Mental Health Matters

What is Social Rejection?

Published on 05/15/2024 by Andrew MarshallLeave a comment

Introduction

Social rejection occurs when an individual is deliberately excluded from a social relationship or social interaction. The topic includes interpersonal rejection (or peer rejection), romantic rejection, and familial estrangement. A person can be rejected or shunned by individuals or an entire group of people. Furthermore, rejection can be either active by bullying, teasing, or ridiculing, or passive by ignoring a person, or giving the “silent treatment”. The experience of being rejected is subjective for the recipient, and it can be perceived when it is not actually present. The word “ostracism” is also commonly used to denote a process of social exclusion (in Ancient Greece, ostracism was a form of temporary banishment following a people’s vote).

Although humans are social beings, some level of rejection is an inevitable part of life. Nevertheless, rejection can become a problem when it is prolonged or consistent, when the relationship is important, or when the individual is highly sensitive to rejection. Rejection by an entire group of people can have especially negative effects, particularly when it results in social isolation.

The experience of rejection can lead to a number of adverse psychological consequences such as loneliness, low self-esteem, aggression, and depression. It can also lead to feelings of insecurity and a heightened sensitivity to future rejection.

Need for Acceptance

Social rejection may be emotionally painful, due to the social nature of human beings, as well as the essential need for social interaction between other humans. Abraham Maslow and other theorists have suggested that the need for love and belongingness is a fundamental human motivation. According to Maslow, all humans, even introverts, need to be able to give and receive affection to be psychologically healthy.

Psychologists believe that simple contact or social interaction with others is not enough to fulfil this need. Instead, people have a strong motivational drive to form and maintain caring interpersonal relationships. People need both stable relationships and satisfying interactions with the people in those relationships. If either of these two ingredients is missing, people will begin to feel lonely and unhappy. Thus, rejection is a significant threat. In fact, the majority of human anxieties appear to reflect concerns over social exclusion.

Being a member of a group is also important for social identity, which is a key component of the self-concept. Mark Leary of Duke University has suggested that the main purpose of self-esteem is to monitor social relations and detect social rejection. In this view, self-esteem is a sociometer which activates negative emotions when signs of exclusion appear.

Social psychological research confirms the motivational basis of the need for acceptance. Specifically, fear of rejection leads to conformity to peer pressure (sometimes called normative influence, cf. informational influence), and compliance to the demands of others. The need for affiliation and social interaction appears to be particularly strong under stress.

In Childhood

Peer rejection has been measured using sociometry and other rating methods. Studies typically show that some children are popular, receiving generally high ratings, many children are in the middle, with moderate ratings, and a minority of children are rejected, showing generally low ratings. One measure of rejection asks children to list peers they like and dislike. Rejected children receive few “like” nominations and many “dislike” nominations. Children classified as neglected receive few nominations of either type.

According to Karen Bierman of Pennsylvania State University, most children who are rejected by their peers display one or more of the following behavior patterns:

Low rates of prosocial behaviour, e.g. taking turns, sharing.
High rates of aggressive or disruptive behaviour.
High rates of inattentive, immature, or impulsive behaviour.
High rates of social anxiety.

Bierman states that well-liked children show social savvy and know when and how to join play groups. Children who are at risk for rejection are more likely to barge in disruptively, or hang back without joining at all. Aggressive children who are athletic or have good social skills are likely to be accepted by peers, and they may become ringleaders in the harassment of less skilled children. Minority children, children with disabilities, or children who have unusual characteristics or behaviour may face greater risks of rejection. Depending on the norms of the peer group, sometimes even minor differences among children lead to rejection or neglect. Children who are less outgoing or simply prefer solitary play are less likely to be rejected than children who are socially inhibited and show signs of insecurity or anxiety.

Peer rejection, once established, tends to be stable over time, and thus difficult for a child to overcome. Researchers have found that active rejection is more stable, more harmful, and more likely to persist after a child transfers to another school, than simple neglect. One reason for this is that peer groups establish reputational biases that act as stereotypes and influence subsequent social interaction. Thus, even when rejected and popular children show similar behaviour and accomplishments, popular children are treated much more favourably.

Rejected children are likely to have lower self-esteem, and to be at greater risk for internalising problems like depression. Some rejected children display externalising behaviour and show aggression rather than depression. The research is largely correlational, but there is evidence of reciprocal effects. This means that children with problems are more likely to be rejected, and this rejection then leads to even greater problems for them. Chronic peer rejection may lead to a negative developmental cycle that worsens with time.

Rejected children are more likely to be bullied and to have fewer friends than popular children, but these conditions are not always present. For example, some popular children do not have close friends, whereas some rejected children do. Peer rejection is believed to be less damaging for children with at least one close friend.

An analysis of 15 school shootings between 1995 and 2001 found that peer rejection was present in all but two of the cases (87%). The documented rejection experiences included both acute and chronic rejection and frequently took the form of ostracism, bullying, and romantic rejection. The authors stated that although it is likely that the rejection experiences contributed to the school shootings, other factors were also present, such as depression, poor impulse control, and other psychopathology.

There are programs available for helping children who suffer from social rejection. One large scale review of 79 controlled studies found that social skills training is very effective (r = 0.40 effect size), with a 70% success rate, compared to 30% success in control groups. There was a decline in effectiveness over time, however, with follow-up studies showing a somewhat smaller effect size (r = 0.35).

In the Laboratory

Laboratory research has found that even short-term rejection from strangers can have powerful (if temporary) effects on an individual. In several social psychology experiments, people chosen at random to receive messages of social exclusion become more aggressive, more willing to cheat, less willing to help others, and more likely to pursue short-term over long-term goals. Rejection appears to lead very rapidly to self-defeating and antisocial behaviour.

Researchers have also investigated how the brain responds to social rejection. One study found that the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex is active when people are experiencing both physical pain and “social pain,” in response to social rejection. A subsequent experiment, also using fMRI neuroimaging, found that three regions become active when people are exposed to images depicting rejection themes. These areas are the posterior cingulate cortex, the parahippocampal gyrus, and the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex. Furthermore, individuals who are high in rejection sensitivity (see below) show less activity in the left prefrontal cortex and the right dorsal superior frontal gyrus, which may indicate less ability to regulate emotional responses to rejection.

An experiment performed in 2007 at the University of California at Berkeley found that individuals with a combination of low self-esteem and low attentional control are more likely to exhibit eye-blink startle responses while viewing rejection themed images. These findings indicate that people who feel bad about themselves are especially vulnerable to rejection, but that people can also control and regulate their emotional reactions.

A study at Miami University indicated that individuals who recently experienced social rejection were better than both accepted and control participants in their ability to discriminate between real and fake smiles. Though both accepted and control participants were better than chance (they did not differ from each other), rejected participants were much better at this task, nearing 80% accuracy. This study is noteworthy in that it is one of the few cases of a positive or adaptive consequence of social rejection.

Ball Toss/Cyberball Experiments

A common experimental technique is the “ball toss” paradigm, which was developed by Kip Williams and his colleagues at Purdue University. This procedure involves a group of three people tossing a ball back and forth. Unbeknownst to the actual participant, two members of the group are working for the experimenter and following a pre-arranged script. In a typical experiment, half of the subjects will be excluded from the activity after a few tosses and never get the ball again. Only a few minutes of this treatment are sufficient to produce negative emotions in the target, including anger and sadness. This effect occurs regardless of self-esteem and other personality differences.

Gender differences have been found in these experiments. In one study, women showed greater nonverbal engagement whereas men disengaged faster and showed face-saving techniques, such as pretending to be uninterested. The researchers concluded that women seek to regain a sense of belonging whereas men are more interested in regaining self-esteem.

A computerised version of the task known as “cyberball” has also been developed and leads to similar results. Cyberball is a virtual ball toss game where the participant is led to believe they are playing with two other participants sitting at computers elsewhere who can toss the ball to either player. The participant is included in the game for the first few minutes, but then excluded by the other players for the remaining three minutes. A significant advantage of the Cyberball software is its openness; Williams made the software available to all researchers. In the software, the researcher can adjust the order of throwing the balls, the user’s avatar, the background, the availability of chat, the introductory message and much other information. In addition, researchers can obtain the programme’s latest version by visiting the official website of CYBERBALL 5.0.

This simple and short time period of ostracism has been found to produce significant increases to self-reported levels of anger and sadness, as well as lowering levels of the four needs. These effects have been found even when the participant is ostracised by out-group members, when the out-group member is identified as a despised person such as someone in the Ku Klux Klan, when they know the source of the ostracism is just a computer, and even when being ostracised means they will be financially rewarded and being included would incur a financial cost. People feel rejected even when they know they are playing only against the computer. A recent set of experiments using cyberball demonstrated that rejection impairs willpower or self-regulation. Specifically, people who are rejected are more likely to eat cookies and less likely to drink an unpleasant tasting beverage that they are told is good for them. These experiments also showed that the negative effects of rejection last longer in individuals who are high in social anxiety.

Life-Alone Paradigm

Another mainstream research method is the Life Alone Paradigm, which was first developed by Twenge and other scholars to evoke feelings of rejection by informing subjects of false test results. In contrast to ball toss and cyberball, it focuses on future rejection, i.e. the experience of rejection that participants may potentially experience in the future. Specifically, at the beginning of the experiment, participants complete a personality scale (in the original method, the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire). They are then informed of their results based on their experimental group rather than the real results. Participants in the rejected group will be told that their test results indicate that they will be alone in the future, regardless of their current state of life. Participants in the accepted group will be told they will have a fulfilling relationship. In the control group, participants were told they would encounter some accidences. In this way, the participants’ sense of rejection is awakened to take the subsequent measurement. After the experiment, the researcher will explain the results to the participants and apologise.

Scholars point out that this method may cause more harm to the subjects. For example, the participants will likely experience a more severe effect on executive functioning during the test. Therefore, this method faces more significant issue with research ethics and harms than other rejection experiments. Consequently, researchers should use this test with caution in experiments and pay attention to the subjects’ reaction afterwards.

Psychology of Ostracism

Most of the research on the psychology of ostracism has been conducted by the social psychologist Kip Williams. He and his colleagues have devised a model of ostracism which provides a framework to show the complexity in the varieties of ostracism and the processes of its effects. There he theorises that ostracism can potentially be so harmful that humans have evolved an efficient warning system to immediately detect and respond to it.

In the animal kingdom as well as in primitive human societies, ostracism can lead to death due to the lack of protection benefits and access to sufficient food resources from the group. Living apart from the whole of society also means not having a mate, so being able to detect ostracism would be a highly adaptive response to ensure survival and continuation of the genetic line.

Temporal Need-Threat Model

The predominant theoretical model of social rejection is the temporal-need threat model proposed by Williams and his colleagues, in which the process of social exclusion is divided into three stages:

Reflexive;
Reflective; and
Resignation.

The reflexive stage happens when social rejection first occurs. It is an immediate effect happened on individuals. Then, the reflective stage enters when the individual starts to reflect and cope with social rejection. Finally, if the rejection last for the long term and the individual cannot successfully cope with it, the social rejection would turn to the resignation stage, where the individual is likely to suffer from severe depression and helplessness. These will likely push the individual into suicide or other extreme behaviour.

Reflexive Stage

The reflexive stage is the first stage of social rejection and refers to the period immediately after social exclusion has occurred. During this stage, Williams proposed that ostracism uniquely poses a threat to four fundamental human needs; the need to belong, the need for control in social situations, the need to maintain high levels of self-esteem, and the need to have a sense of a meaningful existence. When social rejection is related to the individual’s social relationships, the individual’s need for belonging and self-esteem is threatened; when it is not associated with it, it is primarily a threat to a sense of control and meaningful existence.

Another challenge that individuals need to face at this stage is the sense of pain. Previous scholars have used neurobiological methods to find that social exclusion, whether intentional or unintentional, evokes pain in individuals. Specifically, neurobiological evidence suggests that social exclusion increases the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) activation. This brain region, in turn, is associated with physiological pain in individuals. Notably, the right ventral prefrontal cortex (RVPFC) is also further activated when individuals find that social rejection is intentional; this brain region is associated with the regulation of pain perception, implying that pain perception decreases when individuals understand the source of this social rejection. Further research suggests that personal traits or environmental factors do not affect this pain.

Thus, people are motivated to remove this pain with behaviours aimed at reducing the likelihood of others ostracising them any further and increasing their inclusionary status.

Reflective Stage

In the reflective stage, individuals begin to think about and try to cope with social rejection. In the need-threat model, their response is referred to as need fortification, i.e. the creation of interventions that respond to the needs they are threatened by in the reflective stage. Specifically, when individuals’ self-esteem and sense of belonging are threatened, they will try to integrate more into the group. As a result, these rejected individuals develop more pro-social behaviours, such as helping others and giving gifts. In contrast, when their sense of control and meaning is threatened, they show more antisocial behaviour, such as verbal abuse, fighting, etc., to prove they are essential.

Resignation Stage

When individuals have been in social rejection for a long time and cannot improve their situation through effective coping, they move to the third stage, resignation, in which they do not try to change the problem they are facing but choose to accept it. In Zadro’s interview study, in which she interviewed 28 respondents in a state of chronic rejection, she found that the respondents were depressed, self-deprecating and helpless. This social rejection can significantly impact the physical and psychological health of the individual.

Controversy

The controversy over temporal need-threat model has focused on whether it enhances or reduces people’s perception of pain. DeWall and Baumeister’s research suggests that individuals experience a reduction in pain after rejection, a phenomenon they refer to as emotional numbness, which contradicts Williams et al.’s theory that social rejection enhances pain perception. In this regard, Williams suggests that this phenomenon is likely due to differences in the paradigm used in the study, as when using a long-term paradigm such as Life-Alone, individuals do not feel the possibility of rejoining the group, thus creating emotional numbness. This is further supported by Bernstein and Claypool, who found that in separate cyberball and life-alone experiments, stronger stimuli of rejection, such as life-alone, protected people through emotional numbness. In contrast, in the case of minor rejection, such as that in cyberball, the individual’s system detects the rejection cue and draws attention to it through a sense of pain.

Popularity Resurgence

There has been recent research into the function of popularity on development, specifically how a transition from ostracisation to popularity can potentially reverse the deleterious effects of being socially ostracised. While various theories have been put forth regarding what skills or attributes confer an advantage at obtaining popularity, it appears that individuals who were once popular and subsequently experienced a transient ostracisation are often able to employ the same skills that led to their initial popularity to bring about a popularity resurgence.

Romantic

In contrast to the study of childhood rejection, which primarily examines rejection by a group of peers, some researchers focus on the phenomenon of a single individual rejecting another in the context of a romantic relationship. In both teenagers and adults, romantic rejection occurs when a person refuses the romantic advances of another, ignores/avoids or is repulsed by someone who is romantically interested in them, or unilaterally ends an existing relationship. The state of unrequited love is a common experience in youth, but mutual love becomes more typical as people get older.

Romantic rejection is a painful, emotional experience that appears to trigger a response in the caudate nucleus of the brain, and associated dopamine and cortisol activity. Subjectively, rejected individuals experience a range of negative emotions, including frustration, intense anger, jealousy, hate, and eventually, resignation, despair, and possible long-term depression. However, there have been cases where individuals go back and forth between depression and anger.

Rejection Sensitivity

Karen Horney was the first theorist to discuss the phenomenon of rejection sensitivity. She suggested that it is a component of the neurotic personality, and that it is a tendency to feel deep anxiety and humiliation at the slightest rebuff. Simply being made to wait, for example, could be viewed as a rejection and met with extreme anger and hostility.

Albert Mehrabian developed an early questionnaire measure of rejection sensitivity. Mehrabian suggested that sensitive individuals are reluctant to express opinions, tend to avoid arguments or controversial discussions, are reluctant to make requests or impose on others, are easily hurt by negative feedback from others, and tend to rely too much on familiar others and situations so as to avoid rejection.

A more recent (1996) definition of rejection sensitivity is the tendency to “anxiously expect, readily perceive, and overreact” to social rejection. People differ in their readiness to perceive and react to rejection. The causes of individual differences in rejection sensitivity are not well understood. Because of the association between rejection sensitivity and neuroticism, there is a likely genetic predisposition. Rejection sensitive dysphoria, while not a formal diagnosis, is also a common symptom of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), estimated to affect a majority of people with ADHD. Others posit that rejection sensitivity stems from early attachment relationships and parental rejection; also peer rejection is thought to play a role. Bullying, an extreme form of peer rejection, is likely connected to later rejection sensitivity. However, there is no conclusive evidence for any of these theories.

