Dr. Sabiha Alam Choudhury: 2020

Our Ten Most Popular Posts Of 2020

This year has been like no other. The coronavirus pandemic has affected pretty much all aspects of our lives — so it’s no surprise that psychological research looked a bit different in 2020. At Research Digest, we’ve examined much of this emerging work on the effects of the pandemic, from studies exploring the process of psychological recovery to those looking at how to cope with the new reality of home working.

But we’ve also tried to continue providing the broad coverage of psychology research that our readers have come to enjoy. And as we look back at our most popular posts of the year, it’s clear these stories about the human experience continue to educate and entertain, even in the midst of this annus horribilis.

10) Heavy Coffee Drinkers Want Coffee A Lot More Than They Actually Like It

This study has been all over the papers this month — but we first covered it way back in June. I suspect that many people’s coffee consumption has shot through the roof during the pandemic (I know mine has), so it’s perhaps not surprising that this was one of our most read pieces of the year.

9) Here’s How Our Personality Changes As We Age

Personality was once believed to be stable, changing very little after the age of 30 or so. But recent work shows that our personalities actually shift throughout our lives. This study examined how the “Big Five” personality traits of tens of thousands of people changed through middle age and into older age.

8) Cold Days Can Make Us Long For Social Contact — But Warming Up Our Bodies Eliminates This Desire

The idea that temperature can affect our social perceptions — that being physically warm leads us to feel “warm” towards others — is contentious. In fact, this kind of social priming research is often at the centre of controversies about psychology’s replication crisis. But this year, a study suggested one possible explanation for the inconsistencies in past work: the researchers rarely take into account the ambient temperature while they’re conducting their experiments.

7) Why Some People Find It Harder To Drag Themselves To Bed At Night

Why do so many of us suffer from “bedtime procrastination”? Intriguingly, it might be related to the beliefs we have about our willpower. This study found that people who think that willpower is a limited resource that needs to be replenished are more likely to put off going to bed on a stressful day, perhaps because they feel they need more time to recover from their day before sleeping.

6) These Two Revision Strategies Can Prepare You For An Exam Much Better Than Just Restudying Your Notes

Our posts containing practical tips often attract a lot of readers, and this one was no different. Many lab-based studies have identified strategies for more effective studying — but this was a rare case of looking at these approaches in an actual educational setting.

5) Here’s How Long-Distance Runners Are Different From The Rest Of Us

What kind of person decides to run 50 or 100km — or even more? Well, it turns out that ultramarathon runners are actually pretty similar to everyone else. They do seem to be more resilient and better at using certain emotion regulation strategies — but whether that’s the cause or consequence of being a long-distance runner remains unclear.

4) How Psychology Researchers Are Responding To The COVID-19 Pandemic

The start of the first lockdown feels like a lifetime ago now. But as the world was learning to adjust to new routines, many psychologists launched projects to study the effects of the crisis and to inform our response to it. We looked at several of these projects in this story in March.

Our follow-up feature in July didn’t receive quite the same number of readers, but to my mind was more important. This time we explored the worries voiced by many researchers that in “crisis mode”, psychologists were falling for the old methodological pitfalls that the field has long been trying to move on from.

3) Musicians And Their Audiences Show Synchronised Patterns Of Brain Activity

If you cast your mind back to a time when it was possible to attend a concert, you might remember experiencing a feeling of connection with the musicians as they played. That connection can happen even at the neural level, according to a study which found “inter-brain coherence” between a musician and their audience (essentially a correlation in patterns of blood flow in the brains of performer and observer). What’s more, this synchronisation was stronger during the pieces the listeners found more enjoyable. Another study this year found that parents also show patterns of synchrony with each other.

2) Memory Complaints Are More Common Among Older Adults With Particular Personality Traits

A second story about personality and age proved popular this year. In this post, we looked at a study on the link between personality and cognitive complaints in older adults. One factor stood out as predicting fewer cognitive complaints: openness to experience, a trait that entails a liking for intellectual and artistic pursuits and a willingness to try new things.

