Chatter

by Ethan Kross

  “It’s a move that requires”: Amanda Prahl, “Simone Biles Made History with Her Triple Double—Here’s What That Term Actually Means,” PopSugar, Aug. 15, 2019, www.popsugar.com/​fitness/​What-Is-Triple-Double-in-Gymnastics-46501483. Also see Charlotte Caroll, “Simone Biles Is First-Ever Woman to Land Triple Double in Competition on Floor,” Sports Illustrated, Aug. 11, 2019, https://www.si.com/​olympics/​2019/​08/​12/​simone-biles-first-ever-woman-land-triple-double-competition-video.

  He unlinked: Beilock and Gray, “Why Do Athletes Choke Under Pressure?” Note that this work typically uses the word “dechunked” to describe the process that I refer to as “unlinked.”

  paralysis by analysis: Sian Beilock, Choke (New York: Little, Brown, 2011).

  steer our thoughts and behavior: Adele Diamond, “Executive Functions,” Annual Review of Psychology 64 (2013): 135–168.

  limited capacity: Amitai Shenhav et al., “Toward a Rational and Mechanistic Account of Mental Effort,” Annual Review of Neuroscience 40 (2017): 99–124.

  illustration of this limited capacity: Nelson Cowan, “The Magical Mystery Four: How Is Working Memory Capacity Limited, and Why?,” Current Directions in Psychological Science 19 (2010): 51–57.

  hogs our neural capacity: The idea that perseverative cognition compromises executive functions has been studied from several perspectives. See Michael W. Eysenck et al., “Anxiety and Cognitive Performance: Attentional Control Theory,” Emotion 7 (2007): 336–353; Hannah R. Snyder, “Major Depressive Disorder Is Associated with Broad Impairments on Neuropsychological Measures of Executive Function: A Meta-analysis and Review,” Psychological Bulletin 139 (2013): 81–132; and Tim P. Moran, “Anxiety and Working Memory Capacity: A Meta-analysis and Narrative Review,” Psychological Bulletin 142 (2016): 831–864.

  perform worse on tests: Nathaniel von der Embse et al., “Test Anxiety Effects, Predictors, and Correlates: A 30-Year Meta-analytic Review,” Journal of Affective Disorders 227 (2018): 483–493.

  artistic performers: Dianna T. Kenny, “A Systematic Review of Treatments for Music Performance Anxiety,” Anxiety, Stress, and Coping 18 (2005): 183–208.

  make low initial offers: Alison Wood Brooks and Maurice E. Schweitzer, “Can Nervous Nelly Negotiate? How Anxiety Causes Negotiators to Make Low First Offers, Exit Early, and Earn Less Profit,” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 115 (2011): 43–54.

  Bernard Rimé: Bernard Rimé, “Emotion Elicits the Social Sharing of Emotion: Theory and Empirical Review,” Emotion Review 1 (2009): 60–85. I also drew on the following lecture: Bernard Rimé, “The Social Sharing of Emotion” (lecture delivered at Collective Emotions in Cyberspace Consortium), YouTube, published May 20, 2013, www.youtube.com/​watch?v=JdCksLisfUQ.

  From Asia to the Americas: Although Rimé’s research suggests that the motivation to talk about one’s emotions is a cross-cultural phenomenon, cultures nonetheless vary in the rate at which they share their emotions. See Archana Singh-Manoux and Catrin Finkenauer, “Cultural Variations in Social Sharing of Emotions: An Intercultural Perspective on a Universal Phenomenon,” Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 32 (2001): 647–661. Also see Heejung S. Kim, “Social Sharing of Emotion in Words and Otherwise,” Emotion Review 1 (2009): 92–93.

  pushing away: For review, see Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, Blair E. Wisco, and Sonja Lyubomirsky, “Rethinking Rumination,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 3 (2008): 400–424; also see Thomas E. Joiner et al., “Depression and Excessive Reassurance-Seeking,” Psychological Inquiry 10 (1999): 269–278; Michael B. Gurtman, “Depressive Affect and Disclosures as Factors in Interpersonal Rejection,” Cognitive Therapy Research 11 (1987): 87–99; and Jennifer L. Schwartz and Amanda McCombs Thomas, “Perceptions of Coping Responses Exhibited in Depressed Males and Females,” Journal of Social Behavior and Personality 10 (1995): 849–860.

  less capable of solving problems: For reviews, see Nolen-Hoeksema, Wisco, and Lyubomirsky, “Rethinking Rumination”; and Lyubomirsky et al., “Thinking About Rumination,” Annual Review of Clinical Psychology 11 (2015): 1–22.

  toxic outcome: For a discussion of how frayed social relationships contribute to feelings of social isolation and loneliness, see Julianne Holt-Lunstad, “Why Social Relationships Are Important for Physical Health: A Systems Approach to Understanding and Modifying Risk and Perception,” Annual Review of Psychology 69 (2018): 437–458; and Julianne Holt-Lunstad, Timothy B. Smith, Mark Baker, Tyler Harris, and David Stephenson, “Loneliness and Social Isolation as Risk Factors for Mortality: A Meta-analytic Review,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 10 (2015): 227–237.

