26. October 2011 by John Schinnerer.

From ScienceDaily.com…

‘Trading Places’ Most Common Pattern for Couples Dealing With Male Depression

ScienceDaily (Oct. 21, 2011) — University of British Columbia researchers have identified three major patterns that emerge among couples dealing with male depression. These can be described as “trading places,” “business as usual” and “edgy tensions.”

Published in the Social Science & Medicine journal and led by UBC researcher John Oliffe, the paper details how heterosexual couples’ gender roles undergo radical shifts and strain when the male partner is depressed and the female partner seeks to help. Depression, a disorder often thought of as a women’s health issue, is underreported in men, and little is known about how heterosexual couples respond when the male partner is depressed.

“Overall, our study underscores how women play a key role in helping their male partners manage their depression,” says Oliffe, an associate professor in the School of Nursing whose work investigates masculinities and men’s health with a focus on men’s depression.

“Our findings suggest that gender relations are pivotal in how health decisions are made in families and for that reason, it’s important to understand couple dynamics if we want to have effective interventions.”

Oliffe and his UBC colleagues found that “trading places” is the most common pattern. In these relationships, the partners took on atypical masculine and feminine roles to cope with challenges caused by the men’s depression. For instance, men assumed the role of homemaker while the women became the family breadwinner.

Oliffe says, “Here, women partners also broke with feminine ideals in how they provided partner support by employing tough love strategies for self-protection and a means of prompting the men’s self-management of their depression.”

The second most common pattern is “business as usual,” when couples sought to downplay or mask any problems caused by the men’s depression. Holding firm to idealized heterosexual gender roles, the women continued to support and nurture their partners. Despite their ongoing struggles with depression, the men continued to work hard to maintain their careers in typically masculine arenas, which in the study included engineering, science, law enforcement, forestry and coaching.

The third pattern, “edgy tensions,” describes men and women caught in dysfunctional relationships. Each holding ideas of gender roles that differed from those of their partner, these couples grappled with resentment. The men resisted medical treatment. Instead, they used alcohol and illicit drugs, at least in part, to self-manage their depression. The women expressed ambivalence about conforming to the feminine ideal of being a “selfless nurturer,” especially for men who were volatile and unpredictable. The men in turn espoused a view of themselves as head of the household.

The study conducted qualitative analysis through in-depth interviews with 26 men, diagnosed or self identified as depressed, and their 26 partners, from Prince George, Kelowna and Vancouver. The study participants ranged in age from 20 to 53 years old. The duration of the couples’ relationships ranged from two months to 18 years; seven couples had children living at home.

The men self-identified as Anglo-Canadian, First Nations, European, Asian and Middle Eastern. Seven couples were in mixed ethnicity relationships. The men had varying levels of education ranging from some high school to graduate degrees; 14 of the 26 men were unemployed at the time of interview, and self-identified as being of low socio-economic status as a consequence.

This research received support through the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, Institute of Gender and Health.

Story Source:

The above story is reprinted from materials provided by University of British Columbia.

Journal Reference:

John L. Oliffe, Mary T. Kelly, Joan L. Bottorff, Joy L. Johnson, Sabrina T. Wong. “He’s more typically female because he’s not afraid to cry”: Connecting heterosexual gender relations and men’s depression. Social Science & Medicine, 2011; 73 (5): 775 DOI: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2011.06.034

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23. September 2011 by John Schinnerer.

As an individual who is currently going through divorce, I know firsthand the emotional distress that divorcees experience. Divorce brings up feelings of loss, sadness, anger, jealousy, grief, guilt, shame, embarrassment, and anxiety (to name but a few!).

All of these are normal feelings for one muddling through a divorce. While I have struggled at times with my divorce, overall it has gone better than I ever could have imagined. Yes, there have been days filled with depression. There have been moments of hopelessness. There are the occasional bouts of anger. Yet, on the whole, I greatly misjudged just how difficult the experience would be.

Self-Compassion is the Key to an Easier Divorce

Partly, this success is due to my having taught and practiced self-compassion for the past five years.

Self-compassion is basically being kind to yourself when things go badly. However, this is a greatly watered down version of self-compassion.

The goal is to treat yourself with the same type of kindness and compassion that most people extend to loved ones when they fail. When someone else makes a mistake, most people will react with some degree of kindness and understanding. Self-compassion turns down the volume on anger typically associated with huge mistakes while still maintaining your sense of personal responsibility. A 2007 study at Duke University found that ‘inducing self-compassion may disengage the relationship between taking responsibility and experiencing negative affect.’ This allows you to still take full responsibility for your mistakes while minimizing the amount of time that you spend beating yourself up as well as reduced the intensity of those ubiquitous destructive emotions I mentioned earlier.