1) First-Generation University Students Are At Greater Risk Of Experiencing Imposter Syndrome

The competitive nature of STEM classes at university can lead many students to feel like they are an imposter — but first-generation students seem to be at particular risk of imposter syndrome. This, only the second story that we posted in 2020, clearly struck a chord: it was the most popular post of the year.

That’s it from us for 2020. Thank you for reading the Digest this year, and we’ll see you back here in 2021!

Matthew Warren (@MattBWarren) is Editor of BPS Research Digest

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Credit- BPS Research Digest. Published by- Dr. Sabiha : www.drsabiha.blogspot.com

“Psychological Flexibility” May Be Key To Good Relationships Between Couples And Within Families

By Emma Young

What makes for a happy family? The answer — whether you’re talking about a couple or a family with kids — is psychological “flexibility”, according to a new paper in the Journal of Contextual Behavioral Science. Based on a meta-analysis of 174 separate studies, Jennifer S. Daks and Ronald Rogge at the University of Rochester conclude that flexibility helps — and inflexibility hinders — our most important relationships.

The pair analysed data from 203 separate samples, comprising almost 44,000 participants in total. They homed in on measures of psychological flexibility and inflexibility within these studies (which often gathered other data, too), and how they related to measures of family and relationship functioning.

A psychologically flexible person is characterised by a set of attitudes and skills: they are generally open to and accepting of experiences, whether they are good or bad; they try to be mindfully aware of the present moment; they experience difficult thoughts without ruminating on them; they seek to maintain a broader perspective when faced with a challenge; they continue to pursue important goals despite setbacks; and they maintain contact with “deeper values”, no matter how stressful a day might be (so, for example, a parent confronted with a screaming child who holds the value of being a kind, compassionate parent is able to bear this in mind when choosing how to react to the child). Psychological inflexibility describes the opposite of these thoughts and attitudes, and also entails feeling judged or shameful for holding negative thoughts and feelings.

The pair identified a host of specific links between aspects of flexibility or inflexibility and family functioning. For example, they found that inattention to the present moment and a tendency to respond to challenging experiences in a rigid, inflexible way were linked to weaker family bonds. These factors were also linked to lower levels of satisfaction with romantic relationships, and less “adaptive” parenting, suggesting that such an inflexible parent “might have a more difficult time responding to their children’s misbehaviour in sensitive, compassionate and responsive ways.” (In contrast, greater flexibility was strongly linked to more adaptive parenting). A lack of awareness of the present moment was also associated with more shouting and violence among couples and, along with some other measures of inflexibility, to stronger feelings of insecurity in relation to the relationship.

It’s important to note, however, that the overwhelming majority of links were correlational, so the direction of cause-and-effect is not clear. It could be the case that consistently poor child behaviour drives parental inflexibility, for example — or that the two exacerbate each other. The researchers themselves highlight this issue, calling for longitudinal studies to explore the direction and strength of the associations that they report.

But Daks and Rogge also point to potential practical implications of their findings. It might not seem especially surprising that psychological flexibility has emerged as being good for relationships. But in the past, research on flexibility has tended to focus on how it enhances an individual’s wellbeing, rather than the quality of romantic or familial relationships. In revealing the links between flexibility and family functioning, the work suggests a possible target for new interventions. A form of therapy called Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) encourages the development of flexibility, and there is plenty of evidence that it improves an individual’s own functioning, the pair notes. Perhaps, given the new results, it could help family functioning, too — especially if a parenting-focused ACT intervention were to be developed. Since links between greater psychological flexibility in parents and in their children have been reported, such an intervention might in theory have benefits that transmit down through generations.

– Examining the correlates of psychological flexibility in romantic relationship and family dynamics: A meta-analysis

Emma Young (@EmmaELYoung) is a staff writer at BPS Research Digest

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Credit- BPS Research Digest. Published by- Dr. Sabiha : www.drsabiha.blogspot.com

Film Soundtracks Shape Our Impressions Of A Character’s Personality And Thoughts

By Emma Young

If you sit down to watch TV or a film these holidays, you might want to pay a little extra attention to how the soundtrack makes you feel. We all know that background music influences the tone of a scene but what, exactly, soundtracks do to our understanding of a character has not been studied in detail. In a new paper, in Frontiers in Psychology, Alessandro Ansani at Roma Tre University, Italy, and colleagues report work aimed at filling in some of the gaps.

