Why We Cling to Unobtainable Dreams

American Idol has fueled the mega-star dreams of wanna be singers across the country. Yet, as acerbic judge Simon Cowell is quick to point out, many of those dreams are woefully misplaced. The crushing of dreams as impassioned but horribly off-key singers audition season after season makes for dramatic television. We laugh at their folly, wondering how these people can truly believe they have the talent to become professional singers. A new study by psychologists at Ohio State University and the University of Florida published in the current issue of the journal Social Cognition sheds some light on the phenomenon.

Researchers found that people cling to their career dreams with fierce tenacity. Telling someone they lack the skills or knowledge to achieve their goal isn’t enough to shake their belief that they can accomplish their dreams. It takes a clear, often humiliating, demonstration of their lack of ability to convince someone that their dreams are misplaced.

“Most people don’t give up easily on their dreams. They have to be given a graphic picture of what failure will look like if they don’t make it,” study co-author Patrick Carroll, an assistant professor of psychology at OSU-Lima, said in an online article posted on Newswise. “We have a brilliant ability to spin, deflect or outright dismiss undesired evidence that we can’t do something. We try to find reasons to believe.”

It’s a harsh lesson seemingly at odds with the “Dream big! Follow your dreams!” advice that parents use to encourage their children. Shows like American Idol, America’s Got Talent and America’s Next Top Model only fuel our dreams of being “discovered” and catapulted from oblivion to stardom. Idol judge Simon Cowell has often explained that his comments may be cutting, but they’re geared to drag would be stars back to reality. Few make it in the music business, even those with talent.

The problem transcends the entertainment industry. Researchers found that many students harbor unrealistic career dreams, sometimes spending years of fruitless study on career paths for which they lack the ability to succeed. It can be a costly mistake, particularly in today’s uncertain job market.

“Educators are trying to lead students to the most realistic career options,” Carroll said. “You want to encourage students to pursue their dreams, but you don’t want to give them false hope about their abilities and talents.”

Next time: Lessons for parents

Combating Dangerous Pattern Perceptions

Perceiving patterns where none exist, a psychological phenomenon called pattern perception, is a mental coping mechanism used by many people to combat uncertainty when events spin their lives out of control (see our June 10 post). It’s a phenomenon that’s on the rise in these times of economic uncertainty where rising unemployment, catastrophic investment losses, mortgage foreclosures, and a host of other worrisome factors have shattered people’s faith in their ability to control their future.

That loss of control generates an extreme anxiety that can impel people to create and act on connections and associations between innocuous, unrelated events, according to research published in the journal Science. In a series of experiments conducted by Jennifer Whitson of the University of Texas-Austin McCombs School of Business and Adam Galinsky of Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, researchers found that people can trick themselves into seeing nefarious conspiracies behind government pronouncements or business announcements.

Structure and order have a calming effect on our psyches while chaos generates anxiety that can lead to panic or depression. The desire for order can become so overwhelming that people fantasize connections between events to bring order to a world that they feel has become dangerously chaotic.

“Feelings of control are so important to people that a lack of control is inherently threatening,” Galinsky explained. “While some misperceptions can be bad or lead one astray, they’re extremely common and most likely satisfy a deep and enduring psychological need.”

The danger comes when people believe in or act on the imaginary patterns they have created. Illusory stock market trends can lead to poor investment decisions and increased financial anxiety. Imagined conspiracies between co-workers can increase job stress to intolerable levels. Delusional thinking can cause marital stress and jeopardize personal relationships. Fantasized government agendas can lead to paranoia and panic.

Exerting phantom control over chaotic events in our lives through pattern perception can hide a very real need for psychiatric help in coping with anxiety, panic disorders or depression. The combination of cognitive-behavioral therapy and psychodynamic therapy practiced by Atlanta psychiatrist Dr. Tracey Marks is effective in helping people find healthy ways to cope with and mitigate the uncertainties that pervade life today without resorting to harmful pattern perception.

Parents’ Anxiety Can Affect Children

When parents suffer emotional problems, those problems can affect their children. Children who have a parent suffering from an anxiety disorder are also likely to exhibit anxiety. In a new study, researchers at Johns Hopkins Children’s Center have found that family counseling has the ability to prevent anxiety disorders in the children of parents with anxiety disorders.

In a small-scale study to be published in the June issue of the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, researchers found that psychological damage from childhood anxiety could be minimized or prevented when families participated in as few as eight weekly family sessions of cognitive behavioral therapy. Over the course of a year, family counseling sessions used cognitive-behavioral techniques to help parents modify behaviors that contributed to their children’s anxiety, including overprotection, excessive criticism and excessive expression of fear and anxiety in front of their children. Children were also taught coping and problem-solving skills.

