Concerning psychology, popular discourse is obsessive; we “neurotically” review our memories, searching for “PTSD” to explain our fears. We dismiss dramatic behavior as “bipolar” and “schizo” and “psycho.” Psychology similarly explores popular discourse; what we say reflects what we think, and what our culture says demonstrates the ideas society considers most engaging. Our culture’s current—albeit casual—interest in psychology indicates our fascination with mental health, and has sparked this mainstream form of psychological jargon, known to psychologists as “psychobabble.” Characterized by frequent misuse of technical terminology, psychobabble is both shaped by and continually shapes how popular culture views psychology. While many speakers partially understand the literal meaning of psychological terms, they nonetheless use them casually and incorrectly. To understand our relationship with psychology, we must ask why we employ these words on an everyday basis, how vernacular use of these words affects their figurative interpretation, and how this potentially alters their literal meaning. Some psychobabble may foster a culture of mental health awareness, but other usages hinder psychological research. Psychobabble imitates the relationship between popular culture and psychology: to preserve research clarity and promote genuine mental health awareness, we ought to change our cultural use of jargon to reflect only the psychology that pertains to everyday well-being.
CREATION AND CODEPENDENCY: HOW PSYCHOBABBLE CAME TO BE
Author Richard D. Rosen coined “psychobabble” in 1977 to describe vernacular communication that relied on psychological jargon.1 It now includes any speech patterns primarily used in psychological research that are also employed in common communication. For example, in her analysis of psychobabble, psychological researcher Maria Della Corte focuses on therapeutic language (e.g, “I hear what you’re saying”) rather than strictly technical jargon.2 Although Della Corte’s examples may be psychobabble, they are so deeply ingrained in our culture that it is difficult to distinguish them from common empathetic language. This indicates that psychobabble is thoroughly integrated into the vernacular; it may also suggest a codependency of psychology and popular culture, such that their vocabulary differences are often imperceptible.
The history of psychological jargon in the vernacular supports this idea of codependency. Tom Strong, counsellor and professor emeritus at the University of Calgary, argues that popular interest in psychology began after World War II. Thousands of soldiers had suffered significant trauma and were attempting to reintegrate into civilian society. Mental illness was rampant, and people wanted to understand what had happened to their veterans.3 Within a few decades, this curiosity gave rise to mainstream mental health “awareness” via pop psychology and psychoanalysis.
Alongside this growing cultural interest, psychologists and government agencies pushed to “medicalize” psychology through standardization of its language, incorporation of biological data, and classification of mental health concerns.4 Strong argues that medicalization and its effects have largely enhanced psychology; beyond legitimizing it as a scientific discipline, widespread use of jargon unveiled the former mysteries of behavioral research, allowed for self-diagnosis, and improved treatment.5 However, because cultural curiosity soon followed standardization, Strong also notes that the quick translation of jargon into vernacular narrowed its descriptive scope. The limited terminology people used to classify mental health issues prevented them from comprehensively understanding and communicating them.6 Overall, he suggests that medicalization benefited psychology; however, its effects (including psychobabble) will continue to influence research in complex and potentially detrimental ways.
Because psychology has only been studied for a few centuries, mainstream curiosity has influenced it substantially. Strong argues that even the creation of the Diagnostic and Statistics Manual, the primary reference handbook for mental health professionals in the U.S. and internationally, is marked by “pitting medical science’s best linguistic constructions against what has culturally ‘mattered’—ways of getting a linguistic handle on people’s concerns of the day and circumstance.”7 If so, it may be difficult to determine where psychology ends and psychobabble begins. Strong’s claims may seem dramatic; however, the lexical overlap between these fields attests to their mutual influence. Psychobabble should not be condoned or forgotten as part of psychology’s evolution; if anything, psychologists need to better their understanding of how pop culture views their study in order to anticipate mainstream influences.
BUT WHY? POTENTIAL BEHAVIORAL CAUSES OF PSYCHOBABBLE
Explicitly jargon-esque psychobabble is usually figurative, employing an understood meaning different from the literal. The causes and interpretations of psychobabble thus mirror those of other figurative language. Psycholinguistics (the study of language within a behavioral context) often focuses on the apparent inefficiency of figurative language, since direct communication is generally easier to understand than abstract. However, figurative language often serves more purposes than effective communication, such as reflecting and asserting one’s social status.
