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During the pandemic, I was experiencing isolation and feeling the loneliness that comes with it. Instead of letting it gnaw at me, I tried to remember: Loneliness is normal, sometimes even healthy.

Cognitive reappraisal, explained

The peer-reviewed paper in Nature Human Behavior is the most recent project from the Psychological Science Accelerator, a group of hundreds of researchers who combine their resources to pull off psychological studies with massive participant pools and an unusually rigorous methodology.

Near the start of the pandemic, the group put out a call for project proposals to test psychological interventions that could, simply, help people feel better.

“The reason why we choose cognitive reappraisal is because it has been the most widely studied and well-understood strategy,” Ke Wang, the Harvard Kennedy School doctoral student who first proposed this massive project, explains. It’s also a strategy that people don’t always use spontaneously on their own: It helps to be taught.

(The group has two other papers testing different psychological interventions, on how public health messaging in the pandemic can influence behavior. Of note: They’re testing whether “loss aversion,” an influential idea that suggests people respond more strongly when they think they have something to lose, encourages people to protect their health during a pandemic.)

Cognitive reappraisal works because “there’s a link between our thoughts and our feelings,” Kateri McRae, a University of Denver psychologist who studies emotion and who was not involved in this study, says. “A lot of times, our feelings are preceded by certain thoughts.” So when we shift our thoughts, that can precipitate a change in our emotions.

It can be a strategy to cope with a bout of anxiety or depression, or it can just be used to foster mental health resilience. “Individuals who report greater amounts of well-being and daily positive emotion report using reappraisal more frequently than people who report daily negative emotion,” McRae says — though she adds that “there is a little bit of a chicken-and-egg thing here.” What comes first: Do positive people reappraise, or do reappraisers become positive people? “But I certainly think that most people consider it to be something that might serve as a buffer.”

Once you get the hang of the technique, it’s easy to apply reappraisal thinking to many different situations. For instance, sometimes when I felt the excruciating boredom of the pandemic winter lockdown, I tried to reappraise the feeling of boredom as peacefulness, the absence of a bad thing. “I’m lucky to be bored,” I’d think. It would make the bitter pill go down more easily.

Emotion regulation passes a massive worldwide test

Wang and the hundreds of other authors wanted to see if they could teach thousands of people around the world similar coping strategies, to help deal with the stress of the pandemic.

They conducted a preregistered study — meaning a study where the methods and analysis plans are locked into place before data collection begins, to help ensure rigor — and tested two subtly different reappraisal methods, targeting negative emotions associated with living through the pandemic.

The first method is called “refocusing.” It might be better described as “looking on the bright side.”

Let’s say you’re feeling sad, staying home during a lockdown. You can refocus your thoughts to some of the more positive aspects of staying at home. Like: “Staying at home is not that bad,” as Wang explains. “You may find more time to spend with your family, or do things you may not have had time to do, such as cooking.”

Another is called “reconstruing.” This goes a little beyond just looking at the bright side of any particular burden, trying to find an overall less-negative narrative to tell ourselves about the pandemic. It’s less about finding the positive in our individual circumstances and more about looking at the big picture in a new light.

In reconstruing the burdens of the pandemic, for example, you could think: “In the past, people have overcome many challenges that seemed overwhelming at the time, and we will overcome Covid-19 related challenges too,” as the study text suggested to participants.

This isn’t about becoming a blinkered robot that’s only allowed to think positive thoughts. “In our intervention, we’re not forcing them to feel positive all the time,” Wang explains. “We’re teaching them to use it to regulate emotions.” It’s about intervening when thoughts become distressing.

It’s not about never acknowledging negative thoughts, either. “I think there’s a really delicate balance between acknowledging the reality, allowing people to sometimes sit with negativity, but also realizing that positive interpretations of things are possible,” McRae says.

