Mental Health Blogs

Archive for May, 2009

I may be flamed in the comments section for this article, but I’ve sat on it for too long.  Dog trainers understand concepts about raising a well behaved, civilized dog that many parents raising children aren’t privy to.  I do not mean to suggest that children are dogs, certainly not.  But in some ways, our culture spends more time and energy sharing information about training a dog than information about raising a child.  What am I talking about?

Take a minute and Google the term “socialization period”.  How many references do you see to puppies or dogs in the titles?  How many to children?  Exactly.   (I’ll address the issue of socialization later in this article.)  How many parents know what “socialization” means?  Any responsible dog owner does.  Socialization is a crucial component to raising a well-behaved dog or child.  Dog trainers and veterinarians make sure new puppy owners are aware of this concept and advocate strongly for puppies being properly socialized.  (And kudos here for veterinarians and trainers for working so hard to get this information to new dog owners.)  I don’t see the same efforts expended on getting this information to parents.  Some of the biggest behavior problems I see are the result of improper or inadequate socialization.  Dog trainers are also aware of many other concepts that do not seem to cross over to parents.  This may sound horrible, but some of the most helpful ideas I have about working with children came from my dog trainer.  Now before you flame this blog, please hear me out. 

What are some of the concepts which dog owners understand which parents might benefit from?  There are several key concepts which the owners of a new puppy will be taught when trying to raise a well-behaved individual.  The same concepts apply to raising a healthy child.

Consistency

Consistency is most important concept on this page, whether you are raising puppies or children.

Consistency is crucial if you want to raise a well-behaved, secure, intelligent dog.  It is important that they know what the rules are and what to expect from you.  This makes them confident in you and in themselves.  It also enhances their confidence in their ability to master the world they live in.

The same applies to children.  The best way to drive a child (or a dog) insane is to change the rules everyday.  A perfect example of the absence of consistent parenting is children who have grown up in homes with drug abuse or domestic violence.  Their days are never the same.  If Mommy gets her drugs, today will be a “good” day.  If she doesn’t, it will be nightmare.  If Daddy comes home angry, there is one set of rules.  If he comes home calm, there is another set of rules.  If he has been drinking, there is a third set of rules.  Children in homes like this never know what to expect from day to day.  By the time they get to my office, they are very anxious and stressed out.  They ricochet off my walls and are constantly worried about playing with the “right” toy in the “right” way.  They are painfully fearful, insecure and on edge because they can never know for sure what to expect.  One of the most important elements I provide in the therapy room is consistency.  There are always the same toys and they are always in the same place.  The session always last for the same amount of time, on the same day of the week.  This “sameness” is very comforting to children.

It’s important to decide what you want from your child and be as consistent as possible with them.  Naturally, life can be chaotic and adjustments and changes will be necessary.  But if your child is secure in your ability to run the show and has a good feeling that things will eventually get back to “normal” they will find it easier to go with the flow and adapt to change.

It is also important that parents work together as a coherent team.  They must communicate well with each other and agree on what their expectations are for the child.  They must then be consistent in following through.  Mom can’t make Dad the bad guy by letting the child do what they want all day then waiting for Dad to get home and punish them.  Dad can’t let the child do things in secret behind Mom’s back.  One parent can’t buy things for the child that the other parents prohibits.  They have to back each other up and function as a single unit, even if divorced and living separately. 

Parents who were raised in very rigid, authoritarian households are naturally reluctant to recreate this inflexibility in their own homes.  Consistency is not the same as inflexibility.  They are completely different.  To have a morning ritual or schedule does not mean that the child is held to a rigid, inflexible schedule or that they have to “tow the line” like a soldier in boot camp.  It just means that there is a predictable pattern to life that makes life safe and familiar.  The child knows what is expected of them and knows how to “succeed”. 

