What You Can Change _. And What You Can't - Martin E. Seligman [146]
4. S. Greer and T. Morris, “Psychological Attributes of Women Who Develop Breast Cancer: A Controlled Study,” Journal of Psychosomatic Research 19 (1975): 147–53; M. Watson, S. Greer, L. Rowden, C. Gorman, et al., “Relationship Between Emotional Control, Adjustment to Cancer and Depression and Anxiety in Breast Cancer Patients,” Psychological Medicine 21 (1991): 51–57.
5. D. Spiegel, J. Bloom, H. Draemer, and E. Gottheil, “Effect of Psycho-Social Treatment on Survival of Patients with Metastatic Breast Cancer,” Lancet 2 (1989): 888–91.
6. S. Greer and T. Morris, “Psychological Attributes of Women Who Develop Breast Cancer,” found higher rates of breast cancer for both anger suppressors and exploders. There is one very serious statistical problem in this study. With a complex trait like Type C, there is a technique called partial correlation that can tell us what the active ingredient—anger suppression, helplessness, or lack of fighting spirit—is in the higher rates of cancer. These authors consistently fail to use it.
See M. Seligman, Learned Optimism (New York: Knopf, 1991), 167–78, for the documentation of the cancer link to helplessness, hopelessness, and depression. As things stand, my best guess is that any Type C link to breast cancer operates through helplessness, and not through anger suppression.
7. Williams et al., “The Health Consequences of Hostility,” in Chesney and Rosenman, Anger and Hostility in Cardiovascular and Behavioral Disorders, 173–85; K. Matthews, D. Glass, R. Rosenman, and R. Bortner, “Competitive Drive, Pattern A, and Coronary Heart Disease: A Further Analysis of Some Data from the Western Collaborative Group Study,” Journal of Chronic Diseases 30 (1977): 489–98; G. Ironson, C. Taylor, M. Boltwood, et al., “Effects of Anger on Left Ventricle Rejection Fraction in Coronary Artery Disease,” American Journal of Cardiology 70 (1992): 281–85.
8. J. Hokanson and M. Burgess, “The Effects of Status, Type of Frustration, and Aggression on Vascular Processes,” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 65 (1962): 232–37; J. Hokanson and R. Edelman, “Effects of Three Social Responses on Vascular Processes,” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 71 (1966): 442–47.
9. You might ask why regular exercise—e.g., marathon running—decreases your risk of heart attack, since it raises heart rate. During the actual running of the marathon, your heart rate goes way up. But your resting heart rate level during the other twenty-one hours of the day goes down. Indeed, this may be the main benefit of exercise. Your total number of beats per year is now lower, and you don’t reach your beat allotment until later in life.
10. M. Weissman and E. Paykel, The Depressed Woman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 138–53.
11. K. Dodge and N. Crick, “Social Information-Processing Bases of Aggressive Behavior in Children,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 16 (1990): 8–22. Dodge’s work is pioneering and has generated an intervention program for conduct disorder in schools.
12. S. Nolen-Hoeksema, J. Girgus, and M. Seligman, “Depression in Children of Families in Turmoil” (unpublished manuscript). I want especially to exempt my valued colleagues, Joan Girgus and Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, from any responsibility for my speculation that less parental fighting will lower the amount of depression in children.
13. See chapter 8 of my Learned Optimism, on which this discussion of parental turmoil is based. Three other important references are J. Wallerstein and S. Blakeslee, Second Chances: Men, Women, and Children a Decade After Divorce (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1989) (but see R. Forehand, “Parental Divorce and Adolescent Maladjustment: