Monday, February 20, 2012
Prescription
Joshua Fenton et al.
Archives of Internal Medicine, forthcoming
Background: Patient satisfaction is a widely used health care quality metric. However, the relationship between patient satisfaction and health care utilization, expenditures, and outcomes remains ill defined.
Methods: We conducted a prospective cohort study of adult respondents (N = 51 946) to the 2000 through 2007 national Medical Expenditure Panel Survey, including 2 years of panel data for each patient and mortality follow-up data through December 31, 2006, for the 2000 through 2005 subsample (n = 36 428). Year 1 patient satisfaction was assessed using 5 items from the Consumer Assessment of Health Plans Survey. We estimated the adjusted associations between year 1 patient satisfaction and year 2 health care utilization (any emergency department visits and any inpatient admissions), year 2 health care expenditures (total and for prescription drugs), and mortality during a mean follow-up duration of 3.9 years.
Results: Adjusting for sociodemographics, insurance status, availability of a usual source of care, chronic disease burden, health status, and year 1 utilization and expenditures, respondents in the highest patient satisfaction quartile (relative to the lowest patient satisfaction quartile) had lower odds of any emergency department visit (adjusted odds ratio [aOR], 0.92; 95% CI, 0.84-1.00), higher odds of any inpatient admission (aOR, 1.12; 95% CI, 1.02-1.23), 8.8% (95% CI, 1.6%-16.6%) greater total expenditures, 9.1% (95% CI, 2.3%-16.4%) greater prescription drug expenditures, and higher mortality (adjusted hazard ratio, 1.26; 95% CI, 1.05-1.53).
Conclusion: In a nationally representative sample, higher patient satisfaction was associated with less emergency department use but with greater inpatient use, higher overall health care and prescription drug expenditures, and increased mortality.
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Thomas Buchmueller & Christopher Carpenter
Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, forthcoming
Abstract:
Health disparities related to sexual orientation are well documented and may be due to unequal access to a partner's employer-sponsored insurance (ESI). We provide the literature's first evaluation of legislation enacted by California in 2005 that required private employers within the state to treat employees in committed same-sex relationships in the same way as employees in different-sex marriages with respect to ESI. Our analysis uses data on sexual orientation, partnership, and health insurance from the 2001 to 2007 California Health Interview Surveys (CHIS). Prior to the reform, partnered gay men and lesbians were significantly less likely to have ESI in someone else's name than partnered heterosexuals. Pooling data from 2001 to 2007, we find that the reform had no effects on differences in insurance outcomes between gay and straight men. We find some evidence that the reform increased partnership, reduced full-time employment, and increased health insurance coverage among lesbians relative to heterosexual women. The increases in insurance coverage for lesbians are consistent with a role for expanded dependent ESI, suggesting that such policies may reduce sexual orientation-based insurance disparities among women.
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Medicare managed care and primary care quality: Examining racial/ethnic effects across states
Jayasree Basu
Health Care Management Science, March 2012, Pages 15-28
Abstract:
The study assesses the role of Medicare Advantage (MA) plans in providing quality primary care in comparison to FFS Medicare in three states, New York, California, Florida, across three racial ethnic groups. The performance is measured in terms of providing better quality primary care, as defined by lowering the risks of preventable hospital admissions. Using 2004 hospital discharge data (HCUP-SID) of Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality for three states, a multivariate cross sectional design is used with individual admission as the unit of analysis. The study found that MA plans were associated with lower preventable hospitalizations relative to marker admissions. The benefit also spilled over to different racial and ethnic subgroups and in some states, e.g. CA and FL, MA enrollment was associated with significantly lower odds of minority admissions than of white admissions. These results may indicate a potentially favorable role of MA plans in attenuating racial/ethnic inequalities in primary care in some states.
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Survey Shows That At Least Some Physicians Are Not Always Open Or Honest With Patients
Lisa Iezzoni et al.
Health Affairs, February 2012, Pages 383-391
Abstract:
The Charter on Medical Professionalism, endorsed by more than 100 professional groups worldwide and the US Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, requires openness and honesty in physicians' communication with patients. We present data from a 2009 survey of 1,891 practicing physicians nationwide assessing how widely physicians endorse and follow these principles in communicating with patients. The vast majority of physicians completely agreed that physicians should fully inform patients about the risks and benefits of interventions and should never disclose confidential information to unauthorized persons. Overall, approximately one-third of physicians did not completely agree with disclosing serious medical errors to patients, almost one-fifth did not completely agree that physicians should never tell a patient something untrue, and nearly two-fifths did not completely agree that they should disclose their financial relationships with drug and device companies to patients. Just over one-tenth said they had told patients something untrue in the previous year. Our findings raise concerns that some patients might not receive complete and accurate information from their physicians, and doubts about whether patient-centered care is broadly possible without more widespread physician endorsement of the core communication principles of openness and honesty with patients.
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The Impact of Noneconomic Damages Cap on Health Care Delivery in Hospitals
Anca Cotet
American Law and Economics Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
Previous literature focused on narrowly defined treatments reached conflicting conclusions about the association between tort reforms and treatment intensity. Using county-level panel data, I evaluate the impact of noneconomic damages caps on broadly defined measures of health care delivery in hospitals. Caps adoption leads to a 3.5% decrease in surgeries, a 2.5% decrease in admissions, a 4.5% decrease in outpatient visits but has no significant effect on emergency care. These results are not driven by spillovers across state borders or by improvements in health and are accompanied by an increase in mortality from complications of medical and surgical care.
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Further Marginalization: The Link Between Incarceration Rates and State Medicaid Enrollments
Aaron Kupchik & Brian Gifford
Criminal Justice Review, March 2012, Pages 70-88
Abstract:
Although the penal system and public assistance programs play significant roles in the lives of disadvantaged populations in the United States, the relationship between the two institutions is not well understood. This is particularly true of publicly financed health care coverage. In this article, the authors study how state-level incarceration rates shape the provision of publicly financed health care and health insurance (Medicaid), using two theoretical frameworks as a guide: a collateral consequences model and a punitive regime model. The authors use state-level panel data to estimate how the size of the incarcerated population is related to Medicaid enrollments across states and within them over time. These analyses suggest that incarceration rates do have a substantial and positive effect on Medicaid rates within states over time. Across states, the relationship is less clear. On average, states with higher incarceration rates had somewhat fewer Medicaid enrollments until the early 1990s. After this point, Medicaid enrollments began to increase with the size of the incarcerated population. These findings suggest that though states' efforts to control crime and poverty may be linked, whereby states that use incarceration liberally are also stingy with Medicaid, the collateral consequences of mass incarceration undermine these efforts by producing greater demands for social welfare services.
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Salomeh Keyhani et al.
Medical Care, March 2012, Pages 257-261
Objective: To examine the relationship between overuse of healthcare services and geographic variations in medical care.
Design: Systematic Review.
Data Sources: Articles published in Medline between 1978, the year of publication of the first framework to measure quality, and January 1, 2009.
Study Selection: Four investigators screened 114,830 titles and 2 investigators screened all selected abstracts and articles for possible inclusion and extracted all data.
Data Extraction: We extracted data on rates of overuse in different geographic areas. We also extracted data on underuse, if available, for the same population in which overuse was measured.
Results: Five papers examined the relationship between geographic variations and overuse of healthcare services. One study in 2008 compared the appropriateness of coronary angiography (CA) for acute myocardial infarction in high-cost areas versus low cost areas in the Medicare population and found largely similar rates of inappropriateness (12.2% vs. 16.2%). A study in 2000 using national data concluded that overuse of CA explained little of the geographic variations in the use of this procedure in the Medicare program. An older study of Medicare patients found similar rates of inappropriate use of CA (15% to 17% vs. 18%), endoscopy (15% vs. 18% 19%), and carotid endarterectomy (29% vs. 30%) in low-use and high-use regions. A small area reanalysis of data from this study of 3 procedures found no evidence of a relationship between inappropriate use of procedures and volume in 23 adjacent counties of California. Another 2008 study found that inappropriate chemotherapy for stage I cancer was less common in low-cost areas compared with high-cost areas (3.1% vs. 6.3%).
Conclusions: The limited available evidence does not lend support to the hypothesis that inappropriate use of procedures is a major source of geographic variations in intensity and/or costs of care. More research is needed to improve our understanding of the relationship between geographic variations and the quality of care.
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Cathy Bradley et al.
Health Affairs, February 2012, Pages 350-359
Abstract:
The Affordable Care Act will expand health insurance coverage for an estimated thirty-two million uninsured Americans. Increased access to care is intended to reduce the unnecessary use of services such as emergency department visits and to achieve substantial cost savings. However, there is little evidence for such claims. To determine how the uninsured might respond once coverage becomes available, we studied uninsured low-income adults enrolled in a community-based primary care program at Virginia Commonwealth University Medical Center. For people continuously enrolled in the program, emergency department visits and inpatient admissions declined, while primary care visits increased during the study period. Inpatient costs fell each year for this group. Over three years of enrollment, average total costs per year per enrollee fell from $8,899 to $4,569 - a savings of almost 50 percent. We conclude that previously uninsured people may have fewer emergency department visits and lower costs after receiving coverage but that it may take several years of coverage for substantive health care savings to occur.
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The Value of Consumer Choice and the Decline in HMO Enrollments
Gerard Wedig
Economic Inquiry, forthcoming
Abstract:
Health insurance contracts may restrict consumers' choice of medical provider (e.g., hospital) in order to minimize moral hazard inefficiencies. In this article, I assess the economic value of this strategy by comparing the estimated "option value" that consumers assign to provider choice to the negotiated discounts that insurers can achieve by negotiating with a restricted set of providers (i.e., volume discounts). Using a panel of federal employees' health plan choices from 1999 to 2003, I show that the practice of selective contracting (SC) with a limited set of hospitals reduced health maintenance organization (HMO) plans' expected utility by $62-$118, on average, for a standard reduction in the provider choice set. I also conduct simulations which show that by 2003 health plans using SC were theoretically unable to achieve sufficiently large volume discounts from hospital providers to fully compensate for the associated utility losses. My results help to explain the flight from HMO enrollments that occurred in the early 2000s.
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The price sensitivity of Medicare beneficiaries: A regression discontinuity approach
Thomas Buchmueller et al.
Health Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
We use 4 years of data from the retiree health benefits program of the University of Michigan to estimate the effect of price on the health plan choices of Medicare beneficiaries. During the period of our analysis, changes in the University's premium contribution rules led to substantial price changes. A key feature of this 'natural experiment' is that individuals who had retired before a certain date were exempted from having to pay any premium contributions. This 'grandfathering' creates quasi-experimental variation that is ideal for estimating the effect of price. Using regression discontinuity methods, we compare the plan choices of individuals who retired just after the grandfathering cutoff date and were therefore exposed to significant price changes to the choices of a 'control group' of individuals who retired just before that date and therefore did not experience the price changes. The results indicate a statistically significant effect of price, with a $10 increase in monthly premium contributions leading to a 2 to 3 percentage point decrease in a plan's market share.
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Jonathan Weiner et al.
Health Affairs, February 2012, Pages 306-315
Abstract:
The Affordable Care Act calls for the establishment of state-level health insurance exchanges. The viability and success of these exchanges will require effective risk-adjustment strategies to compensate for differences in enrollees' health status across health plans. This article describes why the Affordable Care Act could lead to favorable or adverse risk selection across plans. It reviews provisions in the act and recent proposed regulations intended to mitigate the problem of risk selection. We performed a simulation that showed that under the premium rating restrictions in the law, large incentives for insurers to attract healthier enrollees will be likely to persist - resulting in substantial overpayment to plans with very healthy enrollees and underpayment to plans with very sick members. We conclude that risk adjustment based on patients' diagnoses, such as will be in place from 2014 on, will yield payments to insurers that will be more accurate than what will come solely from the age-adjusted and other rating allowed by the act. We also describe additional challenges of implementing risk adjustment.
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Hospital Ownership Type and Treatment Choices
Esra Eren Bayindir
Journal of Health Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
In the face of increasing health care costs, taxing not-for-profit hospitals may be seen as the right choice to increase government revenues if not-for-profit hospitals are not different from their for-profit counterparts. This study investigates how hospital ownership type affects treatment choices to show whether ownership type and teaching status are correlated with choosing a procedure as the treatment and how these choices relate to patient insurance type. Not-for-profit hospitals significantly differ from for-profits in terms of treatment choices of less profitable patients and all hospitals are more likely to accord the procedure when the patient is privately insured than uninsured though teaching government hospitals are the most likely to accord the procedures for all insurance types. Considering treatment choices, not-for-profit hospitals have different objectives than for-profit and government hospitals and in terms of profit-seeking behavior, not-for-profit hospitals seem to lie between for-profit and government hospitals.
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Aaron Sojourner et al.
NBER Working Paper, January 2012
Abstract:
This paper studies the effects of unions in private-sector nursing homes on a broad range of labor, firm, and consumer outcomes. We link national data on nursing home characteristics from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to records on establishment-level unionization from federal labor agencies, and employ a regression discontinuity design to identify union effects by contrasting outcomes in nursing homes where unions closely won representation elections to outcomes in facilities where unions closely lost such elections. After showing that these two sets of homes are similar leading up to the election, we estimate union effects on staffing levels, care quality, and other outcomes. We find negative effects of unions on staffing levels and no decline in care quality, suggesting positive productivity effects. Consistent with these results, supplementary analysis shows significant increases in wages for some classes of nursing labor. Some evidence suggests that nursing homes in local product markets that were less competitive and had lower union density at the time of election experienced stronger union employment effects. We find no impact of unionization on facility survival. By combining credible identification of union effects, a comprehensive set of outcomes over time with measures of market-level characteristics, this study generates some of the best evidence available on many controversial questions in the economics of unions. Furthermore, it generates evidence from the service sector, which has grown in importance and where evidence on these questions has been thin.
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How Choices In Exchange Design For States Could Affect Insurance Premiums And Levels Of Coverage
Fredric Blavin et al.
