July 27, 2023 ā¢ 31 mins
Laura May is joined by Dr. Patricia Cernadas Curotto, a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Geneva interested in compassion, conflict resolution, inter-group relations, and emotions. Laura attempts to convince Patricia to add kite surfing to her interests as they dive into Patricia's research:
- š How sleep deprivation affects even "perfect" relationships.
- š§ The connection between basic needs like sleep and handling conflicts.
- ā° Time travel: Pro-social behavior and projecting into the future.
- š¤ How compassion-based meditation can assist with conflict resolution.
- š„ Patricia's research on compassion towards disliked individuals and its challenges.
Connect with Patricia:
Patricia's university profile: https://www.unige.ch/fapse/e3lab/members1/post-docs/patricia-cernadas-curotto/
Her LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/patricia-cernadas-curotto-a41415152/
Ā About Laura: Laura is aĀ former Executive Director of the International Mediation InstituteĀ and a negotiation and mediation lecturer.Ā Her doctoral research asked āin what ways does blame make villains in politicsā and covered the gamut from literature studies and linguistics to psychology and neuroscience, victimology to political science.Ā Her expertise includes emotions, polarization, blame, and international politics.Ā Feel free to connect with her onĀ LinkedInĀ orĀ ResearchGateāor even both!Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Laura May (00:10):
Hello and welcome to the Conflict Tipping podcast from Mediate.com,
the podcast that explores socialconflict and what we can do about it.
I'm your host, Laura May,and today I have with me Dr.
Patricia Cernadas Curotto post-doctoralresearcher at the University
of Geneva and teaching at theGeneva School of Social Sciences.
(00:31):
Her interests are compassion, conflictresolution, inter-group relation and
emotions, and I'm trying to convince hershe should add kite surfing to that list.
So welcome Patricia.
Patricia Cernadas Curotto: Happy here today. (00:42):
undefined
Laura May (00:44):
Me too.
I'm happy to have you here toindoctrinate you into kite surfing.
But let's just jump in because I wannastart with one of the papers you've
produced with some co-authors, whichimmediately grabbed my attention.
Because it's about, from what I gather,grumpiness after you haven't slept enough
so is this paper gonna validate me beinggrumpy after I don't have enough sleep?
(01:06):
Like what's it all about?
Patricia Cernadas Curotto: Actually it's more about how sleep (01:08):
undefined
deprivation or lack of sleep canaffect our social interactions and
more precisely, couples conflict.
Because we all have the feelingthat, of course, after a sleepless
night where we be in a bad mood, wefeel less positive emotions and more
(01:31):
intense negative emotions, which hasbeen validated by uh, science so far.
But there wasn't any research showinglike a causality effect of if we
sleep less, do we have a more intenseconflict with our romantic partners,
and this is what we wanted to test.
(01:54):
And in this study, we slept deprivedhalf of some couples and other could
enjoy uh, a good night of sleep and
Laura May (02:03):
This is like a nightmare.
Like why did peoplesign up for this study?
You could not pay me enough to voluntarilybe sleep deprived and then potentially,
I don't know, go on an axe murderingrampage from the sounds of things.
Patricia Cernadas Curotto (02:15):
Actually this is a fair point because
there already like somehow biasin the sample that we studied.
It was only very satisfied couplesthat signed in for this uh, research.
And this was very interesting for usbecause we saw already effects on very
(02:36):
satisfied couples; some preliminarynegative effects of sleep deprivation.
So the question is now what aboutthose who are already in, in
conflict or experienced tensions?
Maybe the sleep deprivation or lackof sleep will fuel the conflict.
(02:58):
And this is why I think it's it wasn't ourplan to have like very satisfied couples,
but we end up with a sample like this andit's still very interesting to see that,
independently of your relationship orthe satisfaction about your relationship,
you still have some troubles when you arenot paying attention to some basic needs
(03:20):
such as just having a good night of sleep.
Laura May (03:24):
So even a perfect relationship can have problems
if someone isn't sleeping enough.
Patricia Cernadas Curotto (03:28):
Exactly.
Yeah.
Laura May (03:31):
And were there any implications of this?
Is it just that you then setthem all away with the homework?
Sleep more and your problems will go away.
Patricia Cernadas Curotto (03:38):
At least in my research, I didn't go that far.
Like.
Giving implications or recommendations.
But so somehow I think it's alsoimportant to pay attention, just like
to be cautious about if I'm havinglike a conflict with someone that I
love, it could be like also someonethat is not my romantic partner.
And if I didn't sleep enough, maybeI should just be cautious that my
(04:01):
emotions will be different, thatI may have experienced more stress
and like higher cortisol levels.
That's was what we tested and just beingcautious about this, you may influence
the way you will handle the conflict.
Laura May (04:19):
And do you think this sort of relates to our own self-talk as well?
If we haven't had enough sleep,we might be meaner to ourselves
because of these emotions too.
Patricia Cernadas Curotto (04:28):
I don't know so far any research on that, but
actually this could be a very nicepoint to test of course, like whether
sleep deprivation impacts our self-loveor self-compassion towards ourself.
And if I had like more time, it wouldbe definitely thing that I'll do or
test because it's very interesting.
(04:50):
Yeah.
Maybe, we know it's uh, lack ofsleep is affecting our emotions.
Making more intense negative emotionsand less intense positive emotions.
Also affecting our way torecognize emotions in others.
Our inhibition to aggression.
There are many factors that areimpairing our social functioning
(05:12):
after sleep deprivation.
Laura May (05:16):
This is why I centralized sleep as the most important thing in my life.
My whole schedule revolves around when Isleep next, and so I'm clearly never gonna
never gonna be angry towards a romanticpartners is what I'm hearing here.
But but speaking of emotions, Iunderstand that your PhD work,
your doctoral research actually hassomething to do with emotions as well.
(05:36):
So what were you actually studying?
Cause you finished I guess lastyear or something like that, right?
Yeah.
So what were you actuallystudying for your PhD?
Patricia Cernadas Curotto (05:44):
So in my PhD, I wasn't anymore like, um,
eliciting conflicts by deprivingpeople of sleep which was good.
I decided to go in the other directionand try to find interventions
influencing our emotions and lookingat if these interventions can help
(06:04):
to promote conflict resolution.
