Archive for January, 2010

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Can Your Online Friends Hurt Your Image?

Friday, January 29th, 2010

Another creepy way that social media is being used — credit card companies and other financial institutions are experimenting with algorithms that profile your online friends. Based on the theory that our character is a reflection of the company we keep, if they do succeed and institute the computer application, what will they really find out? That some of our friends swear, get photographed drunk at parties, or sadly, have a puny social network? And what might that say about our financial stability?

Up until recently, the biggest factor that swayed credit card companies’ opinions about our honesty and timeliness was our credit rating. One’s credit rating is based on the adage if you aim to predict someone’s future behavior, look at their past behavior. Smart, responsible people who haven’t bitten off more than they can chew and who make payments on time will probably continue to behave that way. But that was in the old economy.

In the new economy, with joblessness rates still soaring and the number of real estate foreclosures continuing to mount, a rolling snowball of good people now have bad credit — through no fault of their own. And when the economy’s wheels begin to get greased again and the train is up and running, there will be a huge population of viable consumers with unattractive credit ratings. So how do money lenders separate the losers-by-nature from the losers-by-default?

Easy. They connect the social networking dots using psychology. Here’s one example: A study out of the University of Utah called, “Personality and the Formation of Social Networks” found that extroverted people have larger online social networks and people with an “openness new experience,” have more negative ties with online friends than those who are considered “conscientiousness.” Hold that thought for a minute and draw a line between those findings and a Taiwanese study that showed that personality traits–openness to experience, and conscientiousness–can lead individuals to develop a passion for online shopping activities.

Huh? A compulsion to shop is related to a person who is “open to experience,” which is related to a large social network? These are the kinds of clues that computer researchers are looking to integrate into the detective algorithms. That and the information from the content you post yourself, from Political views, to religion, to mommy-news. Yikes! Would too many “mommy postings” signal to a computer that you aren’t working enough?

And lest you think that you can fool the world by creating an electronic foot print that is an inflated version of yourself, think again. A recent study out of the University of Texas reports that that online social networking profiles convey accurate images of the profile owners, either because people aren’t trying to look good or because they are trying and failing to pull it off.

Bottom line. Our psychology plays out online much the way it does in the real world with both friend selection and behavior.

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Elin Woods: Brave Enough Tame the Tiger!

Thursday, January 28th, 2010

The latest reports on the Tiger Woods saga/drama are that wife, Elin has just returned from visiting with her share-the-wealth hubby in sex rehab. And now she has decided NOT to file for divorce. While America is screaming, “TAKE THE MONEY, ELIN!” I would like to take this opportunity to personally congratulate her. It is a brave woman who attempts to save her marriage and her family in this situation. Not only were his transgressions particularly damaging and hurtful, but she has enormous cultural pressure to leave. We now seem to live in a culture that prefers quick, profitable divorces over the bittersweet emotional work of salveging a marriage. Somehow, a virtuous few think the only sane route for her is to pack up and cash the check.

But before you think I am the champion of weak women who are too afraid to march out as single mothers, please allow me to remind of two small facts — the kids. I don’t have to remind you that children do better emotionally, academically, and financially within the circle of an intact, two-parent household. While we single mothers are doing our best and indeed there are plenty of involved divorced fathers, the statistics do not favor them. According to the Strengthening Families Act of 2003, “Nearly 24 million children in the United States, or 34 percent of all such children, live apart from their biological father. Forty percent of children who live in households without a father have not seen their father in at least one year, and 50 percent of such children have never visited their father’s home.”

Last night I saw a public service announcement by our president, Barack Obama, encouraging men to be better fathers, to devote the time necessary to help kids thrive. Is this where we have come? When a TV commercial is needed to get men to pay attention to their kids???

