Righting Wrongs
/‘What’s wrong?’ is a fundamental question in science research, but the motive for posing it is curiosity rather than a cynical attempt to find fault. It is also not necessarily an argument for the wholesale rejection of existing views that the phrase ‘paradigm shift’ is sometimes taken to imply. Einstein’s theory didn’t render Newton redundant, any more than quantum mechanics replaced relativity. Progress in science is a cumulative process where existing findings are consolidated or revised, punctuated by occasional large jumps.
The question has a parallel in the work of the English Franciscan friar William, born in Ockham, Surrey, in 1285. Better known as William of Occam, his lasting legacy is Occam’s Razor, which he expressed in Latin as entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem – ‘entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity’. In other words, the best answer is the simplest one, and the principle of Occam’s Razor, slicing away redundancy, is a defining feature of science. Its importance was echoed by the theoretical physicist Richard Feynman’s own version, Feynman’s Razor: if you can’t explain something in simple language you probably don’t understand it.
Research on stress is most often found in psychology, a field in which there is perhaps the least evidence for Occam’s Razor. The discipline enjoys the cachet of calling itself a science, but is replete with superfluity and obfuscation. There is no chemobabble or biobabble equivalent to psychobabble. Psychological findings are also seldom exposed to another cornerstone of science, replication. Current attempts to rectify this are indeed finding that many of the results might in reality be mere chance effects. Psychology research does deploy scientific methods, but that doesn’t make it a science.
The programme of research that yielded the evidence base for the Challenge of Change Resilience Training® began in the early 1980s, by interrogating the then-current research on stress and stress management with ‘what’s wrong?’ The answer was ‘most of it’. One example is the false distinction between so-called ‘good’ and ‘bad’ stress. They’re both called stress, which confuses the more rational distinction between highly motivating pressure on the one hand, and debilitating stress on the other. The more recent specious assertion that stress can be your friend simply compounds the misunderstanding.
Another problem was the reliance on life-event scales to measure stress. The scales list a range of things that might have happened to you over a preceding period, typically three to six months. Each event supposedly impacts on some hypothetical capacity to adapt, so the more events you endorse the more your capacity is depleted and the more likely you are to suffer from stress. There have been ample criticisms of the approach over recent decades but it is still widely believed to be true, no doubt because it offers the opportunity to blame something or someone else for your unhappiness.
Since so much of the earlier work was conceptually and methodologically flawed, we disregarded it entirely in the search for a different approach. We began by creating a psychometrically reliable instrument for measuring stress, using a unique scenario approach to generate a more objective set of potential items. Subjecting them to rigorous statistical analysis resulted in the Emotion Control Questionnaire and its sequelae (Roger and co-workers, 1987, 1989, 2011, 2016), which included a prominent scale assessing the tendency to ruminate or churn over emotional upsets.
The questionnaire presented the first psychometrically adequate measure of rumination, so there was little evidence available to indicate what its role might be in stress. We sought to find physiological rather than psychological ways to explore this question, and as reported in a previous blog (Blog 62, Liberating Your Mind), we discovered that rumination compromises the homeostatic cycle. Instead of a natural alternation between peaks of action and troughs of recovery, continuing to ruminate about emotional upsets serves to link the peaks and minimise the troughs, which impacts on both cardiovascular and immune functions. Rumination also serves to prolong the misery we feel about the upsets, which is why defining stress as ruminating about emotional upsets shows exactly why stress has a negative impact on our well-being.
Given the earlier statement about the cumulative nature of research, what, if anything, can be salvaged from earlier work on stress? The focus of the Challenge of Change is on what we describe as everyday stress, which we attribute to the process of rumination rather than to the events themselves. However, exposure to particularly traumatic events might exceed your capacity to cope, and may lead to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Contrary to the impression sometimes conveyed in the media, PTSD is rare compared to the widespread experience of everyday stress, but when it occurs it impacts significantly on the lives of sufferers.
Although rumination still plays a significant role, the source of PTSD is unambiguously a particular event or set of events, and treating the disorder requires intensive intervention to help people come to terms with the event and its aftermath. The threshold that separates everyday from post-traumatic stress is imprecise, since it might vary from one individual to another and even across different situations for the same person, but PTSD can reliably be diagnosed from a series of explicit symptoms, such as debilitating flash-backs (see also my previous Blog 41, Carried Over The Threshold).
‘What’s wrong?’ is a question that will continue to be posed, and research on rumination will undoubtedly be modified or even superseded by later work, but the extent to which findings are integrated into subsequent research depends on their reliability and validity. Those with a weak foundation in science might disappear altogether – phrenology is a case in point – but the powerful evidence for the effects of rumination in both experimental and applied contexts will provide a well-established contribution to future developments.