So basically I focused on compassionbased meditation which is a way of
meditation, in which people areasked to visualize different kind of
targets and send benevolent wishesto these people such as, may you be
(06:24):
happy, may you be free of suffering.
And you have to also pay attentionto your bodily feelings, sensations.
And somehow the literature so farhas shown that compassion based
meditation promotes pro-socialbehavior such as helping.
Also decreases, stressincreases wellbeing.
(06:47):
But there were few only very few researchlinking compassion based meditation
to better social relationships.
And more precisely inthe context of conflicts.
So this is why I focused really oncompassion based meditation and I try
to observe whether people who neverexperienced compassion based meditation
(07:10):
before, were more able to handle aconflict after being trained, or were
less aggressive towards a group or feltcloser towards someone that they dislike.
And this was the main core of the thesis.
Laura May (07:31):
And so does that relate to Kristen Neff's work on compassion
? Patricia Cernadas Curotto: Somehow, yes.
Like Kristen Neff's work is moreabout self-compassion and how we
treat ourself with self-kindness,and how this is related to many
other aspects of our lives.
She has worked, I think withdepression but also eating disorders.
(07:53):
And in our training the difference withher research somehow is that we not only
focused on self-compassion, but we alsofocused a lot on compassion to others.
So there was a part of on thetraining in which participants were
trained to elicit self-compassion.
But also to elicit compassion to others,visualizing different people and sending
(08:17):
these benevolent wishes to those people.
And we have one study in which westudied the ethics of compassion
based meditation on our relationshipwith someone that we dislike.
And importantly during the training,we never mentioned the disliked
(08:38):
person to our participants.
They had to train their compassiontowards a lot of people, but not
explicitly towards the disliked person.
And we tested their emotionsand their feelings of closeness
before the training and after thetraining towards the disliked person.
And what we found is that after thecompassion based training people
(09:02):
felt closer or more similar tothe disliked person than before,
even though it wasn't targeted.
Did you capture who these disliked people were?
Like, were they family members?
Were they people fromdifferent types of groups?
Were they politicians?
Like, Was there any tendency there?
Patricia Cernadas Curotto (09:21):
Yeah we asked someone that they knew, so
for sure it was at least personallyso it couldn't be a leader or
some famous person that they hate.
Mainly it was colleagues.
Sometimes it was also familymembers indeed neighbors, ex
boyfriends, ex girlfriends.
(09:42):
Yeah, I think these were the maincategories of the disliked persons.
And what is interesting is likeone third of our participants
was still interacting with thisdisliked person in their daily life.
So the way that compassioncan help somehow maybe is that
(10:03):
it allows you to somehow livebetter with this disliked person.
Laura May (10:10):
So if we have a colleague we don't like, for example, we can go
away, we can do this meditation wherewe're basically sending them good
vibes, and then we'll find it easierto get along with them in future.
Patricia Cernadas Curotto: This will be the ideal plan. (10:22):
undefined
It depends on some individual factorsuh, if the person is ready also to
send benevolent wishes to this person.
And this is, I don't know if I'm allowedto speak about personal experience
but I went also under the compassionbased meditation, and at first it
(10:43):
wasn't easy to send benevolent wishesto the disliked person because I
don't know it you just don't feel it.
And what I experienced is thatby sending to other people,
there is at some point a step.
And also we did have this for theresearch as well, in which you send
(11:04):
benevolence and compassion towards a lotof people, including all living beings.
And somehow at that point it meansthat you are also sending to this
person, to this disliked person.
So it's an indirect way to send benevolentwishes without explicitly bringing
(11:28):
into the mind this disliked person.
And that may work.
But it takes time.
It's not easy and I won't say thatit's the ideal solution because it
really depends on many factors, but atleast the research was quite promising
regarding this type of relationship.
Laura May (11:50):
I can definitely see that perhaps in the case of this,
wishing good vibes towards a dislikedperson, that you would also need to
have perhaps self-compassion firstand healthy boundaries in place.
Because for example, youknow, we'll use an ex-partner.
Cause I think a lot of peoplehave ex-partners that don't
feel great about right.
(12:11):
And if you are out there wishing themgood vibes and you start to melt a bit
more perhaps and go, oh, they're notthat bad, then you know, it's an easy
doorway to people like abusers and thesepoor relations back into your life.
Unless you have perhaps thatself-compassion and there's boundaries
being like, look, I can wish thisperson with who they are like good
vibes, but they still belong outsideof me and outside of my life.
(12:36):
Cause I can imagine thatwould be really a challenge.
Patricia Cernadas Curotto (12:38):
Yeah, exactly.
You are absolutely right.
I think of course there are some factorsto take into account and if this person
has done so much harm to us maybe it's notideal and maybe not even ethical to ask
to increase compassion for this person.
So it really matters.
(12:59):
Of course, like your ownself-compassion first.
Yeah, I also studied this in the contextof the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
Laura May (13:08):
Because you've done some work with Eran Halperin, I saw well.
I had a member of his team onthe podcast earlier, Adomi, it
was a few months ago now.
But their team's work is sointeresting, especially around hope
and compassion for other parties.
So you were involved in this as well?
Patricia Cernadas Curotto (13:24):
I was involved in trying to increase compassion,
testing also the compassion basedmeditation in Israeli participants and see
if there were some changes in attitudesand emotions towards Palestinians.
Yeah,
Laura May (13:39):
And what happens?
Patricia Cernadas Curotto (13:41):
so.
Laura May (13:43):
You can't just leave it like that.
Patricia Cernadas Curotto (13:45):
What happened was Covid actually, because
it was, it was at the time in whichwe had the covid breakdown and it was
planned to be a in-person training,in-person study longitudinal study.
And we had to modify everything tomake it online training by Zoom.
And I don't know, it's difficultto quantify what was the
(14:09):
impact of Covid on our results.
And actually we had very weak resultsregarding the impact of compassion
training on emotions and closenessuh, felt throughout Palestinians.
Actually the only effect that we havefound is that Israeli participants who
(14:29):
underwent compassion training onlinereported higher levels of closeness
or at Palestinians after the training.
This was already great for us, butit's still to be confirmed because it
wasn't significantly different fromanother group that we used to compare
Laura May (14:52):
Like a control group.
