Thank you all for supporting Real World Research. Writing it has been fun and educational, but after more than a year at it, I’m finding its demands—in terms of the amount of research it requires and my own writer’s OCD (revise, revise, revise, revise, and then revise one more time, or maybe two)–has made it too difficult to maintain.

And so, dear readers, I am shutting down the Real World Research lab.

I’ll be taking a little time off from Psych Central while I finish my book, The Introvert’s Way: Living a Quiet Life in a Noisy World, which will be released later this year by Perigee Books.

But I will be back here in May with a whole new blog. I hope you’ll come back ‘cause I’m gonna miss you all.

Thanks for reading Real World Research and hasta luego,

Sophia Dembling

The implication is that nonfiction is a higher calling, that fiction is a frivolous pastime while nonfiction is a serious education. This has been a push-pull throughout the history of the novel, especially since early novels tended towards salacious or scandalous, more Danielle Steel than Ian McEwan.

Poet Samuel Coleridge, (1712 to 1835) stated his case thus:

I will run the risk of asserting that where the reading of novels prevails as a habit, it occasions in time the entire destruction of the powers of the mind: it is such an utter loss to the reader, that it is not so much to be called pass-time as kill-time. It…provokes no improvement of the intellect, but fills the mind with a mawkish and morbid sensibility, which is directly hostile to the cultivation, invigoration, and enlargement of the nobler powers of the understanding.

My brain must be a mawkish mess  because I love a good novel (currently reading Ann Patchett’s State of Wonder, thumbs  up). I love nonfiction too, but the escape and emotional charge novels provide have always been preferable to me (unless we’re talking narrative nonfiction, like Erik Larson’s engaging histories or a book I recently read in practically one gulp, The Big House: A Century in the Life of an American Summer Home).

So I was gratified to read this New York Times story about the neuroscience of reading fiction.

Some mighty nice connections are being made between reading fiction and how we behave in real life.

Raymond Mar, a psychologist at York University in Canada, performed an analysis of 86 fMRI studies, published last year in the Annual Review of Psychology, and concluded that there was substantial overlap in the brain networks used to understand stories and the networks used to navigate interactions with other individuals — in particular, interactions in which we’re trying to figure out the thoughts and feelings of others. Scientists call this capacity of the brain to construct a map of other people’s intentions “theory of mind.” Narratives offer a unique opportunity to engage this capacity, as we identify with characters’ longings and frustrations, guess at their hidden motives and track their encounters with friends and enemies, neighbors and lovers.

It is an exercise that hones our real-life social skills, another body of research suggests. … individuals who frequently read fiction seem to be better able to understand other people, empathize with them and see the world from their perspective. This relationship persisted even after the researchers accounted for the possibility that more empathetic individuals might prefer reading novels.

I would love to see the study taken another step–comparing reading what are considered trashy novels with reading literature. Are “good” books more effective in honing our theory of mind? I’m betting no, that any book dealing with personal interactions will have the same effect. On the other hand, how do, say, Harlequin romances read in quantity (as fans of them tend to do) affect a person’s theory of mind? Do people who read mostly mysteries and thrillers have a mistrustful theory of mind?

In a somewhat related study, researchers  found that watching tragic movies increases people’s feelings of gratitude.

 …watching tragedy inspires self-reflection, which allows us to re-focus on the people in our lives we might otherwise take for granted. The melancholy emotions these tales arouse ultimately provoke pleasant feelings of gratitude.

I’m going to generalize this study to include reading. I imagine the researchers used movies because it’s a lot easier to sit a bunch of college students/research participants in front of the movie Atonement than sit them down and have them read the whole book. But we are still talking about lies and make-believe, i.e. stories, and the good they can do for us.

Taken together, these studies should give fiction its due. Reading novels is, in fact, educational. It helps us with the soft skills. And that’s pretty important stuff. So nanner, nanner, Mr. Samuel Coleridge.

Photograph by bulinna via Flickr (Creative Commons).

