Can Thinking About Other People’s Positive Traits Reduce Racial Bias?


When we think about the positive qualities of our friends and family members, we often feel a ray of gratitude or pride—but can this regard for others go on to trigger more positive racial attitudes?

My colleagues and I set out to explore whether engaging in a brief mental exercise of admiring someone else’s positive traits could lessen racial bias.

Our Need To Self-Enhance

As human beings, we have a strong need to see ourselves positively. Some psychologists have gone so far as to say this desire for self-enhancement is ubiquitous. For instance, we are more likely to notice, think about, and remember positive information about ourselves, and to lose sight of or forget negative self-related information. We also tend to think of ourselves as more competent, more moral, and more attractive than other people.

Unfortunately, this need to cast our groups and ourselves in a favorable light can sometimes incite negative attitudes toward other groups. So, we wondered: if self-enhancement can worsen our social biases, can promoting or enhancing others reduce them?

Our Capacity To Think Well Of Others

Although the need for self-enhancement is widespread, people also want to connect to and think warmly of others. Not only do we want to be loved and appreciated by others, but we also want to be the ones doing the loving and appreciating. The basic distinction between self- and other-regard is at the heart of numerous psychological theories, and characterizes many of our struggles within our personal and professional relationships. And while these forces are not necessarily opposite ends of a continuum, they do reflect different drives—one that serves our own self-esteem, and one that lifts up and honors other people.

Enhancing The Self Versus Enhancing Someone Else

In a first study, we compared the effects of positive self-regard versus the positive regard of others. We wanted to see if engaging in a brief reflection on the positive traits of close others would cause a trickle-down effect on racial attitudes. We expected that turning attention to the positive qualities of a significant other would cross over to improve racial biases.

We asked participants to engage in two writing exercises—one where they reflected on a positive trait of someone they know, and another where they reflected on a positive trait in themselves. The traits had to be character-based—not superficial or physical. In both cases, participants identified a positive trait in themselves or their friend/acquaintance, and then wrote about how they or their friend/acquaintance exemplified the trait in daily life. Half the participants wrote about their friend first and half wrote about themselves first.

Then, we measured participants’ level of implicit racial bias using the implicit association test, which gauges spontaneous evaluations of faces of White or Black people. We found that implicit racial bias against Black faces was lower after participants had engaged in the process of thinking positively about their friend or acquaintance, compared to when they had been thinking positively of themselves. The process of admiring someone else’s talents or attributes rather than one’s own seemed to carry over to improve automatic racial attitudes.

Next, we examined group-based traits rather than personal traits. Non-Black participants were assigned to reflect on either a positive quality of Black Americans or a positive quality of their own ethno-cultural group. Another third of participants were assigned to a control condition where they engaged in neutral self-reflection. We then measured participants’ explicitly measured racism. After engaging in the pro-Black reflection, participants reported significantly less racism than in the pro-self or neutral-self groups.

In a final study, we attempted to identify the factors that underlie people’s capacity for augmenting or enhancing others rather than themselves. We found that humility—the tendency to see the self as no better or worse than others—was positively related to the enhancement of others but negatively related to the enhancement of self. In turn, the enhancement of others protected against both racism and sexism, whereas self-enhancement did not.

Our findings highlight the carry-over effects of appreciating others. Because self-enhancement is pervasive and has the potential to hamper positive social relations, it’s important to identify ways to counteract it. Our research shows that a simple mental exercise of reflecting on the positive attributes of other people or other groups—ingroup or outgroup—has the power to lessen racial biases.

Prejudice is common and often severe. To make matters worse, many efforts to reduce prejudice are unsuccessful because they are punitive and restrictive, causing people to disengage. Here, we offer a simple strategy that is positive and affirming, and that may foster not just gratitude and pride, but fairness and equality as well.


For Further Reading

Legault, L., Coleman, D., Jurchak, K., & Scaltsas, N. (2021). Reducing prejudice by enhancing the other rather than the self. Self and Identity  https://doi.org/10.1080/15298868.2021.1965016

Onu, D., Kessler, T., Andonovska-Trajkovska, D., Fritsche, I., Midson, G. R., & Smith, J. R. (2016). Inspired by the outgroup: A social identity analysis of intergroup admiration. Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, 19(6), 713-731.   https://doi.org/10.1177/1368430216629811

Scholl, A., Sassenberg, K., Scheepers, D., Ellemers, N., & de Wit, F. (2017). A matter of focus: Power‐ holders feel more responsible after adopting a cognitive other‐focus, rather than a self‐focus. British Journal of Social Psychology, 56(1), 89-102. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjso.12177

Tangney, J. P. (2000). Humility: Theoretical perspectives, empirical findings and directions for future research. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 19(1), 70-82. https://doi.org/10.1521/jscp.2000.19.1.70


Lisa Legault is an Associate Professor of Psychology at Clarkson University in Northern New York. She studies the motivational foundations of prosocial and nonprejudiced attitudes and behaviors. 