Finally, should you be concerned that a negative message might be sent to the children by welcoming back a philanderer — a platinum level lathario at that — please be assured that the children are quite young and their primary narcissism will protect them from knowing about or having to understand this mess. The biggest lesson the kids may get from all this? That people can change, that forgiveness is necessary in love relationships, and that Daddy loves them. Most of all, keeping Daddy at home is the biggest gift of their mother’s love. Elin, on behalf of your vulnerable angels, thank you for taking a big step toward repair. May the force be with you!

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Who’s a Better Husband, John Edwards or Tiger Woods?

Saturday, January 23rd, 2010

Of course we are splitting hairs here. Both men can jointly claim rights to the worst husband of the year award. Former presidential candidate, John Edwards had a love affair and fathered a baby out of wedlock while his wife was being treated for cancer. And, Tiger Woods, well, he dipped his stick in a pletheura of “liberated” women while wifey was pregnant and/or breastfeeding.

I appeared on two CNN shows yesterday to debate the hot topic and was surprised that in one not-very-scientific poll, viewers voted John Edwards the biggest skunk, because he was, after all, not only lying to his ailing wife, but he was lying to the voting public as well. Okay, so I get it. With Edwards, many Americans have a personal axe to grind. But now I ask you to stop thinking like a voter and instead think like a wife. Which dog would you prefer, if you had to be married to one?

To help you ponder this Sophie’s-choice, allow me to tell you about an enlightening psychology study. A group of married women were asked to choose which behavior they would prefer they husband engaged in: A) platonic, though emotionally intimate lunches with a co-worker or B) visits with a prostitute. If you’re a woman reading this, you might have guessed already that the prostitute won hands down over the work-wife. Anthropologists suggest that women fear a redirection of family resources before they worry about a little extra-cirricular nooky. And a business transaction with a prostitute represents  a quantifiable amount of resource extraction. Now an emotionally intimate friendship is another matter — he could open the flood gates of the family bank account with that one. His platonic friendship could certainly morph into a full-blown love affair but even if it didn’t, that woman’s close family member might become ill or she might get that Vegas virus  herself and boom, there’s her kind, deeply connected friend — your husband! — to write a check.

So, if you look at that study and place it as an overlay on the Edwards/Woods debate, Edwards still looks like the worst husband. An emotional and sexually intimate affair that produced a financially dependent child to boot. That’s a work wife who clearly opened the flood gates! At least Tiger didn’t put all his eggs in one basket. His liasons with loose women were a simple exchange of sex for a few party invites and souvenir text messages. It seems almost acceptable. Until you add one element that that psychologoical study did not factor in: The HIV virus.

The more sexual acts with promiscuos women (and who knows what else) the more likely one is to acquire AIDS. Just ask Magic Johnson. Now I want you to imagine a slightly different, though highly plausible, scenario in this debate. You have John Edwards on the one hand, grieving over the potential loss of his wife, falling into the arms of a caring woman who accidently becomes pregnant. And the only way to keep the very job that provides income for both his families is to lie, lie, lie. (Still not excusible, but this is a just a hypothetical debate.)

And then you have Elin, a loving wife who is given a special gift from her husband — the HIV virus — and unknowingly passes it through amniotic fluid or breastmilk to her child. Now we have a man who not only had affairs but murdered his family! Enough said.

John Edwards, will you marry me?

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The Twilight Syndrome? Why Women Read Violent Books.

Tuesday, January 19th, 2010

twilight1In the middle of a divorce battle, Sheila Bellush, a mother of quadruplets, confided to her sister that if anything were to ever happen to her, she should look up true crime author Ann Rule to tell her story. Sure enough, soon after, Sheila was shot and killed by a man hired by her husband. Rule’s book about the crime, Every Breath You Take, has sold over a million copies and 86% of its reviews on Amazon.com are written by women readers.

