health

Widely read in numerous sociology classes, the writings of Barbara Ehrenreich have become classics. Her most recent book, Bright-Sided, was discussed earlier this week on National Public Radio.

NPR’s ‘Talk of the Nation’ reports:

When author Barbara Ehrenreich was diagnosed with breast cancer, she was bombarded with wildly optimistic, inspirational phrases. But a cheerful outlook, she argues, does not cure cancer.

In her new book, Bright-Sided, Ehrenreich explores the negative effects of positive thinking, and the “reckless optimism” that dominates America’s national mindset.

“We need to brace ourselves for a struggle against terrifying obstacles,” Ehrenreich writes, “both of our own making and imposed by the natural world. And the first step is to recover from the mass delusion that is positive thinking.”

A brief excerpt from the book…

How can we be so surpassingly “positive” in self-image and stereotype without being the world’s happiest and best-off people? The answer, I think, is that positivity is not so much our condition or our mood as it is part of our ideology — the way we explain the world and think we ought to function within it. That ideology is “positive thinking,” by which we usually mean two things. One is the generic content of positive thinking — that is, the positive thought itself — which can be summarized as: Things are pretty good right now, at least if you are willing to see silver linings, make lemonade out of lemons, etc., and things are going to get a whole lot better. This is optimism, and it is not the same as hope. Hope is an emotion, a yearning, the experience of which is not entirely within our control. Optimism is a cognitive stance, a conscious expectation, which presumably anyone can develop through practice.

The second thing we mean by “positive thinking” is this practice, or discipline, of trying to think in a positive way. There is, we are told, a practical reason for undertaking this effort: positive thinking supposedly not only makes us feel optimistic but actually makes happy outcomes more likely. If you expect things to get better, they will. How can the mere process of thinking do this? In the rational explanation that many psychologists would offer today, optimism improves health, personal efficacy, confidence, and resilience, making it easier for us to accomplish our goals. A far less rational theory also runs rampant in American ideology — the idea that our thoughts can, in some mysterious way, directly affect the physical world. Negative thoughts somehow produce negative outcomes, while positive thoughts realize themselves in the form of health, prosperity, and success. For both rational and mystical reasons, then, the effort of positive thinking is said to be well worth our time and attention, whether this means reading the relevant books, attending seminars and speeches that offer the appropriate mental training, or just doing the solitary work of concentration on desired outcomes — a better job, an attractive mate, world peace.

Listen to the report here.

Read the NPR transcript.

With this week’s vote in the Senate Finance Committee, Senator Olympia Snowe (R) of Maine, along with 13 other Democrats approved the committee’s healthcare bill. The Times’ blog Room for Debate notes:

For months, [Snowe’s] support seemed pivotal to health care’s overhaul in the Senate. For much of the public, it’s puzzling that the politics of reshaping a sector that accounts for 16 percent of the G.D.P. should seemingly hinge on one senator.

Is this a healthy and expected consequence of Congressional politics? What might this say about how partisan politics has evolved? Is there a historical precedent that we might compare this to?

Sociologist Theda Skocpol, of Harvard University, weighs in on the debate:

No, it is not healthy. But the problem is not just Olympia Snowe — it is a set of Senate rules, formal and informal, that privilege a few votes from senators in small states.

This vote is not the final word, however. This is just a matter of getting a bill out of Senate Finance committee. Bills have to be merged for a final vote in each house, and a conference will work out final details between the Senate and House versions in due course. A lot can and will change.

Olympia Snowe is trying to maintain her leverage in this process, and she is in a sense a proxy for various conservative Democrats, too. She wants to try to shape the final “compromise” on a public option — essentially to block it with a “trigger” approach that would prevent a real option.

Remember, in the end, Olympia Snowe really cannot obstruct final passage. She may get in trouble with fellow Republicans in the Senate if she votes with the Democrats, but she will be in bigger trouble at home in Maine if she obstructs. Maine people want reform.

We have a long ways to go and this is not really all that decisive.

Read more from the New York Times.

Yesterday USA Today ran a story about how ‘flocking’ behavior has now “landed on social networking sites” like Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter. The article integrates commentary from a number of different sociologists on this trend.

USA Today reports:

The interconnected web of our friends, family, neighbors and acquaintances may dominate our lives more than we know.

