Why Do Negative Self-Comparisons Cause A Bad Mood?

Now let us consider why negative self-comparisons produce a bad mood.

There are grounds for belief in a biological connection between negative self-comparisons and physically-induced pain. Psychological trauma such as a loss of a loved one induces some of the same bodily changes as does the pain from a migraine headache, say. When people refer to the death of a loved one as "painful", they are speaking about a biological reality and not just a metaphor. It is reasonable that more ordinary "losses" -- of status, income, career, and of a mother's attention or smile in the case of a child -- have the same sorts of effects, even if milder. And children learn that they lose love when they are bad, unsuccessful, and clumsy, as compared to when they are good, successful, and graceful. Hence negative self-comparisons indicating that one is "bad" in some way are likely to be coupled with the biological connections to loss and pain. It also seems reasonable that the human's need for love is connected to the infant's need for food and being nursed and held by its mother, the loss of which must be felt in the body (Bowlby, 1969; 1980).3

Indeed, there is a statistical link between the death of a parent and the propensity to be depressed, in both animals and humans. And much careful laboratory work shows that separation of adults and their young produces the signs of depression in dogs and monkeys (Scott and Senay, 1973). Hence lack of love hurts, just as lack of food makes one hungry.

Furthermore, there apparently are chemical differences between depressed and undepressed persons. Similar chemical effects are found in animals which have learned that they are helpless to avoid painful shocks (Seligman, 1975, pp. 68, 69, 91, 92). Taken as a whole, then, the evidence suggests that negative self-comparisons, together with a sense of helplessness, produce chemical effects linked to painful bodily sensations, all of which results in a sad mood.

A physically-caused pain may seem more "objective" than a negative self-comparison because the jab of a pin, say, is an absolute objective fact, and does not depend upon a relative comparison to cause a painful perception of it4. The bridge is that negative self-comparisons are connected to pain through learning during one's entire lifetime. You learn to be hurt by a lost job or an examination failure; a person who has never seen an exam or a modern occupational society could not be caused pain by those events. Learned knowledge of this sort always is relative, a matter of comparisons, rather than involving only one absolute physical stimulus.

This implies therapeutic opportunity: It is because the causes of sadness and depression are largely learned that we can hope to remove the pain of depression by managing our minds properly. This is why we can conquer psychologically-induced pain with mental management more easily than we can banish the sensation of pain from arthritis or from freezing feet. With respect to a stimulus that we have learned to experience as painful--lack of professional success, for example--we can re- learn a new meaning for it. That is, we can change the frame of reference, for example, by altering the comparison states that we choose as benchmarks. But it is impossible (except perhaps for a yogi) to change the frame of reference for physical pain so as to remove the pain, though one can certainly reduce the pain by quieting the mind with breathing techniques and other relaxation devices, and by teaching ourselves to take a detached view of the discomfort and pain.

To put the matter in different words: Pain and sadness which are associated with mental events can be prevented because the meaning of the mental events was originally learned; re- learning can remove the pain. But the impact of physically- caused painful events depends much less on learning, and hence re-learning has less capacity to reduce or remove the pain.

Comparison and evaluation of the present state of affairs relative to other states of affairs is fundamental in all information processing, planning, and judgmental thinking. When someone said that life is hard, Voltaire is said to have answered, "Compared to what?" An observation attributed to China illuminates the centrality of comparisons in understanding the world: A fish would be the last to discover the nature of water.

Basic to scientific evidence (and to all knowledge-diagnostic processes including the retina of the eye) is the process of comparison of recording differences, or of contrast. Any appearance of absolute knowledge, or intrinsic knowledge about singular isolated objects, is found to be illusory upon analysis. Securing scientific evidence involves making at least one comparison. (Campbell and Stanley, 1963, p. 6)

Every evaluation boils down to a comparison. "I'm tall" must be with reference to some group of people; a Japanese who would say "I'm tall" in Japan might not say that in the U. S. If you say "I'm good at tennis", the hearer will ask, "Whom do you play with, and whom do you beat?" in order to understand what you mean. Similarly, "I never do anything right" , or "I'm a terrible mother" is hardly meaningful without some standard of comparison.

Helson put it this way: "[A]ll judgments (not only judgments of magnitude) are relative" (1964, p. 126). That is, without a standard of comparison, you cannot make judgments.

Other Related States

Other states of mind which are reactions to the psychological pain of negative self-comparisons5 fit well with this view of depression, as illustrated in the saleswoman joke earlier. Spelling out the analyses further:

1) The person suffering from anxiety compares an anticipated and feared outcome with a benchmark counterfactual; anxiety differs from depression in its uncertainty about the outcome, and perhaps also about the extent to which the person feels helpless to control the outcome.6 People who are mainly depressed often suffer from anxiety, too, just as people who suffer from anxiety also have symptoms of depression from time to time (Klerman, 1988, p. 66). This is explained by the fact that a person who is "down" reflects on a variety of negative self- comparisons, some of which focus on the past and present whereas others focus on the future; those negative self-comparisons pertaining to the future are not only uncertain in nature but may sometimes be altered, which accounts for the state of arousal that characterizes anxiety in contrast to the sadness that characterizes depression.