Know thyself
Does a College Education Reduce Depressive Symptoms in American Young Adults?
Michael McFarland & Brandon Wagner
Social Science & Medicine, December 2015, Pages 75–84
Abstract:
Higher levels of educational attainment are consistently associated with better mental health. Whether this association represents an effect of education on mental health, however, is less clear as omitted variable bias remains a pressing concern with education potentially serving as a proxy for unobserved factors including family background and genetics. To combat this threat and come closer to a causal estimate of the effect of education on depressive symptoms, this study uses data on 231 monozygotic twin pairs from The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health and employs a twin-pair difference-in-difference design to account for both unobserved shared factors between twin pairs (e.g. home, school, and neighborhood environment throughout childhood) and a number of observed non-shared but theoretically relevant factors (e.g. cognitive ability, personality characteristics, adolescent health). We find an inverse association between possessing a college degree and depressive symptoms in both conventional and difference-in-difference models. Results of this study also highlight the potentially overlooked role of personality characteristics in the education and mental health literature.
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How Best-Self Activation Influences Emotions, Physiology and Employment Relationships
Daniel Cable et al.
Harvard Working Paper, September 2015
Abstract:
It may be possible to offer people a new understanding of their best-self concepts, leading to positive personal and social change. We developed theory about how best-self activation can lead to both immediate and long-term outcomes through recursion, interaction, and subjective construal between the self concept and the social system. In two lab experiments and a field experiment in a global consulting firm, we tested the hypotheses by offering people reflections on times they were at their best. Results confirmed that best-self activation inspired improvements in people’s emotions, resistance to disease, resilience to stress and burnout, creative problem solving, performance under pressure, and relationships with their employer. Results also revealed that best-self activations are more effective in creating improvements when they feature information from one’s social network rather than personal reflections.
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Natural Sleep and Its Seasonal Variations in Three Pre-industrial Societies
Gandhi Yetish et al.
Current Biology, forthcoming
Abstract:
How did humans sleep before the modern era? Because the tools to measure sleep under natural conditions were developed long after the invention of the electric devices suspected of delaying and reducing sleep, we investigated sleep in three preindustrial societies. We find that all three show similar sleep organization, suggesting that they express core human sleep patterns, most likely characteristic of pre-modern era Homo sapiens. Sleep periods, the times from onset to offset, averaged 6.9–8.5 hr, with sleep durations of 5.7–7.1 hr, amounts near the low end of those industrial societies. There was a difference of nearly 1 hr between summer and winter sleep. Daily variation in sleep duration was strongly linked to time of onset, rather than offset. None of these groups began sleep near sunset, onset occurring, on average, 3.3 hr after sunset. Awakening was usually before sunrise. The sleep period consistently occurred during the nighttime period of falling environmental temperature, was not interrupted by extended periods of waking, and terminated, with vasoconstriction, near the nadir of daily ambient temperature. The daily cycle of temperature change, largely eliminated from modern sleep environments, may be a potent natural regulator of sleep. Light exposure was maximal in the morning and greatly decreased at noon, indicating that all three groups seek shade at midday and that light activation of the suprachiasmatic nucleus is maximal in the morning. Napping occurred on <7% of days in winter and <22% of days in summer. Mimicking aspects of the natural environment might be effective in treating certain modern sleep disorders.
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Nina Sayer et al.
Journal of Traumatic Stress, October 2015, Pages 381–390
Abstract:
We examined the efficacy of a brief, accessible, nonstigmatizing online intervention — writing expressively about transitioning to civilian life. U.S. Afghanistan and Iraq war veterans with self-reported reintegration difficulty (N = 1,292, 39.3% female, M = 36.87, SD = 9.78 years) were randomly assigned to expressive writing (n = 508), factual control writing (n = 507), or no writing (n = 277). Using intention to treat, generalized linear mixed models demonstrated that 6-months postintervention, veterans who wrote expressively experienced greater reductions in physical complaints, anger, and distress compared with veterans who wrote factually (ds = 0.13 to 0.20; ps < .05) and greater reductions in PTSD symptoms, distress, anger, physical complaints, and reintegration difficulty compared with veterans who did not write at all (ds = 0.22 to 0.35; ps ≤ .001). Veterans who wrote expressively also experienced greater improvement in social support compared to those who did not write (d = 0.17). Relative to both control conditions, expressive writing did not lead to improved life satisfaction. Secondary analyses also found beneficial effects of expressive writing on clinically significant distress, PTSD screening, and employment status. Online expressive writing holds promise for improving health and functioning among veterans experiencing reintegration difficulty, albeit with small effect sizes.