They’ve always been there, making up our social support systems. But now, largely thanks to the burgeoning popularity of online social networks like Facebook, researchers are discovering what a powerful influence our connections — both online and off — really have over our lives.

“Those of us who study social networks believe they matter — that things do spread along social networks,” says Claude Fischer, a sociology professor at the University of California-Berkeley.

Another sociologist adds…

“Social networking sites have brought social networks into people’s consciousness,” says Barry Wellman, a sociologist at the University of Toronto in Canada who started analyzing social networks in the 1960s and has expanded his studies to online.

The research:

For the most part, being part of a social network is good for you, research suggests. For example, a study in this month’s Scientific American Mind finds that social support and social networking offer benefits, from additional resilience to greater life satisfaction to reducing the risk of health problems. Other studies in the past two years have found that feeling like a part of a larger group helps in stroke recovery and memory retention and boosts overall well-being.

“In many ways, human beings behave like flocks of birds or schools of fish,” says Nicholas Christakis, a physician and Harvard University sociologist who is co-author of a new book,Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives, out today.

“So many things we normally think of as individualistic — like what our body size is, or what we think about a political topic, or whether we are happy — are actually collective phenomena,” says Christakis, 47.

Whether they’re face-to-face or virtual, social networks influence human behavior and shape everything from finances to the way people vote, say Christakis and co-author James Fowler, a social scientist at the University of California-San Diego.

The authors suggest that the world is governed by what they call “three degrees of influence” — that is, your friend’s friend’s friend, most likely someone you don’t even know — who indirectly influences your actions and emotions.

For example, when a friend starts exercising more, “I change my mind about how much I should be exercising or I share stories with my other friends who are influenced to do the same. You either change your behavior or you transmit information about the behavior to others, who change their behavior,” says Fowler, 39.

Read more…

A recent story in the Metro News (Vancouver, Canada) caught my attention…

A group that tells people how to kill themselves has been barred from presenting at Vancouver’s public library over concerns that the library could be held liable for helping people to commit suicide.

Paul Whitney, the city’s librarian, said he cancelled the booking — which tells people how to kill themselves, what drug to buy and where to buy it — after legal and law enforcement advisers told him it would violate the Criminal Code.

Whitney said it was inappropriate for the publicly funded library to be putting itself in that position of “undo risk.”

About the group:

But Dr. Philip Nitschke, director of the Australian right-to-die group Exit International, said the group does not encourage people to commit suicide, but rather it gives them end-of-life information to better consider their options.

“This is an issue of vital importance to elderly Canadians … The library is a place where one would expect the free impartation and discussion of ideas and information,” said Nitschke, via an Internet video link from Australia yesterday.

The sociological perspective…

Russel Ogden, a criminologist at Kwantlen Polytechnic University who has studied assisted suicide in Canada for the past 20 years, said talking about suicide is not an offence.

There is evidence, he added, that discussing suicide can even act as a deterrent.

Read more.

The Washington Post reports today on how the Christian right has “found new life with Barack Obama in office, particularly around healthcare” as many had speculated about the declining potency of the group for cultural and political change.

The state of affairs…

As the president prepares to address a joint session of Congress on Wednesday night to press for health-care reform, conservative Christian leaders are rallying their troops to oppose him, with online town hall meetings, church gatherings, fundraising appeals, and e-mail and social networking campaigns. FRC Action, the lobbying arm of the Family Research Council, has scheduled a webcast Thursday night for tens of thousands of supporters in which House  Minority Leader John A. Boehner(R-Ohio) and other speakers will respond to the president’s health-care address.

And a sociologist explains the trend!

“Movements do better when they have something to oppose,” said D. Michael Lindsay, a sociology professor at Rice University who studies evangelicals. “It’s easier to fundraise in those kinds of situations. It’s easier to mobilize volunteers because you have an us versus them mentality, and that plays very well right now for the Christian right.”

After seeing their bread-and-butter issue of abortion take a back seat during the election last year, the Christian right has been a prime force in moving it back to the front row by focusing on it as a potential part of health-care reform.

Additional scholarly commentary…

Laura Olson, professor of politics at Clemson University, said health-care reform has been a way to rally Christian conservatives and get them back into the national conversation.

“It has the potential to remind people in that sector. . . of the American electorate that, ‘This is really one of our core concerns, and here’s a new manifestation of it,’ ” Olson said. “It puts a whole new coat of paint on it and makes it even more useful strategically.”