Health

Social rejection has a large effect on a person’s health. Baumeister and Leary originally suggested that an unsatisfied need to belong would inevitably lead to problems in behaviour as well as mental and physical health. Corroboration of these assumptions about behaviour deficits were seen by John Bowlby in his research. Numerous studies have found that being socially rejected leads to an increase in levels of anxiety. Additionally, the level of depression a person feels as well as the amount they care about their social relationships is directly proportional to the level of rejection they perceive. Rejection affects the emotional health and well being of a person as well. Overall, experiments show that those who have been rejected will suffer from more negative emotions and have fewer positive emotions than those who have been accepted or those who were in neutral or control conditions.

In addition to the emotional response to rejection, there is a large effect on physical health as well. Having poor relationships and being more frequently rejected is predictive of mortality. Also, as long as a decade after the marriage ends, divorced women have higher rates of illness than their non-married or currently married counterparts. In the case of a family estrangement, a core part of the mother’s identity may be betrayed by the rejection of an adult child. The chance for reconciliation, however slight, results in an inability to attain closure. The resulting emotional state and societal stigma from the estrangement may harm psychological and physical health of the parent through end of life.

The immune system tends to be harmed when a person experiences social rejection. This can cause severe problems for those with diseases such as HIV. One study by Cole, Kemeny, and Taylor investigated the differences in the disease progression of HIV positive gay men who were sensitive to rejection compared to those who were not considered rejection sensitive. The study, which took place over nine years, indicated significantly faster rate of low T helper cells, therefore leading to an earlier AIDS diagnosis. They also found that those patients who were more sensitive to rejection died from the disease an average of 2 years earlier than their non-rejection sensitive counterparts.

Other aspects of health are also affected by rejection. Both systolic and diastolic blood pressure increase upon imagining a rejection scenario. Those who are socially rejected have an increased likelihood of suffering from tuberculosis, as well as suicide. Rejection and isolation were found to affect levels of pain following an operation as well as other physical forms of pain. Social rejection may cause a reduction in intelligence. MacDonald and Leary theorise that rejection and exclusion cause physical pain because that pain is a warning sign to support human survival. As humans developed into social creatures, social interactions and relationships became necessary for survival, and the physical pain systems already existed within the human body.

In Popular Culture

Artistic depictions of rejection occur in a variety of art forms. One genre of film that most frequently depicts rejection is romantic comedies. In the film He’s Just Not That Into You, the main characters deal with the challenges of reading and misreading human behaviour. This presents a fear of rejection in romantic relationships as reflected in this quote by the character Mary, “And now you have to go around checking all these different portals just to get rejected by seven different technologies. It’s exhausting.”

Social rejection is also depicted in theatrical plays and musicals. For example, the film Hairspray shares the story of Tracy Turnblad, an overweight 15-year-old dancer set in the 1960s. Tracy and her mother are faced with overcoming society’s expectations regarding weight and physical appearances.

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What is Social Comparison Theory?

Published on 05/14/2024 by Andrew MarshallLeave a comment

Introduction

Social comparison theory, initially proposed by social psychologist Leon Festinger in 1954, centres on the belief that individuals drive to gain accurate self-evaluations. The theory explains how individuals evaluate their opinions and abilities by comparing themselves to others to reduce uncertainty in these domains and learn how to define the self. Comparing oneself to others socially is a form of measurement and self-assessment to identify where an individual stands according to their own set of standards and emotions about themselves.

Following the initial theory, research began to focus on social comparison as a way of self-enhancement, introducing the concepts of downward and upward comparisons and expanding the motivations of social comparisons. Social comparison can be traced back to the pivotal paper by Herbert Hyman, back in 1942. Hyman revealed the assessment of one’s own status is dependent on the group with whom one compares oneself. The social comparison theory is the belief that media influence, social status, and other forms of competitiveness can affect our self-esteem and mood. This can affect individuals’ outlook on themselves and how they fit in with others.

Leon Festinger

Leon Festinger was an American psychologist who developed the concept of social comparison theory. Festinger was born in New York City on 08 May 1919. Festinger was interested in science, which led him to pursue a career in psychology. He received his bachelor’s degree from City College and went on to Iowa State University for his master’s degree and Ph.D., which he received in 1942. Leon Festinger made his mark in social psychology by teaching the importance of scientific experimentation while challenging the influence of behaviourism and its effects.

Festinger put forward many hypotheses about social comparison theory. First, he explained that humans always examine their own views and capabilities in comparison with other people and have the urge to evaluate themselves accordingly. In addition, he argued that these comparisons tend to decrease as the difference between oneself and the other individual with whom one compares oneself begins to increase. He also thought that people have a desire to achieve greater abilities, but there are social constraints that make it difficult to achieve this, and this is often not sufficiently reflected in society’s views.

He continued with the idea that ending comparisons between oneself and others would lead to hostility and disdain of ideas. Their hypothesis also stated that making a change in the importance of a comparison group would increase the pressure to conform to that group. However, he added that if the person, image, or comparison group is very different from the evaluator, the tendency to narrow the range of comparability will become stronger (Festinger, 1954). Lastly, he hypothesized that the comparers’ tendencies would be influenced by their distance from the comparison group’s mode, with those who are closer to the mode having higher tendencies to change and those who are farther away having less (Festinger, 1954).

Initial Framework

In the theory, Festinger provided nine main hypotheses:

First, he stated that humans have a basic drive to evaluate their opinions and abilities and that people evaluate themselves through objective, non-social means (Hypothesis I).
Second, Festinger stated that if objective, non-social means were not available, people would evaluate their opinions and abilities by comparison to other people (Hypothesis II).
Next, he hypothesized that the tendency to compare oneself to another person decreases as the difference between their opinions and abilities becomes more divergent. In other words, if someone is much different from you, you are less likely to compare yourself to that person (Hypothesis III).
He next hypothesized that there is a unidirectional drive upward in the case of abilities, which is largely absent in opinions. This drive refers to the value that is placed on doing better and better. (Hypothesis IV).
Next, Festinger hypothesizes that non-social restraints make it difficult or even impossible to change one’s ability. These restraints are mainly absent for opinions. People can change their thoughts when they want to. Still, no matter how motivated individuals may be to improve their ability, other elements may make this impossible (Hypothesis V).
Festinger hypothesizes that the cessation of comparison with others is accompanied by hostility or derogation to the extent that continued comparison with those persons implies unpleasant consequences (Hypothesis VI)
Next, any factors that increase the importance of some particular group as a comparison group from some specific opinion or ability will increase the pressure toward uniformity concerning that ability or opinion within that group. Suppose discrepancies arise between the evaluator and the comparison group. In that case, there is a tendency to reduce the divergence by either attempting to persuade others or changing their personal views to attain uniformity. However, the importance, relevance, and attraction to a comparison group that affects the original motivation for comparison mediate the pressures towards uniformity (Hypothesis VII).
His following hypothesis states that if persons divergent from one’s own opinion or ability are perceived as different from oneself on attributes consistent with the divergence, the tendency to narrow the range of comparability becomes stronger (Hypothesis VIII).
Lastly, Festinger hypothesized that when there is a range of opinions or abilities in a group, the relative strength of the three manifestations of pressures toward uniformity will be different for those who are close to the group’s mode than those who are distant from the mode. Those close to the mode will have stronger tendencies to change the positions of others, weaker tendencies to narrow the range of comparison, and even weaker tendencies to change their own opinions (Hypothesis IX).[1]

Theoretical Advances

Since its inception, the initial framework has undergone several advances. Key among these are developments in understanding the motivations that underlie social comparisons and the particular types of social comparisons that are made. Motives that are relevant to social comparison include self-enhancement, maintenance of a positive self-evaluation, components of attributions and validation, and the avoidance of closure. While there have been changes in Festinger’s original concept, many fundamental aspects remain, including the prevalence of the tendency towards social comparison and the general process that is social comparison.

Compare and Contrast Self-Evaluation to Self-Enhancement

According to Thorton and Arrowood, self-evaluation is one of the functions of social comparison. This is one process that underlies how an individual engages in social comparison. Each individual’s specific goals will influence how they engage in social comparison. For self-evaluation, people tend to choose a similar comparison target. Specifically, they are most interested in choosing a target who shares some distinctive characteristic with themselves. They also think that knowing the truth about themselves is salutary. Research suggests that most people believe that choosing a similar target helps ensure the accuracy of the self-evaluation. However, individuals do not always act as unbiased self-evaluators and accurate self-evaluations may not be the primary goal of social comparison. There have been many studies and they have shown that American women tend to be dissatisfied with their looks, they either rate themselves “too plain, old, pimply, fat, hairy, tall” and so much more. Women are much more sensitive than men, especially with it having to do with their physical appearance. Due to media digitally altering women’s appearance from the width of their torso or arms to the softness of their complexion creates the ideal that thin and flawless is the only acceptable way to look. This leads to diet culture, excessive exercise, and had led to many eating disorders. This form of social comparison can cause harm and can affect the development of the way someone sees themselves.

Individuals may also seek self-enhancement, or to improve their self-esteem. They may interpret, distort, or ignore the information gained by social comparison to see themselves more positively and further their self-enhancement goals. People also seek self-enhancement because holding favourable illusions about themselves is gratifying. They will also choose to make upward (comparing themselves to someone better off) or downward (comparing themselves to someone worse off) comparisons, depending on which strategy will further their self-enhancement goals. Specifically, when an individual believes that their ability in a specific area is low, they will avoid making upward social comparisons in that area. Unlike self-evaluation goals, people engaging in social comparison with the goal of self-enhancement may not seek out a similar target. In fact, if a target’s similarity is seen as a threat due to the target outperforming the individual on some dimension, the individual may downplay the similarity of the target to themselves. This notion ties closely to the phenomena in psychology introduced also by Leon Festinger himself as it relates to the diminishing of cognitive dissonance. This dissonance causes a psychological uncomfortableness that motivates a person to remove the dissonance. The more dissonance there is, the greater sense of pressure to remove the dissonance and uncomfortableness caused by it. One does not want to perceive oneself in a way that would downplay one’s original belief upon which one’s self-esteem is based and therefore in order to reduce the cognitive dissonance, one is willing to change the cognitive representation of the other person whom one compares oneself to, such that one’s own belief about oneself remains intact. This effectively leads to the comparison of apples to oranges or psychological denial.

Article

When individuals engage in self-comparisons, a complex interplay of psychological and motivational factors comes into play, driving them to become more competitive. one of the key mechanisms at play is the motivation for self-improvement. For instance, in an academic setting, students compare themselves to peers who consistently achieve higher grades can spark a sense of determination and desire to excel in school. Moreover, the comparison to those perceived as superior serves as a powerful catalyst for personal growth and development. when individuals benchmark themselves against someone they view as highly successful, whether in their professional career or personal achievements, it triggers a process of emulation. the desire to achieve a comparable level of success becomes a driving force, propelling individuals to set higher goals, strive for excellence, and continuously evolve to reach the standards set by their role models. The process of self-comparison is deeply ingrained in human nature, and it serves as a fundamental aspect of our social and psychological development. While comparing ourselves to others can offer valuable insights and motivation, the way we engage in this process can vary widely, influencing our self-perception and overall well-being. the interplay between self-comparison, self-enhancement, and positive self-evaluation highlights the complexity of human psychology. While these cognitive processes can contribute to resilience and self-confidence, they also carry the risk of distorting reality and fostering an unrealistic self-image. striking a balance between acknowledging personal strengths and weaknesses, learning from others, and maintaining a healthy level of self-awareness is essential for overall psychological well-being.

Later advances in theory led to self-enhancement being one of the four self-evaluation motives, along with self-assessment, self-verification, and self-improvement.

Upward and Downward Social Comparisons

Wills introduced the concept of downward comparison in 1981. Downward social comparison is a defensive tendency that is used as a means of self-evaluation. When a person looks to another individual or group that they consider to be worse off than themselves in order to feel better about their personal situation, they are making a downward social comparison. Research has suggested that social comparisons with others who are better off or superior, or upward comparisons, can lower self-regard, whereas downward comparisons can elevate self-regard. Downward comparison theory emphasizes the positive effects of comparisons in increasing one’s subjective well-being. For example, it has been found that breast cancer patients made the majority of comparisons with patients less fortunate than themselves. Ashby found similar results in his experiment showing, downward comparison in people subjected to distress from a physical illness such as heart disease or cancer. They also see those who recover from the same illness, and the study found that patients tended to be more optimistic about their own recovery.

Although social comparison research has suggested that upward comparisons can lower self-regard, Collins indicates that this is not always the case. Individuals make upward comparisons, whether consciously or subconsciously when they compare themselves with an individual or comparison group that they perceive as superior or better than themselves in order to improve their views of self or to create a more positive perception of their personal reality. Upward social comparisons are made to self-evaluate and self-improve in the hopes that self-enhancement will also occur. In an upward social comparison, people want to believe themselves to be part of the elite or superior and make comparisons highlighting the similarities between themselves and the comparison group, unlike a downward social comparison, where similarities between individuals or groups are disassociated.

It has also been suggested that upward comparisons may provide an inspiration to improve, and in one study, it was found that while breast cancer patients made more downward comparisons, they showed a preference for information about more fortunate others.

Another study indicated that people who were dieting often used upward social comparisons by posting pictures of thinner people on their refrigerators. These pictures served not only as a reminder of an individual’s current weight but also as an inspiration for a goal to be reached. In simple terms, downward social comparisons are more likely to make us feel better about ourselves, while upward social comparisons are more likely to motivate us to achieve more or reach higher.

The influence of social media on self-comparisons adds another layer of discussion. social media platforms, with their curated content and highlight reels, often become arenas for people to engage in upward social comparisons. The contrast streams of carefully crafted images and updates create an environment where people feel compelled to showcase the positive aspects of their lives, contributing to the phenomenon of self-preservation. The pressure to maintain a favourable online image can intensify the desire for upward social comparisons, as individuals strive to present themselves in the best possible light. the fear of missing out (FOMO) becomes a significant factor in this context. seeing peers enjoying seemingly enriching experiences, luxurious lifestyles, or achieving notable milestones can trigger anxiety and a sense of inadequacy in those making comparisons. Research has indeed indicated a correlation between upward social comparison on social media and negative well-being. people who frequently engage in comparing their lives to the seemingly superior lives of others may experience heightened levels of stress, dissatisfaction, and even symptoms of social media addiction. the constant exposure to idealised representations can create unrealistic standards, fostering a perpetual cycle of discontent. Moreover, the addictive nature of social media platforms, driven by the need for validation through likes and comments, further amplifies the impact of upward social comparison.

Moderators of Social Comparison

Aspinwall and Taylor looked at mood, self-esteem, and threat as moderators that drive individuals to choose to make upward or downward social comparisons. Downward comparisons in cases where individuals had experienced a threat to their self-esteem produced more favourable self-evaluations.

High Self-Esteem and Social Comparison

Aspinwall and Taylor found that upward social comparisons were good in circumstances where the individuals making the comparisons had high self-esteem because these types of comparisons provided them with more motivation and hope than downward social comparisons. However, if these individuals had experienced a recent threat or setback to their self-esteem, they reported that upward comparisons resulted in a more negative affect than downward comparisons. positive self-evaluation, a related concept, involves people assessing themselves in a more positive light than external or objective criteria. This cognitive bias can manifest in various ways, such as perceiving oneself as more competent, attractive, or virtuous than others perceive them. positive self-evaluation is a different process that goes beyond comparison and involves introspection, critical analysis, and reflection on one’s strengths, weaknesses, and progress in specific areas.

Low Self-Esteem and social Comparison

However, people with low self-esteem or people who are experiencing some sort of threat in their life (such as doing poorly in school, or suffering from an illness) tend to favour downward comparisons over upward comparisons. People with low self-esteem and negative affect improve their mood by making downward comparisons. Their mood does not improve as much as it would if they had high self-esteem. Even for people with low self-esteem, these downward social comparisons do improve their negative mood and allow them to feel hope and motivation for their future. However, these feelings of hope could deter them from succeeding due to the harshness with which they judge themselves for their successes and failures. Lower self-esteem can lead an individual to have higher standards for themselves but may never achieve them due to the judgment they receive from within.

Affect/Mood and its Effect on Social Comparison

Individuals who have a negative mood improve their mood by making upward social comparisons, regardless of their level of self-esteem. In addition, both individuals with high self-esteem and low self-esteem who are in a positive mood elevate their mood further by making upward comparisons. However, for those who have recently experienced a threat to their self-esteem or a setback in their life, making upward social comparisons instead of downward social comparisons results in a more negative effect. Self-esteem and the existence of a threat or setback in an individual’s life are two moderators of their response to upward or downward comparisons.