 

A New Rock in College Students’ Shoes: Poor Program Design


Psychological distress is common in college. Students’ suffering is mainly seen in anxious and depressive symptoms, including restlessness, tense feelings, nervousness, sadness, lost interest, and hopelessness. Approximately one in three students will report this kind of emotional suffering, proportionally much more than in the general population (one in five approximately).

Psychological distress can harm students’ academic lives—producing lower grades, missing important obligations, and dropping out of college—and also more serious personal ones such as suicidal thoughts. We must understand why so many college students are struggling with psychological distress.

Psychological Distress and Psychological Needs

According to Self-Determination Theory, an important theory in motivation science, human beings seek to satisfy three fundamental psychological needs in order to achieve well-being and purpose. These needs are:

  • Competence—I am good at this activity,
  • Autonomy—I freely choose to engage in this activity, and
  • Relatedness—I feel important to significant others and significant others are important to me.

As the sun, water, and nutrients in the soil are fundamental for a plant to grow, competence, autonomy, and relatedness are crucial for optimal psychological growth in human beings. Thwarting these needs over a long period will cause harm.

Take a few seconds to consider your own experience while in school. You may have experienced frustration when studying for an exam in a class where explanations were unclear (competence thwarting) or in a subject you disliked (autonomy thwarting), or even where the teacher was unfriendly (relatedness thwarting). Now imagine that in various courses during your studies you felt incompetent, devoid of control over your decisions, and isolated. Would this still be a fulfilling experience, or would it be a distressing one? To ask the question is to answer it.

Psychological Needs and Teachers, Peers, and Study Program

Students can try to be proactive in fulfilling their needs, choosing programs where they feel they are likely to experience competence, autonomy, and relatedness. However, these programs exist in specific social contexts that students do not control. For example, a future student may select a major in engineering because they love this discipline, but they do not control how teachers will deliver their courses, how friendly their peers will be, or how their study program will be organized. Choosing and valuing something do not mean that one can expect to automatically satisfy their psychological needs. It is up to the teachers, peers, and programs to do what is necessary to support these needs to foster optimal functioning in students during college years.

What Our Research Says About College Students’ Psychological Distress

We surveyed 1,797 students and asked about their teachers, their peers, and their study program. Specifically, we distinguished the support versus thwarting of the needs for competence, autonomy, and relatedness by these three sources. We found only a marginal importance of college teachers supporting autonomy, competence, and relatedness to reduce psychological distress.

In contrast, need thwarting by peers and study programs were the big harm doers. Disappointing peer relations are easy to understand as a source of distress, but disappointing study programs may be a surprising and overlooked factor spiraling students’ psychological distress during the college years. When students find that the study program has little predictability and coherence, no implemented means to criticize the curriculum, and high workload that leads them to neglect other areas of their life, they will experience more psychological distress. This finding is especially important considering that aspects inherent to study programs could be adjusted during program evaluation processes and curriculum design to better consider students’ needs.

In conclusion, each year college students may come with the expectation to develop their passion for a given field of study and to experience well-being and purpose, but certainly not to suffer from psychological distress. Our results might help college administrations to understand their responsibility in nurturing students’ autonomy, competence, and relatedness.


For Further Reading

Gilbert, W., Bureau, J. S., Poellhuber, B., & Guay, F. (2021). Predicting college students' psychological distress through basic psychological need-relevant practices by teachers, peers, and the academic program. Motivation and Emotion, 45,436–455. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-021-09892-4
 

Frédéric Guay and Julien Bureau are professors at Université Laval. Their research interests include determinants and consequences of students’ autonomous/controlled motivations.

William Gilbert is a PhD candidate at the same university. His research interests include mental health and healthy life habits among college students.

 

Good News: It’s Possible to Enhance Your Self-Esteem!


You probably know someone who, despite all the good qualities they have, tends to feel inferior to others, regularly devalues themself, and lacks self-confidence. This person regularly evaluates their attributes as negative or insufficient, resulting in low self-esteem.

This could be a major issue considering that self-esteem figures in many of our behaviors (such as perseverance or taking initiative) and could even be a trigger of serious mental problems such as depression.

The Good News

Today, many techniques are described as increasing self-esteem. The work of our research team has been to evaluate whether these techniques are really effective or whether they are just a way to sell new costly therapies or trendy books.

By analyzing 119 studies that tested these different methods, our team found that on the whole, they are effective on self-esteem—even if their effects remain small. A good thing to know, but is one technique better than the others?