Read more.

Several media outlets have been buzzing about a recent sociological study that has been used to explain the proliferation and perseverance of a number of myths related to current debates about U.S. healthcare reform.

Bernie Mooney of Examiner.com writes:

Whether you support healthcare reform or not, one thing should be a given, that whatever decision you reach should be based on the facts. Despite efforts to inform people of what the bill is and what it isn’t, many still believe the myths about the not-yet finalized bill.

You would think that with easy access to the overwhelming amount of information available on the internet and elsewhere, people would be more informed. Maybe that’s the problem. With access to massive amounts of information, people can cherry pick the information that most validates and supports their original view. People want to be right, so they seek out information that supports their worldview rather then information that challenges it. Is this stupidity or is there a more deep-rooted psychological reason for this?

There just might be something at play here beyond simple stupidity. A study done by researchers from four major research institutions* may explain it. The study, There Must Be a Reason: Osama, Saddam and Inferred Justification, was published in the journal Sociological Inquiry. They focused on the belief, held by many Americans, that Saddam Hussein was linked to the terrorist attacks of 9/11 despite all evidence to the contrary.

About the study:

Dr. Steven Hoffman, co-author of the study, said of the findings, “Our data shows substantial support for a cognitive theory known as ‘motivated reasoning,’ which suggests that rather than search rationally for information that either confirms or disconfirms a particular belief, people actually seek out information that confirms what they already believe.”

“We form emotional attachments that get wrapped up in our personal identity and sense of morality, irrespective of the facts of the matter. The problem is that this notion of ‘motivated reasoning’ has only been supported with experimental results in artificial settings. We decided it was time to see if it held up when you talk to actual voters in their homes, workplaces, restaurants, offices and other deliberative settings.”

Hoffman says, “For the most part people completely ignore contrary information. We did not find that people were being duped by a campaign of innuendo so much as they were actively constructing links and justifications that did not exist.”

“They wanted to believe in the link,” he says, “because it helped them make sense of a current reality. So voters’ ability to develop elaborate rationalizations based on faulty information, whether we think that is good or bad for democratic practice, does at least demonstrate an impressive form of creativity.”

Newsweek also picked up on the story. Health columnist Sharon Begley writes:

Some people form and cling to false beliefs about health-care reform (or Obama’s citizenship) despite overwhelming evidence thanks to a mental phenomenon called motivated reasoning, says sociologist Steven Hoffman, visiting assistant professor at the University at Buffalo. “Rather than search rationally for information that either confirms or disconfirms a particular belief,” he says, “people actually seek out information that confirms what they already believe.” And God knows, in the Internet age there is no dearth of sources to confirm even the most ludicrous claims (my favorite being that the moon landings were faked). “For the most part,” says Hoffman, “people completely ignore contrary information” and are able to “develop elaborate rationalizations based on faulty information.”

His conclusions arise from a study he and six colleagues conducted. They were looking at the well-known phenomenon of Americans believing that Saddam Hussein was involved in the 9/11 attacks. Some people, mostly liberals, have blamed that on false information and innuendo spread by the Bush administration and its GOP allies (by former members of the Bush White House, too, as recently as this past March). (As Dick Cheney said in June, suspicion of a link “turned out not to be true.”) But the researchers think another force is at work. In a paper to be published in the September issue of the journalSociological Inquiry(you have to subscribe to the journal to read the full paper, but the authors kindly posted it on their Web site here), they argue that some Americans believe the Saddam-9/11 link because it “made sense of the administration’s decision to go to war against Iraq . . . [T]he fact of the war led to a search for a justification for it, which led them to infer the existence of ties between Iraq and 9/11,” they write.

Read more from Examiner.com
Read more from Newsweek.
UPI.com also picked up the story…
The New York Times also picked up the findings…

The Los Angeles Times ran a story this week, entitled “Macho Men: Too Tough for Healthcare?,” about new research suggesting that men who ‘strongly idealize masculinity’ and are of middle-age are 50% less likely to seek preventative care services from healthcare providers, in comparison to other men.

The LA Times highlighted these findings, presented at the American Sociological Association’s annual meeting:

[The study found that] men with strong masculine beliefs who worked in blue-collar jobs were more likely to report obtaining care than other men — the one exception to the findings. But highly educated macho men were just as unlikely to obtain preventive health care as low-educated macho men. Most research suggests that people with more education have better healthcare habits.