The anecdote:

A professor stood before a philosophy class holding an empty jar. As the students took their seats, she began filling the jar with golf balls. When they reached the top, she asked the students if the jar was full. They agreed that it was. The professor then took a bag of pebbles and poured them into the jar, and they made their way between the spaces of the golf balls. Again she asked the students if the jar was full, and they agreed that it was.

But the professor had another trick up her sleeve. She brought out a bag of sand and proceeded to pour the grains into the jar, filling up more of the remaining space. Again the question came: “It’s full now, correct?” The answer was a resounding “Yes.”

The professor then took a sip of her coffee and dumped the rest into the jar, filling up spaces that no one thought was there.

The thought: how does our brain process negative space?

Like, for example, the space between the golf balls that the pebbles fill, the spaces between the pebbles that the sand fills, and so on.

Imagine a jar full of golf balls. What does the space where there are no golf balls look like? I see small spaces, sort of scalloped. Not much room to roam.

When you learn to draw you are taught to look at the negative as well as the positive spaces. For example, if you are drawing a model with a hand on her hip, the triangle of space inside her bent her arm is as much a part of the drawing as the arm itself. Sometimes looking at the negative spaces in a form gives you a more accurate view of the positive spaces.

In her brilliant book Drawing from the Right Side of the Brain, Betty Edwards talks about how when we start drawing, we tend to get stuck on visual representations of things rather than seeing what is there.

In other words, we might draw a child’s version of a flower (a round circle surrounded by petals) rather than the actual flower that is in front of us. By looking at negative spaces, we take our focus from the idea of a flower to the reality of an object in space. And that is when we start being able to draw what is there.

The drawing that illustrates this post is a classic example of how our shifting focus can change our perception. Do you see a young woman in a hat, or an old woman in a babushka?

How is it we can see the same image but not the same image? Do different parts of the brain light up depending on how we perceive the image? What does that mean? If we can retrain the brain by strengthening new neural connections, what  happens if we start training ourselves to look both at things and the spaces between the things?

Goldstein applies this concept to the way we live life, with the golf balls representing the most important things in our lives. If you don’t put the golf balls in the jar first, you have no room for them. It’s another useful image.

And it makes me think about the spaces between the golf balls. If we take our focus away from the “things” in our lives—people, work, obligations—what do the spaces between them look like? How much room is there? Is the space cramped? Airy? Is there room to roam or is it all chopped up into little bits? What about our relationships? What does the empty space there look like? Does it look like something missing, or does it look like breathing room?

Are we stuck seeing a representation of something in our lives rather than what is actually there? And can training ourselves to look at the negative spaces change the way we perceive the world?

The current fracas over Rush Limbaugh’s unbelievably inappropriate sexist rant against Sandra Fluke brings this back to my mind

I’m going to use this opportunity to recommend a new documentary I’ve seen twice now and could easily sit through again. It’s called Miss Representation, and it’s all about how the media’s representation of women shapes our attitudes and contributes to women’s lack of power in this country.

Lack of power? The “feminazis”? Don’t be silly. We’re modern, liberated, in-charge women.

I wish.

Consider this: Women are 51 percent of the population but only 17 percent of Congress. America ranks 90th in the world in women in legislature. Even China is more progressive than we are in that respect.

Women hold a whopping three percent of power positions in the media—and that includes TV, radio, publishing, online media—all of it. So this means that pretty much everything we (and, more importantly, our children) see in the media is filtered through the sensibilities of men—and that is not to our benefit.

The denigration and disempowerment of women happens not only with the relentless sexualized images with which we are bombarded daily, but also one or two “jokes” at a time. One or two little words at a time. Slut. Prostitute. Fat. Bitch.

I am an unabashed feminist and “know” the issues that women face, but was not prepared for the effect the montages of clips in this documentary would have on me. It’s worse than I was consciously aware of…and it won’t get better unless it gets different. Very different.

Miss Representation is being screened around the country—I saw it at a couple of local colleges. If you have daughters, take them to see it. If you have sons, take them to see it. If you are interested in the position of women in our society, go see it yourself. If it’s not being screened in your city, arrange a screening yourself.

