August 2007 Archives | The Psychology Lounge ™The Psychology Lounge ™

Here is some more evidence that we poorly predict happiness and unhappiness.

A recent article in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology again shows how poor we are at predicting our future states of happiness or unhappiness. As I wrote about in previous posts on happiness, we seem to be quite poor at predicting how we will feel in the future.

Eli Finkel and Paul Eastwick at Northwestern University studied young lovers to see if their predictions of unhappiness after a breakup matched their actual suffering when the breakup occurred.

They looked at college students who had been dating for at least two months and had them fill out multiple questionnaires. Twenty six of the students broke up during the first six months of the study and these students predictions of distress were examined. The students at rated how painful a breakup would be on average two weeks before the breakup.

On average people overestimated the pain of a breakup. There was some correlation between how much people were in love and how much pain they suffered after the breakup, but everyone recovered more quickly than they had predicted. Looking at the actual study it appears that people were able to predict somewhat accurately their suffering in the first two weeks after the breakup. The correlation between their prediction and the actual distress was about 0.60 which means that they were able to predict about 36% of their suffering. But between weeks six and 10, the correlations dropped to about 0.30, which means that they were only able to predict about 10% of the variation in their suffering.

This is interesting in terms of the habituation process that I wrote about earlier. We habituate to both good and bad events. And we underestimate our ability to adapt to both types of events.

Now we shouldn’t make too much of this study. Remember this is a study of college students who had been dating for at least two months. This isn’t exactly a study of deep connection and commitment. It would be interesting, but much more difficult, to look at the same data for married couples who later break up.

Dr. Andrew Gottlieb is a clinical psychologist in Palo Alto, California. Dr. Gottlieb specializes in treating anxiety, depression, relationship problems, and other difficulties using evidence-based cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). CBT is a modern no-drug therapy approach that is targeted, skill-based, and proven effective by many research studies. Visit his website at CambridgeTherapy.com or watch Dr. Gottlieb on YouTube. He can be reached by phone at (650) 324-2666 and email at: Dr. Gottlieb Email.

Ah the joy of summer conferences! American Psychological Association had their annual conference in my lovely city of San Francisco this weekend, and one of the more interesting studies discussed was a study of kids who shoot other kids in school in mass murder attacks. They looked at eight teen shooters and rated them on what they call “cynical shyness.” Cynical shyness is a subset of normal shyness that involves anger and hostility towards others, especially when they are rejected.

Bernardo Carducci, lead author of the study and director of the Shyness Research Institute at Indiana University Southeast in New Albany explained:

“In addition to feelings of anxiety about social situations, cynically shy people, who are a small subclass of shy people, also have feelings of anger and hostility toward others and that comes from this sense of disconnect. Shyness has more in common with extroversion than with introversion. Shy people truly want to be with others, so they make the effort, but when they are rejected or ostracized, they disconnect. Once you disconnect, it’s very easy to start being angry and hate other people. It’s you against them, and they become what I call a cult of one. Once you start thinking ‘it’s me versus them,’ then it becomes easy to start hurting these people.”

Rating the eight teen shooters, they found that four of them had scores of 10 (on a 10 point scale) of cynical shyness, three had scores of 8, and one had a score of 6. Both of the Columbine shooters had scores of 10.

Now it should be pointed out that shyness per se is not dangerous. It is only this angry, cynical form of shyness, mainly found in teenage boys, that may be associated with dangerousness. And one weakness of the study is that they only looked at shooters. There may be many teens who score high on cynical shyness that do not escalate into violence. In fact this would be a good study, to identify what allows other cynically shy students NOT to become dangerous.

But shyness in pre-teens and adolescents is a serious disorder, as it can create intense misery in young people. Shy people desperately want to connect, they just don’t know how. Classes and workshops and group therapy approaches may be helpful in helping teens overcome this serious disorder.

The Psychology Lounge ™

by Dr. Andrew Gottlieb (650) 324-2666

Monthly Archives: August 2007

Sadder but Not Necessarily Wiser (and not quite as sad as expected)

Shyness Plus Rejection Plus Anger = School Shooters? News from APA Conference