The Main Self-Esteem Building Techniques

We grouped the various approaches into broad categories:

  • Cognitive and Behavioral Therapies (CBTs): Probably the most effective for increasing self-esteem, these therapies consist of helping people to better accept themselves, to criticize their negative self-views, and to establish more positive self-beliefs. For this purpose, different techniques are used, such as psychoeducation (explaining the psychological processes underlying low self-esteem), thought questioning, evidence finding, and exercises to develop self-confidence.
  • Reminiscence-Based Therapies: Initially used in the elderly, this approach is based on remembering positive past events (for example, recalling a successful personal situation) and/or the re-evaluation of negative memories (such as recalling a memory of a problematic situation and highlighting the coping strategies used at that time). Reminiscence-based therapies are effective for self-esteem enhancement but less so than CBTs.
  • Evaluative Conditioning: More experimental and not much used, this method involves repeatedly associating the self with positive things so that the self-concept gradually becomes more and more positive. To illustrate, the person might see the word "I" or "me" on a computer screen, and then a smiley face or a positive word (like "vacations" or "intelligent"). This surprising technique is also effective in increasing self-esteem, although we don't know if the positive effects last long after the technique is stopped.           

We also investigated whether other factors could have an impact on their effectiveness (such as format or methodological procedure). People with various mental health disorders (such as depression, anxiety, or eating disorders) benefit more than healthier people do. Maybe people with more serious problems see greater value in these techniques than healthier people do, thus enhancing their motivation and investment in the therapy.

What's Next?

There were many differences between the studies’ methods, as well as imperfections, meaning we still have much to learn about this important topic. It is especially important to remember that how we think of ourselves is based on a multitude of factors including how we think others perceive us, our feelings of competence, our body image, and many others. The most effective ways to increase self-esteem for these different aspects are still to be determined.


For Further Reading

Niveau, N., New, B., & Beaudoin, M. (2021). Self-esteem interventions in adults–A systematic review and meta-analysis. Journal of Research in Personality, 94. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2021.104131

Fennell, M. J. V. (1998). Cognitive therapy in the treatment of low self-esteem. Advances in Psychiatric Treatment, 4(5), 296–304. https://doi.org/10.1192/apt.4.5.296

Sowislo, J. F., & Orth, U. (2013). Does low self-esteem predict depression and anxiety? A meta-analysis of longitudinal studies. Psychological Bulletin139(1), 213-240. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0028931

 

Noémie Niveau, Ph.D., is a research and teaching assistant at the University Grenoble-Alpes in France. Her research interests include self-esteem, links between the self and memory, and psycho-oncology.

 

Surviving Your Loss by Looking to Your Past


For so many individuals and families across the globe who have lost loved ones to the COVID-19 pandemic, this has been a time steeped in tragedy and pain. During this time, many of us have lost loved ones due to other tragedies, as well. Our family suffered the loss of Stephen’s mother to cancer.

We know too well that nothing can replace the presence of loved ones in our lives or entirely relieve the pain of their loss. Nevertheless, we personally find some comfort in reflecting on the life of Stephen’s mother, our memories with her, and the positive impact she had on us. Research we conducted along with our collaborators, published just months before our loss, suggests that those of us who engage in this sort of nostalgic reverie may benefit from reductions in some of the negative symptoms that tend to accompany our loss and grief.

Nostalgia is a sentimental longing for treasured moments in our pasts, and the moments for which we are nostalgic tend to be ones that involve ourselves in relation to our close others, particularly at momentous occasions. We might reflect back on our wedding days, holiday gatherings with our families, great vacations—whatever moments are valuable to us personally.

Nostalgia is a Good Thing

Historically, scholars incorrectly viewed nostalgia as a disorder that would harm our health and well-being. Engaging in nostalgic reverie would make us feel sad and lonely and cause alarming physical symptoms, they thought.

However, historical scholars actually had it backwards: rather than nostalgia bringing about sadness and loneliness, uncomfortable states (like sadness and loneliness) tend to bring about nostalgia. Feeling lonely might lead us to reminisce about some of the treasured moments we shared with our loved ones, and reflecting on those moments then helps us feel less lonely. In this way, nostalgia serves a restorative function and can be quite healthy. In fact, people who experience nostalgia more frequently tend to experience psychological benefits including feeling more accepted, supported, inspired, and optimistic. They also tend to experience more positive emotion and feel that their lives are more meaningful.

Can nostalgia benefit a person even when facing the loss of a loved one to death? In our research, undergraduate students who had lost a loved one within the past two years reported their frequency and personal value of nostalgic engagement as well as their level of distress including intrusive thoughts, irritability and physical symptoms across a one-month period.

Nostalgia helped by reducing distress across time without encouraging what are called “escapist strategies” (like trying to avoid reminders of their loss). More nostalgic people reported fewer intrusive thoughts over time, but less nostalgic people did not experience a similar benefit.

We also examined irritability and physical reactions to the loss, such as trouble sleeping and a pounding heart, and found that these, too, declined over time among more nostalgic people who were suffering from more intense grief. People who were suffering from more intense grief who were less nostalgic did not experience a similar benefit. In fact, their symptoms worsened over time.

