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The Marshmallow Test Chapter 11. Protecting the Hurt Self: Self-Distancing
Author: Walter Mischel Publisher: New York, NY: Little, Brown and Company. Publish Date: 2014-9 Review Date: Status:💥
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In clinical practice, traditional psychotherapists usually urge their troubled clients to confront their unhappy experiences and feelings by persistently asking them, “I wonder why you felt that way?” But beginning early in the 1990s and continuing for twenty years, research by Susan Nolen-Hoeksema of Yale University revealed that while some people manage to get better by asking themselves the “Why?” question, many others get worse. They continue to brood and ruminate, only to become more depressed each time they recount the experience to themselves, friends, or empathic therapists. Instead of helping them “work through the experience,” their endless rumination reactivates the emotional pain, reheats the anger, and reopens the wounds. In short, for many people, asking “Why?” doesn’t help; it hurts.
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When and why does this emotional confrontation backfire, and when does it succeed? That’s the question that Ethan Kross could hardly wait to ask me in the fall of 2001, when, as a new graduate student, he walked into my lab at Columbia University. Answering that question is exactly what he has been doing ever since, starting with his studies at Columbia, which he completed in 2007, and after that in his research as a professor at the University of Michigan.
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When Ethan and I first met, we brainstormed for many hours about how someone like Maria could be helped to cool her distress. We looked back at the marshmallow studies in which the preschoolers had pushed the treats and the bell as far away from themselves as possible, deliberately increasing the distance between themselves and the treat, which turned down their hot system and allowed their cool system to take over. Could this apply when adults try to overcome their anger and depression? It is easy to increase your distance from external stimuli like marshmallow temptations, but how do you create distance from your feelings and yourself?
Note: no we need to confront what distresses us, we need to get closer to it. Otherwise it will get repressed
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LIKE A FLY ON THE WALL
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As Ethan and I began to discuss different ways to help people self-distance when they are trying to overcome painful experiences, Ozlem Ayduk, who was then in the last phases of her graduate work in my lab at Columbia (and since then has become a professor at the University of California, Berkeley), became intrigued by the same question and joined us. Soon we conducted the first of many experiments on self-distancing. In this study, we enlisted Columbia University college students who had experienced a serious social rejection in an important close relationship that had caused them “overwhelming feelings of anger and hostility,” and we asked them to reflect on it in one of two ways. Half of the students were invited to simply “visualize the experience through your own eyes… [and] try to understand your feelings.” This was the “self-immersed” condition in which experiences are viewed as we normally see them through our own eyes.
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To create distance from the self, we asked the other half of the study participants to “visualize the experience from the perspective of a fly on the wall.… Try to understand your ‘distant self’s’ feelings.” From this “self-distanced” perspective, reactions were much less emotional, more abstract, and less egocentric:
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The results were striking. When the participants analyzed their feelings from the usual self-immersed perspective, they recounted the concrete details as if they were reliving the experience (e.g., “He told me to back off” or “I remember watching her cheat on me”) and reactivated the negative emotions they felt (“I was so angry, pissed off, betrayed”). In contrast, when they analyzed their feelings and the reasons for them from a distanced perspective, as a fly on the wall, they began to reappraise the event rather than just recounting it once again and reactivating their distress. They started to see it in a more thoughtful and less emotional way, allowing them to reconstrue and explain the painful past in ways that led to closure. Thus the same question—“Why did I feel that way?”—reactivates the hurt when one is self-immersed, but it will cool the hurt and provide a more adaptive narrative when one is self-distanced, like an observer. Before therapists ask their deeply self-immersed patients the “Why?” question, they might want to think about these results—and consider helping those patients reflect on experiences from a distance so that their hot system is not at its hottest, and their cool system can help them begin to think it through.
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REAPPRAISAL FROM A DISTANCE
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In a 2010 experiment, Ethan and Ozlem studied a new sample of participants and found that those who spontaneously distanced themselves when they reflected on their painful experience, and reappraised it rather than recounted it, felt better and became less stressed—not just in the short term, but also when they returned to the lab seven weeks later and were asked to reflect on the same experience again.
