182: Grow Your Relationships through Active Constructive Responding with Prof. Shelly Gable
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When something positive happens, we instinctively tend to want to share our good news with others. From a relationship-building perspective, research is plentiful when it comes to supporting others in times of distress, but there is very little out there about responding constructively to someone else’s good news. On this episode of The TalentGrow Show, psychologist and professor at UC Santa Barbara Shelly Gable, Ph.D. joins me to discuss her theoretical and practical framework for nurturing our relationships and generating positive outcomes with our responses. Drawing from many years of research, Shelly explains why our responses to positive news make up such a key aspect of our relationships, why Active and Constructive Responding (ACR) is the most effective and authentic way to respond, and how leaders can leverage ACR to build better relationships at work and at home. Listen and remember to share this episode with others!
ABOUT SHELLY GABLE:
Shelly Gable received her Ph.D. in Social and Personality Psychology at the University of Rochester and began her career as an Assistant Professor at UCLA where she earned tenure before joining the faculty at University of California, Santa Barbara in January 2007. Dr. Gable’s research focuses on motivation, emotion regulation, close relationships and positive emotions. She is particularly interested in the social regulation of emotions, positive processes in close relationships, and resilience more broadly. Her awards include teaching awards, the Best Article Award from the International Association of Relationship Researchers, the Early Career Award from the Close Relationships Group of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, and the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) from President George W. Bush.
WHAT YOU’LL LEARN:
· Shelly describes her approach to science, and how it led her to develop the Active and Constructive Responding (ACR) model (5:44)
· The number one thing that people do when something positive happens to them (8:13)
· Shelly shares the results of a recent study, which demonstrated how universal our instinctive response to positive events is (10:08)
· Understanding ACR as a dyadic process (12:33)
· Shelly describes the four prototypical responses we have to good news, and where ACR places in this matrix (13:15)
· How ACR helps nurture better relationships (17:36)
· Which of the four responses is the most harmful? The answer might surprise you (19:27)
· How can leaders leverage Shelly’s insights to make their relationships better? (22:27)
· Three ingredients that go into an active constructive response (24:24)
· What’s new and exciting on Shelly’s horizon? (26:21)
· One specific action you can take to upgrade your leadership and relationship skills (28:44)
RESOURCES:
· Check out Shelly’s website
Episode 182 Shelly Gable
Soundbite You can convey your enthusiasm in a very passive, quiet way, or you can be very involved and active in the conversation. You can also convey your negativity in a very passive, quiet way, or you can convey your negativity with a lot of activity and enthusiasm. Those are kind of independent dimensions. If you kind of think about those as independent dimensions, you can kind of come up with four prototypical responses.
Intro Welcome to the TalentGrow Show, where you can get actionable results-oriented insight and advice on how to take your leadership, communication and people skills to the next level and become the kind of leader people want to follow. And now, your host and leadership development strategist, Halelly Azulay.
Hey there TalentGrowers. Welcome back to another episode of the TalentGrow Show. I’m Halelly Azulay, your leadership development strategist here at TalentGrow and this week’s episode is going to bring you some insights from a researcher I’ve followed for many years and I’m so excited to have her on the show, Dr. Shelly Gable. She will talk to us about the active, constructive responding framework and how you can strengthen your workplace relationships – and by the way, your other relationships as well – by mindfully and intentionally responding in a particular way that actually is correlated with stronger relationships. We’re going to talk about her framework, you’re going to learn how not to respond, how to respond, and ways in which you can strengthen workplace relationships. I hope you enjoy this episode.
Let’s dig in.
TalentGrowers, I’m excited to share with you this conversation with Shelly Gable, PhD. She received her PhD in social and personality psychology from the University of Rochester and began her career as an assistant professor at UCLA where she earned tenure before joining the faculty at University of California Santa Barbara in January 2007. Dr. Gable’s research focuses on motivation, emotion regulation, close relationships and positive emotions. She is particularly interested in the social regulation of emotions, positive processes in close relationships and resilience more broadly. Her awards include teaching awards, the best article award from the International Association of Relationships Researchers, the Best Article Award from the International Association of Relationship Researchers, the Early Career Award from the Close Relationships Group of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, and the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) from President George W. Bush. Shelly, welcome to the TalentGrow Show.