The team recruited 118 online participants who each watched a video clip that was just under two minutes long. It showed a man slowly walking towards tall windows in the columned corridor of an old building. The seaside was visible through the windows, in the distance. As the researchers describe it, he “walks, looks outside, stops, and moves out of the frame.”

At the same time, some of the participants heard the ambient sound that was recorded during the filming, while some heard an extract of “The Isle of the Dead” by Sergei Rachmaninov (a “dogged and anxious” orchestral piece), and the rest heard “Like Someone in Love” by Bill Evans (a “soft, melancholic” piano jazz solo). The participants then filled in questionnaires that asked about their perceptions of the man’s emotions, thoughts and personality, and how pleasant they thought the environment was .

Compared with the other groups, those who’d heard the jazz reported feeling more empathy for the man, and perceived him to be more introverted. The Rachmaninov group felt him to be more conscientious, however. Participants who heard either music soundtrack perceived him to be more agreeable than those who only heard ambient sounds. Those who’d heard the jazz were also more likely to feel that the man was remembering a pleasant event in the past compared with the Rachmaninov listeners, who were more inclined to think that he was planning something. The jazz group also perceived his environment to be cosier. A second study with a batch of 92 students largely replicated these findings.

These findings highlight “the multifaceted influence of the soundtrack on the interpretation of a scene,” the researchers write. We humans have an incessant need to search for knowledge everywhere, they add, and to fill in gaps using inference and imagination. “To understand the plot of a novel or movie, we need to know the characters’ goals and personalities, and if we have no information whatsoever, we try to take advantage of any cue to guess them.” Music, it seems, can act as a complex cue, allowing us to build up a picture of a person and a scene.

Though the original group watched the film out of the lab, the results may not extend to typical viewers of movies. While the participants did consistently report particular impressions of the man’s personality and thoughts when asked to do so, that doesn’t necessarily mean that people spontaneously form such impressions unprompted while watching a blockbuster on their sofa. However, though we would all probably expect movie soundtracks to have an impact on us, this research does help to address a previous criticism that actual research in this field has been sparse.

– How Soundtracks Shape What We See: Analyzing the Influence of Music on Visual Scenes Through Self-Assessment, Eye Tracking, and Pupillometry

Emma Young (@EmmaELYoung) is a staff writer at BPS Research Digest

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Credit- BPS Research Digest. Published by- Dr. Sabiha : www.drsabiha.blogspot.com

People Take Better Care Of Public Parks If They Feel A Greater Sense Of Ownership Over Them

By Emily Reynolds

The “tragedy of the commons” was popularised in the 1960s as a way of explaining how public or shared resources which we’re incentivised to use can become depleted or ruined by individual self-interest. And because we have shared ownership of public resources we feel we have less responsibility for them and therefore less of an impetus to contribute time, energy or money to keeping them going.

As we become more aware (and more concerned) about threats to the environment, the tragedy of the commons seems even more pertinent. How do we keep parks, rivers, lakes and other local resources well-maintained? According to a new study, published in the Journal of Marketing, it might come down to a sense of ownership — the more we feel a property or resource is ours, the better we’ll take care of it.

The focus of the first study was a lake, where 135 participants had rented kayaks. The rental service largely catered to those with no experience of the lake, meaning they were unlikely to have any sense of ownership of the area before their visit. Some of the kayak renters were asked to think of and write down a nickname for the lake, while others were not; all renters were then told that they should pick up objects or trash they found floating in the lake.

Two experimenters then watched the participants and recorded any attempts to pick up floating objects (which had been planted in the lake by the team). When the participants returned their paddleboards, they indicated whether or not they had picked up any rubbish and how much ownership they felt toward the lake.

Those who had given the lake a nickname reported significantly higher levels of psychological ownership of the lake than those who had not. They were also more likely to actually take care of the lake: 41% attempted to pick up the floating objects, compared to just 7% of those in the control condition.

In the second study, participants imagined walking in a park, seeing a sign that said either “welcome to the park” or “welcome to your park” (emphasis added). Participants were then asked how much responsibility they felt for the park, how obligated they felt towards the park, how accountable they felt for it, and whether or not they would pick up rubbish in the park. Participants were also asked how much of $100 they would donate to the park.