Health Affairs, February 2012, Pages 290-298
Abstract:
The Affordable Care Act gives states the option to create health insurance exchanges from which individuals and small employers can purchase health insurance. States have considerable flexibility in how they design and implement these exchanges. We analyze several key design options being considered, using the Urban Institute's Health Insurance Policy Simulation Model: creating separate versus merged small-group and nongroup markets, eliminating age rating in these markets, removing the small-employer credit, and setting the maximum number of employees for firms in the small-group market at 50 versus 100 workers. Among our findings are that merging the small-group and nongroup markets would result in 1.7 million more people nationwide participating in the exchanges and, because of greater affordability of nongroup coverage, approximately 1.0 million more people being insured than if the risk pools were not merged. The various options generate relatively small differences in overall coverage and cost, although some, such as reducing age rating bands, would result in higher costs for some people while lowering costs for others. These cost effects would be most apparent among people who purchase coverage without federal subsidies. On the whole, we conclude that states can make these design choices based on local support and preferences without dramatic repercussions for overall coverage and cost outcomes.
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U.S. hospital efficiency and adoption of health information technology
Natalia Zhivan & Mark Diana
Health Care Management Science, March 2012, Pages 37-47
Abstract:
This study empirically examines the association between hospital inefficiency and the decision to introduce electronic medical records (EMR) and computerized physician order entry (CPOE) in a national sample of U.S. general hospitals in urban areas in 2006. The main research question is whether the presence of hospital cost inefficiency or other factors driving inefficiency in the production process of a hospital explain low adoption rates of health information technology (HIT) in a hospital setting. We estimated a logistic regression of HIT adoption as a function of hospital cost inefficiency scores obtained using a stochastic frontier analysis. The results demonstrate that hospitals with a greater degree of cost inefficiency were more likely to introduce EMR, suggesting that the benefits of EMR implementation in terms of improved efficiency were likely to outweigh the costs of adoption compared to hospitals that are more efficient. The results showed no association between cost inefficiency and the CPOE adoption decision.
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Small Firms' Actions In Two Areas, And Exchange Premium And Enrollment Impact
Christine Eibner et al.
Health Affairs, February 2012, Pages 324-331
Abstract:
The Affordable Care Act changed the regulations governing small firms' health insurance premiums. However, small businesses can avoid many of the new regulations by self-insuring or maintaining grandfathered plans. If small firms with healthy and lower-cost enrollees avoid the regulations, premiums for coverage sold through insurance exchanges could be unaffordable. In this analysis we used the RAND Comprehensive Assessment of Reform Efforts microsimulation model to predict the effects of self-insurance and grandfathering exemptions on coverage and premiums available through the exchanges. We estimate that Affordable Care Act regulations restricting employers' ability to offer grandfathered plans will result in lower premiums on plans available through the exchanges and will have small negative effects on enrollment in the exchanges. Our results suggest that these regulations are essential to keeping premiums on the Small Business Health Options Program (SHOP) exchanges affordable. Our analysis also found that Affordable Care Act regulations limiting self-insurance will reduce enrollment in the exchanges somewhat, without substantially affecting exchange premiums.
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Robert Kaestner & Nasreen Khan
Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, forthcoming
Abstract:
We examine the effect of gaining prescription drug insurance, as a result of Medicare Part D, on use of prescription drugs and other medical services for a nationally representative sample of Medicare beneficiaries. Given the heightened importance of prescription drugs for those with chronic illness, we provide separate estimates for elderly in poorer health. We find that Medicare Part D significantly reduced socioeconomic and geographic disparities in prescription drug insurance among the elderly. Gaining prescription drug insurance through Medicare Part D was associated with a 30 percent increase in the number of annual prescriptions and a 40 percent increase in expenditures on prescription drugs for both the general population of the elderly and the elderly in poorer health. We find little evidence that prescription drug insurance was strongly associated with the use of outpatient and inpatient services, although our investigation of these associations was limited by a lack of statistical power.
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Melissa Ford Shah et al.
Journal of Disability Policy Studies, March 2012, Pages 220-229
Abstract:
This study examines the effectiveness of Washington State's Medicaid Buy-In (MBI) program - Healthcare for Workers With Disabilities (HWD) - which gives workers with disabilities who earn too much for conventional Medicaid the opportunity to purchase full Medicaid coverage by paying a monthly premium based on a sliding income scale. The authors compare HWD enrollees who recently had conventional Medicaid coverage to a statistically matched group of individuals who had conventional Medicaid coverage in recent history and at baseline. Their findings suggest that MBI in Washington State is encouraging work, increasing earnings, and decreasing reliance on food stamps while providing medical coverage to a vulnerable population for whom continuous health insurance is particularly important.
Sunday, February 19, 2012
Under the Influences
Janet Rosenbaum
Journal of Adolescent Health, February 2012, Page S75
Purpose: This research quantifies the impact of high school suspension on the alcohol and drug use of young adults at ages 25-31. Zero-tolerance high school disciplinary policies have been criticized by the American Academy of Pediatrics, but little research has assessed long-term impacts of high school suspension. The research tests hypotheses generated by the theory of secondary deviance, which predicts that school suspension for minor deviance will induce more severe deviance.
Methods: The research analyzed National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health data from in-home interview at waves 1-4 and the school administrator survey. The sample comprised 14,738 students who had never been suspended as of wave 1, of whom 1,572 were suspended between waves 1 and 2. Rubin Causal Inference Model methods were used to infer the impact of high school suspension on the 1,572 suspended students, including Coarsened Exact Matching and Full Matching. We used matching methods to construct a comparison group of non-suspended students similar to the 1,572 suspended students on pre-suspension (wave 1) characteristics. Imbalance between suspended and non-suspended youth is measured as a unitless quantity from 0 to 1, with 0 representing perfect balance, a successful match. Incidence rate ratios were obtained from Poisson regressions within the matched sample that controlled for socioeconomic and educational characteristics. Results were stratified by tertiles of parents' income and test score.
Results: The initial analysis used exact matching on 10 characteristics. The initial results evaluated high school graduation at ages 18-24 and BA attainment at ages 25-31. Exact matching on 10 characteristics reduced imbalance from 0.63 to 0 (perfect match) by restricting analysis to a sub-sample of 1,338 of the 1,572 suspended students. The similar comparison group was 7,835 non-suspended students. School suspension decreased the likelihood of high school graduation by 37% and BA attainment by 77% among low-income youth with high test scores. School suspension decreased the likelihood of BA attainment among nearly all levels of parent income and test scores, an average of reduction of 60%. Subsequent analyses will compare alcohol and drug use between suspended and non-suspended youth, and matching will use a larger set of control variables.
Conclusions: Twelve years later, school suspension may decrease BA attainment among all nearly all groups of youth. Low income youth with high test scores have the potential for socioeconomic mobility but seem particularly at risk for bad outcomes of school suspension. Subsequent analyses will evaluate whether suspended youth are also more likely to engage in alcohol and drug use.
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The Animal House effect: How university-themed comedy films affect students' attitudes
Louise Wasylkiw & Michael Currie
Social Psychology of Education, March 2012, Pages 25-40
Abstract:
Drawing from learning and attitude theories, the current investigation explores the effect of media on students' attitudes. Study 1 was a content analysis of 34 films classified as university-themed comedies and showed that such films highlighted risk-taking (e.g., alcohol consumption) and minimized the importance of academics (e.g., studying). The purpose of Study 2 was to demonstrate the impact of these films on the attitudes university students hold. One hundred and twenty-four undergraduates viewed a segment of either Animal House or a neutral film and results showed that viewing Animal House brought about positive attitudes towards substance use and negative attitudes towards academics even when controlling for past substance use and movie viewing frequency. The discussion focuses on future directions.
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Brian Primack et al.
Journal of Adolescent Health, February 2012, Page S13
Purpose: While smoking is associated with multiple sociodemographic, personal and environmental factors, evidence indicates that exposure to smoking depicted in movies is a strong risk factor for smoking outcomes among adolescents. However, it is not known whether exposure to smoking depicted in movies carries greater influence during early or late adolescence. We aimed to quantify the independent relative contribution to established smoking of exposure to smoking depicted in movies during both early and late adolescence.
Methods: We prospectively assessed 2,049 non-smoking students recruited from 14 randomly selected public schools in New Hampshire and Vermont. At baseline enrollment, students ages 10-14 completed a written survey capturing personal, family, and sociodemographic characteristics and exposure to depictions of smoking in the movies (early exposure). Seven years later, we conducted follow-up telephone interviews to ascertain follow-up exposure to movie smoking (late exposure) and smoking behavior. We used multiple regression models to assess associations between early and late exposure and development of established smoking, defined as having smoked 100 or more cigarettes in one's lifetime. We included in these models potential confounders that demonstrated a bivariable association of P<.20 with established smoking. These multivariable analyses also controlled for clustering of participants within schools by robust sandwich estimator of variance. We estimated covariate-adjusted attributable risk by calculating the reduced probability of established smoking realized by decreasing each participant's exposure from his or her reported level to the first quartile.
Results: Of the final sample of 2049 participants, 1886 (92.0%) were non-Hispanic white and 1092 (53.3%) were female. At baseline, the participants' mean age was 12.1 years (SD=1.1). At follow-up, ages ranged from 16 to 22 years, with a mean of 18.7 years (SD=1.1), One-sixth (17.3%) of the sample progressed to established smoking. In analyses that controlled for covariates and included early and late exposure in the same model, we found that students in the highest quartile for early exposure, compared to those in the lowest, had 73% greater risk of established smoking (relative risk, 1.73; 95% confidence interval, 1.14-2.62). However, risk did not differ for those in the highest and lowest quartiles of late exposure (relative risk for Q4 vs. Q1, 1.13; 95% CI, 0.89-1.44). According to attributable risk models, early exposure was responsible for 31.6% (95% CI, 10.1-53.2) of established smoking in these adolescents. However, only an additional 5.3% (95% CI, -7.0-17.5) of established smoking was attributable to late exposure.
Conclusions: Being in the highest quartile of early exposure was associated with a 73% increase in the relative risk of becoming an established smoker. This suggests that early exposure to smoking depicted in movies is a stronger risk factor than many other factors previously assumed to be highly potent, including parent, sibling, and peer smoking, which had relative risks of 1.36, 1.29, and 1.64, respectively in this study. Educational and policy-related interventions should focus on minimizing early exposure to smoking depicted in movies.
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The Effect of Alcohol Availability on Marijuana Use: Evidence from the Minimum Legal Drinking Age
Benjamin Crost & Santiago Guerrero
Journal of Health Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper exploits the discontinuity created by the Minimum Legal Drinking Age of 21 years to estimate the causal effect of increased alcohol availability on marijuana use. We find that consumption of marijuana decreases sharply at age 21, while consumption of alcohol increases, suggesting that marijuana and alcohol are substitutes. We further find that the substitution effect between alcohol and marijuana is stronger for women than for men. Our results suggest that policies designed to limit alcohol use have the unintended consequence of increasing marijuana use.
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The Effectiveness of Mandatory-Random Student Drug Testing: A Cluster Randomized Trial
Susanne James-Burdumy et al.
Journal of Adolescent Health, February 2012, Pages 172-178
Purpose: This article presents findings from the largest experimental evaluation to date of school-based mandatory-random student drug testing (MRSDT). The study tested the effectiveness of MRSDT in reducing substance use among high school students.
Methods: Cluster randomized trial included 36 high schools and more than 4,700 9th through 12th grade students. After baseline data collection in spring 2007, about half the schools were randomly assigned to a treatment group that was permitted to implement MRSDT immediately, and the remaining half were assigned to a control group that delayed MRSDT until after follow-up data collection was completed 1 year later, in spring 2008. Data from self-administered student questionnaires were used to compare rates of substance use in treatment and control schools at follow-up.
Results: Students subject to MRSDT by their districts reported less substances use in past 30 days compared with students in schools without MRSDT. The program had no detectable spillover effects on the substance use of students not subject to testing. We found no evidence of unintentional negative effects on students' future intentions to use substances, the proportion of students who participated in activities subject to drug testing, or on students' attitudes toward school and perceived consequences of substance use.
Conclusions: MRSDT shows promise in reducing illicit substance use among high school students. The impacts of this study were measured for a 1-year period and may not represent longer term effects.
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Jacky Jennings et al.
Social Science & Medicine, forthcoming
Abstract:
We hypothesized that neighborhoods with drug markets, as compared to those without, have a greater concentration of infected sex partners, i.e. core transmitters, and that in these areas, there is an increased risk environment for STIs. This study determined if neighborhood drug markets were associated with a high-risk sex partnership and, separately, with a current bacterial STI (chlamydia and/or gonorrhea) after controlling for individual demographic and sexual risk factors among a household sample of young people in Baltimore City, MD. Analyses also tested whether links were independent of neighborhood socioeconomic status. Data for this study were collected from a household study, systematic social observations and police arrest, public health STI surveillance and U.S. census data. Nonlinear multilevel models showed that living in neighborhoods with household survey-reported drug markets increased the likelihood of having a high-risk sex partnership after controlling for individual level demographic factors and illicit drug use and neighborhood socioeconomic status. Further, living in neighborhoods with survey-reported drug markets increased the likelihood of having a current bacterial STI after controlling for individual level demographic and sexual risk factors and neighborhood socioeconomic status. The results suggest that local conditions in neighborhoods with drug markets may play an important role in setting-up risk environments for high-risk sex partnerships and bacterial STIs. Patterns observed appeared dependent on the type of drug market indicator used. Future studies should explore how conditions in areas with local drug markets may alter sexual networks structures and whether specific types of drug markets are particularly important in determining STI risk.
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Sudip Chattopadhyay & David Pieper
Contemporary Economic Policy, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper presents a benefit-cost analysis of the ongoing, state-level tobacco prevention and control programs in the United States. Using state-level panel data for the years 1991-2007, the study applies several variants of econometric modeling approaches to estimate the state-level tobacco demand. The paper finds a statistically significant evidence of a sustained and steadily increasing long-run impact of the tobacco control program spending on cigarette demand in states. The study also shows that, if individual states follow the Best Practices funding guidelines, potential future annual benefits of the tobacco control program can be as high as 14-20 times the cost of program implementation.