  For work documenting the toxic effects of loneliness and social isolation, see John T. Cacioppo and Stephanie Cacioppo, “The Growing Problem of Loneliness,” The Lancet 391 (2018): 426; Greg Miller, “Why Loneliness Is Hazardous to Your Health,” Science 14 (2011): 138–140; and Aparna Shankar, Anne McMunn, James Banks, and Andrew Steptoe, “Loneliness, Social Isolation, and Behavioral and Biological Health Indicators in Older Adults,” Health Psychology 30 (2011): 377–385.

  kids who were prone to rumination: Katie A. McLaughlin and Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, “Interpersonal Stress Generation as a Mechanism Linking Rumination to Internalizing Symptoms in Early Adolescents,” Journal of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology 41 (2012): 584–597.

  A study by John Cacioppo and colleagues further underscores the reciprocal link between loneliness and self-focused attention: John T. Cacioppo, Hsi Yuan Chen, and Stephanie Cacioppo, “Reciprocal Influences Between Loneliness and Self-Centeredness: A Cross-Lagged Panel Analysis in a Population-Based Sample of African American, Hispanic, and Caucasian Adults,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 43 (2017): 1125–1135.

  grieving adults: Susan Nolen-Hoeksema and Christopher G. Davis, “ ‘Thanks for Sharing That’: Ruminators and Their Social Support Networks,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 77 (1999): 801–814.

  behave aggressively: Thomas F. Denson et al., “Understanding Impulsive Aggression: Angry Rumination and Reduced Self-Control Capacity Are Mechanisms Underlying the Provocation-Aggression Relationships,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 37 (2011): 850–862; and Brad J. Bushman, “Does Venting Anger Feed or Extinguish the Flame? Catharsis, Rumination, Distraction, Anger, and Aggressive Responding,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 28 (2002): 724–731.

  displace our aggression: Brad J. Bushman et al., “Chewing on It Can Chew You Up: Effects of Rumination on Triggered Displaced Aggression,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 88 (2005): 969–983.

  two and a half billion people: Facebook Newsroom, Facebook, newsroom.fb.com/​company-info/; and J. Clement, “Number of Monthly Active Twitter Users Worldwide from 1st Quarter 2010 to 1st Quarter 2019 (in Millions),” Statista, www.statista.com/​statistics/​282087/​number-of-monthly-active-twitter-users/.

  share their private ruminations: Mina Choi and Catalina L. Toma, “Social Sharing Through Interpersonal Media: Patterns and Effects on Emotional Well-Being,” Computers in Human Behavior 36 (2014): 530–541; and Adriana M. Manago, Tamara Taylor, and Patricia M. Greenfield, “Me and My 400 Friends: The Anatomy of College Students’ Facebook Networks, Their Communication Patterns, and Well-Being,” Developmental Psychology 48 (2012): 369–380.

  how we interact with them: As one example of this principle, consider research my colleagues and I performed demonstrating that passively using Facebook (that is, browsing the site to consume information about others) leads to emotional well-being declines, whereas actively using Facebook (that is, producing information on the site) does not. See Philippe Verduyn et al., “Passive Facebook Usage Undermines Affective Well-Being: Experimental and Longitudinal Evidence,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 144 (2015): 480–488. For review, see Philippe Verduyn et al., “Do Social Network Sites Enhance or Und
ermine Subjective Well-Being? A Critical Review,” Social Issues and Policy Review 11 (2017): 274–302.

  importance of empathy: Jamil Zaki, The War for Kindness: Building Empathy in a Fractured World (New York: Crown, 2019); and Frans B. M. de Waal and Stephanie Preston, “Mammalian Empathy: Behavioural Manifestations and Neural Basis,” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 18 (2017): 498–509.

  find ourselves venting: Rimé, “Emotion Elicits the Social Sharing of Emotion.”

  subtle physical gestures: John Suler, “The Online Disinhibition Effect,” Cyberpsychology and Behavior 3 (2004): 321–326; Noam Lapidot-Lefler and Azy Barak, “Effects of Anonymity, Invisibility, and Lack of Eye-Contact on Toxic Online Disinhibition,” Computers in Human Behavior 28 (2012): 434–443; and Christopher Terry and Jeff Cain, “The Emerging Issue of Digital Empathy,” American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education 80 (2016): 58.

