Affect Coding as a Divorce Predictor

  

According to the Gottman & Levenson “Rebound from Marital Conflict and Divorce Prediction” article, couples were selected from a pool of applicants who responded to a newspaper advertisement to participate in a marriage compatibility study for couples with preexisting conflicts. This selection method created a condition that prevented the sample from being truly statistically random because 1) the couples had preexisting conflicts and 2) it implies that the couples were interested enough in their marital relationship to participate in the study.

The couples had three 15-minute conversations: (1) events of the day; (2) conflict resolution (discussion of a problem area of continuing disagreement); and (3) a pleasant topic. Only the conflict conversation and the pleasant topic were coded and analyzed on the basis of positive or negative affect.

               

                One thing to consider is the order of these discussions. Holding a discussion on conflict resolution prior to the discussion on a pleasant topic might be problematic. The conflict discussion might elicit resentment in the other partner, which could spill over to the pleasant conversation. A 5 minute intermission between conversations was enforced, however I feel that the order of these conversations should have been random so that half the couples would have participated in the conflict conversation first, and the other half would have participated in the pleasant conversation first.

Regardless, the results showed that, as one might expect, conflict discussion generated more negative affect and less positive affect than the positive conversation. Using these results, the researchers used the affective data to predict which couples would be stable and which couples would be divorced in four years. Of those who could be reached for a follow up, they predicted 92.7% correctly.

92.7% is a very promising, statistically significant result; however, I have the following questions regarding the study’s accuracy:

Is four years an adequate timeframe to determine whether a newlywed couple will get a divorce?

The couples in the study were married in the 1980’s and the study was conducted in the late 1990’s. Divorce rates have fallen since (see figure below). Would the findings of this study remain consistent today (or at least proportional)?

Is positive or negative affect a strong enough measure of the emotional responses coded for (e.g. Anger, Joy, Disgust, Sadness, Fear, etc.)? Should some of these emotions carry more weight than others?

-John Merrifield

Visual Fixation Patterns

In this article they talk about where people look when in social interactions. They measured Autistic people in their social competency compared to what they fixated on during social interactions. They did this through a new eye tracking device. They found that "individuals with autism focused two times more on the mouth region, two times less on the eye region, two times more on the body region, and two times more on the object region relative to age - and verbal IQ - matched controls." They also found that "fixation times on the mouth region and on the object region were strong predictors of social competence." Fixation time on the object region was associated with lower social adaptation and greater autistic social impairment. While, fixation time on the mouth region was associated with greater social adaptation and lower autistic social impairment.

Focusing on the eyes and the mouth are connected to being socially competent and this relates back to emotion by being able to recognize what emotions people are expressing through their facial expressions. When I was younger and even today, looking people in the eyes when having a conversation has always been an important aspect of having a conversation. This not only helps the person feel that they are being paid attention to, but also helps me interpret their emotions and some of the non-verbal cues they are expressing.



In this video, the woman is discussing how important the eyes are and how they can communicate different things, such as level as of interest. This goes back to eye contact and how important it can be in regards to social competency.

My questions are regarding the article itself:

1. They don't talk much about how different cultures could affect this. In some cultures it is disrespectful to look at someone at the eye if they are older than you. What would be important in these situations when trying to discern facial expressions?

2. My second question involves the fact that looking at the mouth region was associated with great social adaptation? Why is that? Is it because of trying to understand language?

-Meredith Lohn-Wiley

Affective Forecasting

The Wilson and Gilbert Article illustrates the idea of affective forecasting which is the theory that humans tend to over or underestimate emotions of a future event.

One of the first examples of this in the article was the concept of the impact bias which states how much we tend to overestimate the intensity and duration of our emotions in reaction to an event in the future. The article uses a couple of examples to illustrate this with showing how professors overestimated how unhappy they'd be 5 years after not receiving tenure, and women overestimated how unhappy they'd be in receiving unwanted pregnancy results.
To explain the impact bias Wilson and Gilbert use two terms. The first being focalism which is the tendency to overestimate how much we'll think about a particular event and underestimate how much other events will impact us at the time. An example of this can be winning $100 on the lottery and then realizing there are still $500 worth of bills to be paid.
Another influence on the impact bias was the concept of how much humans don't take into account how quickly something unexpected will be rationalized in our minds and lead to a less emotional impact. To help explain this Gilbert and Wilson give the theory that people don't realize how quickly they can rationalize something so unexpected and how this decreases the level of reaction to the event that they predicted. For example unexpectedly finding $20 on the street and being able to attribute it to someone who had dropped it would be more gratifying then finding $20 in a preschool classroom that you had no idea of where it came from.

The article also goes into negative forecasting and the concept of immune neglect which explains how people unconsciously rationalize a negative situation in their mind and therefore are more likely to cope with it in the future. The example given in the article is the idea that people who found it easier to rationalize why they didn't get a job (having a single interviewer as oppose to a group of interviewers) they tended to have a less strong reaction than people who couldn't seem to rationalize why they didn't receive the job. Gilbert and Wilson use immune neglect to explain why people are more likely to have a better reaction to something that they are able to rationalize in their mind.

A great example of affective forecasting in the real world would be the overestimation of how unhappy/happy people would be when president Obama was elected into office. At the time of his election the approval ratings for Obama were pretty high and since 2008, they've decreased quite a bit. Why? Because people tended to use the concept of focalism. They overestimate how happy/unhappy they'd be with the election results. For example How happy they'd be that an African American or Democrat president was elected may have led to the overestimation but the impact of health care reform may have greatly impacted their life leading to the decrease of happiness in their previously elated prediction.