Competitiveness

Because individuals are driven upwards in the case of abilities, social comparisons can drive competition among peers. In this regard, a comparison’s psychological significance depends on an individual’s social status and the context in which their abilities are being evaluated. One interesting psychological phenomenon related to self-comparison is the concept of self-enhancement. This occurs when people, consciously or unconsciously, focus on the weaknesses or shortcomings of others as a means of boosting their self-esteem. by highlighting the flaws of others, people can create a comparative context where they perceive themselves in a more favourable light. this self-enhancement strategy is often driven by the fundamental human desire to maintain a positive self-image and preserve one’s sense of worth.

Social Status

Competitiveness resulting from social comparisons may be greater in relation to higher social status because individuals with more status have more to lose. In one study, students in a classroom were presented with a bonus point programme where, based on chance, some students’ grades would increase and others would remain the same. Although students could not lose by this programme, higher-status individuals were more likely to object to the programme and report a perceived distributive injustice. It was suggested that this was a cognitive manifestation of an aversion to downward mobility, which has more psychological significance when an individual has more status.

Proximity to a Standard

When individuals are evaluated where meaningful standards exist, such as in an academic classroom where students are ranked, then competitiveness increases as proximity to a standard of performance increases. When the only meaningful standard is the top, then high-ranking individuals are most competitive with their peers, and individuals at low and intermediate ranks are equally competitive. However, when both high and low rankings hold significance, then individuals at high and low ranks are equally competitive and are both more competitive than individuals at intermediate ranks.

Models of Social Comparison

Several models have been introduced to social comparison, including the self-evaluation maintenance model (SEM), proxy model, the triadic model and the three-selves model.

Self-Evaluation Maintenance Model

The SEM model proposes that we make comparisons to maintain or enhance our self-evaluations, focusing on the antagonistic processes of comparison and reflection. Abraham Tesser has researched self-evaluation dynamics that have taken several forms. A self-evaluation maintenance (SEM) model of social behaviour focuses on the consequences of another person’s outstanding performance on one’s own self-evaluation. It sketches out some conditions under which the other’s good performance bolsters self-evaluation, i.e. “basking in reflected glory”, and conditions under which it threatens self-evaluation through a comparison process.

Proxy Model

The proxy model anticipates the success of something that is unfamiliar. The model proposes that if a person is successful or familiar with a task, then he or she would also be successful at a new, similar task. The proxy is evaluated based on ability and is concerned with the question, “Can I do X?” A proxy’s comparison is based on previous attributes. The opinion of the comparer and whether the proxy exerted maximum effort on a preliminary task are variables influencing his or her opinion.

Triadic Model

The Triadic Model builds on the attribution elements of social comparison, proposing that opinions of social comparison are best considered in terms of 3 different evaluative questions: preference assessment (i.e. “Do I like X?”), belief assessment (i.e. “Is X correct?”), and preference prediction (i.e. “Will I like X?”). In the Triadic Model, the most meaningful comparisons are with a person who has already experienced a proxy and exhibits consistency in related attributes or past preferences.

Three-Selves Model

The three-selves model proposes that social comparison theory is a combination of two different theories. One theory is developed around motivation and the factors that influence the type of social comparison information people seek from their environment, and the second is about self-evaluation and the factors that influence the effects of social comparisons on the judgments of self. While there has been much research in the area of comparison motives, there has been little in the area of comparative evaluation. Explaining that the self is conceived as interrelated conceptions accessible depending upon current judgement context and taking a cue from Social Cognitive Theory, this model examines the Assimilation effect and distinguishes three classes of working Self-concept ideas: individual selves, possible selves and collective selves.

Media Influence

The influence of media has been found to play a large role in social comparisons. Researchers examining the social effects of the media have found that in most cases, women tend to engage in upward social comparisons, measuring themselves against some form of societal ideal with a target other, which results in more negative feelings about the self. Social comparisons have become a relevant mechanism for learning about appearance-related social expectations among peers and for evaluating the self in terms of those standards. Although men do make upward comparisons, research finds that more women make upward comparisons and are comparing themselves with unrealistically high standards presented in the media. As women are shown more mainstream media images of powerful, successful, and thin women, they perceive the “ideal” to be the norm for societal views of attractiveness.

Self-perceived similarities with role models on social media can also affect self-esteem for both men and women. Having more self-perceived similarities with a role model can help increase self-esteem, while having less can decrease self-esteem. Social comparison with peers on social media can also lead to feelings of self-pity or satisfaction. The desire for social comparison can cause FoMO and compulsive checking of social media sites.

Over the years, Instagram has become one of the largest social media platforms, mainly among the younger generations. With the growing popularity, individuals worry that this platform may lead to significant emotional burdens, including stress, anxiety, or well-being. A 2020 cross-sectional online survey study in Singapore empirically tested the pathway that linked Instagram to social anxiety. The findings demonstrated that using Instagram would not directly increase social anxiety, but it would instead affect social comparison and self-esteem. There should be continuous research on the underlying impacts of social media on emotional security and help educators design better programmes to support the ongoing positive growth of wellness during this digital era.

When looking at social media platforms, studies have been conducted to analyse the interaction between social networking sites and the upward comparisons viewers can make when viewing their content. Looking specifically at Instagram, a study conducted at the University of Florida in 2021 examined students’ emotions when looking at posts on the platform. The participants in the study assessed themselves more negatively after being presented with this content and felt worse about themselves, which the researchers were able to conclude were similar to the emotions felt when an individual upwardly compared themselves within Social Comparison Theory.

Another emerging media platform is fitness-tracking apps. Shanghai Jiaotong University and East China University of Science and Technology conducted a study in 2018 looking at these apps and Social Comparison theory. They found within their research that people who use these apps could be affected by upward social comparison. Individuals who upwardly compared themselves to other individuals using the app were less likely to want to keep using it.

Teens often feel inferior when looking at their peers’ posts with high achievements and many friends, leading them to have upward comparisons. In contrast, when Teens look at their peers’ posts with fewer friends and achievements, they make downward comparisons. In 2019, Newport Academy conducted a longitudinal survey of 219 first-year students at a university, showing compelling results on the correlation between social media and the theory of social comparison. The researchers’ results indicated that the different social media comparisons imply that some comparisons are more favourable than others. This, overall, may affect a teen’s identity development. Most comparisons can cause negative introspection and personal distress. In contrast, others regard it as an opinion that increases others’ well-being. When teens feel empowered, they can express their vulnerable views, supporting identity formation. More research concludes the influence of parents can also help reduce the negative impact of social media comparison. Parents’ support and unconditional love mitigate anguish associated with teen social comparison.

studies have shed light on the dynamic of social comparison on Instagram, especially among women. The pursuit of likes and comments becomes a quantifiable metric for assessing social approval and attractiveness. The number of likes a post receives and the nature of the comments can, in some cases, be internalised as a reflection of one’s personal appearance and overall appeal. This quantification of online validation can create tangible and, at times, unhealthy links between social media engagement and self-esteem. for women, in particular, Instagram can be a platform for implicit competition, where the number of followers, the aesthetic quality of posts, and the overall engagement metrics contribute to a sense of social standing. The pressure to conform to beauty standards perpetuated on the platform can fuel an ongoing cycle of comparison, influencing self-perception and self-worth. Additionally, the emphasis on curated edited images on Instagram can contribute to a distorted sense of reality. women find themselves comparing their everyday lives to the carefully constructed and filtered snapshots presented by others, potentially leading to feelings of inadequacy and the perpetuation of unrealistic beauty standards.

Criticisms

Many criticisms arose regarding Festinger’s similarity hypothesis. Deutsch and Krauss argued that people seek out dissimilar others in their comparisons, maintaining that this is important for providing valuable self-knowledge, as demonstrated in research. Ambiguity also circulated about the critical dimensions for similarity. Goethals and Darley clarified the role of similarity, suggesting that people prefer to compare those who are similar on related attributes such as opinions, characteristics or abilities to increase confidence for value judgements. However, those dissimilar in related attributes are preferred when validating one’s beliefs.

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_comparison_theory >; it is used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (CC-BY-SA). You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the CC-BY-SA.

What is Emptiness?

Published on 05/13/2024 by Andrew MarshallLeave a comment

Introduction

Emptiness as a human condition is a sense of generalised boredom, social alienation, nihilism and apathy. Feelings of emptiness often accompany dysthymia, depression, loneliness, anhedonia, despair, or other mental/emotional disorders, including schizoid personality disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, schizotypal personality disorder and borderline personality disorder. A sense of emptiness is also part of a natural process of grief, as resulting death of a loved one, or other significant changes. The particular meanings of “emptiness” vary with the particular context and the religious or cultural tradition in which it is used.

While Christianity and Western sociologists and psychologists view a state of emptiness as a negative, unwanted condition, in some Eastern philosophies such as Buddhist philosophy and Taoism, emptiness (Śūnyatā) represents seeing through the illusion of independent self-nature.

In Western Culture

Sociology, Philosophy, and Psychology

In the West, feeling “empty” is often viewed as a negative condition. Psychologist Clive Hazell, for example, attributes feelings of emptiness to problematic family backgrounds with abusive relationships and mistreatment. He claims that some people who are facing a sense of emptiness try to resolve their painful feelings by becoming addicted to a drug or obsessive activity (be it compulsive sex, gambling or work) or engaging in “frenzied action” or violence. In sociology, a sense of emptiness is associated with social alienation of the individual. This sense of alienation may be suppressed while working, due to the routine nature of work tasks, but during leisure hours or during the weekend, people may feel a sense of “existential vacuum” and emptiness.

In political philosophy, emptiness is associated with nihilism. Literary critic Georg Lukács (born in 1885) argued against the “spiritual emptiness and moral inadequacy of capitalism”, and argued in favour of communism as an “entirely new type of civilization, one that promised a fresh start and an opportunity to lead a meaningful and purposeful life.”

The concept of “emptiness” was important to a “certain type of existentialist philosophy and some forms of the Death of God movement”. Existentialism, the “philosophic movement that gives voice to the sense of alienation and despair”, comes from “man’s recognition of his fundamental aloneness in an indifferent universe”. People whose response to the sense of emptiness and aloneness is to give excuses live in bad faith; “people who face the emptiness and accept responsibility aim to live ‘authentic’ lives”. Existentialists argue that “man lives in alienation from God, from nature, from other men, from his own true self.” Crowded into cities, working in mindless jobs, and entertained by light mass media, we “live on the surface of life”, so that even “people who seemingly have ‘everything’ feel empty, uneasy, discontented.”

In cultures where a sense of emptiness is seen as a negative psychological condition, it is often associated with depression. As such, many of the same treatments are proposed: psychotherapy, group therapy, or other types of counselling. As well, people who feel empty may be advised to keep busy and maintain a regular schedule of work and social activities. Other solutions which have been proposed to reduce a sense of emptiness are getting a pet or trying Animal-Assisted Therapy; getting involved in spirituality such as meditation or religious rituals and service; volunteering to fill time and bring social contact; doing social interactions, such as community activities, clubs, or outings; or finding a hobby or recreational activity to regain their interest in life.

Christianity

In Austrian philosopher/educator Rudolf Steiner’s (1861–1925) thinking, spiritual emptiness was a major problem in the educated European middle class. In his 1919 lectures he argued that European culture became “empty of spirit” and “ignorant of the needs, the conditions, that are essential for the life of the spirit”. People experienced a “spiritual emptiness” and their thinking became marked by a “lazy passivity” due to the “absence of will from the life of thought”. In modern Europe, Steiner claimed that people would “allow their thoughts to take possession of them”, and these thoughts were increasingly filled with abstraction and “pure, natural scientific thinking”. The educated middle classes began to think in a way that was “devoid of spirit”, with their minds becoming “dimmer and darker”, and increasing empty of spirit.

Louis Dupré, a professor of philosophy at Yale University, argues that the “spiritual emptiness of our time is a symptom of its religious poverty”. He claims that “many people never experience any emptiness: they are too busy to feel much absence of any kind”; they only realize their spiritual emptiness if “painful personal experiences — the death of a loved one, the collapse of a marriage, the alienation of a child, the failure of a business” shock them into reassessing their sense of meaning.

Spiritual emptiness has been associated with juvenile violence. In John C. Thomas’ 1999 book How Juvenile Violence Begins: Spiritual Emptiness, he argues that youth in impoverished indigenous communities who feel empty may turn to fighting and aggressive crime to fill their sense of meaninglessness. In Cornell University professor James Garbarino’s 1999 book Lost Boys: Why Our Sons Turn Violent and How We Can Save Them, he argues that “neglect, shame, spiritual emptiness, alienation, anger and access to guns are a few of the elements common to violent boys”. A professor of human development, Garbarino claims that violent boys have an “alienation from positive role models” and “a spiritual emptiness that spawns despair”. These youth are seduced by the violent fantasy of the US gun culture, which provides negative role models of tough, aggressive men who use power to get what they want. He claims that boys can be helped by giving them “a sense of purpose” and “spiritual anchors” that can “anchor boys in empathy and socially engaged moral thinking”.

Spiritual emptiness is often connected with addiction, especially by Christian-influenced addiction organisations and counsellors. Bill Wilson, the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, argued that one of the impacts of alcoholism was causing a spiritual emptiness in heavy drinkers. In Abraham J. Twerski’s 1997 book Addictive Thinking: Understanding Self-Deception, he argues that when people feel spiritually empty, they often turn to addictive behaviors to fill the inner void. In contrast to having an empty stomach, which is a clear feeling, having spiritual emptiness is hard to identify, so it fills humans with a “vague unrest”. While people may try to resolve this emptiness by obsessively having sex, overeating, or taking drugs or alcohol, these addictions only give temporary satisfaction. When a person facing a crisis due to feeling spiritually empty is able to stop one addiction, such as compulsive sex, they often just trade it in for another addictive behaviour, such as gambling or overeating.

Fiction, Film, Design and Visual Arts

A number of novelists and filmmakers have depicted emptiness. The concept of “emptiness” was important to a “good deal of 19th–20th century Western imaginative literature”. Novelist Franz Kafka depicted a meaningless bizarre world in The Trial and the existentialist French authors sketched a world cut off from purpose or reason in Jean-Paul Sartre’s La Nausée and Albert Camus’ L’étranger. Existentialism influenced 20th century poet T.S. Eliot, whose poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” describes an “anti-hero or alienated soul, running away from or confronting the emptiness of his or her existence”. Professor Gordon Bigelow argues that the existentialist theme of “spiritual barrenness is commonplace in literature of the 20th century”, which in addition to Eliot includes Ernest Hemingway, Faulkner, Steinbeck and Anderson.

Film adaptations of a number of existentialist novels capture the bleak sense of emptiness espoused by Sartre and Camus. This theme of emptiness has also been used in modern screenplays. Mark Romanek’s 1985 film Static tells the surreal story of a struggling inventor and crucifix factory worker named Ernie who feels spiritually empty because he is saddened by his parents’ death in an accident. Screenwriter Michael Tolkin’s 1994 film The New Age examines “cultural hipness and spiritual emptiness”, creating a “dark, ambitious, unsettling” film that depicts a fashionable LA couple who “are miserable in the midst of their sterile plenty”, and whose souls are stunted by their lives of empty sex, consumption, and distractions. The 1999 film American Beauty examines the spiritual emptiness of life in the US suburbs. In Wes Anderson’s 2007 film The Darjeeling Limited, three brothers who “suffer from spiritual emptiness” and then “self-medicate themselves through sex, social withdrawal, and drugs.” The 2008 film The Informers is a Hollywood drama film written by Bret Easton Ellis and Nicholas Jarecki and directed by Gregor Jordan. The film is based on Ellis’ 1994 collection of short stories of the same name. The film, which is set amidst the decadence of the early 1980s, depicts an assortment of socially alienated, mainly well-off characters who numb their sense of emptiness with casual sex, alcohol, and drugs.

Contemporary architecture critic Herbert Muschamp argues that “horror vacui” (which is Latin for “fear of emptiness”) is a key principle of design. He claims that it has become an obsessive quality that is the “driving force in contemporary American taste”. Muschamp states that “along with the commercial interests that exploit this interest, it is the major factor now shaping attitudes toward public spaces, urban spaces, and even suburban sprawl.”

Films that depict nothingness, shadows and vagueness, either in a visual sense or a moral sense are appreciated in genres such as film noir. As well, travellers and artists are often intrigued by and attracted to vast empty spaces, such as open deserts, barren wastelands or salt flats, and the open sea.

In visual arts emptiness and absence were recognised as phenomena that characterise not only particular works of art (e.g. Yves Klein) but also as a more general tendency within the history of modern art and aesthetics. Following Davor Džalto’s argument on the modern concept of art, the gradual elimination of particular elements that traditionally characterised visual arts, which results in emptiness, is the most important phenomenon within the history and theory of art over the past two hundred years.