Parents who were raised in very authoritarian homes sometimes balk at this idea, and I can certainly understand why.  They don’t want to create that militaristic intolerance and rigidity.  But they can go to far the other way, providing absolutely no structure or consistency.  This is equally stressful to children.  Children, like puppies, need to know what you expect from them, what the rules are, what to do to succeed.  If they know what the rules are then they can follow them and know that everything will be a “good kid”.  They know what to do to “succeed” to “win”.  Not knowing what is expected from day to day creates stress, uncertainty and insecurity.  They don’t know how to “do the right thing” because “the right thing” changes from day to day.  Like all things in life, this requires balance.  Not a rigorous, unalterable schedule that does not allow children to be children, but not a laissez faire, total abandonment of structure either.   A judge (Isaac C. Parker) attempting to tame the wild, wild west in America said, “It’s not the severity of the punishment, but the certainty of it that checks crime…”  This is very true, whether you are trying to deter crime in a town or inappropriate behavior in a child.  Consistency negates the need for severity.  If children know that hitting other children is always wrong, they don’t constantly have to test that boundary.  Communication

You have to communicate what you want in terms the dog can understand.  A dog’s ability to understand human language is very limited.  You can communicate much more readily with them using signals or body language.  If you use language it should be short and sweet.  You cannot launch into a lecture from Wittgenstein and expect a dog to understand. 

Likewise, small children have not yet developed the capacity for analytical thinking.  They cannot comprehend the complexities of adult language.  I see parents trying to reason with a 4 year old about why they do not want them to wander out in traffic without holding their hand.  Though a 4 year old can comprehend language, they can’t comprehend logical arguments and they don’t have the attention span to care.  They just want you to tell them what you want.  Short and sweet.

Socialization

Good dog trainers know that there is a period in a puppy’s life where they must be “socialized” if they are going to know how to behave with other dogs and with people.  We don’t tell parents that children need the same thing.  And there is a certain period of time in which it must be accomplished.  Dogs are socialized initially by their mothers, which is why you don’t take a puppy away from its mother before the age of 8-10 weeks.  Further socialization is required for the puppy to learn how to communicate and interact appropriately with any other species with whom you want it to live.  If you want your puppy to interact well with humans and other dogs you have to socialize them during this period with members of these groups.  If you want the puppy to be a dog who can live peacefully with cats, children, chickens or cows, you have to socialize them with cats, children, chickens and cows. 

Dog owners enroll their puppies in “Socialization Groups” to allow their puppies to interact with other puppies their age.  They will take them to dog clubs in parks so their puppies are allowed to interact with dogs of all ages.  They will also ask every human they encounter to hold and pet their puppy so that the puppy learns to understand human behavior and interact with humans appropriately.  Puppy owners will continue to expose the puppy to new people, dogs, cats and situations until they are a year old.  The socialization must occur while they are a puppy.  Lack of proper socialization cannot be reversed in an adult dog.  If they don’t receive it as a puppy, their behavior as a dog will be markedly impaired and probably irreversible.  This exposure to different species and situations is crucial as it teaches the puppy to tolerate new and different events and stimulations.  It prevents the puppy from growing into a fearful dog who is anxious and possibly aggressive when placed in strange or new situations. 

We often do not tell parents that children need the exact same thing.  Socialization is as important to humans as it is to other mammals.  We are very social creatures.  It has long been known that babies who are not cuddled and held by adults may suffer from “failure to thrive”, become depressed and listless, indifferent, or withdrawn.  As they grow older them often have very, very serious behavior problems.  We have recently seen this in adopted children from Bosnia.  As a result of the genocide there large numbers of infants were orphaned.  Many were placed in orphanages where there were not enough adults to care for them.  They spent most of their days in cribs where their physical needs were met (food, bathing, changing) but they were not held or caressed.  These children were then adopted out to parents all over the world.  The adoptive parents found that the children were unempathic, developed serious problems relating to others and had serious behavior problems both at home and in school. 