The way in which you do this is to speak to yourself as if you were a three-year-old child. This allows for mistakes (which is a major path for learning), screw ups, and errors. Self-compassion is related to greater resiliency (the ability to bounce back from difficulty) which every divorcee can use.

New Study on Self-Compassion and Divorce 

A study is coming out this month in Psychological Science on the importance of self-compassion for those in the midst of a divorce. The authors, David Sbarra, Hillary Smith and Matthias Mehl, state ‘Self-compassion can promote resilience and positive outcomes in the face of divorce.’

The study compared self-compassion to other major traits, such as self-esteem, resistance to depression, realistic optimism, or social intelligence. The findings?

Self-Compassion Accurately Predicted Quickest Positive Outcome Following Divorce 

The only trait that consistently predicted positive outcomes following a divorce was self-compassion. That is amazing!

The study involved 105 participants (38 men and 67 women) with an average age of 40. They’d been married, on average, for 13 years and had been divorced for 3-4 months. The researchers had the participants call to mind their ex-spouse and then talk for four minutes about their thoughts and emotions related to the break up. This was done at three time points - initial visit, three months later and six to nine months later.  The researchers looked at the frequency of intrusive unpleasant thoughts, negative emotions related to the divorce and their ex and how well they were getting on with life since the break up.

Those participants with higher levels of self-compassion recovered from divorce faster and were doing better after the nine month period.

Self-compassion, according to my former Cal classmate, Kristin Neff, is a combination of mindfulness (being aware of feelings of jealousy and anger, for example, without getting stuck in them), an awareness of the interconnectedness of humanity (we all suffer at times), and self-kindness.

Self-compassion, in my opinion, is an integral part of positive psychology in the sense that it is rapidly showing itself to be an instrumental tool in any happy, thriving, meaningful life.

To find out more, check out my award-winning self-help book, Guide to Self: The Beginner’s Guide to Managing Emotion and Thought which is currently available for free at www.GuideToSelf.com.

If you are angry about your divorce, please visit my new video blog (vlog) at AngerGeek.com for free tips on how to turn down the volume on anger!

To life, love and laughter,

John Schinnerer, Ph.D.

Founder Guide to Self, Inc.

Award-winning author, award-winning blogger, national speaker, emotion expert

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27. November 2010 by John Schinnerer.

From the ubiquitous ScienceDaily.com… 

Upper-Class People Have Trouble Recognizing Others’ Emotions

ScienceDaily (Nov. 23, 2010) — Upper-class people have more educational opportunities, greater financial security, and better job prospects than people from lower social classes, but that doesn’t mean they’re more skilled at everything. A new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds surprisingly, that lower-class people are better at reading the emotions of others.

The researchers were inspired by observing that, for lower-class people, success depends more on how much they can rely on other individuals. For example, if you can’t afford to buy support services, such as daycare service for your children, you have to rely on your neighbors or relatives to watch the kids while you attend classes or run errands, says Michael W. Kraus of the University of California-San Francisco. He co-wrote the study with Stéphane Côté of the University of Toronto and Dacher Keltner of the University of California-Berkeley.

To learn more about HOW to read emotions properly, visit http://www.GuideToSelf.com for a FREE copy of the award-winning book, Guide To Self: The Beginner’s Guide to Managing Emotion and Thought by U.C. Berkeley-trained emotion expert, John Schinnerer, Ph.D. Just share your email address and name for a free, instant PDF copy of the 216 page book!

One experiment used volunteers who worked at a university. Some had graduated from college and others had not; researchers used educational level as a proxy for social class. The volunteers did a test of emotion perception, in which they were instructed to look at pictures of faces and indicate which emotions each face was displaying. People with more education performed worse on the task than people with less education. In another study, university students who were of higher social standing (determined from each student’s self-reported perceptions of his or her family’s socioeconomic status) had a more difficult time accurately reading the emotions of a stranger during a group job interview.

These results suggest that people of upper-class status aren’t very good at recognizing the emotions other people are feeling. The researchers speculate that this is because they can solve their problems, like the daycare example, without relying on others — they aren’t as dependent on the people around them.

A final experiment found that, when people were made to feel that they were at a lower social class than they actually were, they got better at reading emotions. This shows that “it’s not something ingrained in the individual,” Kraus says. “It’s the cultural context leading to these differences.” He says this work helps show that stereotypes about the classes are wrong. “It’s not that a lower-class person, no matter what, is going to be less intelligent than an upper-class person. It’s all about the social context the person lives in, and the specific challenges the person faces. If you can shift the context even temporarily, social class differences in any number of behaviors can be eliminated.”

To life, love and laughter,

 John Schinnerer, Ph.D.