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The Return on Investment of a Medicaid Tobacco Cessation Program in Massachusetts
Patrick Richard, Kristina West & Leighton Ku
PLoS ONE, January 2012, e29665
Background and Objective: A high proportion of low-income people insured by the Medicaid program smoke. Earlier research concerning a comprehensive tobacco cessation program implemented by the state of Massachusetts indicated that it was successful in reducing smoking prevalence and those who received tobacco cessation benefits had lower rates of in-patient admissions for cardiovascular conditions, including acute myocardial infarction, coronary atherosclerosis and non-specific chest pain. This study estimates the costs of the tobacco cessation benefit and the short-term Medicaid savings attributable to the aversion of inpatient hospitalization for cardiovascular conditions.
Methods: A cost-benefit analysis approach was used to estimate the program's return on investment. Administrative data were used to compute annual cost per participant. Data from the 2002-2008 Medical Expenditure Panel Survey and from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance Surveys were used to estimate the costs of hospital inpatient admissions by Medicaid smokers. These were combined with earlier estimates of the rate of reduction in cardiovascular hospital admissions attributable to the tobacco cessation program to calculate the return on investment.
Findings: Administrative data indicated that program costs including pharmacotherapy, counseling and outreach costs about $183 per program participant (2010 $). We estimated inpatient savings per participant of $571 (range $549 to $583). Every $1 in program costs was associated with $3.12 (range $3.00 to $3.25) in medical savings, for a $2.12 (range $2.00 to $2.25) return on investment to the Medicaid program for every dollar spent.
Conclusions: These results suggest that an investment in comprehensive tobacco cessation services may result in substantial savings for Medicaid programs. Further federal and state policy actions to promote and cover comprehensive tobacco cessation services in Medicaid may be a cost-effective approach to improve health outcomes for low-income populations.
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Smoking bans and acute myocardial infarction incidence
Michael Marlow
Applied Economics Letters, forthcoming
Abstract:
This article examines the effect of statewide smoking bans on Acute Myocardial Infarction (AMI) incidence. After controlling for endogeneity between smoking ban status and AMI incidence, an econometric model indicates that smoking bans exerted no significant effect over 2005-2009 in the 50 states. The evidence thus suggests that findings from previous studies that bans lowered AMI incidence from 6% to 47% were the result of possible sampling bias and/or from examining periods too short with which to fully evaluate the longer term effects from bans.
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Jennifer Mitchell et al.
Science Translational Medicine, 11 January 2012, Page 116ra6
Abstract:
Excessive consumption of alcohol is among the leading causes of preventable death worldwide. Although ethanol modulates a variety of molecular targets, including several neurotransmitter receptors, the neural mechanisms that underlie its rewarding actions and lead to excessive consumption are unknown. Studies in animals suggest that release of endogenous opioids by ethanol promotes further consumption. To examine this issue in humans and to determine where in the brain endogenous opioids act to promote alcohol consumption, we measured displacement of a radiolabeled μ opioid receptor agonist, [11C]carfentanil, before and immediately after alcohol consumption in both heavy drinkers and control subjects. Drinking alcohol induced opioid release in the nucleus accumbens and orbitofrontal cortex, areas of the brain implicated in reward valuation. Opioid release in the orbitofrontal cortex and nucleus accumbens was significantly positively correlated. Furthermore, changes in orbitofrontal cortex binding correlated significantly with problem alcohol use and subjective high in heavy drinkers, suggesting that differences in endogenous opioid function in these regions contribute to excessive alcohol consumption. These results also suggest a possible mechanism by which opioid antagonists such as naltrexone act to treat alcohol abuse.
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Kayo Fujimoto, Jennifer Unger & Thomas Valente
Child Development, forthcoming
Abstract:
Using a network analytic framework, this study introduces a new method to measure peer influence based on adolescents' affiliations or 2-mode social network data. Exposure based on affiliations is referred to as the "affiliation exposure model." This study demonstrates the methodology using data on young adolescent smoking being influenced by joint participation in school-based organized sports activities with smokers. The analytic sample consisted of 1,260 American adolescents from ages 10 to 13 in middle schools, and the results of the longitudinal regression analyses showed that adolescents were more likely to smoke as they were increasingly exposed to teammates who smoke. This study illustrates the importance of peer influence via affiliation through team sports.
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Liesbeth Mercken et al.
Health Psychology, forthcoming
Objective: Similarity in smoking behavior among adolescent friends could be caused by selection of friends on the basis of behavioral similarity, or by influence processes, where behavior is changed to be similar to that of friends. The main aim of the present study is to disentangle selection and influence processes and study changes over time in these processes using new methods of longitudinal social network analysis.
Methods: The sample consists of 1716 adolescents (mean age at baseline = 12.17 years, SD = .38) in 11 British schools participating in the control group of the ASSIST (A Stop Smoking in School Trial) study. The design was longitudinal with three observations at one-year intervals. At each observation, participants were asked to report on their smoking behavior and friendship networks. An actor-based model of friendship network and smoking behavior coevolution (a statistical model for the simultaneously occurring changes in friendship nominations and smoking) was analyzed, capable of modeling possible changes occurring between observations, allowing alternative influence and selection mechanisms to be investigated, and avoiding the violation of assumptions of statistical independence of observed data.
Results: Adolescent's tendency to select friends based on similar smoking behavior was found to be a stronger predictor of smoking behavior than friends' influence. The proportion of smoking behavior similarity explained by smoking-based selection of friends increased over time, whereas the proportion explained by influence of friends decreased.
Conclusions: Smoking prevention should not solely focus on social influence but also consider selection processes and changes in both processes over time during adolescence.
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Matthew Harding, Ephraim Leibtag & Michael Lovenheim
American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper uses Nielsen Homescan data at the Universal Product Code-transaction level to identify how cigarette taxes are passed through to consumer prices in order to determine how the supply and demand-side split the excess burden of taxation. We find that these excise taxes are less than fully passed through to consumer prices. Using information on consumer location and the location of purchases, we show that the availability of lower-tax goods across uncontrolled borders creates significant differences in how consumer prices are affected by excise taxes. Close to lower-tax borders, about half of the cigarette tax is passed on to consumers through higher prices. Far from these borders, however, consumer prices are much more responsive to excise taxes. We also demonstrate that tax evasion opportunities have a sizable effect on purchasing behavior by altering consumer search, prices paid and quantities purchased. With the household demographic information contained in our data, we show that the incidence of cigarette taxes and the border effect varies across household income groups and race. These findings have important consequences for the distribution of the excess burden of cigarette taxes and thus for the social welfare costs and benefits of these taxes.
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The effects of family stressors on substance use initiation in adolescence
Jason Fletcher & Jody Sindelar
Review of Economics of the Household, March 2012, Pages 99-114
Abstract:
Smoking and drinking are critical problems in adolescence that have long-term adverse impacts on health and socio-economic factors. We examine the extent to which family stresses influence the timing of initiation of smoking and drinking. Using national panel data from the National Educational Longitudinal Study (NELS) we capitalize on the survey design and use school-level fixed effects that control for the local environments, including prices of cigarettes and alcohol. In addition, we narrow our control group to classmates who will experience a similar stressor in the future. We find that a composite measure of family stressors when young increases the likelihood of initiating tobacco and alcohol use, with much of the impact attributable to parental divorce. In our baseline estimates, the composite stress measure is associated with a 30% increase in the likelihood of smoking and a 20% increase in drinking. When we control for multiple sources of confounding, the impact shrinks and remains significant for smoking but not for drinking. We conclude that studies which do not control for confounding are likely to significantly overestimate the impact of family stress on substance use. Our approach helps to move the literature forward by separating causal results from spurious associations.
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A Search-Theoretic Model of the Retail Market for Illicit Drugs
Manolis Galenianos, Rosalie Liccardo Pacula & Nicola Persico
Review of Economic Studies, forthcoming
Abstract:
A search-theoretic model of the retail market for illegal drugs is developed. Trade occurs in bilateral, potentially long-lived matches between sellers and buyers. Buyers incur search costs when experimenting with a new seller. Moral hazard is present because buyers learn purity only after a trade is made. This model is consistent with some new stylized facts about the drugs market, and it is informative for policy design. The effectiveness of different enforcement strategies is evaluated, including some novel ones that leverage the moral hazard present in the market.
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Julia Dilley et al.
American Journal of Public Health, February 2012, Pages e22-e28
Objectives: We examined health effects associated with 3 tobacco control interventions in Washington State: a comprehensive state program, a state policy banning smoking in public places, and price increases.
Methods: We used linear regression models to predict changes in smoking prevalence and specific tobacco-related health conditions associated with the interventions. We estimated dollars saved over 10 years (2000-2009) by the value of hospitalizations prevented, discounting for national trends.
Results: Smoking declines in the state exceeded declines in the nation. Of the interventions, the state program had the most consistent and largest effect on trends for heart disease, cerebrovascular disease, respiratory disease, and cancer. Over 10 years, implementation of the program was associated with prevention of nearly 36 000 hospitalizations, at a value of about $1.5 billion. The return on investment for the state program was more than $5 to $1.
Conclusions: The combined program, policy, and price interventions resulted in reductions in smoking and related health effects, while saving money. Public health and other leaders should continue to invest in tobacco control, including comprehensive programs.
Saturday, February 18, 2012
Put your mind to it
The Idea of Money Counteracts Ego Depletion Effects
Helen Boucher & Monthe Kofos
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Self-control draws upon a resource that is limited, such that acts of self-control deplete the resource, causing performance on subsequent acts of self-control to suffer. In this research, we demonstrate that activating the concept of money can buffer this ego depletion effect. Across two experiments using varied operationalizations of self-control, participants completed an initial task that depleted self-control resources or not, were then reminded of money or neutral concepts, and finally, completed a second task requiring self-control. In both experiments, among depleted participants, those reminded of money performed better on the second self-control task than those reminded of neutral concepts. Additional analyses in Experiment 2 suggest that this buffering effect was due to money reducing both the subjective difficulty and effort required on the second self-control task.
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A Combination of Dopamine Genes Predicts Success by Professional Wall Street Traders
Steve Sapra, Laura Beavin & Paul Zak
PLoS ONE, January 2012, e30844
Abstract:
What determines success on Wall Street? This study examined if genes affecting dopamine levels of professional traders were associated with their career tenure. Sixty professional Wall Street traders were genotyped and compared to a control group who did not trade stocks. We found that distinct alleles of the dopamine receptor 4 promoter (DRD4P) and catecholamine-O-methyltransferase (COMT) that affect synaptic dopamine were predominant in traders. These alleles are associated with moderate, rather than very high or very low, levels of synaptic dopamine. The activity of these alleles correlated positively with years spent trading stocks on Wall Street. Differences in personality and trading behavior were also correlated with allelic variants. This evidence suggests there may be a genetic basis for the traits that make one a successful trader.
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At 6-9 months, human infants know the meanings of many common nouns
Elika Bergelson & Daniel Swingley
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, forthcoming
Abstract:
It is widely accepted that infants begin learning their native language not by learning words, but by discovering features of the speech signal: consonants, vowels, and combinations of these sounds. Learning to understand words, as opposed to just perceiving their sounds, is said to come later, between 9 and 15 mo of age, when infants develop a capacity for interpreting others' goals and intentions. Here, we demonstrate that this consensus about the developmental sequence of human language learning is flawed: in fact, infants already know the meanings of several common words from the age of 6 mo onward. We presented 6- to 9-mo-old infants with sets of pictures to view while their parent named a picture in each set. Over this entire age range, infants directed their gaze to the named pictures, indicating their understanding of spoken words. Because the words were not trained in the laboratory, the results show that even young infants learn ordinary words through daily experience with language. This surprising accomplishment indicates that, contrary to prevailing beliefs, either infants can already grasp the referential intentions of adults at 6 mo or infants can learn words before this ability emerges. The precocious discovery of word meanings suggests a perspective in which learning vocabulary and learning the sound structure of spoken language go hand in hand as language acquisition begins.
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Positive and Negative Mental Health Consequences of Early Childhood Television Watching
Michael Waldman, Sean Nicholson & Nodir Adilov
NBER Working Paper, January 2012
Abstract:
An extensive literature in medicine investigates the health consequences of early childhood television watching. However, this literature does not address the issue of reverse causation, i.e., does early childhood television watching cause specific health outcomes or do children more likely to have these health outcomes watch more television? This paper uses a natural experiment to investigate the health consequences of early childhood television watching and so is not subject to questions concerning reverse causation. Specifically, we use repeated cross-sectional data from 1972 through 1992 on county-level mental retardation rates, county-level autism rates, and county-level children's cable-television subscription rates to investigate how early childhood television watching affects the prevalence of mental retardation and autism. We find a strong negative correlation between average county-level cable subscription rates when a birth cohort is below three and subsequent mental retardation diagnosis rates, but a strong positive correlation between the same cable subscription rates and subsequent autism diagnosis rates. Our results thus suggest that early childhood television watching has important positive and negative health consequences.
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Familial Linkage between Neuropsychiatric Disorders and Intellectual Interests
Benjamin Campbell & Samuel Wang
PLoS ONE, January 2012, e30405
Abstract:
From personality to neuropsychiatric disorders, individual differences in brain function are known to have a strong heritable component. Here we report that between close relatives, a variety of neuropsychiatric disorders covary strongly with intellectual interests. We surveyed an entire class of high-functioning young adults at an elite university for prospective major, familial incidence of neuropsychiatric disorders, and demographic and attitudinal questions. Students aspiring to technical majors (science/mathematics/engineering) were more likely than other students to report a sibling with an autism spectrum disorder (p = 0.037). Conversely, students interested in the humanities were more likely to report a family member with major depressive disorder (p = 8.8×10-4), bipolar disorder (p = 0.027), or substance abuse problems (p = 1.9×10-6). A combined PREdisposition for Subject MattEr (PRESUME) score based on these disorders was strongly predictive of subject matter interests (p = 9.6×10-8). Our results suggest that shared genetic (and perhaps environmental) factors may both predispose for heritable neuropsychiatric disorders and influence the development of intellectual interests.
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David Moreau et al.
