Speaking of Psychology - How close relationships keep us healthy and happy, with Richard Slatcher, PhD

Episode Date: November 3, 2021

Close relationships are essential to our happiness and well-being and are also an important predictor of physical health. Richard Slatcher, PhD, of the University of Georgia, talks about why the support we receive from our partners, family and friends is so important, how we develop these deep ties to each other, and the key ingredients of good and supportive relationships. He also discusses how technology like smartphones and social media is affecting close relationships and his study on “Love in the time of COVID-19.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ask most people about the things that are important to them, about what really matters in their life and what makes them happy. And you'll hear a common refrain, my spouse or partner, my children, my family, my closest friends. Close relationships are essential to our happiness and well-being, and decades of research have shown that they're also important predictors of physical health. Why is that? What kind of support do we receive from our partners and other close relationships,

and why does that support matter so much? What are the biological mechanisms that tie together social relationships and health? What are the ingredients of a good and supportive relationship and how do we develop these deep ties to each other? Also, how has the COVID-19 pandemic affected our close relationships? Are people coming out of the past year and a half feeling a stronger connection to their loved ones or have those ties frayed? And what, if any, lasting effects might we see?

Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life. I'm Kim Mills. Our guest today is Dr. Richard Slatcher, a professor of psychology and head of the Close Relationships Laboratory at the University of Georgia. He studies how our intimate relationships get under our skin to affect our health and well-being, how people come to feel close to each other, and how technology, like smartphones and social media may be affecting our closest relationships. For the past year, he's also been running a study called Love in the Time of COVID that's looked at how people's relationships have been faring through

the pandemic. We'll try to discuss all of that today. Thank you for joining us, Dr. Slatcher. That's great to be here, Kim. It might seem kind of obvious that good relationships make us happier. But as I just mentioned a few moments ago, there are many years of research now suggesting that they make us healthier too. So let's start with a broad question. How and why are relationships important to our health and well-being? What's the scientific evidence? I guess let's start with the well-being question. When you open this segment, it reminded me of one of my intellectual heroes who passed away this year, Ed Deiner, at the University of Illinois, who was really the father of happiness research. And it was his research that really

pointed us to how important social relationships are for our well-being. And he showed that all of the people who indicate on a one to ten scale that they're at the most happy 10, all of them to a person indicate having a close friend in their lives. And it's research that like that that's really kept me going because time and time again we see how important our relationships are for how happy we are and increasingly we're finding out for how healthy we are too. I once gave a talk about five years or so was an interdisciplinary conference, a small meeting. And the person before me was an exercise physiologist. And at the beginning of their talk, they said, I challenge anyone to argue with me about the importance of physical activity. You can't overstate the importance of physical activity.

And I came up and I talked next. And I said, I don't mean to try to top you, but. And then I showed her a graph of basically all of the different things that are associated with longevity, including not. smoking, including physical activity, including not being a, you know, fairly low weight and things like that. And right at the top was our social relationships. And it's a pretty robust finding that people who are more socially connected live longer. And there are all kinds of fascinating studies. There's a great study that you might have heard of called the nuns study, where they studied these nuns over several decades.

And nuns are a great group to study because they all live in the same environment, physical environment. So you're controlling for a lot of extremist factors. And by a mile, the nuns who had the closest relationships lived the longest, and the nuns who are the happiest live the longest. And we've seen this in the Harvard Men's study, you know, that's been going on for close to 100 years now. And so it's really these kind of, you know, the early work in this area that to me was so compelling that got me to shift from just studying the basics of what makes relationships tick and what makes relationships succeed and fail to really how they're, they are tied to why we are happy and healthy.

Much of your research has focused specifically on marriages and other long-term intimate relationships. Are these benefits true for other close relationships too? I mean, you just talked about nuns, so they must be right. I mean, because nuns aren't married, and married to Jesus, they're married to God. But what about other close friendships and family relationships? Are the benefits that people derive equivalent to the benefits that they might get from a long-term intimate partner? Absolutely. I mean, when I think about the size of the effects that we see for intimate relationships,

and we did what's called a meta-analysis or an analysis of many papers, all the papers that have been done at the time, this is about five years ago, on the links between marital satisfaction and longevity. And when you look at other studies that have looked at just social connectedness in terms of how integrated you are with your social network, the social network findings are actually bigger. So although your marriage, if you are married, really impacts your physical health, those other close relationships that we have are enormously important to. And I say close relationships because those are the ones that we've studied like marriage, friendships to a lesser extent, parent-child relationships to a greater extent. Not really, one of the things I've become interested