Nostalgia offers a more positive and constructive way of connecting with our pasts. Rather than ruminating on negative emotions and experiences, we may reflect on treasured, even triumphant moments, moments of love and joy.

We simply asked about nostalgia among our participants, but a great deal of research shows that a variety of methods—such as scents, narratives, and music—can induce nostalgia as well. For us, Carole King’s “You’ve Got a Friend,” will always remind us of Stephen dancing with his mother at our wedding. Paying attention to the present and looking toward the future are important, but it is also healthy to bring out those photo albums or play those records once in a while.


For Further Reading:

Reid, C. A., Green, J. D., Short, S. D., Willis, K. D., Moloney, J. M., Collison, E. A., Wildschut, T., Sedikides, C., & Gramling, S. (2020). The past as a resource for the bereaved: Nostalgia predicts declines in distress. Cognition and Emotion, 35(2), 256-268. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699931.2020.1825339

Sedikides, C., Wildschut, T., Routledge, C., Arndt, J., Hepper, E. G., & Zhou, X. (2015). To nostalgize: Mixing memory with affect and desire. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 51, 189-273. https://doi.org/10.1016/bs.aesp.2014.10.001

Wildschut, T., Sedikides, C., Arndt, J., & Routledge, C. (2006). Nostalgia: Content, triggers, functions. Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, 91(5), 975-993. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.91.5.975
 

Chelsea Reid is an Associate Professor of Psychology at the College of Charleston. She studies the self and interpersonal relationships, with focuses on nostalgia and attitude agreements between partners.

Stephen Short is an Associate Professor of Psychology at the College of Charleston with expertise in advanced statistical techniques and research interests in predictors of attitudes toward science.

 

Rob Chavez

Rob Chavez is an assistant professor at the University of Oregon and director of the Computational Social Neuroscience Lab. He studies how information about the self and social cognition are represented in distributed systems within the brain. He received his B.S. in Psychology from the University of New Mexico and Ph.D. in Cognitive Neuroscience from Dartmouth College.
 

In what ways do you feel your background in personality and social psychology makes the biggest impact in your career?

I like to think of myself as an “applied” personality and social psychologist. My application, however, is directed at the study of the brain. Thus, rather than thinking of neuroscience as a method, I feel like I am the personality and social psychologist on a team of scientists all trying to understand how the brain works. There is so much we don’t know about how social processes are instantiated within our brain, and the biologists aren’t usually asking those questions.


What has been your biggest challenge as a social or personality psychologist?

Psychology is becoming increasingly technical and interdisciplinary. As someone who does interdisciplinary work, it can be hard to keep up with both the latest theories and cutting-edge methods in multiple domains. That said, the fun part is being able to bridge and make fresh connections by mixing methods and ideas across domains to generate new insights.
 

What are you most proud of in your career?

My bachelor's degree. I went to 1.5 years of community college before transferring to the state university in my hometown. I worked full time throughout my five years of college and paid 100% of my own rent and bills; I’ve never worked harder for anything in my life. Despite getting my PhD from a more ‘elite’ university, I am the proudest of my undergraduate degree.
 

Do you have a favorite course to teach and why?

I love teaching my large Intro to Psychology course. Because my interests are so broad, I have a lot of genuine enthusiasm for all areas of psychology which helps when you are the gateway to many peoples’ interest in the field. Although some people don’t like big lecture courses, I love the performative aspects of keeping the attention of 500 students at a time. It brings me back to my days of playing bass in a band in front of the crowd.
 

What career path would you have chosen if you had decided to not pursue psychology?

As a faculty member, I don’t get the chance to get behind the terminal and code as much as I wish I could. I also love working with diverse kinds of data and problems. Although I would still long to answer psychological questions, a career in data science, software engineering, or data visualization would have also kept me busy and happy.

 

Get Self-esteem With a Little Help From Your Friends (and Vice Versa)


Psychologists have long suggested that social relationships have a profound impact on people’s self-esteem. One idea called Sociometer Theory states that the reason why people have low, moderate, or high self-esteem is to signal to themselves how approved they are by their peers. Thus, if people tend to like you, your self-esteem is high, and if they don’t, it is low. Another idea from Attachment Theory is that self-esteem originates when infants first form relationships with primary caregivers, and the self-feeling that is established early on tends to persist as children form new relationships. The research testing these theories has been inconsistent in that some studies found support for long-term effects of social relationships on later self-esteem, whereas other studies did not.

Therefore, to compare the different paths of connection between self-esteem and relationship quality found in the literature, we assembled the findings from 48 studies that followed the same people over time to see whether relationships influenced later feelings of self-esteem. Because theories and research suggest the link can go the other way as well—self-esteem influencing relationships—we also gathered 35 studies testing that path. Self-esteem was defined as people’s comprehensive and subjective views towards themselves, including feelings of self-liking and self-acceptance. Relationships included those with parents, peers, romantic partners, and general social networks. The quality of social relationships was measured either by participants’ ratings of warmth, support, or intimacy; or by partners’ ratings of participants’ popularity/likeability.