This anecdote is used in a new study that reveals why books that evoke fear are popular with women. People might assume that men, being the more aggressive sex, would be most likely to find such gory topics interesting. But the reverse is true. The researchers found that what makes books about graphic crime appealing to women is a survival instinct — a desire to to learn about crime in order to prevent becoming a victim. The study, “Captured by True Crime: Why Women are Drawn to Tales of Rape, Murder, and Serial Killers” is published in Social, Psychological and Personality Science, and makes a connection with women’s fascination with crime and their internal fear. Despite the fact that women are statistically less likely than men to become a victim of a violent crime (with the exception of rape) they perceive themselves to be in more danger. Some researchers blame the media, that tends to award more coverage to violent crimes against women than those with male victims.

The problem with the practice of reading about crime, according to the researchers, is that it can become a vicious cycle. Women feel fear and read about crime in order to be better informed about ways to prevent or survive a crime, but they also become unknowingly exposed to more dangers! They meet more murderers, more unusual ways to bite the bullet, and their fear-actor goes up. Thus, the books become a fear-based cycle for women who are buying them to decrease their fears.

All this got me thinking about the obsession my daughter and her friends have with the Twilight series of books and movies. With Vampires around every corner, there is no shortage of danger and blood flow in those pages. And clearly there is much confusion for heroin Bella as to which man-boy-vampire can be trusted. I wonder if the principles that the researchers discovered about true crime novels also apply to this kind of romantic thriller.

In today’s times, love has become a dangerous game for teen girls. While most of the sexual mores — like the double standard — have been removed, women are still more at risk for pregnancy, an STD, or a broken heart. (Women’s oxytocin release during orgasm helps create a bond.) Could the Twilight vampires, a metaphor for dangerous love, be one way that young girls are trying to make sense of all this?

And if the researchers speculations are true, might this also become a vicious cycle? More stories about dangerous love means more exposure to ways that women can be hurt by men. Besides the Twilight series, there are enough literary clones to warrant a large display table at my local Barnes & Noble called “Dark Love.” Is this what are daughters fear today? Dark love?

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How Helping Others Improves Health

Monday, January 18th, 2010

Haiti-Red-Cross-Volunteer-001If nothing else, we humans are empathetic animals. Watching the news footage of the tragedies in Haiti or of those unemployed and struggling families in recession-torn America can bring great feelings of sadness, even when the suffering is thousands of miles away. The good news is that when those feelings turn into action — altruism — one can have long term improvements in mental health.

Called the “Ebenezer Scrooge effect,” after the selfish and miserable Dickens’ character whose mood improved through helping others, the link between giving and happiness has always fascinated social scientists. Numerous studies have demonstrated that people experience health benefits when treated kindly and compassionately, and now research shows that givers of care can get an even bigger boost. The textbook on the subject, Altruism and Health, edited by Stephen Post is an excellent survey of research on the connection between altruism and mental and physical health from the realms of  biology, psychiatry, psychology, gerontology, epidemiology, and public health. The good news is that much of this research shows that unselfish individuals find life more meaningful, are happier than selfish people, and will often experience better mental health. Some of this research even goes so far as to suggest that unselfish individuals live longer and and have better physical health. There is, of course, one big exception: people who become overwhelmed by caregiving when they extend themselves too far will often suffer from the stressful burden of care. So, knowing one’s limits is crucial to giving.

One particular study of church goers shows that people who offer love, caring, and support to others have better mental health than those who only receive help. The study out of the University of Massachusetts, found that the very act of giving to others gets people outside of themselves and reduces their own anxiety and depression. In the study 2000 people answered questionaires that asked about the kind, quality and amount of loving care that people extended to others. In a second survey the same group were them given a test that looked at their mental health in general. The findings showed that receiving help wasn’t as powerful mood lifter as giving help, which is linked to lower rates of depression and anxiety.

I have one personal example of how caring about another can reduce anxiety. Last year I was giving blood at UCLA’s emergency trauma center. I had never donated blood before and had tremendous anxiety about it. Thankfully, an empathetic nurse gave me unusual attention. But receiving her gift of care didn’t not help me as much as something else that happened during the procedure. I noticed a young woman standing near us who had just given blood. She was swaying as if about to faint. I quickly directed the nurse to leave me and attend to her and in doing so, I felt my own anxiety disappearing. My entire attention was focussed on the girl, who vomited in a trash can before she was laid down, and while I barked directions (I’m like that) and inquired about her well being, I totally forgot that my own body was pumping out a pint of red stuff.

