A little bit of ‘benign masochism’ can bring you closer together, so long as it’s joyful.
Australian researchers have finally taken it upon themselves to tackle one of the bigger behavioural quirks of Tasmanians: the propensity to go swimming, in June, in the nuddy.
Turns out – as much as this humble Back Page scribe does not want to admit it – they may be on to something.
Existing research has long suggested that experiences involving a shared pain promote social connection and identification under some circumstances.
What has been unclear, though, is what additional component needs to be present to predict increased identification.
While certainly one of the more extreme approaches, a wintertide skinny dip is by no means the only painful or uncomfortable activity that humans seek out for fun.
After all, marathons, hot chilis and coal-walking have their respective fanbases, the University of Queensland researchers pointed out in The Journal of Positive Psychology.
To study the effects of an objectively painful and uncomfortable group activity, they looked no further than the yearly winter solstice swim in Hobart’s Derwent River, where the ambient air temperature was just 0.8°C.
The swim, which takes place at sunrise, is part of the island state’s yearly Dark Mofo festival.
Participants are entirely naked.
The researchers surveyed swimmers on two separate swim days across subsequent years.
For good measure, they also surveyed festival goers who attended a “dysphoric art experience” as part of Dark Mofo to provide an aversive-but-not-painful comparator.
The art experience involved people dressed in white who “interacted vigorously” with blood, milk, fruit, fish and the carcass of an animal.
While the nudie swimmers reported significant pre-to-post event increases in social identification, the art experiencers did not.
The reason for this, the researchers theorised, is the presence of “pleasure” in the swim.
“Our findings show that people can experience pleasure in aversive settings, and that pain is certainly no barrier to enjoyment,” the researchers wrote.
A possible explanation for the difference in social identification across the two experiences, they said, was the positive social value attached to the swim – i.e. demonstrating stamina or courage – which was not present for the art experience.
“This research challenges the assumption that pleasure and painful experiences are mutually exclusive, and uncovers new ground in terms of how people benefit from aversive and pleasurable experiences in the collective,” the researchers wrote in The Journal of Positive Psychology.
“… Activities involving high levels of pain carry significant physical and emotional costs, which seem to render them unsustainable from an evolutionary perspective; however, psychological and social dividends can be found on further inspection.”
Personally, I think I’ll be staying out of the water for now.
Send your Dark Mofo holiday pictures to Holly@medicalrepublic.com.au.