Children must be socialized with their peers and it must occur in a specific age range.  I am starting to see a change in our awareness of this as “play groups” and “socialization groups” have begun to be formed for children.  It cannot happen fast enough, especially in this age of technology.  I see a lot of children who are parked in front of a video or a video game and not taken outside to the park (or any other place) to socialize with other children and adults.  I think this plays a very large part in the increased behavior problems we see when children reach school age.  Children who are raised in the isolation of their own home an grow up to be excessively shy and fearful.  They may have difficulties interacting with other children when they enter school. This anxiety can manifest itself in violence towards other children (i.e. hitting and biting), and inability to conform to social norms (i.e. being unable to wait their turn or share with others) and the anxious behavior that often looks like ADHD.

Pack Leader

Another concept familiar to dog owners is that of “pack leader”.  Dog packs, like human groups, have hierarchies.  It is important when raising a puppy that the humans establish themselves as “pack leader”.  Why?

Have you ever seen a household where the dog is in charge instead of the human?  It’s a nightmare.  It’s important to establish who is in charge.  How is this done?  It is not done by power and definitely by abuse, but by following the rules above and by commanding respect.  That’s respect, not fear.  There is a difference. 

The same holds true with a child.  The parents need to be in charge of the child and the household, not the child.  Have you seen households where the child is in charge?  It’s a nightmare, for the parents, for visitors and yes, for the child.  Children are not emotionally mature enough to absorb adult concerns and worries.  They are not mentally mature enough to make the necessary decisions.  And they inherently know this.  Being made responsible for adult emotions and decisions puts an enormous and unfair burden upon them.  What do I mean by this?

I’ve seen parents who expressed their anxiety and stress through the child, making the child responsible for calming them.  I’ve seen parents who worked out familial problems by discussing them with the children.  I’ve even seen parents work out marital difficulties through their children.  This is simply unfair.  Children should be free to be children and adults must shoulder the responsibility for the family themselves.  This does not mean that the family structure must be strict and unforgiving or that communication should be stilted and demanding.  Absolutely not.  It does mean that parents must be the ones making the decisions and comforting the children, not the other way around.

When a lot of people hear that they need to establish themselves at the top of the hierarchy, they visualize a regime based on fear and punishment.  People who visualize a hierarchy this way do so because this is how power was expressed in their home.  But there are different ways of manifesting power.  Mahatma Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had vast amounts of power, yet they were not punitive or harsh.  You can lead from a position of fear, or you can lead from a position of respect.  The latter is always best.  Fear breeds resentment and rebellion.  A heavily punitive and fearful form of leadership will result in either outright disobedience and rebellion or passive-aggressive behavior (smiling in your face while disobeying you behind your back).  Obviously, this is not the ideal.

How do you establish yourself as leader from a position of respect?  You earn respect by giving respect, to yourself and to your child.  You respect your children by communicating clearly and being consistent.  You also gain respect by being in charge and taking responsibility.  Being calm and confident are essential in being respected as the “pack leader”.  Think about bosses for whom you have worked.  Which ones did you respect?  Which ones did you have little use for?  Which ones did you abhor?  What was it about each boss that earned your respect or your contempt?  Use these same concepts in establishing yourself as the head of your family. 

What would a dog trainer tell you?  Here are their tips for establishing yourself as “pack leader”.  Once again, these apply to children as well as puppies.

1.  Be confident
If you are confident in your abilities to parent, your child will be confident in your abilities to parent.  If you express doubt and fret about everything

2.  Praise the positive
Always notice when they get it right, whatever it is.  Positive reinforcement is just as effective as negative reinforcement, without the negative consequences.  It also reinforces that you are in a position to approve good behavior.

3.  Reprimand quickly and fairly, then forgive. 
Holding grudges does not command respect.  It breeds resentment and ill will.

4.  Require that your child do what you ask the first time you ask it. 
Don’t harp on and on.  I see people in the store repeating over and over, “If you don’t stop that I’m going to spank you.”  Now the child and everyone else in the store knows the parent does not mean this and the child keeps on doing what they were doing.

