the best practices for treating an adolescent with depression include weekly visits with a psychologist, and bi-weekly to monthly visits with a psychiatrist. Unfortunately, among all of the young people with depression today, half of them are receiving no treatment, and those who are receive antidepressant medications from their primary physician, instead of a psychiatrist, which comes with its own set of risks. These risks are best managed by seeking mental health professionals, psychologists and psychiatrists, who specialize in treating children and adolescents.  

The second point to be made is that 4% is still low. This black box warning is quite misleading, as many statistics can be. The results of this study could be presented, accurately, by saying that youth taking antidepressants are twice as likely to have suicidal thoughts than depressed youth taking a placebo medication. Saying it this way is alarming. However, one could also say that 96% of youth taking antidepressant medications did not report suicidal thoughts, which is actually encouraging. In truth, 2% and 4% are statistically different from one another, but both are very small percentages. Yet, as a result of this black box warning, use of antidepressant medications for young people with depression plummeted. 

This brings me to another important point, which is that there are serious risks to not treating depression in young people as well. Like I said before, suicidal thoughts are common among individuals with depression. So common in fact that between 2 and 15% of individuals with untreated depression complete suicide. Yes, I said complete. Thus, we are brought to the second, less often considered sentence of the black box warning which reads, "Anyone considering the use of [Insert established name] or any other antidepressant in a child, adolescent, or young adult must balance this risk with the clinical need." In fact, we can see the unintended negative consequences of this black box warning over time. Between 1990 and 2000 adolescent suicide completion rates were steadily declining, and have been steadily increasing since 2004 when the black box warning was added. Click here for a figure of these suicide rates.  

To summarize, youth with depression are likely already experiencing suicidal ideation, and the risk of the teen completing suicide is highest when untreated. Obviously, treatment decisions are extremely personal and there will always be pros and cons of every treatment decision. However, we know that the most effective way to treat depression is a combination of weekly CBT and antidepressant medication, and risks are most effectively managed by mental health professionals who specialize in child and adolescent mental illness. For more on depression and it's treatment, click here. 

I hate exercise too.

Photo credit: https://unsplash.com/

I shouldn’t admit this because I am a health professional, but I don’t like exercise. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy being active. I love living in a city because you can walk everywhere, hiking in the canyons with my dog, and I will usually take the stairs over the elevator to get from Point A to Point B. Despite generally enjoying living an active life, I really hate structured, overt exercise. I’m talking about the kind that requires you to buy a new wardrobe of workout clothes and visit a gym several times a week where you are strapped into machines that contort your muscles to-and-fro while someone who runs ultramarathons for fun yells “imagine carving out that panty line” and “get that leg a little higher” at you while you try not to cry or vomit. For me, all of this feels and seems completely ridiculous. That being said, the data consistently shows that engaging in 30 minutes of aerobic exercise at least 3 times per week will, literally, save your life. If you do that, you will live longer, get injured and sick less, spend less money on medical bills, look younger, feel happier, and sleep more restfully. As far as investments go, exercise is a safe bet. So, professionally, I make recommendations that people exercise, like I did here, and I also participate 2 hours per week in the Los Angeles cult that is CardioBarre. For better or for worse, it is the nearest to my house.

But sometimes, despite this laundry list of benefits, I find it difficult to muster up the motivation to engage in overt exercise activities. There are so many hours in the day, and just under a million other things I could be doing instead that would feel more productive or that I would actually enjoy. If there is anyone out there who thinks and feels the same way, this post is directed at you. In fact, only 26% of people in the United States actually meet the recommended weekly exercise dose, so this is directed at most of you.

In 2008, Hillman, Erickson, and Kramer published a review of what we know about the effects of exercise on the brain. While they reviewed the results of many findings, I will limit my explanation to 3 findings that are particularly motivating for me. First and foremost, exercise creates new brain cells. If you have two cages of rodents, one cage with a running wheel, and one cage without, the rodents in the cage with the running wheel will run on it and create new neurons. Throughout your life, you are creating and losing neurons, with an imbalance toward creating in the first half of life and an imbalance toward losing in the second half. However, exercise promotes the creation of new neurons, thus allowing for more learning early in life, and less deterioration in later life. Second, exercise makes daily tasks less difficult. If you have older adults (ages 60-85) participate in aerobic training multiple times per week over several months, they will process information more quickly, have better spatial reasoning, and have much better executive functioning than people who did not participate in the exercise program. Executive functioning skills most robustly improved compared with the control group as a result of exercise, which include complex thinking such as planning, problem solving, holding multiple pieces of information in memory, and switching between tasks. These results are actually so convincing that researchers are looking into whether exercise interventions can prevent or even reverse the effects of Alzheimer’s Disease. Stay tuned for more on that in the future. Finally, exercise makes you smarter. These effects can even be intergenerational. For example, mothers who exercise during their pregnancy have offspring with more brain cells in the parts of their brain responsible for learning and memory (hippocampus & dentate gyrus). As children continue to develop, kids who engage in more physical activity have higher IQs, better achievement scores in both verbal and math assessments, and have better memories.

So there you have it, even if it’s silly and feels like a sweaty, waste of time and money, exercising with regularity will put you in a better mood, help you think more clearly while you work, and will continue to promote your ability to learn (whatever you want) throughout your life. When you put it in perspective like that, 30 minutes every couple of days isn’t so bad.


