Speaking of Psychology - How to cope with political stress this election season, with Brett Q. Ford, PhD, and Kevin Smith, PhD

Episode Date: May 15, 2024

If the thought of the upcoming election sends your stress level through the roof, you’re not alone. Psychologist Brett Q. Ford, PhD, and political scientist Kevin Smith, PhD, talk about how political stress affects people’s well-being; what high levels of political stress mean for people’s lives, for the U.S. and for democracy; and how to stay politically engaged while still maintaining your mental health. For transcripts, links and more information, please visit the Speaking of Psychology Homepage. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Google Fi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. and that means that election day is less than six months away. If just hearing that fact raises your blood pressure and sends your stress level through the roof, you are not alone. Back in 2022, APA's stress in America poll found that 57% of people surveyed said that the 2024 presidential election was already a significant source of stress for them. The same survey found that 76% of Americans believed that the future of our nation is a significant source of stress, and 66% were stressed by the current political

climate. In fact, some recent research has found that just thinking about politics makes people anxious, stressed, and unhappy. So how does political stress affect people's mental and physical well-being? Is it possible to stay politically engaged in and follow the news while still maintaining your mental health. And if so, how? And what does this level of political stress mean for people's lives and for our country and for democracy as an institution? 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. We have two yesterday. First is Dr. Brett Ford, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, and direct

of the effective science and health laboratory there. Dr. Ford studies what people believe about emotions and how they regulate and manage their emotions. Since the 2016 election, she's been looking at how politics affect our emotions and how anxiety around politics drives people to engage or disengage with political action. Our second guest is Dr. Kevin Smith, a professor of political science at the University of Nebraska Lincoln. Dr. Smith studies the biology, and psychology of individual differences in political attitudes and behavior, why some people are passionate about politics while others couldn't care less, where conservatives and liberals get their political beliefs from, and how those beliefs drive choices and actions.

In recent years, he's also been studying the effects of politics on people's health and well-being. Thank you both for joining me today. Thanks for having us. I'm glad to be here. Now, you both study politics and emotion, but you came to the, these topics from different fields and perspectives. So I'm going to ask you both to start telling us a little bit about your background and why you got interested in politics. Dr. Ford, let's start with you. Well, I started as a stress researcher. So I came at this from the sideways.

I study how people manage stress, how people cope with different types of stressors in their lives. And circa 2016, it seemed like politics certainly qualified as a stressor. As the months and years unfolded, it seemed like maybe politics qualified as a chronic stressor. And so when we took that lens to it, it seemed like studying emotion regulation in the context of politics was an important direction for the work to go. And Dr. Smith, your background is political science. So what led you to these psychological questions? Well, I was involved in a lot of quantitative genetic studies where we did some of the first studies looking at the heritability of political beliefs and attitudes. And we by now have, you know, kind of a mountain of evidence that even though it's a rather complex social phenotype, political,

attitudes and beliefs are fairly highly heritable, which of course raises the question of how does that happen? How does genetics influence attitudes and behaviors? And one of the ways in which we were trying to answer that question is looking at sort of like biological information processing systems. And one of those systems, to make a long story short, was part of the autonomic nervous system, the fight or flight system, where we were looking at levels of cortisol. which is this, you know, popularly known as the stress hormone. And we found that people's cortisol levels are correlated to their political engagement. And that sort of like got us to thinking, well, if engaging with politics is raising people's cortisol levels, and we can observe that, is politics having a broader effect on their psychological,

even physical health and certainly their social health. So that was kind of my launching point into it. One could argue that almost everything controversial in life has political elements. Is the stress or anxiety that we feel related to electoral politics different from the stress or anxiety that we might feel from, say, office politics or family politics? At least from my perspective, I think the short, honest answer to that is we don't know. the data that we have and we've looked at it is consistent with the argument that politics is a unique chronic stressor in the environment. And that people who are not particularly stressed or anxious about other parts of the social environment still seem to get stressed and anxious about politics. you know, I hesitate to crawl out on a limb and declare that definitively simply because,

at least as far as I'm aware, there hasn't been a ton of study on that particular question. Does that ring true for you, Dr. Ford? I think it's useful to think about what politics shares with other forms of stress. So we can triangulate our, you know, hypotheses and how we test our questions. It's certainly a multifaceted stressor. And so it includes, and that might be what makes. it unique in the sense that it includes both these kind of identity-based and group-based forms of stress. When we interact with people we don't like, that stresses us out. When we don't

