Any suggestions for coping with distractions?

Today as I have been trying to write this post, I keep getting ping after ping from my email. I find myself getting more and more aggravated at the interruptions. (You’re not allowed to ignore an email are you?) As I switch from email to blog and back, I am going in circles trying to figure out what to write about.  My goal is to communicate to you about values so I want something that will be interesting for you and that you will read to the end.  Maybe I should just accept that my destiny today is to write about distractions from values and how to cope with them.   

Higgens, Margu, and Scholer (2012) have studied distractions and valuing.  They did an experiment where people were given a prize to solve anagrams while distracting noises played in the background.  The researchers told one group of participants to deal with the noise by “opposing” its interference - in other words to stay focused on the task.  People in the other group were told to “cope” with the unpleasant feelings the noise created – in a sense to pay attention to their feelings. The researchers measured how much attention people in each group paid to the noise versus the anagram, and also how much they valued the prize they would get.  Those who “opposed” the noise, paid less attention to it and also valued the prize more.  Those who focused on coping with feelings paid more attention to the distraction and valued the prize less.  It is not so surprising to me that if I focus on the task of writing (I’m doing that right this minute) and not on the distraction of my email, the writing will engage me more.  That seems intuitive.  What is a bit surprising is that if I focus on my writing instead of on coping with my aggravation, I will also value  the result more.The results for me is that I interest you in values and I can definitely say I will be very pleased it you got all the way here.    

Reference

Higgins, E.T., Marguc, J., & Scholer, A.A. (2012).  Value from adversity: How we deal with adversity matters. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 48, 965-967. Doi: 10.1016/j.jesp.2012.02.012

I think I buy too much stuff. What does this say about my values?

There is no question that the world is organized to make it easy for us to be great consumers and buy lots of things.  I can feel cool or important or part of a great group because I own things that broadcast these messages about me.  And it is virtually impossible to live in our hyper-connected world and be immune to consumer messages.  There are now dozens of psychological studies that have findings indicating that materialism relates to negative personal well-being.  In today’s post, I want to focus on the different kinds of issues that are raised when we “buy into” the messages of consumer culture.

Helga Dittmar and her colleagues (2014) did a meta-analysis (a kind of study combining the results form a lot of other studies) in which they combined data from 259 different studies.  There found a number of interesting things but I want to highlight a few that are important to our discussion of values.  They found that materialism was associated with many different kinds of well-being outcomes (life satisfaction, positive feelings, self-appraisals, anxiety, depression, compulsive buying, physical health, risky behaviors)  One of the stronger associations was between materialism and poor self-appraisals.  This finding suggests if we are not happy with ourselves, then we may buy things to help us feel better.  Giving life meaning by pursuing values might be an antidote to this (see February 5^th post).  The researchers also investigated a lot of different factors that might moderate or lessen the negative relationship between materialism and well-being.  Being older (over 18) and still being materialistic was worse than being under 18 suggesting that as this habit develops, its effects get worse.  In terms of culture, materialism was associated with low levels of well-being in different cultures, but the effect was amplified when people live in cultures with constant consumer messages.  Perhaps the more we are exposed, the more at-risk we are.  Finally, no factor that they studied was able to turn the relationship around and make materialism relate to positive well-being.  It turns out that as a value, materialism pretty much sucks!

Reference

Dittmar, H., Bond, R., Hurst, M, & Kasser, T. (2014). The relationship between materialism and personal well-being: A meta-analysis. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 107: 5, 879–924. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0037409879