5.  Pick your battles.
Do you make a request that you are not prepared to back up.  If you are unwilling to take away their video game for 3 days do not threaten to do so.  Do not insist that they pick up their toys “right now” unless you are prepared to go over and enforce your request.  Making requests that you do not back up makes you look ineffectual.  Children learn very quickly that you do not mean what you say and you lose their respect.

6.  Be tough, but fair. 
You can be tough and loving.  Be tough in a fair, calm, reasonable way.  Do not lose your temper or rage at a child.  And always be fair.  Even the youngest child will respect calm and fairness.

7.  Use modeling behavior.
Modeling behavior is a therapist’s term that refers to acting out the behavior you want others to emulate.  You cannot raise confident, quiet, intelligent children by screaming at them maniacally.  Conduct yourself as you wish them to behave.  They are watching every move you make.  And your actions speak 100 times louder than your words.

8.  Decide the “pecking order” in your home. 
The parents should be the pack leaders, both parents equally.  One parent should not dominate another.  Nor should one parent be placed below the children, or one child elevated above a parent.  You may also decide a pecking order for the children based, for instance, on age.  Older children have more responsibilities, but more privileges than their younger siblings.  As younger siblings age, they too gain these responsibilities – and privileges.  Be sure the pecking order is fair and based on behaviors, not innate qualities.  If you place boys over girls or athletic children over creative children you negate their individuality and create a hierarchy in which they can never move up.  (You also lock them into the role of the “athletic child” for the rest of their childhood, which doesn’t allow them to be anything else.  Children can be athletic and creative.)  If the hierarchy is fair and based upon behaviors and responsibilities, then everyone can participate – and succeed – equally. 

Parenting is a tough job, especially in the modern world where families are isolated from extended family members, technology complicates parenting decisions and an erratic economic environment stresses families which are already straining to stay afloat.  Knowing some basic techniques for raising healthy children may help ease the stress and strain. 

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When I think my life is hard and I want to quit, or just feel sorry for myself, I try to think of people like Aimee Mullins.  Who is Aimee Mullins?

Aimee is a double leg amputee.  She lost both her legs in childhood to a genetic disease.  As an adult she is a recognized athlete, model, actress and activist.  And this beauty has brains.  She graduated from Georgetown University with a double major in history and diplomacy and is a tireless advocate for the disabled. She has been named one of the fifty most beautiful people in the world by People Magazine.

This woman has accomplished more than I ever will, and has done it with a grace and dignity I can only hope to aspire to.  She exemplifies something I have observed in my practice, “from adversity comes strength”.  If you turn and face it that is.  If you run from adversity, or medicate it, or use drugs, alcohol, relationships, work, sex, eating or other things to distract you from it, you do not learn to overcome it.  But if you face adversity squarely in the eyes and walk through it, you come out on the other side with increased compassion for others, increased coping skills you can use to face other adversities in life, increased wisdom and increased self knowledge.

Aimee Mullins has not only faced her disability, she has embraced it; with courage, humility and even humor.  In one interview she quips,

“Pamela Anderson has more prosthetic in her body than I do.  Nobody calls her disabled.” 

This young woman has a voice which should be heard.  I encourage you to listen to her interviews and seminars.  They are free and readily available on the web.  Aimee tells personal and humorous stories of her struggles and her triumphs which will inspire and uplift you.  Two of my favorites are listed below.

“How my Legs Give me Super Powers” on Boing, Boing. 

“Aimee Mullins and her 12 pairs of Legs” on Ted.com. 

For more information about Aimee Mullins please see:  Sport’s Heroes’ article on Aimee for information about her accomplishments and her life, or see:  Wikipedia’s article on Aimee for pictures of her and her famous “boots” designed by Alexander McQueen. 