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Do the benefits of self-distancing when dealing with hurt feelings make a difference outside the relatively artificial conditions of laboratory experiments? Does self-distancing also help people solve problems and cope better with everyday conflicts in close interpersonal relationships? To address those questions, Ozlem and Ethan went on to do a large twenty-one-day daily diary study. At the end of each day of the study, participants logged in to a secure website that asked them to indicate whether they had had an argument with their partner that day. If they had, they were asked to reflect on their deepest thoughts and feelings about the event. Finally, they rated the extent to which they spontaneously self-distanced (i.e., adopted the fly-on-the-wall perspective) as they tried to understand their feelings surrounding their conflict with their partner.
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Overall, people who spontaneously self-distanced when thinking about negative experiences in their relationship also used more constructive problem-solving strategies to resolve conflicts than those who did not spontaneously self-distance. Most interesting was that the low-self-distance people coped adaptively in conflicts, as long as their partners did not become negative and hostile toward them. But if their partners did become hostile, they fully reciprocated, sharply escalating the hostility. The combination of low-self-distancing people with highly negative partners became a formula for escalating hostility that was potentially toxic for the relationship’s future. This pattern emerged whether conflict behavior was measured by self-report as it occurred during the diary study or by direct observation from independent raters when the partners discussed their conflicts in a laboratory setting.
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Cognitive behavior therapists increasingly recognize that self-distancing is a prerequisite for therapeutic change for many people and many problems. They try to help their clients escape at least briefly from the self-immersed perspective by guiding them to realize that their beliefs and perceptions are constructions of “reality,” not revelations of absolute truths that can be seen only one way. Clients learn how to step back from their feelings and actions and observe themselves from a distance. This is a prelude to exploring different ways of thinking about themselves and their experience that might prove to be more productive and less emotionally distressing. They learn that they can represent and think about events in alternative ways that can help them cool their distress. If you break a leg, for example, that’s a fact you cannot change, as you discover when you try to walk on it. But you can change how you think about it: Is it a “horrible accident” that stresses you because you see all the things you can’t do now, like jog and bike? Or is it an unexpected opportunity to do what you’ve long wanted to do, like catch up on reading the books you love?
Note: sure but I could see this leading to a sort of passivity. If the environment is made unnecessarily stressful, people can take a more productive perspective on it, but should still seek to remove it, rather than thing “oh it isn’t so bad.”
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James Gross at Stanford and Kevin Ochsner at Columbia have shown that similar reappraisal strategies can help people cool down a wide range of negative emotions. The researchers see these “cooling effects” not just in self-reports by participants indicating that they feel better when they use cooling strategies, but also in brain imaging studies. These studies show reduced activation of the hot system, particularly the amygdala, and increased activation in the prefrontal cortex when participants are reappraising intensely negative stimuli and experiences with the goal of cooling their emotional impact.
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WHEN CHILDREN SELF-REFLECT
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One of the joys of having many wonderful students and collaborators in research over the years is that when they get exciting results they connect with one another and the collaborations multiply. Angela Duckworth, a young professor at the University of Pennsylvania, was not my student, but our collaborations began when we met at a conference around 2002, each of us bringing our own students along. Subsequently, Ethan and Angela (as well as her student Eli Tsukayama, Ozlem, and myself) wanted to see if the effects of self-distancing found with adults would apply to children and young adolescents. It was a particularly important population to study, because it is the age when kids often torture one another with social exclusion and rejection, leaving those rejected feeling hurt, distressed, and angry. Too often the consequences turn into tragedies that result in public expressions of grief, but there’s still little change in what children learn that could help them cope more constructively with the pain of rejection.