Again, boosting feelings of ownership by highlighting that it was “your” park increased participants’ perceived responsibility for the park. This led these participants to say they would be more likely to pick up rubbish, and to increase their intended donation amount by an average of $8.

The third study, back in the real world, looked at cross country skiers. When renting skis, participants were offered a map of the park: some were asked to plan their route on the map before they set out, while others were not. All renters were then asked whether or not they wanted to add a dollar to the rental fee to help the park, before indicating how likely they would be to volunteer for the park, donate in the future, or engage with the park on social media. Participants who planned their route again reported greater responsibility for the park, and were also more likely to say they’d donate to the park and volunteer in future.

A final study, lab-based study found that a commonly used device — an attendance sign which highlighted that a participant was the 22,452th visitor of the week — reduced the beneficial effects of boosting feelings of psychological ownership. This suggests that when people see themselves as just one individual in a larger group, they felt less responsibility towards the environment.

While the results do suggest clear interventions that could benefit publicly owned goods, the whole point of such resources is that they’re shared — the fact they’re collectively owned is exactly why we’re able to enjoy their many benefits. So should we be encouraging people to think of them as their individual property? Collectivism puts an emphasis on group collaboration and shared interests — factors that could play a part in preserving local resources.

Further research could look into interventions that seek to increase feelings of local collectivity, exploring how that, rather than individualism, might change people’s relationship with their surroundings.

– Caring for the Commons: Using Psychological Ownership to Enhance Stewardship Behavior for Public Goods

Emily Reynolds is a staff writer at BPS Research Digest

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Credit- BPS Research Digest. Published by- Dr. Sabiha : www.drsabiha.blogspot.com

How Many Different Positive Emotions Do We Experience?

By Emma Young

Awe, compassion, love, gratitude… research papers and media stories about these emotions abound. Indeed, the past decade has seen an explosion in work on positive emotions — essentially, emotions that involve pleasant rather than unpleasant feelings. However, very little has been done to explore which distinct feelings, thoughts and motivations characterise each one, argue Aaron Weidman and Jessica Tracy at the University of British Columbia. In a new paper in Emotion, they report their detailed investigation into these subjective experiences — an investigation that has led them to drop some commonly accepted positive emotions from their master list.

Weidman and Tracy began with 18 positive emotions, all of which had been studied in recent papers. These were: admiration, amusement, attachment love, awe, compassion, contentment, empathy, enthusiasm, gratitude, happiness, hope, interest, love, nurturant love, romantic love, schadenfreude, sympathy and tenderness. (Pride has been studied down to the level of its subjective elements in work previously led by Tracy, so wasn’t included in the new research.)

The pair sorted these emotions into five thematic groups: “other-appreciation” (e.g. gratitude), caring (e.g. empathy, compassion), enjoyment (e.g. happiness, contentment) and loving. A total of 150 undergraduate students were each presented with one of the five groups and asked to report up to 10 subjective “elements” of each emotion in that group. For example, participants wrote “I felt concern for someone” as a subjective element of sympathy, and listed “I was on top the world” as an element of enthusiasm.

By identifying elements that seemed to best capture unique aspects of each emotion, the pair whittled more than 1,000 frequently experienced subjective elements to a list of 475, covering the five thematic groups. A fresh batch of participants were then asked to reflect on how they had felt during a given emotion, and to identify elements that best matched those feelings from the relevant group list. Using their responses, Weidman and Tracy homed in on yet smaller lists of elements that best matched each individual emotion.

However, it was not possible to create a distinct set of elements for every emotion. In one striking example, no unique element stood out to separate “compassion” from “empathy” and “tenderness” — and so compassion was dropped from their list of positive emotions. Neither could the pair clearly differentiate between the subjective elements of “happiness” and “contentment”, which went into the next round as “happiness/contentment”. “Love” also failed to make the cut, because it was not distinguishable from its sub-types, which had their own unique elements — in fact, Weidman and Tracy found clear support for a sub-type of “attachment love” (involving a close, secure bond with someone), as well as “nurturant love” (more to do with being dedicated to helping someone else to grow) and “romantic love”.

