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WEDNESDAY, Mar. 21, 2012 — Imagine your best friend is going to get engaged in a month’s time, yet she doesn’t know it. Her soon-to-be-fiancé has told you of his plans, but he’s sworn you to secrecy. You can tell none of your other friends, or even your own husband, for fear that loose lips will ruin the surprise. As a result of possessing this secret, you’d expect to feel a certain amount of psychological stress — after all, controlling your desire to share the news can be mentally taxing. But new research says people keeping secrets feel more than just mental stress, they experience an actual physical burden as well. And what’s more, the bigger the secret the more physically put-upon we feel.
Recognizing that the language associated with secrets often alludes to physical weight (as in the aforementioned descriptions of being “weighed down” or “burdened”), Tufts University psychology professor Michael Slepian and three colleagues decided to examine “whether secrets would thus be experienced as physical burdens, influencing how people perceive and act in the world,” as they write in a report on their research published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology.
Slepian’s team subjected study participants to four tests to assess whether they felt physically burdened by secrecy or not.
The first involved 40 people who’d been told to recall a secret, and were then asked to estimate the steepness of a hill. Some were instructed to recall a “meaningful personal secret” and the rest a “small personal secret.” Those harboring the bigger secret believed the hill was steeper compared to the smaller-secret group.
The second test looked at distance perception. Thirty-six people again were assigned to think of either a big or small secret while they tossed a beanbag at a target. Researchers recorded that the big secret group overthrew the target more than the trivial secret group, “suggesting they perceived greater distance to the target,” the study authors write.
Test three looked at perceptions of common physical tasks. This time researchers found 40 people who’d recently committed adultery, and first asked them to rate how much they thought about their infidelity, how much it affected them and how much it bothered them. This group was then asked to rate the effort and energy needed to perform a range of common tasks, from carrying groceries to giving directions. Similar to the two previous tests, results showed “The more burdensome their secrets were, the more participants perceived everyday behaviors as if they were carrying a physical burden.”
In the last test, 30 gay men were recruited and told to conceal either their sexual orientation or their extraversion in the course of being interviewed on videotape. Following the interview, each subject was asked to move some books as a favor, ostensibly to help the lab relocate. Those who’d been instructed to conceal their sexual orientation moved fewer books than those who’d hidden their extraversion.
What all this indicates, researchers say, is that “The more burdensome the secret and the more thought devoted to it, the more perception and action were influenced in a manner similar to carrying physical weight.”
Don’t keep secrets, ever? Lucky you. But for the rest of us, Slepian and his team have some words of warning. Concealing secrets could eventually lead to problems associated with “physical overexertion, exhaustion, and stress,” they write in the study report.
So the next time a friend confides in you and then demands you keep the juicy news a secret, perhaps you should demand she or he buys you a massage, in exchange for the toll on your emotional health.