Hillman, C. H., Erickson, K. I., & Kramer, A. F. (2008). Be smart, exercise your heart: exercise effects on brain and cognition. Nature reviews neuroscience,9(1), 58-65.

Do you know what you're trying to accomplish?

While I will be the first to swoon over Victorian literature, and allured by the romance and grandiosity of 15th century French imperial etiquette, I am beyond grateful to be living in a time where I can benefit from modern medicine. In the past century, we have all-but-eliminated over a dozen deadly illnesses all through preventing their spread from person-to-person. However, if you really think about how medicine is different today than it was 100 or even 30 years ago, it’s not that we’ve gotten so much more skilled at treating disease (in some cases we have, but not most), it’s that we have built a healthcare system that is expert at preventing illness from ever reaching a point that would be life-threatening. 

All you have to do is visit your physician and get check-ups at least once per year, and you can avoid the agony and loss and pain of several ailments that have plagued our grandmothers and grandfathers for centuries. Some examples of common preventive actions are flu shots, cholesterol tests, prostate exams, pap smears, mammograms, and colonoscopies. These handful of assessments were developed for early detection of the majority of illnesses that cause pain and suffering in the developed world.

Unfortunately, despite all of these advances, people don’t participate in preventive health care. In fact, in the U.S. only 30% of adults between the ages 50-65 are “up-to-date” on their preventive health, while only 50% of people 65+ are “up-to-date.” What gives?

There are a lot of reasons that people don’t get these assessments done as they should and they are all good reasons. Most people have jobs and responsibilities, most people don’t think getting a colonoscopy sounds very fun, most people don’t want to get bad news, and the list goes on.

When faced with these striking numbers and a lack of explanation for them, my good friend and expert in psychology and public health, Eric S. Kim at the University of Michigan (GO BLUE!) asked whether there were psychological variables that explain who does and does not keep their health under control using these preventive measures. In particular, he was interested in whether people with higher “purpose in life” were more likely to participate in these preventive health measures.

Purpose in life was first introduced by Viktor Frankl in an excellent and ground-breaking book, Man’s Search for Meaning where he shared his observations on the strength of the human spirit during the Holocaust. In psychology, purpose in life is measured by asking individuals, “On a scale of 1 to 6, 6 being strongly agree, how much would you agree with the statement, ‘I enjoy making plans for the future and working to make them a reality?’ or ‘I don’t have a good sense of what it is I’m trying to accomplish in life?’ Purpose in life has come up in a past post, where we learned that people with higher purpose in life live longer.

To answer this question, Kim used data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), which is a large, longitudinal data set of over 26,000 adults who have been recruited at age 50 and followed every two years since 1992. Kim used data from 7,168 of these participants (mean age 69) who were followed for 6 years. In the initial assessment, information on each individuals’ current purpose in life, physical health, mental health, and socioeconomic status was collected. Then, every 2 years, the participants reported on whether they had received a flu shot, a colonoscopy, a mammogram for females, a prostate exam for males, or had their cholesterol checked. They also asked each participant whether they had been hospitalized during the past year, and if so, for how many days.

They found that higher purpose in life was associated with a higher likelihood of receiving all but one of the preventive health measures, the flu shot, and that a 1 point increase in purpose in life related to a 17% decrease in the length of hospital stay. Keep in mind that this finding remains even when accounting for family income, type of health insurance, education, marital status, age, and symptoms of depression and anxiety. In other words, people who reported more purpose in life 6 years ago were more like to get a mammogram or a prostate exam, a colonoscopy, and have their cholesterol checked than people with lower reported purpose in life, not to mention when they got sick they had shorter stays in hospitals. The latter finding fits well with past studies showing that more purpose in life is related to less inflammation in the body, meaning that people who have surgery, get sick, or injured will get better faster from the same ailment.

What’s most striking to me is that purpose in life is measured on a 6 point scale. In this study people generally had purpose in life on the higher side, with the average for the “low” group at around a 3, and “high” at around a 5. This means that very small increases in purpose in life can have significant implications for health. Now that we know purpose in life is a magical, health elixir, the million dollar question is whether we can increase purpose in life in order to improve health on a national or even global scale. Programs such as “Well-Being Therapy” are promising. Well-Being Therapy is a cognitive-behavioral intervention designed to prevent depression relapse by helping individuals improve quality of life and experience more fulfillment.

But what if you don’t feel like you have purpose in life right now? Lots of people feel lost at times, direction-less. The research presented here is not causing better health, it is causing behavior that protects health, participation in preventive medicine. The best way to protect your health is to see your primary care physician and regularly.



Kim, E. S., Strecher, V. J., & Ryff, C. D. (2014). Purpose in life and use of preventive health care services. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(46), 16331-16336.

Bored at work?

Boredom has been my very worst enemy for a long time. Luckily, boredom is something I don’t have to cope with much at work because I am 99% captivated with what I do, but inevitably there are tedious and even boring tasks that need to be done. In fact, as many as 87% of people admit to feeling bored at work. So what? Well, I’ll tell you.