Now the question remains: Who are the giving people? Scientists are attempting to study the “altruistic personality” — what biological and environmental conditions shape people to become the givers in our culture. The fruit of all of this work is the reunion of ethics, religion, and science as they find common ground in “moral psychology” and encourage us to be kind as a route to mental and physical health.

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Haiti: Terror Will Be Passed Down

Friday, January 15th, 2010

HAITI-GIRL_1558332cIn the months ahead, after the physical wounds in Haiti are attended to, tremors will be felt throughout the culture as widespread psychological injuries remain.

First there will be the Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, a disorder than can last for months. Those fortune enough to have survived the massive earthquake may experience thoughts, dreams, and hallucinations that intrusively recall the horror of the events. Others will exhibit a kind of numbness, an inability to enjoy life and connect with others, a pattern designed to avoid thoughts that might trigger memories of the event. Now imagine those symptoms as dominant operational behaviors for an entire culture. PTSD may very well become a dysfunctional way-of-life when daily life picks up again — a shadow that will lurk behind every school teacher’s lesson, every shoppers decision, every family dinner table.

But as dismal as that may sound — and children may be greatly affected the worse by PTSD — far more heart wrenching will be the survivor’s syndrome. First identified as “survivor’s guilt” among Holocaust survivors, today the syndrome is known to affect anyone who has survived a massive catastrophic event, and is even common among emergency room personnel. It can involve anxiety, depression, sleep disorders, and emotional numbness, a loss of drive.

The insidious thing about survivor’s syndrome is it’s subtle ability to impact a family for generations. Through silent messages, glances, back turns, and distorted warnings about danger, parents and grandparents with survivors’ syndrome can unknowingly instill the idea that pleasure cannot come without pain, that pain should be expected in life, or that pleasure is not worth risking at all.

Psychological injuries will be a grim reality of future daily life in Haiti. And at this time, mental health workers are as vital to survival as the triage units on the ground today.

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Raising Confident Girls – Educate Her!

Wednesday, January 13th, 2010

Raising a self-confident daughter in a post-feminism age where choices are great, gender roles are fluid, and sexual messages are damaging is a confusing task for a mother. In this second of five articles on the subject, the key word is EDUCATION.

NWCfrontpagepicturesEducate your daughter. Period. Studies show the one thing that reduces teenage pregnancy and reduces overall birth rates in developing countries is the education of girls. It works here too. When girls receive a quality education and are valued at home for their academic achievements, miracles of self-esteem occur. Options become wider. Thinking processes become more complex, and peer pressure becomes only one factor in decision-making. And, providing a quality education need not cost you an arm and a leg. There are plenty of excellent public schools that lead to first-rate universities. But it’s up to you to do the research and make that education accessible to your daughter, even if it means moving to a better neighborhood.

But her intellectual mind is only half the equation. Anyone who has read Daniel Goleman’s groundbreaking books on emotional intelligence knows that even those who are not formally educated can succeed on social smarts alone. Knowing how to understand and communicate feelings is crucial in the business world — and leads to great powers of empathy, a hot skill in the free market.

To raise a self-confident daughter, you must teach her emotional intelligence. It’s the most important lesson a mother can give a child of any gender, and it includes a vocabulary that puts feelings into words. If we can’t name our feelings and share them, we are a long way off from being able to process them and use them in a healthful way. And we teach emotional health by modeling it. Having trouble labeling that feeling in your stomach, yourself? Here’s my handy dictionary of the most common feelings people express. Next time you tell a story to your daughter, add your emotional experience by saying “I feel,” followed by one of these words: Nervous, Happy, Sad, Angry, Disappointed, Hopeful, Ignored, Embarrassed, Envious, Jealous, Lonely, Excited, Surprised, Proud, Scared, Guilty, Aroused, Uncomfortable, Rejected, Loved. Using these “feeling words” in everyday life opens your daughter up to the parallel universe of people’s emotional lives.