The average effect of people’s past relationship quality on their current self-esteem was small but very meaningful given the multiple factors in people’s life histories that can influence their present-day self-esteem. Thus, the studies confirmed long-standing psychological theories claiming that social relationships from your past influence how you feel about yourself today.

What Factors Make a Difference?

Which social relationships matter the most? From what we know so far, all types of relationships (with parents, peers, romantic partners, and general social networks) are equally important in predicting later self-esteem.

At what ages do relationships matter the most? The studies included individuals as young as age 4 and as old as age 76, with an average age of 21 years. In addition, the amount of time between measuring relationships and self-esteem ranged from 4 weeks to 11 years, with an average time lag of 2.3 years. However, there were no effects of either time lag or age. This means that relationships have just as strong an impact on self-esteem for children as they do for older adults and anyone in between.

And What About the Reverse Path?

People’s self-esteem, in turn, also had a small but similarly meaningful effect on the quality of social relationships. This means that the extent to which you feel good about yourself today can impact how positive and supportive your relationships are in the future. This was especially true for relationships in general rather than a particular relationship partner.

An unfortunate implication of our finding is that it holds for negative relationship experiences as well as for positive ones. This means that harsh and unsupportive relationships from your past could continue to diminish your self-esteem today, and vice versa. But there’s no cause for panic because other resources such as resilience, accomplishments, and many other factors can supplement your self-esteem at any point and in turn lead to new relationships that help you get by once again.


For Further Reading

Harris, M. A., & Orth, U. (2020). The link between self-esteem and social relationships: A meta-analysis of longitudinal studies. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 119(6), 1459-1477. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspp0000265

Cameron, J. J., & Granger, S. (2019). Does self-esteem have an interpersonal imprint beyond self-reports? A meta-analysis of self-esteem and objective interpersonal indicators. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 23(1), 73-102. https://doi.org/10.1177/1088868318756532

de Moor, E. L., Denissen, J. J. A., Emons, W. H. M., Bleidorn, W., Luhmann, M., Orth, U., & Chung, J. M. (2021). Self-esteem and satisfaction with social relationships across time. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 120(1), 173-191. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspp0000379
 

Michelle Lucas is an Evaluation Analyst for Austin Independent School District and coauthor of the Lifespan Self-Esteem scale.

Ulrich Orth is Associate Professor of Developmental Psychology at the University of Bern. His main research interests are self-esteem and personality development.

 

From Overwhelmed to Self-affirmed: How Expressing Our Deeply Held Values Can Clear Our Heads

As a Black American mother, social psychologist, and public policy expert, I have found the last year to be difficult—to put it mildly. While I am optimistic to see our nation beginning to reckon with its history of racial injustice, the truth is that I am more overwhelmed than anything else. As a mother of triplets—four-year-old triplets—I can say that there are very few moments when I do not feel overwhelmed. At the same time, I do not experience the burden of poverty. It is incredibly difficult for me to imagine life in 2020 as a single mother living below the poverty line.

For over a decade now, my work has focused on understanding the psychology and decision-making of those who are chronically overwhelmed. Individuals who experience persistent poverty live in a constant state of making difficult tradeoffs about how to manage the scarce resources of money and time. My colleagues and I have taken a novel approach to the study of poverty. We examine some previously unexplored psychological consequences of poverty—and what can be done to provide those living in poverty the resources to make their day-to-day lives a bit more manageable. Poverty places an enormous tax on the ability of anyone to think clearly and make long-term decisions. It forces a person to worry about what lies directly ahead, at the expense of planning for the more distant future.

This is not just about saving money for a rainy day or planning for retirement (though these are critical issues that I also have studied in my own research). In addition to all the well-known burdens of poverty (for example, the consequences for health and safety), poverty has a powerful effect on the way people think. Poverty creates a real, tangible burden that continually consumes the valuable mental resources necessary to thrive. My research has attempted to understand these psychological burdens.

Self-affirmation

My work with Jiaying Zhao and Eldar Shafir on self-affirmation among individuals living in poverty demonstrates some of the real cognitive impacts of the negative stigma of poverty. Self-affirmation refers to one way that individuals can adapt in situations that threaten their sense of self. People can engage in self-affirmation in various ways—for example by talking or writing about things that they deeply value, or sources of personal pride. In turn, self-affirmation can alleviate negative stigma associated with gender, race, or class that might interfere with other behaviors. To illustrate, Akira Miyake and colleagues showed that allowing women enrolled in a college physics class to engage in just two self-affirmations early in the course virtually eliminated the gender gap in class performance.

