The Stages of a Failed Relationship | Compilation

thanks to skillshare for supporting this episode of scishow psych the first thousand people to click the link in the description can get a one month free trial of skillshare's premium membership [Music] relationships just like the people in them grow and evolve over time first you meet then you fall in love and sometimes in the end you break up but there are a lot of steps in between and every couple's journey is different for example take andy and jordan's love story it all started when they locked eyes across the room at an arcade they were immediately attracted to each other which their friends thought was a bit odd because they looked like they could be siblings if only their friends had watched this video you've probably been there you're sitting on the bus or the subway and across from you or two people you're pretty sure siblings because you know they look really similar and then they start making out so not siblings hopefully as strange as it sounds multiple studies have shown that we find people who look like us more attractive and it might be because like the rest of the animal kingdom we're just trying to pass along our genes people often choose partners that are similar to them in everything from personality to age to education level which isn't too surprising these are all examples of assortative mating our tendency to select our life partners with an eye for certain traits and characteristics liking someone with the same interests and experiences makes sense but research suggests we prefer people who look like us too for example one study published in 2013 and plos one showed that subjects found their partner's face more attractive after it was digitally mixed with their own twenty heterosexual couples were asked to look at photos of seven versions of their partner's face each version was blended with another face some male some female some average looking and some really attractive most importantly one of the versions makes the partner's face with the subject's face although the subject didn't know it and as a control one of the versions combined mirrored versions of the partner's face so it was all the same person but the image looked digitally altered just like the rest of them and didn't stand out when the subjects were asked to rank the photos from most to least attractive they liked the version that was blended with their own face the most they liked it even more than the control which was made up of just their partner's face it might seem weird to want to date someone who looks like you sure we tend to prefer things that we've seen before and there's nothing more familiar than the person in the mirror even so incest is kind of a bad thing just ask the royal families of europe or the targaryens so you'd think we'd have evolved to not be attracted to people who look like us but some research suggests that we're attracted to people who look like us because we are actually looking for some genetic similarity in our partners a 2014 study published in the proceedings of the national academy of sciences compared the genetic data for 862 older married couples and found that the married couples were more genetically similar than random non-married pairs in fact the more genetically similar two of the subjects were the more likely they were to be married now that definitely doesn't mean having similar genes automatically means you're gonna get married but the fact that scientists saw that relationship is still pretty strange there seems to be a happy medium when it comes to genetics so you might find someone especially attractive when they have some genetic similarity but not too much in that study i mentioned earlier where subjects rated different pictures of their partners the researchers also did a second experiment they digitally combined different amounts of the subject's face with their partner's face and they found that adding too much or too little of the subject's face made that version of their partner seem less attractive it was that middle amount of similarity about 22 percent that made their partner appear more attractive than normal research in both animal and human populations has found that picking a partner with some genetic similarity is related to more stable partnerships more children and greater altruism among family members evolutionary theory says we're always trying to pass along our genes by raising our kids until they're old enough to start their own families and a partner that shares more of your genes has extra motivation to do that too plus partners with similar genetics often share other characteristics like personality which can make for a more stable relationship so from an evolutionary standpoint it makes some sense to select a partner who looks like you but we've also learned that too much similarity can increase our odds of passing along dangerous recessive traits or other developmental problems plus it's just plain creepy so for a safe genetically similar non-creepy middle ground we find people who look like us this doesn't mean you have to pick a partner who looks like you obviously those other traits we select for like personality and education level are usually more important for stable relationships than whether or not you get confused for cousins all the time physical similarity just seems to be another factor we consider before deciding to swipe right on tinder and it's probably not the most important one so don't be too weirded out we'll let the targaryens keep on keeping on and the rest of us can get back to our normal lives now andy and jordan have found physical attraction but there's more to their love than the physical stage two of their relationship was developing an intellectual and emotional connection it formed over their first few dates when they asked each other these questions which you may have heard of before here are some questions for you given the choice of anyone in the world whom would you invite to dinner would you like to be famous what are you most grateful for and that's just the beginning is there something