Allison Pugh
speaker
77 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Allison Pugh’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
So it was like the arousal moved from the storyteller to the listener as the storyteller was telling the story and as the listener was conveying that they understood and saw the other person. So it was a real sharing or spreading of the emotional load. It's a really beautifully designed study.
Tell me the story she told you. Sure. Erin, she sees one patient. who is intubated and he is so angry at being intubated. He didn't want to be intubated, even though the doctors told him he had to be because he would die otherwise. He couldn't speak, obviously, through the tube. He also couldn't write because he was on, I guess, medications that made that difficult.
So he's just steaming full of fury. And then comes Erin and she sees him And she sees this bottled up anger. And she says, you know, why don't you take this Kleenex box and like throw it, throw it against the wall. And he says, He was so astounded, so relieved and powerfully moved by that, that he like grabs her arm and pulls her in and she sits with him for, you know, 15 minutes or 20 minutes.
And then the next time she sees him, it's about, it's a couple of days later and he's emerged from the procedure and he's no longer intubated. And he says to her, there is nothing like being in the worst moment of your life and you feel like someone understands you. And that is such a perfect capture of what being seen feels like and what it can do for you in your worst moments.
Exactly. And there's actually a lot of research by psychologists and neuroscientists that show that, you know, when someone's holding your hand, it can alleviate pain. But here's an articulated moment where Hiram, the patient, is saying to Erin, you saw me, and that was transporting.
So this is a really voluminous area. I have a couple of favorites. One author reviewed 1,000 articles with 355,000 students and came away with this meta-finding that, you know, among school-age children, he says, the effect size of teacher-student relationships is bigger than most typical educational innovations or curriculum changes.
So like the teacher-student relationship that underlies whether or not someone is learning algebra or can, you know, parse a sentence, that is more powerful, has a greater impact than, say, standard curriculum changes or other innovations. You might expect that to be true for the younger kids, maybe, but maybe less true for middle school or high schoolers. And actually, it's the opposite.
The effect sizes are larger in studies that are conducted in higher grades. And Teacher-student relationships are even more important when kids are academically at risk. You know, kids from disadvantaged economic backgrounds, for example, and kids with learning difficulties.
So it's like even more important for adolescents, even though we don't usually structure those schools to enable it to happen very well.
There's a lot of research that talks about how being seen by one's doctor leads to better health outcomes. and leads directly to patient well-being. And my favorite, perhaps, study here is a meta-analysis that has extremely strict inclusion criteria. So it's only randomized controlled trials in which the relationship between doctor and patient is experimentally manipulated.
So they tell the physicians to do or don't make eye contact or do or don't interrupt, et cetera. And based on that, these scholars, researchers conclude that the impact of clinician-patient relationship on health outcomes was significant and exceeded that of taking an aspirin every day to ward off heart attacks.
Exactly. I mean, think how many people take an aspirin every day to ward off heart attacks. And this is something that actually exceeds even that.
Yeah, they've done great work on this stuff. The study that I most enjoy thinking and talking about is they experimentally varied how cafe customers interacted with baristas, and then they measured their well-being afterward.
And they gave some participants, they gave them instructions to like, you know, have a genuine interaction with the cashier, smile, make eye contact, and have a brief conversation. That was the social condition. And then they had the efficient condition.
Those participants were told, make your interaction with the cashier as efficient as possible, have your money ready, and avoid unnecessary conversation. And it found that people who took the time to have a social interaction with the barista, that increased people's sense of belonging.
Yes, that is a quite profound observation, actually, because what makes us busy? There's a couple of things that lead to it. But in the United States, a lot of times what makes you busy is an inordinate work schedule, kind of overworking schedule. can really shrink the amount of time we have for the other parts of our lives.
And research like this suggests that if you don't kind of give the time and space to those unscripted, trivial encounters throughout your life, if you're always trying to make everything so efficient so that you can maximize the time that you have available for other pursuits, that can have well-being effects.
Yeah. I mean, I've seen that, too. I'm always amazed. One of my brothers, for example, is always really good at honoring the moment, kind of just being there present with the other person. And but he's also also often late. Yeah. And I, on the other hand, am really almost never late and I really need to teach myself.
I have needed to teach myself to pause and, you know, who's this person that I'm kind of blowing by. Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, like, maybe we should we who are not late should be more understanding that those who are are helping to knit us together as a society, you know.
Showing 41–60 of 77 · page 3 of 4
← Previous
Next →