  Cyberbullying: Committee on the Biological and Psychosocial Effects of Peer Victimization: Lessons for Bullying Prevention, National Academy of Sciences Report; Michele P. Hamm et al., “Prevalence and Effect of Cyberbullying on Children and Young People,” JAMA Pediatrics, Aug. 2015; Robin M. Kowalski et al., “Bullying in the Digital Age: A Critical Review and Meta-analysis of Cyberbullying Research Among Youth,” Psychological Bulletin 140 (2014): 1073–1137; and Robert Tokunaga, “Following You Home from School: A Critical Review and Synthesis of Research on Cyber-bullying Victimization,” Computers in Human Behavior 26 (2010): 277–287.

  passage of time: Emotions typically wane once they reach their maximum level of intensity: Philippe Verduyn, Iven Van Mechelen, and Francis Tuerlinckx, “The Relation Between Event Processing and the Duration of Emotional Experience,” Emotion 11 (2011): 20–28; and Philippe Verduyn et al., “Predicting the Duration of Emotional Experience: Two Experience Sampling Studies,” Emotion 9 (2009): 83–91.

  irritate and alienate others: Caitlin McLaughlin and Jessica Vitak, “Norm Evolution and Violation on Facebook,” New Media and Society 14 (2012): 299–315; and Emily M. Buehler, “ ‘You Shouldn’t Use Facebook for That’: Navigating Norm Violations While Seeking Emotional Support on Facebook,” Social Media and Society 3 (2017): 1–11.

  share more negative personal content: Jiyoung Park et al., “When Perceptions Defy Reality: The Relationships Between Depression and Actual and Perceived Facebook Social Support,” Journal of Affective Disorders 200 (2016): 37–44.

  need to self-present: For two classic accounts of the role that self-presentation plays in daily life, see Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1959); and Mark R. Leary and Robin M. Kowalski, “Impression Management: A Literature Review and Two-Component Model,” Psychological Bulletin 107 (1990): 34–47.

  skillfully curate: Randi Zuckerberg captured this facet of Facebook well in an interview she did with The New York Times. “What are you most guilty of on Facebook?” the reporter asked her. “I’m a marketer,” she responded, “and sometimes I almost can’t take it out of my personal life. I’ve had friends call me and say, ‘Your life looks so amazing.’ And I tell them: ‘I’m a marketer; I’m only posting the moments that are amazing.’ ” Susan Dominus, “Randi Zuckerberg: ‘I Really Put Myself Out There,’ ” New York Times, Nov. 1, 2013, www.nytimes.com/​2013/​11/​03/​magazine/​randi-zuckerberg-i-really-put-myself-out-there.html.

  feel better: Amy L. Gonzales and Jeffrey T. Hancock, “Mirror, Mirror on My Facebook Wall: Effects of Exposure to Facebook on Self-Esteem,” Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking 14 (2011): 79–83.

  driven to compare ourselves with others: Leon Festinger, “A Theory of Social Comparison Processes,” Human Relations 7 (1954): 117–140; and Katja Corcoran, Jan Crusius, and Thomas Mussweiler, “Social Comparison: Motives, Standards, and Mechanisms,” in Theories in Social Psychology, ed. D. Chadee (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 119–139. Sometimes we compare ourselves with others to see how we’re stacking up in a particular domain. Other times it’s to make ourselves feel better (by comparing ourselves with someone ostensibly “beneath” us) or to identify how we might improve some facet of our lives that we care about (by comparing ourselves with someone ostensibly “above” us). There is also evidence that comparing ourselves with others is an efficient way of measuring and obtaining information about ourselves.

  A study my colleagues and I published: Verduyn et al., “Passive Facebook Usage Undermines Affective Well-Being.”

  And the more we stew over how badly our lives stack up against others, the worse the consequences. Case in point: A longitudinal study performed with 268 young adults found that the more people compared themselves negatively to others on Facebook, the more they ruminated and the more depressed they felt: Feinstein et al., “Negative Social Comparison on Facebook and Depressive Symptoms,” Psychology of Popular Media Culture 2 (2013): 161–170.

  Also see Melissa G. Hunt et al., “No More FOMO: Limiting Social Media Decreases Loneliness and Depression,” Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology 37 (2018): 751–768; Morten Tromholt, “The Facebook Experiment: Quitting Facebook Leads to Higher Levels of Well-Being,” Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking 19 (2016): 661–666; R. Mosquera et al., “The Economic Effects of Facebook,” Experimental Economics (2019); Holly B. Shakya and Nicholas A. Christakis, “Association of Facebook Use with Compromised Well-Being: A Longitudinal Study,” American Journal of Epidemiology 185 (2017): 203–211; and Cesar G. Escobar-Viera et al., “Passive and Active Social Media Use and Depressive Symptoms Among United States Adults,” Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking 21 (2018): 437–443.

