Tag Archives: Serena Chen

Transference in Everyday Life Biases Inferences, Emotional Responses

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-*Do you re-enact scenarios from your past, but with different people?

Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud

 Sigmund Freud described this experience as “transference,” redirecting feelings toward one person in the past onto a different individual in the present.

The current recipient of feelings may have different characteristics, motivations, and behaviours than the original person, but something about the present individual triggers earlier feelings and actions.

Susan Andersen

Susan Andersen

NYU’s Susan Andersen and Alana Baum demonstrated transference in lab studies when they asked volunteers to describe important people in their lives for whom they had positive feelings or negative feelings.
They also described other people’s significant others.

Later, Anderson and Baum described a person seated in the next room, using either emotionally-positive or emotionally-negative descriptions of someone from the volunteer’s life or someone else’s life.

Participants more accurately recalled the stranger’s description when it resembled their own significant other.
Recall was enhanced because the significant other’s description was memorable, suggesting transference.

Biased inference can result from a memory’s “accessibility” and distinctiveness, according to Anderson’s collaborators Steve W. Cole and Noah Glassman.

Transference is an outgrowth of attachment to others in the past, according to Queens College’s Claudia Chloe Brumbaugh and R. Chris Fraley University of Illinois.

R. Chris Fraley

R. Chris Fraley

In their study, participants read profiles of two potential dating partners:  One description resembled a romantic partner from the person’s past, and another description matched a different participant’s former partner.

Volunteers reported feeling more comfortable and more anxious toward potential dating partners described as similar to previous significant others.
Brumbaugh and Fraley noted that participants “applied attachment representations of past partners” to any potential future partner, and when the new partner’s description resembled an important past partner.

Susan Fiske

Princeton’s Susan Fiske described this transfer of affective responses to a new individual as schema-triggered affect.
Andersen used this framework and a socio-cognitive explanation in a paper with Berkeley’s Serena Chen.

Serena Chen

Serena Chen

People modify views of themselves and others in transference situations, reported Katrina Hinkley and Andersen.
In their research, volunteers demonstrated biased recall about a new person when they were reminded of an earlier significant other.
When participants were re-tested, their lists of the new person’s attributes included elements of themselves when they had been with the former significant person.

Michael Kraus

Michael Kraus

Transference occurs even when a target person possesses an attribute incompatible with the significant other’s characteristics, found University of Illinois’s Michael W. Kraus with Berkeley’s Chen, Victoria A. Lee, and Laura D. Straus.

Participants demonstrated transference in biased memories and judgments about a person they perceived as similar to a former significant other.

The research team elicited positive impressions even when the target was from a different ethnic group.
This suggests that stigma and discrimination may be reduced by evoking positive transference from past experiences to present actors.

Baum and Anderson observed that participants’ current mood was more positive when the target of their transference resembled their significant other and occupied a similar role to the original person.

Transference in the workplace can be problematic when employees react to one another as they responded to others from the past, introducing unconscious emotional elements to work situations.

-*How do you manage transference reactions in work and social situations?

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Self-Compassion, not Self-Esteem, Enhances Performance

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Juliana Breines

Juliana Breines

Self-compassion is treating one’s own mistakes with the same support and compassion offered to others, and it is more important than self-esteem to develop skills and performance, found University of California, Berkeley’s Juliana Breines and Serena Chen.

Self-compassion enables people to accept their mistakes and shortcomings with kindness.
It also enables equanimity when people are aware of painful thoughts and feelings.
Self-compassion is optimised when people accept responsibility for disappointing performance outcomes, and use this information to improve future performance.

Serena Chen

In Breines and Chen’s research, volunteers considered a personal setback with either:

  • self-compassion or
  • self-esteem enhancement (focusing on one’s positive qualities and accomplishments).

People who practiced a self-compassion tended to view personal shortcomings as changeable, and said they felt more motivated to improve performance by avoiding the same mistake.

Another task induced failure, then provided an opportunity to improve performance in a later challenge.
Participants who viewed their initial test failure with self-compassion devoted 25 per cent more time to preparing for future trials, and scored higher on the second test than those who focused on bolstering their self-esteem.