When figurative language is exclusive to a given group of people, it is often employed as a form of social identification.8 This explanation applies to many types of implicit speech, including inside jokes, irony, and culture-specific idioms. A group of friends will understand each other’s inside jokes; a foreigner will be confused by a native speaker’s idioms. These boundaries assert speakers’ and listeners’ belonging: if one understands their community’s figurative language, they demonstrate that they are linguistically (and thus socially) integrated. Similarly, psychobabble is often used ironically or idiomatically, in which only the culture indicates that the meaning intended is not literal. For friends who wash their dishes immediately after meals, it may be perfectly normal to tease each other as “OCD”; for someone only familiar with the literal meaning of obsessive-compulsive disorder, this behavior would be considered cruel. However, if the friends operate under the unspoken agreement that “OCD” can refer to neatness or perfectionism, their use of the word reflects both their affection and sense of belonging in their group, as much as (if not more than) it reflects that implicit definition.
Della Corte argues that the aim of psychobabble can go even beyond identifying our group—it is meant to shape our groups and how they perceive us. If speakers rely on emotionally sensitive, therapeutic language (which Della Corte argues is a key component of psychobabble), they likely appear empathetic; since most psychobabble is technical, it may also indicate a speaker’s breadth of knowledge.9 If we desire empathy and understanding in our groups, we may come to desire it for ourselves. Thus, psychobabble could encourage more cultural compassion and emotional connection.
Highly technical psychobabble may likewise assert a speaker’s intelligence and comprehension of difficult concepts. However, Della Corte insists that if psychobabble aims toward shaping groups and group perception via emotional openness, it is self-defeating, because presenting oneself favorably is a method of self-preservation, not vulnerability.10 She claims that just as optimizing groups’ perception of us prevents ostracism, promoting an appearance of emotional sensitivity is ultimately self-serving. Moreover, appearing emotionally open may prevent others from inquiring into our emotional lives; by frequently or dramatically voicing some emotions, one need not voice others, and can retain emotional privacy without arousing concern. By Della Corte’s logic, psychobabble fails to positively shape group perception, instead defending individuals from potentially unfavorable scrutiny. Della Corte does not consider, however, that this may be another intended function of psychobabble.
This possible self-defense follows patterns laid out by other types of implicit language. Emory University’s economics professors Hugo Mialon and Sue Mialon argue that implicit speech is frequently used to mitigate the risks of insult or argument; they cite a man trying to bribe a police officer by opening his wallet while asking for leniency.11 An explicit statement would end in either arrest or successful bribery; however, with implicit speech, an honest cop may interpret the communication literally and grant him leniency, while a dishonest cop may understand the implied bribe, and accept payment rather than arrest the driver. Thus, implicit speech defends the driver from negative consequences (e.g., paying a ticket or arrest) and strategically increases his odds of a beneficial outcome.
As the above example demonstrates, implicit language can often function both to promote altering perceptions and defend against less desirable outcomes. Even if psychobabble is intended to favorably influence group perception and defend against rejection, its empathetic usage is not contradictory. Rather, it reflects the speaker’s desire for greater empathy within their society. Psychobabble may protect speakers from ostracism and emotional vulnerability; simultaneously, it can assert a speaker’s membership in a group and identify the characteristics they wish the group to have.
INTERPRETATIONS AND THEIR INFLUENCE
Because speakers use psychobabble for many of the same benefits that come from other types of implicit speech, it stands to reason that listeners will process psychobabble in the same way as other figurative language. However, little is known about how we process figurative ideas differently from literal; this question fuels a running debate in the study of psycholinguistics.
For several decades, it was thought that the literal meaning of communication must be processed first, in order for the brain to dismiss it and consider less obvious alternatives.12 This has since been rejected; notably, Raymond Gibbs, a University of California, Santa Cruz psychology professor and researcher, claims that— should literal meaning be processed first—it would take longer for a phrase’s figurative meaning to be understood than its literal.13 Because Gibbs’s research did not indicate this (in some cases, it took subjects less time to understand sarcasm than literal ideas), he disagrees with this model, instead arguing that literal meaning can be bypassed in cases where the figurative speech is familiar.
If this is indeed true, then speakers and listeners of psychobabble may not always process the literal meaning of the words they hear. Rather, Gibbs’s arguments point to relevance theory, the idea that communications can assume different meanings (literal and idiomatic) in biasing contexts.15 Although we may not always be cognizant of our context, language is principally a way of communicating about the reality around us, and the language we use can mean different things depending on the situations in which we use it.