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I cannot find the author of this quote, but it’s great, unless you are addicted to something. (smile)

I know that doing what I love is always more successful than forcing myself to do what other people think would be more profitable.  This blog and my profession are two examples.  When I entered college after high school I was “advised” to go into computers.  That was where “it was at”, the hot field where the jobs would be.  I tried it.  It didn’t work.  I didn’t fit for me.  Spending all day looking for a misplaced period or word was not my idea of satisfaction.  I’m a people person.  I’m a process person.  I dropped out of college and went to work for several years until I had my “Aha!” experience.  Oh yeah, I wanted to study psychology!  I remember now.  I am a person who is easily bored.  And when I am bored, I get into trouble.  Psychology was perfect.  Studying human behavior is forever challenging and never boring.  There are 6 billion people on this planet and I will never figure them all out.  There is always a client in my office who has me flummoxed.  There is always more work to do.  There are always challenges.  And this keeps me on fire.

Though the social services sector is a very hard way to make a living and I’ll never make as much money or make it as easily as my friend the computer programmer, I’m content, I’m satisfied.  My work means something.  And meaning is a reward unto itself.  Meaning is more important than money for me.  When I work only for the money I get very depressed and cynical.  I mean, what’s the point?  And I end up blowing all the money trying to “put” meaning in my life.  Though I’ll always have to live on a budget while my friend travels, gets massages and has her nails done, I think I am more content and have a greater inner peace than people who only follow the money.  I know that I have touched lives, planted seeds, and perhaps, helped a few people along the way.  Money is no substitute for that.

As this blog begins to thrive I realize that this, too, is the reason for any success it may have.  I love the topic.  I love to explore human behavior;  why we do the things we do, why we think the way we do.  This will never be completely answered in my lifetime.  So following the advice of the  quote in this article’s title is working – at least for me. 

Think about it.  What do you love?  What do you think about every single day?  What gets you exicted?  What can you never learn, do, see, get enough of?

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She was sent home from the hospital in a full body cast.  It must have weighed a ton, but my mother insisted on holding her and carrying her around because she wanted her to feel nurtured and cared for.  Traction and braces were next and countless hours of physical rehabilitation.  The doctors still said she would never walk.

I came home from school one day to find my mother standing in the kitchen with tears pouring down her face.  She looked at me and said, “If I go in there I will pick up her and if I pick her up she will never walk” and she nodded toward the main room.  I went in to see my sister, in her braces, doing what all kids at that age do – pulling herself up to the coffee table and trying to stand.  She pulled herself up and fell, pulled herself up and fell.  This is a normal process for all children, but made all the harder for her because she was having to navigate not only balance and gravity, but the braces which held her legs in a very unnatural pose.  Yet she was determined.  She pulled up, she fell down, she got back up.  And my mother stood in the kitchen and let her, crying the entire time.  She knew if she went in there her heart would call out to her and she would pick my sister up – and stop the process.  She knew that allowing my sister to fight her way through this process was the only chance she had to walk.  So she let it happen, the way it had to, even though it broke her heart.  She put my sister’s future above her own emotional needs to make it stop.  Picking her up would have comforted my mother, but crippled my sister. 

My sister’s bone structure is still a mess.  But she walked all over Europe on those legs.  She kayaks, rides horses and swims.  She travels constantly.  You would not know to look at her that she has this problem.  She bears the pain and the limitations with a grace and a strength I cannot even imagine.  

She must have learned if from our mother. 

Happy Mother’s Day Mom.

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These studies do not show how hormones shape women’s judgments of cuteness. But since all the volunteers could see equally well, it’s likely that cuteness also elicits heartwarming emotions, and that the emotional response is entangled with actual perception of cuteness. Whatever the exact mechanism, it appears that cute babies are well designed by nature to make the rewards of motherhood outweigh all the hard work.

