Being able to combine lived experiences with your life’s work is a gift not all of us in the world get to have. For Dr. Belinda Campos, who is a professor in the Department of Chicano/Latino Studies at the University of California, Irvine, the career path she ended up on gave her the opportunity to combine her cultural experiences and understandings from being in a Latino family and the child of recent immigrants with studying social behavior, positive emotions and the cultural shaping of relationships and health. Dr. Campos, who has been researching Social-Personality Psychology for almost 20 years and is also a part of the Department of Psychological Science at Irvine, spoke with MenLiving’s Patrick McKenna about one of life’s most important questions: what makes us as people happy, really? Is it things and accomplishments? Or could it be the close relationships we have and foster, the people who we rely on and are there for in times of joy and sadness?
Patrick:
I’m curious about how your career began, what led you to getting your PhD in Social-Personality Psychology and how it led to where you are today.
Belinda:
I think I came to my undergraduate education like a lot of folks who maybe are the first in their families to have the opportunity to come to college. You don’t have a lot of knowledge beyond the few basic things that it seems like people do when they aspire, like becoming a doctor or lawyer. But I knew that I was really interested in people, and I wanted to figure out something that had to do with working with people. At the time, I’d heard about psychologists from the therapist standpoint.
I was a psychology major coming in, but in the first class on social psychology that I took, the instructor explained to us that you can learn about the psychological processes that explain people’s everyday lives and the way that the broader social world around them influences the way they think and feel and behave. I was like, “I’m in. How do I become a part of that?” Even then, though, I came at it from a standpoint of wondering how somebody who comes from my background could make this kind of a career work out for them. But it did. There was this opportunity to pursue social-personality psychology, and as long as the doors were willing to open, I wanted to go through and see what came next.
Patrick:
That’s awesome. And how long have you been a professor at Irvine?
Belinda:
This is my 14th year, since 2008.
Patrick:
I imagine that most of your career has been at Irvine.
Belinda:
Yes. After getting my PhD from Berkeley, I did a few years as a postdoc, mostly at UCLA. Then I got the job at UC Irvine, and here I am. That’s a funky story too in the sense that at the time that I was on the academic job market, there was a position that opened up that wanted somebody who had expertise in Latino health. It was in the Department of Chicano/Latino Studies because that department has a partnership with the School of Medicine for a program that specifically works with training physicians to be able to be responsive and sensitive to the needs of Latinos.
I’m not sure how it is in the Midwest, but in California, Latinos are the biggest, most underserved group that we have. So, there’s a lot of need to try to figure out how to do better by addressing the health needs of Latinos. By then, some of my research had started examining these cultural elements and the role that culture plays in psychological and physical health outcomes. So, it turned out to be a good fit.
Patrick:
That’s pretty serendipitous. I know that one of the biggest areas of emphasis in your research is how cultural norms can affect people’s health and happiness. You specifically talked about that in the Greater Good Magazine video, about these higher rates of happiness in Latin American countries and Latino culture in the US. What are some of the most interesting findings that you’ve gotten from that research?
Belinda:
That gets us back to my trajectory. In graduate school, one of the things that you do is try to figure out what are you going to study. What is going to be the thing that you try to figure out that is your contribution to understanding how people feel and think and behave? For me, there were two things that were coming together. One, was when I started thinking about what’s really important to people in their lives. The conclusion was relationships and health. As I was coming to understand that I was figuring out that’s where I wanted to think about what kind of questions I wanted to answer. It also seemed to me that culture was this super relevant, but unspoken piece, in the study of relationships and health.
Culture is everywhere. It’s the context around us. I think about it as the invisible normal. It’s what we take for granted in our thinking of how things should be. They say that travel is the best educator. But perhaps the next best educator is being the child of recent immigrants because you get a real sense of the expectations and assumptions of one set of folks, your parents, and when you’re outside of your home, you get a different sense of the expectations about how people should feel and behave.
Patrick:
Right.
Belinda:
So, for me, it was trying to think about how to reconcile these different observations. At the time that I started my work, what I would characterize as Latino ways of doing things, were barely, if at all, represented in the psychological literature. I started to see a space where I thought, “Hmm, I can see some ways of doing things that haven’t been well studied or are understood as a deficit, but I don’t see that it is a deficit. I want to better understand it.” I was coming from that perspective of, “How can I better understand this?”
The question that I wanted to ask was to what extent is putting others before the self matter? Putting others before the self is super common in almost all cultural contexts, except in really individualistic spaces. To what extent is putting others first or being socialized into putting others first matter? What are the consequences of that for relationships and for health? One of the things that you want to understand about what I was studying is that if you think about some of the early research on Latino people and relationships, a lot of the focus was on how they are different from White Americans, European Americans.