Patricia Cernadas Curotto: Like a control group. (14:53):
undefined
Exactly.
Yeah.
Laura May (14:55):
You know, you mentioned the role of Covid and we did have, now
obviously in the English speaking world,we did have a lot of messages of like,
this is where we all come together.
Like this is a great unifier.
So maybe there was underlying messagesof compassion, at least in theory in
those more general broadcast thatcould have skewed your research.
So maybe everyone wasfeeling more compassionate.
(15:15):
Maybe I'm being optimistic though
Patricia Cernadas Curotto (15:17):
No, no research That is arriving so far
from uh, this very interesting periodbecause of course it's also raises
the questions of common identity.
Like we were all facing the samethreat and including in those
contexts of conflict Israelis andPalestinians were facing covid.
(15:40):
They were in the same group at some point.
There are also some group dynamicsthat changed at that time in, for
instance, Israel because anothergroup, like the Ultra-Orthodox, there
were more reluctant to apply therules to prevent covid outbreaks.
Laura May (16:00):
Seems like the Evangelicals and stuff in the US.
They're like, oh, this is alla conspiracy, blah, blah, blah.
We're not gonna wearmasks, blah, blah, blah.
So kind of a similar thing going on?
Patricia Cernadas Curotto (16:10):
I'm not sure it was linked to conspiracy,
but it was more linked to, I thinkthey have some rituals or traditions.
And they are like, very numerousfamilies and so they didn't want to
follow the rules at that time, andthey were more threats to others
Laura May (16:30):
yeah, that's really challenging.
Patricia Cernadas Curotto: So it needs more and more um, (16:33):
undefined
elaboration more research on that.
But I think there is already a paper onthat topic, on how the social dynamics
change in the context of a conflictwhen you suddenly have a new threats and
that puts everyone on the same level.
Laura May (16:53):
I mean, it's like when people talk about if we had an alien invasion,
that would be the only thing we wouldget the nations of the Earth together.
So covid was like the alien invasion.
Patricia Cernadas Curotto (17:02):
Yeah.
That's the, That's the question.
Was Covid exactly like our common enemyand did it somehow, at least for a short
period of time, bring us all together.
Laura May (17:14):
Yeah.
Other than the Hollywoodactors singing about it.
And so, I mean, you mentionedthat compassion was your primary
intervention as far as emotions.
Did you look at any other emotionsin conflict as part of your doctoral
thesis or as part of other work?
Patricia Cernadas Curotto (17:28):
Yeah.
I also looked through anotheremotion based intervention, which
is cognitive reappraisal which ishow we can reinterpret a situation
in order to change our emotions.
Um,
Laura May (17:43):
Can you give an example?
Patricia Cernadas Curotto (17:45):
yeah.
For instance you can be angry becauseyou just miss the bus, and you
can be angry uh, towards yourself.
But you can just evaluatethe situation differently.
Like you can think, okay, maybe Ihave more time to actually work
or I will do my sports today.
Okay.
No matter, I will finish a littlebit later today, so it's just
Laura May (18:10):
There's gonna be a bus crash, and this has actually
saved my life, so I'm grateful
Patricia Cernadas Curotto (18:13):
exactly.
And actually we do a lot of time.
When you think about it it's veryfrequent that we use this technique
like the cognitive reappraisal tochange our emotions at that moment.
Or imagine someone who you are,like, you sent a message to a friend
and this person is not responding.
You can be angry at that person,but you can also think, okay, maybe
(18:35):
she doesn't have the time to reply,maybe she didn't see her phone.
I don't know.
But plenty of reasons why the person
is
Laura May (18:42):
She's kite surfing,
Patricia Cernadas Curotto (18:44):
maybe yeah.
So it's it's actually a verycommon technique and has been
studied quite a lot so far.
And we wanted to look at this becauseit was an intervention that was already
tested in the context of conflict and hasshown some benefits for instance, in the
context of the Israeli Palestine conflict.
(19:06):
People who are trained to reappraise alsoexperience less support for aggressive
policies and more support for conciliatorypolicies toward Palestinians.
And what we wanted to see was toobserve how compassion based meditation
(19:26):
differs from reappraisal training.
Do they have the same benefitsor are there different?
So we had two studiesin which we compare both.
And it seems like somehow cognitiveappraisal changes some outcomes of
conflicts that compassion doesn'tchange- cortisol levels, for instance.
(19:50):
We have found evidence that reappraisaltraining decreases cortisol levels
while compassion doesn't change them.
Laura May (20:00):
It's really interesting because I guess when I think about, you know,
this bodily experience of an emotion,you know, you've mentioned cortisol.
I'm thinking short term unless I havethat same emotion over and over again.
Whereas I guess, I'm not an experton compassion, obviously, but when
I think about compassion and thiscompassion based meditation you've
been describing, my hunch would be thatit would be for longer term results.
(20:22):
You know, because you're kind ofdoing that inner work to have a,
a more compassionate approachto life in a longer term sense.
So, it just kind of seems like for meas a non-expert in this field that there's
some kind of time element perhaps as well.
Patricia Cernadas Curotto: Yeah you are absolutely right. (20:36):
undefined
I think maybe there is an effect of timethat we couldn't control because also we
have short interventions of compassion.
It was five weeks and generally it's eightweeks at least to have like full training.
But also we indeed, we measured ourvariables just after the training and
(20:59):
maybe to see, to observe the, all theefforts of compassion, you need more time.
And this needs to be again investigatedto be certain what are the long terms
effects of compassion based meditationand what are the long effects of
appraisal and do they differ or not?
But there are research interestinglysaying that compassion based meditation
(21:22):
has an ingredient of reappraisal.
Like you are also training yourmind to be more flexible and
changing its interpretation ofthe people you are visualizing
Laura May (21:38):
Fascinating.
It's really interesting.
Patricia Cernadas Curotto: very interwined. (21:41):
undefined
Laura May (21:42):
Yeah, it's like with the example I gave before of an ex-partner,
you start sending them good vibesand then you have that melting.
And the melting is related tothe reappraisal cause you're
reappraising what they've done andhow you feel about it and all of
that kind of stuff going on as well.
Now I wanna talk about another bitof your research, because actually
the way I came across your profileis that Olga Klimecki who was your
(22:04):
PhD supervisor, tagged me in a postabout some research that you had done.