To shrink the element lists to a number practical for use in a scale — and also in a bid to check for agreement between people from different backgrounds — the pair then recruited a fresh batch of more than 1,000 participants. This group comprised men and women who identified as White or East Asian, and who were born either in the US or Canada or in another country. As in the second study, they were asked to rate how relevant various elements were to each emotion.

The researchers found that the six participant groups tended to agree about their subjective experiences of the now 15 emotions. They then used a statistical technique to prune their responses into the final product: 5- to 8-item self-report scales for each of these positive emotions.

The pair argue that their work has various implications. Firstly, though they did find some overlap between elements associated with the different emotions (which will need investigating further), the work supports the relatively modern idea that we experience a range of discrete positive emotions. Also, the research supports the argument that love is not a unitary construct.

Some of their other conclusions will be more controversial, however. For example “happiness” and “contentment” are often conceptualised as distinct emotions, but this is not what they concluded. Neither did they find support for the idea that “joy” and “elation” are independent, discrete emotions — items that reflected both these concepts fell readily under the “happiness/contentment” heading. The loss of “compassion” from the list of positive emotions will be contentious, too.

The new scales clearly need more testing — and it’s important to note that all the participants, no matter where they were born, were living in the US or Canada, which limits generalisability. However, one of the problems with existing work on positive emotions is that different teams often use different measures, making it hard to compare results. If these scales can be accepted, they will help to make work in the field more standardised.

The pair certainly acknowledge that there’s much still to be done, however: “We hope that this work marks a first step in the development of a taxonomy of subjectively experienced positive emotions,” they write — “a model of exactly how many positive emotions are experienced as subjectively distinct, as well as the distinguishing set of subjective elements, causal antecedents, and functional consequences that characterize each of these states.”

– Picking up good vibrations: Uncovering the content of distinct positive emotion subjective experience.

Emma Young (@EmmaELYoung) is a staff writer at BPS Research Digest

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Credit- BPS Research Digest. Published by- Dr. Sabiha : www.drsabiha.blogspot.com

Here’s How Parents’ Reactions To School Performance Influence Their Children’s Wellbeing

By Emma Young

What do you do if your child comes home with a lower score on a test than you both expected? Do you praise their efforts and focus on what they got right? Or do you home in on the answers that they got wrong, hoping this will help them to do better in future?

Research shows that the first, “success-oriented” response is more common in the US than in China, where parents more often opt for “failure-oriented” responses instead. Recent studies in both countries have found that success-oriented responses tend to encourage psychological wellbeing but not necessarily academic success, whereas failure-oriented responses can foster academic performance, but with a cost to the child’s wellbeing.

Jun Wei at Tsinghua University, China, and colleagues wondered what might drive these observed relationships: do different response styles lead children to form different concepts about what their parents want for them — and is this what produces the opposing impacts on wellbeing? In a new paper, published in Developmental Psychology, the team report some intriguing answers to these questions.

The researchers studied 447 American children from three schools in the US and 439 children from a school in southern China. The children were in the same grade of school and were, on average, 13 at the start of the study. They completed a batch of initial surveys, and then a further batch a year later.

In one of the initial surveys, the children were asked to imagine that they had done very well and then very poorly on a school test, and indicate the extent to which they thought their parents would emphasise the successful aspects of their performance, or the negatives (e.g. “My parents would talk about why I didn’t get an even higher score” if they had done well, or “My parents would talk about how I had not worked hard” if they had done poorly).

Along with surveys of general wellbeing and symptoms of anxiety and depression, the children also answered questions about their perceptions of their parents’ goals for them. Responses to statements such as “How important is it to your parents for you to believe in your abilities?” were used to probe parental goals relating to self-worth, while statements such as “How important is to your parents for you to always try to overcome your weaknesses?” explored the extent to which the children thought that their parents held “self-improvement” goals for them.

