What You Can Change _. And What You Can't - Martin E. Seligman [137]
23. It is not only the nonheritable half of personality that can change. The heritable half is made up of both directly genetic effects and “gene-environment covariance.” This last bit of jargon is very important. “Gene-environment covariance” refers to the effective events in the environment that produce a trait but that are correlated with genes, and so do not appear to be environmental effects. So, for example, being very tall is heritable. Playing basketball professionally is also heritable. This is because tall people get into environments-eighth-grade basketball teams, for example—in which they excel and that reward them. They go on to become top basketball players. The genes don’t directly get you to the NBA; success at basketball does. Success at basketball is the effective environmental cause—but it is correlated with the genes for tallness.
Gene-environment covariance can be broken by intervention, allowing change to occur even in the heritable fraction of personality. Tall people who don’t get the opportunity to play basketball in high school don’t get into the NBA. Another example of gene-environment covariance is crime. Crime is partly heritable, and psychopathic kids tend to alienate their parents and teachers. Their parents and teachers usually give up on them because they are so nasty. The kids, lacking a relationship with an adult, turn to the streets. This makes them street-smart criminals. If the parents persist and don’t reject the kid—breaking the covariance—they may prevent the kid from becoming a criminal.
I thank David Lykken for this example. Its implications are profound.
CHAPTER 4 Everyday Anxiety
1. Judith Rapoport, in The Boy Who Couldn’t Stop Washing (New York: Dutton, 1989), calls attention to trichotillomania—the disorder of pulling at your hair, twirling it, picking pimples, and extreme self-grooming. When severe, baldness and skin irritation result. She argues that it is a biological disorder related to obsessive-compulsive disorders and that it can be relieved with an antidepressant drug, Anafranil (clomipramine), that also relieves obsessive-compulsive disorder. While I don’t agree that either trichotillomania or obsessive-compulsive disorder is a “brain” disorder, both do have biological correlates. I believe that the two are related to each other, and that both are related to the evolution of grooming, in the large sense.
2. Randolph Nesse uses the oil-light metaphor in “What Good Is Feeling Bad? The Evolutionary Benefits of Psychic Pain,” The Sciences (1991): 30–37.
3. Developed by Charles Spielberger in collaboration with G. Jacobs, R. Crane, S. Russell, L. Westberry, L. Barker, E. Johnson, J. Knight, and E. Marks. I have selected the trait-anxiety questions, inverting some of the scoring of the negatively worded items for easy self-scoring. Dr. Spielberger has kindly provided comparison norms as well.
4. Benson’s suggested technique (as explained in The Relaxation Response [New York: Morrow, 1975]) combines progressive relaxation, nasal breathing, and meditation. See E. Jacobson’s classic Progressive Relaxation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1938) for the original technique. Neither of these is a quick “how to” manual, however.
The single best quick technique is called applied relaxation training. It is based on a therapy developed by Lars Goren-Ost (“Applied Relaxation: Description of a Coping Technique and Review of Controlled Studies,” Behaviour Research and Therapy 25 [1987]: 397–410). A simple five-page “how to do it” is found in the appendix of D. Clark, “Anxiety States: Panic and Generalized Anxiety,” in K. Hawton, P. Salkovskis, J. Kirk, and D. Clark, eds., Cognitive Behaviour Therapy for Psychiatric Problems: A Practical Guide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 92–96. This technique takes you from progressive relaxation to relaxing while engaged