Journal of Individual Differences, Spring 2012, Pages 83-88
Abstract:
This experiment investigated the relationship between mental rotation and sport training. Undergraduate university students (n = 62) completed the Mental Rotation Test (Vandenberg & Kuse, 1978), before and after a 10-month training in two different sports, which either involved extensive mental rotation ability (wrestling group) or did not (running group). Both groups showed comparable results in the pretest, but the wrestling group outperformed the running group in the posttest. As expected from previous studies, males outperformed women in the pretest and the posttest. Besides, self-reported data gathered after both sessions indicated an increase in adaptive strategies following training in wrestling, but not subsequent to training in running. These findings demonstrate the significant effect of training in particular sports on mental rotation performance, thus showing consistency with the notion of cognitive plasticity induced from motor training involving manipulation of spatial representations. They are discussed within an embodied cognition framework.
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Genetic contributions to stability and change in intelligence from childhood to old age
Ian Deary et al.
Nature, 9 February 2012, Pages 212-215
Abstract:
Understanding the determinants of healthy mental ageing is a priority for society today. So far, we know that intelligence differences show high stability from childhood to old age and there are estimates of the genetic contribution to intelligence at different ages. However, attempts to discover whether genetic causes contribute to differences in cognitive ageing have been relatively uninformative. Here we provide an estimate of the genetic and environmental contributions to stability and change in intelligence across most of the human lifetime. We used genome-wide single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) data from 1,940 unrelated individuals whose intelligence was measured in childhood (age 11 years) and again in old age (age 65, 70 or 79 years). We use a statistical method that allows genetic (co)variance to be estimated from SNP data on unrelated individuals. We estimate that causal genetic variants in linkage disequilibrium with common SNPs account for 0.24 of the variation in cognitive ability change from childhood to old age. Using bivariate analysis, we estimate a genetic correlation between intelligence at age 11 years and in old age of 0.62. These estimates, derived from rarely available data on lifetime cognitive measures, warrant the search for genetic causes of cognitive stability and change.
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Ambiguity aversion and familiarity bias: Evidence from behavioral and gene association studies
Soo Hong Chew, Richard Ebstein & Songfa Zhong
Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, February 2012, Pages 1-18
Abstract:
It is increasingly recognized that decision making under uncertainty depends not only on probabilities, but also on psychological factors such as ambiguity and familiarity. Using 325 Beijing subjects, we conduct a neurogenetic study of ambiguity aversion and familiarity bias in an incentivized laboratory setting. For ambiguity aversion, 49.4% of the subjects choose to bet on the 50-50 deck despite the unknown deck paying 20% more. For familiarity bias, 39.6% choose the bet on Beijing's temperature rather than the corresponding bet with Tokyo even though the latter pays 20% more. We genotype subjects for anxiety-related candidate genes and find a serotonin transporter polymorphism being associated with familiarity bias, but not ambiguity aversion, while the dopamine D5 receptor gene and estrogen receptor beta gene are associated with ambiguity aversion only among female subjects. Our findings contribute to understanding of decision making under uncertainty beyond revealed preference.
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Kenneth Kishida et al.
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences, 5 March 2012, Pages 704-716
Abstract:
Measures of intelligence, when broadcast, serve as salient signals of social status, which may be used to unjustly reinforce low-status stereotypes about out-groups' cultural norms. Herein, we investigate neurobehavioural signals manifest in small (n = 5) groups using functional magnetic resonance imaging and a ‘ranked group IQ task' where implicit signals of social status are broadcast and differentiate individuals based on their expression of cognitive capacity. We report an initial overall decrease in the expression of cognitive capacity in the small group setting. However, the environment of the ‘ranked group IQ task' eventually stratifies the population into two groups (‘high performers', HP and ‘low performers', LP) identifiable based on changes in estimated intelligence quotient and brain responses in the amygdala and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. In addition, we demonstrate signals in the nucleus accumbens consistent with prediction errors in expected changes in status regardless of group membership. Our results suggest that individuals express diminished cognitive capacity in small groups, an effect that is exacerbated by perceived lower status within the group and correlated with specific neurobehavioural responses. The impact these reactions have on intergroup divisions and conflict resolution requires further investigation, but suggests that low-status groups may develop diminished capacity to mitigate conflict using non-violent means.
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Bogdan Kostic, Chastity McFarlan & Anne Cleary
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, forthcoming
Abstract:
Recent work (e.g., Nairne & Pandeirada, 2010) has shown that words are remembered better when they have been processed for their survival value in a grasslands context than when processed in other contexts. It has been suggested that this is because human memory systems were shaped by evolution specifically to help humans survive. Thus far, the survival processing advantage has mainly been shown with grasslands contexts, which are thought to be particularly relevant to human evolution. The present study demonstrated the survival processing advantage with other contexts (e.g., lost in a jungle), including with contexts that should not, in and of themselves, be relevant to human evolution (e.g., lost in outer space). We further examined whether implied social isolation plays a critical role in the survival advantage to memory by comparing scenarios in which the person is alone versus with other people present (e.g., lost at sea alone or with others), and whether the perceived source of danger is social isolation or other human attackers. A survival advantage was shown in both the isolation and the group settings, and whether the primary source of danger was isolation or other human attackers did not matter. These findings suggest that the survival advantage in memory is not dependent on evolutionarily relevant physical contexts (e.g., grasslands) or particular sources of perceived danger (social isolation vs. perceived attackers), showing the advantage to be robust and applicable to a variety of scenarios.
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Arne Öhman et al.
Journal of Cognitive Psychology, January 2012, Pages 17-32
Abstract:
In this paper we present an evolutionary analysis of attention to stimuli that are threatening from an evolutionary perspective, such as angry faces and snakes. We review data showing that angry, photographically depicted angry faces are more rapidly detected than happy faces in a visual search setting provided that they are male and that distractors are redundant in the sense that they are drawn from a small set of faces. Following Isbell's (2009) novel Snake Detection Theory, we predicted that snakes, as the prototypical predators, should be more rapidly detected than spiders, given that spiders have provided less of a predatory threat for primates. We review a series of experiments from our laboratory showing that snakes indeed are more rapidly detected than spiders provided that the target stimuli are presented in a demanding visual context, such as many distractor stimuli, or in peripheral vision. Furthermore, they are more distracting than spiders on the performance of a primary attention task. Because snakes were not affected by perceptual load, whereas spiders followed the usual rule of better detection with low perceptual load, we concluded that attending to snakes might constitute an evolutionary adaptation.
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The Association Between Physicians' Cognitive Skills and Quality of Diabetes Care
Brian Hess et al.
Academic Medicine, February 2012, Pages 157-163
Purpose: To examine the association between physicians' cognitive skills and their performance on a composite measure of diabetes care that included process, outcome, and patient experience measures.
Method: The sample was 676 physicians from the United States with time-limited certification in general internal medicine between 2005 and 2009. Scores from the American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) internal medicine maintenance of certification (MOC) examination were used to measure practicing physicians' cognitive skills (scores reflect fund of medical knowledge, diagnostic acumen, and clinical judgment). Practice performance was assessed using a diabetes composite measure aggregated from clinical and patient experience measures obtained from the ABIM Diabetes Practice Improvement Module.
Results: Using multiple regression analyses and controlling for physician and patient characteristics, MOC examination scores were significantly associated with the diabetes composite scores (β = .22, P < .001). The association was particularly stronger with intermediate outcomes than with process and patient experience measures. Performance in the endocrine disease content domain of the examination was more strongly associated with the diabetes composite scores (β = .19, P < .001) than the performance in other medical content domains (β = .06-.14).
Conclusions: Physicians' cognitive skills significantly relate to their performance on a comprehensive composite measure for diabetes care. Although significant, the modest association suggests that there are unique aspects of physician competence captured by each assessment alone and that both must be considered when assessing a physician's ability to provide high-quality care.
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Earthquakes on the Mind: Implications of Disasters for Human Performance
William Helton & James Head
Human Factors: The Journal of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, forthcoming
Objective: The present study explored the impact a natural disaster has on human performance.
Background: Previous research indicates that traffic accidents increase after disasters. A plausible explanation for this finding is that disasters induce cognitive disruption and this disruption negatively affects performance (e.g., driving quality).
Method: A total of 16 participants (7 men and 9 women) performed a sustained-attention-to-response task before and after a 7.1-magnitude earthquake. Performance (errors of omission, errors of commission, and reaction time) was compared before and after the earthquake.
Results: Errors of omission increased after the earthquake. Changes in errors of commission and reaction times were, however, dependent on individual differences in stress response to the earthquake.
Conclusion: The results indicate that natural disasters may have a negative impact on performance.
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Anna Vinkhuyzen et al.
Behavior Genetics, March 2012, Pages 187-198
Abstract:
Heritability estimates of general intelligence in adulthood generally range from 75 to 85%, with all heritability due to additive genetic influences, while genetic dominance and shared environmental factors are absent, or too small to be detected. These estimates are derived from studies based on the classical twin design and are based on the assumption of random mating. Yet, considerable positive assortative mating has been reported for general intelligence. Unmodeled assortative mating may lead to biased estimates of the relative magnitude of genetic and environmental factors. To investigate the effects of assortative mating on the estimates of the variance components of intelligence, we employed an extended twin-family design. Psychometric IQ data were available for adult monozygotic and dizygotic twins, their siblings, the partners of the twins and siblings, and either the parents or the adult offspring of the twins and siblings (N = 1314). Two underlying processes of assortment were considered: phenotypic assortment and social homogamy. The phenotypic assortment model was slightly preferred over the social homogamy model, suggesting that assortment for intelligence is mostly due to a selection of mates on similarity in intelligence. Under the preferred phenotypic assortment model, the variance of intelligence in adulthood was not only due to non-shared environmental (18%) and additive genetic factors (44%) but also to non-additive genetic factors (27%) and phenotypic assortment (11%).This non-additive nature of genetic influences on intelligence needs to be accommodated in future GWAS studies for intelligence.
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Nash Unsworth, Gregory Spillers & Gene Brewer
Memory, February 2012, Pages 167-176
Abstract:
Remembering previous experiences from one's personal past is a principal component of psychological well-being, personality, sense of self, decision making, and planning for the future. In the current study the ability to search for autobiographical information in memory was examined by having college students recall their Facebook friends. Individual differences in working memory capacity manifested itself in the search of autobiographical memory by way of the total number of friends remembered, the number of clusters of friends, size of clusters, and the speed with which participants could output their friends' names. Although working memory capacity was related to the ability to search autobiographical memory, participants did not differ in the manner in which they approached the search and used contextual cues to help query their memories. These results corroborate recent theorising, which suggests that working memory is a necessary component of self-generating contextual cues to strategically search memory for autobiographical information.
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Omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids and cognition in a college-aged population
Justin Karr, Tyler Grindstaff & Joel Alexander
Experimental and Clinical Psychopharmacology, forthcoming
Abstract:
The cognitive influences of omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids (n-3 PUFA) remain unclear throughout the life span. Dietary n-3 PUFA appear cognitively beneficial prenatally and neuroprotective at later age; however, researchers using supplementation designs have reported disparate findings across age groups. Few studies have examined the cognitive impact of n-3 PUFA during young adulthood. This study assessed the cognitive effects of fish oil supplementation at college age, hypothesizing benefits on affect, executive control, inhibition, and verbal learning and memory. College-aged participants were assigned to active (n = 20, 5 men; xage = 19.9, sage = 1.8) or placebo (n = 21, 7 men; xage = 20.4, sage = 1.6) treatments, receiving fish oil (480 mg DHA/720 mg EPA) or coconut oil, respectively. Both groups completed four weeks of supplementation. At baseline and posttreatment, the researchers administered the Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test (RAVLT; Lezak, 1995), Stroop Color and Word Test (SCWT; Golden & Freshwater, 2002), Trail Making Test (TMT; Corrigan & Hinkeldey, 1987; Gaudino, Geisler, & Squires, 1995; Lezak, 1995), and Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS; Watson, Clark, & Tellegen, 1988). Repeated-measures ANOVAs indicated no benefits of fish oil on the SCWT, RAVLT Stages 1 to 5, or PANAS. An interaction occurred between condition and time of measurement (i.e., baseline and posttreatment) on RAVLT Stages 6 and 7, and placebo significantly improved TMT performance over fish oil. The benefits of n-3 PUFA on RAVLT performance derived more from depreciated placebo performance than improved performance due to fish oil. The placebo gain on TMT performance likely derived from a learning effect. Together, these results present limited cognitive benefits of n-3 PUFA at college age; however, the treatment may have been subtherapeutic, with a larger sample needed to generalize these results.
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Digit ratio and academic performance in dentistry students
Renato Nicolás Hopp, Juliana Pucci de Moraes & Jacks Jorge
Personality and Individual Differences, April 2012, Pages 643-646
Abstract:
It has been suggested that prenatal testosterone (PT) is positively related to intelligence or learning-ability skills. Digit ratio (2D:4D) is a negative correlate of PT. This study considered the correlations between 2D:4D and success in practical and theoretical examinations in the Dental School curriculum of a Brazilian University. Overall, 80 subjects (40 males) had their right hand palm photographed by a digital camera attached to a standardising device. The index and ring fingers were measured using Adobe Photoshop. Digit ratio was correlated to the grades obtained by the students through four semesters. Theoretical and practical grades were significantly negatively correlated to digit ratio in males (and this was particularly so after the influence of age and hours of study were removed, p = 0.02 and 0.004, respectively), but not in females (p = 0.89 and 0.77, respectively). This finding supports a link between high PT and intelligence in males. Our finding of no relationship between 2D:4D and examination marks in female students, suggests that PT may not influence intelligence in females.
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Steven Young, Christina Brown & Nalini Ambady
Cognition & Emotion, forthcoming
Abstract:
Research suggests that attention is attracted to evolutionary threats (e.g., snakes) due to an evolved "fear-module" that automatically detects biological threats to survival. However, recent evidence indicates that non-evolutionary threats (e.g., guns) capture and hold attention as well, suggesting a more general "threat-relevance" mechanism that directs attentional resources toward any potential danger in the environment. The current research measured how selective attentional resources were influenced both by the type of threat (e.g., snake vs. gun) and by the context in which the threat was encountered. Participants were primed with either natural or human-made environments to assess how these contexts influence attention to evolutionary and non-evolutionary threats, as measured by a spatial-cueing task. The results indicate that whether biological or non-biological threats receive greater attentional processing is determined by the context in which they are encountered.