you've dreamed of doing for a long time yeah well why haven't you done it yet or what about if you were to die today without the chance to communicate with anyone what would you most regret not saying and why haven't you said it yet okay that got a little intense but it was supposed to these are just a few of the 36 questions that have earned the reputation of being able to make people fall in love thanks to a viral new york times article which is bonkers right but the psychology paper they came from which was published in 1997 is legit and it's helped us learn a lot about how telling other people about ourselves can deepen relationships of all kinds the original paper consisted of three fairly similar experiments where undergrads in a psychology class were paired with a classmate they didn't know well many pairs included one man and one woman but quite a few pairs had two women just because of who was taking the classes they were given 45 minutes and three sets of questions to talk about which got progressively more personal and at the end they were given tests to evaluate how much they liked each other and whether they would want to work together again pretty straightforward right and overall the researchers analyzed 190 pairs of students and a few variables for instance they wanted to know what would happen when students were paired with someone they shared values with or with someone they'd been told they'd probably like most of these things didn't have much of an effect but the researchers did find that increasingly personal questions led to stronger feelings of liking and closeness than small talk prompts like the last time you went to the zoo and yes they did follow up with the pairs afterwards and some of them did stay close one pair even got married and invited the whole research team but that wasn't the point the study wasn't about romantic love it was about any kind of temporary intimacy which the researchers described as incorporating someone else into your sense of self in fact happily ever after was so not the point that the researchers said they always carefully debrief their subjects they emphasized that this was an unusual way to form a relationship and that the students shouldn't feel any obligation to their partners the actual point of this study was pretty simple studying relationships is hard sure you can study people who are already besties and psychologists definitely do that but it's not easy to standardize pre-existing relationships and doing so could affect the results how close are they and how long have they been close what brought them together it's hard to base an objective study and draw conclusions from something so fuzzy to try and get around this problem some researchers have used speed dating to test their hypotheses it's a good idea but because speed dating is so brief it's mostly appropriate for studying initial romantic attraction than other types of closeness so in the 1990s these researchers developed their own procedure to try and study temporary intimacy in the lab they wanted it to be easy to replicate and not too time consuming and it seems to work their procedure has been used a lot since then mostly to study a process called self-disclosure which is basically telling or showing people things about yourself even before this 1997 study there was a lot of research about self-disclosure out there suggesting that it's important to starting and building a close relationship with friends family or a romantic partner but the studies that have used this method to induce closeness in the lab have learned a whole bunch of stuff for example we think that taking turns self-disclosing can build intimacy more effectively than one-sided sharing and it's the experience of someone sharing stuff with you that makes you feel closer to them not the act of sharing yourself one study found that social anxiety makes telling someone about yourself less effective at building closeness while another found that moving in sync with someone else for instance going through two versions of an assignment to check them against each other can make it more effective today a lot of the research in this field is looking into self-disclosure on the internet and psychologists think that it also makes people feel close studying this can be kind of tricky though because we change how much we share about ourselves on different platforms so overall researchers agree that self-disclosure does create intimacy and build relationships but it's important to remember that there's a time and a place for those sorts of deep conversations like you can't just start shouting things about yourself at people there's actually research showing that the receptiveness and responsiveness of whoever's listening to your self-disclosures is really important a 2004 study of 98 couples found that it really mattered when someone felt like their self-disclosures were being heard by their partners specifically it increased how much the bond was strengthened when their partner shared stuff and another study found that wanting to be close to someone was enough to create anticipatory feelings of closeness even before the self-disclosures started so yes people who answer those 36 questions can fall in love but you shouldn't count on them to do the trick really this procedure is just a cool tool to help scientists better understand these weird messy beautiful things we call relationships so after getting to know each other a little better andy and jordan fell in love and they wanted to share their love with the people they love so as the holiday season approached they decided they were ready for stage three meeting the parents because the holiday season is just that time of year when many couples decide to lock in their decision to be with each other it is often dubiously called cuffing season it's chilly out which means it's time to cuddle no i mean it we're in the thick of what's known as cuffing season it's the time of year when we're more likely to want to settle down with a romantic partner at least for a little while it runs from approximately october through