The team found that, in both countries, children who felt that their parents were more success-oriented in their responses were more likely to feel that their parents held self-worth goals for them, and statistically speaking, this went a long way to explaining higher levels of general wellbeing in this group a year later. In the US only, stronger perceptions that parents held self-worth goals were also associated with fewer symptoms of anxiety and depression a year on. Why wasn’t this seen in the children in China, too? It might be because children in China are subject to more academic stress, because of the format of the school examination system, the team suggests — and the impact of this on symptoms of anxiety and depression overwhelms any variations relating to parental response style.

In both the US and China, the team also found that the more parents used failure-oriented responses, the more the children felt that their parents held self-improvement goals for them — and in China only, the more they felt their parents were concerned about their self-worth too. This may be “because Chinese parents convey their belief in their children’s potential by urging them to strive to do better”, the researchers write.

However, failure-oriented responses from the parents were also associated with decreased wellbeing among the American children, and higher levels of anxiety and depression symptoms in kids from both countries. “It could be that when parents highlight the negative aspects of their children’s performance, adolescents feel incompetent, regardless of whether they perceive their parents as wanting them to constantly strive to self-improve,” the researchers write. “The thwarted need for competence may dampen adolescents’ psychological functioning.”

The team did home in only a few dimensions of the parent-child relationship, which is, of course, complex. For parents everywhere, it would certainly be interesting to know whether the positive academic effects of a failure-oriented response style could be gained without a cost to wellbeing — could an emphasis on praising successes with a dash of observation of any failures of effort work best, perhaps? I know that as parent, that’s what I aim for. But only future research will reveal if it’s actually a good strategy for my children.

– Parents’ Responses to Their Children’s Performance: A Process Examination in the United States and China

Emma Young (@EmmaELYoung) is a staff writer at BPS Research Digest

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Credit- BPS Research Digest. Published by- Dr. Sabiha : www.drsabiha.blogspot.com

Gloomy Evenings And Dark Traits: The Week’s Best Psychology Links

Our weekly round-up of the best psychology coverage from elsewhere on the web

Psychology is arguably the poster child for the replication crisis, but other fields suffer from similar issues too. At Science, Cathleen O’Grady examines the efforts by ecologists to tackle their own field’s reproducibility problems, and how they are learning from the experience of psychologists.

Researchers have created a safer version of the psychoactive drug ibogaine, and it seems to improve behaviours associated with addiction and depression in rats. Past work had suggested that ibogaine may help treat drug addictions — but it can also have fatal side-effects, reports Jon Hamilton at NPR. So in the new work, scientists tweaked the structure of the molecule to create a substance that is safer but which still has beneficial properties. It remains to be seen whether it works for humans.

The shortest day of the year is nearly upon us — but if you’ve found yourself taken aback by the dark evenings, you’re not alone. Even though we experience dark winter nights every year, there are psychological reasons why we might “forget” about them and find it unsettling when they come around again, explains Shayla Love at Vice.

The uncertainty of 2020 has been difficult for a lot of us. But some people find it particularly challenging to deal with feelings of uncertainty, writes Jayne Morriss at The Conversation. Greater “intolerance” of uncertainty can leave people feeling distressed and make even good outcomes appear less satisfactory — but, Morriss explains, there are a number of strategies which may help to reduce this “uncertainty distress”.

Scientists have implanted an array of electrodes into the visual cortex of two macaques, which allow the monkeys to “see” shapes corresponding to the pattern of stimulation. The work holds promise for restoring some amount of sight to people who are blind and whose optic nerve is damaged. But it is harder to access the relevant brain regions in humans, explains Michael Le Page at New Scientist — and fairly crude artificial vision is not necessarily desired by the blind community.

People with “dark” personality traits are manipulative and self-centred — but does that actually help them get ahead? In some lab-based tasks, perhaps, write Craig Neumann and Scott Barry Kaufman at Psyche, but when it comes to real life they actually have limited success.

This weekend, the Cosmic Shambles Network is hosting a 24 hour online show, “Nine Lessons and Carols for Socially Distanced People“, with profits going to charity. The line-up looks fantastic, with comedians, authors, actors, musicians, and scientists all taking part — including a bunch of psychologists and neuroscientists (such as PsychCrunch podcast presenter Ginny Smith!).