Boredom at work is associated with a number of negative outcomes, including depression symptoms, high job turnover, and actively engaging in behavior that interferes with the goals of the company/organization (I recently learned this is called “counterproductive work behavior”). These associations may seem intuitive to you, and even perhaps meaningless, unless they are 1) malleable and 2) you are either running an organization or are a bored employee of one. If you are either, this recent study by Madelon van Hooff at the Radboud University Nijmegen and Edwin van Hooft of University of Amsterdam will be of interest to you.

Basically, van Hooff and van Hooft conducted a study to better understand why work-related boredom related to depression symptoms and counterproductive work behavior (CWB). In specific, they looked at whether there were behaviors people engaged in that increased the likelihood that feeling bored would lead to these negative outcomes, and also examined behaviors that may buffer these relationships.

Before I tell you what they did, I think it’s important to explain what they were thinking. The basic premise of their work is that boredom is an emotion, a negative emotion. I would whole-heartedly agree. So, when you are at work, you are engaging in behaviors to achieve your work-related goals; sometimes that is to serve someone, learn something, teach someone, or organize something. They argue that once a person experiences a negative emotion, their behavior shifts to then cope with that negative emotion. So, in their model, boredom highjacks all of the energy you are putting toward your work goals, and redirects it to trying to feel less bored. Facebook anyone? Buzzfeed? Reddit? Extra long coffee breaks? In their model, more boredom in your job would cause you to engage in more boredom coping behaviors, and have less long-term satisfaction in your job, therefore giving way to negative outcomes such as depression and counterproductive work behavior.

In the study, they define counterproductive work behavior as things like stealing equipment from the company, and blaming others for your own mistakes. According to this model, the only way to “treat” the problem is to give employees other behaviors to cope with their boredom in ways that promote their learning and engagement. Van Hooff and van Hooft call this Job Crafting. More on this later.

To conduct their study, they recruited 200 adults (55% female, ~ age 39) to complete 2 online surveys, 1 month apart. These participants represented a range of professions including IT Specialists, Project managers, teachers, and secretaries. It’s also important to note that 85% of the sample had at least a bachelor’s degree.

First, the participants completed a survey about their demographic information and boredom susceptibility at work. For the purposes of this study, they defined boredom from an emotional and cognitive perspective, including questions like “I get bored with my work” and “My job goes by slowly.” One month later, they completed an online survey about their behaviors used to cope with boredom (taking long breaks, pretending to be busy, and involvement in non-work activities during the day to kill time), their counterproductive work behaviors, and symptoms of depression (I feel sad and lonely). They also had the participants complete information about their Job Crafting behaviors. Job crafting refers to an employee’s report of how often they seek guidance or support on work related tasks, seek opportunities to learn and develop new skills, and start new projects.

What they found is probably not surprising, but also very valuable no matter whether you are a manager or employee. Basically, they found that boredom was only related to counterproductive work behavior and depression if the employee engaged in boredom coping behaviors. This means that feeling bored doesn’t lead to feelings of depression or employees who steal and are not accountable for their actions, only their boredom coping behaviors create that link. This is good news because boredom at work is probably inevitable, albeit variably for different people and professions.

They also found that engaging in job crafting buffered the association between feeling bored and these boredom coping behaviors. This is good news because it means that we, as employees and managers, can do something to eliminate the negative consequences of boredom to our health and productivity. To learn more about how, we have to look more closely at how the researchers defined job crafting. Job crafting includes anything an employee can do to change their job characteristics, such as:

• increasing job demands that promote learning new skills
• decreasing job demands that hinder their work like dealing with people with “unreasonable expectations” 
• increasing social resources like receiving more feedback, coaching and mentoring on how to grow in their position and job. 

As an employer, job crafting can actually be facilitated for employees by making opportunities more obvious. For example, offering opportunities for employees to learn new skills to make familiar and easy tasks more challenging and engaging, offering opportunities for positive feedback and mentoring, and suggesting new projects employees can initiate within the scope of their position and goals of the organization.

Obviously, different jobs have different latitude when it comes to opportunities for job crafting, with one end of the spectrum being companies like Google where employees are expected to be developing their own service or tech projects and on the other places in the major commercial service industry like Starbucks. Come to think of it though, even my local Starbucks has a rotating board of Barista’s drink of the day which features a creation of one of the employees. Even this is an opportunity to reduce feelings of boredom within the work environment in service of the well-being of the employee and the business.

While the findings here are compelling and informative from many perspectives, it’s important to keep in mind that they are limited as well. Most importantly, these findings are not causal and boredom likely does not cause depressive symptoms. In fact it is highly likely that depressed individuals are more likely to experience negative emotions, like boredom, at work. Regardless, these data make a larger point that warrants consideration…

Boredom is bad for everyone, and it appears that we can more effectively cope with that as managers and employees by seeking opportunities to learn from whatever we are doing and initiate new projects to deal with boredom, rather than waste time avoiding the boredom.

van Hooff, M. L., & van Hooft, E. A. (2014). Boredom at Work: Proximal and Distal Consequences of Affective Work-Related Boredom. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 19(3), 348 –359.

Can we use TV to prevent depression?