share values with other people, that stresses us out. There's also this kind of superordinate structural level of stress that can come from politics, right? When you're facing systems that are much, much bigger than you and potentially feel like they are doing dance. to you in some way or have the potential to if the election doesn't work out in the way that you want it to. It reminds me a little bit of stress that that's linked with being of lower socioeconomic status, right? These large and tractable systems that seem to be working against you. So I think, you know, it's useful to draw on our knowledge about other stressors, but that at the end of the day, politics may be unique in the sense that it's this kind of conglomeration of several really

crucial forms of stress. And if I could just follow up on that, I agree 100% with everything that Brett just said. One of the other sort of like unique aspects about politics is it's virtually impossible to avoid. You know, most of us have smartphones these days, and it's literally in our pockets. I mean, it's just really, you really, really have to work hard to avoid politics these days. Well, Dr. Ford, you published a study last year in which you asked people to track their daily news consumption and their emotions and well-being. How does political news consumption affect people's stress levels, health, and well-being? So we assume that people experience politics largely through their news consumption. We didn't necessarily constrain the study to that, though. It could have been conversations that they had with people that they know. It was mostly just,

how are you learning about politics today? But I certainly expect a lot of that to come through the news and social media. And we found, first of all, that people, and we did not recruit particularly special participants. We found that participants were feeling stressed, feeling a variety of negative emotions about politics, at least 75%, 80% of the days that we asked them. and that they were feeling intense degrees of negative emotion on about half of the days that we assessed. Like every other day, there's an intense negative emotional experience going on for people from across the political spectrum. And Dr. Smith, you've done several national surveys on politics, stress, and health around the last two presidential elections. What did you find? Well, we asked our respondent to a number of questions about how politics is affecting

them sort of like psychologically, emotionally, socially, even their physical help. And what we found is that, you know, kind of like astonishingly large percentages of Americans identify politics as a source of not just stress, but it is interrupting with their sleep patterns. They sort of like associate politics with, you know, I've said things on social media, or to people that I end up later regretting. I kind of like compulsively follow some sort of like social media news, that sort of thing. And two of our studies, we asked about suicidal ideation, and in both of those samples, one in 20 said that they'd had thoughts of suicide associated with politics, which just

astonished me. And if the estimates from our national surveys or even within the bull part, I mean, I think the short description is that politics is not being very good for the mental health of Americans and maybe not even their physical health. How does political stress compare with other stressors in people's lives? I mean, that sounds pretty acute. Are politics as big a source of worry as money or health? I mean, we do surveys at the APA every year and we find money and health are way up there. Politics is on the list, but how do you find in your work where politics falls on the stress continuum? I haven't looked specifically at those types of comparisons.

If I were to speculate, part of what makes politics stressful is potentially the implications, the downstream. implications that it has for personal outcomes, right? Like what, what is so upsetting about having someone in power who you don't agree with? It's largely because you think they're going to enact policies, laws, whatever, that are going to impact you or the ones that you love. So perhaps in that sense, it's a bit more distal than some of these, you know, moment to moment, I can't make ends meet today. But I do wonder if it is, I liked the word, you know, continuum or spectrum, because I imagine that these things are kind of falling along a spectrum and there aren't necessarily discrete categories, but that is speculation. Yeah, and we've come at it from a slightly different

perspective in the sense that we have been looking at, you know, sort of like diagnostic survey batteries for anxiety and stress that are general. And then we've been trying to see whether, you know, measures of political stress and anxiety, are they sort of like highly correlated with these? Can political stress still be an independent predictor? Or, you know, is it an independent predictor of these kind of like negative emotional and psychological effects when you control for like generalized anxiety? And generally speaking, at least in the data that we have so far, and we haven't done a ton on this, it seems to suggest that politics can be separable from sort of like more generalized measures of anxiety and stress. But we haven't looked at all about specific stressors, like are you worried about money or that sort of thing?

When it comes to election stress levels, do you find that there are, say, partisan differences or differences between the sexes or other demographic factors? We rarely find partisan differences in what, in day-to-day experiences of stress about politics. And that's the study you referenced earlier where we kind of pinged people day after day, either two weeks or three weeks. And there aren't in that context partisan differences. Now, when we zoom out and look at MacRae, level events. We have some forthcoming work looking at the impeachments of Donald Trump at different