february for those of us in the northern hemisphere and the phrase comes from the idea of being literally tied down or cuffed to a romantic partner charming anyways as cliche as this sounds it does seem to be a real phenomenon and even though i don't want to quote that rather troubling holiday song it turns out that the reason cuffing season is a thing may be because it's cold outside while the phrase cuffing season is a gift from pop culture rather than a technical term scientist coined there's plenty of reason to believe it's a real thing while humans don't have what you'd typically think of as a mating season if when you were growing up it felt like everyone had birthday parties in the summer or the first few weeks of school well you weren't wrong and you can do the math i was born at the end of september thanks new year's eve party also thanks to social media dating apps and the google machine we actually have a lot of data on when people are most couple-y facebook has found we're more likely to change our relationship status to in a relationship when it's chillier especially in late december and mid-february or at least we were in 2010 and 2011 back when people actually cared about being facebook official i don't even know where that setting is am i in a relationship someone let me know and dating app usage also goes up in the winter for instance a 2015 survey of hinge users found that they were more interested in settling down in the wintertime than in other seasons so cuffing season is real but like why evolution is probably playing a pretty big role lots of animals evolved to have their offspring in the spring and summer when there were more resources to take care of them but there's also pretty good evidence that there's a lot going on psychologically which drives this yearning to settle down by the fire drink some hot cocoa and cuddle like winter is kind of tough on us we're a lot more likely to get sick and there are all those holidays to stress over we also produce less serotonin a neurotransmitter known to play a role in mood regulation and that can lead to the so-called winter blues and their clinically diagnosable cousin seasonal affective disorder but what can help us combat this stress why cuddling cuddling and other forms of consensual social touch release oxytocin a hormone known to be linked to social bonding and oxytocin causes the release of dopamine and serotonin in key areas of the brain to help counteract all those lousy stressful feelings and make us feel less alone but aside from this pretty intuitive and sensible idea that social touch and bonding can alleviate stress there's also something else that might be at work we might just be literally cold you see there are lots of studies that show we mix up social and physical warmth or substitute them for each other for example one 2014 study found that after watching a video where someone was ostracized participants were less likely to feel lonely if they were able to touch something warm and a study from 2012 found that warm and fuzzy tv ads tug on our heart strings less when we're warm and cozy ourselves another looked at people eating alone in the food courts of shopping malls because that's what everyone wants while eating slightly wilted french fries by themselves in a mall to be approached by a stranger running a study yes i'm cold jeff let me eat this stupid wilted fry anyways they found that people who were eating with one other person estimated the temperature to be about 2.5 degrees celsius warmer than the people who were eating alone additional experiments in the same study got even wackier in one students were given warm or cool tea and then asked to suggest features for a robot made they were told was being developed in japan totally casual those who got the cooler tea were more likely to ask for more social features like talking or going for walks together or other activities presumably because they yearn for emotional warmth from their robot made this is all part of what's known as social thermoregulation theory the idea is that temperature regulation is super important to animals and one of the ways to warm up is to huddle close to others so given our already social nature we may have evolved to seek out others as a way to regulate our body temperature and somewhere along the way we ended up conflating physical and emotional warmth of course this could all apply to platonic social bonding and hey definitely don't underestimate platonic cuddling we are equal opportunity cuddlers here but there's also reason to believe that the cold makes us want romance too a 2012 study of 53 undergrads found that iced tea and chili ambient temperatures both made viewers enjoy romance movies more the same wasn't true for actions comedies or thrillers and people were also more likely to rent romance movies during the coldest months which makes our collective obsession with ridiculous christmas rom-coms make a bit more sense in the northern hemisphere so if you find yourself wishing you could settle down with someone this winter there are probably a lot of reasons you're feeling that way winter messes with our heads in all sorts of ways but the good news is you're probably not alone so jordan and andy are cuddled up by the fire and settling in for a winter season together but before we learn more about jordan and andy's relationship i'd like to pause to thank our sponsor skillshare skillshare is an online learning community that offers real projects to create and the support of fellow creatives to help empower you to accomplish real growth premium membership gives you unlimited access so you can join the classes and communities that are just right for you plus skillshare is always ad-free so you can focus on learning for example if you've been enjoying the psychology behind jordan and andy's relationship you might enjoy the course people psychology a short guide to understanding people and the first thousand people to click the link in our description will get a one month free trial of premium membership but back to andy and jordan at this point they don't really feel like