in actually during the pandemic is the importance of not. non-close relationships, you know, that's something that we've, a lot of us have lost. But yes, absolutely. Friendships, for example, just matter so much. Ed Deiner showed us that. We've done some podcasts where we've talked to people about the importance of even sort of ships in the night kinds of relationships where you may just have a conversation with a stranger and how you derive benefits from that. So let me ask you, then, what are the biological mechanisms that underlie the link between

relationships and health? You talk about relationships get under our skin. What do you mean by that? So that's a tougher question to answer, in part because the science is changing so quickly on what we call biomarkers in health psychology, those specific physiological markers that we can assess that seem to, on the one hand, robustly predict physical health outcomes like asthma morbidity, for example, cardiovascular functioning, risk of heart attack, and that are also associated with relationships.

And if you look at the history of health psychology, you can see if you take a snapshot of, say, 40 years ago, the hot thing was like heart rate and blood pressure. And then it starts moving toward different markers of the immune system 20 or 30 years ago, some of Sheldon Cohen's work, the researcher who studied the links between stress and the common cold, where he starts looking at. at what we call pro-inflammatory cytokines, which are markers of inflammation in the immune system. We start seeing studies of cortisol. So we're looking at, we've looked at all of these things.

And I would say the most compelling evidence for relationships linking health are mortality findings. And you see that time and time again. Mortality is pretty easy to measure. Whereas when you're measuring something like pro-inflammatory cytokines from a one-shot blood draw, Our cytokine levels fluctuate greatly across the day. And so it's a much less precise measure. Having said that, we have found more positive social relationships in kids. We've looked at we have a big study that's been going on for about 10 years in Detroit,

Michigan of youth with asthma. And we've shown that positive parent-child relationships are associated with lower levels of inflammation in these youth and that those levels of inflammation aren't in turn associated with better asthma symptoms. We've looked a lot at the stress hormone cortisol, which is naturally secreted throughout the day, does a lot of things, primarily metabolic function, but is a good measure of stress. We have some pretty consistent evidence that positive social relationships are associated with a steeper decline in cortisol across the day. We'll have people, we've done a few studies like this where you give people a little cotton swabs to take home with them. And over a long

weekend, from say a Friday through a Monday, six times a day, they'll chew on a little cotton swab at predetermined times to capture the circadian rhythm of cortisol. And then on those individual days, we'll either ask them about what their relationships are like, or we also use this device that's that's an app on Android and an iPhone called the electronically activated recorder or the ear to sort of take a fly on the wall perspective of people's social interactions which is a great objective way of tapping into relationships and either way you look at it if it's self-reports daily reports or through the ear through sound files that are coded by our research assistance you find these same kinds of effects with sort of quote

healthier cortisol patterns being associated with healthier relationship functioning. But are those things going to be the holy grail of our understanding of why relationships are associated with health? I doubt it. But they all point in the same direction. Showing that relationships are associated with health-related physiology. And I think one of the most exciting things about this line of research that keeps me interested, is that we're learning more and more every year about how this works from a biological standpoint. So not all marriages are good ones, of course, and bad marriages can also have an effect on our health. What are the differences between those kinds of relationships that lead to better health and well-being and those that don't?

So that's a good question because, you know, there's this general finding that being married is good for your health. And that is on the whole true. But if you dig deeper, it's much better to not be married for your health and well-being than it is to be in a bad marriage. And so you're asking what constitutes sort of, you know, the negative sorts of aspects of marriage that we're looking at that are associated with poor health. The biggest thing is conflict and how people have conflict. Much of our work is in line with some of the classic studies in clinical and social psychology

that John Gottman and others did in the lab where they found that levels of hostility in conflict discussions and low levels of positive emotions in trying to resolve conflict are associated with poor health, a former graduate student of mine who's now a professor, Sabrina Byerstedel, just published a paper last year looking at this where we had couples interacting in the lab trying to resolve a long-standing disagreement. Of course, they never resolve it. But the point is to try to see how they try to resolve it. And so we found exactly what she had predicted,