And I was like, oh, who's this?
Who's this Patricia lady?
And it was about work you'd done onsome kind of pro-social interventions
that talked about the future perhaps.
So what was that all about?
Patricia Cernadas Curotto (22:21):
Okay.
So that was about what are the functionsof our future thinking ability because
we are all aware that we are able tomental time traveling, which is, I
think, amazing ability that we have.
Laura May (22:38):
So we can imagine ourselves in 10 years and we can imagine
ourselves back in the past as well,not the dinosaur past, also the
dinosaur past, but also in our ownpersonal past to relook at things.
Patricia Cernadas Curotto (22:49):
Yeah, we are able to relive things.
We're able to imagine like superuh, close future, like in one hour,
but also as you said in 10 years.
Maybe it's not like the reality,but we are able at least to
create these images in our mind.
(23:09):
And there are many functions of futurethinkings so far that were discovered.
And one of them were like oneresearcher Brendan Gaesser.
He was suggesting that maybe it is alsolinked to more pro-social behavior,
like to be able to think about your ownfuture and the way it's argued is that
(23:37):
somehow because we're able to createimages in our mind these are maybe the
same brain regions that are able tocreate the perspective of someone else.
Like when we are empathic or we want totake the perspective of someone else.
We are also recruiting these brainregions to imagine what is going
(24:01):
on on the mind of someone else.
Laura May (24:04):
So it's like, you know, if we use the example of we can
imagine ourselves 10 years fromnow, really, that person that
we're imagining is not us today.
But we're able to project our feelingsand our thoughts and our desires
onto this person, and we use the sameskill with other people and imagining
who they are and what they want.
Patricia Cernadas Curotto (24:22):
Yes, there are some research arguing that we are
using these same constructs, the sameprocesses to project ourself in the
future and to project into others minds.
And so the idea was, okay, if this istrue could we actually elicit future
(24:42):
thinking to people and check afterwardsif they are indeed more pro-social;
if they are helping more the others.
And so this is what we did.
We asked half of our participants toproject themselves into the future.
Like to imagine there's many eventsthat happened to them in the next year.
(25:06):
And the other half has to name animalsas fast as they can, because the idea
was to just have kind of the same taskin terms of duration and fluency because
also for the future thinking, they hadto give the greater number of future
events and then they they had to play agame in which we said that they need to
(25:33):
have the greatest number of points andwe didn't tell them at all that we were
looking at how many times they will helpsomeone else because they were paired
with someone else playing also the game.
And this person was blocked.
And we were actually observing howmany times our participants were able
(25:57):
to unblock the other participants.
And we found very strong effectsthat actually people who were in the
future condition were more helpful.
Laura May (26:09):
It brings to mind that strategy, where you ask
yourself, when something upsets you?
You ask yourself willthis matter in 10 minutes.
In 10 months, in 10 years.
And when you think about yourself in10 years, they're like, they're not
even gonna remember this happening.
Like, they're clearlynot gonna care about it.
And so just the kind ofdistancing effect, right?
So I wonder if that's related.
(26:31):
This idea of like future self and whetherit's really compassionate, like putting
yourself in other shoes or whetherit's just that like, you're in the
mindset of oh, it doesn't really matter.
Like it's not a bigdeal if I help them out.
It'd be really curious toyeah, disentangle those.
Patricia Cernadas Curotto (26:45):
And I know there is a research, at least in couples
conflicts, asking them when they'rein the conflict to reflect on their
future with their partner and actuallyit helps to resolve the conflict.
Laura May (26:59):
Nice.
Nice.
It's very mediatey, right?
It's like where it's not youagainst me, us against the problem.
And when you centralize the relationshipas the thing you are looking after,
whether it's now or in the future, ithelps people gain that perspective.
So with this future thinkingstudy, were there any differences
between the participants?
Like, do we all dothings in the same way?
Patricia Cernadas Curotto (27:22):
Um, so.
What we measured in terms of individualdifferences was the ability in
general to travel in time like in thepast, but also in the future and in
general, their pro-social behaviors.
And what was very interesting isthat we found a link between people
(27:44):
who are very prone to travelingtime positively past or future.
They were also more prosocial in theirdaily lives, so it also goes into the
direction of the behavioral results.
Laura May (28:01):
So if I imagine going into the future or the past to
help somebody, I'm probably helpingpeople in my daily life as well.
Patricia Cernadas Curotto (28:07):
Yes, and not necessarily imagining helping
someone, but just traveling in timepositively because it was like a
questionnaire that was only assessingthe positive mental time traveling.
But yeah, apparently it'slinked, at least in our
Laura May (28:27):
Okay, so like nice people are consistently nice
no matter what time they're in.
Patricia Cernadas Curotto (28:32):
Yes,
Laura May (28:35):
And what are you working on now?
What's in the future for you?
Cuz we are time traveling.
Patricia Cernadas Curotto (28:40):
Yeah.
So I worked all along so far withadults and now I have a project in
Canada with kids, with children.
And I want to observe the levels ofself-compassion and compassion to others.
And I want to link this to theirwellbeing psychological wellbeing.
(29:02):
How If they're less anxious if they'revery self-compassionate, for instance,
or they feel a lot of compassion toothers but also to social wellbeing,
how they are accepted by their peers.
So this is the next step for me, andI think if we find that compassion to
(29:22):
others and self-compassion are key forour wellbeing at young ages, I think it
would be so nice to be able to implementsome self-compassion and compassion
to others ingredients in schools.
So that will be like the ultimate goal.
Laura May (29:40):
Love that.
Future thinking.
Displayed perfectly here.
Incredible.
And so taking all of this together, itsounds like we've all got some homework in
that we need to make sure we sleep enough,that we're practicing compassion based
meditation, that we're reappraising thingspositively, and that we're thinking back
on good times from the sounds of things,and then we'll have great relationships.
(30:05):
So is that our homework from you?
Are you assigning usthis homework, Patricia?
Patricia Cernadas Curotto (30:08):
I, I will definitely say that, yeah we, at least
we should try and we will see, butI hope there are no adverse effects.
Laura May (30:16):
Oh.
Patricia Cernadas Curotto (30:17):
We never know of course with research.
But yeah I think definitely tobe conscious about our needs
in terms of sleep is essential.
