The biggest conference I’ve ever been to was the Association for Psychological Science conference in Washington, in 2011. I’m pretty sure former US president Ronald Reagan was shot just outside the conference venue back in 1981. When I say the conference was big, I mean that it was the kind of conference where you get to give a talk about your research only if you’re world famous. It regularly hosts more than 4000 attendees and if, like me, you’re not famous, you get to stand next to a poster of your research for a couple of hours in a room that’s like an aircraft hangar, alongside hundreds of others. Then you take down your poster, and the next shift of hundreds of people come in and present their posters.
That year, I presented data showing that about 90% of our fellows and members of the Royal Society of New Zealand (and 80% of the general population) believed in evolution. While I tend to see as many presentations as I can at a conference, the value of the ones I regularly attend are the conversations that happen between sessions, during tea breaks and over dinner. That’s where you often get to hear about the really interesting stuff that’s going on.
In fact, I was warned early on about presenting research at big conferences unless it had already been published. Why? Because, I was told, there might be people in the audience with the kind of resources to go back to their workplace the next day, copy your research and get it into a journal before you can. That sounds pretty cynical.
So maybe I shouldn’t be telling you any of the ideas I’ve had but haven’t published yet. That’s okay. I trust you.
Tattoos? Yup, some people say they got tattoos to deal with their emotions.
I’ve been thinking a lot about why people do the things they do. In fact, that sits at the heart of pretty much all my research (and teaching, too). I do a lot of research on deliberate self-injury, originally because if there’s one thing we know about human beings it’s that we’re adapted to avoiding pain. So why do so many of us deliberately do things that cause us pain? The answer is … for a variety of reasons. Maybe to punish ourselves, maybe to communicate our distress or to avoid unpleasant emotions.
But these individual “functions” can be lumped together into two families of functions; intrapersonal ones that revolve around what’s going on in our own heads (eg, self-punishment, emotion regulation) and interpersonal ones that relate to managing what’s happening in our social world (like bonding with peers or showing other people how upset we are). Personally, I think they’re all intrapersonal, in that they’re about dealing with our thoughts and emotions, but it’s the source of those thoughts and emotions that can come from inside or outside of us.
I don’t think this general distinction is limited to self-injury, though. My team has been doing some work on why people do or don’t watch horror movies, and there are parallels. Some people watch horrors to get the adrenalin pumping (intrapersonal), or to bond with others (interpersonal). Tattoos? Yup, some people say they got tattoos to deal with their emotions.
I’ve not done it yet, but I bet that extreme sports, like ultramarathon running or mountain biking, also overlap a bit. Now, I’m not saying that watching a horror movie or hopping on your mountain bike are forms of self-injury. I’m saying that, like self-injury, they serve psychological functions and there are some psychological functions that transcend individual behaviours, like managing emotions or bonding with others.
If that’s the case, then a really good question is why, when we have a smorgasbord of possible behaviours lined up in front of us, some of us choose to drink until we’re blotto, or get a tattoo, or run until our legs stop working. Maybe I’ll do some research on that.