I was recently in Miami for the annual meeting for the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies (www.istss.org) where the theme of the meeting was “Healing Lives and Communities: Addressing the Effects of Childhood Trauma Across the Lifespan.” There was an interdisciplinary panel at the meeting on “Using media to prevent trauma” between scientists and filmmakers. The goal of this panel was to open a dialogue within the scientific community about whether trauma is too prevalent to treat individually, and whether population based “interventions” are a more effective way to prevent the negative psychological consequences of trauma. Are we using a teaspoon to remove water from our punctured lifeboat? During this discussion, they brought up The San Francisco Mood Survey Project, which is uber-cool, so I was inclined to share it with you.

In the late 1970s, mental health awareness was increasing, and epidemiological surveys confirmed that almost 10% of people are depressed*, while 25% of people will be depressed at some point in their life. Even then, it is remarkable to note, there was an understanding among research-oriented clinical psychologists that cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) was the most effective way to treat depression. More about that in this past post.

Dr. Ricardo Muñoz of University of California- San Francisco is a psychologist specializing in effective interventions for the treatment of depression. Today, he focuses mostly on interventions using the internet, however in 1978, the best option for community intervention was television. Luckily, the host of a television news program in San Francisco approached him and a group of psychologists at UCSF and UC Berkeley to develop a mini-series on depression. So, the research group compiled active components of effective CBT for depression and compiled them into ten 4-minute segments that were aired during the noon, evening, and nightly news for two weeks. This is considered “primary prevention” because “rather than waiting for people to become depressed enough to seek therapy, preventive educational interventions can be made available to the general public.”

One week before airing the 10 segments, they conducted a phone survey by asking 216 individuals (~ 40 years) about their symptoms of depression and whether they engage in any of the behaviors that would (unbeknownst to them) be recommended on the television segments.

Some examples of the content of these segments are: making a list of 15 pleasant activities, writing out a contract to exercise and eat healthy, showing ways people can reward themselves for following the contract, listing positive thoughts, and showing how to relax.

One week after the 10th segment was aired, they conducted phone interviews with 220 individuals (58 were new). Participants reported on their depression symptoms, how often they engage in the behaviors recommended in the segments, and whether they watched any of the segments on the news in the past 2 weeks.

Unfortunately, only 47 of the participating individuals watched at least one of the segments of the intervention, however the results of the intervention were promising. Individuals whose pre- intervention depression scores were high (clinically significant) who also watched at least one segment, reported a decrease in depression symptoms one week after the intervention. This is an important finding because one of the biggest criticisms of community interventions like these, and more recently on the internet, is the worry that people who are depressed will stop seeking treatment and be at increased risk for persistent illness or suicide. See a past article about depression and suicide risk here. So not only did Muñoz and colleagues find that depression symptoms declined in people who watched the segments, but specifically in those with clinically significant symptoms.

Overall, I find it remarkable that this was done 30 years ago, but disappointing that more programs like this have not “taken off.” Clearly, there are benefits, but apparently the benefits don’t outweigh the costs. This study is no exception given how much time and money it must have taken to compose and produce the 10 segments, to only reach ~20% of a population. But perhaps we should be interested in long term gains, not 2 week gains. In graduate school, I learned about a concept called Gross National Happiness, was proposed by the King of Bhutan, as a way of dedicating national resources to promoting quality of life rather than productivity (GNP) per se.

What is also remarkable to me about this study was whether it was prevention or intervention. Keep in mind, the main finding was that people with clinically significant symptoms showed reductions. This implies that the segments were therapeutic, or served as an intervention. However, for some historical context, the first segment was aired the day after the Guyana mass suicide, not to mention the Mayor of San Francisco Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk were shot one week later. Thus, it is possible that the intervention somehow buffered the impact of these major socio-political traumas as evidenced by a lack of increasing symptoms.

This brings me back to my original topic, which is the question of whether we can prevent the negative impacts of trauma using media. And if we can, what might that look like? I often take my training as a clinical psychologist for granted, and forget that everyone is not trauma-informed. What clinical psychologists know about trauma is that telling your story with others is part of the healing process, as long as those others are “safe.” We know that when someone tells us about a personal experience, either rape or assault or a motor vehicle accident, that is privileged information that was very difficult to share. As receivers of that information, we are responsible for showing gratitude for that information, and validating them by recognizing the overwhelming emotions that must have accompanied their experience. The media does not routinely do that. Only the rarest journalists do that. As a result, we live in a world where emotions are stigmatized, shame is marketed, destitution is disgusting, and victims of trauma are never validated unless they can afford to pay for it. I wonder what the world would look like if instead everyone was “safe.”

*Depression is defined by two weeks of persisting low or negative mood and loss of pleasure in previously enjoyed activities which are then accompanied by several other unpleasant experiences (changes in sleep, appetite, worry, thoughts about death). If you are worried that you might be suffering from depression, you should take an online survey here, or contact your primary care physician for a referral to a therapist.

Muñoz, R. F., Glish, M., Soo-Hoo, T., & Robertson, J. (1982). The San Francisco mood survey project: Preliminary work toward the prevention of depression. American Journal of Community Psychology, 10(3), 317-329.

Take a Forgiveness Pill

There is a pretty consistent finding in psychology that more the stressful experiences you have in your lifetime, the worse your mental and physical health will be. Thus, psychology and public health researchers have been dedicating time and money to figuring out what links stressful experiences to poor health, and what can buffer these effects. One psychological resource that has received attention is forgiveness. While the number of stressful life events you experience is related to more physical and mental health problems, the same is true for forgiveness in reverse. In other words, the more you forgive, the better your health.