Founder of Guide to Self, Inc.

http://drjohnsblog.wordpress.com Hot blog on the latest in anger management tips, tools and tricks

@johnschin Follow john on Twitter

Story Source:
The above story is reprinted (with editorial adaptations by ScienceDaily staff) from materials provided by Association for Psychological Science.
________________________________________
Journal Reference:
1. M. W. Kraus, S. Cote, D. Keltner. Social Class, Contextualism, and Empathic Accuracy. Psychological Science, 2010; 21 (11): 1716 DOI: 10.1177/0956797610387613

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6. October 2010 by John Schinnerer.

From ScienceDaily…

 ScienceDaily (Oct. 4, 2010) — People match each other’s language styles more during happier periods of their relationship than at other times, according to new research from psychologists at The University of Texas at Austin. “When two people start a conversation, they usually begin talking alike within a matter of seconds,” says James Pennebaker, psychology professor and co-author of the study. “This also happens when people read a book or watch a movie. As soon as the credits roll, they find themselves talking like the author or the central characters.” 

This tendency is called language style matching or LSM. It is the focus of Pennebaker’s and co-author Molly E. Ireland’s study published in the September issue of Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. “Because style matching is automatic,” says Ireland, a psychology graduate student, “it serves as an unobtrusive window into people’s close relationships with others.” 

Ireland and Pennebaker tracked the language used by almost 2,000 college students as they responded to class assignments written in very different language styles. If the essay question was asked in a dry, confusing way, the students answered accordingly. If asked in a flighty, “Valley girl” way, the students punctuated their answers with “like,” “sorta” and “kinda.” The researchers extended their work by analyzing the written language of famous authors. For example, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung wrote to each other almost weekly over a seven-year period as their careers were developing. Using style-matching statistics, Ireland and Pennebaker were able to chart the two men’s tempestuous relationship from their early days of joint admiration to their final days of mutual contempt by counting the ways they used pronouns, prepositions and other words, such as the, you, a and as, that have little meaning outside the context of the sentence. 

The style-matching approach proved to be a powerful bellwether of marriages as well. Style-matching scores were calculated between poetry written by two pairs of spouses, Victorian poets Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning and 20th century poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, which mapped major changes in their relationships. “Style words in the spouses’ poems were more similar during happier periods of their relationships and less synchronized toward each relationship’s end,” Ireland says. 

…

Ireland and Pennebaker are investigating whether LSM during everyday conversation can be used to predict the beginning and end of romantic relationships. Style matching has the potential to quickly and easily reveal whether any given pair of people — ranging from business rivals to romantic partners — are psychologically on the same page and what this means for their future together.

For full article, click here.

University of Texas at Austin (2010, October 4). Mimicking other’s language style shows a happy relationship, study suggests. ScienceDaily. Retrieved October 5, 2010, from http://www.sciencedaily.com­ /releases/2010/10/101004101322.htm

Have a wonderful day!

John Schinnerer, Ph.D.

Emotion expert

Guide to Self, Inc.

For a free copy of John’s award-winning book on cultivating happiness, managing anger, turning down stress and anxiety and minimizing sadness, click here.

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2. August 2010 by John Schinnerer.

This is a comment I posted after a lovely young woman asked about anger management therapy for her husband. She was close to her wit’s end; sick of his constant annoyance, criticisms and irritability. She was asking if anyone knew of any possible way to get her husband to learn new ways of relating or if her only option was divorce.

Dear Kristin:

I’ve been working on designing free online anger management classes to teach men the latest scientifically proven tools for anger management therapy. My background is as a Ph.D. in ed psychology from U.C. Berkeley. I wrote an award-winning book in 2007 on proven tools to turn down the volume on negative emotions, such as anger and irritability, and techniques to turn up the volume on positive emotions, like love, happiness and curiosity.

From my years of research on the mind, I’ve found that merely targeting the anger is necessary but insufficient. As the brain is always looking to maintain a balance or homeostasis, we must teach these two paths simultaneously (turn up the positive and turn down the negative feelings).

I’ve had such success with this process and my clients that I’ve been asked to share the message with a wider audience. Typically, my clients ask “Shouldn’t everyone learn these tools?” To which my answer is “absolutely.” So I’m offering these tools for free at http://www.guidetoself.com. There you can receive a free copy of the eBook, free video lessons and free articles.

The entire process sidesteps the whole issue of shame, embarrassment and fear that men often feel when they seek outside “help”. Using these videos, men can learn useful, proven, concrete tools in the privacy of their own home. This makes it possible to help men who might not otherwise find a way to learn these invaluable tools. 

I hope and pray this is of use to you and your husband!

Best,
John Schinnerer, Ph.D.
Founder Guide to Self
http://www.GuideToSelf.com

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