Got Purpose? Your Health Might Depend on It

August 9, 2015 aricpratherLeave a comment

In a symposium that felt much like a philosophy lecture, attendees were treated to a spirited discussion of the gap (or perceived gap) between humanistic and positive psychology. The room was filled beyond capacity- the strongest turnout of any of the symposiums I attended throughout the convention. Why? Psychology can ask some pretty big questions. Big questions like “what does it mean to be human?” and “what is the purpose in life?” are some of the questions that draw people to psychology in the first place.

While many psychologists relegate such big questions to philosophical debates, others are trying to get at them scientifically. One such researcher is Dr. Carol Ryff, a professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Ryff has made a career out of developing and testing core constructs that define well-being. One of these constructs she calls “purpose in life.” How does one define purpose in life? Ryff defined it as “finding meaning and direction in your life.” In a several studies, she has documented that purpose in life, as a measure, has impressive predictive utility for health. First, purpose in life is not static (i.e., it changes over time). In a recent study, she and her colleagues found the purpose in life plummets, on average, as we get older. In addition, low levels of purpose in life are associated with several biomarkers indicative of early disease risk and premature mortality. For example, she has linked low purpose in life to markers of systemic inflammation, which has been linked to heart disease, among other chronic conditions.

Does one’s purpose in life effect one’s biology directly? People who report more purpose in their lives appear to take better care of themselves. For example, Ryff and colleagues used data from the Health and Retirement Study, a longitudinal study of older adults, and found that those reporting greater purpose in life were more likely engage in preventive care (e.g., get their cholesterol checked, get cancer screenings).

Is it possible to increase someone’s purpose in life? On the face of it, sure. I can certainly think of friends and loved ones who have found greater purpose in response to life experiences, such as surviving a health scare or having a baby. What about an intervention that could be deployed to lots of people? That’s something Ryff and her colleagues are thinking about. While she didn’t get into details, she did note a recent study, known as the Lighten Up study, that seeks to improve well-being among older adults. Just another example of how psychologists are tackling questions at the core of human experience.

Psychologists Can Help Reduce Racial Profiling in Policing

August 8, 2015August 9, 2015 Amy NovotneyLeave a comment

Psychologists know the statistic well: Although blacks constitute only 12 percent of America’s population, they represent 40 percent of the nation’s prison inmates. Stanford University social psychologist Jennifer Eberhardt, PhD, has been studying the consequences of the psychological association between race and crime for more than a decade. Her findings, which she shared Saturday during a plenary address on race and policing in America, reveal the startling ways that race influences us, even when we don’t think it does.

In one seminal study, for example, participants were subliminally primed with a series of black or white faces on a computer screen, and then watched as blurry pictures of guns and knives came into focus. Eberhardt found that participants — no matter their race — tended to recognize the weapons quicker when exposed to black faces in the primer versus white faces.

More recently, her research has shown that informing white people about the disproportionate incarceration rate of blacks makes them likely to support the expansion of harsh punitive policies, such as California’s Three Strikes Law and similar measures in other states.

Despite the pervasiveness of society’s association between blacks and crime, our behavior in response to those unconscious racial biases can be changed, Eberhardt said. Research has shown, for example, that more training — particularly in the use of firearms — can help police officers overcome racial biases.

She also pointed to the potential role of technology in addressing racial biases, noting that mandating police officer use of body cameras can help improve police relations with the public.

“We need to begin to think about this footage as data, not just as courtroom evidence,” she said. “We can look across the thousands of these videotapes to examine, in the aggregate, whether officers do indeed approach African-Americans in a different way than other groups — whether there’s a more negative tone or pitch to the voice, and whether that can predict whether the interaction is going to escalate. The footage can also be used to more fully appreciate the interactions where things go right and where officers have been able to skillfully de-escalate conflict.”

“The Stanford Prison Experiment” movie: What happened in the film that didn’t happen in real life?

August 8, 2015August 8, 2015 Jamie ChamberlinLeave a comment

The new feature film “The Stanford Prison Experiment” is “about 90 percent accurate,” said Stanford University psychologist Philip G. Zimbardo, PhD, at a showing of the film today as part of APA’s Film Festival.