Additionally, some of that early research was done without a sense that the things they might be doing, might be good. It was more of what we call a “deficit” perspective. “What’s wrong with you all that you can do more right by being more like us?” From my perspective though, I was like, “No, I don’t think that’s right. I think there’s something else here. And I’d like to better understand it.” So, when you ask what some of the things that I feel most proud of in my work, it’s that I was asking the questions about these psychological processes that were seen as a negative and as a deficit in Latino people and my work showed that those processes could be good. What the data actually say is that “No, it’s not true, these ways of doing things are pretty favorable. They’re linked to positive psychological outcomes, and they’re linked to positive physical health indicators.
Patrick:
When you were talking about the deficit, my mind went to if there’s only one means to an end that is the right thing, then of course this thing that’s just doing something differently is seen as wrong. It’s like, “No, it’s different. And the outcomes are different.”
Belinda:
I like the way that you put it there in the sense of like, “Wait, wait, wait. Is there only one pathway to something?” Of course not, it doesn’t make sense that there should only be one way to do things. It makes sense that there are multiple ways of doing things. And Latino ways of doing things turned out to be one way of doing things that was not well known in American psych. But it turns out that those ways of doing things can behave good for relationships and for health.
Patrick:
What made you latch onto this concept and make it such a focus of your work?
Belinda:
I think the personal element is useful. As you’re learning in classes, and you’re being taught about, “Here’s what we know about happiness. Here’s what we know about relationships. Here’s what we know about health.” The child of immigrant perspective gives you that head scratching moment of, “No, I don’t think that’s all that’s going on there.” I think it clues you in as to what other possibilities are because you’ve seen them. But then when it comes to figuring out what you’re going to do, well, that’s a little bit more of a journey. You start off trying to figure out what’s going to be your career path and then what are you going to do in that specific career path. How does it all make sense coming together?
For me, when I started thinking about the things that came together, the thread that united my different research interests – high quality relationships, positive emotions and the cultural shaping of relationships and health – I thought, “Oh, what that all has in common is I’m interested in processes that prioritize others before the self.” If you think about high quality relationships, that’s the space where most of us do most of our prioritizing others before the self, with our loved ones. That’s when we’re most willing to give of ourselves, and when we find it most rewarding to give of ourselves. That’s true whether it’s in our families, with our friends, with our romantic partners…that’s the space where we do that most.
What is it that motivates us to put others before the self? It’s positive emotions. So positive emotions like love and gratitude help us put others before the self. And so, I thought, “Ah, so that explains why I’m interested in that.” Culture and health are just the natural unfolding of those processes; if you have this emphasis on putting others before the self, does that makes a difference in relationships and does that makes a difference to emotionality? And if so, how does that impact health?
Patrick:
I’ve gotten to speak with other behavioral scientists and people that study happiness and joy and the science behind it. And as you’ve been saying, and as I’ve heard, it seems like meaningful relationships equate to us feeling better in life for the most part.
Belinda:
People reliably say that, so we must start paying attention to that.
Patrick:
Exactly. So how do you think people can better prioritize relationships over maybe solely focusing on their selves or what’s going on for them?
Belinda:
I think that there’s two answers to that. If you come from a background where you have access to cultural norms that socialize it in you, then I think the trick is to realize that that’s a good thing. A lot of the times, especially if you’re an ethnic minority in your society, you likely live in a space that tells you that the ways of doing things that are common among your family aren’t the good ways. For those of us that come up in situations like that where we’re like, “Hmm, no, no, no, that’s not what I see on TV. That’s not how folks are supposed to be. I want my parents to be doing things differently.” I think the message there is, “Wait a minute. There’s a lot of wisdom and good in the things that you’ve been socialized into. Let’s not throw that out. Let’s maybe come back to it and see it for the good that it can be.”
And then I think if you are on the other side of things and come from a background where you’re like, “Oh, I haven’t really heard of this way of doing things. I haven’t necessarily thought about it, but it sounds like a good thing.” Here, I would say that things like positive emotions can be a good conduit for this. Because if we think about positive emotions, yes, some of them are more self-focused. Like pride, for example. We feel good about the self, but what a lot of them naturally do when we experience them is bring us into other focus.
Patrick:
Right, I follow.
Belinda:
For example, if you think about all the research that is coming together around awe, awe makes you feel a little bit smaller relative to yourself; just getting the sense of vastness. There are bigger things around you, and it makes you a little bit smaller. I think about that as one of the emotional experiences that make us more likely to focus on others. I also think about love. Love makes us focus on others. Some of the studies that we have going on in my lab right now are asking the question of, “To what extent do the other-focused emotions sometimes go together with the self-focused emotions?” For example, even when you’re feeling pride, is it all about you or is it also about the gratitude for the folks who helped contribute to getting you there?