Friday, February 17, 2012
Connecting with voters
Craig Garthwaite & Timothy Moore
Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, forthcoming
Abstract:
Identifying the effects of political endorsements has historically been difficult. Before the 2008 Democratic presidential primary, Barack Obama was endorsed by talk show host Oprah Winfrey. In this article, we assess the impact of this endorsement using, as measures of Winfrey's influence, subscriptions to her magazine and sales of books she recommends. We find that her endorsement increased Obama's votes and financial contributions, and also increased overall voter turnout. No connection is found between the measures of Oprah's influence and previous elections, nor with underlying political preferences. Our results suggest that Winfrey's endorsement was responsible for approximately 1 million additional votes for Obama.
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Dodging the vote? Military conscription and U.S. voter participation, 1948-2006
Richard Cebula & Franklin Mixon
Empirical Economics, February 2012, Pages 325-343
Abstract:
This study investigates the impact of ending the military draft on voter turnout in the U.S. The main study period runs from 1948 through 2006. After controlling for the unemployment rate, the degree of labor force unionization, the U.S.-Iraq War, the impact of voting in presidential elections, the female labor force participation rate, the percent of the adult population with a college degree, income, and a variable to reflect strong approval or disapproval of the U.S. President, compelling empirical evidence is found that ending the military draft in the U.S. acted to significantly reduce the aggregate voter participation rate.
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Achieving Validation: Barack Obama and Black Turnout in 2008
Seth McKee, M.V. Hood & David Hill
State Politics & Policy Quarterly, March 2012, Pages 3-22
Abstract:
In this study we examine black voting in the 2008 presidential election. Recognizing the significance of having an African American win the presidency, we evaluate black political attitudes in 2008 vis-à-vis 2004, place black turnout in historical context, and discuss the problem of vote overreporting. The issue of vote overreporting plagues surveys, and this is particularly notable among African American respondents. The momentousness of Barack Obama's candidacy and subsequent election may further complicate black turnout responses. On the one hand, an African American Democratic presidential nominee is expected to mobilize blacks, but on the other hand this situation is also expected to increase the social desirability to misreport voting. To get around this intractable problem with surveys, we evaluate validated black turnout in the state of Georgia, which provides individual-level data on the population of registered voters. The validated black turnout numbers are much lower than those reported in national studies like the Current Population Survey, but our analysis indicates that compared to 2004, African American registration and voting in Georgia were markedly higher in 2008.
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The Impact of Election Day Registration on Voter Turnout and Election Outcomes
Jacob Neiheisel & Barry Burden
American Politics Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
Voter registration is widely viewed as a barrier to voter participation in general, and especially so for likely Democratic voters. A popular remedy for both turnout effects is election day registration (EDR), which eliminates the closing date by permitting registration at the polls. Following earlier research we posit a small positive effect of EDR on turnout. But contrary to conventional wisdom, we theorize that individuals most likely to take advantage of EDR are in fact Republican voters. To investigate these causal effects we make use of a natural experiment in Wisconsin. When EDR was implemented in Wisconsin in 1976, only municipalities that already required registration were affected by the change in the law. Analysis of this intervention shows that EDR did increase turnout in Wisconsin but actually decreased the Democratic share of the two-party vote for president.
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A Turn Toward Avoidance? Selective Exposure to Online Political Information, 2004-2008
Kelly Garrett, Dustin Carnahan & Emily Lynch
Political Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
Scholars warn that avoidance of attitude-discrepant political information is becoming increasingly common due in part to an ideologically fragmented online news environment that allows individuals to systematically eschew contact with ideas that differ from their own. Data collected over a series of national RDD surveys conducted between 2004 and 2008 challenge this assertion, demonstrating that Americans' use of attitude-consistent political sources is positively correlated with use of more attitudinally challenging sources. This pattern holds over time and across different types of online outlets, and applies even among those most strongly committed to their political ideology, although the relationship is weaker for this group. Implications for these findings are discussed.
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They Just Do Not Vote Like They Used To: A Methodology to Empirically Assess Election Fraud
M.V. Hood & William Gillespie
Social Science Quarterly, March 2012, Pages 76-94
Objectives: In contemporary U.S. elections there is no shortage of allegations concerning election fraud. These claims are, however, based in large part on anecdotal evidence, unsubstantiated assertions, or the study of reported complaints. The absence of a general methodology to actively search for evidence of election fraud has resulted in policy arguments devoid of empirical data and systematic analyses.
Methods: In this article, we present a general methodology to study contemporary election fraud based on the Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD) process. We then apply this approach to a case study of a particular type of fraud.
Results: After examining approximately 2.1 million votes cast during the 2006 general election in Georgia, we find no evidence that election fraud was committed under the auspices of deceased registrants.
Conclusion: In this article, we have introduced a general methodology for the scientific study of election fraud. We urge social scientists to make use of such a framework to investigate the prevalence of different types of fraud across varying election cycles and jurisdictions.
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Negative Advertising and Political Competition
Amit Gandhi, Daniela Iorio & Carly Urban
University of Wisconsin Working Paper, October 2011
Abstract:
Why is negative advertising such a prominent feature of competition in the political market? We propose an explanation that is based on the "fewness" of competitors in a political race. The typical election in the United States is a two-candidate race. In such duopoly contests, there is a simple economic rationale for "going negative" relative to nonduopoly contests: when the number of competitors is greater than two, engaging in negative ads creates positive externalities for opponents that are not the object of the attack. In contrast, positive ads benefit only the advertiser. To empirically investigate the hypothesis that the number of competitors can explain the volume of negative advertising in an election, we focus on US non-presidential primary contests in 2004, where the nature of primaries provides us with a cross section of independent races and large variation in the number of entrants. Our estimation employs novel data from the Wisconsin Advertising Project, which contains information on all political advertisements aired in the top 100 media markets in 2004 races. We find that duopolies are twice as likely to air a negative ad when compared to non-duopolies, and that doubling the number of competitors drives the rate of negative advertising in an election close to zero. These results are robust to the inclusion of a variety of controls and instruments for entrants in the race.
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Attack Advertising, the White Decision, and Voter Participation in State Supreme Court Elections
Melinda Gann Hall & Chris Bonneau
Political Research Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
This project evaluates whether televised attack advertising and less restrictive campaign speech codes brought about by Republican Party of Minnesota v. White (2002) have had adverse effects on citizen participation in state supreme court elections. The authors' specific focus is on partisan and nonpartisan races from 2002 through 2006. Overall, they find that attack ads and liberalized speech codes actually mobilize rather than demobilize the electorate. These findings highlight the striking similarities between supreme court elections and elections to other important offices. These results also raise questions about the validity of normative accounts of the relationship between citizens and the bench.
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It's about Time: The Lifespan of Information Effects in a Multiweek Campaign
Dona-Gene Mitchell
American Journal of Political Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
I advance a theoretical and empirical framework that puts time and thus the temporal dynamics of candidate evaluation front and center in order to advance our understanding of the lifespan of information effects while enhancing the external validity of our experimental approaches. With these temporal properties in mind, I designed a "panel experiment" with research conducted over 12 weeks. This represents the first experimental approach to combine control over information exposure with attention to information processing throughout the course of a multiweek campaign. Against the backdrop of partisanship, empirical tests assess the ability of transient exposure to issue and character information to produce effects that endure beyond the moment the information is encountered either via memory-based or on-line processes. Findings reveal a remarkably limited role for enduring information effects and suggest a "rapid displacement" model of information processing where new information quickly displaces the accumulated stockpile of old information.
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Dollars on the Sidewalk: Should U.S. Presidential Candidates Advertise in Uncontested States?
Carly Urban & Sarah Niebler
University of Wisconsin Working Paper, October 2011
Abstract:
Presidential candidates in the United States do not intentionally advertise in states without rigorous competition for electoral votes. However, in some areas of non-competitive states, media markets overlap with battleground states, exposing these regions to political ads. These spillover advertisements allow us to examine the relationship between advertisements and individual campaign contributions, with data from the Wisconsin Advertising Project and the Federal Elections Commission. Using propensity score matching within uncontested states, we find that 2008 aggregate giving in zip codes exposed to political ads was approximately $6,800 (31.3% of mean contributions) more than in similar zip codes without advertisements.
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A Wuffle, Craig Leonard Brians & Kristine Coulter
PS: Political Science & Politics, January 2012, Pages 78-82
Abstract:
We consider the neglected importance of temperature as an explanatory variable. We show that: (1) colder states have turnout that is high relative to the national average; (2) the coldest states in the United States were more likely to adopt Election Day Registration (EDR) than other states, and very hot states never did so; and (3) those who live in colder states live longer.
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Hesitation Blues: Does Minority Opinion Status Lead to Delayed Responses?
Michael Huge & Carroll Glynn
Communication Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
Research in public opinion and political communication indicates that those who hold viewpoints that are in the minority may be more hesitant to express their opinion when compared to those in the majority. Gauging hesitation through response latencies has been put forth as a measure of the internalization of majority pressure. In a laboratory setting, participants are asked to offer simple judgments (e.g., "like" or "dislike") for various digitized images of both political and nonpolitical persons, things, and ideas. Responses are recorded and categorized according to majority or minority status and then analyzed at both the subject and the object level in an attempt to better understand the link between the climate of opinion and response hesitancy. Overall, those in the minority take longer to offer "like" or "dislike" responses when compared to those in the majority. This relationship is positively correlated with the size of the majority. Furthermore, individual differences are found to moderate the minority slowness effect (MSE). The effect is also found to be stronger for political objects when compared to nonpolitical objects.
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Brian Gaines, Timothy Nokken & Collin Groebe
State Politics & Policy Quarterly, March 2012, Pages 43-57
Abstract:
In Illinois and Texas, senate elections return members to serve terms of different length. Because term length schedules are randomized, these states provide a natural experiment. Cross-sectional comparison of chambers requires statistical controls for myriad factors that distinguish cases (chambers or periods). These two chambers, by contrast, produce direct evidence of term length's impact on electoral behavior. We test hypotheses about term length's impact on candidacies, campaign expenditures, and voter participation with data from 1968 to 2010. Surprisingly, there is little evidence of any significant differences between contests for two-year and four-year terms.
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Daniel Biggers
American Politics Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
Proponents of direct democracy contend that the institution increases political knowledge, but limited evidence supports this assertion over a single election. Previous studies of the relationship, however, do not account for the heterogeneous effects of each proposition and employ political knowledge scales that insufficiently rely on information directly related to political campaigns. I address these limitations by looking at the issue content of each ballot measure and using the 2006 and 2008 Cooperative Congressional Election Studies (CCES), which contain numerous voting-relevant and policy-oriented questions from which to construct an improved measurement of actual campaign learning. Although I find no effect attributable to the total number of measures on the ballot, those addressing social issues, because they are well known, highly salient, and tap into existing social cleavages, do exhibit the hypothesized effect on political knowledge. I discuss the implications of these findings in the conclusion.
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Elizabeth Cascio & Ebonya Washington
NBER Working Paper, January 2012
Abstract:
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA) has been called one of the most effective pieces of civil rights legislation in US history, having generated dramatic increases in black voter registration and black voter turnout across the South. We show that the expansion of black voting rights in some southern states brought about by one requirement of the VRA - the elimination of literacy tests at voter registration - was accompanied by a shift in the distribution of state aid toward localities with higher proportions of black residents, who held newfound power to affect the reelection of state officials, a finding that is consistent with models of distributive politics. Our estimates imply an elasticity of state transfers to counties with respect to turnout in presidential elections - the closest available measure of enfranchisement - of roughly one.
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Election Administration and the Pure Effect of Voter Registration on Turnout
Barry Burden & Jacob Neiheisel
Political Research Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
Voter registration is thought to have a substantial negative effect on American voter turnout. The authors clarify this understanding in two ways. First, using a natural experiment in Wisconsin, they estimate the pure effect of registration, stripped of aspects such as the closing date. Registration lowers turnout by about 2 percentage points. Second, the authors argue that administrative capacities of local election officials are important moderators of how much registration affects turnout. Municipalities with less capacity are associated with bigger decreases in turnout. Researchers and policy makers should consider administrative capacity as a component in the equal application of voting laws.
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Media Advertising and Ballot Initiatives: The Case of Animal Welfare Regulation
Timothy Richards, William Allender & Di Fang
Contemporary Economic Policy, forthcoming
Abstract:
Spending on political advertising increases with every election cycle, not only for congressional or presidential candidates, but also for state-level ballot initiatives. There is little research in marketing, however, on the effectiveness of political advertising at this level. In this study, we conduct an experimental analysis of advertisements used during the 2008 campaign to mandate new animal welfare standards in California (Proposition 2). Using subjects' willingness-to-pay for cage-free eggs as a proxy for their likely voting behavior, we investigate whether advertising provides real information to likely voters, and thus sharpens their existing attitudes toward the issue, or whether advertising can indeed change preferences. We find that advertising in support of Proposition 2 was more effective in raising subjects' willingness-to-pay for cage-free eggs than ads in opposition were in reducing it, but we also find that ads in support of the measure reduce the dispersion of preferences and thus polarize attitudes toward the initiative. More generally, political ads are found to contain considerably more "hype" than "real information" in the sense of Johnson and Myatt [Johnson, J. P., and D. P. Myatt. "On the Simple Economics of Advertising, Marketing and Product Design." American Economic Review, 96, 2006, 756-84].
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Ellen Quintelier & Marc Hooghe
International Political Science Review, January 2012, Pages 63-81
Abstract:
The expectation that participation entails socialization effects on political attitudes is not routinely tested in a longitudinal manner. In this article, we report on a two-year panel study among 4325 late adolescents in Belgium. By means of a cross-lagged structural equation model, it was ascertained that the relationship between participation and attitudes is reciprocal. The relationship between participation (at Time1) and attitudes (at Time2) was significantly stronger than the relationship between attitudes (at Time1) and participation (at Time2). Therefore, the current study supports the socialization perspective. Individual and collective forms of participation have equally strong socialization effects.
