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Understanding Changes in Attitudes Toward Suicide Between 1980s and 2010s in the United States
Yi Tong & Julie Phillips
Social Science Quarterly, forthcoming
Methods: We use General Social Survey (GSS) data from the 1980s (n = 4,840) and 2010s (n = 5,607) and conduct an Oaxaca decomposition.
Results: Although Americans remain largely unaccepting of suicide, except in the case of incurable disease, a greater percentage found suicide to be acceptable in 2010s than in 1980s. Individuals who are male, white, more educated, less religious, and more politically liberal find suicide more acceptable. Changes over time in population composition (e.g., rising education levels and declines in religion) account for about 50 percent of the rise in suicide acceptability between 1980s and 2010s.
Residential Mobility Affects Self-Concept, Group Support, and Happiness of Individuals and Communities
Thomas Talhelm & Shigehiro Oishi
University of Virginia Working Paper, July 2018
Abstract:
Evidence across several studies leads to the conclusion that having moved and living in an unstable community are associated with some of psychology’s most central variables: happiness, self-concept, and altruism. We review evidence that mobile communities and mobile people have more individualistic self-concepts, identify with groups more conditionally, and support the local community less. People who moved as children have lower satisfaction with life — unless they are extraverted. We also show that extraverted US states are happier when they are mobile, and introverted states are happier when they are stable. We explain how mobility can have two different effects depending on whether we are talking about how many times people have moved (individual mobility) or what percent of the local population has moved (community mobility). Furthermore, regional and national differences in mobility help explain important regional and cultural psychological differences.
Sickness behavior is not all about the immune response: Possible roles of expectations and prediction errors in the worry of being sick
Julie Lasselin et al.
Brain, Behavior, and Immunity, forthcoming
Methods: Twenty-two healthy participants were made sick by intravenously administering lipopolysaccharide (2 ng/kg body weight). Their expectations of becoming sick were assessed before the injection.
Results: Participants having lower expectations of becoming sick before the injection reacted with more emotional distress (i.e., more negative affect and lower emotional arousal) than those with high expectations of becoming sick, despite having similar overall sickness behavior (i.e., a combined factor including fatigue, pain, nausea and social withdrawal). In keeping with a predictive coding model, the “prediction error signal”, i.e., the discrepancy between the immune signal and sickness expectancy, predicted emotional distress (reduction in emotional arousal in particular).
Interaction of HPA axis genetics and early life stress shapes emotion recognition in healthy adults
Corinna Hartling et al.
Psychoneuroendocrinology, January 2019, Pages 28-37
Background: Early life stress (ELS) affects facial emotion recognition (FER), as well as the underlying brain network. However, there is considerable inter-individual variability in these ELS-caused alterations. As the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis is assumed to mediate neural and behavioural sequelae of ELS, the genetic disposition towards HPA axis reactivity might explain differential vulnerabilities.
Methods: An additive genetic profile score (GPS) of HPA axis reactivity was built from 6 SNPs in 3 HPA axis-related genes (FKBP5, CRHR1, NR3C1). We studied two independent samples. As a proof of concept, GPS was tested as a predictor of cortisol increase to a psychosocial challenge (MIST) in a healthy community sample of n = 40. For the main study, a sample of n = 170 completed a video-based FER task and retrospectively reported ELS experiences in the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire (CTQ).
Results: GPS positively predicted cortisol increase in the stress challenge over and above covariates. CTQ and genetic profile scores interacted to predict facial emotion recognition, such that ELS had a detrimental effect on emotion processing only in individuals with higher GPS. Post-hoc moderation analyses revealed that, while a less stress-responsive genetic profile was protective against ELS effects, individuals carrying a moderate to high GPS were affected by ELS in their ability to infer emotion from facial expressions.
Eye-movement intervention enhances extinction via amygdala deactivation
Lycia de Voogd et al.
Journal of Neuroscience, forthcoming
Abstract:
Improving extinction learning is essential to optimize psychotherapy for persistent fear-related disorders. In two independent studies (both n=24), we found that goal-directed eye movements activate a dorsal fronto-parietal network and transiently deactivate the amygdala ([graphic1]=.17). Connectivity analyses revealed that this down-regulation potentially engages a ventromedial prefrontal pathway known to be involved in cognitive regulation of emotion. Critically, when eye movements followed memory reactivation during extinction learning, it reduced spontaneous fear recovery 24 hours later ([graphic2]=.21). Stronger amygdala deactivation furthermore predicted a stronger reduction in subsequent fear recovery after reinstatement (r=.39). In conclusion, we show that extinction learning can be improved with a non-invasive eye-movement intervention that triggers a transient suppression of the amygdala. Our finding that another task which taxes working memory leads to a similar amygdala suppression furthermore indicates that this effect is likely not specific to eye movements, which is in line with a large body of behavioral studies. This study contributes to the understanding of a widely used treatment for traumatic symptoms by providing a parsimonious account for how working memory tasks and goal-directed eye movements can enhance extinction-based psychotherapy, namely through neural circuits (e.g., amygdala deactivation) similar to those that support cognitive control of emotion.