points in the time course before, you know, the impeachment, the acquittal, impeachment acquittal, and so forth. There are huge partisan effects that track exactly as you think they would based on who kind of, quote, won or loss in a given context. So it's a really interesting pattern. It really depends on the context in which you're measuring those emotions, those macro-level events where there are clear wins and losses, you see partisan differences that are very consistent, very strong. When you're asking people about day-to-day life, we're all kind of on an emotional rollercoaster, it seems. And our research, I mean, we haven't looked day-to-day. I mean, we've taken like national samples. And what we have found fairly consistently in terms of the demographic factors that

predict higher levels of these negative effects of politics, age is a big one. Younger people tend to suffer from these effects more than older people. We have found ideology to be a fairly consistent predictor with liberals tending to report more of this than conservatives. Gender we haven't, I mean, we found some stuff, but it's kind of mixed, and I wouldn't make anything definitive on that. But two of the other things that we found kind of like consistent is that people who are interested in politics and paying attention to politics tend to suffer from this more or report more of this sort of stuff, which I guess isn't too surprising. The other thing that is, I found really interesting, is that people who do not like their partisan opposites,

if you're a conservative really doesn't like liberals and, you know, think they're lying and cheating, or if you're, you know, vice versa, you tend to report more stress and anxiety from politics. And I think those are the big sort of like demographic predictors of this sort of thing that we've found. Now, United States citizens are certainly not alone and having a very fraught political atmosphere these days. what about people who live in countries where the head of state is absolute, in other words, a dictator and people don't really have a choice as to who their leader is? Does that have any impact on whether people feel more or less stressed? Do we even know?

Yeah, as far as I know, maybe Brett knows something different, but I don't think we know. Do we, Brent? I mean, there are, there's really interesting work being done in other cultures and other countries. there's several wonderful researchers who focus on emotion, emotion regulation, and stress and a group-based conflict in Israel. And I think to some degree, some of the patterns that we're talking about are kind of human patterns, where something big and frag. frightening happens, something threatening happens. It naturally evokes a response. But of course, people vary from each other, but on average, there will be a response. On average, people want to manage that stress. On average, humans are relatively resilient and we're actually pretty good

at coping with stress, on average. And yet there might be really important downstream consequences of managing that stress. This is a question that I get semi-regularly when I talk about work on how, when you're really good at coping with the stress of politics, you're actually less likely to be engaged because emotions kind of drive engagement and people will ask, well, what about in countries where your engagement doesn't necessarily might not have the impact that it can in other countries that are more democratically oriented or in countries where, or locations,

where your action could directly, you know, jeopardize your health and well-being. What happens in those countries? And I say that work is really important and needs to be done. And I don't yet know if it were, that has done it. Make every get-together chill. This Memorial Day, get up to an extra $1,000 off select top brand appliances like LG. Plus, get free delivery at the Home Depot. Tackle pool towels and camp laundry with a large capacity washer.

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Or do we not even have the historical research to know? I don't think that, I mean, certainly in the sense of the kind of stuff that Brett and I are doing. I mean, I don't think we have research that goes back decades and decades to where we can sort of like track it in a fine-grained way. But, I mean, we've gotten pretty upset and stressful and anxious about politics in the past. I mean, at one point, we had a civil war. And I would imagine that that was pretty stressful and anxious for an awful lot of people. Certainly, if you went back to the 1950s and the 1960s with some of the things that was going on, the civil rights movement. I'm sure there's a lot of stress and anxiety around those sorts of things.

But are we sort of like in kind of like a new sort of like unique environment that is conducive to producing these sorts of emotional responses to politics? I mean, I think there's a reasonable argument that there is. I mean, everybody is blaming social media for everything these days. But, I mean, the fact is it's a different information environment and a good deal of that information environment. There's no gatekeeper and it's specifically designed to provoke emotional responses. So in that sense, I would say that, you know, we're living in sort of like a unique and different time. And that's even without talking about sort of like, you know, all the attendant things that go with a rerun of the 2020 election, which in and of itself was not just stressful. But if you listen to some of our subjects, kind of a traumatic event.

It was. Yeah. Yeah. Well, Dr. Ford, one of the findings of your research is that when people are feeling anxiety or stress because of politics, their strategies, that can enable them to feel better. You just mentioned disengagement as one of them. But these strategies have trade-offs. I mean, can you talk about that?