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Do voters reward rebellion? The electoral accountability of MPs in Britain
Nick Vivyan & Markus Wagner
European Journal of Political Research, March 2012, Pages 235-264
Abstract:
To hold their Members of Parliament individually accountable for their legislative behaviour, British voters would need to base their decision to vote for an MP at least partially on the extent to which the MP's legislative voting behaviour deviated from that of the MP's party leadership. Voters should evaluate this deviation contingent on their views of the party leadership. MP rebellion can signal that voter-MP congruence is greater than that of the voter and the MP's party leadership. In this article it is found that only constituents with negative attitudes toward the Labour government reward rebellious Labour MPs, albeit to a limited extent. A similar conditional association is not observed on a single issue: Iraq. The policy accountability of MPs is relatively weak and general rather than issue-specific.
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Partisan Discord in the Family and Political Engagement: A Comparative Behavioral Analysis
Jennifer Fitzgerald & Amber Curtis
Journal of Politics, January 2012, Pages 129-141
Abstract:
What happens to a person's level of political engagement when he is surrounded by partisan disagreement? Previous work offers a mixed picture; in certain circumstances political discord promotes engagement while in others it has the opposite effect. This analysis tests existing theories by looking at the implications of disagreement within the family. We leverage panel data to trace effects over time, and we examine this dynamic across political units. Household data from Britain, Germany, and Switzerland reveal that those whose parents are divided politically tend to become more, not less, engaged in politics. Comparatively, these effects appear stronger in some countries than in others, but the three-country analysis only suggests reasons why. Therefore, we take advantage of Swiss subnational political variation to further investigate the conditioning role of institutions. This step confirms that proportional representation elections moderate the relationship between parental disagreement and interest in politics.
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Length of compulsory education and voter turnout - evidence from a staged reform
Panu Pelkonen
Public Choice, January 2012, Pages 51-75
Abstract:
This study estimates the impact of education on voter turnout. The identification relies on a reform, which increased the length of compulsory schooling in Norway from seven to nine years. The impact is measured both at the individual, and the municipality level. Both sets of analysis suggest that additional education has no effect on voter turnout. The impact of education on various measures of civic outcomes is also estimated. Of these, only the likelihood of signing a petition is found to be positively affected by education.
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Scott Campbell & Nojin Kwak
Journal of Communication, December 2011, Pages 1005-1024
Abstract:
In recent years, mobile communication has emerged as a channel for political discourse among network ties. Although some celebrate new possibilities for political life, others are concerned that it can lead to network insularity and political detachment. This study examined how mobile-mediated discourse with strong ties interacts with characteristics of those ties to predict levels of political participation. Findings revealed that mobile-based discourse is positively associated with political participation, but that this relationship is moderated by the size and heterogeneity of one's network. Participation increases with use of the technology in large networks of like-minded individuals, but declines with use of the technology in homogeneous networks that are small. Implications and future research considerations are offered in the discussion.
Thursday, February 16, 2012
Put a ring on it
The puzzle of monogamous marriage
Joseph Henrich, Robert Boyd & Peter Richerson
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences, 5 March 2012, Pages 657-669
Abstract:
The anthropological record indicates that approximately 85 per cent of human societies have permitted men to have more than one wife (polygynous marriage), and both empirical and evolutionary considerations suggest that large absolute differences in wealth should favour more polygynous marriages. Yet, monogamous marriage has spread across Europe, and more recently across the globe, even as absolute wealth differences have expanded. Here, we develop and explore the hypothesis that the norms and institutions that compose the modern package of monogamous marriage have been favoured by cultural evolution because of their group-beneficial effects - promoting success in inter-group competition. In suppressing intrasexual competition and reducing the size of the pool of unmarried men, normative monogamy reduces crime rates, including rape, murder, assault, robbery and fraud, as well as decreasing personal abuses. By assuaging the competition for younger brides, normative monogamy decreases (i) the spousal age gap, (ii) fertility, and (iii) gender inequality. By shifting male efforts from seeking wives to paternal investment, normative monogamy increases savings, child investment and economic productivity. By increasing the relatedness within households, normative monogamy reduces intra-household conflict, leading to lower rates of child neglect, abuse, accidental death and homicide. These predictions are tested using converging lines of evidence from across the human sciences.
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Education, Labor Markets and the Retreat from Marriage
Kristen Harknett & Arielle Kuperberg
Social Forces, September 2011, Pages 41-63
Abstract:
Using data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing study and the Current Population Survey, we find that labor market conditions play a large role in explaining the positive relationship between educational attainment and marriage. Our results suggest that if low-educated parents enjoyed the same, stronger labor market conditions as their more-educated counterparts, then differences in marriage by education would narrow considerably. Better labor markets are positively related to marriage for fathers at all educational levels. In contrast, better labor markets are positively related to marriage for less-educated mothers but not their more-educated counterparts. We discuss the implications of our findings for theories about women's earning power and marriage, the current economic recession and future studies of differences in family structure across education groups.
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Laurie Scheuble, David Johnson & Katherine Johnson
Sex Roles, February 2012, Pages 282-292
Abstract:
This study examines time period and regional effects on U.S. college students' attitudes and plans regarding marital naming. Data were gathered at a Midwestern college in 1990 and 2006 and at an Eastern university in 2006 (N = 867). No time period effect was identified for marital name plans in the Midwest samples. Women were neither more nor less likely to plan to retain their birth name in 1990 as compared to 2006. A time period effect was found for attitudes: Midwest women in 2006 were more likely to say a woman was more committed to the marriage if she took her husband's last name as compared to Midwest women in 1990. This indicates that women in the Midwest may have become more conservative over time. We also found regional differences: women in the East were significantly more likely than women in the Midwest to plan to keep their birth surname upon marriage. Findings suggest a trend toward more conservative attitudes over time and location although plans, perhaps due to the rareness of maintaining a birth surname upon marriage, have not changed.
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Reexamining the Case for Marriage: Union Formation and Changes in Well-being
Kelly Musick & Larry Bumpass
Journal of Marriage and Family, February 2012, Pages 1-18
Abstract:
This article addresses open questions about the nature and meaning of the positive association between marriage and well-being, namely, the extent to which it is causal, shared with cohabitation, and stable over time. We relied on data from the National Survey of Families and Households (N = 2,737) and a modeling approach that controls for fixed differences between individuals by relating union transitions to changes in well-being. This study is unique in examining the persistence of changes in well-being as marriages and cohabitations progress (and potentially dissolve) over time. The effects of marriage and cohabitation are found to be similar across a range of measures tapping psychological well-being, health, and social ties. Where there are statistically significant differences, marriage is not always more advantageous. Overall, differences tend to be small and appear to dissipate over time, even when the greater instability of cohabitation is taken into account.
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Marriage on the Margins: Free Wives, Enslaved Husbands, and the Law in Early Virginia
Terri Snyder
Law and History Review, February 2012, Pages 141-171
Abstract:
In 1725, Jane Webb, a free woman of color, sued Thomas Savage, a slave owner and middling planter, in Northampton County Court, on the Eastern Shore of Virginia. Webb v. Savage was an unusual lawsuit, the culmination of over twenty years of legal wrangling between two parties who had an uncommon and intimate connection. The case originated in a 1703 contract between the pair, and at the time it was written, its terms, assumedly, were clear and mutually agreed upon. Two decades later, however, a tangled skein of circumstances obscured the stipulations of that original agreement. Over the course of those same years, the legal meaning of freedom for individuals like Jane Webb had fundamentally changed. Both fraught interpersonal relations and the evolution of race-based law mattered to the 1725 chancery case for one simple reason: Thomas Savage owned Jane Webb's husband. Despite the fact that Webb's spouse, named only in the records as Left, was enslaved, their marriage was legally recognized, and the seven children born to the couple, following the legal doctrine partus sequitur ventrum, took their free status as well as their surname from their mother.
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"You can't be happier than your wife": Happiness Gaps and Divorce
Cahit Guven, Claudia Senik & Holger Stichnoth
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, forthcoming
Abstract:
Based on three large panel surveys, this paper shows that happiness gaps between spouses are a good predictor of future divorce. The effect of happiness gaps is asymmetric: couples are more likely to break-up when the woman is the less happy partner. De facto, divorces appear to be initiated predominantly by women who are less happy than their husband. This asymmetry suggests that the effect of happiness gaps is grounded on motives of relative deprivation (i.e. comparisons of happiness between spouses) rather than on a preference for equal happiness.
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Stigma or Separation? Understanding the Incarceration-Divorce Relationship
Michael Massoglia, Brianna Remster & Ryan King
Social Forces, September 2011, Pages 133-155
Abstract:
Prior research suggests a correlation between incarceration and marital dissolution, although questions remain as to why this association exists. Is it the stigma associated with "doing time" that drives couples apart? Or is it simply the duration of physical separation that leads to divorce? This research utilizes data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79) and the Survey of Officer and Enlisted Personnel to shed light on these questions. The findings generally support a separation explanation of the incarceration-divorce relationship. Specifically, the data show that exposure to incarceration has no effect on marital dissolution after duration of incarceration is taken into account. In addition, across both datasets we find that individuals who spend substantial time away from spouses are at higher risk of divorce. The findings point to the importance of spousal separation for understanding the incarceration-marital dissolution relationship. Moreover, and in contrast to settings in which stigma appears quite salient (e.g., labor markets), our results suggest that the shared history and degree of intimacy among married partners may weaken the salience of the stigma of incarceration. Findings are discussed in the context of a burgeoning body of work on the collateral consequences of incarceration and have implications for the growing pool of men in American society returning from prison.
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Marriage and Desistance From Crime: A Consideration of Gene-Environment Correlation
J.C. Barnes & Kevin Beaver
Journal of Marriage and Family, February 2012, Pages 19-33
Abstract:
An impressive body of research has examined the effect of marriage on desistance from a criminal career. Although extensive efforts have been made to control for potential confounders, almost no research has considered the role that genetic influences play in the relationship. In this study, the authors revisited the marriage-desistance connection by analyzing sibling data drawn from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health; Ns ranged between 2,224 and 3,745 siblings) and by using a statistical design that controls for confounding genetic influences. The findings revealed that both marriage and desistance were under genetic influence (h2 = .56 and .49, respectively). In addition, before controlling for shared genetic influences, marriage was predictive of desistance. After genetic influences were controlled, the marriage effect remained statistically significant but was reduced by 60%. The implications of these findings for life course criminology are considered.
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The pill and partnerships: The impact of the birth control pill on cohabitation
Finn Christensen
Journal of Population Economics, December 2011, Pages 29-52
Abstract:
This paper investigates the impact on cohabitation behavior of the introduction and dispersion of the birth control pill in the USA during the 1960s and early 1970s. A theoretical model generates several predictions that are tested using the first wave of the National Survey of Families and Households. Empirically, the causal effect is identified by exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in state laws granting access to the pill to unmarried women under age 21. The evidence shows that the pill was a catalyst that increased cohabitation's role in selecting marriage partners, but did little in the short run to promote cohabitation as a substitute for marriage.
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Loes van Gelderen et al.
Children and Youth Services Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
The purpose of the current qualitative study was to investigate whether adolescents in American planned lesbian families experienced negative reactions from their social environment associated with their mothers' sexual orientation, and if so, to explore the nature of these experiences. In addition, the focus was on the coping strategies as described by the adolescents themselves. Results revealed that half of the 78 participating 17-years-olds had experienced homophobic stigmatization. Such experiences usually took place within the school context and peers were most frequently mentioned as the source. The adolescents used adaptive strategies (such as optimism) more frequently than maladaptive strategies (such as avoidance) to cope with these negative experiences. Our results suggest that intervention programs focused on family diversity should be developed for school children of all ages since the stigmatization experienced by the studied adolescents typically happened in that context.
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Mark Hatzenbuehler et al.
American Journal of Public Health, February 2012, Pages 285-291
Objectives: We sought to determine whether health care use and expenditures among gay and bisexual men were reduced following the enactment of same-sex marriage laws in Massachusetts in 2003.
Methods: We used quasi-experimental, prospective data from 1211 sexual minority male patients in a community-based health center in Massachusetts.
Results: In the 12 months after the legalization of same-sex marriage, sexual minority men had a statistically significant decrease in medical care visits (mean = 5.00 vs mean = 4.67; P = .05; Cohen's d = 0.17), mental health care visits (mean = 24.72 vs mean = 22.20; P = .03; Cohen's d = 0.35), and mental health care costs (mean = $2442.28 vs mean = $2137.38; P = .01; Cohen's d = 0.41), compared with the 12 months before the law change. These effects were not modified by partnership status, indicating that the health effect of same-sex marriage laws was similar for partnered and nonpartnered men.
Conclusions: Policies that confer protections to same-sex couples may be effective in reducing health care use and costs among sexual minority men.
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Variation in the Relationship Between Education and Marriage: Marriage Market Mismatch?
Kelly Musick, Jennie Brand & Dwight Davis
Journal of Marriage and Family, February 2012, Pages 53-69
Abstract:
Educational expansion has led to greater diversity in the social backgrounds of college students. We ask how schooling interacts with this diversity to influence marriage formation among men and women. Relying on data from the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (N = 3,208), we use a propensity score approach to group men and women into social strata and multilevel event history models to test differences in the effects of college attendance across strata. We find a statistically significant, positive trend in the effects of college attendance across strata, with the largest effects of college on first marriage among the more advantaged and the smallest - indeed, negative - effects among the least advantaged men and women. These findings appear consistent with a mismatch in the marriage market between individuals' education and their social backgrounds.
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Why do even satisfied newlyweds eventually go on to divorce?
Justin Lavner & Thomas Bradbury
Journal of Family Psychology, February 2012, Pages 1-10
Abstract:
Although divorce typically follows an extended period of unhappiness that begins early in marriage, some couples who are very happy throughout the first several years of marriage will also go on to divorce. This study aimed to identify risk factors early in marriage that distinguish initially satisfied couples who eventually divorce from those who remain married. We identified 136 couples reporting stably high levels of relationship satisfaction in the first 4 years of marriage. We compared the couples who went on to divorce by the 10-year follow-up with the couples who remained married on initial measures of commitment, observed communication, stress, and personality. Divorcing couples displayed more negative communication, emotion, and social support as newlyweds compared with couples who did not divorce. No significant differences were found in the other domains, in relationship satisfaction, or in positive behaviors. Overall, results indicate that even couples who are very successful at navigating the early years of marriage can be vulnerable to later dissolution if their interpersonal exchanges are poorly regulated. We speculate that, paradoxically, the many strengths possessed by these couples may mask their potent interpersonal liabilities, posing challenges for educational interventions designed to help these couples.
