Hey, Google, what’s the collective noun for postgraduate students? Let’s not stop at the obvious, but boring “cohort”. I strike gold with a chemistry discussion board that suggests “a flotsam”, “an awkward”, and even a “DOOOOOMM”. One of the more depressing is “an indenture” because “the only reason it isn’t slavery is it ends … Probably less whipping as well …”.
At this moment, I have a large cohort of postgraduates under my wing, and they have diverse projects. Although I don’t have a lot of time to devote to my own pet projects, I do have a few things on the simmer that have something in common – they focus on the psychological functions for different behaviours.
Why? First, I’m just plain nosy and I’ve always been fascinated by why people do things. Second, psychological functions are central to my research on non-suicidal self-injury. That is to say, people who deliberately hurt themselves without any intent to die are not “attention-seekers”, “weirdos”, or “emo” (though some people who are “emo” may also hurt themselves), so self-injury always serves one or more psychological functions.
The most common function is emotion regulation, to deal with unpleasant and overwhelming emotions, but there are others. Self-punishment or sensation-seeking, peer bonding or demonstrating toughness, for example. Broadly, these multifarious functions fall into two families: intrapersonal functions that reflect what’s going on in someone’s head, and interpersonal functions that reflect what’s going on in one’s relationships.
But there’s no reason to think this is limited to self-injury. What about extreme sports, for example? A good friend of mine runs ultra-marathons, and we’ve discussed the blurry line between this particular pursuit and self-injury, and there is a limited overlap in terms of the psychological functions they share.
What about, for the purpose of this column, tattoos? Tattoos are interesting for many reasons, and I’ve seen speculation that they may also be thought of as self-harm; they hurt, they involve deliberate change to one’s body, etc. According to a 2009 UMR poll, about 20% of us have a tattoo. My latest survey on this suggests it’s now closer to one in four. Younger people are more likely to report a tattoo, but one in 10 of my 75-years-plus participants say they’ve got at least one.
It may surprise you to learn there isn’t a lot of psychological research on tattoos. My favourite bits come from North American research that reflects an, ahem, conservative understanding of tattoos. For example, a 2005 Canadian study set out to test whether people who have tattoos are the kind of folk who get into trouble and found this wasn’t the case. What it did suggest was that the stereotypes of folk with tattoos as being the kind of people who would get into trouble means that, in social situations, people assume they’re the ones most likely to buy drugs or get up to mischief.
In my New Zealand sample, tattoo owners are indistinguishable from the un-inked in terms of their general mental health, and they’re no more likely to be disagreeable to others.
Back to functions – what psychological functions do tattoos serve? Among young adults, we find five families of “function”. The least common of these overlaps with our self-injury function research – regulating one’s emotions through getting and having tattoos. More commonly, tattoos embody or remind the tattooed person about past or current challenges. Third, tattoos can illustrate bonding with peers, or signalling one’s friendship group. Fourth, and unsurprisingly, tattoos symbolise connections to our whānau and where we come from. Finally, and most common of all, tattoos are self-expression, and the more tattoos someone has, the more they tend to endorse this function.
The resemblance to self-harm ends here, though. Although people who have a history of self-injury tend to report more current mental distress, the same can’t be said for young people with tattoos.
