Turns out you can really pack up your troubles
By Wency Leung
From Tuesday's Globe and Mail
From Tuesday's Globe and Mail
A new study suggests literally sealing up materials associated with a bad experience may help you to move on
Still reeling from a layoff? Can't get over losing a client? Haunted by a failed business venture? If so, literally packing away your troubles may help you move on.
A new study from University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management suggests that physically sealing up materials associated with a bad experience in a box or envelope can help alleviate feelings of regret and failure.
"On a personal level, it is indeed a great coping mechanism," Dilip Soman, professor of marketing and co-author of the study, said in an e-mail. "Our results suggest that people - employees, entrepreneurs ... anyone whose thinking and performance is encumbered by memories of a past failure ... can pack up any tangibles associated with that failure and seal it away; and this would allow them to refocus and start afresh on a new venture."
In a series of experiments, to be published in the U.S. journal Psychological Science, the researchers found that participants expressed less negative emotion when surveyed after they had placed written recollections of a bad experience inside an envelope, compared with those who turned in the materials unsealed.
Enclosing a stimulus that was unrelated to the participants' bad experience did not have the same effect. They also tried having participants attach the material together with a paper clip and found that simply adding the extra step didn't help either.
Metaphors such as "bottling up anger" or "burying one's sorrows" may, in fact, have grounding in the psychological closure related to the physical act of enclosing one's emotions, the researchers suggest. They also note their experiments offer evidence of the efficacy of metaphor therapy, in which individuals work out problems through symbolic representations.
They add that the results indicate a link between sensory-motor experience and memory.
"[W]e show that the metaphorical act of enclosing and sealing influences the memory, in the sense that the recollection of the emotional details of an event becomes weaker," the researchers write in the paper. "This seems to suggest that physical experiences interfere with cognitive entities such as memory and retrieval."
More study must be done to determine whether people actually need to carry out the act of physical closure themselves to soothe their negative emotions or whether it's sufficient to see others do it for them, the researchers say.
Dr. Soman says the results of the study also indicate a potential market for products that aid in the enclosing of negative memories, such as new services for courier companies or services related to prepaid mortgage deals that help ease people's stress over their debt burdens.
"In our research, for example, we spoke to people who said that they stressed out too much about work they had completed but were unable to submit," he says, noting there may be demand for products that could help make the completion of work feel more final. "This was true for tax filing, homework assignments, [and] work project[s]."
A new study from University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management suggests that physically sealing up materials associated with a bad experience in a box or envelope can help alleviate feelings of regret and failure.
"On a personal level, it is indeed a great coping mechanism," Dilip Soman, professor of marketing and co-author of the study, said in an e-mail. "Our results suggest that people - employees, entrepreneurs ... anyone whose thinking and performance is encumbered by memories of a past failure ... can pack up any tangibles associated with that failure and seal it away; and this would allow them to refocus and start afresh on a new venture."
In a series of experiments, to be published in the U.S. journal Psychological Science, the researchers found that participants expressed less negative emotion when surveyed after they had placed written recollections of a bad experience inside an envelope, compared with those who turned in the materials unsealed.
Enclosing a stimulus that was unrelated to the participants' bad experience did not have the same effect. They also tried having participants attach the material together with a paper clip and found that simply adding the extra step didn't help either.
Metaphors such as "bottling up anger" or "burying one's sorrows" may, in fact, have grounding in the psychological closure related to the physical act of enclosing one's emotions, the researchers suggest. They also note their experiments offer evidence of the efficacy of metaphor therapy, in which individuals work out problems through symbolic representations.
They add that the results indicate a link between sensory-motor experience and memory.
"[W]e show that the metaphorical act of enclosing and sealing influences the memory, in the sense that the recollection of the emotional details of an event becomes weaker," the researchers write in the paper. "This seems to suggest that physical experiences interfere with cognitive entities such as memory and retrieval."
More study must be done to determine whether people actually need to carry out the act of physical closure themselves to soothe their negative emotions or whether it's sufficient to see others do it for them, the researchers say.
Dr. Soman says the results of the study also indicate a potential market for products that aid in the enclosing of negative memories, such as new services for courier companies or services related to prepaid mortgage deals that help ease people's stress over their debt burdens.
"In our research, for example, we spoke to people who said that they stressed out too much about work they had completed but were unable to submit," he says, noting there may be demand for products that could help make the completion of work feel more final. "This was true for tax filing, homework assignments, [and] work project[s]."
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