they need anyone else they can't even imagine how they lived without each other stage four of this particular relationship was infatuation and they might have taken it a bit too far in any healthy relationship whether it's with a friend or a partner you should be able to depend on the other person hopefully you can count on them to keep their promises or listen to you vent if you've had a tough day but sometimes people can become too dependent on each other one person can start relying on another for all of their emotional health and even identity and that's where codependency comes in it's a word thrown around a lot in pop psychology and it doesn't have a clinical definition but when it comes to relationships it's not healthy even if hollywood might romanticize it the term codependency was first used in the 1980s mostly by organizations like alcoholics anonymous and addiction counselors it was supposedly a condition that comes from being close with someone who struggles with alcohol addiction the idea was that a codependent person ends up supporting their loved ones so that they never hit rock bottom basically when they finally realized they have a problem and changed their lives and in doing so the codependent person supposedly enabled the addiction instead of helping but there's no research supporting this idea and abandoning someone who's struggling usually causes more harm in fact many things that were labeled codependent like providing treatment or safer ways to gradually fight an addiction are often really helpful these days psychologists and counselors mainly use codependency to refer to a set of observed emotional behaviors and attachments and to separate it from the old false ideas about addiction they'll sometimes call it relationship dependency emotional dependency or even obsessive love in a codependent relationship one person is dependent on the other for their emotional needs and they don't feel complete without their romantic partner or best friend some psychologists think codependency might be influenced by things like personality or a traumatic event in someone's childhood like if they have a broken relationship with a caregiver but it's also not something you can be clinically diagnosed with emotional dependency can be measured with surveys like the love attitude scale which was developed by psychologists in the late 1990s to help determine someone's feelings about relationships the survey asks people to think about their partner or hypothetical partner and then has them agree or disagree with statements like if my partner ignores me for a while i sometimes do stupid things to get their attention back if they score within a certain range their behavior is most likely codependent now codependency or emotional dependency is different than something called dependent personality disorder or dpd this is in the dsm-5 the most recent version of the manual that clinical psychologists use to diagnose different conditions people with dpd often feel totally powerless and like they aren't capable of caring for themselves meanwhile someone who's codependent may think they can function independently just fine but if they aren't in a close relationship they might feel lonely and emotionally unsatisfied and if a close relationship ends they'll often feel stronger grief and have a higher risk of depression than the average person not only that but codependency is unhealthy while a relationship is happening too multiple studies have shown that codependent relationships are related to depression eating disorders and health problems related to stress because when someone links their self-worth to other people they may feel a need to prove themselves or sacrifice too much to try and make someone else happy and the person being dependent on can feel pressure to keep the relationship going to avoid hurting their friend so it really isn't healthy for anyone multiple researchers have also shown that people who are codependent are more likely to stay in abusive relationships they may even think this abuse comes out of love or have such low self-esteem that they believe they deserve it which to be totally clear is never true even though codependency doesn't have a spot in the dsm like dependent personality disorder does it can still be treated by talking with a therapist a professional can help someone get out of an abusive relationship or friendship or work with them to manage their connections and feelings in a healthier way and medicines like antidepressants can also help with the depression or anxiety that can go along with codependency so even though some romance movies or cheesy hashtag relationship goals graphics might glamorize relationships that complete you it's definitely not true now healthy loving relationships are important and tons of studies have shown that we don't do so well for cut off from other people but one relationship should never define someone's value or be the source of all their emotional health that's just not how people work and here is where stage five set in trouble in paradise of course right when they were hitting a rocky spot in their relationship valentine's day rolled around i'm not saying valentine's day is what broke them up but maybe it was here's why ah love is in the air or at least it should be since it's almost valentine's day but here's the thing scientists have found that this romantic holiday can have a negative impact on relationships and the holiday-related obligation to be lovey-dovey may have something to do with it there aren't a ton of studies on valentine's day but those that exist suggest it isn't all hearts and roses for example one study from 2004 found that college couples that have been dating for at least five weeks were two and a half times more likely to break up in the weeks surrounding valentine's day than during three other comparable times of the academic year which kind of seems to go against the whole point of having a special day to celebrate love but there are several reasons why this holiday might doom relationships for starters there are all the expectations surrounding