In our research, we invited people to describe, in detail, a previous personal episode when they felt proud and successful, and this alleviated some of the cognitive impacts of the stigma of poverty. These low-income participants were more likely to take information about a benefit (free tax preparation) and showed higher executive control. Several of these studies were conducted at soup kitchens—where the stigma of poverty was certainly quite salient. Our findings show how a positive self-reflection can provide some mental bandwidth to a population that can benefit greatly from less psychological background noise.

Our work provides one example of how psychological science can be used to understand (and potentially address) a significant social challenge. The COVID-19 pandemic has created an immeasurable laundry list of daily stressors and hassles. And these stressors are taxing our collective mental well-being. Many individuals may worry about becoming sick on a daily basis—even seasonal allergies have likely been far more stress-inducing this year than usual. Caregivers (women, in particular) are engaging in the impossible task of juggling their professional and personal obligations in an unprecedented way. Others are experiencing the compounding effects of social isolation and loneliness after months of limited contact with the outside world.

Although a simple self-affirmation task surely cannot erase all of the burdens faced by members of a wide range of stigmatized groups, it can be one piece of a bigger solution. We should also remember that many consequences of stigma are compounded when they intersect. For example, the health outcomes of Black mothers are dramatically worse than those of their White counterparts. In the United States, people of color, women, individuals experiencing poverty, and those who live with other types of stigma can benefit from these types of tools and strategies to mitigate the chronic stress that goes along with them. Self-affirmation is just one potential tool.

What else can we do?

Government agencies and employers can do a much better job of acknowledging and addressing the array of demands that have so many Americans feeling under water. This goes far beyond the straightforward economic impacts. For example, employers should not merely acknowledge the increased stress faced by workers who are also caregivers. They should also create policies to give these families flexibility in their work routines. In addition, we must increase access to and use of mental health care—both for preventative purposes and in the face of significant acute issues. Institutions should also implement authentically anti-racist policies and practices. And that can begin with acknowledging and addressing the outsize stresses placed on people of color during everyday interactions, as well as times of collective crisis.


For Further Reading

Hall, C. C., Zhao, J., & Shafir, E. (2014). Self-affirmation among the poor: Cognitive and behavioral implications. Psychological Science, 25(2), 619-625.

Mani, A., Mullainathan, S., Shafir, E., & Zhao, J. (2013). Poverty impedes cognitive function. Science341(6149), 976-980.

Sherman, D. K., & Cohen, G. L. (2006). The psychology of self‐defense: Self‐affirmation theory. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 38, 183-242.


Crystal Hall is an Associate Professor of Public Policy and Governance at the University of Washington in Seattle, where she has been surviving the pandemic with her husband and their 4-year-old triplets.

How Can We Forgive Others? Self-compassion as a Step Toward Forgiveness


Please take a moment and recall a time when somebody hurt you. What did this person do to you? What was your relationship with this person? How are you feeling right now? Do you want to take revenge on this person, or avoid seeing them, or re-establish a relationship? Psychological research found that forgiveness promotes harmonious relationships and our own well-being. If this is the case, who is more willing to forgive others? My colleague and I found that self-compassion is one of the key characteristics of such people.

Self-compassion is defined as the tendency to care for ourselves when things go wrong, just as we treat our friends and family compassionately. Theory suggests that people who have self-compassion treat themselves in a kind and accepting manner, connecting their experiences with those of others, and taking a balanced and nonjudgmental perspective on their situation. The emotional tone of a self-compassionate person is calm and cheerful. Such a person would say to themselves “It is okay to feel bad because of what has happened. There are lots of people who encounter similar experiences, so I am not the only one who suffers. I will take a break and feel relaxed because I care about myself.”

This might sound like such people are self-indulgent. However, past research in psychology found that self-compassionate people actually take responsibility for negative events and make efforts to improve their situation. Our research also showed that self-compassionate people forgive the person who hurt them.

How do self-compassionate people forgive others? Our research attempted to answer this question. We recruited 254 participants from a Japanese internet research service. We asked them to complete a questionnaire to measure self-compassion, and then to recall a time when someone they knew had hurt them―yes, you have just experienced our methodology at the beginning of this blog. Later, they answered questions about repetitive thoughts on their offenders and their intention to forgive. Specifically, forgiveness was indicated by a lower intention to revenge and avoid their offenders and a higher motive to re-establish relationships with the persons.

Self-compassionate people did not dwell on the persons who hurt them, and, thus, they were willing to forgive them. Self-compassionate people were less likely to continue thinking of their offenders, and thus had lower intentions to seek revenge and avoid the persons. Self-compassion includes taking a broader perspective of experiences without getting carried away with negative thoughts. Because of the tendency to take a bird’s-eye view, self-compassionate people might be able to release repetitive thoughts and therefore their grudge against someone who hurt them.