Self-compassion can enhance performance, suggested Breines and Chen, because it enables more dispassionate assessment of actions, abilities, and opportunities for future improvement.
In contrast, self-esteem-bolstering thoughts may narrow focus to consider only positive characteristics while overlooking opportunities for improvement.

Robert McCrae

Self-compassion measures were related to positive personality characteristics outlined in Robert McCrae and Paul Costa’s five factor model of personality known by the acronym OCEAN:

Paul Costa

  • Openness (curious vs. consistent/cautious)
  • Conscientiousness (organised vs. careless)
  • Extraversion (outgoing vs. reserved)
  • Agreeableness (friendly vs. unkind)
  • Neuroticism (nervous vs. confident)

    in a study by Kristin Neff and Stephanie Rude of University of Texas, and Kristin Kirkpatrick of Eastern Kentucky University.

Kristin Neff

Neff’s team found that higher levels of personal well-being, optimism, initiative, conscientiousness, curiosity, happiness were associated with self-compassion.
Higher self-compassion was also related to lower anxiety and depression.

In contrast, self-criticism, was associated with imagined assessments by others and comparisons with other people.

Mark Baldwin

McGill University’s Mark Baldwin found that participants who imagined an important person providing evaluative feedback experienced more negative self-evaluations, self-criticism, and negative moods.

Compassionate self-appraisals enable people to perform better and experience more positive moods than self-critical evaluations.

-*How have you applied self-compassion to improve performance?

Related Post
Working toward Goals with “Implementation Intentions”

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Working toward Goals with “Implementation Intentions”

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People are motivated by goals that enable:

  • Relatedness to others,
  • Competence in skillful performance,
  • Autonomy in directing effort, according to Columbia’s Heidi Grant Halvorson.

    Heidi Grant Halvorson

    Heidi Grant Halvorson

    Juliana Breines

    • She advocated working toward “better” performance rather than focusing on achieving the goal.

    This can be accomplished by acknowledging mistakes and practicing self-compassion, suggested by Berkeley’s Juliana Breines and Serena Chen, and University of Texas‘s Kristin Neff.

The Relatedness-Competence-Autonomy model aligns with Daniel Pink’s suggestion that meaningful goals enable two similar features and one different element:

Daniel Pink

  • Autonomy (same): Controlling work content and context,
  • Mastery (like Competence): Improving skill over time through persistence, effort, corrective feedback,
  • Purpose (in contrast to Relatedness): Being part of an inspiring goal.

Halvorson suggested ways to move closer toward goals:

Serena Chen

-Consider the larger context of specific productive actions, 

-Define reasons for doing what needs to be done – the “why,”

-Use “implementation intentions” to prepare responses for challenging situations:

–If “x” occurs (specify time, place, circumstance),
-Then I will respond by doing, thinking, saying “y.”

    • “When I feel anxious, I will focus on inhaling and exhaling slowly for 60 seconds.”
      “When it’s 7 am, I will walk for 10 minutes,”

Kristin Neff

-Apply implementation intention routines (habits) for “strategic automation” to reduce decision-overload that may undermine self-control,

-Focus on something interesting for five minutes to evoke positive feelings,

-Review “small wins” and progress toward goals.

Goal persistence can be increased, reported Stanford’s Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer in a study of employees at seven companies.

Teresa Amabile

Teresa Amabile

They found that “catalysts” and “nourishers” continue movement toward goals:

    • Capitalise on preferred motivational style:
      -“Promotion-focused” (maximise gains, avoid missed opportunities, powered by optimism),
      -“Prevention-focused” (minimise losses, variance, powered by cautious pessimism),
    • Build willpower by committing to one specific, positively-stated behavior change (“walking for 10 minutes a day every day”)
    • Apply “implementation intentions,”
    • Focus on a limited number of achievable goals,
    • Enlist “mental contrasting” to think about the satisfaction of achieving the goal.