Thank you for having me.
I’m really glad you’ve come by. I have known about your work for many years because I am very interested in positive psychology and recently I think our mutual colleague Caroline Adams Miller was posting that she had done an interview with you and it was just for people who are inside of her group and I thought, “That’s no fair! I’d like to also have that opportunity to share that with my listeners,” so I figured let’s make it happen. Thank you so much for taking time to spend your afternoon here with the TalentGrowers. Before we move into what you are known for and your study of relationships, I’d love for you to describe your professional journey very briefly. Where did you start and how did you get to where you are today?
It’s a pretty good question. When I was growing up, I didn’t know what a social or personal psychologist was or did, so it was definitely a longer journey. I ended up being a psychology major as an undergrad and I fell in love with research, but I also wanted to help people, I also wasn’t sure if I wanted to do some clinical work, so after undergraduate, after getting my BA in psychology, I spent a few years working in various mental health settings. I realized pretty quickly that the setting wasn’t exactly the best fit for my talent, that I was really better I think with research and looking at bigger pictures than actually one-on-one application. I immediately started the graduate school application process, looking at getting into school to continue my work, my research on social and personality psychology. I did my Master’s degree at College of Louisville Mary for two years, and then I spent four years studying for my PhD, earning my PhD at the University of Rochester. I was really fortunate that I was hired by UCLA right out of graduate school and I moved across the country and started my lab at UCLA and then I think I was there for almost seven or eight years until I moved up the road, basically, to Santa Barbara. It’s been very interesting journey. I wouldn’t say, like I said, knew necessarily what my end goal was, but I knew I wanted to do research. I knew I was interested in emotions and close relationships and emotion regulation, so all these issues, all these psychological processes were very fascinating to me and I kind of ended up in academia because I was able to study those things, the things that I found interesting, at my own direction. That’s how I think I ended up in academia.
I have to say that I find that most people’s careers are not necessarily a straight line or something they would have predicted early on, so I always find it very fascinating to hear about people’s journeys and how they meander to where they got. I also moved from the East Coast to California so I share that with you and Santa Barbara is gorgeous! You have published worked that has become pretty key and core in the world of positive psychology. In your research, you discovered that there are different ways in which people respond to good news, because a lot of times we focus on how people respond to sad things, or how they respond in a relationship when someone is experiencing difficulties, but this idea that when someone tells you something good that has happened to them, how you respond makes a really big difference in the strength of your relationship. I’d love for you to share that with the TalentGrowers, about the act of constructive responding framework and how it works.
First, I think it’s important to kind of back up a little bit, how we even started looking at the act of constructive responses. There are different ways to approach science and I think one of the things I do is I take a look at the literature and try to identify, “What are we missing here? What piece is missing here?” A lot of times the missing pieces may not be that interesting, but kind of toward the end of my graduate school career, there was a lot of interest in what is called coping and social support. It’s the idea that people need to talk about when they have a stressor happen to them and they can reach out and talk about it and that’s one way of coping and that’s an important way to kind of deal with negative events and stressors in your life. And also then, the counterpart to that that’s kind of in the relationship field is having people around you that can offer you either tangible support – like helping you solve the problem – or emotional support by making you feel better about it. Having those people around is very good and the data were really clear that being able to reach out to someone and having that person respond well was associated with the mental health and also even physical health. There’s a lot of findings coming out in the late 90s, early 2000s, that were in that realm.