In the study, participants were assigned to read about refocusing, reconstruing, or two control conditions. Participants took a survey before they learned the technique to assess their baseline emotional state. Afterward, they were measured again and asked to assess their feelings overall about the pandemic, and how they are responding to it.

Notably, both techniques fared equally well in decreasing people’s negative emotions, and the effects, the authors report, aren’t just statistically significant — they seemed to make a big practical difference for people.

The difference in feelings between those who learned reappraisals, compared to those who did not, was as big as the difference between people who had faced extreme hardships due to the pandemic, compared to those who had not. That’s a notable improvement. (Of course, the interventions are not “guaranteed” to work for any particular individual. The study reported changes on average.)

Also, the interventions didn’t seem to decrease willingness to engage in Covid-safe behaviors like masking. “Some people may worry that if you improve emotions, people may be less cautionary,” Wang says. “But we don’t find that in our study.”

Notably, too, the interventions — which were translated by a team of hundreds of people into 44 languages — broadly worked in every country tested, though there was some variability. The interventions were most effective in Brazil, Germany, and Hungary, and they were least effective in Russia, Romania, and Egypt. “So far, we haven’t found anything that can systematically explain what country can benefit more or less,” Wang says. (The researchers didn’t have representative samples in all the countries studied, so there could be a lot of reasons why they found the variation.)

A drawing of a face in profile with the main image smiling and the shadow image behind it not smiling. Getty Images

“A lot of times, our feelings are preceded by certain thoughts,” says Kateri McRae, a University of Denver psychologist. So when we shift our thoughts, that can precipitate a change in our emotions.

A psychological finding you can trust

The narrower conclusion of this study, that cognitive reappraisal works, is not super surprising. “The finding that reappraisal decreases negative emotion and increases positive emotion is something that has been replicated over and over and over ad nauseam,” McRae says. “I couldn’t just get that finding published if I really wanted to, because it’s been so well-established.”

But there were aspects of the study that are new and significant. “I think this scale, scope, and timeliness to speak to the crisis we’re in right now were the most impressive parts about it,” she says.

There’s a burgeoning research movement in psychology dedicated to testing out single-session interventions, delivered either online or remotely. Mental health care is often inaccessible and expensive, so the more psychological interventions that can be unbundled from a whole suite of intensive therapy, the more good they can potentially do around the world. Many people whose distress doesn’t rise to the level of a mental health diagnosis could still benefit, the study suggests.

That said, there’s still more work to do here. Other researchers not involved in the project wish it had studied these participants over time, to see if the intervention had a lasting effect.

“A study this large would have provided a particularly informative test of whether a single- session universal intervention could exert lasting, more generalized effects,” says Jessica Schleider, a Stony Brook University psychologist who specializes in studying single-session psychological interventions. “I do think it’s scientifically valuable to know that reappraisal can provide in-the-moment support this broadly, and it can be recommended as one coping option to try for folks in distress.”

The authors of the paper acknowledge this limitation, and some others. The study had people view photos reminding them of Covid-19 stresses, which “might not represent local situations for different groups of participants,” the authors report. It also doesn’t represent all the myriad emotional triggers we encounter living during a pandemic. But most of all, they see this work as foundational for other questions.

The Psychological Science Accelerator, the group behind the massive undertaking of the paper, was launched in response to psychology’s “replication crisis.” Over the past decade, many famous psychological theories have collapsed under rigorous re-testing. As many as 50 percent of all psychology papers might not be replicable, though no one knows the true extent of the rot in the foundations of psychology. There have also been some high-profile cases of outright data fraud related to some of psychology’s most popular findings. The Accelerator, which operates on a shoestring budget (it reports that this study of tens of thousands of people cost only $17,000, much of which came from individual lab members), is seeking to rebuild the field on a firmer foundation.

It’s a “credibility crisis,” Patrick Forscher, a psychologist and member of the Accelerator who worked on the reappraisal paper, says. “Because there are more issues rather than just replicability. So my personal view is that you can look at a lot of psychological findings and just put a question mark on them — not that they’re definitely false. We know that some of the practices that were used to produce a lot of those findings are, themselves, not all that credible.”