Here’s an eight-minute trailer  (there’s a shorter one here but I highly recommend the longer one).

Miss Representation 8 min. Trailer 8/23/11 from Miss Representation on Vimeo.

After you’ve rolled around together a few thousand times, sex can become rote, which is, to use the technical term, a bummer. People in long-term relationships do all kinds of things to try to keep the passion alive—dressing in costumes, role playing, bringing gizmos and gadgets into the bedroom.

Or  they could try just talking, suggests a study titled “Day-to-Day Changes in Intimacy Predict Heightened Relationship Passion, Sexual Occurrence, and Sexual Satisfaction.”

Not any old talking, but the kind of talk that advances intimacy. That is, self-disclosure; telling your partner stuff he or she didn’t know about you. Of course, this only works when your partner responds with warmth and sympathy. And vice versa.

The researchers theorize that one reason passion is so high in budding relationships is because couples are learning about each other, and each sympathetically received self-disclosure causes passion to flare. Over time, however, the revelations slow, the new information dries up, intimacy reaches a plateau, and sex hits the doldrums.

Some researchers consider passion an emotion that is experienced as physiological desire. It’s also a motivational emotion—it motivates you to want to get that fine piece into bed. 

That’s all well and good, but genuine emotions are difficult to impossible to conjure out of thin air. Chances are you can’t just look at a partner of, say, 10 years, and elicit passion from nothing new. You need something to trigger the emotion, and this study suggests that self-disclosure leads to intimacy leads to passion. (Although the article points out that this is not a great tactic for a first date. TMI usually is not an aphrodisiac.)

The study was done with 67 heterosexual couples, average age of 27.39 for the men, 25.96 for women, and the average relationship length was 48.6 months. Participants filled out daily diaries individually. Both men and women filled out an average of about 19 daily diaries.

The researchers found a connection between feelings of intimacy and sexual activity and satisfaction with sexual activity. They also found that if one member of a couple felt a boost in intimacy, it boosted passion for both.

…although it may tend to decay over time, passionate love can be fed and kept alive within relationships, where partners actively pursue fresh discoveries about each other and thus fuel continued growth in intimacy.

How to use this in the real world?

Certainly doing new things together is good for relationships. The novelty of something new is close enough to the novelty of a new relationship to bring a little zip to things.

…couples in long-term, and generally satisfying, relationships who take part in novel and arousing activities experience a boost in relationship satisfaction. These novel experiences appear to recreate the relatively rapid intimacy growth present in new relationships, where novel shared experiences are common.

Doing something new together can show you a completely new aspect of your longtime honey. (“Wow, he wasn’t scared at all on that zipline. Who knew he was so brave?”)

Perhaps, too, a certain amount of autonomy can help a relationship because if individuals are out having their own experiences, they each have something new to bring home to the other, providing opportunities for new self-disclosure. (This might just be my take on it though, because I have never been, could never be, part of a joined-at-the-hip couple. The very thought makes me hyperventilate.)

But probably the most important take-home here is that women’s need to talk about feeeeeeelings is not just a way to irritate their menfolk. It is a way of keeping intimacy growing and therefore, increasing passion. So instead of sighing and bracing for subtle torture when they hear the words, “We need to talk,” men in long-term relationships should remind themselves that a good talk might very well lead to other good things.

Goldstein is a psychologist in private practice, and his excellent blog is about mindfulness. His book, The Now Effect: How This Moment Can Change the Rest of Your Life, is a manual for learning mindfulness. The book is short, quick-read chapters that leave you with lots to think about and try.

“See, Touch, Go” is the chapter that twanged a note in my brain–one image, in particular. Goldstein describes the See, Touch, Go method in an anecdote, through the words of a dog trainer trying to help a family frustrated by their rambunctious rescue dog.

“‘See, touch, go.’ When your mind begins to wander off onto all your worries and frustrations with this dog, see that your mind has wandered, touch the thought like you might softly touch your reflection in a pond, and then gently go back to focusing on the training we’ve discussed.”