Another simpler way of looking at this is the estimation of college students on how happy they'll be with a job that is in their degree field as oppose to not in their degree field after graduation. People that are easily able to rationalize their job (psychology student, psychologist) as oppose to people who aren't able to rationalize their job (history student, business worker). According to Gilbert and Wilson the one able to rationalize their job is happier, but is that really true? This could determine how much external factors really play a role. Perhaps further research?


Discussion Questions:

In class we talked about Emotion Regulation. We talked about the idea of inhibition and enhancing your emotions in order to make it easier to accept. How much does this idea of regulating our emotions impact our affective forecasting? Are they correlated at all or does it have little or no impact on how we estimate our future emotions?

In the article there was no mention of how this affects different genders or ethnicities. For example does socioeconomic status effect the way that we predict our future events? Do people really reach for the stars or do they reach as high as they feel they can go? Is this dependent on external factors such as sex and ethnicity?

-Jessica Lopez (jal3347)

Seeking Pleasure and Seeking Pain

In the Riediger et al. article entitled Seeking Pleasure and Seeking Pain: Differences in Prohedonic and Contra-Hedonic Motivation From Adolescence to Old Age, three main claims are proposed. First, they operationally define contra-hedonic feelings as “wanting either to maintain or enhance negative affect or to dampen positive affect” and claim that this is more frequent in adolescents. Contrastingly, in their second claim they state people older in age are more likely to show prohedonic motivations, which they define as “wanting to either maintain, but not enhance positive affect or to dampen negative affect”. Their last claim is that they expect prohedonic feelings to be more strongly related to the person’s affect at a given time than contra-hedonic feelings.

To support their claims, they erroneously (explained later) state that adolescence is characterized by a state of turmoil and negative emotionality, which may lead to contra-hedonic motivations. They also corroborate this assertion with the notion that adolescents are inclined to experience these contra-hedonic feelings in order to seek personal autonomy from authority figures and to test their identities. Furthermore, older adults’ are motivated towards prohedonic beliefs due to “the shrinking horizon of time” and their acceptance of the finitude of life. The final claim is bolstered by the idea that contra-hedonic motivations are more likely to serve utilitarian functions than hedonic functions.

There are many examples in the media that bolster the idea that adolescence is an age plagued by turmoil and rebellion. For example, the movie Empire Records is the quintessential stereotype of teenage rebellion in action. The protagonists actively engage in rebellious activities that end up in negative consequences. No matter how many times their actions fail, they always revert to the same behaviors, thus creating a temporary identity sprung out of failure and emotionality. A second great example of the extreme emotionality of adolescence was provided in class by the quote by Anna Freud stating that “to be normal during the adolescent period is by itself abnormal”, which was later proven false by many studies. These studies make it known that adolescents show good psychological adjustment and that positive emotionality is stabilized by the 9th-12th grades.

On a more comical note, the view that older aged people are more likely to experience prohedonic motivation due to the finitude of life is portrayed in the movie The Bucket List featuring Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman. The movie follows two terminally ill men, who are conscious of the time restrictions of their lives, as they complete their wish list of acts before they die. The movie progresses from a sense of depression to the quick acknowledgement that before they die they must have the time of their lives. This correlates to the idea that Riediger et al. propose that older aged people have more of a proclivity towards prohedonic feelings because of an awareness that they might die soon.

Discussion questions.

Riediger et al. state in the discussion section of their article that “longitudinal investigations are necessary to determine whether the age-related differences observed in this study correspond to intraindividual changes as people grow older, and to explore the antecedents, correlates, and consequences of interindividual differences in these changes”. What results do you think that these longitudinal studies will yield? Are old aged people who believe in God and therefore an afterlife more likely to have prohedonic or contra-hedonic motivations compared to Atheists who believe in no life after death?

The Riediger et al. article came out in 2009, most likely after the two studies discussed in class repudiated the claim by Anna Freud that “to be normal during the adolescent period is by itself abnormal”. In light of such a contradiction, what effects do you think that knowledge of these results would have had on the authors before they had begun such study? Would they have attributed contrahedonic feelings to other characteristics of adolescence? If so, which?

- Guillermo Wippold (gmw399)

Social Rejection and Facial Expressions of Emotion

Individuals who fear or undergo social rejection show increased attention to social cues.



In this movie, the girl eating the banana has been rejected by her peers because she is an early bloomer and gets much more attention because of her appearance. Even though she receives a lot of sexual attention from the boys in her class, it is obvious throughout the movie that she's not ready for that attention, and is very sensitive to others' perceptions of her sexuality.

In this clip, one of her peers accuses her of sleeping around, and she responds by furthering their opinion of her. She seems aware of the context of the conversation from the beginning, and also acknowledges the giggling girls behind her at the scene's end. The other girls' responses to her (the giggling, gossip, and accusations) prime her reaction to them, leading her to further ostracize herself from their community, and search for an actual friend (the girl at the end of the clip). This interaction illustrates how social rejection can increase attention to social cues in eliciting a response that leads one to avoid socially perilous situations. Furthermore, Bernstein's article argues that increased attention to social cues is beneficial in directing resources away from the rejectors, and towards those giving off valid, positive social cues.

In the social status manipulation, were the experimenters actually manipulating social status and socially rejecting peers in the writing exercise? Could the findings actually be due to a priming effect?

While the experimenters argue that response to social rejection can be positive in directing attention away from adverse social interactions, couldn't this response have negative social implications in enabling the ostracism of the rejected individual?

What types of emotions characterize the rejection-response interaction? Are these purely social emotions?

-Erin Griffin