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June 14, 2009 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
25:43
1392 Depression, Self Attack, Authority - A Masters Thesis
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Yes, I did. Fantastic.
Some of you might know that about a year ago, I mentioned that I was doing my thesis.
I tried to get my master's degree in psychology, and I have completed my thesis project, and I would like to talk about it.
So basically what I'll do is I'll just give you...
Just a basic outline of it and what I did and what I found.
And then I'll take some questions over that.
Fantastic. So basically, I wanted to do something in psychology that was sort of a topic that we all struggle with, especially here on the board.
And one of the things that usually comes up is self-attack.
And... I went to my professors about this, and I asked them if there was anything literature about self-attack.
And well, they said it's not really called self-attack, it's called high self-criticism.
And so I went and looked at literature, and there's just like a ton of stuff in the psychology literature about high self-criticism.
And basically what happens with high self-criticism is, you know, for example, you have A parent who's, you know, not satisfied with their child.
You know, they're kind of abusive, so they're very highly...
They highly criticize their child.
And this child ends up internalizing that criticism.
And then, then, And then later on in life, we see...
Different manifestations of this self-criticism.
So, for example, this high self-critic will end up getting into relationships with people who are very judgmental towards them and highly critical of them.
And so on.
Now, a famous psychologist named Alfred Adler, I don't know if you've heard of him, but He sort of talks about how this self-criticism later on in life is a way, although a maladaptive way, to safeguard self-esteem.
The hidden motive with high self-criticism is self-enhancement to protect their ego and so forth.
They safeguard their self-esteem through aggression and withdrawal.
And this faulty self-esteem is very sensitive to success and failures, and they're very sensitive to other people criticizing them and so on.
Self-critics do tend to keep their standards at a safe level because they're afraid of failure.
They do have a tendency to attack themselves by becoming perfectionists.
You know, they set the standard way too high, and then they fail, and they attack themselves.
And, you know, the strategy of aiming low is also used to communicate to people that little should be expected of them, and that also safeguards their self-esteem.
And after failures, they suffer like everybody else, but this self-criticism kind of cushions the blow.
So, you know, you kind of see how, you know, from Their childhood origins to, as an adult, this criticism from the parents ends up carrying over with them.
And this is the reason why they don't get help for it, because it kind of maintains itself.
And there's a lot of stuff about self-criticism.
The least stuff that's been done on it is with parenting.
And a little bit about the parents of self-critics.
So I want to do a thesis project exploring that, see if I can find out anything else about the parents of self-critics.
So I looked up in the literature things about parenting styles.
In psychology, a really popular thing about parenting styles is these particular parenting styles called authoritarian styles.
Permissive and authoritative.
Authoritarian parents, as the name suggests, they always try to maintain authority and control over their children.
They set strict rules and they punish their children punitively if they don't follow those rules.
Permissive parents, they give up most of their control over their children.
They're kind of a laissez-faire type of parents.
You know, they make few of any rules.
And what's also interesting about permissive parents' mind-by is that children of these parents tend to be narcissists later on in their life.
Because essentially they have to raise themselves.
And the last style is the authoritative.
These parents are described as trying to help their children to become responsible for themselves and think about the consequences of their behavior.
They provide reasonable expectations for their children and they try to reward children for good behavior rather than whether they follow the rules or not.
So I had the idea of seeing if I could combine the two and thinking that authoritarian parents would lead to self-critical children.
So I set up a study where I give some college students taking an intro psychology class, I give them these questionnaires.
Two of the questionnaires were designed to have them classify the mother and then the father on these various parenting styles.
And then the middle questionnaire was designed to measure their level of self-criticism.
And fortunately, the results, I think, I didn't quite get the results I was expecting.
But the only result I did find was that father authoritarianism was positively correlated with self-criticism, although correlation is not causation.
And this might be due to the kind of study I did.
I'm asking college students to, even though they didn't understand what the questionnaire was for, they were rating their parents.