The original press release for the study included some thoughts from the author…

“This research strongly suggests that deep-seated masculinity beliefs are one core cause of men’s poor health, inasmuch as they reduce compliance with recommended preventative health services,” said Kristen W. Springer, the study’s primary investigator. Springer is an assistant professor of sociology at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, as well as a Robert Wood Johnson Health & Society Scholar at Columbia University. “Although previous research points to the health-promoting effects of higher socio-economic status, in the case of the most masculine men—those who most strongly endorse ideals of ‘old school’ masculinity—increases in job status actually have a detrimental effect on preventative healthcare seeking.”

She continues…

“For masculine men in blue-collar occupations, this research suggests that the masculinity threat of seeking health care is less concerning than the masculinity threat of not performing their jobs,” Springer said. “However, as job status increases among men who have strong masculinity beliefs, the likelihood that they will obtain preventative healthcare declines significantly. These findings provide some insight into the persistent gender paradox in health whereby men have a lower life expectancy at birth relative to women, despite having higher socioeconomic resources.”

Read more from the LA Times.

Read more from the press release.

USA Today covered the study as well, read here.

The story was also picked up by the New York Times a few days later, read here.

Earlier this week the New York Times ran a story about joblessness in the current recession. The article, entitled “The Price of U.S. Recession is Paid in Jobs,” includes commentary from sociologist Thomas Cottle.

The Times reports:

The pain of joblessness extends well beyond the workers themselves, hitting their families and entire communities as home foreclosures mount, neighborhoods decay and crime rises.

“I see long-term unemployment as a real, treacherous disease. And it kills. It kills,” said Boston University sociologist Thomas Cottle, ticking off side effects from stress and hypertension to depression, alcoholism and drug addiction.

Even the rate of dental cavities goes up as the unemployed tend to put off routine medical care, said Cottle, author of “Hardest Times: The Trauma of Long Term Unemployment.”

He worries that the recession is slowly eroding belief in the American ideal that if you work hard enough, you will get ahead. The longer unemployment endures, the more people will feel abandoned and betrayed, he said.

Read more.

Earlier this week Reuters Health ran a story about a new study suggesting that “people who get married and stay married may enjoy better health than the perpetually single, but losing a spouse could take a significant health toll…”

In the new study, researchers found that middle-aged and older Americans who were currently married tended to give higher ratings to their health than their never-married counterparts. They also reported fewer depression symptoms and limits on their mobility.

On the other hand, divorced or widowed adults fared worse than the never married on certain health measures — including the number of chronic health conditions reported. “Previously married people experience, on average, 20 percent more conditions and 23 percent more limitations,” the researchers write in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior.

Remarriage seemed to lessen some of the health effects of divorce or widowhood. However, remarried men and women were still in generally poorer health than those in a lasting marriage.

Sociologist Linda J. Waite of the University of Chicago co-authored the report:

“We argue that losing a marriage through divorce or widowhood is extremely stressful and that a high-stress period takes a toll on health,” researcher Linda J. Waite, a professor of sociology at the University of Chicago, said in a written statement.

“Think of health as money in the bank,” she added. “Think of a marriage as a mechanism for ‘saving’ or adding to health. Think of divorce as a period of very high expenditures.”

Read more.

This morning USA Today ran a story about new research soon to be published in the journal Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology debunking some popular myths about suicide.

USA Today reports:

Common beliefs about suicide being more likely on Mondays and during the winter aren’t really true, according to new research from the University of California, Riverside — summer is the most common season and Wednesday the most likely day. [The study is co-authored by sociology professor Augustine Kposowa.]

July and August are the most common months for suicide, followed by April and May, finds the analysis… The researchers found that 24.6% of suicides were on Wednesdays, with Thursdays the least likely day at just 11.1%.

Kposowa elaborates:

Kposowa says the common wisdom used to be that suicides were more likely on Mondays because the weekend had ended; however, he says Wednesday is right in the middle of the work week when stress is highest and the weekend is still farther away.

“Thursday is lowest because usually people are in better moods because the weekend is near,” he says.

He also says the folklore about more suicides in winter never really was true because much past research has shown that suicide was more likely in the spring.

Read more.