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Just think about what it takes to learn biology. Not textbook biology, the kind you learn in high school with microscopes and dissecting kits. Rather, the kind you learn on your own, as a young child encountering the vast and diverse world of living things. How does the human mind link together things as varied as hippos and lichen and mosquitoes and rhododendrons? And how do we sort this diversity into meaningful categories? In short, how do we think about life?

Psychologists are very interested in how the mature mind sorts the living world, and where we put ourselves in relation to other life forms. That’s the stuff of philosophy and religion and morality. But it’s not as obvious as one would think. Take motion, for example. Many living things move, but so do rivers and clouds and rocket ships. And some living things, like coral, don’t appear to move at all. So it’s not just the fact of motion that defines life, but the why and how. Young children find this confusing and make a lot of mistakes about what’s animated and what’s not. Only over time do we outgrow our primitive, childish ideas and replace them with a sophisticated view of the natural world.

Or do we? Do we really discard all our naive thinking as we experience the world and learn about its complexity? University of Pennsylvania psychologists Robert Goldberg and Sharon Thompson-Schill have been exploring these questions in the laboratory, with intriguing results. Here’s one of their experiments:

The psychologists showed a group of college students a long list of words, one at a time and very rapidly. Some were the names of plants, others animals, and still others non-living things. The non-living things were further divided into non-moving objects like brooms; non-moving natural things, like boulders; moving artifacts like trucks; and finally, natural moving things, like rivers. The idea was to see how quickly and accurately the volunteers used movement and “naturalness” to classify these various things as living or non-living.

The scientists were particularly interested in how we think about plants, where we put them in the grand scheme of things. Plants are an interesting anomaly because—at least to young children—they don’t “do” anything; instead, we do things to them, like climb them and water them and prune them. If they move at all, their movement is very subtle. Not surprisingly, kids often misclassify plants as non-living.

But how about college students? Well, it appears that they too make mistakes, even with all that formal education: The volunteers in the study were much more hesitant in classifying plants, suggesting that they had to slow down to deliberately overrule their naïve taxonomy; and they also made more outright errors. They were also slower to size up moving things in general, and non-living natural things—suggesting that movement and naturalness were the features that stymied them.

To be fair, these weren’t biology majors. And we all know that kids can slip into college without much in the way of rigorous scientific training. But here’s the really interesting part. The psychologists ran basically the same experiment with biology professors, people who make their living teaching university students about the natural world. Indeed, the volunteers in this second study had been teaching college-level biology for a quarter century, on average, and at highly prestigious schools.

And guess what. As reported in the April issue of the journal Psychological Science, the profs did better than the undergraduates, but not as brilliantly as one might from the scientific elite. Even these experts were significantly worse at classifying plants than they were at categorizing animals. That is, even a lifetime of advanced scientific training didn’t trump the naïve impulse to view plants as artifacts.

Children may be natural-born taxonomists, but they’re not all that good at it. That’s because they have a deep-wired urge to see the world as designed and simple, and to be at the center of it all. Apparently that impulse never goes away entirely.

For more insights into the quirks of human nature, visit “We’re Only Human” at www.psychologicalscience.org/onlyhuman. Selections from the blog also appear regularly in the magazine Scientific American Mind and at www.sciam.com.

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One in five Americans is currently taking care of another adult, voluntarily tending to an ill or frail loved one. And as the Baby-Boomer generation ages, that obligation is likely to increase. The burden takes a serious toll on caregivers, leading to poorer health and even an increased risk of death.

But what is it that actually takes the toll? Is it the physical wear-and-tear of feeding and bathing a needy relative? Is it simply that caregivers have too much work and too little time and energy? Or is it the emotional costs of watching a loved one deteriorate, or the anticipation of loss? Or all of this rolled together?

Interestingly, these possibilities have never really been sorted out—until now. A team of public health researchers, headed by Stephanie Brown at the University of Michigan, decided to explore these questions by examining the histories of more than 3000 elderly married people over several years. The couples were all living together in their own homes, but the level of neediness varied, as did the commitment of caring time. The researchers tracked the health and the survival rate of the caregivers, all 70 or older.