Take for example, graduation. Are you thinking about you and what you did, or are you thinking about what you did because other folks helped you get there? Are you thinking that you’re going to be able to give back to other people as a result. I think we’re finding that for our students who are the first in their families to come to college, so much of what is meaningful about graduation is that they’re going to be able to contribute to their loved ones in a way that they would not have been able to if not for that education. So, their pride is mixed with their gratitude in a way that’s really interesting to see.
Patrick:
I totally just lit up at the mention of graduation. I graduated back in late 2018. I have dealt with mental health stuff for most of my life. I dealt with depression, and I got diagnosed with bipolar back in 2017 after having a manic episode. Since that time, I’m in a much better healthy state and have for sure come a long way. But the reason I say this is I got depressed so I had to withdraw. I was at University of Missouri, withdrew from my classes, came home, tried to get better, didn’t work. Went back to school, manic episode happened, which as you can imagine is not conducive with school. Flash forward to 2018, I really came out of another depressive episode, started getting healthy, was calling it the come-up year for Pat, but-
Belinda:
I’m happy for Pat.
Patrick:
Thank you. By the end of 2018, I had a certain number of credits to get done and I got them done. At graduation, I was very proud of myself obviously, but it was mostly for my family and my mom, because I just think of…Oh my God. It was great to get the piece of paper and just be done with that, but truly, like you said, it was a hundred percent me thinking about the people that kept me alive and have supported me unconditionally like my mom.
Belinda:
That’s really beautiful. I don’t specifically study the context of mental health when things go wrong, but what you just said right now brings me back to what we were talking about, the multiple pathways. I focus on the cultural piece, but you’re talking about right now is about different kinds of suffering. I would count what you just described as suffering for you and suffering for your mother. Different kinds of suffering make us more sensitive, I think, to others. Makes us more empathetic.
Patrick:
I was going to say, sensitive as a positive thing for sure.
Belinda:
Yes. Oh absolutely, I mean it as a positive thing. It makes us more attuned to other people in a way that’s good for relationships, I think. You just described a beautiful example of that. These experiences can imbue something that might otherwise be all about us into something that helps us to recognize the bigger picture around us in a way that’s good for relationships. That must have been an amazing day for your mom.
Patrick:
It was. And now you got me in my feelings. This is why I love doing these interviews.
Belinda:
You give her a call and tell her that you were thinking about this. Tell her you appreciate it.
Patrick:
I definitely will. One of our missions at MenLiving is facilitating a space where guys can come and make those meaningful lasting connections and feel seen and heard. What positive impact do you think people can have when they prioritize connections over the self?
Belinda:
I really appreciate that you bring the question to me in a gendered way because I don’t necessarily always think about it that way. You’re making me think of some papers that I was reading recently that struck me as really bringing together this other focus, but in a way that seems to resonate with different ways that people think about masculinity. This was a study of Latino immigrant men. And it was asking what they think qualifies as well-being and what makes them feel good and purposeful. It was a small study, but the men consistently answered that feeling that they were meeting the needs of their loved ones was the answer. So, taking care of family, and in this case, these were immigrants who were probably sending remittances to family at a substantial cost to themselves. Knowing that they were taking care of their loved ones was what they described as the key thing that impacted their wellbeing.
I thought, “Oh, that’s really amazing.” It’s a way of thinking that might be typically associated with masculinity, but in a way that pulls it back to relationships. You’re not trying to do well at work and in other parts of your life just for you per se, but you’re doing it as part of this greater goal of doing right by your loved ones.
Patrick:
That’s really fascinating and beautiful. From your expertise and the amount of studying and work you’ve done with this topic; do you have any parting advice on how people can better maintain important relationships in the hopes that it leads to a more fulfilling life?
Belinda:
I’m going to give you my standard advice on this. Try to resist the urge to make it about you. I think in relationships when there’s disagreement, conflict or when somebody’s upset, we might be tempted to think, “Why are they upset at me?” “They must be upset with me” “They think I did …” There’s this temptation to maybe escalate things based on that, perhaps to get defensive, maybe even prepare for a spirited offense as the best defense. But try not to assume that it’s about you. If somebody is unhappy, upset or something else, try not to make it about you.
Instead, go find out what it is. Try to understand from their perspective. You’ll be in a better place to be able to be of assistance if you aren’t focused on you, the implications for you, and getting so far into yourself that you can’t process what the other person is thinking and feeling. But if you don’t make it about you, maybe you can make it about them. And maybe you can help get things figured out for the better. And in doing so, you are more likely to bring about good for “us.”
