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(Un)healthy doubt

After more than 2000 kilometres and several stops, we have finally reached our goal: the heel of the boot, the east-most part of Italy. Astonishing! Now that we are here, I have instantly forgotten all those hours in the car under a burning sun. But on the way back, a little voice in my head nags: ‘You could have also just stopped in Tuscany! Now you have to drive all the way back as well!’ I quickly shake it off. It was amazing. I couldn’t have made a better choice.

It is an interesting trick our brain plays on us: as soon as we have taken a decision, we tend to remember its positive aspects better. In psychology, this phenomenon is referred to as the ‘choice-supportive bias’. In one of the first studies on this bias, participants were asked to choose between two candidates in an imaginary job interview procedure. Both applicants had four positive and four negative traits. However, when participants had to indicate afterwards which traits they still remembered, it turned out that they could recollect more positive characteristics of the chosen candidate (or even made ones up), and more negative traits of the rejected person. It seems that these differences already arise at the moment of the decision, but only get stronger over time. And what a follow-up study found was even more remarkable: when participants forgot their original choice, and were being told that they actually chose the rejected candidate, that suddenly became the one for which they had more positive memories.

These little ‘mistakes’ in our memory may seem quite problematic at first sight, but in reality they are quite useful. Imagine how tiring it would be if you would keep doubting all your decisions endlessly… Research in depressed individuals suggests that certain memory tricks function less well for them, which in some respects gives them a more realistic picture of reality. They miss the distorting, optimistic glasses through which most people subconsciously look at the world, with more rumination and feelings of regret as a consequence.

Nevertheless, these distorting glasses have disadvantages as well. By only remembering the positive aspects of our choices, sometimes we get quite stubbornly convinced of being right. Take my father, who is still driving the same model of car after twenty years. If you ask him, there is simply no better one. Salespeople are happy to take advantage of our selective memory. Notably, the bias goes even further: in subsequent research, participants could not even choose themselves, but were presented with only one option. They were told this option was selected especially for them, based on their personality. Guess what? They also had more positive memories of this prescribed option in the follow-up. So when washing machine salesmen can convince someone of the positive characteristics of the much more expensive model A, they run a relatively low risk that the customer will come back to trade it for the cheaper model B – by now, the buyer will be convinced that model A is simply the best.

So as useful as the choice-supportive bias may be, sometimes it doesn’t hurt to think deeply about why you made a certain decision – and to try something completely new from time to time, to prevent yourself from getting stuck in old beliefs and habits. For example, I had convinced myself for years that chocolate ice cream was the tastiest flavour. I didn’t order anything else, until one day, spontaneously, I chose a fruit sorbet and realised I much preferred that. And oh, how useful that discovery has been, during those weeks in Italy! 

‘Come out of your cave!’

For three weeks I have been sitting at home with a broken ankle. After my first outside drink in almost a year, my bike got tangled up with that of my boyfriend on the way home. ‘I had forgotten how to do that, public life!’ I joke when people ask me how on earth this could happen.

But is that really a joke? At a festival in a park, I run into some acquaintances for the first time since Covid. After some pleasantries back and forth, we just stand there, awkwardly staring at each other. Everyone seems to be wondering: socializing, how did we do that again?

Psychologists have dubbed this phenomenon (the difficulty to pick up ‘normal life’ post-Covid) the cave syndrome. For most of us, this will feel like a mild unease. In the past year, we have had to learn new routines. Now we are being asked to completely change those again, which can make one feel uncomfortable. But in more extreme cases, the cave syndrome can result in anxiety and stress, for example when seeing groups of people. We still feel the threat of the virus, and do not have a clear view of exactly how high the risk of contagion still is.

Clearly there are large individual differences in the ease with which we ‘come out of our caves’. Much of our social lives consists of culturally determined rules that we learn ourselves and teach others through the years, also referred to as social scripts. ‘In case of an awkward silence, start talking about the weather.’ ‘Don’t interrupt someone mid-sentence.’ ‘If your conversation partner starts looking at his cellphone in boredom, change the subject.’ For some people, such scripts feel very natural; they won’t unlearn them easily and will start applying them again effortlessly. But for certain groups of individuals, this will be way less self-evident.