valentine's day i mean it's no secret that valentine's day comes with its share of obligations like if you're in a relationship you're generally expected to give your partner something and that's not necessarily a bad thing since gifts can make you feel closer to your beloved but studies suggest that they don't change the overall trajectory of a relationship and they may actually be harmful if they're given for the wrong reasons some as of yet unpublished research presented at a meeting of the association for consumer research found that if you feel like your partner gave you a gift out of obligation then that gift may make you feel less happy with the relationship you might also end up comparing your valentine's day gifts to the ones your friends or other coupled people got which brings us to another way the holiday might damage relationships comparisons see there's a concept called interdependence theory that says a person satisfaction in their relationship relies on two things how their current relationship compares to what they expect of their relationships in general and how their partner compares to currently available alternatives and if you see other couples giving better gifts or doing more grandiose and romantic things on valentine's day well that could raise your expectations of relationships in general suddenly your current relationship doesn't seem to measure up so well but the worst part is that comparisons to other couples can fall prey to pernicious cognitive bias known as fundamental attribution error that's when you attribute the actions of others to inherit traits but your own to circumstances so you might think that duo you saw having extra romantic night did that because they have a fantastic relationship while your own celebration was just because it's valentine's day of course those assumptions probably aren't true everyone else is following the same script when it comes to february 14th it's just that when you see their perfect selfies and amazing gifts it's all too easy to assume that their celebration is more authentic than yours and if that's not bad enough you might already be noticing the particulars of your relationship around valentine's day and how they do or do not stack up because of a priming effect see studies suggest that when you're surrounded by commercials and storefronts and twitter memes all devoted to love and romance you can't help but think about love and romance for example a 2009 study found the words cupid and flowers popped into people's heads more easily in early february and the 2017 study showed that people actually raised their opinions of chocolates and flowers around valentine's day the thing is thinking about romance and relationships can tarnish how people view their partners it may highlight and magnify existing issues for example though this seems to somewhat depend on how the person approaches romance more generally something psychologists call attachment style attachment style is a measure of a person's attitude about relationships based on two dimensions attachment related avoidance and attachment related anxiety people high in anxiety are less secure in themselves and tend to see others as a solution so they tend to be preoccupied with seeking intimacy and support from their partners meanwhile people high in avoidance are secure in themselves but aren't too trusting of support from others so they tend to be less interested in intimacy in general and avoidance in particular seems to translate to being less happy with partners like a 2014 study found that people with avoidant attachment were less satisfied with their relationships but here's the kicker that dissatisfaction was magnified on valentine's day that wasn't the case for people who were low in avoidance even if they scored high on attachment-related anxiety in fact the holiday-related reminders seemed to boost how they felt about their partner and that's actually kind of a theme valentine's day can hurt relationships but it doesn't hurt all of them equally mostly it negatively affects ones that are already on the rocks like remember that statistic about people being two and a half times more likely to break up around valentine's day it turns out that relationships that were rated as weak were nearly five times more likely to break up during the two weeks around valentine's day than stronger ones furthermore if the relationship was already strong or improving when valentine's day came around the holiday didn't have a negative effect something similar may be true for feelings of obligation around gift giving if you're already not feeling great about the relationship preliminary research suggests you're more likely to assume your partner gave you a gift out of obligation that makes you less likely to feel grateful for the gift and therefore less satisfied in the relationship and even comparisons to other couples aren't always bad if you really believe your relationship is better than others then drawing comparisons might make you feel more satisfied with what you got the big takeaway is that valentine's day isn't a breakup instigator it's a catalyst it doesn't cause relationships to end all by itself it just gives a little push to the ones already headed that way so if you're happy valentine's day isn't likely to sour things but if your relationship isn't all that great it might speed you towards ending it which if we're being honest could be for the best so just like that what was supposed to be a romantic holiday for andy and jordan to express their love for one another turned into the beginning of the end for their relationship it entered stage six the breakup but in this case jordan couldn't even tell andy to their face andy was ghosted here's more on the psychology of ghosting this probably won't come as much of a surprise but breaking up with someone is hard there's the rejection the tears the possible shouting and if nothing else it's just really awkward maybe that's why for better or worse some people decide a proper breakup isn't worth it instead they choose to just disappear in other words they ghost ghosting is