This idea was the foundation for a study by Uchiyama et al, in which the team selected priming stories to pair with metaphorical and sarcastic statements in order to determine which areas of the brain activated in response to figurative language.16 All the statements were commonly used, but also live (i.e., they retained literal cultural meaning); thus, the participants were unable to tell from the statements themselves whether they were literal or figurative. The stories were designed to provide the necessary context using either relevant, applicable, or random ideas. Participants identified whether the statement was meant to be interpreted literally (coherently or incoherently) or figuratively (as metaphor or sarcasm) with accuracies above ninety percent.17 This demonstrates that context regulates how figurative language is interpreted; in the case of psychobabble, the informal context in which jargon is used should encourage an informal interpretation.
Researcher Rachel Giora expands on this idea, arguing that the salient (i.e., most accessed and subjectively important) meaning alone is obligatory, and always processed initially.18 The context in which we typically encounter a word will influence any other contexts in which it is used, so that its meaning in that typical context will dominate our understanding. Giora thus claims that we need not always process the literal meaning of expressions if we have had enough exposure to a non-literal meaning to make it more salient; thus, cultural understandings of a word are likely to be more salient.19 Given the history of psychological jargon, Giora’s ideas suggest that psychobabble could devastate literal interpretations. Because popular psychology is so prevalent, most people will primarily encounter these words in non-clinical contexts, their salient meaning becoming that which they hear used inappropriately in the vernacular. If their exposure to psychobabble is great enough, they may be able to bypass the literal meaning altogether. On a broad level, this could transform these once technical terms into something akin to dead metaphors and idioms (i.e. figurative language that no longer makes sense literally due to cultural shifts). Even if psychobabble does not eradicate the literal meaning of jargon, it could very well weaken the mainstream understanding, such that only highly trained experts will automatically infer the literal meaning as their most salient.
Many already express concern about the observable, psychobabble-induced dilution of jargon. One community of therapists complains that “psychobabble is often difficult to understand and can obfuscate the meaning of even relatively simple ideas.”20 The group argues that psychobabble so alters the meaning of jargon, patients will often dismiss serious diagnoses by automatically inferring their cultural meaning.21 Psychobabble can also increase stigma; because the disparity between the literal and cultural meanings of these words is so great, official diagnosis is often confusing and frightening to patients, who may even deny the severity of their symptoms and refuse treatment.22
Linguistically trained editor James Harbeck parodies inappropriate use of psychological jargon in his article for The Week, arguing that his readers should learn what “all these mental-health related words are really supposed to mean.”23 He doesn’t consider the possibility that many users know what these words mean literally but continues to educate his readers about the technical meaning of several terms and mock inappropriate usage. Given the fraught and intimate relationship between psychology and popular culture, it is unclear whether education would hinder or augment stigma, or how much education would be needed to prevent inappropriate usage. However, it may be difficult to alter the broader cultural meaning via vocabulary lessons, especially since early attempts at self-education diluted jargon and created psychobabble.24 The fact that psychobabble observably degrades both mental health treatments and mainstream understanding suggests that the broader culture and study of psychology are already too closely interlinked. Accurate mental health education may be desirable, but not at the expense of diluting and stigmatizing jargon.
For better or worse, psychobabble is thoroughly rooted in our language and culture. Some suggest that it should be removed from the common sphere entirely; however, there is a plethora of evidence indicating that popular culture and psychological jargon are codependent and unlikely to separate fully. Nonetheless, some psychobabble can be useful: therapeutic language encourages emotional connections and some understanding of psychology, and—at the very least—promotes appearances of emotional sensitivity. Moreover, because it’s not perfectly clear what constitutes therapeutic language and what constitutes empathy, exterminating all psychobabble may discourage genuine emotional awareness and vulnerability. However, much psychobabble—including the misuse of mental disorder terminology—does not further these ends. Virtually all sources agree that these uses of psychobabble dilute meaning and desensitize listeners to the reality of mental illness. Although it is impractical and inadvisable to fully separate popular culture from psychology, we ought to direct our interest away from its more technical areas and toward those aspects concerned with everyday well-being, that promote genuine emotional openness and are already interlinked with humanity’s innate empathy. Amateur discourse about psychology will predominantly be psychobabble; no matter how much we aim to educate in popular discourse, something will always be lost in translation. Although it’s natural to try to understand ourselves and communicate that perceived understanding to others, extreme psychobabble only obfuscates the actual meaning of mental illness. Curiosity about mental health is not inherently wrong, but that curiosity shapes our language and culture. If we aim not only to appear informed and empathetic but also to actually develop these traits, that curiosity could easily promote a culture of compassion. There is much “psychobabble” that can be applied by healthy individuals; if we use only that jargon that applies to everyday context, we will gain a necessary and desirable understanding of mental health, while preserving a powerful vocabulary to help those in psychological need.