In Eastern Cultures

Buddhism

The Buddhist term emptiness (Skt. śūnyatā) refers specifically to the idea that everything is dependently originated, including the causes and conditions themselves, and even the principle of causality itself. It is not nihilism, nor is it meditating on nothingness. Instead, it refers to the absence (emptiness) of inherent existence. Buddhapalita says:

What is the reality of things just as it is? It is the absence of essence. Unskilled persons whose eye of intelligence is obscured by the darkness of delusion conceive of an essence of things and then generate attachment and hostility with regard to them. (Buddhapālita-mula-madhyamaka-vrtti P5242,73.5.6-74.1.2).

In an interview, the Dalai Lama stated that tantric meditation can be used for “heightening your own realization of emptiness or mind of enlightenment”. In Buddhist philosophy, attaining a realisation of emptiness of inherent existence is key to the permanent cessation of suffering, i.e. liberation.

Even while an ordinary being, if upon hearing of emptiness great joy arises within again and again, the eyes moisten with tears of great joy, and the hairs of the body stand on end, such a person has the seed of the mind of a complete Buddha; He is a vessel for teachings on thatness, and ultimate truth should be taught to him. After that, good qualities will grow in him. ( Chandrakirti, Guide to the Middle Way, vv. 6:4-5).

The Dalai Lama argues that tantric yoga trainees need to realise the emptiness of inherent existence before they can go on to the “highest yoga tantra initiation”; realizing the emptiness of inherent existence of the mind is the “fundamental innate mind of clear light, which is the subtlest level of the mind”, where all “energy and mental processes are withdrawn or dissolved”, so that all that appears to the mind is “pure emptiness”. As well, emptiness is “linked to the creative Void, meaning that it is a state of complete receptivity and perfect enlightenment”, the merging of the “ego with its own essence”, which Buddhists call the “clear light”.

In Ven. Thubten Chodron’s 2005 interview with Lama Zopa Rinpoche, the lama noted that “ordinary beings who haven’t realized emptiness don’t see things as similar to illusions”, and one does not “realize that things are merely labeled by mind and exist by mere name”. He argues that “when we meditate on emptiness, we drop an atom bomb on this [sense of a] truly existent I” and to realize that “what appears true…isn’t true”. By this, the lama is claiming that what is thought to be real—our thoughts and feelings about people and things—”exists by being merely labeled”. He argues that meditators who attain knowledge of a state of emptiness are able to realise that their thoughts are merely illusions from labelling by the mind.

Taoism

In Taoism, attaining a state of emptiness is viewed as a state of stillness and placidity which is the “mirror of the universe” and the “pure mind”. The Tao Te Ching claims that emptiness is related to the “Tao, the Great Principle, the Creator and Sustainer of everything in the universe”. It is argued that it is the “state of mind of the Taoist disciple who follows the Tao”, who has successfully emptied the mind “of all wishes and ideas not fitted with the Tao’s Movement”. For a person who attains a state of emptiness, the “still mind of the sage is the mirror of heaven and earth, the glass of all things”, a state of “vacancy, stillness, placidity, tastelessness, quietude, silence, and non-action” which is the “perfection of the Tao and its characteristics, the “mirror of the universe” and the “pure mind”.

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emptiness >; it is used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (CC-BY-SA). You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the CC-BY-SA.

What is Self-Concealment?

Published on 05/09/2024 by Andrew MarshallLeave a comment

Introduction

Self-concealment is a psychological construct defined as “a predisposition to actively conceal from others personal information that one perceives as distressing or negative”. Its opposite is self-disclosure.

The concealed personal information (thoughts, feelings, actions, or events) is highly intimate, negative in valence and has three characteristics: it is a subset of private information, can be consciously accessed, and is actively concealed from others. Self-concealment significantly contributes to negative psychological health.

Historical Context

Secrets and secret keeping have been a longstanding interest of psychologists and psychotherapists. Jourard’s work on self-disclosure and Pennebaker’s research on the health benefits of disclosing traumatic events and secrets set the stage for the conceptualisation and measurement of self-concealment.

Jourard’s research pointed to the conclusion that stress and illness result not only from low self-disclosure, but more so from the intentional avoidance of being known by another person. In a later line of research, Pennebaker and his colleagues examined the confiding-illness relation or the inhibition-disease link and found that not expressing thoughts and feelings about traumatic events is associated with long-term health effects. Pennebaker attributed the unwillingness to disclose distressing personal information to either circumstances or individual differences. The self-concealment construct, and the scale for its measurement, the Self-Concealment Scale, were introduced to permit assessment and conceptualisation of individual differences on this personality dimension.

Psychological Effects

Self-concealment uniquely and significantly contributes to the prediction of anxiety, depression, and physical symptoms. Subsequent research has examined the effects of self-concealment on subjective well-being and coping, finding that high self-concealment is associated with psychological distress and self-reported physical symptoms, anxiety and depression, shyness, negative self-esteem, loneliness, rumination, trait social anxiety, social anxiety, and self-silencing, ambivalence over emotional expressiveness, maladaptive mood regulation, and acute and chronic pain.

Individuals with increased inferiority feelings have a higher tendency toward self-concealment, which in turn results in an increase in loneliness and a decrease in happiness.

Research

Theoretical models offered to explain the consistent finding of negative health effects for self-concealment include:

An inhibition model developed by Pennebaker, which would attribute these effects to the physiological work that is a consequence of the behavioural inhibition accompanying the self-concealment process.
A preoccupation model based on the work of Wegner that sees the thought suppression associated with self-concealment as ironically leading to intrusive thoughts and even greater preoccupation with distressing personal information, which in turn leads to poor well-being.
Self-perception theory, which argues that behaviour influences attitudes – the self-concealing person observes his or her own concealing behaviour and concludes that there must be a good reason for the behaviour, leading to negative characterological self-attributions that fit with this conclusion (e.g. “I must be bad because I am concealing this aspect of myself”).
Self-determination theory, which explains the negative health effects of self-concealment as the consequence of the frustration of the individual’s basic needs of autonomy, relatedness, and competence.

Kelly offers a comprehensive review of several explanatory models and the evidence supporting each of them, concluding that a genetic component shared by high self-concealers might make them both more prone to self-conceal and more vulnerable to physical and psychological problems.

Research studies have focused on the relation of self-concealment to attachment orientations, help seeking and attitudes toward counselling, desire for greater (physical) interpersonal distance, stigma, distress disclosure, lying behaviour and authenticity, and psychotherapy process.

Research also focuses on self-concealment in specific populations: LGBT, multicultural, and adolescents, families, and romantic partners.

A recent review of 137 studies using the Self-Concealment Scale presented a working model for the antecedents of self-concealment and the mechanisms of action for its health effects. The authors conceptualise self-concealment as a “complex trait-like motivational construct where high levels of SC motivation energize a range of goal-directed behaviours (e.g. keeping secrets, behavioural avoidance, lying) and dysfunctional strategies for the regulation of emotions (e.g. expressive suppression) which serve to conceal negative or distressing personal information.” These mechanisms are seen as then affecting health through direct and indirect pathways, and as being “energized by a conflict between urges to conceal, and reveal—a dual-motive conflict which eventually leads to adverse physiological effects and a breakdown of self-regulatory resources”.

Self-Concealment Scale

The 10-item Self-Concealment Scale (SCS) measures the degree to which a person tends to conceal personal information perceived as negative or distressing. The SCS has proven to have excellent psychometric properties (internal consistency and test-retest reliability) and unidimensionality. Representative items include: “I have an important secret that I haven’t shared with anyone”, “There are lots of things about me that I keep to myself”, “Some of my secrets have really tormented me”, “When something bad happens to me, I tend to keep it to myself”, and “My secrets are too embarrassing to share with others”.

In Marginalised Populations

Minority groups employ self-concealment to manage perceived stigma. For example, LGBT people (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans) people, who are stigmatised (see coming out) for the characteristics inherent to their sexual identities or gender identity, employ self-concealment as a result.

Self-concealment is observed in African, Asian and Latin American international college students. For African Americans in particular their self-concealment correlates with the degree of their Afrocentric cultural values. Arab and Middle Eastern people have been documented employing the following identity negotiation strategies:

Humorous Accounting: A stigmatised minority will employ humour as a way to establish common ground.
Educational Accounting: A stigmatised minority will make an effort to educate the person questioning their stigmatised identity. This method is a common method used by Muslim women who wear hijabs in the study.
Defiant Accounting: A stigmatised minority will challenge the person questioning their identity by confronting the right to interrogate a stigmatised identity.
Cowering: A stigmatised minority will meet the demands of the person questioning their stigmatised identity due to real, or perceived fears of violence.

Self-concealment strategies can also present in those with sexual paraphilias. Research in the experiences of furies, a stigmatised group, found that they are more likely to self disclose if there is little difference in power between the furry and the individual with whom they are disclosing their identity to.

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-concealment >; it is used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (CC-BY-SA). You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the CC-BY-SA.

What is Social Defeat?

Published on 05/08/2024 by Andrew Marshall1 Comment

Introduction

In social psychology, social defeat is the negative experience of being excluded from the majority group. The term is used in the study of the physiological and behavioural effects of hostile interactions among either animals or humans, in either a dyadic or in a group-individual context, potentially greatly affecting control over resources, access to mates, and social positions.

Background

Research on social stress has accumulated a useful body of knowledge, providing perspective on the effects of detrimental social and environmental interaction on the brain. Research and experimentation suffer from many methodological difficulties: usually a lack of ecological validity (similarity with natural conditions and stressors) or are not amenable to scientific investigation (difficult to test and verify).

Social psychology approaches to human aggression have developed a multitude of perspectives, based on observations of human phenomena like bullying, physical and verbal abuse, relational and indirect aggression, etc. Despite the richness of theories developed, the body of knowledge generated has not satisfied scientific requirements of testability and verifiability.

Animal studies of within-species aggression developed in 2 main branches:

Approaches based on laboratory experiments, on controlled conditions, allowing the measurement of behavioural, endocrine and neurological variables, but with the shortcoming of applying unnatural stressors (such as foot-shocks and restraint stress) in unnatural conditions (laboratory cages rarely approximate native habitats); and
Approaches based on observations of animals in naturalistic settings, which avoided artificial environments and unnatural stresses, but usually not allowing the measurement of physiological effects or the manipulation of relevant variables.

In real life situations, animals (including humans) have to cope with stresses generated within their own species, during their interactions with conspecifics, especially due to recurrent struggles over the control of limited resources, mates and social positions (Bjorkqvist, 2001; Rohde, 2001; Allen & Badcock, 2003).

Social defeat is a source of chronic stress in animals and humans, capable of causing significant changes in behaviour, brain functioning, physiology, neurotransmitter and hormone levels, and health (Bjorkqvist, 2001; Rohde, 2001; Allen & Badcock, 2003).

Brief History

The social defeat approach was originated from animal experiments, using the “resident-intruder” paradigm, in which an animal was placed in the cage of another animal or group of animals of the same species, in a manner that allowed a non-lethal conflict. It has been documented to produce anxiety-like and depressive-like behavioural declines in susceptible mice, for instance.

If animals are allowed to fight on a single occasion only, it is usually regarded as a model of acute stress; if they are allowed to fight on several occasions, on different days, consecutive or not, it is regarded as a model of chronic stress. After the defeat or in the interval between fights, the subordinate animal may also be exposed to threats from the dominant one, by having to stay in a cage or compartment beside or nearby the dominant, exposed to its visual or olfactory cues.

Later, the social defeat approach was also applied to observations of animal within-species aggression, in the wild, which suggested that the hypotheses generated on artificial laboratory settings can also be applied in observed in natural settings, confirming the predictions of the model.

In Humans

It has been proposed that animal models of social conflict may be useful for studying a number of mental disorders, including major depression, generalised anxiety disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, drug abuse, aggressive psychopathologies, eating disorders and schizophrenia (Bjorkqvist, 2001; Selten & Cantor-Graae, 2005; Rohde, 2001).

The social defeat model has been extended to include observations of human aggression, bullying, relational aggression, chronic subordination and humiliation. The social defeat model attempts to extend animal studies to include human behaviour as well, in contrast to the social psychology study of aggression, in which comparisons are drawn exclusively from experiments involving humans (Bjorkqvist, 2001; Rohde, 2001).

Bullying has interesting parallels with animal models of social defeat, the bully being equivalent to the dominant animal and the victim the subordinate one. At stake are possessions of material objects, money, etc., social position in the group, represented by in-group prestige, and the consequent lack of access to mates, including for socio-sexual behaviours like copulation. Human victims typically experience symptoms like low self-esteem (due to low regard by the group), feelings of depression (due to unworthiness of efforts), social withdrawal (reduced investments in the social environment), anxiety (due to a threatening environment), and they can also be shown to experience a plethora of physiological effects, e.g. increased corticosterone levels, and also a shift towards sympathetic balance in the autonomic nervous system (Bjorkqvist, 2001).

Research about human aggression, usually conducted by psychologists or social psychologists, resembles to a great extent the research about social defeat and animal aggression, usually conducted by biologists or physiological psychologists. However, there is the problem of the use of different terminologies for similar concepts, which hinders communication between the two bodies of knowledge (Bjorkqvist, 2001).

Similarly, research on depression has employed similar constructs, such as learned helplessness, although that theory is focused on the perceived inability to escape any sort of negative stimuli rather than on social factors.

Behavioural and Physiological Effects

Social defeat is a very potent stressor and can lead to a variety of behavioural effects, like social withdrawal (reduced interactions with conspecifics), lethargy (reduced locomotor activity), reduced exploratory behaviour (of both open field and novel objects), anhedonia (reduced reward-related behaviours), decreased socio-sexual behaviours (including decreased attempts to mate and copulate after defeat), various motivational deficits, decreased levels of testosterone (due to a decline in the functionality of the Leydig cells of the testes), increased tendencies to stereotyped behaviours and self-administration of drugs and alcohol (Rygula et alli, 2005; Huhman, 2006).

Research also implicates that the referred behavioural effects are moderated by neuroendocrine phenomena involving serotonin, dopamine, epinephrine, norepinephrine, and in the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, locus ceruleus and limbic systems (Bjorkqvist, 2001; Rygula et alli, 2005; Selten & Cantor-Graae, 2005; Marinia et alli, 2006; Huhman, 2006).

Both animal and human studies suggest that the social environment has a strong influence on the consequences of stresses. This finding seems to be especially true in the case of social stresses, like social defeat (Bjorkqvist, 2001; Rygula et alli, 2005; de Jong et alli, 2005).

In animal studies, animals housed collectively showed reduced symptoms after defeat, in comparison with those housed alone; and animals that live in more stable groups (with stable hierarchies, less intra-group aggression) exhibit reduced effects after a defeat, in comparison with those housed in a more unstable group (de Jong et alli, 2005). In separate studies, defeat behaviours can be modulated by acetylcholine (Smith et al., 2015).[2]

In human studies, individuals with greater support seem to be protected against excessive neuroendocrine activation, thereby reducing the adverse effects of stresses in general, and especially stresses of social origin.

This apparent confusion, in which social defeat generates behavioural and neuroendocrine effects, both of which depending on social contextual variables, raises the question of how to interpret this data. A useful concept is the concept of “causal chain”, in which recurrent evolutionary events, in this case intra-specific competition, generates selective pressures that last for thousands of generations, influencing a whole species. This way physiological phenomena may evolve, in this case the referred neuro-endocrine phenomena, to facilitate adaptive patterns of action by individuals, in this case the referred behavioural effects. According to this framework, selective pressures generated by intra-specific competition can be considered as the ultimate cause, the neuroendocrine phenomena can be considered to be the proximate causes (sometimes also called mechanisms or moderators) and the observed behavioural alterations are considered the effects (the end events in the causal chain)(Gilbert et alli, 2002; Allen & Badcock, 2003; Rygula et alli, 2005).

Some authors, for example Randolph Nesse, warn us that patterns of behaviour commonly considered inappropriate or even pathological may well have adaptive value. Evolutionary psychology provides several possible explanations for why humans typically respond to social dynamics in the way that they do, including possible functions of self-esteem in relation to dominance hierarchies. In a synchronic perspective behaviours considered abnormal may in fact be part of an adaptive response to stressors in modern or at least in old environments, for example social stressors from chronic subordination or interpersonal conflicts (Gilbert et alli, 2002; Allen & Badcock, 2003). Similarly, from a diachronic perspective various behaviours related to intra-species competition or predator-prey relationships may have played a role in the evolution of human abilities, for example defensive immobilisation is hypothesized to have played a role in the evolution of both human parent-child attachment and theory of mind.

