FEST Writing Group

What is, what will be, and what should be the place of the family system variable in a science of human behavior?

Last week I spent three days attending the annual convention of the Association for Psychological Science, in San Francisco this year. It is a gathering of 4,300 psychologists and it is striking that there are rooms and rooms of hardy, good looking young people attending and presenting their research supported by funds from their departments and grantors. This is an organization that started in 1989. when I joined as a charter member. Obviously, institutional support for psychological science has been robust these last few decades. I enjoy receiving their journals Psychological Science, Current Directions in Psychological Science, Perspectives in Psychological Science, Clinical Psychological Science, and Psychological Science in the Public Interest. They are premier publications in the field. This is the second annual meeting of theirs I have been to and I wish I could go more often. Here I will report on some of the things I found there of interest to me because they represent interesting points of potential contact between Bowen theory and current research.

The meeting was all research reports, research, research, and research. George Bonanno is the Columbia Teacher’s College researcher who studies adaptation to disaster, traumatic events and loss and finds that rates of resilience are high (about 75%) and rates of resilience are consistent across diagnostic populations and types of challenging life events. His research, and that of the many students of his that have used his model for their own research, challenges viewpoints from mental health that Bowen challenged as well in his teaching – views that appear to be self serving and that seem to function like a societal projection process in which mental health experts lead society to define the population as weaker than it is – that people generally need professional help to adjust after disasters and losses. Meanwhile, for the approximately 10% of the population that develop chronic symptoms, like chronic depression after disaster, heart attack, or death of a family member, I would hypothesize, based on theory, that there has been a major shift in the family emotional system created in the wake of the event that resulted in a greater ongoing emotional load for the individual being studied.

Another theme of the research Bonanno and his students do, that challenges prevalent mental health beliefs, is that grief work as a focus following death of significant others is misguided. One of the younger researchers systematically demonstrated that the difficulties in adjustment following death of a spouse is more a matter of loss of one’s own role in life than it is a matter of grief over loss of the other –  much like it is in loss of a job. Moreover adjustment is better predicted  by looking forward to putting self together after loss, than by expression of feelings of grief, and this is the case following many kinds of loss.  Bonanno’s view regarding coping and emotion is that doing both -reflecting on the loss and looking forward towards rebuilding identity, while regulating emotion up and down – reflects self- regulatory flexibility that is sensitive to context in which one or the other coping strategy may be fitting or adaptive. I have a note saying, “Functions of emotion are context bound” and it would be interesting to look at this idea in the context of the family emotional system following loss. Meanwhile, the research conclusions fit better with Bowen theory than with current biases that favor professional encouragement of focusing on and expressing negative affect in mental health as if it is a precondition to adjustment following loss.

There’s  interesting work going on at UC Davis, my alma mater, in Leah Hibel’s lab, where they are studying physiological co-regulation in family relationships. It is perhaps predictable that the researchers are perplexed that conflict predicts more co-regulation or synchrony between dissatisfied spouses than with satisfied couples, (Saxbe & Repetti, 2010). Meanwhile, Hibel’s lab found that cortisol levels synchronize, at increased levels, between mother and infant after mother’s conflict with father, at the same time that neither spouses cortisol levels were elevated  after conflict in relation to one another. They hypothesize it is the baby who is adjusting to mother’s stress level and this raised the (to them) novel question, “is lack of synchrony protective?”. It looked to me like the bias  in this group has been that physiological synchrony/co regulation,  or being together, has been considered to be desirable. But the research is instead pointing to separate physiology as the condition of more ideal interactions. Also, the transmission of stress from the parental pair to the baby is providing a beginning view of the primary triangle and how it works to condition stress reactivity in the child. I found this rather exciting being the psychological science nerd that I am and that it is at Davis. 🙂

At Stanford, research on “systematic desensitization”  for PTSD is showing that the treatment is not actually resulting in extinguishing fear reactions to specific triggers as the rationale of systematic desensitization predicts. Rather, it seems to result in increased executive level functioning and generalized emotion regulation decreasing reactivity to life in a more general change that has shown value across a number of diagnostic categories. This research supports Bowen theory  better than Behavior learning theory.   I also remember Bowen saying this kind of therapy achieves its effect as chronic anxiety goes down in the context of  the relationship with the therapist.

The view that emotion regulation by prefrontal cortex functions has wide applicability in adaptive behavior and treatment was present throughout many of the sessions I attended. One example is the work of Mahzarin Banaji, of Harvard. She devised a method of observing implicit attitudes via response latencies (see the IAT at www.implicit.harvard.edu).  She finds a shocking prevalence of us vs. them biases in everyone which are laid out in her new book Blind Spots. She concludes, consistent with an important principle of differentiation, that in even in the face of our biased reactions,   we can move toward choosing to act consistent with our values rather than with our automatic biases. I am interested in whether this research technique could be adapted to capture our implicit biases in our families for clarity about whom we are together with and how much.

There’s a lot more but I’ll stop here.