At the screening, Zimbardo — who conducted the now-famous experiment in 1971 to simulate the conditions of prison and examine the power of social situations over individual personality — shared some of the differences between what really happened in the basement of the Stanford psychology building and what’s depicted in the film.

Among the greatest differences is that the movie shows one student being “arrested” by Palo Alto police at his home to begin the study, omitting the fact that all nine students assigned as prisoners were first taken to the Palo Alto police department after their arrests. There, they were booked, fingerprinted and held in a cell for several hours before they were taken to the university.

Other differences include:

• The Stanford professor who encounters Zimbardo as he is sitting outside the prisoners’ cells one night and asks, “What is the independent variable in your study? This is an experiment, right, not just a simulation?” is played by an older actor in the movie. In reality, the person who posed that question was Zimbardo’s same-age Stanford colleague and his Yale graduate school roommate – well-known experimental psychologist Gordon Bower, PhD.

• Zimbardo was never involved in the “parole hearings” held for prisoners as he is in the movie. Instead, some secretaries ran those meetings along with Carlo Prescott (who is featured in the film) — a man Zimbardo brought in to help with the experiment because he had recently been released from prison after serving 17 years.

• In the real study, there was less frequent physical abuse by the guards, Zimbardo noted. “The only physical abuse was during the rebellion when the guards broke in and the prisoners started attacking them,” he said.

Zimbardo told attendees that the experiment eventually led him to shift his area of research to shyness, which he studied for the next 20 years. “One of the messages of the study is the extent to which all prisons are prisons of the mind,” he said. “Shyness is a self-imposed psychological prison.”

He also said that he moved away from “creating evil” to “inspiring heroism” by launching the Heroic Imagination Project, a nonprofit organization that teaches children about heroism and promotes the use of social science research to teach people ways to resist bullying and oppression.

Zimbardo is now organizing a screening of “The Stanford Prison Experiment” for President Obama at the While House since the president recently made the first visit by a sitting president to a federal prison and is calling for prison reform.

“The Stanford Prison Experiment” is showing in theatres in limited release. Zimbardo will be answering attendees’ questions about the film online over the next few days. Email questions to .

Weight Stigma, Stress and Obesity

August 6, 2015August 6, 2015 aricprather2 Comments

We have all heard about the perils of the obesity epidemic and its cost ho society. But something you may not know is that it’s not all about willpower and the make-up of the food environment. In this regard, Dr. Janet Tomiyama, an assistant professor at UC Los Angeles, gave a spirited, and impressively convincing, invited talk as part of Div. 38’s programming on the insidious role of weight stigma.

So how does feeling stigmatized hurt your waistline? In a recent paper, she outlines a model in which weight stigma increases one’s psychological stress, leading to increases in one’s stress physiology- in particular, levels of cortisol (that pesky stress hormone). Cortisol has many known effects, including contributing to visceral fat deposition and a drive to eat, both of which certainly undermine the goal of losing weight. Not only does weight stigma fail to motivate individuals to lose weight, it may, as Tomiyama hypothesizes, lead to additional weight gain.

Is weight stigma that prevalent? Maybe in the general population, but not among experts or clinicians who treat obese individuals, right? WRONG. In another recent study, Tomiyama examined the explicit and implicit biases against obesity among attendees of a national obesity conference. Participants (around 200 of them) completed several measures of bias, and consistent with Tomiyama’s hypothesis and prior research, even the experts showed a high level of negative bias toward obesity. In fact, compared to a similar study carried out 10 years earlier, explicit bias is actually on the rise. To follow up on this work, she turned to the laboratory and subjected participants to pictures of thin and heavier people. The participants were under the impression that they were there to judge the pleasantness of different lotions (all the lotions were actually odorless). It turns out that individuals exposed to pictures of obese people rated the odors as less pleasant than when exposed to leaner stimuli. This is disturbing, of course, but also a fine example of great social psychology. Tomiyama described a number of other studies supporting her model, as well as several forthcoming studies.

Weight stigma reflects a novel, and often unacknowledged, contributor to the obesity epidemic. It will take further scientific creativity from Tomiyama and others to move weight stigma onto the national stage. Until then, as I told Tomiyama after her talk, “if I was still an undergraduate and had heard you talk, I would have wanted to become a social psychologist.”

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