which was that these hostile behaviors that come out in these interactions among some couples were associated after they left the lab with dysregulated cortisol patterns in daily life, with a less, steep decline in cortisol throughout the day. In other words, the cortisol stayed high for those couples. So I would say conflict is the big one, but also a lack of positive emotions, too. You know, those intimate relationships that are lacking humor, that are lacking, caring, and that are lacking one big thing that I've looked at throughout my almost 20 years doing this

research and relationships. And that is what we call perceived partner responsiveness. This is a really, really important thing for relationships, not just for your own physical health and well-being, but especially for the health of the relationship. And so the idea here is that partners vary in the extent to which they make each other feel understood, really listened to, cared for, validated. You know, it's not just being a good listener, but that's a big part of it. It's also being responsive to your partner's needs, being sensitive, you know, knowing when they might need what we call instrumental support or, you know,

taking out the garbage, helping clean the kitchen, help take the kids somewhere, being sensitive to those kinds of things. Those positive aspects of responsiveness we found are really important in terms of predicting health. A former postdoc of mine, Sarah Stanton, had a really nice paper published a couple of years ago in the journal Psychosomatic Medicine where she showed over a 20-year period from a large data set called Midlife in the United States that's at the University of Wisconsin publicly available data of a few thousand people that perceived partner responsiveness at the very beginning of the study predicted 10 years later how people were responding.

to daily stressors and those people who earlier, 10 years earlier, said that they had partners who were really responsive to them, well, they were less emotionally reactive to stressors 10 years later. So they would have the same stressors, but they were reacting less to them. And that in turn, 10 years after that or 20 years from the beginning of the study, predicted lower levels of mortality. So this is, you know, one of the things that I'm really interested in is not just understanding from a biological standpoint, how relationships get under the skin, but from a psychological one.

So what are the, what we call mechanisms here? And so emotionality seems to be a key part of it. We've seen that in a few different studies of ours. But I think this is, what's so nice about this is that you have multiple time points and you can really help to better ascertain the causal direction of these things. So it's interesting to me that so far sex hasn't come up. And I'm wondering the importance of that in relationships as well. I mean, it doesn't matter whether it's there, how good it is, or whether it's just about communications generally and the ability to resolve conflict. That's a really important question, Kim.

What I can tell you is that over the last 10 years, sex research, at least within social psychology and the study of relationships, has been at the vanguard. I think a lot of the most excited. research has been in the areas of sexual satisfaction and what leads to a sexually healthy relationship. And we've seen an explosion in this kind of research that when I, the big annual meeting of social psychologists, we have a separate submeeting at the beginning of the conference for those people that study close relationships. And there are now so many people that study

sex and relationships that they have their own pre-conference. Having said that, there's been not that much work that I'm aware of and some of my colleagues who are more expert in that area of research might correct me about this, but I don't know of much research that has looked at sexual satisfaction and say predicting mortality, for example, or some sorts of biomarkers of health. But I think it's really important that we start looking at it because just so many studies have shown that sexual satisfaction is really important to relationships. You can be happy in a relationship where you're not terribly satisfied with your sex life, but if you are really satisfied with your sex life, you're much more likely to be happy

in that relationship. That makes sense on its face. Well, let's switch for a minute and talk about technology. You published a study a couple of years ago called Smartphones in Close Relationships, the case for an evolutionary mismatch. How are smartphones interfering with people's relationships these days? Are we spending more time on our phones now than we are talking to our spouses? Or is that just a New Yorker cartoon?

This has been one of the lines of research that I've been most interested in the last couple of years is how all of this new technology. And it's still very new from an evolutionary standpoint, of course. But even in recent memory, it's still all pretty new, how all of that impacts our relationships. And so from a theoretical standpoint, social media shouldn't be all that great for helping us to build close relationships. We can build somewhat superficial relationships online and they can become deeper if they become offline relationships. But the idea that online interactions on social media are going to really foster a deep sense

of connection is very much at odds with evolutionary history and why we devise. developed to be very social creatures. We developed to be social creatures in small groups, primarily diads or groups of two or three or four people. And it's in those groups kind of only that you can really feel a sense of intimacy. It's hard if I'm sending out a tweet to hundreds, thousands, or even millions of people, I'm not going to necessarily feel close to those people who are reacting to my tweet, even if it's overwhelmingly positive. It might make me feel good, but I'm not going to feel deeply connected. And so that's really the evolutionary mismatch there that we have these tools that are supposed to make us feel connected, but at least from what we

know about how relationships work, they shouldn't necessarily. Now, are they bad for us? Most of the good research out there suggests that social media use has very little impact on our well-being in terms of good or bad. It's sort of a net neutral. There have been some really good, rigorous meta-analysis done the last couple of years where people are using better measures, more objective measures of screen time use and time spent on social media. And when you take a step back away from self-reports, I should say self-reports, you know, if I ask you, how much do you use social media and how happy you are, there's a, you know, generally a small correlation between self-reported, how much I say I'm using social media and lower well-being.