I really believe that compassionbased meditation could be um,
great tool and self-compassion aswell for our social relationships.
And finally, yeah I guess we should reallytrain our ability of mental time traveling
(30:41):
and if possible, to be positive, yeah.
Laura May (30:46):
Well look Patricia, thank you so much for joining me today.
And for those who are interestedin learning more about your
work, where can they find you?
Patricia Cernadas Curotto: You can find me in the website (30:54):
undefined
of the University of Geneva.
Laura May (30:58):
All right well, I'll make sure I include the link to the website in the
episode description and for everyone else.
Until next time, this is LauraMay with the Conflict Tipping
Podcast from Mediate com.
Hello and welcome to the Conflict Tipping podcast from Mediate.com,
the podcast that explores socialconflict and what we can do about it.
I'm your host, Laura May,and today I have with me Dr.
Patricia Cernadas Curotto post-doctoralresearcher at the University
of Geneva and teaching at theGeneva School of Social Sciences.
(00:31):
Her interests are compassion, conflictresolution, inter-group relation and
emotions, and I'm trying to convince hershe should add kite surfing to that list.
So welcome Patricia.
Patricia Cernadas Curotto: Happy here today. (00:42):
undefined
Laura May (00:44):
Me too.
I'm happy to have you here toindoctrinate you into kite surfing.
But let's just jump in because I wannastart with one of the papers you've
produced with some co-authors, whichimmediately grabbed my attention.
Because it's about, from what I gather,grumpiness after you haven't slept enough
so is this paper gonna validate me beinggrumpy after I don't have enough sleep?
(01:06):
Like what's it all about?
Patricia Cernadas Curotto: Actually it's more about how sleep (01:08):
undefined
deprivation or lack of sleep canaffect our social interactions and
more precisely, couples conflict.
Because we all have the feelingthat, of course, after a sleepless
night where we be in a bad mood, wefeel less positive emotions and more
(01:31):
intense negative emotions, which hasbeen validated by uh, science so far.
But there wasn't any research showinglike a causality effect of if we
sleep less, do we have a more intenseconflict with our romantic partners,
and this is what we wanted to test.
(01:54):
And in this study, we slept deprivedhalf of some couples and other could
enjoy uh, a good night of sleep and
Laura May (02:03):
This is like a nightmare.
Like why did peoplesign up for this study?
You could not pay me enough to voluntarilybe sleep deprived and then potentially,
I don't know, go on an axe murderingrampage from the sounds of things.
Patricia Cernadas Curotto (02:15):
Actually this is a fair point because
there already like somehow biasin the sample that we studied.
It was only very satisfied couplesthat signed in for this uh, research.
And this was very interesting for usbecause we saw already effects on very
(02:36):
satisfied couples; some preliminarynegative effects of sleep deprivation.
So the question is now what aboutthose who are already in, in
conflict or experienced tensions?
Maybe the sleep deprivation or lackof sleep will fuel the conflict.
(02:58):
And this is why I think it's it wasn't ourplan to have like very satisfied couples,
but we end up with a sample like this andit's still very interesting to see that,
independently of your relationship orthe satisfaction about your relationship,
you still have some troubles when you arenot paying attention to some basic needs
(03:20):
such as just having a good night of sleep.
Laura May (03:24):
So even a perfect relationship can have problems
if someone isn't sleeping enough.
Patricia Cernadas Curotto (03:28):
Exactly.
Yeah.
Laura May (03:31):
And were there any implications of this?
Is it just that you then setthem all away with the homework?
Sleep more and your problems will go away.
Patricia Cernadas Curotto (03:38):
At least in my research, I didn't go that far.
Like.
Giving implications or recommendations.
But so somehow I think it's alsoimportant to pay attention, just like
to be cautious about if I'm havinglike a conflict with someone that I
love, it could be like also someonethat is not my romantic partner.
And if I didn't sleep enough, maybeI should just be cautious that my
(04:01):
emotions will be different, thatI may have experienced more stress
and like higher cortisol levels.
That's was what we tested and just beingcautious about this, you may influence
the way you will handle the conflict.
Laura May (04:19):
And do you think this sort of relates to our own self-talk as well?
If we haven't had enough sleep,we might be meaner to ourselves
because of these emotions too.
Patricia Cernadas Curotto (04:28):
I don't know so far any research on that, but
actually this could be a very nicepoint to test of course, like whether
sleep deprivation impacts our self-loveor self-compassion towards ourself.
And if I had like more time, it wouldbe definitely thing that I'll do or
test because it's very interesting.
(04:50):
Yeah.
Maybe, we know it's uh, lack ofsleep is affecting our emotions.
Making more intense negative emotionsand less intense positive emotions.
Also affecting our way torecognize emotions in others.
Our inhibition to aggression.
There are many factors that areimpairing our social functioning
(05:12):
after sleep deprivation.
Laura May (05:16):
This is why I centralized sleep as the most important thing in my life.
My whole schedule revolves around when Isleep next, and so I'm clearly never gonna
never gonna be angry towards a romanticpartners is what I'm hearing here.
But but speaking of emotions, Iunderstand that your PhD work,
your doctoral research actually hassomething to do with emotions as well.
(05:36):
So what were you actually studying?
Cause you finished I guess lastyear or something like that, right?
Yeah.
So what were you actuallystudying for your PhD?
Patricia Cernadas Curotto (05:44):
So in my PhD, I wasn't anymore like, um,
eliciting conflicts by deprivingpeople of sleep which was good.
I decided to go in the other directionand try to find interventions
influencing our emotions and lookingat if these interventions can help
(06:04):
to promote conflict resolution.
So basically I focused on compassionbased meditation which is a way of
meditation, in which people areasked to visualize different kind of
targets and send benevolent wishesto these people such as, may you be
(06:24):
happy, may you be free of suffering.
And you have to also pay attentionto your bodily feelings, sensations.
And somehow the literature so farhas shown that compassion based
meditation promotes pro-socialbehavior such as helping.
Also decreases, stressincreases wellbeing.
(06:47):
But there were few only very few researchlinking compassion based meditation
to better social relationships.
And more precisely inthe context of conflicts.
So this is why I focused really oncompassion based meditation and I try
to observe whether people who neverexperienced compassion based meditation
(07:10):
before, were more able to handle aconflict after being trained, or were
less aggressive towards a group or feltcloser towards someone that they dislike.
