Considering Reflexivity as a Scholar and a Parent

This week's readings were, not surprisingly, very interesting to me, given my final paper topic. The traditional "light" perception of hope and optimism is something I find fascinating. Our societal bias toward the benefits of optimism and hope serves a great purpose for many people, encouraging them to "buck up" and to "find the silver lining", helping them to strive through difficult times with the hope and promise that things will get better. But, what about those for whom things will only get worse? What about those struggling through difficult times who look to their future and see nothing but more suffering and pain? In this way, our societal expectation of hopefulness seems to do a silent, yet powerful, disservice to many others. Our readings this week explore this topic quite nicely, ranging from exploring positive and negative orientations to life (Chang & Sanna, 2003), the need to contextualize the understanding of positive psychological constructs (McNulty & Fincham, 2012) and the impact of writing, talking and thinking about negative and positive life events (Lyubomisrsky, Sousa, & Dickerhoof, 2006).

As Chang & Sanna (2003) found, a pessimistic orientation to life can strengthen a person to better deal with the inevitable accumulation of negative life stress, making them better adjusted than their more optimistic peers under these circumstances. This, for me,  may be the most concrete example that I've seen so far of the problems inherent in Parks (1995) refers to as the ideology of intimacy, and is an important finding that should give us pause. How often do we tell people who make negative comments about a situation to try to see the bright side? I tell my son this all the time--when things don't go his way, everything is just terrible. It worries me, as his mother. There is a history of major depression in our family, and I worry incessantly that my children will struggle with this as they grow and mature. But, how much of that worry or concern is translating into my parenting to privilege optimism over pessimism? And, in privileging this optimistic orientation, am I crippling my children by not enabling them to develop an orientation that may be the very thing that helps him to adapt to life when the going gets tough? My number one job as a parent is to prepare my children to live the best possible life they can by providing them with the tools that will help them manage and even thrive in difficult times. In considering that in relation to Chang & Sanna's (2003) article, I see that my task is to facilitate adaptability in my children--help them to move seamlessly between optimism and pessimism, seeing the value and drawbacks to each so that they can adopt the orientation that will best suit them in their current life situation. My job is to help them see the value of those things highly valued by society and those things de-valued by society for them as individuals. Further, help them to recognize the value of these orientations in others.

Continuing my citizen reflection as a parent, I consider the Lyubomirsky, Sousa, & Dickerhoof (2006) article about the value/drawbacks of thinking, speaking and writing about positive and negative life events. As a communication scholar, I often think/talk/write about the value of reflection and being responsive. Reflexivity, or responsiveness, is key in trying to enter into a dialogic exchange with an Other. Personally, I privilege reflexivity, and have never given much thought to the difference between reflexively thinking, writing or speaking--and I've never really considered the difference between positive and negative events. It's always just been what you most prefer-and always preferable to reflect than to not reflect. This article, however, demonstrates that reflection and rumination each have their place. There is a dark side to reflection and a bright side to rumination--like all other constructs in this class, they each have their place and cannot fit neatly into any one quadrant in the dark side template. As a critic, this highlights the problem with privileging reflexivity over rumination. As a scholar, I have a strong interest in the concept of dialogue, and one of the key elements of dialogue is self-reflexivity, or critically evaluating your own positionality in dominant discourses as well as the positionality of the Other. This critical self-reflexivity opens up space to "produce what self and other can experience, rather than reproducing what either has" (Deetz & Simpson, 2004, p. 143). This sounds great as a scholar because it puts the onus on each communicator to actively consider their own and actively seek out another's perspective in co-constructing a reality. This facilitates voice for those with and without power--something I am keenly interested in. However, these readings explicate for us the dark side of reflexivity--something I had never thought of before and actually feel a little bit uncomfortable articulating. How can self-reflexivity be dark? It takes a lot of work...it's not always practical, for one thing. And clearly too much self reflexivity in positive situations can negate the otherwise healthy benefits associated with positive life events. We don't want to over-think the good things, but we need to make sense of the bad things. Honestly, I couldn't help but think about self-attribution bias as I considered this. We attribute positive things to ourselves and negative things to others--but when we can't externalize negative events, we have to make sense of them somehow. When we think about these negative events self-reflexively we are said to "grow". However, when we are self-reflexive about positive things, we run the risk of externalizing that which we would otherwise naturally attribute to ourselves. In other words, we complicate the fundamental attribution bias that may serve to maximize the health benefits of perceived positive life experiences. Hmmm...something to think more about.