But when you take a step away from self-reports, people are so, they have no clue how much time they actually spend on social media. So when you actually look objectively, what we found is there's very little, if any, association, which surprised me, for example, between how much couples are using their smartphones and how satisfied they are in their relationship. It really seems to be when it comes to the effect of our phones on our intimate relationships, at least. It seems that the perceptions are what probably matter the most. So if you perceive that your partner is not being very responsive to you because they're on their phone all the time, you're probably not going to be that happy in your relationship.

To what extent is that grounded in reality? small part of it is certainly grounded in reality, but a big part of it is grounded in how we see ourselves, in our personalities, how we kind of globally assess our relationship. If I'm in a relationship that I think is really good, I'm more likely to give my partner the benefit of the doubt when asked about, does your partner listen to you when they're on their phone? whereas if I'm really not in a great relationship, or maybe even if I'm really annoyed at my partner that day, and you ask me that same question, I'll be like, yeah, she does seem to use her phone a lot and ignore me. So this is one where I think we really need greater clarity on the links

between online, say, social media and technologies in general and how it impacts our relationships. I would surmise that if there's a negative, it's mainly through taking people, away from in-person social interactions. So if people are spending so much time online that they're neglecting in-person social interactions, and it's positive, it can be positive in a number of ways. I mean, in finding social support, in forming connections with people that then become stronger connections offline, informing new friendships with people generally. It can be, you know, there are a lot of benefits. But the negatives, I think, are less clear. And I'm becoming becoming more murky than I am clearer about my thoughts on this. But again, that's kind of what

makes it exciting too. You know, initially we thought social media was so bad and now we think, ah, maybe it's not so bad. You know, and I tell parents this when I give talk sometimes at schools, you know, don't worry so much. So if we see a couple in a restaurant say where they're both on their phones, it doesn't necessarily mean that they have a crummy relationship, right? I mean, we don't know. No, not necessarily. Yeah, they may be both introverts. They might be both trying to figure out what they're going to be ordering at the restaurant, right? Now, if you see a couple that's spending most of the meal doing that, they probably don't have a great relationship, but it's not necessarily just because of that phone use. That phone use is probably more of a

symptom than it is actually driving relationship dissatisfaction. So you did another interesting study a few years ago that we might call the double date study where you looked at how interacting with another couple affected couples' feelings for each other? What was the impetus for that study and what did you find? Yeah, that was one of my favorites of our studies. I did that as part of my dissertation when I was at the University of Texas. And something that had always intrigued me that was really understudied was the effect of social networks on people's intimate relationships. My wife and I have been very fortunate to have great friends that we have as a couple and both individuals and couple friends. And this was a case maybe a little bit of what we call

me search, you know, where I wanted to figure out, you know, what is it about it? Is it that my wife and I are just happy in our relationship and therefore we are forming more friendships together, or is there something inherently beneficial about sharing friends with your spouse? And so the way that we did this was we brought couples, pairs of couples into the lab. And we basically provided them the context to have a really good first date. We did this through a pretty neat technique that was developed by the psychologist Art Aaron. called the Fast Friends, which is 45 minutes of questions that you take turns asking one another that increase in amount of self-disclosure. So, like, the first couple of questions are just fun ones,

like if there was anybody that you could have as a dinner guest, living or dead, who would that be? What would constitute a perfect day for you? You kind of go around, and these are sort of icebreakers, But then you get into some pretty deep stuff, like, what's your relationship with your parents like? And at the end of that, what we found was compared to those in a small talk condition, which was pretty boring. The couples in the fast friends condition, they really felt close to the other couples. Fully a third of them when we followed up with them a month later became friends in real life, which is, which I think is pretty remarkable given, you know, I'm not sure a third of the couples I meet I want to become friends with.