Compiled by Matthew Warren (@MattbWarren), Editor of BPS Research Digest

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Liberal Americans’ Distress At 2016 Election Result Shouldn’t Be Labelled “Depression”, Study Argues

Photo: Supporters of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton react during election night 2016. Kena Betancur/AFP via Getty Images

By Emily Reynolds

Anyone who’s been invested in an election result will understand the close relationship between politics and emotion — something that is perhaps even more affecting when that result is disappointing. After the 2016 presidential election, for example, articles appeared in the US press describing a “national nervous breakdown” and offering tips to deal with so-called “political depression”, and empirical studies indicated that the same event had caused psychological distress.

But while it would be hard to deny that politics can have a serious impact on our mood, is it correct to call that “depression”? Almog Simchon at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and team ask this question in a new paper published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology — and while they find self-reported “Trump depression” in liberal Americans post-election, the empirical data suggests this isn’t an enduring or even clinically significant experience.

In the first part of the study, participants indicated which political party they felt the greatest identification with, as well as which presidential candidate they had voted for in 2016; they then indicated how down, depressed and hopeless they had felt for the year before the election, the two weeks before the election, and from the election until the day of the survey, which took place in May 2018. As expected, those who identified as Democrats reported feeling more depressed after the election, with the opposite effect to be found in Republicans.

The team then repeated the experiment with new participants — only now all references to the election were omitted, with questions instead focusing purely on the timeframes involved. This time, there was no evidence of a post-election increase in depression among Democrats. This suggests that the emotional valence of certain events can change the stories we tell about ourselves and our lives.

The next study looked more broadly at liberal American responses to the election using real time data about people’s moods at the time of the election. To do this, the team used a machine learning algorithm originally designed to detect depression from social media users’ posts. The team analysed over 10 million tweets posted between October and November 2016, and while there was an effect on Democrats’ moods in the first few days after the election, this response was not long-lived: by November 13th, moods had returned to their pre-election baseline. A similar analysis of Google searches, looking for terms such as “depression”, “depression symptoms”, and “depression test” also found no indication that the election had caused a significant increase in depression.

Social media may not be the best gauge for understanding the long-term impact of an event on mental health — Twitter in particular is fast-moving and responsive to ongoing events, and not necessarily so good at capturing deeper or more persistent effects. But the findings do suggest, again, that emotional responses to the election were more ephemeral than the term “depression” might suggest.

Two final studies looked at real world attempts to seek help for depression. The first looked at state-level antidepressant consumption on Medicaid between 2016 and 2017, and the second at the number of people seeking treatment for depression before and after the election, using a data set that also contained daily information about depression and political affiliation.

For the state-level data, the team found that the state’s political affiliation — Democratic or Republican — had no bearing on changes in antidepressant usage from before to after the election. And in the second study, there was no evidence that the depression levels of liberal Americans increased after the election.

So it seems that reports of “Trump depression” are not quite accurate: in every study other than the first — in which participants were specifically reminded of the election — there was no evidence at all that depression had increased after the election.

The team suggests that self-reports of post-election depression could be somewhat performative, signalling group identity and ideological beliefs. This might not tell the whole story, though — there’s no evidence here that the feelings of distress or hopelessness felt by liberals after the election were false or purely performative, just that they weren’t clinically significant or persistent enough to be considered depression per se.

It would be interesting to look further into the traits and demographics of those reporting feelings of distress. If you’re a wealthy person with liberal politics, for example, then an election win for a pro-austerity party might be distressing but is unlikely to have as significant an impact on the material conditions of your life as that of someone on a low wage or in precarious work. Would the latter party be more likely to experience depression? And what protective factors are at play when it comes to weathering political distress?

The team partly puts the use of the term “Trump depression” down to “concept creep”, an expanding or overgeneralisation of the terminology of mental illness or trauma. It therefore seems important to develop a way to talk about distress — political or otherwise — outside of such terms, which can often be stigmatising or lacking in nuance. Using clinical terms unnecessarily might seem validating, but only serves to diminish both the experiences of those living with serious mental illness and the range of normal emotions that we experience across our political, social and personal lives.

– Political depression? A big-data, multimethod investigation of Americans’ emotional response to the Trump presidency.

Emily Reynolds is a staff writer at BPS Research Digest

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