when someone terminates a relationship by ending communications abruptly and without explanation it's something people have probably been doing forever but the word has only picked up steam within the last few years in fact it's picked up so much steam that psychologists have started to study it recently they've begun investigating why people do this and their results suggest that at least some of it might have to do with how people view relationships in general if it's never happened to you ghosting might seem like some weird worst case scenario internet thing but it actually happens all the time for example in a 2018 study that pulled almost 750 people 23 percent of participants reported being ghosted by a romantic partner and almost 40 percent reported being ghosted by a friend studies have even found that people ghost employers or potential employers by not responding to offers or by not showing up for work or interviews this isn't a millennial or gen z thing either because ghosting isn't new the term may have started getting traction recently but this behavior has probably been around forever it's just that for your grandparents ghosting might have looked like not sending letters or skipping phone calls this phenomenon has likely become such a capital t thing because technology has changed the way many people communicate texting and social media have made communication easier and more instantaneous and many relationships or jobs are now started through apps and emails instead of in-person meetups among other things that makes it really easy to avoid someone if you think things aren't going to work out when it comes to why people do this though there likely isn't just one answer like in a 2019 study published in imagination cognition and personality participants reported that they ghosted someone because of everything from attractiveness to convenience to safety which is quite a range of explanations other researchers though have suggested that how you feel about ghosting could be based on something more fundamental how you think about relationships more broadly research on relationship theories covers two types of beliefs destiny and growth if you're a stronger believer in destiny it means you think that the outcome of relationship is more set in stone it's either going to work out or it's not this is associated with a fixed mindset and if you think like this you might believe that you have a soulmate someone who is fundamentally a perfect match on the other hand if you're a stronger believer in growth it means you think relationships can grow over time if you think like this you probably believe that all relationship hurdles can eventually be overcome in that 2018 study i mentioned earlier the researchers didn't just look at how frequently people ghosted they also asked participants about their relationship beliefs and they found that stronger destiny beliefs led to more positive views toward ghosting more specifically when compared to people with weaker destiny beliefs this group was about 63 percent more likely to say that ghosting was an acceptable way to end a long-term relationship those with stronger growth beliefs tended to say the opposite this may have happened because people with stronger destiny beliefs are often quicker to end a relationship when they don't think it's a good fit alternatively these results could be related to whether participants thought they could be friends with someone after a breakup if they didn't they might not have cared as much about how that person responded to being ghosted now we're not here to make sweeping claims about how you personally should end your relationships we're just here to talk about what psychologists have observed because really it's super fascinating that this is even something researchers have studied ultimately while all kinds of study participants have different opinions on whether ghosting is okay the overarching theme seems to be that there are better ways to end relationships if nothing else ghosting doesn't allow someone closure and if there is something they could have done better it doesn't give them a chance to learn in the long run this may also make it harder for the ghoster to communicate disinterest or what isn't going well for them and in a professional setting well the employer suddenly has an unexpected vacancy which isn't great every relationship is different though so whether you want a ghost because of safety or a destiny mindset we'll leave those decisions up to you now that jordan is out of the picture and we're all very sad about it here in the studio andy advanced to stage seven moving on andy wasn't going to let this be an entirely negative experience they weren't thrilled about it but there were things that andy could learn from their relationship with jordan next here's what we can learn from our broken hearts if you're the kind of person who like feels all the feels you maybe found yourself wishing at some point or another that you could just shut them down for a little while like take the emotion chip and dial it from an eight to a two it's a little tiring being the person who cries during the cell phone commercials or gets all riled up about the injustices in the world or can't get over that broken heart so you might wish you could rely a little more on your head than your heart but the more we study our brains the more that kind of dichotomy between reason and emotion is disappearing and though you might wish you could rein in your feelings and sometimes you can sometimes you shouldn't we have a long history of thinking of reason and emotion as totally different things plato described them as two horses pulling us in opposite directions and the idea hasn't really gone away since then we even think about our brains in those terms complex thought and reasoning is right there in the term we use for the brain region associated with it the cerebral cortex structures like the amygdala on the other hand play key roles in emotion and that's not wrong there is lots of evidence to support the idea that those separate brain regions are associated with those