“Air Rage and the Psychology of Steven Slater's Outburst” plus 1 more

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Air Rage and the Psychology of Steven Slater's Outburst Posted: 11 Aug 2010 02:25 PM PDT As dramatic exits go, Steven Slater's was hard to beat. After an argument with a passenger, the 38-year-old flight attendant for JetBlue Airways quit his job on Monday by telling passengers off (some say cursing them out) over the intercom system as his plane taxied into the gate at New York's JFK airport. He then grabbed a beer from the beverage cart, deployed the plane's emergency chute, and slid onto the tarmac. When the story hit the news, Slater became an instant celebrity. Online, people cheered what they saw as his principled stance. Someone set up a Facebook Fan page, which quickly attracted more than 130,000 members. Video tributes were made, and at least one folk ballad composed. Why all the adulation for one man? One reason, psychologists say, is that we see ourselves in Slater - both in the buildup he must have felt before he snapped and in the cathartic moment when he let it all out. The fact that Slater snapped likely had to do with both the structured environment and the flight attendant's personal history. The outburst may even be healthy, it turns out. Airline anger The JetBlue incident began early on the flight from Pittsburgh, according to news reports. A passenger with an oversized bag argued with Slater when he told her she'd have to check it; later, at the end of the flight, the same passenger stood up and began rummaging in the overhead bin while the plane was still taxiing. When Slater went to tell her to stay seated, police told the New York Times, the bag hit him on the head and the passenger cursed at him. That triggered Slater's unusual exit. Most people can sympathize with the frustrations of air travel, said Jonathan Bricker, a psychologist at the University of Washington and Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle who has studied air travel anxiety and so-called "air rage." On an airplane, he said, both passengers and flight attendants are subject to a huge number of strict, sometimes arbitrary, rules. "Whenever you create more rules for human behaviors, you create reactance, you create people wanting to react to those rules and wanting to do the opposite of those rules," Bricker told LiveScience. These attempts to wrest control back from largely faceless rule-makers could have driven both the passenger's insistence on standing up to get her bags and Slater's frustration, Bricker said. Additional stress - like the caregiver stress Slater might feel from taking care of his ailing mother - could exacerbate the situation. "You've got the passenger's stress, you've got the passenger's own history, you've got Mr. Slater and his history, and you've got a rule-governed environment," Bricker said. "When you put them together, it can lead to events like this." Self-control and self-preservation Part of a flight attendant's job is to face the public every day with a smile, but that level of self-control can become difficult over time, said Brandon Schmeichel, a professor of psychology at Texas A&M. It's possible that Slater simply ran out of energy to tamp down his true emotions. "Willpower may operate like a muscle," Schmeichel said. "So when you exercise your muscles in the short-term, that 10th dumbbell curl is more difficult than the second." On the other hand, a dramatic move like Slater's can sometimes be healthy in the long run, University of Michigan evolutionary psychologist Daniel Kruger told LiveScience. Anger may play an evolutionary role in telling us when we're in a bad situation. "These angry responses have a function when we really might not be well-suited for that particular role or relationship," Kruger said. "It might just require something that is so intense and acute, like these seemingly out-of-nowhere reactions, to sever those ties." Why we love Slater There could also be an evolutionary component to the public outpouring of support for Slater, Kruger said. Primates are hierarchy-minded creatures, and any challenge to authority gets our attention. In this case, a passenger challenged Slater's authority, and he, in turn, challenged his bosses'. "Social status is a big part of this social world," Kruger said. "[Evolutionarily], we want to know where everyone is, and if there's a change, it would be greatly to our advantage to be aware of that." The uniqueness of air travel likely also plays a role in the public's fascination, Bricker said. People know what it feels like to see passengers breaking rules or acting obnoxious, so we can empathize with Slater's feelings. Even off of airplanes, most of us know what it feels like to control ourselves and act polite even if we don't want to, Schmeichel said. We also know that others don't always show their true colors. "We recognize that sometimes people aren't behaving how they want to behave," Schmeichel said. "So when someone actually has that kind of cathartic moment, we can identify." LiveScience.com chronicles the daily advances and innovations made in science and technology. We take on the misconceptions that often pop up around scientific discoveries and deliver short, provocative explanations with a certain wit and style. Check out our science videos, Trivia & Quizzes and Top 10s. Join our community to debate hot-button issues like stem cells, climate change and evolution. You can also sign up for free newsletters, register for RSS feeds and get cool gadgets at the LiveScience Store. Five Filters featured article: "Peace Envoy" Blair Gets an Easy Ride in the Independent. 