The latest test of cognitive reappraisals puts the science of mental health interventions on a firmer foundation. Psychology encompasses a lot of flimsy ideas that claim to make your life better. Here’s one that seems to actually work.

Scientists collected footage of octopuses at a site in southeastern Australia called Octopolis. It’s home to an unusually high density of the animals, which have long been considered antisocial.

Do octopuses really throw objects at each other?

Octopuses are elusive creatures and difficult to spot in the wild — unless you find yourself in “Octopolis.”

Named by Godfrey-Smith, Octopolis is a small site off the coast of southeastern Australia that is home to an unusually high density of common Sydney octopuses (which are also known as gloomy octopuses). A few cameras at the site offer researchers a rare glimpse into interactions among these largely antisocial animals.

It’s footage from Octopolis that revealed the unusual siphon behavior with new clarity: Octopuses there commonly gather debris in their arms — silt, algae, or shells — “and then use the siphon to expel the material” up to several body lengths away, the authors write in the study.

Peter Godfrey-Smith et al.
In panel A, an octopus shoots silt and kelp toward another octopus. In panel B, the octopus receives a face full of silt and kelp. C and D panels show the mechanics.

To be sure, Godfrey-Smith acknowledges that “throw” is an imperfect term for describing the behavior. “Strictly speaking,” he said, “it’s just a very octopus-y way of propelling something.”

The researchers observed more than 100 such “throws” in less than 24 hours of footage from 2015. Often, the animals used their siphons to propel objects out of their dens or discard the remains of food, the authors write. But in many cases, they seemed to be launching debris toward a target.

Octopuses seem to target annoyances. Is it intentional?

In more than a dozen cases that the scientists observed, octopuses hit other octopuses with debris. The females tend to throw more than the males, said Godfrey-Smith, who is the author of Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness.

“You’ll have a female that does this a bunch of times at one male over a period of several hours,” he said. “By the end of it, he’s kind of ducking. It is quite amusing.”

In another example, a male octopus was “rebuffed in a mating attempt,” the authors write, and then proceeded to throw something of a tantrum: “He threw a shell, changed color, and appeared to accelerate his breathing.”

Courtesy of Peter Godfrey-Smith, David Scheel, Stephanie Chancellor, Stefan Linquist, and Matthew Lawrence
An octopus launches silt at another octopus (on the right), which appears to duck.

The octopuses also threw debris toward fish and toward an underwater camera that was close to their dens, the authors write. Before some throws, the animals even seem to orient their bodies toward the target, according to the study.

The authors say these behaviors suggest that octopuses are capable of deliberately launching objects at other animals, perhaps with the intention of hitting them. “Octopuses can thus definitely be added to the shortlist of animals who regularly throw or propel objects, and provisionally added to the shorter list of those who direct their throws on other animals,” they wrote.

But Mather and other outside experts aren’t convinced that octopuses pick up an item to launch at a target. They could just be sweeping out their den, for example, and accidentally hit another octopus in the process.

Amodio, meanwhile, says it’s likely that octopuses do pick up debris for the purpose of launching — but he has doubts about “the intention to hit the other individual with the object.” They might just propel the object in the general direction of a nuisance, he said.

Reinhard Dirscherl/ullstein bild via Getty Image
A common octopus in Costa Brava, Spain.

Godfrey-Smith, for his part, acknowledges that it’s challenging to work out whether or not hits are intentional. Nonetheless, he’s convinced that octopuses are, in fact, targeting each other. When a female octopus is repeatedly launching junk at a male, it’s hard to see it any other way. “You don’t need to clean your den that much,” he said, and the male is “expecting to be hit because he’s ducking.”

Why we care if octopuses can throw objects at each other

Whether or not octopuses are intentionally hurling objects at each other — and whether or not we can really call it “throwing” — the study shows that octopuses can use their siphon in clever ways: to move debris, arrange a den, and perhaps even send a signal to other animals, including us.