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Christine Stanik & Chalandra Bryant
Sex Roles, February 2012, Pages 256-267
Abstract:
This research examined associations between husbands' and wives' gender role attitudes, division of household labor, and marital quality in a sample of 697 newlywed African American couples residing in the southern region of the United States. Guided by a cultural ecological framework, we tested hypotheses specific to the unique socio-cultural context of African Americans using a mixed model ANCOVA design. Results revealed that: (1) couples reported lower marital quality when husbands had relatively more traditional gender role attitudes; (2) husbands reported lower marital quality when the couple engaged in a relatively more traditional division of household labor; and (3) husbands with more traditional attitudes who also engaged in a traditional division of labor reported lower marital quality compared to all other husbands. Although African Americans are thought to have more flexible gender role orientations than other racial/ethnic groups within the U.S., these results document within group variability in couple gender dynamics and its association with variability in marital quality.
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Ronald Simons et al.
Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, February 2012, Pages 77-101
Abstract:
The present study tests a developmental model designed to explain the romantic relationship difficulties and reluctance to marry often reported for African Americans. Using longitudinal data from a sample of approximately 400 African American young adults, we examine the manner in which race-related adverse experiences during late childhood and early adolescence give rise to the cynical view of romantic partners and marriage held by many young African Americans. Our results indicate that adverse circumstances disproportionately suffered by African American youth (viz., harsh parenting, family instability, discrimination, criminal victimization, and financial hardship) promote distrustful relational schemas that lead to troubled dating relationships, and that these negative relationship experiences, in turn, encourage a less positive view of marriage.
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The Happy Homemaker? Married Women's Well-Being in Cross-National Perspective
Judith Treas, Tanja van der Lippe & Tsui-o ChloeTai
Social Forces, September 2011, Pages 111-132
Abstract:
A long-standing debate questions whether homemakers or working wives are happier. Drawing on cross-national data for 28 countries, this research uses multi-level models to provide fresh evidence on this controversy. All things considered, homemakers are slightly happier than wives who work fulltime, but they have no advantage over part-time workers. The work status gap in happiness persists even controlling for family life mediators. Cross-level interactions between work status and macro-level variables suggest that country characteristics - GDP, social spending, women's labor force participation, liberal gender ideology and public child care - ameliorate the disadvantage in happiness for full-time working wives compared to homemakers and part-time workers.
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Robert Wood et al.
Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, forthcoming
Abstract:
This article examines the impacts of Building Strong Families, a healthy marriage and relationship skills education program serving unmarried parents who were expecting or had recently had a baby. Based on a random assignment research design, the analysis uses survey data from more than 4,700 couples across eight research sites to estimate program effects. Results varied across sites, with one site having a pattern of positive effects (but no effect on marriage) and another having numerous negative effects. However, when impacts are averaged across all research sites, the findings indicate that the program had no overall effects on couples' relationship quality or the likelihood that they remained together or got married.
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Brian Willoughby et al.
Journal of Family Issues, February 2012, Pages 223-245
Abstract:
Using a sample of 335 young adults and their parents, this study investigated the intergenerational transmission of marital attitudes from parents to their children and how parental marital quality moderates that relationship. Results suggested that the marital attitudes of both mothers and fathers are related to the marital attitudes of their children. Parents' marital quality had little direct impact on the marital attitudes of their young adult children but did moderate the relationship between fathers' marital attitudes and their young adults' marital attitudes. The association between fathers' marital attitudes and their children's marital attitudes increased at higher levels of marital quality.
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Vanessa Alger & Jocelyn Elise Crowley
Sociological Inquiry, February 2012, Pages 78-99
Abstract:
This article explores whether mothers' perceived control over their own workplace flexibility options has any relationship to their satisfaction with their husbands' contributions to household labor in the United States. We hypothesize that flexibility enhances their ability to more adeptly engage in role management in multiple life areas, thus enabling them to be more satisfied with their partners' domestic input as well. We use a unique data set of 1,078 randomly sampled women involved in mothers' organizations that generally attract members based on their current level of participation in the paid labor market. We then link nine distinct workplace flexibility policies with mothers' satisfaction related to their husbands' participation in all household tasks, as well as a subset of female-typed tasks. We find that across both arrays of tasks, mothers with more perceived control over work-related schedule predictability and those that had the ability to secure employment again after an extended break had higher levels of satisfaction with their husbands' participation in household labor. In addition, short-term time off to address unexpected needs was important for all tasks considered together only.
Wednesday, February 15, 2012
Merit Scholarship
Megan Thiele, Kristen Shorette & Catherine Bolzendahl
Sociological Inquiry, forthcoming
Abstract:
The United States leads the world in public higher education, with a substantial amount of funding coming from state, rather than federal, government sources. Perhaps not surprisingly, the amount states contribute varies widely, leading researchers to explore the sources of such variation. While numerous factors have been shown to matter, the potential relevance of political representation remains unclear. To address this gap, the relationship between state legislators' own educational backgrounds and state spending on higher education is tested. Utilizing a database of publicly available information on the educational backgrounds of 6,517 state senators and representatives, we find that states with a higher percentage of legislators who attended state colleges and/or universities invest more generously in public higher education than other state legislatures. Results support theories of representation, suggesting that legislators may be directly advocating for spending given their own educational profiles.
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Does Federal Student Aid Raise Tuition? New Evidence on For-Profit Colleges
Stephanie Riegg Cellini & Claudia Goldin
NBER Working Paper, February 2012
Abstract:
We use administrative data from five states to provide the first comprehensive estimates of the size of the for-profit higher education sector in the U.S. Our estimates include schools that are not currently eligible to participate in federal student aid programs under Title IV of the Higher Education Act and are therefore missed in official counts. We find that the number of for-profit institutions is double the official count and the number of students is between one-quarter and one-third greater. Many for-profit institutions that are not Title IV eligible offer programs and certificates that are similar, if not identical, to those given by institutions that are part of Title IV. We find that the Title IV institutions charge tuition that is about 75 percent higher than that charged by comparable institutions whose students cannot apply for federal financial aid. The dollar value of the premium is about equal to the amount of financial aid received by students in eligible institutions, lending credence to the "Bennett hypothesis" that aid-eligible institutions raise tuition to maximize aid.
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Jordan Matsudaira, Adrienne Hosek & Elias Walsh
Economics of Education Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
We examine the effects of Title I on school behavior, resources, and academic performance using a rich set of school finance and student-level achievement data from one large urban school district using a regression discontinuity design. We find that Title I eligibility raises Federal revenues of schools by about $460 per student. This is partially offset by decreases in revenues from state categorical aid grants, so that the net increase to schools is about $360 per student. We find no impact on overall school-level test scores, but also no impact among the subgroups of students most likely to be affected by Title I. A novel finding is that schools appear to respond to the incentives embedded in the Title I allocation process by manipulating the fraction of their students signed up for free lunch to secure more Federal funds.
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Examining the Effects of Gifted Programming in Mathematics and Reading Using the ECLS-K
Jill Adelson, Betsy McCoach & Katherine Gavin
Gifted Child Quarterly, January 2012, Pages 25-39
Abstract:
This study examined the average effects of schools' third through fifth grade gifted programming policy in mathematics and reading on overall school achievement, on gifted students' achievement and academic attitudes and on nongifted students' achievement and academic attitudes. Data and results represent a broad, national look at school personnel-reported programming without distinction as to type, length, or degree of programming. No detrimental effects were found at the overall school level or for nongifted students. However, the results also indicated that, on average, the diverse programs reported in the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 1988-1989 (ECLS-K) database had no effect on gifted students' achievement or academic attitudes. Considered in light of prior research indicating benefits of specific programs and existing inconsistent policies and programs, this suggests the need for future research to determine effective program characteristics and suggests that policy makers, educators, and parents actively must seek research-based practices to use with gifted children.
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James Banks & Fabrizio Mazzonna
Economic Journal, forthcoming
Abstract:
In this paper we exploit the 1947 change to the minimum school-leaving age in England from 14 to 15, to evaluate the causal effect of a year of education on cognitive abilities at older ages. We use a regression discontinuity design analysis and find a large and significant effect of the reform on males' memory and executive functioning at older ages, using simple cognitive tests from the English Longitudinal Survey on Ageing (ELSA) as our outcome measures. This result is particularly remarkable since the reform had a powerful and immediate effect on about half the population of 14-year-olds. We investigate and discuss the potential channels by which this reform may have had its effects, as well as carrying out a full set of sensitivity analyses and robustness checks.
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Teacher Salaries and Teacher Aptitude: An Analysis Using Quantile Regressions
Gregory Gilpin
Economics of Education Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
This study investigates the relationship between salaries and scholastic aptitude for full-time public high school humanities and mathematics/sciences teachers. For identification, we rely on variation in salaries between adjacent school districts within the same state. The results indicate that teacher aptitude is positively correlated with teacher salaries with an elasticity point estimate of 0.132. However, using quantile regressions, we find the elasticity estimates form an inverted U-shape across the scholastic aptitude distribution, and that higher aptitude teachers are more profoundly affected by the percentage of students eligible for free lunch and local street crime, while lower aptitude teachers are more profoundly affected by local education support. Furthermore, studying mathematics/sciences teachers, we find that while the elasticity estimates maintain an inverted U-shape, scholastic aptitude is not correlated with changes in salaries for the lower 40 percentiles of the aptitude distribution.
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Aligning Student, Parent, and Teacher Incentives: Evidence from Houston Public Schools
Roland Fryer
NBER Working Paper, January 2012
Abstract:
This paper describes an experiment designed to investigate the impact of aligning student, parent, and teacher incentives on student achievement. On outcomes for which incentives were provided, there were large treatment effects. Students in treatment schools mastered more than one standard deviation more math objectives than control students, and their parents attended almost twice as many parent-teacher conferences. In contrast, on related outcomes that were not incentivized (e.g. standardized test scores, parental engagement), we observe both positive and negative effects. We argue that these facts are consistent with a moral hazard model with multiple tasks, though other explanations are possible.
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The Complexity of Non-Completion: Being Pushed or Pulled to Drop Out of High School
Christen Bradley & Linda Renzulli
Social Forces, December 2011, Pages 521-545
Abstract:
Using a model of student dropout with only two possible outcomes - "still in school" or "dropout" - hides the complex reasons that students leave high school. We offer a model with three outcomes: in school, pushed out or pulled out. Using data from the Educational Longitudinal Survey, we find that for black students, differences in SES explain higher likelihoods of being either pushed or pulled out as compared to white students, but Latino students remain more likely to be pulled out even after we control for SES. We also find that SES moderates the relationship between race/gender and being pushed out, and that higher levels of SES may be detrimental to students of color in the context of high poverty schools.
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Cohort Crowding and Nonresident College Enrollment
John Winters
Economics of Education Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
This study uses a fixed effects panel data framework to examine the effects of cohort crowding and other variables on nonresident enrollment at four-year public colleges and universities. The results suggest that larger cohorts of resident students crowd out nonresident students at flagship universities, but there is inconsistent evidence of crowd out at non-flagship schools. Additionally, larger cohorts of resident students result in increased nonresident tuition at flagship universities but not at non-flagship schools. When faced with larger cohorts of resident students, flagship universities lower the numbers of nonresident students enrolled and raise the price for nonresidents.
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Information Constraints and Financial Aid Policy
Judith Scott-Clayton
NBER Working Paper, February 2012
Abstract:
One justification for public support of higher education is that prospective students, particularly those from underprivileged groups, lack complete information about the costs and benefits of a college degree. Beyond financial considerations, students may also lack information about what they need to do academically to prepare for and successfully complete college. Yet until recently, college aid programs have typically paid little attention to students' information constraints, and the complexity of some programs can exacerbate the problem. This chapter describes the information problems facing prospective students as well as their consequences, drawing upon economic theory and empirical evidence.
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Public sector decentralization and school performance: International evidence
Torberg Falch & Justina Fischer
Economics Letters, March 2012, Pages 276-279
Abstract:
Using a panel of international student test scores 1980-2000 (PISA and TIMSS), panel fixed effects estimates suggest that government spending decentralization is conducive to student performance. The effect does not appear to be mediated through levels of educational spending.
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Competition, Wages and Teacher Sorting: Lessons Learned from a Voucher Reform
Lena Hensvik
Economic Journal, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper examines how the entry of private independent high schools in Sweden affects the mobility and wages of teachers in a market with individual wage bargaining. Using matched employer-employee panel data covering all high school teachers over 16 years, I show that the entry of private schools is associated with higher teacher salaries, also for teachers in public schools. The wage returns from competition are highest for teachers entering the profession and for teachers in math and science. Private school entry also seems to have increased wage dispersion between high- and low-skilled teachers within the same field.
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What Explains Trends in Labor Supply Among U.S. Undergraduates, 1970-2009?
Judith Scott-Clayton
NBER Working Paper, January 2012
Abstract:
Recent cohorts of college enrollees are more likely to work, and work substantially more, than those of the past. October CPS data reveal that average labor supply among 18 to 22-year-old full-time undergraduates nearly doubled between 1970 and 2000, rising from 6 hours to 11 hours per week. In 2000 over half of these "traditional" college students were working for pay in the reference week, and the average working student worked 22 hours per week. After 2000, labor supply leveled off and then fell abruptly in the wake of the Great Recession to an average of 8 hours per week in 2009. This paper considers several explanations for the long-term trend of rising employment - including compositional change and rising tuition costs - and considers whether the upward trend is likely to resume when economic conditions improve.
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Parental Income and the Fruits of Labor: Variability in Homework Efficacy in Secondary School
Jonathan Daw
Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, forthcoming
Abstract:
Research in the sociology of education has shown that noncognitive traits are important predictors of educational outcomes and a mechanism of the intergenerational transmission of status. However, previous research on this topic typically posits that there is a constant effect of these traits with variable prevalences of these traits by socioeconomic status. Using time spent on homework as an example, I analyze income-based heterogeneity in homework efficacy, defined as the individual effect of study time on academic achievement, using a national U.S. probability sample of secondary students. Higher income students gain more knowledge from their homework time than their counterparts in all grades and all subjects except history, with greater group differences for math than for science and reading. These results are confirmed by models accounting for time-invariant unobserved heterogeneity in the 8th-10th, but not 10th-12th, grade windows. These results imply that increases in the amount of homework assigned may increase the socioeconomic achievement gap in math, science, and reading in secondary school.