Thus, Dr. Loren Touissant and colleagues were interested in clarifying whether forgiveness buffers the association between stressful life experiences and health. To do this, they recruited 148 undergraduate students and asked them to complete a life stress interview. This interview, the STRAIN developed by Dr. George Slavich at UCLA, takes under an hour and asks the participant about their exposure to up to 96 life events that can be stressful, as well as asks participants to rate these events in terms of severity, and provide detail on when these experiences occurred (e.g., during childhood or adulthood). These participants then completed the Heartland Forgiveness Scale. According to Wikipedia, Forgiveness is the voluntary or unintentional process by which a victim undergoes a change in feelings and attitude regarding an offense, lets go of negative emotions, with an increased ability to wish the offender well. 

In psychology, forgiveness can refer to either your amount of forgiveness in the context of a single experience, or your general tendency to be forgiving. For the purposes of this study, Dr. Touissant was interested in general tendency toward forgiveness, or “dispositional forgivingness.” Finally, the participants provided information on their mental and physical health at the time of the study.

The participants in the study, despite being college undergraduates were exposed to an average of 13 stressful life events, were fairly high on forgiveness (average score of 88 on a scale between 18-125), and had moderate symptoms for both physical and mental health. They found that, consistent with previous studies, more exposure to life stressors was related to poorer physical health and more mental health symptoms. Similarly, more forgiveness was related to fewer mental health symptoms and better physical health.  

They then tested whether having higher dispositional forgiveness buffered the association between life stress and health. They found that forgiveness and life stress independently predicted better physical health, and the forgiveness did not buffer the link between life stress and physical health symptoms. In contrast, they found that higher forgiveness did buffer the association between life stress and mental health. Specifically, participants who reported high levels of forgiveness showed no association between the number of stressful life events and their mental health, while participants with average or below average forgiveness had stronger associations between the amount of life stress and their mental health symptoms. 

One question that emerges from these findings is, “Why the difference in findings between physical and mental health?” Touissant’s argument in the article is that mental health problems are often related to recent stressors, while physical health problems develop over more time. In this sample of young adults, it is possible that the story may be different in 20 or 30 years, when there are more physical health problems for them to deal with. It’s also possible that life stress and psychological resources such as forgiveness independently influence our health across our lives. Regardless of the reason, these findings are good news.

Why is this good news? Often we can’t help how much stress we are exposed to. Children can’t control whether they are abused and neglected, we can’t prevent earthquakes and tornados, we can’t save everyone in our lives from getting sick and passing on. Stressful life events are a certainty. We can, however, develop effective skills and strategies for responding to and coping with stress. This study suggests that forgiveness is one skill we can learn, practice, and master in the service of our own health.

Despite the strengths of this study, this research has limitations. Most importantly, like most psychology research, this study is not causal. Since you cannot randomly assign people to receive a life filled with stress or a life void of it, there is no way to know whether stress causes mental and physical health problems in humans. The same goes for forgiveness. However, we can develop interventions on forgiveness to see whether teaching individuals how to practice forgiveness improves or even prevents physical and mental illness. This is certainly where the field is leading, so get excited!

In the mean time, you can explore your own forgiveness tendency by taking the Heartland Forgiveness Scale here, and finding creative ways to practice in your own daily life.

Toussaint, L., Shields, G. S., Dorn, G., & Slavich, G. M. (2014). Effects of lifetime stress exposure on mental and physical health in young adulthood: How stress degrades and forgiveness protects health. Journal of Health Psychology, 1359105314544132.

Dads and Emotional Development

In honor of Father's Day, I thought I would continue to highlight what we have learned from recent research on the importance of fathers in the emotional development of their children. Fathers are important, we all know that, but it's difficult to pin down the unique contributions that fathers make to the development of their children. Our culture doesn't do much to help with that, since the stereotype for fathers (in the U.S. at least) is that emotional development occurs with the mother while fathers manage the BBQ, take care of the car, and fix the leaky sink. 

Luckily, psychologists such as Dr. Kristel Thomassin, a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard University, continue to study emotional development by looking at the role of both mothers and fathers. In a recently published study we see that these stereotypes couldn't be further from the truth. In her most recent study, Dr. Thomassin and her colleague, Dr. Cynthia Suveg of the University of Georgia wanted some answers to the question: 

How do real-time interactions between children and their parents relate to the development of healthy emotion regulation? 

Now, this is a complicated question. This study highlights the complexity of the issue by first acknowledging that children do not simply develop emotion regulation from their parents in a "vertical" way, but rather that there is a transactional  or "horizontal" relationship as well. Children have different biologically inherited temperaments, they respond to the world with emotions in part by instinct and in part by copying the way their parents respond to the world, the world responds to their emotional state, and they learn from those responses how to behave in the next situation.

This pattern repeats every hour of every day until the child is an adult with a repertoire of behaviors that may or may not aid them in maintaining a  meaningful life in the face of life stress. Given the complexities of this bi-directional relationship, the present study looked at moment-to-moment interactions between children and their parents and described how those interactions relate to the development "effective" or "healthy" emotion regulation, and symptoms of psychopathology (depression, anxiety, oppositional defiance, aggression). 