OK, so the dog trainer is beside the point. What got me is this:

Touch the thought like you might softly touch your reflection in a pond.

For years, I have struggled with the meditation skill of letting thoughts just drift through my mind. My thoughts always seem to snag on something and hang around. But touching a pond … that may be the image I need. I imagine softly touching a pond, the thought, so the water barely ripples out in concentric circles that grow wider and softer and fade to stillness.

Yes, I think I can do that. For whatever reason, that makes perfect sense to me.

Imagery. It’s so powerful. We all use it, for better or worse. Athletes use it extensively and successfully. It can help musicians. It’s used to treat phobias and eating disorders.

One study looks at the images people with social phobia take into interactions. Participants in the study entered two social interactions with a stranger, holding a positive image of themselves in one encounter, a negative image in another.

With a positive image of themselves, the people experienced less anxiety, appeared less anxious, and performed better. And when participant and assessor ratings were compared afterwards,  it seemed the negative imagery caused people with social anxiety to underestimate their performance after the fact, and overestimate how nervous they had seemed. In other words, positive self-imagery not only helps people perform better, but it helps them feel like they performed better, too.

It sorta sounds like a no-brainer but is it really? Plus it’s easier to think about now that we have an image of a person going into a room first with a negative self-image, then with a positive self-image. I can picture that. It gives me something to work with.

Imagery is strongly tied to emotion. One theory suggests that to avoid distressing images, people think about bad stuff in verbal form, which leads to pathological worry or depressive rumination. In other words, maybe we get words spinning around and around in our heads rather than just looking a fear right in the eye. And I mean looking. An image. Worst-case scenario.

A 2010 article titled “Mental imagery in emotion and emotional disorders” includes a useful little rundown on some theories on imagery and emotion.

One theory says that our brain’s emotional systems are sensitive to imagery because emotions appeared pretty early in our evolution, before we had language but when we still had to be sensitive to risks and rewards. It’s possible that emotional responses are unconnected to higher-level processes. Imagery goes straight to the amygdala.

And it appears that imagery can override, to some extent, other perceptual processes. If you hold a visual image in your head, you are likely to miss any “faint visual signal,” in the real world, because imagining and seeing use some of the same brain processes. (Same with auditory images; imagining a sound can cause you to miss real sound.) So whatever we imagine, good or bad, can override at least a little bit of reality. (More fodder for the debate about cell phones and driving, because we probably conjure an image of the person we’re talking to as we talk.)

Imagery also appears to be important in autobiographical memory. When we remember, we are highly likely to do it with images, and those images stimulate emotions.

So.

Touch the thought like you might softly touch your reflection in a pond.

This image is tranquil. I know what it looks like, I know what it feels like, the emotion it elicits is pleasant and peaceful. The imagery of the rippling water also leads me out of the turbulent center of a busy mind to stillness. This image gives me something on which to hang an abstract concept.

Imagery is both personal and universal. Not all images work for all people, you have to find or invent your own. But once you find a useful image, it’s a great tool for your cognitive toolbox. (Can you picture that?)

Think about the Dowager Countess of Grantham, marvelous Maggie Smith. When she doesn’t like something, she gets a face like a cat that’s smelled something bad. And you get the message.

If you read authors like Edith Wharton and Jane Austin, you know there’s not a lot of bellowing and stomping around. Hearts are broken, fortunes lost, people became ill, or bereaved, despondent or angry, and through everything, they all use their inside voices.

Compare that to, say, the last week on this blog, in which the volume on everything was turned up to 11 (although the comments remained civil and I thank you all for that). Daughter had to rant in public to make her point, Dad had to shoot a computer to make his point, I had to “hate” Dad to make my point. And I’m not generally a hater. But I got swept into what seems a trend of our time: anger that becomes superheated, superfast.

It’s not necessarily just that America is getting less civil. For some reason these days, it seems we need the volume on all our emotions cranked way up. Even negative emotions. Maybe especially negative emotions. We need to watch screen violence that is increasingly extreme, we need to fight our battles publicly and with insults and vehemence, and we need to grieve extravagantly, where everyone can see us.