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Frank Vitaro et al.
Journal of Educational Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
The goal of this study was to examine how different types of social experiences in kindergarten relate to Grade 1 academic achievement, while controlling for possible genetic and shared environmental influences through the use of the monozygotic (MZ) twin difference method. Social experiences in kindergarten included relationship quality with the larger peer group (i.e., rejection and victimization), relationship quality with one's best friend, and relationship quality with the teacher. Control variables included parental hostility-coercion, child cognitive skills and externalizing problems, and equivalent social experiences in Grade 1. Participants consisted of 223 MZ twin pairs ages 6 years at Time 1 (T1) and 7 years at Time 2 (T2). Results showed that within-pair differences in peer rejection and in poor teacher-child relationship quality at T1 uniquely predicted differences in MZ twins' academic achievement at T2. Mechanisms that could account for the possible causal role of these social experiences in regard to children's school achievement are discussed.
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Estimating the Effect of Leaders on Public Sector Productivity: The Case of School Principals
Gregory Branch, Eric Hanushek & Steven Rivkin
NBER Working Paper, February 2012
Abstract:
Although much has been written about the importance of leadership in the determination of organizational success, there is little quantitative evidence due to the difficulty of separating the impact of leaders from other organizational components - particularly in the public sector. Schools provide an especially rich environment for studying the impact of public sector management, not only because of the hypothesized importance of leadership but also because of the plentiful achievement data that provide information on institutional outcomes. Outcome-based estimates of principal value-added to student achievement reveal significant variation in principal quality that appears to be larger for high-poverty schools. Alternate lower-bound estimates based on direct estimation of the variance yield smaller estimates of the variation in principal productivity but ones that are still important, particularly for high poverty schools. Patterns of teacher exits by principal quality validate the notion that a primary channel for principal influence is the management of the teacher force. Finally, looking at principal transitions by quality reveals little systematic evidence that more effective leaders have a higher probability of exiting high poverty schools.
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Adoption? Adaptation? Evaluating the Formation of Educational Expectations
Megan Andrew & Robert Hauser
Social Forces, December 2011, Pages 497-520
Abstract:
Sociologists have long used educational expectations to understand the complex mental processes underlying individuals' educational decision making. Yet, little research evaluates how students actually formulate their educational expectations. Status attainment theory asserts that students adopt their educational expectations early based on family background and social influences, and that their educational expectations are driven by a static mental construct as a result. In contrast, recent research based on Bayesian learning theory hypothesizes that students mostly adapt their educational expectations in light of new information about their academic potential. Comparing models of expectations formation in adolescence, we find that students' expectations do not derive from a static mental construct. However, students adapt their educational expectations only modestly and only in response to very large changes in grade point averages. Thus, adolescent educational expectations stabilize early and are rather persistent over time.
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Measuring the earnings returns to lifelong learning in the UK
Jo Blanden et al.
Economics of Education Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper examines the earnings returns to learning that takes place following the conventional ‘school-to-work' stage of the life-course. We operationalise such ‘lifelong learning' as the attainment of certified qualifications in adulthood, following the completion of the first period of continuous full-time education. Using data from the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) for the period 1991-2006, our approach and findings represent an important addition to the existing evidence base. By using annual data, we are able to employ the fixed effects estimator, which eliminates the problem of time-invariant unobserved heterogeneity. Our dynamic specification uses a lag structure to consider how earnings returns evolve in the medium and longer run, whilst also controlling for wage trends which were evident prior to qualification attainment. Our results show a medium-run return for women of 10% on hourly wages. For men, initial suggestions of a similar positive return are eliminated once pre-qualification trends are taken into account. This suggests that adult learning has a causal effect on women's subsequent earnings but, for men, any apparent gain is due to selection.
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Arjumand Siddiqi et al.
Journal of Public Health Policy, February 2012, Pages 1-15
Abstract:
This study is premised on the notion that public health policy should address not only health itself, but also primary determinants of health. We examined the effect of national policies on educational outcomes, in particular, on adolescent reading literacy (ARL). We compared the effect of traditional policy indicators - national income and educational spending - with income inequality, a measure of redistributive policies. We used Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) data that provide a rare opportunity to test policy effects after accounting for competing individual-, school-, and country-level explanations. Our sample consisted of 119 814 students, 5126 schools, and 24 countries. Multilevel/Hierarchical regression findings were striking: GDP had a significant, but negligible effect on ARL scores (β=0.002, SE=0.0008), while educational spending had no significant effect. By contrast, income inequality exhibited a larger inverse association (β=-1.15, SE=0.57). Among the wealthy nations in OECD, additional economic prosperity and educational spending is trumped by distribution of income for its effect on ARL. Our study yielded a striking result about education, a major determinant of health. Not only is income inequality a significant determinant of ARL scores, but direct spending on education and overall national economic prosperity are not.
Tuesday, February 14, 2012
Social Skills
Oxytocin modulates selection of allies in intergroup conflict
Carsten De Dreu et al.
Proceedings of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences, 22 March 2012, Pages 1150-1154
Abstract:
In intergroup competition and conflict, humans benefit from coalitions with strong partners who help them to protect their in-group and prevail over competing out-groups. Here, we link oxytocin, a neuropeptide produced in the hypothalamus, to ally selection in intergroup competition. In a double-blind placebo-controlled experiment, males self-administered oxytocin or placebo, and made selection decisions about six high-threat and six low-threat targets as potential allies in intergroup competition. Males given oxytocin rather than placebo viewed high-threat targets as more useful allies and more frequently selected them into their team than low-threat targets.
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Christopher Wilson, Tom Robinson & Mark Callister
Mass Communication and Society, March/April 2012, Pages 261-283
Abstract:
The scope and nature of reality television has changed since researchers last conducted a content analysis of the antisocial behavior for this type of programming. This study examines the content of seven seasons of Survivor, one of America's longest running reality television programs, to determine the types, frequency, and context of antisocial behavior presented in the series as well as the possible effects of the program on longtime viewers using social learning and cultivation theories. In the 76.4 hours of programming analyzed for this study, 4,207 antisocial acts were documented in the coding database. Indirect aggression and verbal aggression were found to be the most frequently occurring types of antisocial behavior. The number (4,207) and the rate (45.7 acts per hour) of antisocial acts in the seven seasons of Survivor analyzed in this study is higher than the findings of a previous study of antisocial behavior in reality-based television conducted in 1997. This study clearly demonstrates that longtime viewers of Survivor get a higher dose of antisocial behavior than did regular viewers of news programming and other reality-based programs that aired slightly more than 10 years ago.
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Testosterone disrupts human collaboration by increasing egocentric choices
Nicholas Wright et al.
Proceedings of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences, forthcoming
Abstract:
Collaboration can provide benefits to the individual and the group across a variety of contexts. Even in simple perceptual tasks, the aggregation of individuals' personal information can enable enhanced group decision-making. However, in certain circumstances such collaboration can worsen performance, or even expose an individual to exploitation in economic tasks, and therefore a balance needs to be struck between a collaborative and a more egocentric disposition. Neurohumoral agents such as oxytocin are known to promote collaborative behaviours in economic tasks, but whether there are opponent agents, and whether these might even affect information aggregation without an economic component, is unknown. Here, we show that an androgen hormone, testosterone, acts as such an agent. Testosterone causally disrupted collaborative decision-making in a perceptual decision task, markedly reducing performance benefit individuals accrued from collaboration while leaving individual decision-making ability unaffected. This effect emerged because testosterone engendered more egocentric choices, manifest in an overweighting of one's own relative to others' judgements during joint decision-making. Our findings show that the biological control of social behaviour is dynamically regulated not only by modulators promoting, but also by those diminishing a propensity to collaborate.
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Fieke Harinck & Gerben Van Kleef
British Journal of Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Emotions play an important role in conflict resolution. Past work has found that negotiators tend to concede when confronted with anger. We argue and show that this effect occurs in conflicts about interests, but not in conflicts about values. In value conflicts that are more closely tied to a person's values, norms, and identity, expressions of anger are likely to backfire. We demonstrate that people deem expressions of anger more unfair in value conflicts than in interest conflicts (Study 1) and that they are more likely to engage in retaliatory and escalatory behaviours when confronted with an angry reaction in the context of a value issue rather than an interest issue (Study 2).
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Evolving to Divide the Fruits of Cooperation
Elliott Wagner
Philosophy of Science, January 2012, Pages 81-94
Abstract:
Cooperation and the allocation of common resources are core features of social behavior. Games idealizing both interactions have been studied separately. But here, rather than examining the dynamics of the individual games, the interactions are combined so that players first choose whether to cooperate, and then, if they jointly cooperate, they bargain over the fruits of their cooperation. It is shown that the dynamics of the combined game cannot simply be reduced to the dynamics of the individual games and that both cooperation and fair division are more likely in the combined game than in the constituent games taken separately.
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Is Adolescent Bullying an Evolutionary Adaptation?
Anthony Volk et al.
Aggressive Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
Bullying appears to be ubiquitous across cultures, involving hundreds of millions of adolescents worldwide, and has potentially serious negative consequences for its participants (particularly victims). We challenge the traditionally held belief that bullying results from maladaptive development by reviewing evidence that bullying may be, in part, an evolved, facultative, adaptive strategy that offers some benefits to its practitioners. In support of this view, we draw from research that suggests bullying serves to promote adolescent bullies' evolutionarily-relevant somatic, sexual, and dominance goals, has a genetic basis, and is widespread among nonhuman animals. We identify and explain differences in the bullying behavior of the two sexes, as well as when and why bullying is adaptive and when it may not be. We offer commentary on both the failures and successes of current anti-bullying interventions from an evolutionary perspective and suggest future directions for both research and anti-bullying interventions.
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Bullying among adolescent football players: Role of masculinity and moral atmosphere
Jesse Steinfeldt et al.
Psychology of Men & Masculinity, forthcoming
Abstract:
Identifying practices of masculinity socialization that contribute to the establishment of gender privilege can help address violence and bullying in schools (Connell, 1996). Because the sport of football is considered an important contributor to masculinity construction, establishing peer networks, and creating hierarchies of student status, this study examined the influence of social norms (i.e., moral atmosphere, meanings of adolescent masculinity) on bullying beliefs and behaviors of 206 high school football players. Results demonstrated that moral atmosphere (Peer Influence, Influential Male Figure) and adherence to male role norms significantly predicted bullying, but the strongest predictor was the perception of whether the most influential male in a player's life would approve of the bullying behavior. In addition to prevention interventions highlighting the role of influential men and masculinity norms in this process, implications for practice suggest that football players can use their peer influence and status as center sport participants to create a school culture that does not tolerate bullying.
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Amygdala and hippocampus fail to habituate to faces in individuals with an inhibited temperament
Jennifer Urbano Blackford et al.
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, forthcoming
Abstract:
Habituation is a basic form of learning that reflects the adaptive reduction in responses to a stimulus that is neither threatening nor rewarding. Extremely shy, or inhibited individuals, are typically slow to acclimate to new people, a behavioral pattern that may reflect slower habituation to novelty. To test this hypothesis, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to examine habituation to neutral faces in 39 young adults with either an extreme inhibited or extreme uninhibited temperament. Our investigation focused on two key brain regions involved in response to novelty - the amygdala and the hippocampus. Habituation to neutral faces in the amygdala and hippocampus differed significantly by temperament group. Individuals with an uninhibited temperament demonstrated habituation in both the amygdala and hippocampus, as expected. In contrast, in individuals with an inhibited temperament, the amygdala and hippocampus failed to habituate across repeated presentations of faces. The failure of the amygdala and hippocampus to habituate to faces represents a novel neural substrate mediating the behavioral differences seen in individuals with an inhibited temperament. We propose that this failure to habituate reflects a social learning deficit in individuals with an inhibited temperament and provides a possible mechanism for increased risk for social anxiety.
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The virtues of gossip: Reputational information sharing as prosocial behavior
Matthew Feinberg et al.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Reputation systems promote cooperation and deter antisocial behavior in groups. Little is known, however, about how and why people share reputational information. Here, we seek to establish the existence and dynamics of prosocial gossip, the sharing of negative evaluative information about a target in a way that protects others from antisocial or exploitative behavior. We present a model of prosocial gossip and the results of 4 studies testing the model's claims. Results of Studies 1 through 3 demonstrate that (a) individuals who observe an antisocial act experience negative affect and are compelled to share information about the antisocial actor with a potentially vulnerable person, (b) sharing such information reduces negative affect created by observing the antisocial behavior, and (c) individuals possessing more prosocial orientations are the most motivated to engage in such gossip, even at a personal cost, and exhibit the greatest reduction in negative affect as a result. Study 4 demonstrates that prosocial gossip can effectively deter selfishness and promote cooperation. Taken together these results highlight the roles of prosocial motivations and negative affective reactions to injustice in maintaining reputational information sharing in groups. We conclude by discussing implications for reputational theories of the maintenance of cooperation in human groups.
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The Impact of High School Leadership on Subsequent Educational Attainment
Kathryn Rouse
Social Science Quarterly, forthcoming
Objectives: Universities increasingly emphasize the importance of leadership skills, but budget shortfalls in public high schools threaten the availability of leadership opportunities for many youths. Few studies, however, have examined the impact of high school leadership experience on key economic outcomes. This study narrows this gap by estimating the causal impact of leadership in high school on educational attainment measured several years later.
Methods: The article uses data from the National Education Longitudinal Study. To address selection bias, the effect of high school leadership is estimated using ordinary least squares, propensity score matching, and instrumental variables models.
Results: Every estimation method and model specification examined implies that high school leadership has a large, positive impact on postsecondary educational attainment.
Conclusions: This article indicates the impact of high school leadership is, at a minimum, nontrivial. This result implies decisions regarding financial cutbacks for extracurricular activities should not be taken lightly.
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Status Differences in the Cognitive Activation of Social Networks
Edward Bishop Smith, Tanya Menon & