news & trends
When Paula Abdul began belting out her hit song "Promise of a New
Day" last year, she was doing a lot more than furthering her career as a
top pop singer. She was giving the economy a big, if temporary,
boost.
It's not that she pulled in that much money. She was sounding a
mindlessly cheery message and, widely played, it has had an impact on
people's psyches that will be felt this year as an increase in consumer
confidence and spending.
"Popular culture can forewarn us of changes in public sentiment not
yet evident in public-opinion polls," contends Columbia University
psychologist Harold Zullow. In a study that gives a whole new meaning to
downbeat, he has found that when top-40 song lyrics turn sharply gloomy,
there'll be a recession one to two years later. That's been the case for
every recession save one since 1955.
Sustained ruminative and pessimistic lyrics in 1989 and early 1990
(such as "We all tall down like toy soldiers," from Martika and "The one
good thing in my life has gone away," from Fine Young Cannibals) led
Zullow--in May 1990--to publicly predict the current recession, which
began last year.
Reporting in the Journal of Economic Psychology (No. 12), Zullow
took the lyrics of 1,344 songs that hit the top between 1955 and 1989 and
analyzed them for two depressive psychological traits: rumination about
bad events and pessimistic explanatory style. Then he tracked the
findings against two leading indicators--index of consumer optimism and
the GNP growth.
A gold medal for gloomiest might go to "Puff the Magic Dragon."
Protagonist Puff explains a bad event (playmate Jackie no longer comes to
play) as due to causes that are internal and unchanging ("Puff could not
be brave") rather than a more optimistic view of causes as external and
temporary.
Transmitted by mass media and popular culture, this out-loud
rumination puts a spin on our moods and cognitively colors how we view
real-world events, especially how much we worry about bad events. That,
in turn, predicts consumer pessimism, which in turn predicts decreased
personal expenditures, then a dip in the GNP.
What's ahead? Overall, there's been a long slide into pessimism
since 1965, and that will continue for the better part of the decade. But
while the candidates battle it out and temporarily revive our collective
spirit, we'll get a reprieve from the shorter-term rocking and rolling
between optimism and pessimism: 1992 will be a year of denial--a
"Don't-worry-be-happy" kind of year.
PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): Paula Abdul
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