I was changed when Princess Diana was suddenly and tragically killed. Not because I cared about her, but because the level of public wailing and garment-rending, the piles of teddy bears, the overheated coverage, all kinda freaked me out. It was like grief gone wild. At that point, I checked out of the cult of celebrity.  I totally didn’t get it.

I grieved when John Lennon was shot. I even joined the crowd at the Dakota, where he lived and died, for Yoko’s 10 minutes of silence. But I went to the Dakota, I thought about John Lennon, I shed a tear, I went home. I didn’t camp out by a police barrier and wail, or leave a tear-stained letter on the  sidewalk.

And in addition to the period of communal grief when a national or world figure dies, social networking has  made grief part of the background noise of our lives. We get the outpourings of posts, comments, and videos when public figures die, but we also get the stream of personal little tributes: “it was 10 years ago,” … “miss you every day” …

I don’t object. I’m just observing.

We see symbols of grief on our streets and roadways. Near my home, a girl died when her car hit a tree. This was years ago. Five? Ten? It’s all blurred together, but this entire time, a shrine of flowers and stuffed animals has hung from that tree. The items are changed and refreshed occasionally, but not often. Maybe they change them every year, on the anniversary. I don’t know. For a long time, there was a large stuffed dog, pinned to the tree trunk by its ears, growing filthier and more forlorn as the seasons changed. It was depressing. And not in a good way. Something else has been pinned up there now, I think, and is in its own stage of decay.

The Oklahoma City National Memorial & Museum  honors “those who were killed, those who survived and those changed forever” by the 1995 bombing of the  Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building.  I particularly like the Gates of Time, which are an elegant tribute to the moments before and after the fatal explosion . And the museum is remarkable and engrossing.

But there’s more. With all due respect to the victims, there is a whole lot of memorializing here. The gates and reflecting pool are the centerpiece, but the other centerpiece is the Field of Empty Chairs. Then there’s the Survivor Wall and the Survivor Tree. Also the Rescuers Orchard. There’s a wall full of colorful messages from children. And there’s The Fence, a small section of what was the original fence around the bomb site, where people still leave mementos and tributes. Two-hundred feet of fence covered with beads and stickers, crosses, cards, notes, wreaths, teddy bears, ID cards…whatever people could part with that would add their voice to the grief for all time. (Or until they clean the fence off and let it all start fresh. And all the mementos are archived)

It’s folk art, but what’s it about? Why are people drawn to a site that is designed to evoke sadness? Why do they feel compelled to enter the sadness?

What purpose do negative emotions serve? Why do we seek them out and why do we seem to need them? We yell at each other online, watch extreme violence, grieve loudly and/or publicly–there must be some reward to all that or we wouldn’t do it. Humans are funny that way.

In pondering this question, I stumbled on the Institute for Dark Tourism Research, which has been in the works for a while and will officially  launch with a symposium in April.

Dark tourism. I hadn’t heard that phrase. The Oklahoma City memorial, is dark tourism. So is Ground Zero. Battlefields. Auschwitz. The London Dungeon.  Alcatraz (one of my favorites).

From institute’s website:

It is only recently that dark tourism, in its various shades, has become widespread and seemingly more popular. Whilst it remains unclear as to whether the proliferation of dark tourism is due to an increased supply of attractions and sites, or whether consumers are demanding more and more of the macabre, media inspired or otherwise, death in touristic form is an increasing feature of the contemporary landscape.

It’s all of a piece, I think.  Yelling on blogs, watching people get blown up, visiting places that make us cry. We are drawn to the dark side, and perhaps more than we used to be. (Maybe? What do you think?)  We seek out ways to feel bad.

Have our lives become so easy that we seek out negative emotions? Are the ordinary scuffles, stories, and tragedies of our everyday lives no longer enough to satiate our need for negativity? Does grief connect us more strongly with others? Are we flooded with some sort of rewarding brain chemical when we experience grief and anger? (I assume anger comes with a dose of adrenalin, but does grief?) Can we become addicted to feelings?