And, but I think what was most interesting was after, after this double date, people felt better about their own relationships. So they felt closer to their romantic partner. And in a follow-up study that was done by my former grad student, Keith Welker, we found that couples who went through the fast friends with other couples, they also felt more passionately in love with their partner. So this kind of gets to the sexual satisfaction, you know, passion is very much tied in with that. And it's hard to maintain passion for your partner over time. And this seemed like it at least gave people a short-term boost. So the take home for this is that

double dates can be really great for your relationship. And I think that's one of those things that we really missed during the pandemic. Speaking of the pandemic, let's talk for a minute about your love in the time of COVID project. Because it's gotten a lot of media attention, people are really interested in how relationships are faring through the pandemic. So what have you found so far? It's still ongoing, right? I mean, you haven't. It is still ongoing. In fact, we're having our biweekly meeting tomorrow. It's given me a great source of meaning during the pandemic and it's been really fun and interesting to be a part of this project.

We started it at the end of March 2020, just like a week after everything shut down. And it's been going since then, and we're now, I think, at our 13th wave of data collection. And we started with a ton of people. So the first few waves, we have a few thousand people. We're now down to a core group of about five or 600 people that have stuck with us the whole time, for which I am extremely grateful. because we've learned so much about just generally what people are doing to cope better during the pandemic. And it's shown us a lot of interesting things.

People who have been getting outside more during the pandemic are a lot happier. People who are exercising more are happier. And not surprisingly, relationships play a key role, especially face-to-face one. So for those people that were able to have pods or, you know, small groups of people that they, that they were comfortable seeing during the pandemic, those in-person interactions were associated with boosts and happiness and lower levels of depression during the pandemic. Spending time with your kids can be both a stressor during the pandemic, but also can give people a great sense of meaning. Zoom was an interesting thing that we've been looking at. That was one of those things I would never have predicted at the very beginning. of the pandemic would end up being one of these things that we studied. But we found the smaller

Zoom calls, the smaller video chats seem to be the most gratifying to people, that they feel more connected after a one-on-one because it much more approximates an in-person social interaction than does a large Zoom call. The problem with a large video chat, even though they can have their merit certainly and people have had these Zoom happy hours and things like that. But it's not a natural happy hour, right? Like at a happy hour, you're not going to be sitting around to the circle of people going, okay, you talk next, you go next, you go next, right? You're going to be pairing off maybe with one or two people over here. You know, maybe you say, okay, I'm going to go get another drink because the conversation was boring. And then, you know, you have, it's much more

organic, right? And it allows much more of a give and take. Whereas online, it's really, you know, there's a lot of listening, hopefully, and just a little bit of talking. And so it's, that's why we think that the small ones are much more like the conversation you and I are having. That's much more akin to a real world conversation. And one of the more interesting things from our Zoom findings was that extroverts in particular loathe large Zoom calls because they can't talk. So they don't have the opportunity like they would at a party to really to have that social need met. And also, they can't be responded to. I said before, the importance of responsiveness. And it's really hard to feel responded to in a large Zoom call

because people are distracted, you don't know if they're really paying attention to you. The cues are not there like they would be in real life. So that's kind of interesting, too. Another finding that we had was about extroversion. This reminds me, if you spend any time on Twitter, which I have from time to time, there were a lot of memes early last year about look out for your extroverted friends. They're really suffering right now. And from everything that I know as a psychologist about extroversion, I thought, I don't think that's right.

I think extroverts are generally probably doing better right now. Extroverts tend to have more energy. They tend to find creative solutions to social problems in terms of like making sure those social needs get met, whereas introverts will often in a situation like the pandemic not have the inclination to sort of make the effort to stay socially connected. And they tend to be a little bit lower in energy too. so you're not going to see people going outside as much. And that's actually exactly what we found was that over the first three months of the pandemic, the most extroverted people showed the fewest depressive symptoms. They showed the highest levels of happiness and meaning in life. And we found that that was at least partially explained by feeling more socially connected

with other people compared to their more introverted counterparts. And also doing things like exercising more, getting outside more, All those things that we already know during the pandemic were good for people's well-being. So, yeah, lots of interesting findings. We have a big, it's a big international consortium at this point of a bunch of researchers working on this project. And so we seem to have new findings every week. One of the things we were about to look at is long-distance relationships during the pandemic, which we know very little about how distance may have impacted people.