Furthermore, our work showed that self-compassionate people are more willing to re-establish harmonious relationships with their offenders. When we give kindness to ourselves and our hearts are filled with warmth and love, then we might be able to extend compassion even toward someone who hurt us. Additionally, self-compassionate people are considered to see their connections with others and kindly acknowledge that human beings are imperfect. Such acknowledgment may foster compassion toward offenders.

Let’s recap. What should we do if we cannot forgive others? Our results suggest that self-compassion is an important step toward forgiveness. When we treat ourselves with compassion, we start to forgive the person who hurt us. You might be a bit concerned that you may be not good at showing compassion to yourself. Please don’t worry. The good news is that self-compassion is not just a stable characteristic but a skill that everyone can learn. Psychologists have developed several training programs to learn self-compassion skills. Research has consistently reported the effectiveness of such programs among children, university students, adults, and people with mental illness. So, even if you feel low in self-compassion now, you will be able to develop compassion for yourself.

A next step in research will be to arrange for people to undergo such a training program and see if they become more able to forgive others. With self-compassion, we seem to reduce our grudges against others and move toward better relationships.


For Further Reading

Miyagawa, Y., & Taniguchi, J. (2020). Self-compassion helps people forgive transgressors: Cognitive pathways of interpersonal transgressions. Self and Identity. https://doi.org/10.1080/15298868.2020.1862904

Neff, K. D. (2003). Self-compassion: An alternative conceptualization of a healthy attitude toward oneself. Self and Identity, 2(3), 85-101. https://doi.org/10.1080/15298860309032

Germer, C. K., & Neff, K. D. (2013). Self-compassion in clinical practice. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 69(8), 856-867. https://doi.org/10.1002/jclp.22021
 

Yuki Miyagawa is a Lecturer at Otemon Gakuin University in Japan. His research focuses on understanding the processes through which people cope with adversity.
 

The Potential Benefits of Remembering that “Everybody Hurts”


Picture how you reacted when a romantic partner broke up with you. Did you eat an entire tub of ice cream? Did you lock yourself away for hours while scrolling through photos of your ex? Social rejection—whether in romantic relationships, within friendships, or at work—is something that everyone experiences in life, but we do not always know how to cope with rejection effectively.

Research shows that people often respond to rejection in ways that are probably not helpful: eating unhealthy foods, making risky decisions, behaving aggressively, lashing out at other people… The list of unhelpful responses to rejection is long.

What if you could respond in a more effective way, simply by changing how you treat yourself? Self-compassion, a concept derived from Buddhist teaching, involves taking compassion and turning it inward. People unfamiliar with the idea of self-compassion may actually find it easier to be compassionate to others than to themselves.

Self-compassion has three interconnected components: self-kindness (treating yourself in the way that you would treat a close friend or loved one), common humanity (acknowledging that all human beings are imperfect and that everyone suffers), and mindfulness (acknowledging negative thoughts or feelings without getting carried away with them or trying to push them away). Over the past 18 years, considerable research evidence supports the benefits of self-compassion in a wide variety of areas: reacting to trauma, coping with health problems, and dealing with loneliness in one’s first year at university, just to name a few.

In my own research, I tested whether people who are more self-compassionate (compared to people who are less so) might respond less negatively to rejection. I then tested whether temporarily inducing a self-compassionate mindset would lead to relatively more positive responses when recalling a painful instance of rejection.

In one study, I found that among people who were highly self-compassionate, the links between feeling high belongingness (in other words, not feeling rejected) and negative mood/depression were relatively weak. Specifically, highly self-compassionate people were relatively less affected by feeling rejected. Less self-compassionate people were relatively more affected by feeling rejected.

In a second study, I followed undergraduates over the course of two weeks. Before the study started, they had filled out a measure of self-compassion and another measure of general self-esteem. At the end of each day, they wrote about what event most affected how socially included or excluded they felt that day. They then filled out more questionnaires about their mood and feelings of acceptance. Among highly self-compassionate people, the relationship between daily acceptance feelings and positive mood was relatively weak. The flip side of this result is that among people who were less self-compassionate, the link between daily acceptance feelings and positive mood was relatively strong. These results suggest again that people who practice self-compassion may be less affected by daily fluctuations in perceived acceptance.

Then, I did a study where people wrote about a time that they felt especially rejected, but in one of three different ways: in a self-compassionate way, in a high-self-esteem way, or with catharsis (“really letting go”). People who wrote about their experience of rejection from a self-compassionate perspective showed more positive reactions (better mood, better temporary self-esteem, and fewer temporary depressive symptoms) than did whose who simply “really let go.”

So, the good news? Many studies have shown that people can learn to practice self-compassion. The overall pattern of my results suggests that, at least in some ways, self-compassion may be beneficial when coping with rejection. So, the next time that you are hurting from the sting of rejection, it might help to remember, as the popular old R.E.M. song suggests, that “Everybody Hurts.” Maybe everybody could use some self-compassion, too.