And this was the main core of the thesis.
Laura May (07:31):
And so does that relate to Kristen Neff's work on compassion
? Patricia Cernadas Curotto: Somehow, yes.
Like Kristen Neff's work is moreabout self-compassion and how we
treat ourself with self-kindness,and how this is related to many
other aspects of our lives.
She has worked, I think withdepression but also eating disorders.
(07:53):
And in our training the difference withher research somehow is that we not only
focused on self-compassion, but we alsofocused a lot on compassion to others.
So there was a part of on thetraining in which participants were
trained to elicit self-compassion.
But also to elicit compassion to others,visualizing different people and sending
(08:17):
these benevolent wishes to those people.
And we have one study in which westudied the ethics of compassion
based meditation on our relationshipwith someone that we dislike.
And importantly during the training,we never mentioned the disliked
(08:38):
person to our participants.
They had to train their compassiontowards a lot of people, but not
explicitly towards the disliked person.
And we tested their emotionsand their feelings of closeness
before the training and after thetraining towards the disliked person.
And what we found is that after thecompassion based training people
(09:02):
felt closer or more similar tothe disliked person than before,
even though it wasn't targeted.
Did you capture who these disliked people were?
Like, were they family members?
Were they people fromdifferent types of groups?
Were they politicians?
Like, Was there any tendency there?
Patricia Cernadas Curotto (09:21):
Yeah we asked someone that they knew, so
for sure it was at least personallyso it couldn't be a leader or
some famous person that they hate.
Mainly it was colleagues.
Sometimes it was also familymembers indeed neighbors, ex
boyfriends, ex girlfriends.
(09:42):
Yeah, I think these were the maincategories of the disliked persons.
And what is interesting is likeone third of our participants
was still interacting with thisdisliked person in their daily life.
So the way that compassioncan help somehow maybe is that
(10:03):
it allows you to somehow livebetter with this disliked person.
Laura May (10:10):
So if we have a colleague we don't like, for example, we can go
away, we can do this meditation wherewe're basically sending them good
vibes, and then we'll find it easierto get along with them in future.
Patricia Cernadas Curotto: This will be the ideal plan. (10:22):
undefined
It depends on some individual factorsuh, if the person is ready also to
send benevolent wishes to this person.
And this is, I don't know if I'm allowedto speak about personal experience
but I went also under the compassionbased meditation, and at first it
(10:43):
wasn't easy to send benevolent wishesto the disliked person because I
don't know it you just don't feel it.
And what I experienced is thatby sending to other people,
there is at some point a step.
And also we did have this for theresearch as well, in which you send
(11:04):
benevolence and compassion towards a lotof people, including all living beings.
And somehow at that point it meansthat you are also sending to this
person, to this disliked person.
So it's an indirect way to send benevolentwishes without explicitly bringing
(11:28):
into the mind this disliked person.
And that may work.
But it takes time.
It's not easy and I won't say thatit's the ideal solution because it
really depends on many factors, but atleast the research was quite promising
regarding this type of relationship.
Laura May (11:50):
I can definitely see that perhaps in the case of this,
wishing good vibes towards a dislikedperson, that you would also need to
have perhaps self-compassion firstand healthy boundaries in place.
Because for example, youknow, we'll use an ex-partner.
Cause I think a lot of peoplehave ex-partners that don't
feel great about right.
(12:11):
And if you are out there wishing themgood vibes and you start to melt a bit
more perhaps and go, oh, they're notthat bad, then you know, it's an easy
doorway to people like abusers and thesepoor relations back into your life.
Unless you have perhaps thatself-compassion and there's boundaries
being like, look, I can wish thisperson with who they are like good
vibes, but they still belong outsideof me and outside of my life.
(12:36):
Cause I can imagine thatwould be really a challenge.
Patricia Cernadas Curotto (12:38):
Yeah, exactly.
You are absolutely right.
I think of course there are some factorsto take into account and if this person
has done so much harm to us maybe it's notideal and maybe not even ethical to ask
to increase compassion for this person.
So it really matters.
(12:59):
Of course, like your ownself-compassion first.
Yeah, I also studied this in the contextof the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
Laura May (13:08):
Because you've done some work with Eran Halperin, I saw well.
I had a member of his team onthe podcast earlier, Adomi, it
was a few months ago now.
But their team's work is sointeresting, especially around hope
and compassion for other parties.
So you were involved in this as well?
Patricia Cernadas Curotto (13:24):
I was involved in trying to increase compassion,
testing also the compassion basedmeditation in Israeli participants and see
if there were some changes in attitudesand emotions towards Palestinians.
Yeah,
Laura May (13:39):
And what happens?
Patricia Cernadas Curotto (13:41):
so.
Laura May (13:43):
You can't just leave it like that.
Patricia Cernadas Curotto (13:45):
What happened was Covid actually, because
it was, it was at the time in whichwe had the covid breakdown and it was
planned to be a in-person training,in-person study longitudinal study.
And we had to modify everything tomake it online training by Zoom.
And I don't know, it's difficultto quantify what was the
(14:09):
impact of Covid on our results.
And actually we had very weak resultsregarding the impact of compassion
training on emotions and closenessuh, felt throughout Palestinians.
Actually the only effect that we havefound is that Israeli participants who
(14:29):
underwent compassion training onlinereported higher levels of closeness
or at Palestinians after the training.
This was already great for us, butit's still to be confirmed because it
wasn't significantly different fromanother group that we used to compare
Laura May (14:52):
Like a control group.
Patricia Cernadas Curotto: Like a control group. (14:53):
undefined
Exactly.
Yeah.
Laura May (14:55):
You know, you mentioned the role of Covid and we did have, now
obviously in the English speaking world,we did have a lot of messages of like,
this is where we all come together.
Like this is a great unifier.
So maybe there was underlying messagesof compassion, at least in theory in
those more general broadcast thatcould have skewed your research.
So maybe everyone wasfeeling more compassionate.
(15:15):
Maybe I'm being optimistic though
Patricia Cernadas Curotto (15:17):
No, no research That is arriving so far
from uh, this very interesting periodbecause of course it's also raises
the questions of common identity.