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We focused especially on anger-related experiences and feelings in children because they had been linked in earlier research to destructive consequences, notably to escalating aggression, outbursts of violence, and the onset of depression. In the study by Ethan Kross and his team, fifth-grade boys and girls were cued to recall an interpersonal experience in which they felt overwhelming feelings of anger. They were instructed to “close your eyes. Go back to the time and place of the experience you just recalled and see the scene in your imagination.” Then, in the self-immersed condition, they were asked to “replay the situation as it unfolds in your imagination through your own eyes.” But in the self-distanced condition, they were instructed to “take a few steps back. Move away from the situation to a point where you can now watch the event unfold from a distance and see yourself in the event. As you do this, focus on what has now become the distant you. Now watch the situation unfold as if it were happening to the distant you all over again. Replay the event as it unfolds in your imagination as you observe your distant self.”
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Just as we had seen with young adults, self-distancing led the children to focus less on recounting and reliving the angry feelings that they had initially experienced and helped them rethink the event in ways that reduced their anger and promoted insight and closure. They developed a more objective perspective on the event, blamed the other person less, and created stories that helped them get over their anger. These findings came from a diverse sample of children, and they held regardless of gender, race, or socioeconomic status.
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HEALING THE BROKEN HEART
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Is the kind of pain Maria experienced from her “broken heart” just a metaphor, or does it capture a biological reality? That’s another question about emotion regulation that Ethan Kross and his colleagues examined in a 2011 experiment. While their brains were being scanned by fMRI, people who had recently experienced an unwanted breakup viewed a photograph of their ex-partner and thought about their rejection. In another condition, the same individuals experienced intense physical pain from thermal stimulation to their forearm. During their physical pain, two brain areas (the secondary somatosensory cortex and the dorsal posterior insula) became activated; the same brain areas were activated when they thought about being rejected and looked at the image of the person who had broken their heart. When we speak about rejection experiences in terms of physical pain, it is not just a metaphor—the broken heart and emotional pain really do hurt in a physical way.
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The overlap in how emotional pain and physical pain are experienced and processed in the brain raises many questions. One that is often asked, with tongue in cheek, is whether it would help to take painkillers to deal with heartbreaks and the endless other forms of rejection and exclusion. Researchers on social pain get this question at the end of their talks from people trying to be funny—but as it turns out, the answer is a strong yes! “Take two aspirins and call me in the morning” would be a coldhearted response to a friend’s late-night report of fresh heartbreak, but it has a solid basis in the research.
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Naomi Eisenberger and her colleagues at the University of California in Los Angeles gave volunteers either an over-the-counter (nonprescription) painkiller or a placebo to take every day over the course of three weeks. The volunteers monitored their levels of pain caused by social rejection in their everyday lives over those three weeks, unaware of whether they were taking the painkiller or the placebo. Those who were on the painkiller reported a significant reduction in their daily hurt feelings, beginning on average at day 9 and continuing to day 21, the last day of the study. Those taking the placebo showed no change. Another group of volunteers took either the painkiller or the placebo, again without knowing what they were taking, and then experienced a social rejection while in the fMRI scanner. While their brains were being scanned, they played Cyberball, a virtual reality game of catch from which they were eventually socially excluded: after seven tosses to them, they watched what looked like two other participants throw the ball to each other for forty-five throws without ever throwing it to them. In response to the social exclusion, those who had been on the painkiller for three weeks had significantly less neural activity in the pain areas of their brains.
Note: they’re just numbing the pain. They’re not actually overcoming it
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If over-the-counter painkillers don’t help soothe Maria’s heartbreak, and she cannot manage the effortful mental acrobatics required to look at her experience as if she were the observant fly on the wall, another antidote remains. When feeling rejection pain, it helps to think about those to whom you are enduringly and securely attached. Just as looking at a picture of the person who rejected you can reactivate the pain of a broken heart, thinking about the people to whom you are deeply attached, people you love who love you back, can make it easier to overcome the kind of pain that kept Maria trapped in her past. This antidote is most effective for people who are already securely attached to others in their lives; it does not work as well for those who avoid attachment and close relationships.