How a Lack of Money Can Worsen Physical Pain | Newsweek Voices - Wray Herbert

Poverty Hurts

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If earning money eases pain, losing money—or earning power—should similarly increase pain. The psychologists ran another experiment to test this. This time, they primed thoughts of losing or not having money. They did this by having half the volunteers compile a detailed list of everything they had spent money on in the previous month; others merely wrote about the weather, to serve as controls. Then they all participated in the same computerized ball game, and as before, some were ostracized and others not.

The findings were unambiguous. As reported in the June issue of the journal Psychological Science, thinking about expenses and spending—lack of money in general—increased feelings of distress, especially for those who were excluded by their social group. It also led to diminished pain tolerance in the hot-water test. Put another way, people who were focused on financial need suffered more pain of every kind than people who felt financially empowered.

When the researchers looked at this the other way around, they found that inflicting pain or social rejection also increased volunteers' desire for money. There's the risk of a vicious spiral here: the very real pain of being poor and marginalized could actually exaggerate and distort the desire the desire for money, so that further rejection and hardship is even more painful, and so on. The result could be a kind of psychological inflation.

Back to those recent college grads. A recession is a time of adversity, and it's very threatening on many levels. Money becomes much more highly valued during hard times because it makes people feel stronger and more able to cope. But it's also scarcer, so people actually experience more pain. A further risk is that those who feel powerless because of economic circumstances will look for a different pleasure, other than a paycheck, to boost their confidence: food, alcohol, drugs. It won't work, but it would be understandable.

Wray Herbert writes the We're Only Human blog at www.psychologicalscience.org/onlyhuman.

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This article left out an important fact: the measurement of stress. We can easily imagine how the experimenters measured the pain of subjects in the hot-water test. All they had to do was ask the subjects to rate their pain on a scale of 1-10. But how did they measure psychological distress? The sentence in the article reads as follows: "...thinking about expenses and spending???lack of money in general???increased feelings of distress, especially for those who were excluded by their social group." This sentence can't be interpreted if we don't know how the experiementers came to the conclusion that lack of money "increased feelings of distress."