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Distraction?
Psychologists Frown on the Smiley Face
By Erica Goode New York Times Service (August 15, 2000)
NEW YORK - Barbara Held has had just about enough of accentuating
the positive and eliminating the negative.
She does not want to cheer up, look on the bright side or let a smile be her
umbrella. And she is not planning to put a smiley face sticker on her car
bumper.
In fact, she views such activities as rather worrisome. She is one of a small
band of psychologists who believe that their profession - and indeed the
United States as a whole - has succumbed to an ethos of unrelenting
positivity. This ''tyranny of the positive attitude,'' as Ms. Held sees it,
prescribes cheerfulness and optimism as a formula for success, resilience
and good health, and equates negativity with failure, vulnerability and
general unhealthiness.
Positive thinking is a staple of self-help books, popular music and Sunday
sermons. And in recent years, it has also found a home in the positive
psychology movement, which was founded to correct what its leaders,
including Martin Seligman, a professor of psychology at the University of
Pennsylvania and a former president of the American Psychological
Association, saw as the field's overly narrow focus on mental illness and
human failing.
But Ms. Held and like-minded colleagues, who gathered last week at the
psychological association's meetings in Washington for a symposium titled
''The (Overlooked) Virtues of Negativity,'' feel that bliss can be taken too
far.
While positive thinking has its advantages, they argue, a little whining now
and then is not such a bad thing. Pessimism, in some circumstances, may
have its place. And the pressure to be upbeat, they assert, may gloss over
individual needs and differences, and may make one feel worse instead of
better.
''I'm worried that we're not making space for people to feel bad,'' said Ms.
Held, a clinical psychologist at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, and
the author of ''Stop Smiling Start Kvetching.''
''Life is very hard,'' Ms. Held said. ''If you're having a hard time with
something, it can make it harder to cope if you feel pressure to act O.K.
when you're not.''
A large body of experimental work has elaborated on the pluses of
optimism and positive thinking, which appear to have beneficial effects on
performance, social adjustment and some aspects of health. But at least
some research supports the notion that in some cases, it may be more useful
to see the glass as half empty.
Julie Norem, a social psychologist at Wellesley College, for example, has
studied ''defensive pessimism,'' a coping strategy that involves setting
unrealistically low expectations, then mentally playing out all the possible
outcomes of a given situation.
For instance, Ms. Norem explained, a defensive pessimist is likely to
approach a coming public speaking engagement with mounting anxiety. But
rather than giving herself a pep talk or using positive imagery to calm herself
down, the defensive pessimist will picture herself tripping over the
microphone cord, dropping her notes and dissolving into a fit of coughing.
Yet this anxious reverie will also include plans for avoiding such humiliation,
like wearing low heeled-shoes or having a glass of water on the lectern.
''This mental rehearsal tends to make defensive pessimists feel less anxious,
and so they actually perform better,'' Ms. Norem said.
Researchers have investigated the benefits of griping (high for those who do
it infrequently, lower for frequent complainers) and the extent of pessimism
in different cultures. Asian-Americans, one study found, are more
pessimistic than Caucasian-Americans, and are more likely to use
pessimism as a way of coping.
Work by James Pennebaker, a professor of psychology at the University of
Texas at Austin, also underlines the positive role of what some might call
''constructive negativity.''
Obsessively ruminating about how miserable life is, studies show, can have
a harmful effect on health. But in a series of studies, Mr. Pennebaker and
his colleagues asked subjects to focus on stressful or disturbing life events in
a structured way, writing essays about the most traumatic experience of
their lives, for example. The subjects' health improved on a variety of
measures, and this improvement persisted for up to four months after the
studies were over.
Mr. Pennebaker said that he was happy to be considered part of the
positive psychology movement. But, he added, ''A lot depends on what we
mean by positive psychology.''
''There's some reasonably compelling evidence to suggest that when people
are falsely peppy and upbeat and chipper, it's not very healthy,'' he said.
And, he added, little data supports the idea that a positive attitude enhances
health - something he pointed out repeatedly several years ago when his
wife developed breast cancer, and people kept telling her, ''You just need
to be positive all the time.''
In fact, Mr. Pennebaker said, a 1989 study he published with David
Watson, now at the University of Iowa, indicates that even nervous,
unhappy people, prone to chronic complaining, appear to be no more
unhealthy than their buoyant peers. Subjects in the study who scored high
on measures of nervousness, apprehension, irritability and oversensitivity
were more likely to complain about physical symptoms. But they were no
more likely to visit the doctor, develop high blood pressure or die.
''It's not bad to be nervous and it's not bad to be angry,'' Mr. Watson said
in an interview. ''We have these emotions because they serve useful
functions for us.''
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