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What is Social Stress?

Published on 05/07/202405/08/2024 by Andrew Marshall1 Comment

Introduction

Social stress is stress that stems from one’s relationships with others and from the social environment in general. Based on the appraisal theory of emotion, stress arises when a person evaluates a situation as personally relevant and perceives that they do not have the resources to cope or handle the specific situation.

Refer to Social Defeat.

The activation of social stress does not necessarily have to occur linked to a specific event, the mere idea that the event may occur could trigger it. This means that any element that takes a subject out of their personal and intimate environment could become a stressful experience. This situation makes them socially incompetent individuals.

There are three main categories of social stressors. Life events are defined as abrupt, severe life changes that require an individual to adapt quickly (ex. sexual assault, sudden injury). Chronic strains are defined as persistent events which require an individual to make adaptations over an extended period of time (ex. divorce, unemployment). Daily hassles are defined as minor events that occur, which require adaptation throughout the day (ex. bad traffic, disagreements). When stress becomes chronic, one experiences emotional, behavioural, and physiological changes that can put one under greater risk for developing a mental disorder and physical illness.

Humans are social beings by nature, as they typically have a fundamental need and desire to maintain positive social relationships. Thus, they usually find maintaining positive social ties to be beneficial. Social relationships can offer nurturance, foster feelings of social inclusion, and lead to reproductive success. Anything that disrupts or threatens to disrupt their relationships with others can result in social stress. This can include low social status in society or in particular groups, giving a speech, interviewing with potential employers, caring for a child or spouse with a chronic illness, meeting new people at a party, the threat of or actual death of a loved one, divorce, and discrimination. Social stress can arise from one’s micro-environment (e.g. family ties) and macro-environment (e.g. hierarchical societal structure). Social stress is typically the most frequent type of stressor that people experience in their daily lives and affects people more intensely than other types of stressors.

Definitions

Researchers define social stress and social stressors in various ways. Wadman, Durkin, and Conti-Ramsden (2011) defined social stress as “the feelings of discomfort or anxiety that individuals may experience in social situations, and the associated tendency to avoid potentially stressful social situations”. Ilfield (1977) defined social stressors as “circumstances of daily social roles that are generally considered problematic or undesirable”. Dormann and Zapf (2004) defined social stressors as “a class of characteristics, situations, episodes, or behaviors that are related to psychological or physical strain and that are somehow social in nature”.

Measurement

Social stress is typically measured through self-report questionnaires. In the laboratory, researchers can induce social stress through various methods and protocols.

Self-Reports

There are several questionnaires used to assess environmental and psychosocial stress. Such self-report measures include the Test of Negative Social Exchange, the Marital Adjustment Test, the Risky Families Questionnaire, the Holmes–Rahe Stress Inventory, the Trier Inventory for the Assessment of Chronic Stress, the Daily Stress Inventory, the Job Content Questionnaire, the Perceived Stress Scale, and the Stress and Adversity Inventory.

In addition to self-report questionnaires, researchers can employ structured interview assessments. The Life Events and Difficulties Schedule (LEDS) is one of the most popular instruments used in research. The purpose of this type of measure is to probe the participant to elaborate on their stressful life events, rather than answering singular questions. The UCLA Life Stress Interview (LSI), which is similar to the LEDS, includes questions about romantic partners, closest friendships, other friendships, and family relationships.

Induction

In rodent models, social disruption and social defeat are two common social stress paradigms. In the social disruption paradigm, an aggressive rodent is introduced into a cage housing male rodents that have already naturally established a social hierarchy. The aggressive “intruder” disrupts the social hierarchy, causing the residents social stress. In the social defeat paradigm, an aggressive “intruder” and another non-aggressive male rodent fight.

In human research, the Trier Social Stress Task (TSST) is widely used to induce social stress in the laboratory. In the TSST, participants are told that they have to prepare and give a speech about why they would be a great candidate for their ideal job. The experimenter films the participant while they give the speech and informs the participant that a panel of judges will evaluate that speech. After the public speaking component, the experimenter administers a mathematics task that involves counting backwards by certain increments. If the participant makes a mistake, the experimenter prompts them to start again. The threat of negative evaluation is the social stressor. Researchers can measure the stress response by comparing pre-stress salivary cortisol levels and post-stress salivary cortisol levels. Other common stress measures used in the TSST are self-report measures like the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory and physiological measures like heart rate.

In a laboratory conflict discussion, couples identify several specific areas of conflict in their relationship. The couples then pinpoint a couple topics to discuss later on in the experiment (ex. finances, child-rearing). Couples are told to discuss the conflict(s) for 10 minutes while being videotaped.

Brouwer and Hogervorst (2014) designed the Sing-a-Song Stress Test (SSST) to induce stress in the laboratory setting. After viewing neutral images with subsequent 1-minute rest periods, the participant is instructed to sing a song after the next 1-minute rest period is complete. Researchers found that skin conductance and heart rate are significantly higher during the post-song message interval than the previous 1-minute intervals. The stress levels are comparable to that induced in the Trier Social Stress Task. In 2020, a systematic review about the TSST provided several guidelines to standardise the use of the TSST across studies.

Statistical Indicators of Stress in Large Groups

A statistical indicator of stress, simultaneous increase of variance and correlations, was proposed for diagnosis of stress and successfully used in physiology and finance. Its applicability for early diagnosis of social stress in large groups was demonstrated by the analysis of crises. It was examined in the prolonged stress period preceding the 2014 Ukrainian economic and political crisis. There was a simultaneous increase in the total correlation between the 19 major public fears in the Ukrainian society (by about 64%) and also in their statistical dispersion (by 29%) during the pre-crisis years.

Mental Health

Research has consistently demonstrated that social stress increases risk for developing negative mental health outcomes. One prospective study asked over fifteen hundred Finnish employees whether they had “considerable difficulties with [their] coworkers/superiors/inferiors during the last 6 months, 5 years, earlier, or never”. Information on suicides, hospitalisations due to psychosis, suicidal behaviour, alcohol intoxication, depressive symptoms, and medication for chronic psychiatric disorders was then gathered from the national registries of mortality and morbidity. Those who had experienced conflict in the workplace with co-workers or supervisors in the last five years were more likely to be diagnosed with a psychiatric condition.

Research on the LGBT population has suggested that people who identify as LGBT suffer more from mental health disorders, such as substance abuse and mood disorders, compared to those who identify as heterosexual. Researchers deduce that the LGBT people’s higher risk of mental health issues derives from their stressful social environments. Minority groups can face high levels of stigma, prejudice, and discrimination on a regular basis, therefore leading to the development of various mental health disorders.

Depression

Risk for developing clinical depression significantly increases after experiencing social stress; depressed individuals often experience interpersonal loss before becoming depressed. One study found that depressed individuals who had been rejected by others had developed depression about three times more quickly than those who had experienced stress not involving social rejection. Several studies have suggested that unemployment roughly doubles the risk of developing depression. In non-clinically depressed populations, people with friends and family who make too many demands, criticise, and create tension and conflict tend to have more depressive symptoms. Conflict between spouses leads to more psychological distress and depressive symptoms, especially for wives. In particular, unhappy married couples are 10–25 times more at risk for developing clinical depression. Similarly, social stress arising from discrimination is related to greater depressive symptoms. In one study, African-Americans and non-Hispanic whites reported on their daily experiences of discrimination and depressive symptoms. Regardless of race, those who perceived more discrimination had higher depressive symptoms. Posselt and Lipson found, in 2016, that undergraduates had a 37% higher chance of developing developing if they perceived their classroom environments as highly competitive.

Anxiety

The biological basis for anxiety disorders is rooted in the consistent activation of the stress response. Fear, which is the defining emotion of an anxiety disorder, occurs when someone perceives a situation (a stressor) as threatening. This activates the stress response. If a person has difficulty regulating this stress response, it may activate inappropriately. Stress can therefore arise when a real stressor is not present or when something isn’t actually threatening. This can lead to the development of an anxiety disorder (panic attacks, social anxiety, OCD, etc.). Social anxiety disorder is defined as the fear of being judged or evaluated by others, even if no such threat is actually present.

Research shows a connection between social stress, such as traumatic life events and chronic strains, and the development of anxiety disorders. A study that examined a subpopulation of adults, both young and middle-age, found that those who had diagnosed panic disorder in adulthood also experienced sexual abuse during childhood. Children who experience social stressors, such as physical and psychological abuse, as well as parental loss, are also more at risk for developing anxiety disorders during adulthood than children who did not experience such stressors.

In 2016, an analysis of 40,350 undergraduates from 70 institutions by Posselt and Lipson found that they had a 69% higher chance of developing anxiety if they perceived their classroom environments as highly competitive.

Long-Term Effects

Social stress occurring early in life can have psychopathological effects that develop or persist in adulthood. One longitudinal study found that children were more likely to have a psychiatric disorder (e.g. anxiety, depressive, disruptive, personality, and substance use disorders) in late adolescence and early adulthood when their parents showed more maladaptive child-rearing behaviours (e.g. loud arguments between parents, verbal abuse, difficulty controlling anger toward the child, lack of parental support or availability, and harsh punishment). Child temperament and parental psychiatric disorders did not explain this association. Other studies have documented the robust relationships between children’s social stress within the family environment and depression, aggression, antisocial behaviour, anxiety, suicide, and hostile, oppositional, and delinquent behaviour.

Relapse and Recurrence

Social stress can also exacerbate current psychopathological conditions and compromise recovery. For instance, patients recovering from depression or bipolar disorder are two times more likely to relapse if there is familial tension. People with eating disorders are also more likely to relapse if their family members make more critical comments, are more hostile, or are over-involved. Similarly, outpatients with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder show greater psychotic symptoms if the most influential person in their life is critical and are more likely to relapse if their familial relationships are marked by tension.

In regard to substance abuse, cocaine-dependent individuals report greater cravings for cocaine following exposure to a social stressor. Traumatic life events and social stressors can also trigger the exacerbation of the symptoms of mental health disorders. Socially phobic children who experience a stressful event can become even more avoidant and socially inactive.

Physical Health

Research has also found a robust relationship between various social stressors and aspects of physical health.

Mortality

Social status, a macro-social stressor, is a robust predictor of death. In a study of over 1700 British civil servants, socioeconomic status (SES) was inversely related to mortality. Those with the lowest SES have worse health outcomes and greater mortality rates than those with the greatest SES. Other studies have replicated this relationship between SES and mortality in a range of diseases, including infectious, digestive, and respiratory diseases. A study examining the link between SES and mortality in the elderly found that education level, household income, and occupational prestige were all related to lower mortality in men. In women, however, only household income was related to lower mortality.

Similarly, social stressors in the micro-environment are also linked to increased mortality. A seminal longitudinal study of nearly 7,000 people found that socially isolated people had greater risk of dying from any cause.

Social support, which is defined as “the comfort, assistance, and/or information one receives through formal or informal contacts with individuals or groups”, has been linked to physical health outcomes. Research shows the three aspects of social support, available attachments, perceived social support, and frequency of social interactions, can predict mortality thirty months after assessment.

Morbidity

Social stress also makes people more sick. People who have fewer social contacts are at greater risk for developing illness, including cardiovascular disease. The lower one’s social status, the more likely he or she is to have a cardiovascular, gastrointestinal, musculoskeletal, neoplastic, pulmonary, renal, or other chronic diseases. These links are not explained by other, more traditional risk factors such as race, health behaviours, age, sex, or access to health care.

In one laboratory study, researchers interviewed participants to determine whether they had been experiencing social conflicts with spouses, close family members and friends. They then exposed the participants to the common cold virus and found that participants with conflict-ridden relationships were two times more likely to develop a cold than those without such social stress. Social support, especially in terms of support for socioeconomic stressors, is inversely related to physical morbidity. A study that investigated social determinants of health in an urban slum in India found that social exclusion, stress, and lack of social support are significantly related to illnesses, such as hypertension, coronary heart disease, and diabetes.

Students who are being bullied may show signs of depression, impaired academic achievement, impaired quality of sleep, and anxiety disorders.

Long-Term Effects

Exposure to social stress in childhood can also have long-term effects, increasing risk for developing diseases later in life. In particular, adults who were maltreated (emotionally, physically, sexually abused or neglected) as children report more disease outcomes, such as stroke, heart attack, diabetes, and hypertension or greater severity of those outcomes. The Adverse Childhood Experiences study (ACE), which includes over seventeen thousand adults, also found that there was a 20% increase in likelihood for experiencing heart disease for each kind of chronic familial social stressor experienced in childhood, and this was not due to typical risk factors for heart disease such as demographics, smoking, exercise, adiposity, diabetes, or hypertension.

Recovery and Other Disease

Social stress has also been tied to worse health outcomes among patients who already have a disease. Patients with end-stage renal disease faced a 46% increased risk for mortality when there was more relationship negativity with their spouse even when controlling for severity of disease and treatment. Similarly, women who had experienced an acute coronary event were three times more likely to experience another coronary event if they experienced moderate to severe marital strain. This finding remained even after controlling for demographics, health behaviours, and disease status.

With regard to HIV/AIDS, stress may affect the progression from the virus to the disease. Research shows the HIV-positive males who have more negative life events, social stress, and lack of social support progress to a clinical AIDS diagnosis more quickly than HIV-positive males who do not have as high levels of social stress. For HIV-positive females, who have also contracted the HSV virus, stress is a risk factor for genital herpes breakouts.

Physiology

Social stress leads to a number of physiological changes that mediate its relationship to physical health. In the short term, the physiological changes outlined below are adaptive, as they enable the stressed organism to cope better. Dysregulation of these systems or repeated activation of them over the long-term can be detrimental to health.

Sympathetic Nervous System

The sympathetic nervous system (SNS) becomes activated in response to stress. Sympathetic arousal stimulates the medulla of the medulla to secrete epinephrine and norepinephrine into the blood stream, which facilitates the fight-or-flight response. Blood pressure, heart rate, and sweating increase, veins constrict to allow the heart to beat with more force, arteries leading to muscles dilate, and blood flow to parts of the body not essential for the fight or flight response decreases. If stress persists in the long run, then blood pressure remains elevated, leading to hypertension and atherosclerosis, both precursors to cardiovascular disease.

A number of animal and human studies have confirmed that social stress increases risk for negative health outcomes by increasing SNS activity. Studies of rodents show that social stress causes hypertension and atherosclerosis. Studies of non-human primates also show that social stress clogs arteries. Although humans cannot be randomized to receive social stress due to ethical concerns, studies have nevertheless shown that negative social interactions characterised by conflict lead to increases in blood pressure and heart rate. Social stress stemming from perceived daily discrimination is also associated with elevated levels of blood pressure during the day and a lack of blood pressure dipping at night.

Hypothalamic-Pituitary Adrenocortical Axis (HPA)

In response to stress, the hypothalamus releases corticotropin-releasing hormone (CRH), stimulating the anterior pituitary to release adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH). ACTH then stimulates the adrenal cortex to secrete glucocorticoids, including cortisol. Social stress can lead to adverse health outcomes by chronically activating the HPA axis or disrupting the HPA system. There are a number of studies that link social stress and indications of a disrupted HPA axis; for instance, monkey infants neglected by their mothers show prolonged cortisol responses following a challenging event.

In humans, abused women exhibit a prolonged elevation in cortisol following a standardised psychosocial laboratory stressor compared to those without an abuse history. Maltreated children show higher morning cortisol values than non-maltreated children. Their HPA systems also fail to recover after a stressful social interaction with their caregiver. Over time, low-SES children show progressively greater output of cortisol. Although these studies point to a disrupted HPA system accounting for the link between social stress and physical health, they did not include disease outcomes. Nevertheless, a dysfunctional HPA response to stress is thought to increase risk for developing or exacerbating diseases such as diabetes, cancer, cardiovascular disease, and hypertension.

Inflammation

Inflammation is an immune response that is critical to fighting infections and repairing injured tissue. Although acute inflammation is adaptive, chronic inflammatory activity can contribute to adverse health outcomes, such as hypertension, atherosclerosis, coronary heart disease, depression, diabetes, and some cancers.

Research has elucidated a relationship between different social stressors and cytokines (the markers of inflammation). Chronic social stressors, such as caring for a spouse with dementia, lead to greater circulating levels of cytokine interleukin-6 (IL-6), whereas acute social stress tasks in the laboratory have been shown to elicit increases in proinflammatory cytokines. Similarly, when faced with another type of social stress, namely social evaluative threat, participants showed increases in IL-6 and a soluble receptor for tumour necrosis factor-α. Increases in inflammation may persist over time, as studies have shown that chronic relationship stress has been tied to greater IL-6 production 6 months later and children reared in a stressful family environment marked by neglect and conflict tend to show elevated levels of C-reactive protein, a marker of IL-6, in adulthood.

