ozarque's Journal
[Most Recent Entries]
[Calendar View]
[Friends View]
Wednesday, October 31st, 2007
| Time |
Event |
| 7:28a |
Testing -- please ignore #Hostility Research Update If there is a _theory_ of verbal self-defense for American English -- and I certainly hope there is, given all the decades I've spent working on it -- one of its most basic principles is that hostile language is dangerous to the health and well-being of people who speak American English. That statement means _literally_ dangerous, not dangerous in some metaphorical sense, and the danger is explicable in terms of physiological and neurophysiological mechanisms that can be objectively demonstrated. Early in the history of the research regarding this principle, much confusion was created by some wandering down the garden path associated with the concept of the "Type A" personality; confusion was also created by some glitches in the choice of an instrument for diagnosing hostility. In recent years, however, those confusions have been put to rest, and the body of research literature is now substantial enough that I consider it safe to say that the principle itself is no longer controversial. One of the first articles that I found helpful, decades ago, was this very brief one -- "Distrust, Rage May Be 'Toxic Core' That Puts 'Type A' Person at Risk," by Chris Raymond, on page 813 of _JAMA_ for 2/10/1989. It started by saying that hostility may well cause you to die of heart disease, went on to quote Redford B. Williams saying that "of all the aspects originally described as making up the global Type A pattern, only those related to hostility and anger are really coronary prone," and then said: "According to Williams, the coronary-prone hostile personality comprises three parts: cynical mistrust of other people's motives..., frequent feelings of anger, and aggressive expression of hostility toward others without regard for their feelings." It also reported the results of a few small studies that appeared to support Williams' claims. Over the years, many more studies -- some with very large populations -- have replicated and clarified the results of that earlier research. We've come a long way since 1989. And I would like to recommend to you two recent articles that provide a history and overview of the research to date, as well as useful bibliographies with links to additional sources of information. The first article is "Psychosocial Risk Factors for Cardiovascular Disease: More Than One Culprit at Work," by Redford B. Williams et al., in _JAMA_ 290: 2190-2192 (2003), available online at http://tinyurl.com/2ce3hh . Here is its opening paragraph (with its bibliography subscripts deleted): "Solid scientific evidence supporting the adverse effects of stress on health began to emerge nearly 30 years ago with the report by Rosenman et al. showing that men with type A behavior (time urgency, hostility, achievement striving) were twice as likely as their counterparts with type B behavior (lacking type A characteristics) to develop coronary heart disease (CHD) over an 8-year period. Failure to replicate this finding in another large-scale prospective study raised questions about the validity of type A behavior as a CHD risk factor. However, subsequent research makes a strong case that of the 3 components of the global type A behavior pattern, hostility is the one most reliably associated with increased CHD risk." The second article is "Hostility as a Predictor of Survival in Patients With Coronary Artery Disease," by Stephen H. Boyle et al., on pp. 629-532 of _Psychosomatic Medicine_ 66:529-632 (2004), available online at http://www.psychosomaticmedicine.org/cgi/content/full/66/5/629 . This article discusses the history of the diagnostic instrument used to _identify_ hostility as an aspect of behavior in research subjects, starting with the 50-item Cook-Medley Hostility Scale (CMHS) and progressing to an abbreviated version of that instrument known as "the ACM." The article says: "The ACM consisted of the combination of the cynicism, hostile attribution, hostile affect, and aggressive responding subscales that were identified in an earlier study (Barefoot et al. 1989) by a rational analysis of the item content. ... A reanalysis of an earlier study of CAD patients, with additional follow-up, showed that the ACM was a significant predictor of both CHD and total mortality while the total CMHS was not. One explanation for this finding relates to the item content of the total scale, which contains a variety of items, only some of which reflect the construct of hostility. To the extent that it is 'hostility' that identifies individuals at risk for negative health outcomes, a scale that provides a purer measure of that construct will likely have a stronger relation to survival. The results of our study are consistent with this notion." | | 7:55a |
Personal note; explanation of "testing -- please ignore" post...
I spent much of yesterday trying -- unsuccessfully -- to send the second half of my Verbal Self-Defense Newsletter to my VSD Network members. I appreciate the vigilance of the Big Cyberpowers, intellectually, but emotionally I do wish they would quit mistaking my newsletters for spam. I have done vast amounts of newsletter-scrubbing in an attempt to satisfy them -- eliminating all sequences of capital letters, making certain there are no Naughty Words, avoiding any sequence of language that looks even remotely like a sales pitch, et cetera et cetera -- and still ... they cut me off at the pass every now and then.
Anyway, it occurred to me that one way to handle the crisis would be to post the whole missing section in my LJ, send the members an e-mail with the URL for the section so they could go cut-and-paste it, and then delete it from the journal -- and so I tried that. And it didn't work.
I then tried sending only a part of the missing section -- the "testing -- please ignore" post below -- and that appeared instantly, in the normal fashion. Which is, I suppose, a clue.
I apologize for the clutter and the commotion.... | | 8:30a |
Recommended link; Oliver Sacks interview.... Recommended: "Tales of Oliver Sacks and the Brain," an interview [on an amazing array of topics] with Oliver Sacks, by Dave Weich. At http://tinyurl.com/2b9ngc . | | 10:18a |
Linguistics; pragmatics; favors; part nine; the "favors grammar" in old age...