To do this, they recruited 51 children between the ages of 7 and 12. Each parent completed a checklist of their child's most common strategies for regulating emotions. Each parent (mother and father) and the child's teacher completed a list of symptoms the child exhibits that may indicate the presence of psychopathology. In this sample, about 20% of the children demonstrated clinically significant symptoms of psychopathology. Then, they had each child sit down with both their mother and father to complete the Emotion Discussion Task. In this task the family was given an emotion (anxious, sad, angry, happy) and asked to discuss a time they experienced this feeling. Each family completed this task for a total of 20 minutes, with 5 minutes dedicated to each feeling. These 20 minute discussions were videotaped, then the verbal and non-verbal behavior of each family member was coded as either positive or negative for each 10 second segment of the video. For example, if a child smiled, that would be coded as positive affect. If immediately after the child smiled, the mother rolled her eyes, that would be coded as negative, while if the father smiled back at the child that would be coded as positive. With this extremely detailed coding, this team of researchers was able to quantify the reciprocal interactions between mothers, fathers, and their children.   

They expected that mothers would show more emotional reactions to their children, which was true. Mothers were more likely than fathers to respond to their children's emotional words or behaviors with matched and reciprocated emotions. They also expected that mothers and fathers who showed more positive affect in response to their child's emotions (e.g. touching their arm when the child is sad, or laughing when the child is laughing) would have children with fewer problem behaviors and symptoms. Likewise, they expected that mothers and fathers who showed more negative affect in response to their child's emotions (e.g. laughing at the child's expense, showing hostility when the child is expressing anger) would have children with more problem behaviors and symptoms. This was also true, but only for fathers. In other words, fathers who respond with positive, supportive, and reciprocal affect to their children's emotional state had children with fewer problems at home and at school.  Thus, the father's role in emotional development by simply responding to the child's emotion in a supportive way is protective during development. What's more interesting is that the child's "healthy emotion regulation" accounted for this relationship, such that a father's ability to respond with positive and supportive emotional reciprocity to their child's emotional state was related to better ability to regulate emotions in general, which was related to fewer symptoms of psychopathology.

This finding suggests that fathers play a unique and important role in helping a child develop effective ways to manage their primary emotions. From a very basic perspective, a parent's ability to show support to a child or validate their experience goes a long way. If a child is crying, an adult laughing at them teaches the child that showing negative emotions is something to be ashamed of. If a child is angry, a parent responding to the child's frustration with their own frustration sends the message that the child's emotions are a burden to the parent, and should be suppressed if possible. It's probably not difficult to see how these patterns can, across a lifetime, facilitate depression, anxiety, or aggression. However, before this study we would have expected that this was a stronger relationship between mothers and their children, instead of fathers and their children, while that was not the case.

What's also important to remember is that these families were not doing anything extraordinary during the task, simply discussing a recent experience where emotions were involved. This occurs at the dinner table every night, or in the car on the way to a birthday party. Every moment counts. 

So, what's the point? What many parents lose sight of is that they are teaching their child every moment of every day, whether they are trying to or not. Kids learn something very special and unique about emotion regulation from their fathers. If you are a parent, the way you respond to your child's feelings will teach them how to behave when they have those feelings in the future and, hopefully, protect them from developing ineffective ways of coping with emotions and stress as they grow. For me that meant learning, "Don't sweat the small stuff. And remember, it's all small stuff" and how to deal with stress by making lists and prioritizing my time, but all fathers have a special skill set to share about how to get through life unscathed.

For more on Fathers click here to read last year's feature! 

Thomassin, K., & Suveg, C. (2014). Reciprocal Positive Affect and Well-Regulated, Adjusted Children: A Unique Contribution of Fathers. Parenting, 14(1), 28-46.

How to Handle Cyberbullying: Insights from the frontlines of science

I am writing this week from Austin, TX where I am attending the biannual meeting of the Society for Research on Adolescence, or SRA. SRA is an interdisciplinary society focused on the theoretical, empirical, and policy research issues of adolescence. These issues can range from biological development through the pubertal transition to risky driving to parent child relationships to social media use. Given that the mission of ScienceForWomen.org is to share recent research findings with all of you, I thought I would highlight the findings from one of the symposia I attended.

This symposia was on cyberbullying, which is a problem for many of the children and adolescents I have treated, but has also been featured in the news of late. What was most striking at the outset of this presentation was the international and ubiquitous presence of cyberbullying in the lives of young people today. The presenters in this talk were Sarah Coyne of Brigham Young University, Stacey Bradbury of Bowling Green State University, Kay Bussey of Macquarie University, and Cigdem Topcu, Middle East Technicial Univerisity.  

Cyberbullying can be defined in many ways, as I learned while listening to these experts today. For our purposes we can simply define it as using forms of digital media and communication to hurt another person. For some people this can be spreading rumors, editing photographs of people in embarrassing ways, intentionally excluding a person from events or activities, or anonymously and/or publicly threatening or insulting a person.

As a child & adolescent clinical psychologist, I see cyberbullying play a very negative role in the maintenance of low self-esteem, social anxiety, depression, and eating disorders every single day. Despite my tendency to be an early adopter of new technology, I am also a person who didn’t grow up in the world of Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, I can’t necessarily relate to the experiences of being vulnerable to some of the nasty, degrading, exclusionary, and humiliating experiences that could occur 7 days a week, 24 hours per day for today’s school-aged youth.