Tomorrow: How exposure to relationships shapes her capacity to love.

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Raising A Confident Daughter – Respect Her!

Tuesday, January 12th, 2010

IMG_2017In this day and age, girls may have more freedom to pursue their dreams but they also have more confusion. The working world they will enter is still not a place where feminine energy is rewarded and the messages that women are being sent about sexual freedom may be setting them back. Because men and women are not equal, they are different, not one gender more powerful than the other. They may have many similar skills but their reward system is very different. Women value relationships and men value competition and power. So how do we help our girls “find themselves” as women in a world with so many choices and so few roadmaps? This is the first of five blogs can give Moms a few clues, and the word of the day is RESPECT.

Respect her Body from the Get Go. Our daughters won’t be able to respect their own bodies if we are intrusive. And this respect starts with the diaper change. When you change you infants diaper, give verbal explanations for what you are doing even if you think they can’t understand. (Babies understand most of their mother-tongue long before they ever have the muscular ability to form words.) Imagine you are a helpless being, captive in the land of giants. How would you like to be touched, cleaned, and bathed?  As she grows older, give her privacy and teach her about good/touch, bad/touch and physical boundaries.

And, model self-respect yourself. We’ve all heard the adage that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. And Mama, you are the tree from which she will spring. Your actions will have a much greater impact on your daughter than your words. Trust me, soon she won’t even hear you because of that darned ipod! So, it is very important that we respect ourselves. That may mean speaking up in defense of yourself or your family, protecting yourself from damaging relationships or simply living the values that you hope your daughter will live.

How you live is the most important way you parent. Teaching your daughter be not give herself pain by being respectful of yourself can go a long way to boosting her self esteem. Tomorrow: Teaching emotional intelligence along with an academic education.

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How to Raise a Self Confident Girl

Monday, January 11th, 2010

IMG_2179Dr. Wendy Walsh: I remember the moment I held my first-born daughter in my arms. I breathed a deep sigh of relief that I was given a baby who runs on estrogen. Yippee! I silently cheered. I got a girl. Girls I understand. This is something I know how to shape … and then they grew.

Nearly 12 years later, with two of them now under my roof — one sporting boobs, the other sporting moods — I more often ask, “Why me?” Why, God, couldn’t you have given me the far less complicated model of kid, a boy? Nonetheless, I have persevered, and I learned through experience and a whole lot of thick textbooks that raising a confident girl in a culture that still values logic over emotional intuition, and money-making skills over mothering skills, is quite an art.

We are a gender that excels in words rather than action. We are a gender whose feelings are sometimes more important than our grades, and our friendships define us more than anything. Girls build elaborate communities, and in our hunter/gatherer history, were the backbone of the species. Men hunted and dropped in with protein, but women still gathered more calories and maintained a multiaged moving “settlement” where babies, toddlers, teens, aunties, mothers, and grandmothers all had vital roles in the nest. Women’s power as a gender includes intellectual, emotional, nurturing, creative, and sexual power. Yah baby, hear us roar.

Fast-forward past hunter/gatherers, the farming age, and the industrial revolution to our current world — the Information Age, where we are now called post-feminists. Funny thing about feminism — it did an important job of liberating masculine energy in women and allowed our girls to gain some much-needed equity on the economic playing field, but we are now seeing that we threw the baby out with the bath water. Today, women with strong creativity, mothering skills, and emotional powers are not rewarded like the gals who excel in “left brain” math and logic. Seems the only traditionally feminine power that was allowed to remain and be rewarded is sexual power, and ladies, that’s getting out of control. Pardon my French, but it is raining whores! It’s some age in which to be raising a girl.