The results were interesting and a bit surprising. As reported in the April issue of the journal Psychological Science, those who were providing the most care for their spouses—14 or more hours a week—actually had a lower mortality rate than did those who had no care obligation. This was true regardless of the spouse’s neediness, including cognitive decline. This suggests that the health problems of caregivers may not result from the actual burden of caring. Indeed, caring may have a tonic effect under certain circumstances, which may offset the emotional toll of witnessing a spouse’s deterioration and worrying about life alone.

Why would that be? It’s not entirely clear, but it may be that the very act of giving acts as a buffer, moderating the untoward physical consequences of chronic stress, including immune dysfunction. It’s also possible that the hormones associated with helping—oxytocin, for example—actually help the body’s cells repair and store nutrients. Whatever the mechanism, it appears that nurturance is a blessing at the microscopic level.

For more insights into human nature, visit the “We’re Only Human” blog at www.psychologicalscience.org/onlyhuman. For more on healthy aging, see Wray Herbert’s recent “Mind Matters” column at Newsweek.com.

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Much of the immorality in the news these days has to do with greed: Wealthy financiers running Ponzi schemes, presidential aides cheating on their taxes, industrialists spoiling the environment. There appears to be a widespread erosion of any sense of social responsibility.

What’s going on with these people? Are they simply bad people? Are our educational and religious institutions failing? Are the rewards of being a good and honest man simply not enough to curb our darker impulses? Or are we all both sinners and saints, depending on the circumstances?

Psychologists have been looking into these questions, specifically the idea that we all toggle back and forth constantly between righteousness and immorality. Is it possible that we have a set point for morality, much like we do for body weight? Three Northwestern University psychologists recently explored this question in the laboratory, with some intriguing results.

Sonya Sachdeva, Rumen Iliev and Douglas Medin had the idea that our sense of moral self-worth might serve as a kind of thermostat, tilting us toward moral stricture at one time and moral license at another, but keeping us on a steady track. They tested this by priming volunteers’ feelings of moral superiority—or their sense of guilt—and watching what happened.

In one experiment, for example, they had the volunteers write brief stories about themselves. Some were required to use words like generous, fair and kind, while others wrote their stories using words such as greedy, mean and selfish. This was the unconscious prime, well known to activate feeling of either righteousness or regret. Afterward, all the volunteers were given a chance to donate money to a favorite charity; as much as $10 or as little as zero. The volunteers didn’t know their charity was being measured as part of the experiment, and the results were unambiguous. Those who were primed to think of their moral transgressions gave on average $5.30, more than twice that of controls; those who were primed to feel self-righteous gave a piddling $1.07.

These results suggest that when people feel immoral, they “cleanse” their self image by acting unselfishly. But when they have reason to feel a little superior, that positive self image triggers a sense of moral license. That is, the righteous feel they have some latitude to stray a bit in order to compensate. It’s like working in a soup kitchen gives you the right to cheat on your taxes later in the week.

The psychologists wanted to double check these findings, and they did so in the context of the environment. That is, do the same feelings of moral superiority and moral transgression shape the trade-offs we make between self-interest and the health of the planet? They used the same primes, and then had all the volunteers pretend they were managing a manufacturing plant. As managers, they had to choose how much they would pay to operate filters that would control smokestack pollution. They could simply obey the industry standard, or they could do more or less; that is, choose social responsibility or choose to cheat the common good.

The results, reported in the April issue of the journal Psychological Science, were clear. Those who were feeling morally debased were much more communitarian, spending more money for the sake of clean skies. The morally righteous were stingy, and what’s more, they took the view that plant managers should put profits ahead of green concerns. They saw it as a business decision, not an ethical choice.

So it appears that our inner moralist deals in a kind of moral “currency.” We collect chits through our good deeds, and debts through our transgressions, and we spend our chits to pay off our moral debts. That way, we keep the moral ledger balanced.