  Research has also begun to demonstrate how these findings generalize to other social media platforms like Instagram. Eline Frison and Steven Eggermont, “Browsing, Posting, and Liking on Instagram: The Reciprocal Relationships Between Different Types of Instagram Use and Adolescents’ Depressed Mood,” Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking 20 (2017): 603–609.

  the more envy they experienced: The negative consequences of envy are well-established. However, envy isn’t all bad. It can be functional in small doses, motivating us to improve ourselves: Jens Lange, Aaron Weidman, and Jan Crusius, “The Painful Duality of Envy: Evidence for an Integrative Theory and a Meta-analysis on the Relation of Envy and Schadenfreude,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 114 (2018): 572–598.

  One answer to that question: Additional explanations for why we continue to use social media in spite of its negative consequences include: (a) our desire to stay abreast of what is happening in our community, which might trump our desire to feel better about ourselves at any given moment in time, (b) the desire to obtain feedback from others, and (c) people often misjudge how using Facebook will make them feel (i.e., we focus on the potential positives that social media will bring us, losing sight [or perhaps even being unaware in the first place] of its potential to do harm as well). For discussion, see Ethan Kross and Susannah Cazaubon, “How Does Social Media Influence People’s Emotional Lives?,” in Applications of Social Psychology: How Social Psychology Can Contribute to the Solution of Real-World Problems, eds. J. Forgas, William D. Crano, and Klaus Fiedler (New York: Routledge-Psychology Press, 2020), 250–264.

  Harvard neuroscientists: Diana I. Tamir and Jason P. Mitchell, “Disclosing Information About the Self Is Intrinsically Rewarding,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 109 (2012): 8038–8043.

  languages across the globe: Geoff MacDonald and Mark R. Leary, “Why Does Social Exclusion Hurt? The Relationship Between Social and Physical Pain,” Psychological Bulletin 131 (2005): 202–223; Naomi I. Eisenberger, Matthew D. Lieberman, and Kipling D. Williams, “Does Rejection Hurt? An fMRI Study of Social Exclusion,” Science 302 (2003): 290–292.

  heartbroken of New York City: Ethan Kross et al., “Social Rejection Shares Somatosensory Repre
sentations with Physical Pain,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 108 (2011): 6270–6275.

  city of eight million: https://www.health.ny.gov/​statistics/​vital_statistics/​2007/​table02.htm.

  influence what happens in our bodies: Naomi I. Eisenberger and Steve W. Cole, “Social Neuroscience and Health: Neurophysiological Mechanisms Linking Social Ties with Physical Health,” Nature Neuroscience 15 (2012): 669–674; and Gregory Miller, Edith Chen, and Steve W. Cole, “Health Psychology: Developing Biologically Plausible Models Linking the Social World and Physical Health,” Annual Review of Psychology 60 (2009): 501–524.

  $500 billion annually: Michele Hellebuyck et al., “Workplace Health Survey,” Mental Health America, www.mhanational.org/​sites/​default/​files/​Mind%20the%20Workplace%20-%20MHA%20Workplace%20Health%20Survey%202017%20FINAL.pdf.

  negative verbal stream: For an account of how perseverative cognition, which often takes the form of verbal rumination and worry (see the introduction), prolongs the stress response, see Brosschot, Gerin, and Thayer, “Perseverative Cognition Hypothesis”; Jos F. Brosschot, “Markers of Chronic Stress: Prolonged Physiological Activation and (Un)conscious Perseverative Cognition,” Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews 35 (2010): 46–50; and Cristina Ottaviani et al., “Physiological Concomitants of Perseverative Cognition: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis,” Psychological Bulletin 142 (2016): 231–259.

  illnesses that span the gamut: Andrew Steptoe and Mika Kivimaki, “Stress and Cardiovascular Disease,” Nature Reviews Cardiology 9 (2012): 360–370; Suzanne C. Segerstrom and Gregory E. Miller, “Psychological Stress and the Human Immune System: A Meta-analytic Study of 30 Years of Inquiry,” Psychological Bulletin 130 (2004): 601–630; Bruce S. McEwen, “Brain on Stress: How the Social Environment Gets Under the Skin,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 109 (2012): 17180–17185; Ronald Glaser and Janice Kiecolt-Glaser, “Stress-Induced Immune Dysfunction: Implications for Health,” Nature Reviews Immunology 5 (2005): 243–251; Edna Maria Vissoci Reiche, Sandra Odebrecht Vargas Nunes, and Helena Kaminami Morimoto, “Stress, Depression, the Immune System, and Cancer,” Lancet Oncology 5 (2004): 617–625; A. Janet Tomiyama, “Stress and Obesity,” Annual Review of Psychology 70 (2019): 703–718; and Gregory E. Miller et al., “A Functional Genomic Fingerprint of Chronic Stress in Humans: Blunted Glucocorticoid and Increased NF-κB Signaling,” Biological Psychiatry 15 (2008): 266–272.