After reading our social psychology book, I found an explanation for this odd behavior! Two-factor theory of emotion states that emotion is experienced based on physiological arousal and cognitive interpretation of the arousal (Schachter & Singer, 1962). To interpret my cousins’ behavior more specifically my two year old cousin is still in the early years of walking, so sometimes she’ll fall. When I’m around I just make a funny noise and just say “Oh! Down goes baby!” however when her parents are around they freak out “Oh my gosh!! Are you ok?! Poor baby!!!” When using two-factor theory of emotion, my baby cousin reacts to my response with giggles and keeps on with her business because her heightened physiological arousal is cognitively interpreted as silly. When she sees her parents’ reactions she reacts to the fall with fear because she sees fear in her parents. So in reality her “bad behavior” or as I call it “excessive crying” is not because my aunt and uncle are bad parents, it’s because they worry about my cousins and their well being.
A second term I used to explain the life around me using social psychology is self-handicapping. According to Berglas and Jones (1978) people make excuses in anticipation of failure in order to still look good to others. When I read this description it made me think of a girl that we used to have on the swim team a few years back, let’s call her Amber. The first season I swam with Amber, I knew that she was a very good swimmer she was so good that she got a nationals cut and missed going to nationals by one person, although she didn’t make it I knew that she had a lot of potential left in her. The next year, I noticed that she was injured and sick more often and due to all of the illnesses she had to miss practice a lot and did not perform as well in meets. Then I began to notice a pattern, if she did well at the swim meet the following week she was at practice and continued to be well the rest of the week. However, if she performed poorly at the meet, she was sick the rest of the week and blamed her bad performance on the fact the she had been coming down with something. Another odd pattern that I noticed was her reactions to injuries and illnesses around her mother, she was always much worse when her mom was around. Her behavior continued to be like this until she graduated and no longer swam for college. I always wondered why she changed so much, I now realize that it’s because she was trying to make herself feel better about not being as good as she had been in the past.
References:
Berglas, S. and Jones E.E. (1978). Drug choice as a self-handicapping strategy in response to noncontingent success. Journal of personality and social psychology, 36, 405-417.
Schachter, S. and Singer, J. (1962). Cognitive, social, and physiological determinants of the emotional state. Psychological Review, 69, 379-399.
I knew someone just like that on my high school golf team. She was always either sick or she had a back injury during the golf season--she was never fully well and uninjured. I realize now that this was just an excuse for her mediocre performance on the golf course. She wanted to play at UT (which obviously requires a lot of talent) and her dad was living vicariously through her playing on the team, so he was putting pressure on her to play in college too. This may sound harsh, but she was never quite good enough to play anywhere except a junior college like the one she is currently at, and she used self-handicapping to make herself and her dad feel better about her mediocre golf scores.
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