My children tend to ruminate over bad events. Constantly re-playing the events in their mind and re-living the embarrassment and problems that were associated with it. I always try to get them to reflect on the event...write out what made you angry, talk to me about why you were upset. Think about how the other person felt in the situation (take their perspective). Tell me the story from her perspective. We reflect together on the bad events they tell me about. But at night, after we're done talking, they ruminate. And I shudder at the internal dialogue I know is occurring in their little minds. What are they thinking about themselves? How are they seeing themselves? So I keep teaching reflection strategies to them and hope they will start to do this on their own. My kids hash out and re-hash out all the negative experiences of their lives. We spend comparatively miniscule amounts of time talking about/celebrating the positive things that occur. Don't get me wrong, I do celebrate their victories with them, but they don't focus on them for very long. Typically, after school, I ask them to tell me their high and low points of the day. The low points ALWAYS get the most time. These readings have shown me the value of encouraging them to live and re-play their victories. Too often I make time for their problems, and don't take the time to sit down and really listen to their victories. After reading these articles, I plan to make a concerted effort to give my children my FULL attention and encourage them to go into explicit detail about their victories.


I also have to wonder a bit about the Lyubomirsky, et al (2006) article's conceptualization of thinking as rumination. I realize that they differentiate between rumination (repetitive thinking) and adaptive thought (reflection) in the set up of their study--see page. 693. However, I did not see how they made the distinction between repetitive and reflective thought in operationalizing the construct in any of the three studies (see their description of the thinking condition on page 697). Thought was lumped in as one variable. I find this distinction to be of utmost importance--reflective and repetitive thinking are two very different processes, and, if we aren't careful, we run the risk of priviliging the ideology of intimacy by over-simplifying and reducing thought and over-privileging the expression of thought through writing or talking without regard for the differences between reflection and rumination. I would like to see a more nuanced study that differentiates between reflective thought and rumination and use that information to complement the findings in these three studies. I think this is an important step in ensuring that we are not perpetuating/succumbing to the biases toward disclosure inherent in the ideology of intimacy. While the bulk of research has supported that writing/talking about traumatic events is more beneficial than thinking about it, some studies do not support this (Koenig-Kellas, Willis, & Kranstuber, 2011).

A final note about communication's role in studying psychological constructs--McNulty and Finchman (2012) seem to suggest that the notion of positive psychology is simply psychology--whether it's positive or negative should not detract from the idea that it is all psychology. We talked in the first weeks of class about how the dark side of communication is simply communication--however the need for the dark side is evident because of our biases toward more positive constructs. The dark side draws our collective research attention to traditionally under-represented subjects of study and this serves to marginalize those who experience the world in this way. It seems that biases exist in all disciplines...and our discipline is responsive to the biases that plague us via the dark side in the same way psychology is responsive to the biases that plague it via positive psychology. We both must be careful not to lose sight of the fact that all of this--positive and negative, comprise the larger discipline.  Also, McNulty (2012) suggests psychologists should account for the "contextual nature of psychological processes" (p. 107). As a communication scholar, this seems like an open invitation to examine traditionally psychological constructs from a relational standpoint, using a communicative lens and further informing our understanding of how these constructs are enacted in and through our relationships. Koenig-Kellas, Willer, and Kranstuber (2011) provide an important avenue through which we can answer this call--communicative sense-making. In recognizing that individuals make sense of both positive and negative life events communicatively rather than individually, they outline a valuable communicative lens through which we can productively contextualize psychological constructs, moving from the cognitive to the relational. As a parent, it has become clear to me that my role in helping my children make sense of their positive and negative life events through narrative sense making is of vital importance, and that which I choose to emphasize and that which I help them emphasize will shape the stories that shape their futures.

Deetz, S., & Simpson, J. (2004). Critical organizational dialogue: Open formation and the demand of "otherness". In R. Anderson, L. Baxter, & K.N. Cissna (Eds.) Theorizing difference in communication studies. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.