Well, another area where you've done some researchers looking at cross-cultural relationships, I know you worked with couples in Japan. What similarities or differences did you find in terms of how close relationships affect health and well-being in different cultures? So the project that I told you about where we followed, where we had data for couples over 20 years, this midlife in the United States study in Wisconsin, it turns out that there is a corollary study to it in Japan that has all of the exact same measures. age-matched with the Wisconsin sample. So it offers a really nice opportunity for researchers to look at differences between two pretty different cultures. On the one hand, the United States, which is what we would call a more independent culture, a more individualistic culture, and then Japan on the

other, which is a more collectivistic or interdependent culture. And so this emerged out of a graduate course on social relationships that I teach, where we were talking about responsiveness And one of the PhD students in the class said, you know, Rich, you keep talking about how important responsiveness is in people's intimate relationships. But I lived in Japan for a few years. And the outside relationships, outside the intimate relationships. So relationships with family members especially seem to be a lot more important. And she said, I just think that responsiveness is going to matter less for people's happiness there than it would here.

And so she did some preliminary analyses and I bumped into a very close colleague at a meeting who I've published a few papers on responsiveness with. And I told him about this idea and he said, you're not going to believe it. We're looking at that exact same question. And so we joined forces to look at this. And what we found was, as my student initially had thought, there were differences. Now, responsiveness in your relationship still was associated. with greater well-being in Japan, but not to the same extent as it is here in the United States. Here, how responsive your intimate partner is seems to matter a lot more because we put so much weight

on our intimate relationships. Eli Finkel has done some really nice work in this area, the social psychologist at Northwestern University, who's written a book called The All or Nothing marriage. And he has hypothesized that in Western society, over the last 100 years or so, the intimate relationship has been almost an exclusive focus for us in terms of, for those that are in intimate relationships for pathways to happiness and meaning in life. In other words, we are expecting more and more from our intimate partners in terms of helping us to be happy. And for those marriages that are incredibly happy and bring us meaning, people seem to be highly self-actualized and to use terms of Abraham Maslow. Whereas those couples where they're not getting those needs, self-esteem needs and those kinds of needs, you know, about that deal with the core self, those kinds of needs met, that they're miserable at the extremes.

And our data seem to suggest that, yes, that is more true here than in countries like Japan, where there's not as much pressure on intimate partners to satisfy all of your needs. The family, the extended social network is more important there than it is here. And I think there's a lesson to be learned there, you know, that maybe we're putting too much pressure on our relationships to make us happy. So, keying off of that, we've been talking a lot about research and theory. So let me ask a question for listeners who might be interested in more practical advice and wisdom that they can draw from your research. Last question, what are the most important things people can do to improve their relationships and become better partners?

Excellent question to end up. Try to be as responsive a partner as you can. And that starts with being a good listener to your partner. When you come home from work, put the phone down, when your partner makes a bid for your attention, really try to, try to pay attention to them and then more broadly to try to be sensitive to their needs. But I think being a really good listener is a key part of that. One of the things that we know is a good booster for relationships is what we call novel and exciting activities.

Try something new together. And there's lots of things that will seem new now that we're coming out of the pandemic that we haven't done for a long time. But go on a hike together. Go on a double date together. or just go on a date to a restaurant you haven't tried. You know, trying new things that are fun can be a boost to people's relationships. For parents out there, and I have some friends that are new parents,

it's really important to maintain that connection and to try to do things with your spouse to try to keep that connection going because the strength of those two parent families comes from the strength of their relationship. and the importance of social networks. You know, if you're finding that you and your partner don't do a lot with friends together, I would suggest that they look at that and see if there are ways that they can branch out a bit, maybe have some work colleagues and their spouses over to your place or neighbors because they can be so enriching for our relationships.

Well, thank you, Dr. Slatcher. This has been really interesting. I appreciate all of your insights. and hearing about your research, which is just fascinating. Thank you. Well, it's been fun for me. Thank you for having me. You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology on our website at www.combeckycology.org or on Apple, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. And please, if you like us, leave a review.

If you have comments or ideas for future podcasts, you can email us at speaking of psychology at APA.org. Speaking of psychology is produced by Lee Wynerman. Our sound editor is Chris Kondyin. Thank you for listening. For the American Psychological Association, I'm Kim Mills.