“If psychiatrists or family doctors diagnose anxiety in adult patients, it’s now clearly a good idea that they ask about the patients’ children and, if appropriate, refer them for evaluation,” said the study’s senior investigator Golda Ginsburg, Ph.D., a child psychologist at Johns Hopkins Children’s Center and associate professor of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, in an internet press release on newswise. Ginsburg said the research indicates new treatment protocols for anxiety patients who are parents, noting that few doctors today consider the ramifications of parents’ mental illnesses on their children.

The Johns Hopkins study indicated that the children of parents who had been diagnosed with an anxiety disorder were seven times more likely to develop an anxiety disorder themselves. Sixty-five percent of children living with an anxious parent evidenced anxiety symptoms that met the criteria for an anxiety disorder. One in five U.S. children is affected by an anxiety disorder that often goes undiagnosed. In children, undiagnosed anxiety or delayed treatment can lead to depression, poor academic performance and substance abuse that can last throughout childhood and follow a child into adulthood. For these reasons, the Johns Hopkins team has been focusing on techniques to prevent, rather than treat, childhood anxiety. A larger study involving 100 families is now underway.

Fame, Money, Beauty Don’t Bring Happiness

It turns out that those oft sought goals in life — fame, wealth and beauty — don’t bring happiness and can, in fact, make life miserable. That’s the finding of a new study by three researchers at the University of Rochester in New York that was reported this week on ScienceDaily online.

“People understand that it’s important to pursue goals in their lives, and they believe that attaining these goals (fame, wealth, beauty) will have positive consequences,” said study author Edward Deci, professor of psychology at the University of Rochester. However, he noted that the study disproved that belief. “Even though our culture puts a strong emphasis on attaining wealth and fame, pursuing these goals does not contribute to having a satisfying life,” Deci said. “The things that make your life happy are growing as an individual, having loving relationships, and contributing to your community.”

The study tracked recent university graduates using in-depth psychological surveys to gauge satisfaction, self-esteem, anxiety, stress and positive/negative emotions. Goals were evaluated as intrinsic such as developing deep, personal relationships or extrinsic such as attaining personal wealth.  Identical surveys were administered 12 and 24 months after college graduation, a critical development stage for young adults who have finally left the safety net of home and university to make their own way in the world.

While the study confirmed earlier research that commitment to a goal increases an individual’s success in achieving that goal, it broke new ground in analyzing the relationship between goals and happiness. The study found that the content of the goal, not the desire to achieve it, most affected happiness. Achieving materialistic and image-related goals actually generated negative emotions like shame and anger and produced anxiety symptoms including headaches and stomachaches. The greatest satisfaction came from the achievement of intrinsic goals such as personal growth, building relationships, improving the community and physical fitness that met the basic psychological needs of autonomy, competence and relatedness.

While study authors emphasized the need for further study over broader population groups, they did suggest that the emphasis on extrinsic pursuits — career building, long work hours, possession acquisition, etc. — that is typical of the educated, post-collegiate, young adults may lead to general feelings of dissatisfaction with life. Young people may be happier if they place less emphasis on career pursuits and greater emphasis on psychologically nourishing experiences such as spending time with friends and family or pursuing personal interests.

Children Can Strain Marital Bliss

There is nothing so miraculous and charming as a sleeping baby — and nothing so frustrating or exasperating as a tantruming toddler. Children have the power to evoke a wide range of emotions in their parents — often running through the entire emotional repertoire from love to resentment within the space of a few hours. Having a child can turn life into an emotional rollercoaster for which most parents are unprepared. The parenting classes taken during pregnancy do little to prepare parents for the emotional strain that having a child can place on their marriage. As many new parents find out, having is not the same as wanting.

In an 8-year study of 218 couples recently published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, nearly half  of the couples reported a decrease in marital satisfaction after the birth of their first child. Study author Brian Doss, an assistant professor of psychology at Texas A&M, teamed with researchers from the University of Denver to study the effects of children on their parents’ marriages. While childless couples also suffered diminished marital quality over time, University of Denver psychology professor and study researcher Scott Stanley told MyFox National, “having a baby accelerates the deterioration, especially seen during periods of adjustment right after the birth of a child.”

The study found that couples who had been married longer and those with higher incomes experienced fewer marital problems after the birth of a baby than those who had been married only a short time or who had lower incomes. Couples who lived together before marriage seemed to find it harder to cope with a new baby than those who had lived separately before getting married.

While sleep deprivation, lost freedom, lack of time for pursuits outside of childcare, and necessary changes in the division of labor within the home — and perceived inequities — contribute to marital strife when a baby joins the family; the study found that communication and sex were the keys to maintaining marital bliss. Parents often put sex and their relationship with each other on the back burner when a baby enters the picture, allowing the child to take center stage. That’s a mistake, researchers found. The happiest marriages were those where parents still “dated,” made time for sex, and made an extra effort to focus on their relationship and each other.