For Further Reading

Koch, E. J. (2020). Remembering that “Everybody Hurts”: The role of self-compassion in responses to rejection. Basic and Applied Social Psychology. doi: 10.1080/01973533.2020.1726748

Neff, K. D. (2011). Self-compassion, self-esteem, and well-being. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 5(1), 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1751-9004.2010.00330.x

Neff, K. D. (2003). The development and validation of a scale to measure self-compassion. Self and Identity, 2(3), 223-250. doi:10.1080/15298860309027
 

Erika Koch is Associate Professor of Psychology at St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia, Canada. She tries to practice self-compassion in her day-to-day life (but mindfully acknowledges that she does not always succeed).

Why We Should Listen Well When Other People Disclose Prejudice

At the same time that there is increased pressure to talk about prejudice openly and honestly, there is also an increased risk of being ostracized or “canceled” for saying the wrong thing.  We thought that talking about one’s prejudices might actually be helpful for reducing prejudice if the person listening provides full attention and conveys understanding, empathy, and non-judgment.

We tested whether speakers who receive this kind of attentive listening report more self-insight and openness to change in relation to their prejudiced attitude than speakers who converse with listeners who give little feedback that they really “hear” and understand what speakers are saying. We expected that high-quality listening might even lead to lower prejudiced attitudes compared to inattentive or judgmental listening.

Across a pilot study and three experiments, we found evidence supporting the importance of high-quality listening when discussing prejudiced attitudes. For example, in an in-person experiment conducted in the UK, we asked participants to have a face-to-face conversation with a researcher about a negative bias the participant held. In the high-quality listening condition, the listener maintained constant eye contact and used non-verbal signals such as head nodding that convey interest and curiosity. The researcher also conveyed understanding, empathy, and support to the speaker but did not express agreement or disagreement with what the participant said. In the regular listening condition, the listener was mostly silent throughout the conversation.

Participants in the high-quality listening condition reported they had more self-insight than speakers in the regular listening condition and also reported greater openness to change their attitude. Importantly, they also reported more favorable attitudes—that is, less prejudice—toward the group they talked about than those in the regular listening condition. Participants who received high-quality listening had higher self-insight and openness to change, which led to lower prejudice.

We replicated this study in Israel. Instead of having participants select the group that they would talk about, we first assessed their prejudice to different groups and then assigned them to write about a specific group that they were prejudiced against. Even in this more challenging discussion, high-quality listening led to more openness and less prejudiced attitudes compared to regular-quality listening.

Our research suggests that conversations about prejudice may be beneficial when they are held with listeners who convey empathy, understanding, and support. Future studies may want to examine whether this is also true when people express very high levels of prejudice and how long the beneficial effects of high-quality listening last.

In summary, our research highlighted the important role that high-quality listening plays in facilitating constructive conversations and suggests that listeners can help speakers feel more open and gain insights when responding in ways that convey empathy, understanding, and support.   It’s obviously hard to talk openly about prejudice, but our research suggests that these conversations can be useful if listeners respond correctly.


For Further Reading

Itzchakov, G., Weinstein, N., Legate, N., & Amar, M. (2020). Can high-quality listening predict lower speakers’ prejudiced attitudes? Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2020.104022

Itzchakov, G., DeMarree, K. G., Kluger, A. N., & Turjeman-Levi, Y. (2018). The listener sets the tone: High-quality listening increases attitude clarity and behavior-intention consequences. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin44(5), 762-778.

Itzchakov, G., & Kluger, A. N. (2018). The power of listening in helping people change. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2018/05/the-power-of-listening-in-helping-people-change

Itzchakov, G., Kluger, A. N., & Castro, D. R. (2017). I am aware of my inconsistencies but can tolerate them: The effect of high-quality listening on speakers’ attitude ambivalence. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 43(1), 105-120.

Kalla, J. L., & Broockman, D. E. (2020). Reducing exclusionary attitudes through interpersonal conversation: evidence from three field experiments. American Political Science Review, 114(2), 410-425.

Weinstein, N., Przybylski, A. K., & Ryan, R. M. (2013). The integrative process: New research and future directions. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 22(1), 69-74.


Guy Itzchakov is an Assistant Professor at the University of Haifa, Department of Human Services. Guy’s focal line of research examines the effects of high-quality listening on attitude structure and change.

Netta Weinstein is an Associate Professor at the University of Reading, School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences. Netta’s focus is on constructive motivational climates, emotional well-being, and interpersonal functioning.

Nicole Legate is an Associate Professor at Illinois Institute of Technology, Department of Psychology, studying prejudice, stigma, and motivation.

Moty Amar is an Associate Professor at the Ono Academic College, School of Business. He also serves there as the chair of the department of advertising and marketing communications and as the principal of the behavioral research laboratory.