But I kind of took a look at that and said, this is all wonderful research and it absolutely is important to do, but my experience and the data we’d been collecting on people’s lives showed me that there were many more positive events that people experience, or at least mildly positive to very positive on a daily basis. There was virtually no literature out there on what people do when positive things happen to them. There wasn’t even very much out there about, “Do you even talk about them? Do you celebrate them in any way? Do you reflect on them? How do these positive events make it into our experience? How do they contribute to well-being?” So our first question was do people do anything when good things happen to them? We set out to answer that question. We designed a series of studies that basically asked that question, and we found very quickly that the number one thing people do is they reach out to other people – kind of similar to and paralleling that social support/coping process I explained earlier – so it wasn’t that surprising to us that people were using their close relationships and their acquaintances and their other friendships to kind of reach out and talk about positive events. But it then became very apparent to us pretty quickly that the counterpart, the other part of the story, was you can’t just talk about these events. What’s important is how people respond to them.
People have this need to share it, like if they experience a good event, they naturally want to tell it to someone.
Exactly. We did studies with college students, we did them with members of the community, and we found that if you asked people on a daily basis, “What’s the best thing that happened to you today?” not every day is going to be the day you get accepted to medical school or that you get a raise at work or anything like that. But there are little things – you’re doing the laundry and you find a $20 bill that you didn’t know you had, or you had a really good conversation with a friend, you got a chance to have lunch with a colleague and it went really well. There are little things that happen everyday, and even those little things, people were reaching out and telling other people around. “Hey, I had this really good lunch with my friend that I hadn’t seen for a while,” or, “We finished a project at work that we’ve been working on for a long time and it feels really good to have that done.” All these little things, people were reaching out and talking about these to their friends. Some of our studies, up to like 80 or 90 percent, even those little events, are being shared with at least one other person on a daily basis.
Recent studies that we did, which was quite surprising for us, because this was a study that was not set up to look necessarily at this process of capitalization, which is what we call it. But we were doing a study of a lead scientist – these are physicists at the top of their game. These are physicists that have PhDs, have been in the field for 10 or 20 years, are publishing cutting-edge papers, some of them may go on to win Nobel Prizes. That was part of our sample. The other part of our sample were active writers in screenwriters guilds. These are all people who have at least sold one screenplay to Hollywood, so to get your screenwriters card you have to be somewhat successful. These are all professional writers and elite scientists in the one sample. The study was mainly designed to look at creativity, but I asked the same question – if you had a good idea, did you tell anybody about it? Even these people who are at the top of their game are telling other people that they had a good idea today, in their field, most of the time. So this process is all over, it’s everywhere. But like I said, we kind of realized that this is a very common process.
It doesn’t show insecurity or something like this? It’s normal and common?
No. It’s normal, it’s not bragging, it’s just part of sharing. Imagine all the things that connect us to other people. If we only could share the negative events that happen to us, these relationships would not be very fun. This is kind of what started my interest in this was, “Look, no one, for example, decides they’re going to marry someone because this person is going to be great if these horrible things happen.” 95 percent of the rest of our lives together it’s unimportant how we get along or anything like that – I kind of felt that wasn’t the right way to think about an intimate relationship. If you looked at the close relationship literature up to that point in time, you would have thought that the only determinant of stability in, for example, marriage, was whether or not you could resolve conflict and whether or not you were there for each other when things went wrong, it seemed like there was a black box for everything else. It became very apparent to us, like I said, it was a relationship process. This is a normal thing, people are doing this, and it’s part of intimacy. It’s part of how people are sharing their lives and how they’re getting closer to one another, how they’re forming these bonds. Of course the natural thing is to have to look at this as what we call a dyadic process. It takes two to tango. You can’t just put something out there in the ether. It’s going to have the same affect no matter what the response is. So we started looking at the response of the person who the positive event was shared with, and that’s how we started looking at active constructive responding, and comparing this to other ways in which people can respond and in trying to tease out those differences of how people respond.
Yes. Would you like to describe that to the listeners? Basically it’s a matrix. There are four boxes and we can share that on the show notes as a graphic if that’s helpful. Walk us through it.