Interactions of Physiological Systems

There is extensive evidence that the above physiological systems affect one another’s functioning. For instance, cortisol tends to have a suppressive effect on inflammatory processes, and proinflammatory cytokines can also activate the HPA system. Sympathetic activity can also upregulate inflammatory activity. Given the relationships among these physiological systems, social stress may also influence health indirectly via affecting a particular physiological system that in turn affects a different physiological system.

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_stress >; it is used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (CC-BY-SA). You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the CC-BY-SA.

What is Abulia?

Published on 05/06/2024 by Andrew MarshallLeave a comment

Introduction

In neurology, abulia, or aboulia (from Ancient Greek: βουλή, meaning “will”), refers to a lack of will or initiative and can be seen as a disorder of diminished motivation (DDM). Abulia falls in the middle of the spectrum of diminished motivation, with apathy being less extreme and akinetic mutism being more extreme than abulia. The condition was originally considered to be a disorder of the will, and aboulic individuals are unable to act or make decisions independently; and their condition may range in severity from subtle to overwhelming. In the case of akinetic mutism, many patients describe that as soon as they “will” or attempt a movement, a “counter-will” or “resistance” rises up to meet them.

Symptoms and Signs

The clinical condition denoted abulia was first described in 1838; however, since that time, a number of different, some contradictory, definitions have emerged. Abulia has been described as a loss of drive, expression, behaviour and speech output, with slowing and prolonged speech latency, and reduction of spontaneous thought content and initiative, being considered more recently as ‘a reduction in action emotion and cognition’. The clinical features most commonly associated with abulia are:

Difficulty in initiating and sustaining purposeful movements
Lack of spontaneous movement
Reduced spontaneous speech
Increased response-time to queries
Passivity
Reduced emotional responsiveness and spontaneity
Reduced social interactions
Reduced interest in usual pastimes

Especially in patients with progressive dementia, it may affect feeding. Patients may continue to chew or hold food in their mouths for hours without swallowing it. The behaviour may be most evident after these patients have eaten part of their meals and no longer have strong appetites.

Differentiation from other Disorders

Both neurologists and psychiatrists recognise abulia to be a distinct clinical entity, but its status as a syndrome is unclear. Although abulia has been known to clinicians since 1838, it has been subjected to different interpretations – from ‘a pure lack of will’, in the absence of motor paralysis to, more recently, being considered ‘a reduction in action emotion and cognition’. As a result of the changing definition of abulia, there is currently a debate on whether or not abulia is a sign or a symptom of another disease, or its own disease that seems to appear in the presence of other more well-researched diseases, such as Alzheimer’s disease.

A 2002 survey of two movement disorder experts, two neuropsychiatrists, and two rehabilitation experts, did not seem to shed any light on the matter of differentiating abulia from other DDMs. The experts used the terms “apathy” and “abulia” interchangeably and debated whether or not abulia was a discrete entity, or just a hazy gray area on a spectrum of more defined disorders. Four of the experts said abulia was a sign and a symptom, and the group was split on whether or not it was a syndrome. Another survey, which consisted of true and false questions about what abulia is distinct from, whether it is a sign, symptom, or syndrome, where lesions are present in cases of abulia, what diseases are commonly associated with abulia, and what current treatments are used for abulia, was sent to 15 neurologists and 10 psychiatrists. Most experts agreed that abulia is clinically distinct from depression, akinetic mutism, and alexithymia. However, only 32% believed abulia was different from apathy, while 44% said they were not different, and 24% were unsure. Yet again, there was disagreement about whether or not abulia is a sign, symptom, or syndrome.

The study of motivation has been mostly about how stimuli come to acquire significance for animals. Only recently has the study of motivational processes been extended to integrate biological drives and emotional states in the explanation of purposeful behaviour in human beings. Considering the number of disorders attributed to a lack of will and motivation, it is essential that abulia and apathy be defined more precisely to avoid confusion.

Causes

Many different causes of abulia have been suggested. While there is some debate about the validity of abulia as a separate disease, experts mostly agree that abulia is the result of frontal lesions and not with cerebellar or brainstem lesions. As a result of more and more evidence showing that the mesolimbic and the mesocortical dopamine system are key to motivation and responsiveness to reward, abulia may be a dopamine-related dysfunction. Abulia may also result from a variety of brain injuries which cause personality change, such as dementing illnesses, trauma, or intracerebral haemorrhage (stroke), especially stroke causing diffuse injury to the right hemisphere.

Damage to the Basal Ganglia

Injuries to the frontal lobe and/or the basal ganglia can interfere with an individual’s ability to initiate speech, movement, and social interaction. Studies have shown that 5-67% of all patients with traumatic brain injuries and 13% of patients with lesions on their basal ganglia experience some form of diminished motivation.

It may complicate rehabilitation when a stroke patient is uninterested in performing tasks like walking despite being capable of doing so. It should be differentiated from apraxia, when a brain injured patient has impairment in comprehending the movements necessary to perform a motor task despite not having any paralysis that prevents performing the task; that condition can also result in lack of initiation of activity.

Damage to the Capsular Genu

A case study involving two patients with acute confusional state and abulia was conducted to see if these symptoms were the result of an infarct in the capsular genu. Using clinical neuropsychological and MRI evaluations at baseline and one year later showed that the cognitive impairment was still there one year after the stroke. Cognitive and behavioural alterations due to a genu infarct are most likely because the thalamo-cortical projection fibres that originate from the ventral-anterior and medial-dorsal nuclei traverse the internal capsule genu. These tracts are part of a complex system of cortical and subcortical frontal circuits through which the flow of information from the entire cortex takes place before reaching the basal ganglia. Cognitive deterioration could have occurred through the genu infarcts affecting the inferior and anterior thalamic peduncles. In this case study the patients did not show any functional deficits at the follow-up one year after the stroke and were not depressed but did show diminished motivations. This result supports the idea that abulia may exist independently of depression as its own syndrome.

Damage to Anterior Cingulate Circuit

The anterior cingulate circuit consists of the anterior cingulate cortex, also referred to as Brodmann area 24, and its projections to the ventral striatum which includes the ventromedial caudate. The loop continues to connect to the ventral pallidum, which connects to the ventral anterior nucleus of the thalamus. This circuit is essential for the initiation of behaviour, motivation and goal orientation, which are the very things missing from a patient with a disorder of diminished motivation. Unilateral injury or injury along any point in the circuit leads to abulia regardless of the side of the injury, but if there is bilateral damage, the patient will exhibit a more extreme case of diminished motivation, akinetic mutism.

Acute Caudate Vascular Lesions

It s well documented that the caudate nucleus is involved in degenerative diseases of the central nervous system such as Huntington disease. In a case study of 32 acute caudate stroke patients, 48% were found to be experiencing abulia. Most of the cases where abulia was present were when the patients had a left caudate infarct that extended into the putamen as seen through a CT or MRI scan.

Diagnosis

Diagnosis for abulia can be quite difficult because it falls between two other disorders of diminished motivation, and one could easily see an extreme case of abulia as akinetic mutism or a lesser case of abulia as apathy and therefore, not treat the patient appropriately. If it were to be confused with apathy, it might lead to attempts to involve the patient with physical rehabilitation or other interventions where a source of strong motivation would be necessary to succeed but would still be absent. The best way to diagnose abulia is through clinical observation of the patient as well as questioning of close relatives and loved ones to give the doctor a frame of reference with which they can compare the patient’s new behaviour to see if there is in fact a case of diminished motivation. In recent years, imaging studies using a CT or MRI scan have been shown to be quite helpful in localising brain lesions which have been shown to be one of the main causes of abulia.

Conditions where Abulia may be Present

Normal pressure hydrocephalus
Major depressive disorder
Persistent depressive disorder
Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder
Schizophrenia
Frontotemporal dementia
Parkinson’s disease
Huntington’s disease
Pick’s disease
Progressive supranuclear palsy
Traumatic brain injury
Stroke

Alzheimer’s Disease

A lack of motivation has been reported in 25–50% of patients with Alzheimer’s disease. While depression is also common in patients with this disease, abulia is not a mere symptom of depressions because more than half of the patients with Alzheimer’s disease with abulia do not have depression. Several studies have shown that abulia is most prevalent in cases of severe dementia which may result from reduced metabolic activity in the prefrontal regions of the brain. Patients with Alzheimer’s disease and abulia are significantly older than patients with Alzheimer’s who do not lack motivation. Going along with that, the prevalence of abulia increased from 14% in patients with a mild case Alzheimer’s disease to 61% in patients with a severe case of Alzheimer’s disease, which most likely developed over time as the patient got older.

Treatment

Most current treatments for abulia are pharmacological, including the use of antidepressants. However, antidepressant treatment is not always successful and this has opened the door to alternative methods of treatment. The first step to successful treatment of abulia, or any other DDM, is a preliminary evaluation of the patient’s general medical condition and fixing the problems that can be fixed easily. This may mean controlling seizures or headaches, arranging physical or cognitive rehabilitation for cognitive and sensorimotor loss, or ensuring optimal hearing, vision, and speech. These elementary steps also increase motivation because improved physical status may enhance functional capacity, drive, and energy and thereby increase the patient’s expectation that initiative and effort will be successful.

There are 5 steps to pharmacological treatment:

Optimize medical status.
Diagnose and treat other conditions more specifically associated with diminished motivation (e.g. apathetic hyperthyroidism, Parkinson’s disease).
Eliminate or reduce doses of psychotropics and other agents that aggravate motivational loss (e.g. SSRIs, dopamine antagonists).
Treat depression efficaciously when both DDM and depression are present.
Increase motivation through use of stimulants, dopamine agonists, or other agents such as cholinesterase inhibitors.

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What is the Pseudobulbar Affect?

Published on 05/03/2024 by Andrew MarshallLeave a comment

Introduction

Pseudobulbar affect (PBA), or emotional incontinence, is a type of neurological disorder characterised by uncontrollable episodes of crying or laughing. PBA occurs secondary to a neurologic disorder or brain injury. Patients may find themselves crying uncontrollably at something that is only slightly sad, being unable to stop themselves for several minutes. Episodes may also be mood-incongruent: a patient may laugh uncontrollably when angry or frustrated, for example. Sometimes, the episodes may switch between emotional states, resulting in the patient crying uncontrollably before dissolving into fits of laughter.

The pseudobulbar affect, also referred to as emotional lability, should not be confused with depression that stem from emotional instability – affective dysregulation – commonly seen in mental illnesses and certain personality disorders.

Signs and Symptoms

The cardinal feature of the disorder is a pathologically lowered threshold for exhibiting the behavioural response of laughter, crying, anger or all of the above. An affected individual exhibits episodes of laughter, crying, anger or a combination of these without an apparent motivating stimulus or in response to stimuli that would not have elicited such an emotional response before the onset of their underlying neurologic disorder. In some patients, the emotional response is exaggerated in intensity but is provoked by a stimulus with an emotional valence congruent with the character of the emotional display. For example, a sad stimulus provokes a pathologically exaggerated weeping response instead of a sigh, which the patient normally would have exhibited in that particular instance.

However, in some other patients, the character of the emotional display can be incongruent with, and even contradictory to, the emotional valence of the provoking stimulus or may be incited by a stimulus with no clear valence. For example, a patient may laugh in response to sad news or cry in response to stimuli with no emotional undertone, or, once provoked, the episodes may switch from laughing to crying or vice versa.

The symptoms of PBA can be severe, with persistent and unremitting episodes. Characteristics include:

The onset can be sudden and unpredictable, and has been described by some patients as coming on like a seizure;
The outbursts have a typical duration of a few seconds to several minutes; and,
The outbursts may happen several times a day.

Many people with neurologic disorders exhibit uncontrollable episodes of laughing, crying, or anger that are either exaggerated or contradictory to the context in which they occur. Where patients have significant cognitive deficits (e.g. Alzheimer’s) it can be unclear whether it is true PBA as opposed to a grosser form of emotional dysregulation, but patients with intact cognition often report the symptom as disturbing. Patients report that their episodes are at best only partially amenable to voluntary control, and unless they experience a severe change of mental status, as in traumatic brain injury they often have insight into their problem and judge their emotional displays as inappropriate and out of character. The clinical effect of PBA can be severe, with unremitting and persistent symptoms that can be disabling to patients, and may significantly affect quality of life for caregivers

Social Impact

While not as profoundly disabling as the physical symptoms of the most common diseases that cause it (such as ALS), PBA may significantly influence individuals’ social functioning and their relationships with others. Such sudden, frequent, extreme, uncontrollable emotional outbursts may lead to social withdrawal and interfere with activities of daily living, social and professional pursuits, and reduce overall healthcare. For example, patients with ALS and MS are often cognitively normal. However, the appearance of uncontrollable emotions is commonly associated with many additional neurological disorders such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, Parkinson’s disease, cerebral palsy, autism, epilepsy, and migraines. This may lead to avoidance of social interactions for the patient, which in turn impairs their coping mechanisms and their careers.

Depression

PBA may often be misdiagnosed as clinical depression or bipolar disorder; however, many clear distinctions exist.

In depressive and bipolar disorders, crying, anger or laughter are typically indicative of mood, whereas the pathological displays of crying which occur in PBA are often in contrast to the underlying mood, or greatly in excess of the mood or eliciting stimulus. In addition, a key to differentiating depression from PBA is duration: PBA episodes are sudden, occurring in an episodic manner, while crying in depression is a more sustained presentation and closely relates to the underlying mood state. The level of control that one has over the crying, anger or other emotional displays in PBA is minimal or non-existent, whereas for those with depression, the emotional expression (typically crying) can be modulated by the situation. Similarly, the trigger for episodes of crying in patients with PBA may be nonspecific, minimal or inappropriate to the situation, but in depression the stimulus is specific to the mood-related condition. These differences are outlined in the adjacent Table.

In some cases, depressed mood and PBA may co-exist. Since depression is one of the most common emotional changes in patients with neurodegenerative disease or post-stroke sequelae, it is often comorbid with PBA. Comorbidity implies that depression is distinct from PBA and is not necessary for, nor does it exclude, a diagnosis of PBA.

Causes

The specific pathophysiology involved in this frequently debilitating condition is still under investigation; the primary pathogenic mechanisms of PBA remain controversial. One hypothesis, established by early researchers such as Wilson and Oppenheim, placed emphasis on the role of the corticobulbar pathways in modulating emotional expression in a top-down model, and theorised that PBA occurs when bilateral lesions in the descending corticobulbar tract cause failure of voluntary control of emotion, which leads to the disinhibition, or release, of laughing/crying centres in the brainstem. Other theories implicate the prefrontal cortex.

Secondary Condition

PBA is a condition that occurs secondary to neurological disease or brain injury, and is thought to result from disruptions of neural networks that control the generation and regulation of motor output of emotions. PBA is most commonly observed in people with neurologic injuries such as traumatic brain injury (TBI) and stroke, and neurologic diseases such as dementias including Alzheimer’s disease, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), multiple sclerosis (MS), amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), and Parkinson’s disease (PD). It has been reported as a symptom of hyperthyroidism, Graves’ disease, or hypothyroidism in combination with depression.

PBA has also been observed in association with a variety of other brain disorders, including brain tumours, Wilson’s disease, syphilitic pseudobulbar palsy, and various encephalitides. Rarer conditions associated with PBA include gelastic epilepsy, dacrystic epilepsy, central pontine myelinolysis, olivopontinocerebellar atrophy, lipid storage diseases, chemical exposure (e.g. nitrous oxide and insecticides), fou rire prodromique, and Angelman syndrome.

It is hypothesized that these primary neurologic injuries and diseases affect chemical signalling in the brain, which in turn disrupts the neurologic pathways that control emotional expression.

Stroke

PBA is one of the most frequently reported post-stroke behavioural disorders, with a range of reported prevalence rates from 28% to 52%. The higher prevalence rates tend to be reported in stroke patients who are older or who have a history of prior stroke. The relationship between post-stroke depression and PBA is complicated, because the depressive syndrome also occurs with high frequency in stroke survivors. Post-stroke patients with PBA are more depressed than post-stroke patients without PBA, and the presence of a depressive syndrome may exacerbate the weeping side of PBA symptoms.

Multiple Sclerosis

Recent studies suggest that approximately 10% of patients with multiple sclerosis (MS) will experience at least one episode of emotional lability. PBA is generally associated with later stages of the disease (chronic progressive phase). PBA in MS patients is associated with more severe intellectual deterioration, physical disability, and neurological disability.

Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis

A study designed specifically to survey for prevalence found that 49% of patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) also had PBA. PBA does not appear to be associated with duration of ALS. It is a symptom of ALS that many patients are unaware of and do not receive information about from their physician.

Traumatic Brain Injury

One study of 301 consecutive cases in a clinic setting reported a 5% prevalence. PBA occurred in patients with more severe head injury, and coincided with other neurological features suggestive of pseudobulbar palsy.

The Brain Injury Association of America (BIAA) indicates that approximately 80% of survey respondents experience symptoms of PBA. Results from a recent investigation estimate the prevalence of PBA associated with traumatic brain injury to exceed more than 55% of survivors.

Treatment

Education of patients, families, and caregivers is an important component of the appropriate treatment of PBA. Crying associated with PBA may be incorrectly interpreted as depression; laughter may be embarrassing, anger can be debilitating. It is therefore critical for families and caregivers to recognize the pathological nature of PBA and the reassurance that this is an involuntary syndrome that is manageable. Traditionally, antidepressants such as sertraline, fluoxetine, citalopram, nortriptyline, and amitriptyline have been prescribed with some efficacy.

Medication

Dextromethorphan hydrobromide affects the signals in the brain that trigger the cough reflex. It is used as a cough suppressant, although it can sometimes be used, medicinally, as a pain reliever, and is also used as a recreational drug.

Quinidine sulfate affects the way the heart beats, and is generally used in people with certain heart rhythm disorders. It is also used to treat malaria. Quinidine sulfate, as a metabolic inhibitor, “increases plasma levels of dextromethorphan by competitively inhibiting cytochrome P450 2D6, which catalyses a major biotransformation pathway for dextromethorphan,” enabling therapeutic dextromethorphan concentrations.

Dextromethorphan/quinidine is a combination of these two generic drugs, and is the first Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved drug for the treatment of PBA, approved on 29 October 2010.

In the pivotal multicentre study that led to its approval, the “Objectives…[were] to evaluate the safety, tolerability, and efficacy of two different doses of AVP-923 [Dextromethorphan/quinidine combination]…when compared to placebo.” The conditions and results of that study are as follows:

At one study site, a total of 326 participants received one of three dose options. “METHODS: In a 12-week randomized, double-blind trial, ALS and MS patients with clinically significant PBA” were given a twice-daily dose of one of the following:

Placebo (N=109)
Dextromethorphan hydrobromide 30 mg/quinidine sulfate 10 mg (N=110)
Nuedexta – dextromethorphan hydrobromide 20 mg/quinidine sulfate 10 mg (N=107)

283 patients (86.8%) completed the study. The number of PBA episodes (laughing, crying or aggressive outbursts) were 47% and 49% lower (based on the trial’s outcome measures), respectively, for the drug-combination options than for the placebo. The “mean CNS-LS scores” decreased by 8.2 points for both drug-combination options, vs a decrease of 5.7 points for the placebo.

Overall, the trial showed a statistically significant benefit from taking a combination of dextromethorphan and quinidine, with both dosages being safe and well tolerated. For a secondary objective measuring a participant’s “perceived health status…measuring eight health concepts: vitality, physical functioning, bodily pain, general health perceptions, physical role-, emotional role-, social role functioning, and mental health,” the higher dosage showed improvement, especially on measures of social functioning and mental health.

Epidemiology

Prevalence estimates place the number of people with PBA between 1.5 and 2 million in the United States alone, which would be less than 1% of the US population even at the high end of the estimate. Some argue that the number is probably higher and that clinicians underdiagnose PBA. However, the prevalence estimate of 2 million is based on an online survey. Self-selected computer-savvy patients in at-risk groups evaluated their own symptoms and submitted their self-diagnoses. No doctor or clinic confirmed the data. Motivation to participate could have been influenced by the presence of symptoms, which would have skewed the results. The actual prevalence could very well be quite a bit lower than estimated.

Brief History

The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals by Charles Darwin was published in 1872. In Chapter VI, “Special Expressions of Man: Suffering and Weeping”, Darwin discusses cultural variations in the acceptability of weeping and the wide differences in individual responses to suffering. The chapter contains the following sentence:

We must not, however, lay too much stress on the copious shedding of tears by the insane, as being due to the lack of all restraint; for certain brain-diseases, as hemiplegia, brain-wasting, and senile decay, have a special tendency to induce weeping.

Terminology

Historically, there have been a variety of terms used for the disorder, including pseudobulbar affect, pathological laughter and crying, emotional lability, emotionalism, emotional dysregulation, or more recently, involuntary emotional expression disorder. The term pseudobulbar (pseudo- + bulbar) came from the idea that the symptoms seemed similar to those caused by a bulbar lesion (that is, a lesion in the medulla oblongata).

Terms such as forced crying, involuntary crying, pathological emotionality, and emotional incontinence have also been used, although less frequently.

In Popular Culture

Arthur Fleck, the central character of the 2019 film Joker, displays signs of pseudobulbar affect, which are said to be what Joaquin Phoenix used as inspiration for his character’s signature laugh.

In the 2019 movie Parasite, the character Ki-woo sustains head trauma, and although it is not clearly mentioned that he’s affected by pseudobulbar affect, he mentions not being able to stop laughing when thinking about all the events that occur in the movie.

In the 2020 movie Naan Sirithal, the character Gandhi (Hiphop Tamizha Adhi) suffers from pseudobulbar affect due to all the stress he suffers from various parts of his life gets accumulated and starts to laugh uncontrollably.

In the medical television show House, season 7, episode 8 (“Small Sacrifices”), the character Ramon Silva, played by Kuno Becker displays pseudobulbar affect, with uncontrollable incongruent laughter, while having the Marburg variety of multiple sclerosis.

In season 3, episode 9 of The Good Fight, the character Brenda DeCarlo, an external auditor, displays pseudobulbar affect, with uncontrollable incongruent laughter.

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudobulbar_affect >; it is used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (CC-BY-SA). You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the CC-BY-SA.

What is Amygdala Hijack?

Published on 05/02/2024 by Andrew MarshallLeave a comment

Introduction

An amygdala hijack is an emotional response that is immediate, overwhelming, and out of measure with the actual stimulus because it has triggered a much more significant emotional threat.

The term, coined by Daniel Goleman in his 1996 book Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ, is used by affective neuroscientists and is considered a formal academic term. The amygdala is made up of two small, round structures located closer to the forehead than (anterior to) the hippocampi, near the temporal lobes. The amygdalae are involved in detecting and learning which parts of our surroundings are important and have emotional significance. They are critical for the production of emotion. They are known to be very important for negative emotions, especially fear. Amygdala activation often happens when we see a potential threat. The amygdala uses our past, related memories to help us make decisions about what is currently happening.

Definition

The output of sense organs is first received by the thalamus. Part of the thalamus’ stimuli goes directly to the amygdala or “emotional/irrational brain”, while other parts are sent to the neocortex or “thinking/rational brain”. If the amygdala perceives a match to the stimulus, i.e. if the record of experiences in the hippocampus tells the amygdala that it is a fight, flight or freeze situation, then the amygdala triggers the HPA (hypothalmic–pituitary–adrenal) axis and “hijacks” or overtakes rational brain function.

This emotional brain activity processes information milliseconds earlier than the rational brain, so in case of a match, the amygdala acts before any possible direction from the neocortex can be received. If, however, the amygdala does not find any match to the stimulus received with its recorded threatening situations, then it acts according to the directions received from the neocortex. When the amygdala perceives a threat, it can lead that person to react irrationally and destructively.

Goleman states that emotions “make us pay attention right now—this is urgent—and gives us an immediate action plan without having to think twice. The emotional component evolved very early: Do I eat it, or does it eat me?” The emotional response “can take over the rest of the brain in a millisecond if threatened”. An amygdala hijack exhibits three signs: strong emotional reaction, sudden onset, and post-episode realization if the reaction was inappropriate.

Goleman later emphasized that “self-control is crucial … when facing someone who is in the throes of an amygdala hijack” so as to avoid a complementary hijacking—whether in work situations, or in private life. Thus for example “one key marital competence is for partners to learn to soothe their own distressed feelings … nothing gets resolved positively when husband or wife is in the midst of an emotional hijacking”. The danger is that:

“when our partner becomes, in effect, our enemy, we are in the grip of an ‘amygdala hijack’ in which our emotional memory, lodged in the limbic center of our brain, rules our reactions without the benefit of logic or reason … which causes our bodies to go into a ‘fight or flight’ response.”

Non-Distressing Hijack

Goleman points out that:

“not all limbic hijackings are distressing. When a joke strikes someone as so uproarious that their laughter is almost explosive, that, too, is a limbic response. It is at work also in moments of intense joy.”

He also cites the case of a man strolling by a canal when he saw a girl staring petrified at the water.

“[B]efore he knew quite why, he had jumped into the water—in his coat and tie. Only once he was in the water did he realize that the girl was staring in shock at a toddler who had fallen in—whom he was able to rescue.”

Emotional Relearning

Joseph E. LeDoux was positive about the possibility of learning to control the amygdala’s hair-trigger role in emotional outbursts.

“Once your emotional system learns something, it seems you never let it go. What therapy does is teach you how to control it—it teaches your neocortex how to inhibit your amygdala. The propensity to act is suppressed, while your basic emotion about it remains in a subdued form.”

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What is Social Alienation?

Published on 04/30/2024 by Andrew Marshall1 Comment

Introduction

Social alienation is a person’s feeling of disconnection from a group – whether friends, family, or wider society – with which the individual has an affiliation. Such alienation has been described as “a condition in social relationships reflected by (1) a low degree of integration or common values and (2) a high degree of distance or isolation (3a) between individuals, or (3b) between an individual and a group of people in a community or work environment [enumeration added]”. It is a sociological concept developed by several classical and contemporary theorists. The concept has many discipline-specific uses and can refer both to a personal psychological state (subjectively) and to a type of social relationship (objectively).

Brief History

The term alienation has been used over the ages with varied and sometimes contradictory meanings. In ancient history it could mean a metaphysical sense of achieving a higher state of contemplation, ecstasy or union—becoming alienated from a limited existence in the world, in a positive sense. Examples of this usage have been traced to neoplatonic philosophers such as Plotinus (in the Greek alloiosis). There have also long been religious concepts of being separated or cut off from God and the faithful, alienated in a negative sense. The New Testament mentions the term apallotrioomai in Greek—”being alienated from”. Ideas of estrangement from a Golden Age, or due to a fall of man, or approximate equivalents in differing cultures or religions, have also been described as concepts of alienation. A double positive and negative sense of alienation is broadly shown in the spiritual beliefs referred to as Gnosticism.

Alienation also had a particular legal-political meaning since as early as Ancient Roman times, where to alienate property (alienato) is to transfer ownership of it to someone else. The term alienation itself comes from the Latin alienus which meant ‘of another place or person’, which in turn came from alius, meaning “other” or “another”. Another usage of the term in Ancient Greco-Roman times was by physicians referring to disturbed, difficult or abnormal states of mind, generally attributed to imbalanced physiology. In Latin alienatio mentis (mental alienation), this usage has been dated to Asclepiades. Once translations of such works had resurfaced in the West in the 17th century, physicians again began using the term, which is typically attributed to Felix Platter.

In medieval times, a relationship between alienation and social order has been described, mediated in part by mysticism and monasticism. The Crusades and witch-hunts have been described as forms of mass alienation.

17th Century

In the 17th century, Hugo Grotius put forward the concept that everyone has ‘sovereign authority’ over themselves but that they could alienate that natural right to the common good, an early social contract theory. In the 18th century, Hutcheson introduced a distinction between alienable and unalienable rights in the legal sense of the term. Rousseau published influential works on the same theme, and is also seen as having popularised a more psychological-social concept relating to alienation from a state of nature due to the expansion of civil society or the nation state.

In the same century a law of alienation of affection was introduced for men to seek compensation from other men accused of taking away ‘their’ woman.

In the history of literature, the German Romantics appear to be the first group of writers and poets in whose work the concept of alienation is regularly found. Around the start of the 19th century, Hegel popularized a Christian (Lutheran) and Idealist philosophy of alienation. He used German terms in partially different senses, referring to a psychological state and an objective process, and in general posited that the self was a historical and social creation, which becomes alienated from itself via a perceived objective world, but can become de-alienated again when that world is seen as just another aspect of the self-consciousness, which may be achieved by self-sacrifice to the common good.

Around the same time, Pinel was popularising a new understanding of mental alienation, particularly through his ‘medical-philosophical treatise’. He argued that people could be disturbed (alienated) by emotional states and social conditions, without necessarily having lost (become alienated from) their reason, as had generally been assumed. Hegel praised Pinel for his ‘moral treatment’ approach, and developed related theories. Nevertheless, as Foucault would later write, “… in an obscure, shared origin, the ‘alienation’ of physicians and the ‘alienation’ of philosophers started to take shape—two configurations in which man in any case corrupts his truth, but between which, after Hegel, the nineteenth century stopped seeing any trace of resemblance.”

Marx

Marx was initially in the Young Hegelian camp and, like Feuerbach, rejected the spiritual basis, and adapted Hegel’s dialectic model to a theory of (historical) materialism. Marx’s theory of alienation is articulated most clearly in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and The German Ideology (1846). The ‘young’ Marx wrote more often and directly of alienation than the ‘mature’ Marx, which some regard as an ideological break while others maintain that the concept remained central. Structuralists generally hold that there was a transition from a philosophical-anthropological (Marxist humanism) concept (e.g. internal alienation from the self) to a structural-historical interpretation (e.g. external alienation by appropriation of labour), accompanied by a change in terminology from alienation to exploitation to commodity fetishism and reification. Marx’s concepts of alienation have been classed into four types by Kostas Axelos: economic and social alienation, political alienation, human alienation, and ideological alienation.

In the concept’s most prominent use, it refers to the economic and social alienation aspect in which workers are disconnected from what they produce and why they produce. Marx believed that alienation is a systematic result of capitalism. Essentially, there is an “exploitation of men by men” where the division of labour creates an economic hierarchy. His theory of alienation was based upon his observation that in emerging industrial production under capitalism, workers inevitably lose control of their lives and selves by not having any control of their work. Workers never become autonomous, self-realised human beings in any significant sense, except in the way the bourgeoisie wants the worker to be realised. His theory relies on Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity (1841), which argues that the idea of God has alienated the characteristics of the human being. Stirner would take the analysis further in The Ego and Its Own (1844), declaring that even ‘humanity’ is an alienating ideal for the individual, to which Marx and Engels responded in The German Ideology (1845). Alienation in capitalist societies occurs because in work each contributes to the common wealth but they can only express this fundamentally social aspect of individuality through a production system that is not publicly social but privately owned, for which each individual functions as an instrument, not as a social being. Kostas Axelos summarizes that for Marx, in capitalism “work renders man an alien to himself and to his own products.” “The malaise of this alienation from the self means that the worker does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy….The worker only feels himself outside his work, and in his work he feels outside himself….Its alien character emerges clearly in the fact as soon as no physical or other compulsion exists, it is avoided like the plague.”. Marx also wrote, in a curtailed manner, that capitalist owners also experience alienation, through benefiting from the economic machine by endlessly competing, exploiting others and maintaining mass alienation in society.

Political Alienation refers specifically to the idea that “politics is the form that organizes the productive forces of the economy” in a way that is alienating because it “distorts the logic of economic development”.

Through Human Alienation, individuals become estranged to themselves in the quest to stay alive, where “they lose their true existence in the struggle for subsistence”. Marx focuses on two aspects of human nature which he calls “historical conditions.” The first aspect refers to the necessity of food, clothes, shelter, and more. Secondly, Marx believes that after satisfying these basic needs people have the tendency to develop more “needs” or desires that they will work towards satisfying, hence, humans become stuck in a cycle of never ending wants which makes them strangers to each other.

When referring to ideological alienation, Axelos proposes that Marx believes that all religions divert people away from “their true happiness” and instead turn them towards “illusory happiness”.

There is a commonly noted problem of translation in grappling with ideas of alienation derived from German-language philosophical texts: the word alienation, and similar words such as estrangement, are often used interchangeably to translate two distinct German words, Entfremdung and Entäußerung. The former means specifically interpersonal estrangement, while the latter can have a broader and more active meaning that might refer also to externalisation, relinquishment, or sale (alienation) of property. In general, and contrary to his predecessors, Marx may have used the terms interchangeably, though he also wrote “Entfremdung… constitutes the real interest of this Entäußerung.”