Like we were all facing the samethreat and including in those
contexts of conflict Israelis andPalestinians were facing covid.
(15:40):
They were in the same group at some point.
There are also some group dynamicsthat changed at that time in, for
instance, Israel because anothergroup, like the Ultra-Orthodox, there
were more reluctant to apply therules to prevent covid outbreaks.
Laura May (16:00):
Seems like the Evangelicals and stuff in the US.
They're like, oh, this is alla conspiracy, blah, blah, blah.
We're not gonna wearmasks, blah, blah, blah.
So kind of a similar thing going on?
Patricia Cernadas Curotto (16:10):
I'm not sure it was linked to conspiracy,
but it was more linked to, I thinkthey have some rituals or traditions.
And they are like, very numerousfamilies and so they didn't want to
follow the rules at that time, andthey were more threats to others
Laura May (16:30):
yeah, that's really challenging.
Patricia Cernadas Curotto: So it needs more and more um, (16:33):
undefined
elaboration more research on that.
But I think there is already a paper onthat topic, on how the social dynamics
change in the context of a conflictwhen you suddenly have a new threats and
that puts everyone on the same level.
Laura May (16:53):
I mean, it's like when people talk about if we had an alien invasion,
that would be the only thing we wouldget the nations of the Earth together.
So covid was like the alien invasion.
Patricia Cernadas Curotto (17:02):
Yeah.
That's the, That's the question.
Was Covid exactly like our common enemyand did it somehow, at least for a short
period of time, bring us all together.
Laura May (17:14):
Yeah.
Other than the Hollywoodactors singing about it.
And so, I mean, you mentionedthat compassion was your primary
intervention as far as emotions.
Did you look at any other emotionsin conflict as part of your doctoral
thesis or as part of other work?
Patricia Cernadas Curotto (17:28):
Yeah.
I also looked through anotheremotion based intervention, which
is cognitive reappraisal which ishow we can reinterpret a situation
in order to change our emotions.
Um,
Laura May (17:43):
Can you give an example?
Patricia Cernadas Curotto (17:45):
yeah.
For instance you can be angry becauseyou just miss the bus, and you
can be angry uh, towards yourself.
But you can just evaluatethe situation differently.
Like you can think, okay, maybe Ihave more time to actually work
or I will do my sports today.
Okay.
No matter, I will finish a littlebit later today, so it's just
Laura May (18:10):
There's gonna be a bus crash, and this has actually
saved my life, so I'm grateful
Patricia Cernadas Curotto (18:13):
exactly.
And actually we do a lot of time.
When you think about it it's veryfrequent that we use this technique
like the cognitive reappraisal tochange our emotions at that moment.
Or imagine someone who you are,like, you sent a message to a friend
and this person is not responding.
You can be angry at that person,but you can also think, okay, maybe
(18:35):
she doesn't have the time to reply,maybe she didn't see her phone.
I don't know.
But plenty of reasons why the person
is
Laura May (18:42):
She's kite surfing,
Patricia Cernadas Curotto (18:44):
maybe yeah.
So it's it's actually a verycommon technique and has been
studied quite a lot so far.
And we wanted to look at this becauseit was an intervention that was already
tested in the context of conflict and hasshown some benefits for instance, in the
context of the Israeli Palestine conflict.
(19:06):
People who are trained to reappraise alsoexperience less support for aggressive
policies and more support for conciliatorypolicies toward Palestinians.
And what we wanted to see was toobserve how compassion based meditation
(19:26):
differs from reappraisal training.
Do they have the same benefitsor are there different?
So we had two studiesin which we compare both.
And it seems like somehow cognitiveappraisal changes some outcomes of
conflicts that compassion doesn'tchange- cortisol levels, for instance.
(19:50):
We have found evidence that reappraisaltraining decreases cortisol levels
while compassion doesn't change them.
Laura May (20:00):
It's really interesting because I guess when I think about, you know,
this bodily experience of an emotion,you know, you've mentioned cortisol.
I'm thinking short term unless I havethat same emotion over and over again.
Whereas I guess, I'm not an experton compassion, obviously, but when
I think about compassion and thiscompassion based meditation you've
been describing, my hunch would be thatit would be for longer term results.
(20:22):
You know, because you're kind ofdoing that inner work to have a,
a more compassionate approachto life in a longer term sense.
So, it just kind of seems like for meas a non-expert in this field that there's
some kind of time element perhaps as well.
Patricia Cernadas Curotto: Yeah you are absolutely right. (20:36):
undefined
I think maybe there is an effect of timethat we couldn't control because also we
have short interventions of compassion.
It was five weeks and generally it's eightweeks at least to have like full training.
But also we indeed, we measured ourvariables just after the training and
(20:59):
maybe to see, to observe the, all theefforts of compassion, you need more time.
And this needs to be again investigatedto be certain what are the long terms
effects of compassion based meditationand what are the long effects of
appraisal and do they differ or not?
But there are research interestinglysaying that compassion based meditation
(21:22):
has an ingredient of reappraisal.
Like you are also training yourmind to be more flexible and
changing its interpretation ofthe people you are visualizing
Laura May (21:38):
Fascinating.
It's really interesting.
Patricia Cernadas Curotto: very interwined. (21:41):
undefined
Laura May (21:42):
Yeah, it's like with the example I gave before of an ex-partner,
you start sending them good vibesand then you have that melting.
And the melting is related tothe reappraisal cause you're
reappraising what they've done andhow you feel about it and all of
that kind of stuff going on as well.
Now I wanna talk about another bitof your research, because actually
the way I came across your profileis that Olga Klimecki who was your
(22:04):
PhD supervisor, tagged me in a postabout some research that you had done.
And I was like, oh, who's this?
Who's this Patricia lady?
And it was about work you'd done onsome kind of pro-social interventions
that talked about the future perhaps.
So what was that all about?
Patricia Cernadas Curotto (22:21):
Okay.
So that was about what are the functionsof our future thinking ability because
we are all aware that we are able tomental time traveling, which is, I
think, amazing ability that we have.
Laura May (22:38):
So we can imagine ourselves in 10 years and we can imagine
ourselves back in the past as well,not the dinosaur past, also the
dinosaur past, but also in our ownpersonal past to relook at things.
Patricia Cernadas Curotto (22:49):
Yeah, we are able to relive things.