So given that our emotions help us do things, right? We have emotions for a reason. They help push us to take actions in the world. And our negative emotions also help us do things. When we are angry, it helps us confront. When we're anxious, it helps us kind of take care. of threats. And when we focus on getting rid of those emotions, and there's a variety of strategies that people use in their daily life to help manage these types of negative emotions

that are really effective and useful and help promote mental health and even physical health, when we get rid of these emotions, sometimes we miss out on some of the benefits that those emotions provide us. And to the extent that they can help push us to be engaged and to stay motivated to take action, when we lose them, we lose some of that motivation. And so the same strategies that help us kind of get through the day and manage, you know, family stressors and money stress and things like that in really important ways can also help us in the context of politics. But then we find that the people who are very successful at using these strategies, they have better well-being in daily life, but they're the ones who are least likely to take action. Yeah, and that is something

that, you know, especially as a political scientist, I find not just concerning, not just sort of like super interesting, but really concerning. I mean, the findings that we've come up with track exactly with what Brett is saying is that, you know, negative emotion essentially motivates you to pay attention and get engaged civically. And if, you know, your way to deal with those negative emotions is to, you know, ignore the stuff that is producing those negative emotions, basically you civically disengage. And that's not healthy for democracy, right? So, I mean, Brett and I we're having a little bit of a conversation earlier this week is it's sort of like the $64,000 question in our research, right? Is how do you get people to civically engage while still mitigating

these sorts of effects? And yeah, I would really like to know the answer to that question. Well, are there positive effects from being absorbed by politics? For instance, I mean, I've been to a few national political conventions, both as a reporter and later as an advocate. And I can tell you that the delegates and the other attendees seem really happy in this hyper-partisan milieu. Is that healthy? Well, what is health? That's for another podcast. Yeah. I think you're exactly on the right track. And that's where our research is going and where hints in some ongoing research is pointing us as well. So when we focus on the negative emotions and getting rid of them,

that's where we see these very consistent patterns of tradeoff. Because when we focus on the strategies that are really effective for getting rid of negative emotion, they often involve disengagement, tuning out, making things be less bad in our minds, which is super effective, right? Things not being such a big deal or, you know, it'll blow over or whatever. Those are really important strategies that we apply to other stressors in our lives. And it makes sense that that's part of our toolkit. When we apply it to politics, that's maybe where we get into trouble because we start disengaging and tuning out.

But to your point, Kim, there are positive emotions too. And I don't talk about positive emotions to be, you know, a polyana and say, let's all just put on rose-colored glasses and like hold hands and I don't know, sing kumbaya. That's not really what it's about. It's not meant to be a denial of what is very stressful. it's actually the opposite. So we can let our negative emotions be. We don't have to make the situation be less bad. We don't have to make it be less severe or whatever.

We can let that sit. We don't have to engage in the cognitive strategies to distort the situation to be something that it's not. We can let it be scary and frustrating and, you know, whatever, despairing, depending on who you are. But it can also be an opportunity to connect with other people, to have admiration or inspiration, to form these collective groups or have these collective experiences that can be uplifting and induce all sorts of other emotions, compassion, pride,

admiration, gratitude. Those emotions also drive political engagement. And so if we focus on cultivating those types of socially connected experiences, you get the benefit of feeling good, which in turn also helps keep you motivated. So that's, I think, a really promising direction. And I think one of the things that a lot of people don't quite realize is there's, you know, a subsection of the population that really enjoys politics. Right. I mean, they enjoy it as a contact sport. They like the conflict. They like to get involved. They like the self-satisfaction. of being involved in a cause that they think is better than them and draw emotional sustenance

from that. So, yeah, I mean, I think there are sort of like positive emotions involved here, but there's a lot of individual level differences, right? I mean, you know, the notion of getting up in front of people and going after someone who disagrees with you, hammer and tongue, and having that give and take, you know, to many people, that would stress them out enormously. But for a lot of people involved in the political arena, it's like, hey, yeah, that sounds like fun. Bring it on.

Let me have some more of that. Now, there have been a lot of conversations so far this election year about how many voters are not happy with either of the presumptive major party presidential candidates. Is that an unusually stressful position to be in? Is it more or less stressful to feel like you have no good choice at least at the top of the ticket? It's not great. No. It's not a great situation. I mean, to the extent that it links up with other concepts that we know about,

learned helplessness, right, the idea that there's nothing you can do to really change things because if you're perceiving either option as not so good, it sounds to me like a recipe for an action. And that's not going to be good for the country, most likely. And even if it does prompt action is probably a negative form of action. In other words, I'm going to the polls not to vote for someone. I'm going to the polls to vote against someone. There really isn't a choice here that I'm going to feel good about.

And I mean, I'm not sure what that does to people psychologically, but I kind of doubt it makes them feel good. your sense that it's more intense this year than in prior years. I mean, I know I always hear people saying, I don't like either candidate, but I'm going to vote or I'm not going to do anything. Yeah, I mean, for a variety of different reasons, we have two uniquely unpopular major party candidates in the United States. And that does not make for a happy isn't the future going to be great, sort of mood amongst the electorate.