Late 1800s to 1900s

Many sociologists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were concerned about alienating effects of modernisation. German sociologists Georg Simmel and Ferdinand Tönnies wrote critical works on individualisation and urbanisation. Simmel’s The Philosophy of Money describes how relationships become more and more mediated by money. Tönnies’ Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft (Community and Society) is about the loss of primary relationships such as familial bonds in favour of goal-oriented, secondary relationships. This idea of alienation can be observed in some other contexts, although the term may not be as frequently used. In the context of an individual’s relationships within society, alienation can mean the unresponsiveness of society as a whole to the individuality of each member of the society. When collective decisions are made, it is usually impossible for the unique needs of each person to be taken into account.

The American sociologist C. Wright Mills conducted a major study of alienation in modern society with White Collar in 1951, describing how modern consumption-capitalism has shaped a society where you have to sell your personality in addition to your work. Melvin Seeman was part of a surge in alienation research during the mid-20th century when he published his paper, “On the Meaning of Alienation”, in 1959. Seeman used the insights of Marx, Emile Durkheim and others to construct what is often considered a model to recognize the five prominent features of alienation: powerlessness, meaninglessness, normlessness, isolation and self-estrangement. Seeman later added a sixth element (cultural estrangement), although this element does not feature prominently in later discussions of his work.

In a broader philosophical context, especially in existentialism and phenomenology, alienation describes the inadequacy of the human being (or the mind) in relation to the world. The human mind (as the subject who perceives) sees the world as an object of perception, and is distanced from the world, rather than living within it. This line of thought is generally traced to the works of Søren Kierkegaard in the 19th century, who, from a Christian viewpoint, saw alienation as separation from God, and also examined the emotions and feelings of individuals when faced with life choices. Many 20th-century philosophers (both theistic and atheistic) and theologians were influenced by Kierkegaard’s notions of angst, despair and the importance of the individual. Martin Heidegger’s concepts of anxiety (angst) and mortality drew from Kierkegaard; he is indebted to the way Kierkegaard lays out the importance of our subjective relation to truth, our existence in the face of death, the temporality of existence and the importance of passionately affirming one’s being-in-the-world. Jean-Paul Sartre described the “thing-in-itself” which is infinite and overflowing, and claimed that any attempt to describe or understand the thing-in-itself is “reflective consciousness”. Since there is no way for the reflective consciousness to subsume the pre-reflective, Sartre argued that all reflection is fated to a form of anxiety (i.e. the human condition). As well, Sartre argued that when a person tries to gain knowledge of the “Other” (meaning beings or objects that are not the self), their self-consciousness has a “masochistic desire” to be limited. This is expressed metaphorically in the line from the play No Exit, “Hell is other people”.

In the theory of psychoanalysis developed around the start of the 20th century, Sigmund Freud did not explicitly address the concept of alienation, but other analysts subsequently have. It is a theory of divisions and conflicts between the conscious and unconscious mind, between different parts of a hypothetical psychic apparatus, and between the self and civilisation. It postulates defence mechanisms, including splitting, in both normal and disturbed functioning. The concept of repression has been described as having functionally equivalent effects as the idea of false consciousness associated with Marxist theory.

A form of Western Marxism developed during the century, which included influential analyses of false consciousness by György Lukács. Critics of bureaucracy and the Protestant Ethic also drew on the works of Max Weber.

Figures associated with critical theory, in particular with the Frankfurt School, such as Theodor Adorno and Erich Fromm, also developed theories of alienation, drawing on neo-Marxist ideas as well as other influences including neo-Freudian and sociological theories. One approach applies Marxist theories of commodification to the cultural, educational and party-political spheres. Links are drawn between socioeconomic structures, psychological states of alienation, and personal human relationships. In the 1960s the revolutionary group Situationist International came to some prominence, staging ‘situations’ intended to highlight an alternative way of life to advanced capitalism, the latter conceptualised as a diffuse ‘spectacle’, a fake reality masking a degradation of human life. The Theory of Communicative Action associated with Jürgen Habermas emphasizes the essential role of language in public life, suggesting that alienation stems from the distortion of reasoned moral debate by the strategic dominance of market forces and state power.

This critical programme can be contrasted with traditions that attempt to extract problems of alienation from the broader socioeconomic context, or which at least accept the broader context on its own terms, and which often attribute problems to individual abnormality or failures to adjust.

After the boom in alienation research that characterised the 1950s and 1960s, interest in alienation research subsided, although in sociology it was maintained by the Research Committee on Alienation of the International Sociological Association (ISA).

In the 1990s, there was again an upsurge of interest in alienation prompted by the fall of the Soviet Union, globalization, the information explosion, increasing awareness of ethnic conflicts, and post-modernism. Felix Geyer believes the growing complexity of the contemporary world and post-modernism prompted a reinterpretation of alienation that suits the contemporary living environment. In late 20th and early 21st century sociology, it has been particularly the works of Lauren Langman and Devorah Kalekin-Fishman that address the issue of alienation in the contemporary western world.

Modalities

Powerlessness

Alienation in the sense of a lack of power has been technically defined by Seeman as “the expectancy or probability held by the individual that his own behaviour cannot determine the occurrence of the outcomes, or reinforcements, he seeks.” Seeman argues that this is “the notion of alienation as it originated in the Marxian view of the worker’s condition in capitalist society: the worker is alienated to the extent that the prerogative and means of decision are expropriated by the ruling entrepreneurs”. More succinctly, Kalekin-Fishman says, “A person suffers from alienation in the form of ‘powerlessness’ when she is conscious of the gap between what she would like to do and what she feels capable of doing”.

In discussing powerlessness, Seeman also incorporated the insights of the psychologist Julian Rotter. Rotter distinguishes between internal control and external locus of control, which means “differences (among persons or situations) in the degree to which success or failure is attributable to external factors (e.g. luck, chance, or powerful others), as against success or failure that is seen as the outcome of one’s personal skills or characteristics”. Powerlessness, therefore, is the perception that the individual does not have the means to achieve his goals.

Ultimately breaking with the Marxist tradition, Geyer remarks that “a new type of powerlessness has emerged, where the core problem is no longer being unfree but rather being unable to select from among an overchoice of alternatives for action, whose consequences one often cannot even fathom”. Geyer adapts cybernetics to alienation theory, and writes that powerlessness is the result of delayed feedback: “The more complex one’s environment, the later one is confronted with the latent, and often unintended, consequences of one’s actions. Consequently, in view of this causality-obscuring time lag, both the ‘rewards’ and ‘punishments’ for one’s actions increasingly tend to be viewed as random, often with apathy and alienation as a result”.

Meaninglessness

A sense of meaning has been defined by Seeman as “the individual’s sense of understanding events in which he is engaged”. Seeman writes that meaninglessness “is characterized by a low expectancy that satisfactory predictions about the future outcomes of behaviour can be made.” Whereas powerlessness refers to the sensed ability to control outcomes, this refers to the sensed ability to predict outcomes. In this respect, meaninglessness is closely tied to powerlessness; Seeman argues, “the view that one lives in an intelligible world might be a prerequisite to expectancies for control; and the unintelligibility of complex affairs is presumably conducive to the development of high expectancies for external control (that is, high powerlessness)”.

Geyer believes meaninglessness should be reinterpreted for postmodern times: “With the accelerating throughput of information … meaningless is not a matter anymore of whether one can assign meaning to incoming information, but of whether one can develop adequate new scanning mechanisms to gather the goal-relevant information one needs, as well as more efficient selection procedures to prevent being overburdened by the information one does not need, but is bombarded with on a regular basis.” Information overload or the so-called “data tsunami” are well-known information problems confronting contemporary man, and Geyer thus argues that meaninglessness is turned on its head.

Normlessness

Normlessness (or what Durkheim referred to as anomie) “denotes the situation in which the social norms regulating individual conduct have broken down or are no longer effective as rules for behaviour”. This aspect refers to the inability to identify with the dominant values of society or rather, with values that are perceived to be dominant. Seeman adds that this aspect can manifest in a particularly negative manner, “The anomic situation … may be defined as one in which there is a high expectancy that socially unapproved behaviours are required to achieve given goals”.

Neal and Collas write that “[n]ormlessness derives partly from conditions of complexity and conflict in which individuals become unclear about the composition and enforcement of social norms. Sudden and abrupt changes occur in life conditions, and the norms that usually operate may no longer seem adequate as guidelines for conduct”. This is a particular issue after the fall of the Soviet Union, mass migrations from developing to developed countries, and the general sense of disillusionment that characterised the 1990s.

Relationships

One concept used in regard to specific relationships is that of parental alienation, where a separated child expresses a general dislike for one of their parents (who may have divorced or separated). The term is not applied where there is child abuse. The parental alienation might be due to specific influences from either parent or could result from the social dynamics of the family as a whole. It can also be understood in terms of attachment, the social and emotional process of bonding between child and caregiver. Adoptees can feel alienated from both adoptive parents and birth parents.

Familial estrangement between parents and adult children “is attributed to a number of biological, psychological, social, and structural factors affecting the family, including attachment disorders, incompatible values and beliefs, unfulfilled expectations, critical life events and transitions, parental alienation, and ineffective communication patterns.” The degree of alienation has been positively correlated with decreased emotional functioning in the parent who feels a loss of identity and stigma.

Attachment relationships in adults can also involve feelings of alienation. Indeed, emotional alienation is said to be a common way of life for many, whether it is experienced as overwhelming, unacknowledged in the midst of a socioeconomic race, or contributes to seemingly unrelated problems.

Social Isolation

Social isolation refers to “The feeling of being segregated from one’s community”. Neal and Collas emphasize the centrality of social isolation in the modern world: “While social isolation is typically experienced as a form of personal stress, its sources are deeply embedded in the social organization of the modern world. With increased isolation and atomization, much of our daily interactions are with those who are strangers to us and with whom we lack any ongoing social relationships.”

Since the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, migrants from Eastern Europe and developing countries have flocked to developed countries in search of a better living standard. This has led to entire communities becoming uprooted: no longer fully part of their homelands, but neither integrated into their adopted communities. Diaspora literature depicts the plights of these migrants, such as Hafid Bouazza in Paravion.

Political Alienation

One manifestation of the above dimensions of alienation can be a feeling of estrangement from the political system and a lack of engagement therein. Such political alienation could result from not identifying with any particular political party or message, and could result in revolution, reforming behaviour, or abstention from the political process, possibly due to voter apathy.

A similar concept is policy alienation, where workers experience a state of psychological disconnection from a policy programme being implemented.

Self-Estrangement

Self-estrangement is an elusive concept in sociology, as recognized by Seeman, although he included it as an aspect in his model of alienation. Some, with Marx, consider self-estrangement to be the result and thus the heart of social alienation. Self-estrangement can be defined as “the psychological state of denying one’s own interests – of seeking out extrinsically rather than intrinsically satisfying, activities…”. It could be characterised as a feeling of having become a stranger to oneself, or to some parts of oneself, or alternatively as a problem of self-knowledge, or authenticity.

Seeman recognised the problems inherent in defining the “self”, while post-modernism in particular has questioned the very possibility of pin-pointing what precisely “self” constitutes. Further in that way, if the self is relationally constituted, does it make sense to speak of “self-estrangement” rather than “social isolation”? Costas and Fleming suggest that although the concept of self-estrangement “has not weathered postmodern criticisms of essentialism and economic determinism well”, the concept still has value if a Lacanian reading of the self is adopted. This can be seen as part of a wider debate on the concept of self between humanism and antihumanism, structuralism and post-structuralism, or nature and nurture.

Mental Disturbance

Until early in the 20th century, psychological problems were referred to in psychiatry as states of mental alienation, implying that a person had become separated from themselves, their reason or the world. From the 1960s alienation was again considered in regard to clinical states of disturbance, typically using a broad concept of a ‘schizoid’ (‘splitting’) process taken from psychoanalytic theory. The splitting was said to occur within regular child development and in everyday life, as well as in more extreme or dysfunctional form in conditions such as schizoid personality and schizophrenia.

Varied concepts of alienation and self-estrangement were used to link internal schizoid states with observable symptoms and with external socioeconomic divisions, without necessarily explaining or evidencing underlying causation. R.D. Laing was particularly influential in arguing that dysfunctional families and socioeconomic oppression caused states of alienation and ontological insecurity in people, which could be considered adaptations but which were diagnosed as disorders by mainstream psychiatry and society. The specific theories associated with Laing and others at that time are not widely accepted, but work from other theoretical perspectives sometimes addresses the same theme.

In a related vein, for Ian Parker, psychology normalizes conditions of social alienation. While it could help groups of individuals emancipate themselves, it serves the role of reproducing existing conditions. This view can be seen as part of a broader tradition sometimes referred to as critical psychology or liberation psychology, which emphasizes that an individual is enmeshed within a social-political framework, and so therefore are psychological problems. Likewise, some psychoanalysts suggest that while psychoanalysis emphasizes environmental causes and reactions, it also attributes the problems of individuals to internal conflicts stemming from early psychosocial development, effectively divorcing them from the wider ongoing context. Slavoj Zizek (drawing on Herbert Marcuse, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalysis) argues that in today’s capitalist society, the individual is estranged from their self through the repressive injunction to “enjoy!” Such an injunction does not allow room for the recognition of alienation and, indeed, could itself be seen as an expression of alienation.

More to the political right, however, psychotherapy and associated notions have long been considered anywhere from ineffectual due to their inherent bias against the reality of inborn such as group-specific (genetic) traits to actively destructive much rather than emancipatory. On the other hand, they are not alone in this sentiment either as Marcuse, among others, goes on to speak of repressive desublimation.

Disability

Differences between persons with disabilities and individuals in relative abilities, or perceived abilities, can be a cause of alienation. One study, “Social Alienation and Peer Identification: A Study of the Social Construction of Deafness”, found that among deaf adults one theme emerged consistently across all categories of life experience: social rejection by, and alienation from, the larger hearing community. Only when the respondents described interactions with deaf people did the theme of isolation give way to comments about participation and meaningful interaction. This appeared to be related to specific needs, for example for real conversation, for information, the opportunity to develop close friendships and a sense of family. It was suggested that the social meaning of deafness is established by interaction between deaf and hearing people, sometimes resulting in marginalisation of the deaf, which is sometimes challenged. It has also led to the creation of alternatives and the deaf community is described as one such alternative.

Physicians and nurses often deal with people who are temporarily or permanently alienated from communities, which could be a result or a cause of medical conditions and suffering, and it has been suggested that therefore attention should be paid to learning from experiences of the special pain that alienation can bring.

Criticisms

Eric Voegelin with whom also originates the related phrase “to Immanentise the eschaton”, may be read as rather accepting of alienation:

The human condition has radical limits, and humans do not feel perfectly comfortable (to say the least). But it is not “ideological” to feel dissatisfaction or to desire something more perfect than what we have. Indeed such feelings as disquiet, anxiety, frustration and even alienation are, according Voegelin, normal. “Man is in deadly anguish,” writes Voegelin, “because he takes life seriously and cannot bear existence without meaning.” For reflection on the limits of the human condition to give rise to ideology, a certain “mood” must be present. What is this mood? It is the mood not only of alienation but of revolt. Ideology involves the active revolt against existential truth and the effort to construct a different world. Voegelin designates this mood as “pneumopathological,” a term he found in Schelling. It is the feeling of “estrangement from the spirit” so intense that it entails a willful closing of the soul to the transcendent.

Philosophers Heidegger, Peter Sloterdijk and more recently Alexander Grau argue for a similar fact of alienation.

In Art and Popular Culture

Alienation is most often represented in literature as the psychological isolation of an individual from society or community. In a volume of Bloom’s Literary Themes, Shakespeare’s Hamlet is described as the ‘supreme literary portrait’ of alienation, while noting that some may argue for Achilles in the Iliad. In addition, Bartleby, the Scrivener is introduced as a perfect example because so many senses of alienation are present. Other literary works described as dealing with the theme of alienation are: The Bell Jar, Black Boy, Brave New World, The Catcher in the Rye, The Chosen, Dubliners, Othello, Fahrenheit 451, Invisible Man, Mrs Dalloway, Notes from Underground, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, The Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus, The Trial, The Castle, Waiting for Godot, The Waste Land, and Young Goodman Brown. Contemporary British works noted for their perspective on alienation include The Child in Time, London Fields, Trainspotting, and Regeneration.

Sociologist Harry Dahms has analysed The Matrix Trilogy of films in the context of theories of alienation in modern society. He suggests that the central theme of The Matrix is the “all-pervasive yet increasingly invisible prevalence of alienation in the world today, and difficulties that accompany attempts to overcome it”.

British progressive rock band Pink Floyd’s concept album The Wall (1979) and British alternative rock band Radiohead’s album OK Computer (1997), both deal with the subject of alienation in their lyrics.

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