Does that mean they’re even more intelligent than we thought?

The question itself is fraught, as it suggests that there’s some universal idea of what it means to be intelligent. In our assessment of animals, intelligence is often measured using a human yardstick, as the primatologist Frans de Waal writes in his book Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? “Every species deals flexibly with the environment and develops solutions to the problems it poses,” he writes. “Each one does it differently.”

An octopus with its arms spread out seen from underneath with the surface of the water overhead. David Fleetham/VW PICS/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
A day octopus swims through the open ocean in Hawaii.

Octopuses, for one, are nothing like us. In fact, “when our two branches of the animal family tree diverged, backbones hadn’t been invented,” as Elizabeth Preston wrote in the New York Times. “It makes sense to be cautious when we guess what’s going on in these animals’ minds.”

There is a benefit to our obsession with octopus intelligence: We show them more respect and compassion, which has implications for wildlife conservation, experts say. “You probably won’t conserve what you don’t respect,” Mather says.

Then again, what makes octopuses so marvelous is just how different from us they are. Case in point: Each of their eight tentacles has roughly 300 suckers, and each of those can have as many as 10,000 or so sensory neurons, allowing them to perceive touch and taste. “It’s alien,” Grasso said. “It isn’t human.”

  1. August 18, 2021

Yet while gentrifying neighborhoods create those types of interactions between neighbors or heavier “order maintenance” policing, the gentrification isn’t the root issue. Segregating neighborhoods does not get rid of these sentiments or the harms they cause: it simply hides them. In a wealthy, white enclave like the Upper East Side, there aren’t somehow fewer people who assume any Black person on their street is begging for money than there are in gentrifying neighborhoods. In fact, there are likely more. Gentrifying neighborhoods pull back the veil and allow for these worlds to collide, displaying the vast differences in income, access to education, and government protection and investment.

All of the problems people worry about when they invoke gentrification — displacement, police action against people of color, lack of investment, predatory landlords — are also present in segregated neighborhoods, often even more so.

As George Washington University professor Suleiman Osman wrote in his 2011 book The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn: “Stories abounded of renters [in Brooklyn] being pressured by landlords to leave revitalizing areas. But non-revitalizing blocks with high rates of abandonment and demolition saw rates of displacement that were just as high.”

What is gentrification?

Defining gentrification is hard, even for the experts.

The Urban Displacement Project, a research and policy group at the University of California Berkeley, defines it as:

a process of neighborhood change that includes economic change in a historically disinvested neighborhood — by means of real estate investment and new higher-income residents moving in — as well as demographic change — not only in terms of income level, but also in terms of changes in the education level or racial make-up of residents.

While this covers the conceptual ideas, determining which neighborhoods are gentrifying has been difficult for researchers. Not for lack of trying: MIT urban studies PhD candidate Benjamin Preis and his study co-authors compared four different models of gentrification and displacement risk and found “striking differences between the models.” For instance, one weighted “access to public transit” as a gentrification risk factor while the others didn’t, and another didn’t include data on racial composition.

The researchers applied all of the models to Boston and found that there are “only seven [census] tracts that all four models agreed were either gentrifying or at risk of gentrification or displacement.”

“[The models] disagree on the front end, they disagree on what we call gentrification, and then not surprisingly, they really disagree on the back end to actually map out what those neighborhoods are,” Preis told Vox. “You end up with radical disagreement. One method identified nearly 120 tracts facing displacement pressure and another had just 39.”

As Columbia University researcher Brett McMillan explains in the publication Shelterforce, while people often assume that gentrification happens predominantly in overwhelmingly Black or brown neighborhoods, that is not actually the case. He details research finding “Chicago neighborhoods with Black populations of greater than 40 percent experienced significantly lower rates of gentrification” and “white ‘invasion’ into census tracts with Black populations of 50 percent or more has been a relatively infrequent phenomenon.”