So, you know, there are some methodological problems there, but I didn't have a whole lot of resources to do the study.
If I could do the study over again, I might do something like, you know, have maybe a younger child interact with the parent and, you know, maybe classify the parents based on this interaction and then maybe get the kid to take a self-criticism questionnaire later on and see if I could find the connection there.
So I think that's basically what my study was about.
I mean, I didn't find everything I wanted to, but I found a lot of interesting stuff there.
And that's about all I'm going to do.
I mean, if anybody has any questions, I can clarify that.
So just to reiterate, and thank you so much, this is very interesting.
So we have the authoritarian, the permissive, And the democratic or authoritative parents.
Is it completely unfair for me when the link that you sent to me was democratic parents help children learn to be responsible for themselves and to think about the consequences of their behavior.
They do this by providing clear, reasonable expectations for their children and explanations for why they expect their children to behave in a particular manner.
They monitor their children's behavior.
This is actually your approach to marriage, right?
They monitor their children's behavior to make sure they follow through on rules and expectations.
They do this in a warming, loving Anna, blah, blah, blah.
They often try to catch their children being good and reinforcing the good behavior rather than focusing on the bad, sweetie.
Sorry. For example, a child who leaves her toys on a staircase may be told not to do this because someone might trip and get hurt and a toy might be damaged.
As children mature, parents involve children making rules and doing chores.
Who will mop the kitchen floor and who will carry out the trash?
Parents who have a democratic style give choices based on a child's ability.
For a toddler... The choice might be red shirt or striped shirt.
For an older child, the choice might be apple, orange, or banana.
Parents guide children's behavior by teaching, not punishment.
You threw your truck at Mindy.
That hurt her. We're putting your truck away until you can play with it safely.
And whereas the authoritarian and permissive parents are not that, as I would say, nuanced, mature, and balanced, is it just my preference or perhaps bigotry to say that What I would call democratic or authoritative parenting would be classified as good parenting and the other parenting styles not so much with the goodness.
Is that unfair or is that a reasonable thing to say?
Oh, sure. Sorry if I didn't clarify that.
Yeah, basically what they have found is that with authoritative parenting, that really is the best kind of parenting and that tends to, in these studies, produce the best results.
You know, in terms of healthy attachment and so forth, and good outcomes for the children.
Whereas the other two, not so much.
Right, right. Now, it's interesting, so you found that positive correlation, though again, this is to stress that correlation is not causality, between authoritarian fathers and a heightened degree of self-attack?
Yes. So, in other words, you know, the higher the score of self-criticism, the more we tend to see authoritarian fathers there.
So that could be a lot of these people who had highly authoritative authoritarian fathers, you know, who are very self-critical of themselves.
No, you can't have Daddy's microphone.
I'm sorry, sweetums. Just a little bit older before you can take over the show.
This is authoritative parenting.
It's not democratic yet, sweet dums, because you're just too little, sweet dums.
Yes, you are. Yes, you are.
Because in about six months, you will actually be able to raise the maturity level of the program considerably.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Sorry about that.
All right. So that, I mean, that seems to me...
It's a reasonable theory, of course.
I mean, that if you have an authoritative, because I said so, kind of parent...
Who has very high standards and is critical of children for not meeting those standards, that you would tend to internalize that and be very critical and not at ease with your own inevitable experiences of failure and setback and so on.
Right. Right, right.
Okay. And did you, just out of curiosity, did you do any correlations between the permissive and self-attack continuum?
Yeah, yeah. You know, the thing is, it's really kind of hard to find a lot of people with very permissive parents.
You know, usually you find authoritarian and authoritative there, but permissive is kind of low with college students for some reason.
Sorry, I'm not being quite authoritative enough with my child.
That's fine. And do other people have questions that they would like?
I think you've been kind enough that after your paper is in, you would consider putting it somewhere available to our listeners because I certainly would like to look at it more and go over your math with a fine-tooth comb.
Just kidding. Certainly.