Why have we supersized even negative emotions?

I regret the tone but stand behind the content of my last post. So here’s a voice of reason to say it all better. Today’s guest post is by my friend Dr. Lara Mayeux, a developmental psychologist who studies kids’ peer relations at the University of Oklahoma, and mother of two young daughters (read about her wishes for them here). 

If you want to read original research into parenting styles and child outcomes, Lara suggests looking  for Nina Mounts (parenting and peer relationships); Joan Grusec  (parenting and social and emotional development); Robert Larzelere (discipline and research methodology); Laurence Steinberg (adolescent development). Diana Baumrind is one of the pioneers in the study of parenting styles; a lot of subsequent research has been based on her work.

*****

By Lara Mayeux

I have to get this off my chest: I’m really, really tired of seeing parents celebrated for their bad parenting choices.

Parenting is hard. I get that — I have two kids under the age of five. And none of us is perfect, and we shouldn’t expect each other to be. But there’s a big difference between allowing parents some room to screw up, and actually cheering them on when they’ve made a mistake. And I’m telling you, this laptop-shooting dad—he made a mistake.

Let me tell you why. And while I’m at it, I’m also (incidentally) telling you why parents who do any number of creepy things that have gained some traction in the media recently are also making mistakes. Parents who (for example) stand on street corners with signs denigrating their children, or parents who seem to refuse to allow their teens the slightest bit of autonomy (paging the Tiger Mother).

The science of parenting, even to an expert who knows how to interpret these things, can be confusing, contradictory, and even counterintuitive. Certain parenting choices, like spanking and other forms of corporal punishment, can have anywhere from neutral to very negative effects on children’s adjustment, depending on a variety of parental and child factors. Finding a clear, straight answer to a question like “How should I discipline my child?” isn’t easy, because it depends largely on the temperament of the child, among other things.

Parenting researchers often highlight the importance of parental control, and they typically study two types: behavioral control (things like setting rules, restrictions, and types of discipline) and psychological control.

Behavioral control seems to work best at moderate levels. For example, children who are well-adjusted tend to have parents who provide them with appropriate levels of structure (not too lax, not too rigid), and discipline them consistently and without getting physical. Psychological control, on the other hand, includes things like guilt trips, love withdrawal, and verbal hostility—things that typically don’t bode well for child outcomes, particularly in the context of other risk factors, like living in a high-conflict home.

So-called “tough love” — which our culture seems to find very appealing in response to children acting like, well, children – often includes elements of psychological control. It certainly seems to be cathartic for parents, especially parents of teenagers. And I’ve no doubt that most parents who take extreme measures, like hostility or severe restriction of their child’s freedom, absolutely mean well and think their choices will help their children in the long run. (Well, I don’t know about Laptop Dad. His reaction just seemed petty and vindictive to me.)

But the reality is that these kinds of reactions to children’s misbehavior don’t actually serve their intended purpose. As parents, our primary goal is to socialize our children into independent adults who can form healthy relationships with others and make good choices on their own. But when our parenting behaviors undermine our relationships with our children (as guilt trips, love withdrawal, and hostility do) or model unhealthy or destructive behaviors (like violence), we’re not making good choices as parents.

Again, no parent is perfect. Sometimes I’ll hear a guilt trip sneak into my own discipline with my girls, and cringe. There’s such a fine line between inducing empathy and inducing guilt. But all I can do is try to do better the next time. I’m lucky to have supportive friends and family to remind me that I’m not going to ruin them by laying on the guilt every once in a while. But to encourage and even celebrate bad parenting choices, to the extent that those choices are held up as heroic? Now that’s a different story.

*****

Me again, with a list of some of Lara’s favorite parenting books, in case you want to read more about it without getting into the original research:

Playful Parenting by Lawrence J. Cohen

Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers by Gordon Neufeld and Gabor Mate M.D.

The Discipline Book: How to Have a Better-Behaved Child From Birth to Age Ten by Martha and William Sears (She cautions me that this one might be controversial.)

How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish

Photo by André Mouraux via Flickr (Creative Commons).