The other big issue with defining gentrification is attempting to quantify physical displacement. Widely viewed as the most pernicious byproduct of gentrification, the evidence that gentrification causes physical displacement is a mixed bag.

Displacement is another phenomenon that is difficult to define. The reasons people move are not cataloged in any database, and poor Americans are notably transient due to financial insecurity. Additionally, defining “forced” displacement is difficult — if someone can afford a one-bedroom apartment in their community but not a larger home, are they being displaced if they have a kid and move to a more affordable neighborhood? People move for a variety of reasons: In 2015, FiveThirtyEight calculated that the average American moved more than 11 times in their lives, indicating that there are very few “longtime residents” of anywhere.

Importantly, research by preeminent eviction scholar Matthew Desmond “found no evidence that renters residing in gentrifying or in racially- and economically-integrated neighborhoods had a higher likelihood of eviction.” But perhaps increasing rents can cause displacement without evictions. (The way to avoid that would be to keep rents low by building more housing and preserving existing affordable housing, but more on that later.)

While the arson in Hoboken was a clear-cut case of forced displacement, measuring the insidious ways that financially insecure Americans could be nudged out of their neighborhoods is extremely difficult.

The research literature in this space is mixed. Some researchers have found that “rather than rapid displacement, gentrification was associated with slower residential turnover among [disadvantaged] households.” Other research, however, found that “between 8,300 and 11,600 households per year were displaced in New York City between 1989 and 2002 … between 6.6 and 9.9 percent of all local moves among renter households.”

Overall, the research literature leans toward the view that gentrifying neighborhoods can lead to displacement, but they don’t have to. Gentrification can bring with it the promise of integration and sorely needed investment that can increase residents’ quality of life — but only if disadvantaged residents are set up to take part in the benefits of increased investment.

Most urban dwellers live in poor neighborhoods that stay poor, or in higher- income neighborhoods doing their damnedest to stay that way

The cry of “fire, fire, gentrifier” spread through city neighborhoods last year during some of the racial justice protests. The battle lines in these neighborhoods are not clear but the anger directed at the yuppies brunching on the sidewalks was palpable. The group that conspicuously gets to avoid this conflict? Wealthy (often white) urban and suburban homeowners who have long refused to allow either integration or even yuppies to live in their segregated neighborhoods.

Chants of “Fire fire, gentrifier. Black people used to live here!” as the crowd makes their way through Logan Square this evening in Chicago #Chicago #AdamToledo pic.twitter.com/04S1qHUQvU

— Brendan Gutenschwager (@BGOnTheScene) April 17, 2021

While there are very real harms that accompany gentrification, it’s important not to lose the forest for the trees.

Gentrifying neighborhoods are “very tiny pieces of the story,” says UC Berkeley professor of city and regional planning Karen Chapple, who leads the school’s Urban Displacement Project (UDP), which has worked to map gentrification in several US cities.

When Chapple was doing her first map of the Bay Area in 2005, she says, “about 10 percent of the neighborhoods were gentrifying but about 40 percent were just getting poorer over time. And it wasn’t the story that anybody wanted to hear. … Systemic poverty and racism is so hard … and [gentrification] is also much more visible.”

Looking at UDP’s work in Southern California, they find that in San Diego County only “7 percent of tracts experienced risk of or ongoing gentrification/displacement.” In Chicago, they find that only 18 percent of low-income households “live in low-income neighborhoods at risk of, or already experiencing gentrification and/or displacement.”

What’s happening in the rest of the neighborhoods? Segregation and/or concentrated poverty, which have been constant companions to disadvantaged communities.

In Denver, Colorado, they find that only “17 percent of neighborhoods were at risk of gentrification,” and “45 percent of Denver’s moderate-to-high-income neighborhoods demonstrated risk of or ongoing exclusion of lower-income households.”