For more insights into the quirks of human nature, visit “We’re Only Human” at www.psychologicalscience.org/onlyhuman. Excerpts from the blog also appear regularly in the magazine Scientific American Mind and at sciam.com.

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I used to jog a fair bit, and when I did I loved having a regular running partner. It’s not that I’m undisciplined, but his company nudged me to run just a bit farther or faster than I might on my own. And some days it worked the other way. It’s like we drew motivation and stamina from each other’s presence.

This will come as no surprise to anyone who has ever enlisted a friend to go on a diet or joined a group to quit smoking or drinking. We have this intuitive sense that our minds and bodies are intertwined with those of others, that we can use these deep neural connections to improve discipline and enhance performance. And it often appears to work.

But is there a downside to such psychological cohesion? Is it possible that we might also be emotionally and physically depleted by others’ efforts? In other words, can your self-discipline literally wear me out?

Psychologists are very interested in the power of vicarious thoughts and feelings, because they have clear implications for everything from public health campaigns to personnel management. What if cohesion and camaraderie are actually taking an unseen toll on workers and dieters and recovering addicts?

Yale University psychologist Joshua Ackerman and colleagues decided to explore this idea in the laboratory. They wondered if we might automatically and unconsciously simulate the behavior of others around us—and if such internal aping might lead to real mental exhaustion and breakdown of discipline. They devised a couple clever experiments to test this theory of vicarious depletion.

In one study, they had a group of volunteers read a story about a waiter at a fancy restaurant. The waiter arrives at work hungry, but he is prohibited from eating any of the restaurant food. The story describes in mouth-watering detail the meals that the hungry waiter must serve: Imagine cold poached salmon, roast chicken and fresh asparagus, chocolate mousse cake. Some simply read the story, but others were told to put themselves in the waiter’s shoes, to imagine his thoughts and feelings.

Then all the volunteers played a game sort of like The Price Is Right. They estimated the value of goods like watches and cars and major appliances and bid on them. The idea was to see if vicariously experiencing the waiter’s self-discipline would deplete the volunteers’ own self-discipline—and if that depletion would affect their behavior in a completed unrelated realm, namely shopping. Would the torture of denying oneself all that delicious food turn the volunteers into spendthrifts?

And it did, dramatically. Those who suffered along with the fictional waiter spent a full $6000 more than the others on imaginary luxury items. The psychologists did a separate test of mood just to rule out the possibility that they were squandering their cash because of grumpiness. They weren’t. It appears they exhausted their reserve of self-discipline in the restaurant and that the exhaustion carried over.

The psychologists wanted to double-check these findings using a more realistic and complex scenario. Some of the volunteers did the same hungry waiter exercise, but others read about a well-fed waiter who worked in a mediocre fast-food joint. Afterward they had them complete a difficult and time-pressured word problem—one known to tax a host of executive skills like concentration, motivation and information processing.

The results, reported in the March issue of the journal Psychological Science, were interesting and not entirely expected. Again, those who took the part of the hungry waiter became cognitively depleted—leading to inferior performance on the problem-solving task. But those who merely witnessed the waiter’s self-control were better problem-solvers than those who witnessed the well-fed waiter. That is, seeing someone exert control sparked the idea of discipline and reinforced the goal, but actually experiencing the denial led to vicarious exhaustion.

This raises an intriguing possibility. It’s well known that dysfunctional groups don’t perform well, but these findings suggest that group coordination can also work “too well.” That is, if group members—workers, exercisers, addicts—are too tightly synchronized with each other, the exhaustion of one group member can spread to the entire group. Despite its name, self-control is a social enterprise, which means that our own successes and failures may be shaped by others more than we like to think.

For more insights into the quirks of human nature, visit “We’re Only Human” at www.psychologicalscience.org/onlyhuman. Excerpts from the blog also appear regularly in the magazine Scientific American Mind and at http://www.sciam.com/.

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