(If you haven’t seen it yet, click here.)

The girl’s post complained about how her parents made her work soo hard and how she hated having to do chores and how instead of making her get a job, her parents should pay her for everything she does around the house and blah blah blah, etc. etc. etc. basic teenager bitching and moaning.

Well, this made daddy soo angry that he posted a video online of himself sitting in a field, cigarette smoldering in one hand, his voice trembling with rage, telling his daughter everything that was wrong with the post, and how disrespectful she is, how hard he worked as a kid, and how he warned her about posting stupid stuff of Facebook. Then, to punish her, he pulls out a gun and shoots several rounds into her laptop.

I hate this video. I hate this man. I hate his indignant self-righteousness and thin skin.

I know teenagers can be aggravating, but they’re teenagers. They do stupid shit. They bitch and moan. They rail against authority. They get pissed at their parents. That’s all part of being a teenager. Parents’ job is to not to show them who’s boss or keep them in line, but to help them become grow up and become independent without hurting themselves or anyone else. In the scale of bad adolescent behavior, complaining about your parents ranks pretty low.

Laptop-shooting dad was as impulsive and childish as his daughter. I could tell by that enraged tremble in his voice that this was not a man 100 percent in control. Like his daughter, he ranted, he posted it online, and he took it a step further by pulling a weapon on a defenseless laptop.

It’s good that he took his rage out on the laptop rather than his child, but it was an act of rage nonetheless. And for what? Because she lipped off. She didn’t break any laws, she didn’t cause injury. She used a few curse words and had herself a little public rant. He’s set the bar pretty high now for punishment. What will he do when she does something really bad? And she just might.

Now, I have no idea what kind of dad this guy is when he’s not smokin’ mad. Maybe he’s Bill Cosby 364 days a year, but just reached his limit. But if this video is an example of his parenting style, then he may have reason to be concerned about what mischief his daughter might get into next.

Research about parenting styles is crystal clear on the superiority of authoritative parenting . Authoritative parenting places limits and controls on kids while also respecting kids’ autonomy. Discipline is consistent, and not harsh or arbitrary, and the punishment fits the crime.

Authoritarian parenting, on the other hand, is “my way or the highway” parenting. Strict, totalitarian, and with little discussion.

Research shows that authoritarian parenting is positively correlated with delinquency, and new research finds that one reason for this is that kids of authoritarian parents were less likely to consider their parents’ authority legitimate.

To measure kids’ perception of the legitimacy of their parents’ authority, the researchers adapted a scale originally developed to measure attitudes towards police.

Ten items were selected and reworded to reflect participants’ trust in their parents (e.g., “My parents can be trusted to make decisions that are right for me”) and their obligation to obey their parents’ rules (e.g., “I should do what my parents tell me to do even when I do not like the way they treat me”). Respondents reported their agreement with each item on a four point Likert Scale (1: Strongly Disagree; 4:Strongly Agree).

Kids who reported their parents as authoritarian were more likely to discount the legitimacy of their parents’ authority, and more likely to do things like smoke, drink, and steal.

This study does have some serious limitations, outlined at the end of the article. For one, they relied on kids’ reports on both parenting style and delinquent behaviors. Kids might report their parents as being more authoritarian than they really are because that’s what kids do. And they might have exaggerated their delinquent behaviors because, as other research shows, popular kids tend to do stuff like smoking, drinking and having sex, and kids want to be perceived as popular.

Still, it’s hard to imagine laptop-shooting dad getting genuine remorse and respect from his daughter when he went ahead indulged in the same bad behavior as she, and then some. Daddy threw a tantrum.

I’m sure the video and the accolades that followed made him feel like a big man. But to me, he’s just a crybaby with a gun.

I picked up The Squeaky Wheel: Complaining the Right Way To Get Results, Improve Your Relationships, Enhance Self-Esteem, by psychologist Guy Winch, in hopes of learning something about the chronic complainers in my life.

But the book taught me as much about myself as others.