The idea is we based some of our original thinking on some existing research in other areas, but the idea is that you can describe responses along many dimensions. But two of the important ones are whether or not it’s a positive, constructive response, or if it’s more negative and destructive. That’s one dimension upon which you can be very constructive, all the way down to being very destructive. You can think of that as a continuum. Another independent dimension, kind of how active or passive you are? You can convey your enthusiasm in a very passive, quiet way, or you can be very involved and active in the conversation. You can also convey your negativity in a very passive, quiet way, or you can convey your negativity with a lot of activity and enthusiasm. Those are kind of independent dimensions. If you kind of think about those as independent dimensions, you can kind of come up with four prototypical responses.
The one that has turned out to be mostly positively associated with outcomes that we’re interested in is this active constructive response. Asking questions, providing positive feedback, validating feedback, and basically celebrating or at least acknowledging whether the event might be important to the person. That would kind of sum up the act of constructive responding. The other three types that are ways in which people can respond, another one is active destructive which is kind of what we used to call “finding the cloud in the silver lining.” You’re also very active in the conversation. You may even ask some questions, but these are all kind of undermining the importance of the event, pointing out perhaps the downsides that the person hasn’t thought of, or saying why it’s not that big of a deal, for example, or just really kind of undermining the positivity of the event that’s been shared. Those are kind of the two active responses you can have.
Then there are two passive responses – one is being quietly supportive. Kind of, “That’s nice,” and then that’s the end of it. Not very many questions, not really very much elaboration, not asking for elaboration, not asking for connections, but just saying, “That’s a pretty cool thing,” and leaving it at that and having that positive response. Then you can also be passive and destructive and there are two different ways to do this. One is you can pretty much ignore the events by changing the subject. A person might share a positive event with you and you just completely talk about something else instead. Or, you can actually turn it back onto yourself. Kind of make it more self-focused. Like a person might say, “I had a really good day at work,” and, “Let me tell you what happened to me at work today.” Pulling that back to the self and talking instead of focusing on the person and connecting with the person who is sharing the event, you are really talking about yourself. Those are the four different types of responses that we’ve seen in our lab. We’ve had people come into the lab and have these kinds of conversations and we videotape them and coded them. We’ve had people tell us what typically happens. We’ve had people keep a daily experience diary log and tell us how people respond. So we’ve tried to capture this in different ways, both in the lab and kind of in the field, and these four different types kind of sum up the ways in which people can respond.
The one you found a significant correlation or is it causal?
Most of our work is correlational, because we’re usually dealing with trying to understand events naturally as they occur, although we have done some experimental work where we’ve manipulated the type of response our participants get, so we do have some evidence for some causality here as well, but most of our work is based in on-going relationships, using real events and so we have less control over that, both our lab as well as some other labs have done some clever manipulations where people receive. We decide what kind of response they’re going to receive and then they have a little bit more confidence in the causal link here, but what we find is, in general, active constructive responding is positively correlated with both personal outcomes and what I mean by personal outcomes is outcomes for the person sharing the event. For example, higher self esteem, more positive emotions even above and beyond what you feel for the event itself, higher well being, less loneliness, those kinds of self variables. We also find that acts of constructive responding is very strongly related to the development and the stability and the satisfaction people have with the relationship they have with the person that is responding. So between the person who is sharing the event and the responder to that sharing, the relationship between those people is much more positive when the responder is active constructive in general, and even in instances we see fluctuation from moment to moment, based on responses. Active constructive responses. If the responder is passive or destructive – so any of those other three types that I described – we often see a negative correlation between the response and the outcome. Sharing event and hearing those other three is usually associated with less relationship satisfaction, for example, with the person who is responding, less commitment to that person, less liking of that person. But also it has detriment for the actual person sharing the events. You tend to see lower positive emotion, higher negative emotion, lower self-esteem, those types of negative outcomes we see.
I do want to pull out some things we can use in terms of actionable ways we can improve our relationships using these insights. But you just mentioned something that makes me want to ask you some more. I know that you did other research where you found surprising evidence about which one is the most harmful of the responses. It was not what you expected?
Exactly. It was the passive destructive is really a bad one.