Oh, also I wanted to mention that, you know, a lot of these studies in self-criticism, they tend to use females and they tend to talk about the mothers.
There tends to be this...
We study the daughter-mother bond because they consider that the most strongest bond.
So that's studied a lot.
And a lot of the few childhood studies I looked at, it was mostly from the mother.
So what we were expecting in this study, one of my hypotheses, was that females would be more highly self-critical than males.
But we didn't find any significant difference.
And mothers were, you know, mother authoritarians were not shown to have any influence on self-criticism.
So the father authoritarian self-criticism is a little surprising for me.
Right, right. You had mentioned also, if I remember rightly, the correlation between authoritative parenting, self-attack, and depression?
Yes, yes. In general, self-criticism tends to be talked about as a vulnerability to depression.
That just means the self-critic does try to maintain their ego and their self-esteem, but they do it in a maladaptive way, so they tend to fall into depression a lot.
And do you know any of the sort of theory or studies behind that?
Uh, again, Adler does talk about that.
It's, I mean, it's essentially, you know, them trying to cope with the world, you know, after their parents have did what they did to them, you know, with the high criticism.
They have this habit of setting their own standards and everything to try to keep their ego and everything in line, but they tend to You know, fall off or whatever.
They'll set high goals.
It doesn't work.
So they attack themselves, if that makes any sense.
Right. It's sort of the exhaustion that comes after the self-attack can be characterized as a kind of depression and hopelessness about ever escaping the self-attack or hopelessness about ever meeting the standards that provoke the self-attack.
Right. Yeah. I'd also try and make the suggestion as well that if you can wrap the actual facts I think that you really will have achieved the empirical standards that this show consistently tries to provide.
Yeah, absolutely. Excellent.
See, a deficiency of self-attack could absolutely characterize my approach to empiricism, but we can perhaps talk about that another time when I'm ready for a good long cry.
Yeah, good luck with it, and do let us know how it goes.
Congratulations. I think it's a really, really exciting thing to be doing.
Thank you very much.
Did anyone else have any other questions for the Divine Mr.
J on this topic or related topics?
I had a couple questions, if that's alright.
Sure. Well, I was kind of wondering if you could go over some of the findings that you weren't expecting?
Well, yeah, sure.
We used a main analysis.
It's called a regression analysis.
It's kind of complicated to go into, but That was the main analysis where I was trying to get the findings that were hypothesized.
Basically, everything else except for the correlation I was talking about earlier, everything else was not significant.
So, for example, we examined the self-criticism of the males and the females.
They're not significantly different.
Was that one of the things that you had...
Did you hypothesize before starting this study?
Yes, I had a set of hypotheses.
So, for example, the self-criticism literature would predict that females would be more self-critical than males, for reasons I can explain if you'd like.
We didn't find that in this study, and it could be just the participants we had.
Yeah. I was expecting that at least one authoritarian parent would have some connection with self-criticism.
And there was a correlation, but I was looking for something a little stronger than that.
And that was a little interesting.
The self-criticism literature mostly dealt with mothers and children, and they would predict that Mothers would heavily influence self-criticism, but that was not found in the study.
Either way, authoritarian mothers were not influencing of high self-criticism.
Authoritative mothers, just to go the other way, were not influencing low self-criticism.
Do you do any kind of, I don't know if it would be follow-up or speculation or What it would be as to why you think that happened?
What that means?
No, I did kind of do some descriptives in there, and I got some numbers, other numbers in there.
I did found some things like males tended to have...
A little stronger, although not significant.
They tend to have a lot stronger high self-criticism and a lot stronger responses to authoritarian fathers.
So that finding then actually is not just insignificant, but runs completely counter to your expectations.
Yeah, in a way. I mean, it's kind of going along the direction that authoritarian parents would influence self-criticism.
Just kind of not where I thought it would go, if that makes any sense, you know.
All right, but you were expecting females to be more self-critical, and instead you found males more self-critical.
Is that correct? Well, yeah.