particular functions but it's also not as simple as that reason and emotion are also very intertwined lesion and imaging studies have shown that another part of your brain the anterior cingulate cortex plays a role in both and while different sections of it process cognition and emotion they do have an effect on each other several meta-analyses have shown that doing something cognitively demanding like say your math homework reduces activity in the emotional parts of the anterior cingulate cortex it works the other way too strong emotion can suppress activity in the cognitive parts and the studies and reviews arguing that our so-called emotional and logical brains are almost impossible to disentangle continue to pile up the fact that our feelings aren't boxed off in a separate part of our brain explains why they affect our decision-making fear and anger have been shown in particular to make people worse at negotiating for something for example and a 2014 study that showed upsetting negative feedback on a test made people do worse on subsequent logic problems but while we think of being quote unquote emotional as something that makes us make bad choices or think irrationally emotions can actually help us with judgment and decision making take the case of elliot a man who underwent surgery to remove a brain tumor from his frontal lobe while his brain seemed totally normal afterwards his life completely changed he got fired he made a bunch of terrible financial decisions and he got divorced and then remarried and then divorced again the conclusion that the neuroscientist studying him came to was that his surgery had disrupted interactions between his amygdala and his frontal lobe his intelligence was still intact but he wasn't really able to feel emotions and that made him completely incapable of making decisions since he couldn't tell how his choices would make him feel later on he couldn't assign value to different options so he endlessly deliberated every little thing studies in gamblers have also found that emotions help them avoid making bad decisions mistakes and failures feel lousy and the gamblers don't want to feel that way again so they learn to make better bets and the idea that emotions can actually help you make better decisions makes a lot of evolutionary sense negative emotions teach you what not to do kind of like how physical pain teaches you not to put your hand on a hot stove emotions shape other cognitive processes and helpful ways too they optimize which sensory information we pay attention to guide our social interactions and help us remember the things that are most important but all of this isn't to say that you don't have control over your emotions at all emotional regulation is a well-studied process and there are various points at which you can step in and tell your emotions to sit down so yes you can change how you feel how intense that feeling is and how long it lasts but not everyone is super great at that a 2015 study of 176 people actually found differences between the brains of emotional people and more rational ones emotional people that tend to cry a lot at sad movies or freak out during scary ones score higher on emotional empathy measures which basically mean they tend to actually feel what others feel and the researchers found that people with higher emotional empathy scores tended to have more gray matter density in the insula a part of the cerebral cortex while it's unclear whether that made them more emotional or whether being more emotional changed their brains it does really solidify the idea that there are individual differences in how we feel and deal with emotions and in general studies have found that older people control their feelings better than younger ones perhaps because practice makes perfect but the good news is if you're sometimes more emotional than you'd like to be there are things you can do both to control your emotions and to use your emotional powers for good for one the timing of when you try to control an emotion is super important so rather than trying to suppress an emotion once you're already in the midst of it it's much more effective to reframe the way you're thinking about a situation while an emotion is forming and this one sounds weird but talking to ourselves in the third person can give us enough distance to think about things differently so hank you should remember that next time you want to dial things back and framing matters too corny as it sounds looking for the silver lining or at least seeing the situation as a challenge to overcome rather than an emotional blow can help you bounce back faster but ultimately it's not always a bad thing to feel those feels while some feelings suck they're kind of important listening to your feelings instead of fighting them can help you identify what's really wrong so you have a chance to change it because emotions are not the mortal enemy of logical thought they're just trying to help sometimes they just do it a little too much jordan and andy's relationship didn't work out but look most relationships don't work out they still had a great time at the arcade and snuggling by the fire together they were happy when they were happy and they were able to learn and grow from their experience and i hope you enjoyed learning from it too thanks again to skillshare for sponsoring this episode of scishow psych there's a link in the description again check them out and thank you for watching [Music] you

Channel: SciShow Psych

Views: 60,710

Keywords: SciShow, science, Hank, Green, education, learn, brain, psychology, The Stages of a Failed Relationship | Compilation, Why Are We Attracted to People Who Look Like Us?, The Science of the 36 Questions That Help People Fall in Love, 'Tis The Season for Snuggles: The Psychology of Cuffing Season, Codependency: When Relationships Become Everything, Valentine's Day Is Bad for Relationships (and That's a Good Thing), What Psychologists Can Tell You About Ghosting, heartbreak, valentines day

Id: uhCxUsSlcPU

Length: 37min 42sec (2262 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 15 2022