For example, people with social anxiety are overly sensitive to negative social signals. They will be much quicker to interpret someone’s facial expression as bored or annoyed. This means social situations in themselves are already stressful to them, but especially after such a long break. Or take autistic individuals: they often mention that applying social rules has been something they had to teach themselves very consciously, in order to camouflage their communicative difficulties. This process of camouflaging is often very tiresome for them. Already at the start of the first lockdown, many autistic adults indicated being anxious about partly having lost their acquired skills by the time the pandemic would end.

Finally, teenagers and young adults are mentioned as a group deserving extra attention right now. In the midst of a phase of their lives that is highly important for social development (a phase in which they usually learn to stand on their own two feet, to make new friends, to experiment), everything was suddenly put to a halt. More than others they may look at this past period as lost time that needs to be made up for – but how?

It is not at all strange that we are all experiencing some nervousness around this, after spending more than a year mostly at home. Still, it is good to be alert to people that experience an extraordinary amount of anxiety, or that still do not dare to leave their house after some more time. Possibly, for them, more active guidance and help are needed. Generally, psychologists mention the importance of respecting that everyone adapts at their own pace, and that some people may continue to choose to spend some more nights on their own than before. And although I cannot wait until the plaster can be removed from my ankle so that I can truly enjoy the regained freedom, the thought of a society that has more understanding for the more introverted among us, definitely soothes me.

“Sorry love, with those masks I have a hard time understanding everything,” the baker sighs as she asks me to repeat my order for the third time. I doubt whether it’s my face mask, however. Also before the pandemic people often had trouble understanding my ‘Holland’ accent here in Flanders. Nevertheless, face masks do create a problem in communication for many. Deaf people and those who are hard of hearing experience difficulties – thankfully it was quickly decided that the mask can be taken off to enable lip reading.

But there’s another group of people of whom many find the masks burdensome: autistic individuals. One of the characteristics of autism is hyper- or hyposensitivity to sensory input. This means that autistic individuals can be either overly sensitive or much less sensitive to certain information coming in through specific senses, such as light or sound, but also touch. This not only entails being touched by other people, but also, for example, hypersensitivity to the texture of specific food, clothes, or pinching shoes. A face mask, which in addition changes how one’s own breathing is experienced, can therefore feel very uncomfortable for some, and even lead to panic reactions.

The interpretation of another person’s facial expressions can also be problematic if half of that person’s face is covered. To see if someone is happy, angry, or sad, the eyes and mouth are our most important sources of information. Additionally, body language, gestures and intonation can give further cues. As face masks make the mouth unavailable, this leaves only the eyes visible. This can be hard if you’re autistic, as research has shown that autistic individuals look to the eyes less often than others when seeing emotional expressions (but equally or even more often to the mouth). Although this issue is still being debated, it could make the mouth their primary source of information for recognizing emotions.

The amygdala, a brain region that is crucial for emotion processing and emotional reflexes, potentially plays a role in these atypical patterns of eye contact. The explanations scientists have given for this are contradictory at first sight. On the one hand, it has been said that autistic individuals show less arousal when someone makes eye contact with them. Their amygdala would be less active, and it would therefore be harder to keep their attention by looking them in the eye. On the other hand, direct eye contact could alert an autistic person too much, resulting in stress responses and avoidance. These two explanations don’t have to be mutually exclusive. We see a lot of individual variation among autistic persons, also in emotion recognition. Despite the long-held belief, autistic individuals are not necessarily worse at this. Possibly this is because they get more information from watching the mouth – which nowadays is almost always hidden from view in public life.

So what to do? Face masks were not introduced without reason, and we will not be ‘freed’ from wearing them for a while. For autistic individuals, some online trainings have been offered to help them get used to wearing a mask, and masks made out of more breathable fabric have been introduced. However, we can all contribute: by simply realizing that face masks really do pose a challenge to some, and by being understanding and patient about that. Luckily the solution to my own communicative problems at the bakery is very simple: I will just diligently keep practicing my Flemish.