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Bridging The Gap Between Clinicians And Researchers In Psychology Posted: 11 Aug 2010 08:23 AM PDT Newswise — Psychotherapy practitioners and researchers often carry out their work in separate worlds, and there exists a great need to close the gap between them, so that each can benefit from the work of the other, according to Marvin R. Goldfried, Ph.D., Stony Brook University Professor of Psychology, who will address the topic at the 118th Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association in San Diego, California, on August 13. Dr. Goldfried, a distinguished professor of clinical psychology, who functions as both a clinician and a researcher, has come up with a new way close this gap between clinical practice and research. As President of the Society of Clinical Psychology, Division 12 of the American Psychological Association, Dr. Goldfried is heading an effort open a line of communication between practice and research, through which practitioners would have a means to provide feedback to researchers on their practical results with evidence-based treatments. Psychotherapists have been practicing for over 100 years. For many years, the decision of whether therapy worked was left to the opinion of the practitioner and the patient. However, there has been the growing recognition that research studies were needed to independently demonstrate if and how the treatment worked. Using a research approach to provide evidence that therapy worked—clinical trials-- researchers have compiled a list of empirically supported treatments that have fared well. Although these findings have been very important, practicing clinicians have raised the concern that the conditions of practice in the real world are not the same as those in clinical trials. Believing that both researchers and clinicians have important information about the workings of therapy, Goldfried has announced a program that the Society of Clinical Psychology of the American Psychological Association has established a way to build a "two-way bridge" between research and practice. As observed by Goldfried, "Our medical colleagues, whose practice is informed by clinical trials, has such a bridge. When a drug has been approved by the FDA on the basis on randomized clinical trials, and is subsequently used for treatment, a mechanism exists for providing feedback about how well it fares in the real clinical setting. Thus practitioners can file incident reports to the FDA when they encounter problems in the use of any given drug in clinical practice. Within the field of psychotherapy, the practitioner can readily provide similar feedback to researchers." The demonstration of the feasibility of the two-way bridge has begun with a survey of practitioners who use cognitive behavior therapy to treat panic disorder, a clinical problem that has received favorable research evidence and one that occurs frequently in clinical practice. "Despite the fact that there has been extensive research on the treatment of panic, we believe that there is still much that can be learned from the clinicians treating such patients," he says. "Although all therapists who have experience with this clinical problem would have much to offer, we decided to focus on the use of an intervention that has received empirical support-- cognitive-behavior therapy. There is a promising psychodynamic treatment for panic currently under investigation, but it has yet to have achieved empirically supported status." Dr. Goldfried said that building a bridge between clinician and researchers will have practical implications as the federal government becomes more involved in quality assurance for Medicare and Medicaid. "They must do what people agree is appropriate, or what works," he said. "The public implication is that patients will receive better treatment if what they are undergoing is both informed by research and clinical experience." Part of the State University of New York system, Stony Brook University encompasses 200 buildings on 1,450 acres. In the 50+ years since its founding, the University has grown tremendously, now with nearly 24,700 students and 2,200 faculty and is recognized as one of the nation's important centers of learning and scholarship. It is a member of the prestigious Association of American Universities, and ranks among the top 100 national universities in America and among the top 50 public national universities in the country according to the 2010 U.S. News & World Report survey. Considered one of the "flagship" campuses in the SUNY system, Stony Brook University co-manages Brookhaven National Laboratory, joining an elite group of universities, including Berkeley, University of Chicago, Cornell, MIT, and Princeton that run federal research and development laboratories. SBU is a driving force of the Long Island economy, with an annual economic impact of $4.65 billion, generating nearly 60,000 jobs, and accounts for nearly 4% of all economic activity in Nassau and Suffolk counties, and roughly 7.5 percent of total jobs in Suffolk County. Five Filters featured article: "Peace Envoy" Blair Gets an Easy Ride in the Independent. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

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