Racial and income segregation locks low-income people in a trap of concentrated poverty. The best schools are relegated to the highest-income neighborhoods, good jobs often exist in either exclusive or gentrifying neighborhoods, and businesses are less willing to take root in an area of concentrated poverty because there are fewer customers. All of this is a vicious cycle that traps low-income Americans. It also hinders their ability to foster growth on their own because financial insecurity makes people transient and lacking in time and energy to build community.

Meanwhile, homeowners in well-off neighborhoods have cemented systems of local control through rules like exclusionary zoning to keep their neighborhoods prohibitively expensive for lower-income Americans, including many Black and brown Americans.

Zoning laws are the rules and regulations that decide what types of homes can be built where. While this can sound innocuous, exclusionary zoning is anything but. These rules have a dark history in the United States as a tool of racial and economic segregation, used explicitly to keep certain races, religions, and nationalities out of certain neighborhoods. And while the explicit racism has been wiped from the legal text, the effect of many of these rules remains the same: keeping affordable housing and the people who need it away from the wealthiest Americans.

City by city, the message is clear: Segregation and concentrated poverty are the true blights of urban life, despite our fascination with gentrification.

Local zoning rules often keep affordable housing and the people who need it away from the wealthiest Americans.

How to ethically create integrated neighborhoods

Gentrification does carry with it real harms, but there are ways to reduce those and to provide a pathway for integrated, equitable cities.

Integration is not a panacea, but research shows that following gentrification, “children benefit from increased exposure to higher-opportunity neighborhoods, and some are more likely to attend and complete college.” Further, gentrification can allow existing homeowners in a community to benefit from the rising property values, as long as anti-displacement policies exist to ensure property tax payments don’t price people out.

There are a few other policies the US could pursue to mitigate the harms that accrue to disadvantaged communities.

First, the economic literature is clear that increased housing production reduces rents. It also ensures that new entrants don’t bid up the price of existing homes but rather turn to new construction for their housing needs. The evidence that does exist showing that modern-day gentrification leads to displacement links that displacement to rising rents. Reducing that pressure is paramount to stopping unwanted displacement. In Hoboken, New Jersey, during the violent evictions and arsons, the vacancy rate fell below 1 percent by the start of the 1980s. This supply crunch contributes to the incentive for property owners to push out lower-income tenants.

Second, tenant protection policies could help forestall some evictions. A right to counsel in housing proceedings, for example, would rebalance power between low-income tenants and property owners seeking to evict due to potential profits from selling or converting the property for higher-income use. It’s also important for cities to work to preserve existing affordable housing, especially as new housing gets built.

Third, rezoning of wealthy white segregated neighborhoods could slow the speed at which gentrifying neighborhoods change, and help tackle segregation. Slowing gentrification can ensure that local officials can respond to protect existing residents while also allowing the benefits of the phenomenon to accrue.

These types of interventions can provide a roadmap for how to ethically integrate urban neighborhoods.

None of this is to undermine the very real cultural conflict that gentrification brings. Even if you’re able to stay in your neighborhood and your home, watching store after store pop up that doesn’t serve your community or isn’t available to you at your income level can be deeply alienating. It’s no wonder that people who have faced centuries of disinvestment grow angry as public and private money flows into their neighborhoods only after high-income, college-educated people choose to move there. Even if those people are not wholly responsible for the inequality, the blatant injustice is hard to ignore.

Taken all together, it becomes clear why we focus on gentrification while the unseen culprits (segregated enclaves) are able to avoid controversy: Gentrification is the most visual manifestation of inequality in urban life.

“Gentrification is a cultural sphere to work out feelings of resentment around inequality. … Those feelings aren’t to be discounted,” Gottlieb argues. “This is a manifestation of a long-running sense of ‘I am not welcomed in the city, I don’t have a right to the city.’ Sometimes those feelings can be worked out in the cultural terrain of gentrification, even indeed if the people moving in aren’t the proximate cause for them leaving.”

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