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Man-Kit Lei et al.
Social Science & Medicine, forthcoming
Methods: Hypotheses were tested with a sample of 99 African American women from the Family and Community Health Study (FACHS).
Results: Allele variants of the serotonin transporter gene (5-HTT) interact with neighborhood crime to predict depressive symptoms in a manner consonant with the differential susceptibility perspective. Furthermore, this association is mediated by DNA methylation of the promoter region of the serotonin transporter gene.
Conclusion: The findings provide support for an integrated model in which changes in DNA methylation, resulting from neighborhood crime, can result in an increase or decrease in gene activity which, in turn, influences depressive symptoms.
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Do People’s World Views Matter? The Why and How
Sylvia Xiaohua Chen et al.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Over the past decades, personality and social psychologists have extensively investigated the role of self-views in individual functioning. Research on world views, however, has been less well studied due to overly specific conceptualizations, and little research about how and why they impact life outcomes. To answer why and how world views matter, we conducted 7 studies to examine the functions, antecedents, and consequences of generalized beliefs about the world, operationalized as social axioms (Leung et al., 2002). This research focused on 2 axiom factors, namely, social cynicism and reward for application. These axioms were found to explain individual differences in self-views over and above personality traits in Hong Kong and U.S. samples (Study 1) and to explain cultural differences in self-views in addition to self-construals among Mainland Chinese, Hong Kong Chinese, East Asian Canadians, and European Canadians (Study 2). Endorsement of social axioms by participants, their parents, and close friends was collected from Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Canada to infer parental and peer influences on world views (Study 3). World views affected psychological well-being through the mediation of positive self-views across 3 age groups, including children, adolescents, and young adults (Study 4) and over time (Study 5). The mediation of negative self-views was through comparative self-criticism rather than internalized self-criticism (Study 6). Holistic thinking moderated the effect of social cynicism on self-views and psychological well-being (Study 7). These results converge to show that world views as a distal force and self-views as a proximal force matter in people’s subjective evaluation of their lives.
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Stepping Back to Move Forward: Expressive Writing Promotes Self-Distancing
Jiyoung Park, Özlem Ayduk & Ethan Kross
Emotion, forthcoming
Abstract:
Prior research indicates that expressive writing enhances well-being by leading people to construct meaningful narratives that explain distressing life experiences. But how does expressive writing facilitate meaning-making? We addressed this issue in 2 longitudinal studies by examining whether and how expressive writing promotes self-distancing, a process that facilitates meaning-making. At baseline in both studies, participants reflected on a distressing life experience. In Study 1 participants were then randomly assigned to write about their distressing experience or a non-emotional topic for 15 min on 3 consecutive days; in Study 2 participants were randomly assigned to write or think about their distressing experience or write about a non-emotional topic for the same amount of time. One day following the intervention, expressive writing participants in both studies self-distanced more when they reflected over their distressing experience compared with participants in the other conditions, which in turn led them to experience less emotional reactivity 1 month (Studies 1 and 2) and 6 months (Study 2) after the intervention. Analyses using data from both studies indicated that expressive writing reduced physical symptoms indirectly through its effects on self-distancing and emotional reactivity [that is, expressive writing group (vs. comparison groups) → greater self-distancing → less emotional reactivity → fewer physical symptoms]. Finally, linguistic analyses using essays from both studies indicated that increased use of causation words and decreased use of negative emotion words and first-person singular pronouns predicted increases in self-distancing over time. These findings demonstrate that expressive writing promotes self-distancing and illustrate how it does so.
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Two Definitions of Waiting Well
Kate Sweeny et al.
