{"id":2890,"date":"2009-10-07T04:11:35","date_gmt":"2009-10-07T12:11:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/secularright.org\/wordpress\/?p=2890"},"modified":"2009-10-07T10:37:20","modified_gmt":"2009-10-07T18:37:20","slug":"the-bright-side-of-being-blue","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/the-bright-side-of-being-blue\/","title":{"rendered":"The Bright Side of Being Blue"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m going to assume here that all readers of Secular Right are deep enthralled in their copies of \u00a0We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism<\/em><\/a>. \u00a0 That would be the top copy, I mean, of the\u00a0five you purchased as gifts for family and friends.<\/p>\n

One infuriating thing about writing a nonfiction book that uses data from recent research (in my case, from the\u00a0human sciences) is that some reinforcing research will appear just too late for inclusion.<\/p>\n

Well, here I am in Chapter 7 of WAD<\/em>:<\/p>\n

Researchers like S. Taylor and J. Brown (Illusion and Well-Being<\/em>, 1988) have found that a\u00a0moderate degree of self-deception is normal in mentally healthy people, and is likely adaptive. Contrariwise: \u00a0“[I]t appears to be not the well-adjusted individual but the individual who experiences subjective distress who\u00a0is more likely to process self-relevant information in a relatively unbiased and balanced fashion.”<\/p>\n

To put it slightly differently: up to a point, the more depressed and maladjusted you are, the more likely it is\u00a0that you are seeing things right, with minimal bias.<\/p>\n

Or differently again: For a happy and well-adjusted life, practice self-deception. If it’s the cold, unvarnished\u00a0truth you want, seek out a melancholy pessimist. (Which, if you are reading this book, is what you have\u00a0done.)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

No sooner is that out in print than I hear about a\u00a0paper<\/a> by behavioral geneticist Paul Andrews titled “The Bright Side of Being Blue.” Andrews goes\u00a0further down the road opened up by Taylor & Brown (and many others he cites), arguing that depression is not a\u00a0pathology at all, and may actually be adaptive!<\/p>\n

In summary, we hypothesize that depression is a stress response mechanism: (1) that is triggered by\u00a0analytically difficult problems that influence important fitness-related goals; (2) that coordinates changes in body\u00a0systems to promote sustained analysis of the triggering problem, otherwise known as depressive rumination; (3) that\u00a0helps people generate and evaluate potential solutions to the triggering problem; and (4) that makes tradeoffs with\u00a0other goals in order to promote analysis of the triggering problem, including reduced accuracy on laboratory tasks.\u00a0Collectively, we refer to this suite of claims as the analytical rumination<\/em> (AR)\u00a0hypothesis<\/em>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I coulda used that for my book. Of course, we melancholy depressives knew it anyway!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m going to assume here that all readers of Secular Right are deep enthralled in their copies of \u00a0We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism. \u00a0 That would be the top copy, I mean, of the\u00a0five you purchased as gifts for … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2890"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2890"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2890\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2898,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2890\/revisions\/2898"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2890"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2890"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2890"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}