You would think the act of destructive – where the person goes, “Oh, that’s stupid, you shouldn’t do that” – that that would be really harmful, but you’re saying it’s the passive destructive. That’s the one where they either completely blow you off or they turn it onto themselves?
Right. That one seems to be much more consistently and strongly related in all of our studies. Negatively related to outcomes. In retrospect, even though it wasn’t our original expectation, we really intuitively thought the active destructive was just the nail in the coffin kind of thing. That couldn’t go. But at least someone who is being active destructive is still in it. They’re still showing that they are interested in connecting, at least trying to connect, even if they’re missing the mark. They’re still in the conversation, and so there may be some benefit from the effort that is being put forth and the interest they’re showing. Even if it is not providing the kind of feedback that we would think we might want to hear. But, on the other hand, if you think about a passive destructive response, it’s saying two things to the person who is sharing. It’s saying, number one, the event that you think is positive is not that interesting or positive in my mind, not even enough for me to talk about it or acknowledge it. And the other piece that it is conveying to the person that is sharing the event is that, “I don’t even care enough about you to care about it.” So even though you’ve talked about it, not only invalidating the event itself, but I’m also kind of devaluing our relationship. Or at least my care or my concern for you. So those two pieces, in retrospect, now it makes sense to us that the passive destructive response seems to have this effect as well.
That makes sense. Active destructive, the way you describe it, you’d think a lot of times people are well meaning. They’re trying to protect you. They’re thinking about the things that could go wrong, not because they want it to go wrong but they’re trying to show caring.
Exactly. Maybe with the best of intentions, I don’t want you to get your hopes up about this potential promotion that you’re very excited about because what if you don’t get it? You can see how even though it may not feel good in the moment, it’s still conveying this, “I have your best interests at heart,” which is really at the core of what intimacy is really all about. I know you, and I care about you. It’s both those things. I know you and care about you. I get it.
So the TalentGrowers, we mostly talk about workplace relationships, and especially as a leader, the way in which you respond to people is really important, obviously, in every way. But in this way, I’m glad you came on because I think that lots of times people don’t think about this as actively or just not as aware. What are some of the ways that leaders can use your insights to make their relationships better?
I think one of the biggest takeaways that I look back now at 15 years of research, the idea that doing something when good things happen, so if you’re a leader and you’ve got people working on your projects or however the structure is, when positive things happen for the person or the group, stop and acknowledge that. Take advantage of those opportunities. It’s those moments that help build the trusting relationship that you, as a leader, want to have with the people who you are leading. And some of our other work has shown that it’s actually building a foundation through these kind of positive moments that kind of builds a safety net almost, so that when you do have to, for example, tell people, “No, actually this is not how it should be done,” or you have to correct, you have to reprimand someone for example, it’s through that basis of that trusting relationship that that message can actually come through. So you’re actually building, using these moments, these positive moments – and they don’t have to be big, they can be small, and it doesn’t mean you buy a big cake every time the smallest thing happens, not at all – because you really kind of calibrate your response. An active constructive response to a smaller, less big, important event –
Give us an example?
For example, your group finishes a project they’ve been working on for a long, long time. Maybe it’s been a six-month project and they get it in, made the deadline and they’re there – that would require a bigger celebration. That would be that maybe that’s the time you do buy the cake for the break room. You do a big pep talk and you tell people how important, it’s really important, when we talk about an act of constructive response, there’s really three ingredients that go into that. It’s really this idea of understanding and validation and showing some concerns. It’s like, “Hey, I understand how hard you really worked for this. I know it’s important to you because of the way in which you really stepped it up. I really do care about the fact that you worked really hard and I know.” Conveying those three things is important. That’s the key. So when it’s a big event, you buy the cake and you have a big pep talk and you tell everyone that. When it’s maybe a little small thing, like, “Hey, you solved this one problem to move us forward or move the goalpost forward a little bit on this project,” you pull someone aside and say, “Hey, I saw that you worked really hard on that. I really appreciate the talent that you put into that, and I’m looking forward to seeing how you continue to contribute to this project.” It’s still those three pieces of information. Still those three – understanding, validating and showing some concern and caring for people. But it’s just calibrated to the event. That’s what I mean by triangulating and calibrating your response to the actual event itself.