We're able to imagine like superuh, close future, like in one hour,
but also as you said in 10 years.
Maybe it's not like the reality,but we are able at least to
create these images in our mind.
(23:09):
And there are many functions of futurethinkings so far that were discovered.
And one of them were like oneresearcher Brendan Gaesser.
He was suggesting that maybe it is alsolinked to more pro-social behavior,
like to be able to think about your ownfuture and the way it's argued is that
(23:37):
somehow because we're able to createimages in our mind these are maybe the
same brain regions that are able tocreate the perspective of someone else.
Like when we are empathic or we want totake the perspective of someone else.
We are also recruiting these brainregions to imagine what is going
(24:01):
on on the mind of someone else.
Laura May (24:04):
So it's like, you know, if we use the example of we can
imagine ourselves 10 years fromnow, really, that person that
we're imagining is not us today.
But we're able to project our feelingsand our thoughts and our desires
onto this person, and we use the sameskill with other people and imagining
who they are and what they want.
Patricia Cernadas Curotto (24:22):
Yes, there are some research arguing that we are
using these same constructs, the sameprocesses to project ourself in the
future and to project into others minds.
And so the idea was, okay, if this istrue could we actually elicit future
(24:42):
thinking to people and check afterwardsif they are indeed more pro-social;
if they are helping more the others.
And so this is what we did.
We asked half of our participants toproject themselves into the future.
Like to imagine there's many eventsthat happened to them in the next year.
(25:06):
And the other half has to name animalsas fast as they can, because the idea
was to just have kind of the same taskin terms of duration and fluency because
also for the future thinking, they hadto give the greater number of future
events and then they they had to play agame in which we said that they need to
(25:33):
have the greatest number of points andwe didn't tell them at all that we were
looking at how many times they will helpsomeone else because they were paired
with someone else playing also the game.
And this person was blocked.
And we were actually observing howmany times our participants were able
(25:57):
to unblock the other participants.
And we found very strong effectsthat actually people who were in the
future condition were more helpful.
Laura May (26:09):
It brings to mind that strategy, where you ask
yourself, when something upsets you?
You ask yourself willthis matter in 10 minutes.
In 10 months, in 10 years.
And when you think about yourself in10 years, they're like, they're not
even gonna remember this happening.
Like, they're clearlynot gonna care about it.
And so just the kind ofdistancing effect, right?
So I wonder if that's related.
(26:31):
This idea of like future self and whetherit's really compassionate, like putting
yourself in other shoes or whetherit's just that like, you're in the
mindset of oh, it doesn't really matter.
Like it's not a bigdeal if I help them out.
It'd be really curious toyeah, disentangle those.
Patricia Cernadas Curotto (26:45):
And I know there is a research, at least in couples
conflicts, asking them when they'rein the conflict to reflect on their
future with their partner and actuallyit helps to resolve the conflict.
Laura May (26:59):
Nice.
Nice.
It's very mediatey, right?
It's like where it's not youagainst me, us against the problem.
And when you centralize the relationshipas the thing you are looking after,
whether it's now or in the future, ithelps people gain that perspective.
So with this future thinkingstudy, were there any differences
between the participants?
Like, do we all dothings in the same way?
Patricia Cernadas Curotto (27:22):
Um, so.
What we measured in terms of individualdifferences was the ability in
general to travel in time like in thepast, but also in the future and in
general, their pro-social behaviors.
And what was very interesting isthat we found a link between people
(27:44):
who are very prone to travelingtime positively past or future.
They were also more prosocial in theirdaily lives, so it also goes into the
direction of the behavioral results.
Laura May (28:01):
So if I imagine going into the future or the past to
help somebody, I'm probably helpingpeople in my daily life as well.
Patricia Cernadas Curotto (28:07):
Yes, and not necessarily imagining helping
someone, but just traveling in timepositively because it was like a
questionnaire that was only assessingthe positive mental time traveling.
But yeah, apparently it'slinked, at least in our
Laura May (28:27):
Okay, so like nice people are consistently nice
no matter what time they're in.
Patricia Cernadas Curotto (28:32):
Yes,
Laura May (28:35):
And what are you working on now?
What's in the future for you?
Cuz we are time traveling.
Patricia Cernadas Curotto (28:40):
Yeah.
So I worked all along so far withadults and now I have a project in
Canada with kids, with children.
And I want to observe the levels ofself-compassion and compassion to others.
And I want to link this to theirwellbeing psychological wellbeing.
(29:02):
How If they're less anxious if they'revery self-compassionate, for instance,
or they feel a lot of compassion toothers but also to social wellbeing,
how they are accepted by their peers.
So this is the next step for me, andI think if we find that compassion to
(29:22):
others and self-compassion are key forour wellbeing at young ages, I think it
would be so nice to be able to implementsome self-compassion and compassion
to others ingredients in schools.
So that will be like the ultimate goal.
Laura May (29:40):
Love that.
Future thinking.
Displayed perfectly here.
Incredible.
And so taking all of this together, itsounds like we've all got some homework in
that we need to make sure we sleep enough,that we're practicing compassion based
meditation, that we're reappraising thingspositively, and that we're thinking back
on good times from the sounds of things,and then we'll have great relationships.
(30:05):
So is that our homework from you?
Are you assigning usthis homework, Patricia?
Patricia Cernadas Curotto (30:08):
I, I will definitely say that, yeah we, at least
we should try and we will see, butI hope there are no adverse effects.
Laura May (30:16):
Oh.
Patricia Cernadas Curotto (30:17):
We never know of course with research.
But yeah I think definitely tobe conscious about our needs
in terms of sleep is essential.
I really believe that compassionbased meditation could be um,
great tool and self-compassion aswell for our social relationships.
And finally, yeah I guess we should reallytrain our ability of mental time traveling
(30:41):
and if possible, to be positive, yeah.
Laura May (30:46):
Well look Patricia, thank you so much for joining me today.
And for those who are interestedin learning more about your
work, where can they find you?
Patricia Cernadas Curotto: You can find me in the website (30:54):
undefined
of the University of Geneva.
Laura May (30:58):
All right well, I'll make sure I include the link to the website in the
episode description and for everyone else.
Until next time, this is LauraMay with the Conflict Tipping
Podcast from Mediate com.
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