The whole "ambience" that goes with asking for favors and responding to requests for favors is very different for elders than it is for the younger generations. Obviously there is some overlap with the information you've developed in this discussion about the favors situation in the context of disabilities -- not because being old should be perceived as a disability, but because one of the effects of aging is that you gradually find yourself unable to do a lot of things you were able to do when you were younger, or unable to do them adequately. I suspect that all of that is obvious to you; your own common sense will tell you that when an elder says "This door is so heavy I can't get it open; could you open it for me, please?" you should say, "Sure," and open the cottonpicking door.
There is one aspect of the favors situation in old age, however, that is less obvious, and that I don't see anyone warning younger people about. I'm going to try to warn you about it in this post, because I think it's something younger people need to know while they're still younger people.
It's possible that you and your housemate(s) will age at the same rate, but it's not likely. Usually, one or more of you will age more quickly, and will show the effects of age more quickly. And one of those effects is almost certainly going to be forgetfulness. I'm not talking about dementia of any kind; that's a whole different story. I'm talking about ordinary elderly forgetfulness and ordinary elderly tendencies to do things carelessly and in too much of a hurry.
Suppose your elderly housemate does all these things in a single day...
**Leaves the house without locking the front door
**Takes a shower and doesn't turn off the water completely, so that a trickle of water is left running
**Washes a few breakfast dishes but fails to get the sink clean afterward, so that flecks of food are left sticking to the sides of the sink
**Prunes some bushes outside your place and leaves the pruning shears lying on the grass under the bushes
**Fails to take a prescribed medication
**Bakes some bread and doesn't turn off the oven
How do you handle this? There are at least three choices...
1. You and your housemate fight about it, constantly.
This is common -- I've seen it many times -- and it's a sure path to misery. It's not a good choice. But neither of the other two choices is a good choice; they're better than Choice #1, but they're not good choices. They are:
2. You follow your housemate around all day, as discreetly as you can manage, and you take care of all the things that have been forgotten. You lock the door, you turn off the water, you clean the sink properly, you put away the pruning shears, you turn off the oven, you give your housemate the forgotten medication. And the only time you mention any of this is with the medication, when you have to say, "I noticed that you forgot your pill, and I thought I'd bring it to you with some water so you could take it." The rest of the time, you just deal with it and say nothing.
3. You keep a careful eye on your housemate, as in #2, but you only take care of the forgotten things yourself when they're genuinely urgent. If the water has been left running, you do turn it off. But for the other things, you ask your housemate for a favor. With utterances like... "Would you do me a favor? Would you try to remember not to leave the water running?" And "When I was in the kitchen a minute ago I noticed that you didn't get the sink clean when you washed the breakfast dishes. Would you do me a favor and fix that?" And "You left the pruning shears outside when you pruned the bushes. Would you go put them away, please, when you have a minute?"
With Choice #2, your housemate will be reasonably happy and things will get done. But your housemate is being treated like a helpless child, which is insulting, and you are behaving like a martyr, which not only adds to your workload but -- unless you're a saint -- is going to make you feel resentful and cross, even bitter.
With Choice #3, you're treating your housemate like a rational adult, and you're not having to do all those extra tasks yourself. But your housemate -- unless your housemate is a saint -- is going to perceive you as someone who is constantly nagging, who isn't willing to be kind enough to do a few small tasks, and who is deliberately trying to humiliate him/her.
It seems to me that while you and your housemate(s) are still young enough to discuss this, you ought to make clear to one another what your preferences are. What would you rather have happen? Would you rather be treated like a helpless child and left in peace? Would you rather be treated like a rational adult and have the things you've forgotten pointed out to you so that you can fix them yourself? Are you willing to be the martyr that Choice #2 requires? Are you willing to be on the receiving end of Choice #3?
I think this is something that should be decided in advance. If it never happens, well and good; no harm done, and you are blessed. But if it does happen, it will then be too late to negotiate an agreement about how it should be handled. If you're the one who behaves this way, what do you want? Do you want the other person to just take care of whatever you didn't do, and say nothing? Do you want to always be told about what you did and asked not to do it again? Do you want to be checked on constantly, or would you rather not have that done, even if it's sure to lead to serious problems sometimes? And if it's your housemate, not you, who grows forgetful, are you willing to be someone who does all that checking?
Finally... Of course it's not the case that only elderly people do things like those on the list at the beginning of this post. Careless people of any age, people of any age who try to do things too quickly, and people who just don't care, do them. But with the non-elderly you know what to do. A toddler does a task and is so very proud, but misses a few details -- you take care of the missing details unobtrusively and you praise the toddler. And then you find an opportunity to talk about those details. An older child or a teenager does a task and leaves something out; you tell that child what the problem is, because it's your responsibility to teach that youngster how things are done. And you follow up on that. A non-elderly unimpaired adult does that sort of thing ... you tell that adult what the problem is, and that you object, and that you have a right to expect that it won't keep happening. But your eighty-seven-year-old housemate who's grown forgetful?
I think this needs to be worked out in advance. |
|