I want to go back, Dr. Smith, to something that you said right at the beginning about people's political bent being hereditary, in essence. Can you talk a little bit more about that and how we know? I mean, it's not so much that you would be necessarily a Republican or a Democrat. I mean, that parties are sort of made up constructs. but conservative and liberal, for example. Is that what we're talking about?

Yeah, that's exactly what we're talking about. And there's been a number of studies done over the past 20 or so years. The first one was done back in 1986, but nobody really picked up on it, but certainly since the early 2000. And a lot of these studies are twin studies, so they take advantage of the fact that there's, you know, identical twins are literally genetically identical. and fraternal twins, disogotic twins, share only about 50% of their genes. So in very, very rough terms, if identical twins are more like each other politically than fraternal twins, that's a prima facie case. I mean, there's a lot of fancy statistics that can come into it, but that's the basic

idea that if identical twins are more alike than fraternal twins, it's evidence that that trait is genetically influenced. But we also have adoption studies. People tend to be more politically like their biological parents than their adoptive parents. We have twins raised apart studies. And the twins tend to be more like each other. Now we have like genome wide association scans that predict ideology. So there's a number of different ways that has been triangulate.

But the bottom line is ideology is not only heritable. It's kind of, it's more heritable than a lot of other psychological traits. I mean, the estimates vary up, but on the low end, it's 30%. And on the high end, it's 60. Next time you get a 23-in-me test, you'll find out whether you're liberal or conservative. Let me ask, as we're kind of getting to wrapping up here, whether you have advice that you want to our listeners with about how to manage their stress around the elections this summer and fall, because it's only going to ramp up, I'm afraid.

My advice would be to not follow the common refrain of, you know, keep calm and carry on. I think that type of messaging reinforces the idea of if you're feeling bad, get rid of those feelings. It's okay for things to feel upsetting and just letting yourself sit with that and accept those feelings and accept the signals that they're providing you about how you feel about how things are. And connect with people that you care about, you know, connect with people who share your values, connect with people who don't share your values, provide yourself with opportunities to have moments of compassion and inspiration and pride and connection and love. And these things are not mutually exclusive. You can let the world be kind of a scary place and you can also be a

beautiful place where you can connect with people. And through that balance, I think we can maintain a connection to our values. And those values can help keep us engaged and motivated to do our civic duties. And then these opportunities to connect with people help us maintain our mental health and well-being. That's what I'll try to do. I don't know. You can check back with me in a year.

All right. I think my response will make every Polly-Sai 101 teacher really, really happy. I think one of the things that people can do is become better informed about the democratic process in the institutions of our political system. One of the things that we find is that people who are truly politically knowledgeable about what a representative democracy is, how it functions, and what our institutions do,

they tend consistently to report less of these negative effects than those who are less informed. And we think that part of what's going on there is if you understand the institutions and you understand how democracy works, democracy doesn't get rid of, conflict. It just manages it. That's all it does. And the institutions at our system are set up to manage that conflict. And they've taken a pretty good kicking over the past five to six years. And you know what? They've held. They have more or less done their job. And I am pretty sure that the republic can survive the 2024 election regardless of what happens. And the reason why I can say something like that is because, you know, I not only understand the institutions, but have

some faith in them and some faith in the process. And I think if people could, not in a polyanish naive way, but an informed way, gain some of that, I think that could take some of the edge off the anxiety and stress. You know what? If, you know, if I'm a conservative in Biden wins, or if I'm a liberal and Trump ones, you know what, things will probably be okay. Not great. Not great. I'm really not trying to be polyanish here, but we'll survive. And this is really my last question. Are either of you or both of you doing any kind of research now related to the 2024 election specifically? I am now. No, I mean, we need to understand what's going on. So it's certainly.

certainly on our radar and we'll be, you know, stay tuned. Okay. Yeah, and I'm a political scientist. So we, you know, it will come as a shocker as absolutely. We're taking advantage of the 2024 election to redo some, to replicate some studies and also sort of like investigate a few new avenues about how people are feeling about politics and dealing with it. All right. We'll have to talk again. I want to thank you both for joining me today.

This has been really interesting. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks so much. You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology on our website at www.w. Speakingof Psychology.org or on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like what you've heard, please subscribe and leave us 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. For the American Psychological Association, thank you for listening. I'm Kim Mills.