Make it contextual, big and small.
Big and small, yes.
We’ve recently talked on the show about giving feedback and hope important it is when, as you’ve mentioned, that when you have multiple positive interactions, you’re creating a foundation of trust and a positive overall relationship, that makes it much easier for people to understand that you are well-intended when you do say something that’s hard to hear. This is kind of part of that whole formula of more positive to negative interactions. This is a type of very actionable, positive interaction that you can consciously insert into your relationships.
Absolutely.
Great. I would love to talk to you a lot more, but we’re almost running out of time, so before you share one specific action Shelly, what’s new and exciting on your horizon? What’s got you energized these days?
For the last year and a half or so, I’ve been looking much more at the regulation of emotion by other people. We’ve been doing a pretty big project, trying to understand how and at what stages people in our lives may help us regular different emotions without our knowledge, even perhaps. Giving you some concrete examples of kind of setting up a world for us that we aren’t even aware of. Maybe something like taking us to our favorite restaurant sometimes or pointing out things they know we like, all the way to when we’re having an emotional experience, helping us either feel better or not feel as bad about that. Kind of taking a step back and looking at the entire process of kind of setting up a world around us as well as helping us respond in different ways to the world that is around us. That’s been really exciting because again, it’s one of the places in the literature where we saw a hole and we realize there’s been a lot of work on how people regulate their own emotions, like how I myself try to set up situations for myself that are going to make it more or less likely to experience at different states, but there’s very little on how people do that for us or with us. So we’re looking at that piece of the puzzle right now.
That’s very interesting. So they’re actively co-managing your experience?
Yes. To give you a little hint, one of the papers we just submitted, it happens a lot. So we’re excited because it was our intuition, but we seemed to have tapped into an area that we’re really excited about and has a lot of opportunity for us to explain again both people’s own experiences, their individual experiences, but also the relationships they find themselves in.
Is this related to mirror neurons or reciprocity at all?
We think maybe part of the skill might be understanding people’s emotional states and the way they might respond, kind of gives you a leg up to do some of the things, but we’re still at the earlier stages of just looking at behavior.
Very cool. I look forward to hearing more about it when it gets published and maybe we’ll bring you back on to talk about that. So what’s one specific action that TalentGrowers can take today, tomorrow, this week, that can help them upgrade their own relationships?
I would say some specific action is to start looking for opportunities to capitalize on the people around you in terms of when they have little and big things, positive things, happen to them. To take a moment and spend that time and see what you can make out of it to build that relationship.
Be on the lookout for opportunities to apply what they just learned?
Exactly.
Cool. Well, I’m sure people are going to want to hear more from you and about your research and stay in touch. What would be the best ways for them to stay in touch online, on social, where should they follow you?
We have our lab posts a lot of our newest findings and our new papers and things that we’re excited about and it’s the Ember Lab at UCSB psychology department. Ember stands for Emotions, Behaviors and Relationships.
Great, we’ll link to that. And are you active on social media?
I am not.
Then we will not follow you there! All right, very good. Shelly, thank you so much for stopping by the TalentGrow Show and sharing your insights with the TalentGrowers.
Thank you.
Outro Okay TalentGrowers, there you have it. Another episode is in the books and I hope that you enjoyed it. I’d love to hear what you thought about it and let me know what you’d like to hear in the future and of course take action. Go ahead and begin to monitor all of your interactions. Start to be a spy, a detective, for opportunities to practice what Dr. Gable just taught us about how you can respond in a more active, constructive way. I would love to hear about your experiment and how it goes and what you find, so be in touch. Thanks for listening. I look forward to hearing from you and until next week, I’m Halelly Azulay, your leadership development strategist here at TalentGrow, and this is the TalentGrow Show. Until the next time, make today great.
Thanks for listening to the TalentGrow Show, where we help you develop your talent to become the kind of leader that people want to follow. For more information, visit TalentGrow.com.
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