The end for positive affirmations?

2009-07-07T00:02:00.000-07:00

A new study was published in June in the journal Psychological Science. The senior author was Dr Joanne Wood. Unfortunately Dr Wood's views have been widely circulated in newspapers around the world, on radio and online, pretty much as she first wrote them. Not a critical analysis to be seen. There seem to be a lot of journalists out there who feel quite oppressed by the notion that people with low self esteem might be able to change their self evaluations by using different than usual self-talk to balance things up a little. It seems that none of the journalists spreading the word has bothered to read the original paper or they might have been less impressed.

While it may be true that people with very low self esteem had a negative reaction to a positive self-statement under some conditions, the context of Dr Wood's study is so far removed from a real life situation that her more general conclusions about likely negative effects of positive affirmations and therapy are not plausible.

Dr Wood's study had participants fill out a scale of self-esteem and half of them said a single positive affirmation like "I am am loveable" during the testing process. The affirmation seems to have had little effect except for the low self-estee, people. In explanation Dr Wood suggests that positive self-statements cause negative moods in people with low self-esteem because they conflict with those people’s views of themselves. She proposes that the low self-esteem people found the affirmation so unbelievable that it strengthened their own negative view rather than reversing it. She goes further and concludes that many readers of self-help books that encourage positive self-statements are likely to suffer from low self-esteem in the same way, thus these books may be worse than useless.

The study tells us almost nothing about positive self-statements as they might be used in any counselling or self affirming activity. As far as the key group of low self-esteem participants were concerned the experimental situation was characterized by having a single positive statement buried in the midst of dozens of negative statements that they were saying to themselves as they filled out the questions in the self esteem scale. Think about it. They have very negative feelings about themselves. For every question in the self-esteem scale they are asked to put in writing exactly how negative these feelings are. Then at some point, soon after this, they say a single positive affirmation. It must have seemed a ridiculous thing to do. They may well have felt irritated by such a weird thing to be doing after having spent a long time saying the very opposite.

The study's authors and the journalist commentators appear not to have thought too much about this context in which the self-affirmation statement was made. It seems to me that there is no possibility of generalizing the findings beyond this very peculiar context.

The study's findings tell us nothing about what might happen when people with low self esteem read a persuasive book about self attitudes that guides them towards a rational analysis of themselves together with some acceptable self-afirmations. They tell us nothing about how people might respond to a sensitive therapist who guides them towards appreciating those positive qualities they do have and who is emotionally supportive -thereby providing the positive regard that they have trouble offering themselves. The content of such a dialogue is likely to involve rational analysis and justification for these new ways of thinking (rather than a single confronting emotional idea) and in this way might present many believable, acceptable new ways to think about oneself. The study certainly doesn't tell us that positive affirmations don't work, except for one very unusual, artificial, experimental situation. In other words, the study is not about real life. It is about not much at all.

PSYC1PLUS

The end for positive affirmations?