Despite the many years that have passed since, I still wince remembering my last months on a job that had gone bad. I became the person whose friends ducked for cover when they saw me coming because they knew to expect a litany of complaints about my miserable life.

And a few years ago, when I was again floundering professionally, I realized with horror that friends had started looking at me with pity. It was an awful epiphany. As Winch points out. “By succumbing to the special attention pity offers us, the convenience of lowered expectations, and other secondary gains associated with being objects of others’ sorrow, we become victims in our own eyes as well as those of others.”

I am going to imprint those important words on my brain. I don’t want friends pitying or dodging me.

And while I’ve been feeling bad about wanting to avoid the chronic complainers in my life, this book helped me understand the risks of complaining for the sake of complaining.

Rather than citing empirical research, Winch bases most of what he writes on his own experiences and his work as a therapist. But his hypotheses about the risks and benefits of complaining bear testing in the real world.

Returning to my original intent, I asked Winch, via email, a few questions about chronic complainers. (Not me, of course. Other people)

Your book focuses on the benefits—economically, emotionally, and in relationships–of effective complaining. What differentiates positive from negative complaining?

Positive complaints are like good project managers—they know how to get results. Complaining is not about being right or proving a point, it’s about getting a resolution. Negative complaints are ones that have no purpose other than to let off steam. They don’t change anything and they often make things worse (perhaps because we lack the necessary skill sets to complain effectively). Complaints, especially those that are meaningful to us, provide us with golden opportunities to do things such as clear the air in a relationship, or feel empowered, or improve our communities. It’s a shame to waste them.

Why do people get stuck in a complaining rut? Is it because they complain ineffectively or do you think they get something positive from it?

Unfortunately, there’s something quite broken in our complaining psychology—which is the perceptions, feelings and beliefs that get triggered when we have a complaint or dissatisfaction. No matter how frustrated we are, we believe that addressing our complaint to the person who can resolve it (be it our spouse, colleague, or customer service rep) will resolve nothing and only lead to an argument or a confrontation. So we choose to vent to our friends about it instead and end up spending just as much time, effort and aggravation (we relive the angst every time we tell the tale) as we would have had we complained productively in the first place.

When people understand the relationship and self-esteem costs we pay for ineffective complaining and learn the correct techniques, they break out of the rut and complain much more effectively.

What do you think of the idea of what I call “recreational bitching and moaning”? Is there social currency to griping? At what point does it stop being recreational and start being annoying?

Venting our feelings can be very useful when it is not possible for us to resolve the complaint in that moment for whatever reason or when the matter is too insignificant to pursue but irritating enough to nag at us.

Complaints also serve social functions, such as impression management and bonding opportunities (“OMG! You hated that movie too? We’re like twins!). But once we begin to sound negative a substantial amount of the time, we’re no longer recreational moaners—we’ve turned pro. We’re chronic complainers.

In discussing chronic complainers, you say there’s a point where people’s reaction goes from compassion to pity. Is there also a point of compassion fatigue?

Absolutely! There are those rare people who suffer one terrible misfortune after another, but the vast majority of over-complainers really don’t have enough material to support their complaining habit. They either retread the same complaint territory over and over again, or they complain about increasingly insignificant things (“That was the third busted teabag this week! I’m cursed, I tell you!”). Both of these can trigger compassion fatigue in listeners, not to mention eye rolling.

You also say that many chronic complainers don’t recognize the moment when compassion ends. Does this mean it’s up to people around the chronic complainer to complain about all the complaining? How? Is that effective?

Chronic complainers don’t see themselves as being negative. They see the world as being negative and themselves as merely reflecting that reality. Therefore, getting across to them that their complaining has become problematic is by no means easy.

In my book, I describe a family therapy case in which the father was a chronic complainer. I gave him a “daily complaint budget” of a certain number of complaints per day which he was not allowed to exceed. But that only works once you have the person’s cooperation. The best and safest way to raise the issue with a chronic complainer is to first express compassion for their hard time but then to simply draw their attention to how negative they sound. And then duck.

Visit Dr. Winch’s website and watch the trailer for The Squeaky Wheel here.