A recent poll done by Time magazine on the current state of American women is as positive as it is perplexing. In business, power, and economics, the news is good. Women make up 49 percent of the workforce and 57 percent of all college students, and hold jobs that include Supreme Court Justices, governors, and Ivy League presidents. However, even on the economic playing field, there is still a lag. For every dollar that men make, women earn only 77 cents. On the home front, things aren’t quite as rosy. Nearly 70 percent of women still have the primary responsibility of taking care of children, the sick, elderly, and theirhomes.

The problem that feminists didn’t forecast when they staged the International Women’s Year back in 1975 was this: as women left the household, no one else showed up to do the job she left at home — the down and sometimes dirty work of womanhood: cooking, cleaning, and child-rearing. Or, as I like to call it, playing with fire, chemicals, and poop! So what if our daughter would like to be a traditional woman and not want a career outside of the home (God forbid!)? Unless she is Martha Stewart and can turn her canning, crafts, and cooking into an empire, few men these days can finance this type of woman’s “hobby.” But what we can do is instill enough self-confidence in her that she feels empowered to create further progress for women.

So, as mothers, how do we raise self-confident daughters in a world that clashes with her biology and exerts pressure to earn money while toiling as queen of her castle? I wish I had all the answers. So I did some research. Read my next five blogs to learn how things like your respect, your words, your male friends, and your boundaries can make her a force to reckon with.

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Divorce Rate Down. Couples Finding happiness.

Friday, January 8th, 2010

divorceAnother silver lining to the recession. The divorce rate is dropping dramatically even though the population is growing. According to the Center of Disease Control National Center for Health Statistics, the divorce rate is the lowest in thirty years! So what’s going on? Well, if you consider that the primary clusters of divorce decline are in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New York — yep, the northeastern states with heavy exposure to the financial industry — you can assume that divorce has become just too expensive.

Paying for costly divorce lawyers aside, it takes a mini-fortune to maintain two homes these days, so many couples are opting to ride out the rough patch. (Reminder to those faced with such a dilemma: Didn’t your vows include “for richer or for poorer?”) Bottom line, it is much cheaper to support one household than two.

In a Canadian Study authored by York University professor Anne-Marie Ambert, two kinds of divorce are mentioned: those resulting from an unhappy marriage, and those resulting from “a weak commitment to marriage.”  In other words, in good times, plenty of salvageable marriages are terminated, but a recession creates more “commitment” to marriage.

Besides surviving together, long-term marriage can even be profitable. According to Barbara Bartlein, RN, LCSW, author of “Why Did I Marry You Anyway? Overcoming the myths that hinder a happy marriage,” long term marriage leads to greater wealth accumulation.  Sharing expenses and making the responsible choices that go along with raising children, leads to wealth.

A study out of the UK suggests that married people with children have increased “life satisfaction” than either childless couples or single parents. For unmarried individuals, raising children had little or no positive effect on their happiness. These findings are by Dr. Luis Angeles of the University of Glasgow in the UK.

One other factor that erodes salvageable marriages in good times is the boredom factor. “For boredom to have such long-term implications I think is very significant,” said co-author Terri Orbuch, a research professor at the University of Michigan and a professor of sociology at Oakland University. But Orbuch’s study found that closeness over time can eliminate that effect,. Sharing novel activities with each other — like taking a wine class or learning to play a sport — is the key, said Orbuch. The recession has been linked to reduced employment and more free time — time that can become quality time with a spouse. And, facing the emotional and physical challenges of surviving a recession together is anything but boring!

Finally, Tiger Woods example aside, infidelity may be on the decline. Financing an affair can be prohibitive and hunting for a job may take president over hunting for a lover. The extra cash and leisure time required for sexual courtship  are both in short supply as people worry about paying the mortgage.

All this is ultimately good news because new research on happiness and divorce suggests that two-thirds of the spouses who stayed with their marriage instead of divorcing were happy five years later. Of those spouses who did leave the marriage, only half were happy after five years, according to “Why Marry.”

So, staying together can actually help you find happiness!


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