Sense Making

Often in life things happen that make us extremely happy or extremely sad. But even sudden and unexpected occurrences such as receiving a pay rise because you have been great at work, or news that one of your friends has been saying nasty things behind your back don’t take a hold of us forever. The effects eventually wear off and often a lot quicker than we expect. But why and how does this occur? Why do we move on past great disappointments and why does thinking about our promotion at work have less ‘fuzziness’ over time?

This blog will provide one likely explanation.

One area of psychology that has received a fair amount of attention is known as the ‘expressive writing paradigm’. The basic gist of this is that researchers get participants to write about a previously traumatic or upsetting life experience on a regular basis for a few weeks or so and see what effects such a task may have. One could be forgiven if they guessed that writing about the bad times might actually make you feel more depressed over time, but this doesn’t seem to be the case. Harris (2006) pooled together all of the studies that had examined the expressive writing paradigm in normal run of the mill participants. The results suggest a very positive effect, in the form of reducing the amount of health care participants needed in subsequent follow ups weeks or months after the study had finished. Similar findings of increased happiness and life satisfaction have been reported from other studies too.

An interesting question is why? Luckily a further set of studies by Lyubomirsky et al. (2006) can help to shed some light on this. Psychologists have theorised that the expressive writing paradigm may produce such beneficial effects because instructing individuals to write about painful past experiences helps them come to understand and make sense of what happened and why. Hence, once an explanation has been provided and individuals feel as though they understand the experience and it eventually becomes just another past event in their life, becoming less inclined to think about it. This type of idea is backed up by other research that has shown that spouses that lose a loved one tend to recover better if they can come to terms with what has happened and give meaning or understanding to it.

The Lyubomirsky studies tested this kind of prediction. In one study they had participants partake in the usual expressive writing programme or instead of writing, instructed some participants to only think about the past negative experience. The theory was that because whilst writing is especially conductive for structure, organisation and thus sense making, thinking can be more difficult and thoughts can often become repetitive and go round in circles. Thus, participants assigned to the writing condition were hypothesised to show greater benefits in a follow up. This was the case, with the writing condition reporting greater psychological well being at follow up.

In a further study the researchers addressed the question even more directly by manipulating how participants wrote about their past experiences. In one condition participants were encouraged to analyze and find meaning from the negative event, whilst in the other they were guided to repeat and rehearse the experience. Those analyzing and finding meaning again tended to come off better than those instructed to replay the negative event over and over again.
Such studies are interesting and may even be useful if one faces something nasty in life. They suggest that by providing an explanation to, and understanding a past experience that evoked great emotion we make it more normal and this results in it invoking less of an emotional reaction. But what about the flip side of the coin? Should we analyze the good times too? Wilson & colleagues (2005) answer this question in a number of studies and the take home message would appear to be that one should be careful when thinking about the good times.

In one study participants were approached on campus and given a small card with a free dollar attached to it. Receiving a free gift is always mood lifting. But the researchers manipulated the message on the small card so that participants received one of two cards. The first card provided very general information with no real explanation, whilst the second type of card appeared to explain why the coin had been given away (without actually providing much more detail) Posing to be part of another study a different researcher then returned 5 minutes later and asked participants to fill out a mood questionnaire. The results showed that participants that believed they had an explanation to the random act of kindness actually felt less happy than those who were still unaware as to why they had received the gift.

The explanation here is that whether positive or negative, by making sense of a past experience we ‘normalize’ it, making it more like any other run of the mill event in life, effectively reducing its emotional value. Blissfully ignorance might not be such a bad thing after all at least when it comes to thinking about past triumphs or good news.

Application

Writing or trying to explain and understand a hurtful experience may at first be painful but in the long rather adaptive.

Unless one is searching for meaning or understanding, mentally replaying bad experiences is probably a bad idea.

Thinking about how and why your friend was able to pick out such an amazing birthday present may actually be a good idea if you don’t want that mood to fade.