Emotion, forthcoming
Abstract:
Waiting for uncertain news is often distressing, at times even more distressing than facing bad news. The goal of this article was to investigate strategies for “waiting well” during these periods of uncertainty. Specifically, we propose 2 definitions of waiting well. First, people can wait in such a way as to ease their distress during the waiting period. Second, people could wait in such a way as to ease the pain of bad news or enhance the thrill of good news. We conducted a longitudinal study of law graduates (N = 230) awaiting their result on the California bar exam. Participants completed questionnaires prior to the exam, every 2 weeks during the 4-month waiting period, and shortly after learning whether they passed or failed. Cross-lagged models revealed that participants were quite unsuccessful at waiting well by our first definition. That is, their coping strategies were ineffective for reducing distress associated with uncertainty, apparently even backfiring in some cases. However, multiple regression analyses examining relationships between waiting experiences and responses to good and bad news found that many participants were successful at waiting well according to our second definition: Participants who suffered through a waiting period marked by anxiety, rumination, and pessimism responded more productively to bad news and more joyfully to good news, as compared with participants who suffered little during the wait. These findings substantiate the difficulty of enduring a stressful waiting period but suggest that this difficulty may pay off once the news arrives.
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Effect of the Garrett Lee Smith Memorial Suicide Prevention Program on Suicide Attempts Among Youths
Lucas Godoy Garraza et al.
JAMA Psychiatry, forthcoming
Objective: To determine whether a reduction in suicide attempts among youths occurs following the implementation of the Garrett Lee Smith Memorial Suicide Prevention Program (hereafter referred to as the GLS program), consistent with the reduction in mortality documented previously.
Design, Setting, and Participants: We conducted an observational study of community-based suicide prevention programs for youths across 46 states and 12 tribal communities. The study compared 466 counties implementing the GLS program between 2006 and 2009 with 1161 counties that shared key preintervention characteristics but were not exposed to the GLS program. The unweighted rounded numbers of respondents used in this analysis were 84 000 in the control group and 57 000 in the intervention group. We used propensity score–based techniques to increase comparability (on background characteristics) between counties that implemented the GLS program and counties that did not. We combined information on program activities collected by the GLS national evaluation with information on county characteristics from several secondary sources. The data analysis was performed between April and August 2014. P < .05 was considered statistically significant.
Exposures: Comprehensive, multifaceted suicide prevention programs, including gatekeeper training, education and mental health awareness programs, screening activities, improved community partnerships and linkages to service, programs for suicide survivors, and crisis hotlines.
Results: Counties implementing GLS program activities had significantly lower suicide attempt rates among youths 16 to 23 years of age in the year following implementation of the GLS program than did similar counties that did not implement GLS program activities (4.9 fewer attempts per 1000 youths [95% CI, 1.8-8.0 fewer attempts per 1000 youths]; P = .003). More than 79 000 suicide attempts may have been averted during the period studied following implementation of the GLS program. There was no significant difference in suicide attempt rates among individuals older than 23 years during that same period. There was no evidence of longer-term differences in suicide attempt rates.
Conclusions and Relevance: Comprehensive GLS program activities were associated with a reduction in suicide attempt rates. Sustained suicide prevention programming efforts may be needed to maintain the reduction in suicide attempt rates.
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Changes in Self-Definition Impede Recovery From Rejection
Lauren Howe & Carol Dweck
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, forthcoming
Abstract:
Previous research highlights how adept people are at emotional recovery after rejection, but less research has examined factors that can prevent full recovery. In five studies, we investigate how changing one’s self-definition in response to rejection causes more lasting damage. We demonstrate that people who endorse an entity theory of personality (i.e., personality cannot be changed) report alterations in their self-definitions when reflecting on past rejections (Studies 1, 2, and 3) or imagining novel rejection experiences (Studies 4 and 5). Further, these changes in self-definition hinder post-rejection recovery, causing individuals to feel haunted by their past, that is, to fear the recurrence of rejection and to experience lingering negative affect from the rejection. Thus, beliefs that prompt people to tie experiences of rejection to self-definition cause rejection’s impact to linger.