They were a little more self-critical, but not significantly more self-critical, if that makes any sense.
Not enough to be significant in the study, is what you're saying.
Is that right? Right. Yeah.
Not any more than would chance, would predict.
What's sort of the bandwidth of significance?
Usually when we do significance, we...
On all of our significance tests, we usually put it at a.05 level, which means that if something is significant, there's only like a 5% chance that, you know, if we do this study over and over again, there's only a 5% chance that it's just due to chance.
And not that there's an actual effect there.
And if it's not significant, it's greater than.05.
Just a couple more questions.
Sure. How did you decide...
How did you categorize these three sort of parenting styles?
How did you decide when respondents sent you the responses back that this particular respondent belongs in the authoritarian pile as opposed to the permissive pile?
That sort of thing.
Sure. There's...
If you read the literature in the...
Parenting styles, they do use a questionnaire that's designed for that.
And the way this questionnaire works is there's like 20 questions on there, and they'll give a statement, and then there's a Likert scale, which means there's like 1 through 5, you know, 1 being strongest, 5 being whatever.
And these questions are designed so there's various subscales.
Like, you know, questions 1 through 10 are designed to ask questions about The authoritarian parent.
And what you do at the end of it is you just add up these subscales.
Add the numbers up.
Okay, so it's kind of...
They try to quantify answers to the questions.
Right. Can you give me a typical question from...
The parental authority questioner?
Yeah. I'm just kind of curious if you don't mind.
I hope this isn't boring everybody else, but I'm kind of curious.
That's no problem. A typical question would be, while I was growing up, my mother felt that in a well-run home, the children should have their way in the family as often as the parents do.
One, strongly agree.
Two, disagree. Three, neither agree nor disagree.
Four, agree. Number five strongly agree.
Oh, I see.
Okay. That makes sense.
And this one, this is from the questionnaire designed with emphasis on the mother.
The other questionnaire has the same questions but with emphasis on the father.
So that's how we got both of them for both parents.
Oh, and respondents had to answer both questionnaires then.
Yes. Oh, okay.
That's interesting.
You said earlier that you were disappointed in not being able to get to a younger age group sample set.
Was there anything that you did to, I don't know, mitigate or take into account or, like...
How did you deal with the fact that you were working with not an ideal sample set?
Well, most of the time when you do research, you know, especially in college, I mean, the best participants that you have available is college students and usually some are taking like an intro psychology course.
Those are sometimes ideal for most studies.
This one probably wasn't ideal for this study because they are college students and most of them might have moved out of their home and so forth.
Right. And you are asking them about their parents.
According to my debriefings of everybody, nobody could guess the hypothesis and they didn't really know exactly what I was trying to find out.
They knew I was asking about the parents.
So there might be a little bit of bias there.
I mean, it is a little problematic, but, you know, given the resources I had at the time, that's the best that I could do.
Right. But if I could do it over again, I would try to pair off children with parents and see if I can get the information directly rather than sort of this indirect way.
Because it is problematic for anybody to...
Find out about somebody's parents through the child in a questionnaire later on as an adult, if that makes any sense.
It might also be interesting to take this to other departments, right?
Like, give it to, you know, hard sciences students or math students or music students and see if you get any, you know, because people tend to gravitate toward those subjects as a sort of as a...
At least I did anyway.
There's a reaction to what was going on at home, right?
Right. That might be interesting.
Somebody from the chat room asked, I wonder what kind of results you get with participants in therapy.
Well, that would be interesting.
Although, as I mentioned earlier, if they're going to cognitive behavioral therapy, they might already be dealing with the self-criticism.
So we're Kind of not really getting the results of it, you know, as if they weren't in therapy, you know.
The purpose of my study was not to really cure anything, of course.
It's just kind of trying to find out a little more information from it.
Whereas a clinical perspective would be trying to, you know, deal with the self-criticism.
I hope that answers your question.
Well, thank you. That was really, really interesting.
I do appreciate that. And do let us know when the thesis is done.
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