Carol Dweck

Carol Dweck

Halvorson collaborated with Stanford’s Carol Dweck and quoted Henry Ford: “Whether you think you can or think you can’t, you’re probably right” to underscore the value of optimistic engagement with goals.

Henry Ford

Henry Ford

They synthesized Dweck’s work on “mindsets” with Halvorson’s recommendations for setting, monitoring, protecting, executing, and celebrating goals.  

An earlier post outlined Dweck’s definitions of mindsets:

• Fixed Mindset:  Belief that personal capabilities are given, fixed, limited to present capacities, associated with fear, anxiety,

• Growth Mindset:  View that personal capabilities can expand based on commitment, effort, practice, instruction, correcting mistakes, collaboration.

Peter Gollwitzer

Peter Gollwitzer

Columbia’s Peter Gollwitzer refined “mindsets” by distinguishing the Deliberative Mindset of evaluating which goals to pursue from the Implementation Mindset of planning goal execution.

His team found that the Deliberative Mindset is associated with:

    • Accurate, impartial analysis of goal feasibility and desirability,
    • Open-mindedness.

In contrast, the Implementation Mindset is linked to:

    • Optimistic, partial analysis of goal feasibility and desirability,
    • Closed-mindedness.

Halvorson, Dweck and Gollwitzer translated their research on self-determination and motivation into practical recommendations for goal seekers:

    • Adopt a supportive “mindset,”
    • Practice “self-compassion” when encountering setbacks to achieving goals,
    • Design effective responses to anticipated challenging situations,
    • Use “implementation intentions” and “strategic automation” toward goals,
    • Consider incremental progress toward goals.

-*What approaches help you work toward goals?

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Perceived Personal Power Can Modify Time Perception, Perceived Stress

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Alice Moon

Alice Moon

People’s subjective experience of time differ based on individual characteristics, which can influence feelings of control over time and coping with time demands.

Serena Chen

Serena Chen

University of California Berkeley’s Alice Moon and Serena Chen evaluated more than 550 volunteers’ ratings of their perceived personal power and their perspectives on available time to accomplish goals.

Moon and Chen asked more than 100 participants to assume the role of a “manager” while sitting in a “high-power chair,” or the role of an “employee” while both groups rated their perceived personal resources of time and power.
Participants who played the more powerful role of “manager” reported that they had more time than “employee.”

Moon and Chen also primed more than 100 American adults to think of themselves in high-power or low-power positions, and asked them to rate statements about availability of time to achieve goals.

Even when participants did not actually have more available time, those who felt most powerful perceived greater control over their time, and greater time availability.
This is another example of the power of expectation exceeding the importance of an actual resource, competency, or experience.

Mario Weick

Mario Weick

These findings support other reports that managers experience less stress than subordinates in organizations, attributable to their “position power.”

Ana Guinote

Ana Guinote

People who feel powerful tend to hold a significantly optimistic bias when predicting time required to complete task, reported University of Kent’s Mario Weick and Ana Guinote of University College London.

They attributed this unrealistic optimism to confident belief in personal self-efficacy accompanying subjective feelings of power in their evaluation of:

  • Actual power and time perception,
  • Induced feelings of power through priming,
  • Pre-existing personal self-perceptions.

Priyanka D. Joshi

Priyanka D. Joshi

This “planning fallacy” of underestimating task completion time often results from a narrow focus on the goal, coupled with the optimism bias that obscures potential obstacles and risks.

Nathanael Fast

Nathanael Fast

Likewise, people who feel powerful also tend to feel more confident about the future, more aware of their “future self,” and more willing to wait for longer-term rewards, found University of Southern California ’s Priyanka D. Joshi and Nathanael J. Fast.

Specifically, participants assigned to high-power roles and to power priming instructions were less likely to display temporal discounting, or choosing smaller short-term rewards over larger goals that require a longer waiting period.

This suggests that people who feel powerful have a sense of abundance in other domains, including time and money.
As a result, feeling powerful enables people to forego current rewards, “delay gratification,” and make present investments to achieve potentially larger longer-term pay-offs.

-*How do you increase your personal experience of power and time perspective?

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