The overarching theme of these talks centered on who is at risk for being cyberbullied, who kids disclose these experiences to, how kids cope with cyberbullying, and what we can do about it as adults in their lives. I won’t go into my usual detail about how each of the studies addressed these questions, but I will lend my summary and interpretation of their findings.

First, it’s pretty clear that middle school is the time when cyberbullying becomes a big problem, for girls first and then for boys. This may be because girls are more social, and therefore have more motivation to engage in multiple types of social interactions. This could also be because boys predominantly engage in cyberbullying of a sexual nature, and they develop later in that arena than girls. Related to this, patterns of cyberbullying don’t appear to be much different than typical gender and age differences in the use of relational aggression. This is reassuring in some ways because psychologists, parents, and teachers have been helping to teach their children not to use aggression for a very long time. This is not new. Unfortunately, we have been studying childhood relational aggression so well, we know that aggression is best prevented rather than treated, and the best time to intervene is during the preschool-early school-aged years. So, all the more reason for us to continue teaching our youngest the importance of interpersonal problem solving without tying to hurt others, which will not only prevent traditional aggression but also its newest manifestation, cyberbullying.

That point was even further solidified by the next study, which looked at how kids cope with cyberbullying differently than traditional bullying. The short story is: they don’t. Kids who were able to cope with in person bullying, or relational aggression, were also able to cope with cyberbullying. The coping strategies measured in this study were problem solving (thinking carefully about how to react to a distressing situation in order to achieve your goals), distancing (taking a third person’s perspective on the situation in order to react less emotionally), distraction (engaging your mind in a neutral or enjoyable activity in order to reduce the immediate negative emotions of the situation), and retaliation (trying to do to another what they did to you). Kids who reported “effective coping” or the lack of long term negative perceptions of cyberbullying experiences and believed that what they did was helpful, did so in both traditional and cyberbullying experiences. There were no differences in their perceptions of impact for either if they used adaptive coping through problem-solving, distraction, or distancing, instead of retaliation. So, as a parent or a teacher who is tasked with helping children deal with the stress of growing up in this day and age, these skills are widely applicable.

Another of the presentations focused on children’s disclosure of bullying experiences. What they found was that children prefer to disclose bullying experiences to people who can help, either by helping deal with it or intervening effectively. Imagine that! They found that girls were more likely to disclose to their mothers, while boys were more likely to disclose to their friends. Unfortunately, teachers were not a preferred confidante in cases of bullying or cyberbullying, likely because teachers report that there is little they can do to help and kids report little faith in their teachers to intervene. In an effort to do my duty as a psychologist, I would like to remind all people who take care of children of the diffusion of responsibility: if a child is being bullied, be that in person or via the internet or by the spreading of cruel rumors or exclusion from activities, you should help them or no one else will.  

One of the audience members asked the panel of speakers whether adult intervention is sometimes more hurtful than helpful because it could result in more bullying. I thought this was a great question given the complex social dynamics of high school. One of the speakers responded that adolescents are always benefitted by adult involvement when being bullying. Now slow down, this does not mean fighting your kids’ battles, this means providing your support by listening to them and helping them cope. Dealing with the problem directly for your child will only allow them to avoid developing effective interpersonal skills which will be useful when they have colleagues, roommates, partners, and bosses. Alternatively, there are likely effective school- or community-based ways to systemically address or reduce the occurrence of bullying in the lives of children generally. Providing the support of being a confidante and helping kids practice effective, non-retaliative, coping skills helps kids feel better which is the most important outcome, even if it doesn’t stop the occurrence of bullying.

Perhaps even more informative, the experts were clear that, at this point in history, somewhere around 80% of youth social interactions occur electronically and that simply taking access away creates more problems than it solves. In my clinical work I have come across countless well-intended parents whose solution for the negative impact of cyberbullying and social media on their child’s mental health has been to eliminate their child’s access to it altogether.  Under most circumstances, that decision would further isolate youth from their positive peer relationships, thus increasing their risk and even perpetuating their problems with depression, self-esteem, and anxiety.  Instead, parents can familiarize themselves with how to use different social networking and gaming programs to help kids to establish privacy settings. This will help bullies have less access while still allowing the child to feel trusted and not isolated from their friends. 

In summary, the most important message to be taken away from these talks is that even though we didn’t grow up with the threat or experience of cyberbullying, we are not useless in helping kids deal with these experiences. The skills we learned while growing up (distancing, distraction, and problem-solving) are just as helpful when facing cyberbullying as they are with everything else.

Dubow, E.F. (Chair, March, 2014) Cyberbullying and Cyber Victimization in Early Adolescence: Coping, Disclosure, and Implications for Intervention. Symposium conducted at the meeting of the Society for Research on Adoescence, Austin, TX. 

Make your generosity matter this Christmas.

Christmas is my favorite time of the year because I love buying presents for the people who are important to me. In fact, I begin actively spying on my family and friends in July so that I always have the opportunity to find exactly the right gift that will bring them the most joy on Christmas morning. Given that Christmas is upon us, and my personal passion for gift-giving, I thought it appropriate to share what psychology researchers have found on how giving to others, or generosity, impacts our health and happiness throughout our lives.

First of all, positive psychologists have studied generosity at length for at least a decade. For example, there are several studies showing that giving to others and engaging in random acts of kindness will increase your subjective well-being, or happiness. In fact, helping others seems to benefit the giver even more than the receiver. What we don’t know is how helping others increases our well-being. Are we simply biologically designed to put others before ourselves because that’s how humans were able to evolve, raise families, and build civilization? Or, do we simply get a rush from that warm fuzzy feeling that comes from helping others?

In a recent study published by Dr. Lara Aknin of Simon Fraser University and colleagues, they conducted two experiments to determine what aspects of generosity cause increases in happiness. In the first study, they recruited 120 adults to a study on “charitable appeals” where the participants completed surveys about their happiness in life. The participants were then given $10 and asked to put it away. Half of the participants were randomly asked to consider donating to UNICEF after reading this script:

“Before you make a decision about donating though, you should know that your donation will be given to the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF), which is a charitable foundation whose work is carried out in 190 countries around the world. The heart of UNICEF’s work is in the field with some 10,000 employees working on international priorities such as child protection, survival and development.”

The other half of the participants were also asked to consider donating to UNICEF, although their script read:

“Before you make a decision about donating though, you should know that your donation will be given to Spread the Net, a subsidiary branch of the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF). This cause was initiated to raise awareness and help wipe out death by malaria. Every $10 collected purchases a bed net for a child in Africa – a simple, effective, inexpensive way to make a BIG difference – saving lives, one net at a time”

Dr. Aknin argues that these two scripts differ in their potential for “prosocial impact”, or the awareness of the impact you have on the life of another person. While both scripts highlight the purpose of UNICEF as helping sick children around the world, the second script highlights the role the reader’s donation would specifically play in impacting the life of a child.

After deciding whether to make a donation or not, the participants completed a second set of surveys about their mood and happiness.

Dr. Aknin and her colleagues found that there was no difference in the amount of money donated between the two groups. This is interesting to me because previous research has argued that there is such a thing as “identifiable victim effect.” Identifiable victim effect is where people are more likely to donate to charities when they have seen, met, or know something about the people who need their help. According to this theory, the children at risk for malaria are identified more so than all of the other children UNICEF helps, so more people in that condition should have donated more of their money. Instead, the average donation per person across each of these conditions was $5.

They also found that individuals who donated to Spread the Net experienced significant increases in happiness, while their peers who donated the same amount to the UNICEF emergency fund did not. They interpreted these results as evidence that the emotional benefits of generosity occur only when the giver is aware of the impact their generosity had on other lives. But how can we be sure that knowing the impact on these kids’ lives was the cause of the increase in happiness? Could it have been something else? For example, could it have been something simple like knowing the specific use of the money? Or caring more about disease prevention than disaster relief?

Dr. Aknin was concerned about the same things, so she and her colleagues conducted a 2^nd study to test the causal association between prosocial impact and increases in an individual’s happiness.

To do this, they recruited 181 adults from all over North America. These participants were randomized to 1 of 3 conditions: personal, prosocial boost, prosocial blocked. In each condition they were asked to recall the last time they spent $20 on either themselves (personal), another person in a way that made an impact in their lives (prosocial boost), or another person in a way that the purchase did not make an impact on that person (prosocial blocked). After describing this event, the participant completed surveys on their present mood and their happiness. They then compared reports of emotional well-being and happiness across these three conditions.

They found that participants who were randomized to vividly recall a time that they made an impact on another person reported greater emotional well-being and happiness. In comparison, the participants who were randomized to the personal and prosocial blocked conditions showed no differences in their reports of happiness or emotional well-being.

So what can you do to capitalize on this year’s season of giving? It may be too late for this, but if you are still struggling to find the right gift for a special person in your life, think of the impact you want to have on their life and find a gift that fulfills that purpose. Also, give your gifts in person. Nothing beats the look on a person’s face when they open a carefully selected gift that says, “I’ve been paying attention.” More importantly, many of us will have the opportunity to receive gifts this holiday season which means an opportunity to increase the happiness of our family and friends. Show your gratitude by explaining how each gift you get will impact your life in a positive way. A simple “Thx” via text message just won’t cut it. Remind them of this impact over time.

For example, I would like to personally express my gratitude to all of my ScienceForWomen.org readers. We now have thousands of readers from all over the world. Your passion for knowledge and appreciation for scientific approaches to understanding yourselves and others are what keep me reading and writing each week. Some of you have emailed to let me know that you adopted a puppy after this article. Others of you have made important decisions to seek help after articles like this one and this one. Even more of you have used these articles to show your feelings for others through articles like this. You all have made me feel that I have impacted your lives, and that I can continue to do so by sharing one study at a time. Thank you & Happy Christmas!

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that the emotional benefits of generosity all come back to showing your gratitude, and helping those around us understand that they make a difference in our lives. I won’t belabor the point since I’ve discussed gratitude before (Click here to read more articles from ScienceForWomen.org on gratitude). If you’re interested in more research on how generosity helps the generous, or to make your generosity more impactful for others, I recommend checking out Stephen Post’s new book, The Hidden Gifts of Helping. 

Aknin, L. B., Dunn, E. W., Whillans, A. V., Grant, A. M., & Norton, M. I. (2013). Making a difference matters: Impact unlocks the emotional benefits of prosocial spending. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization.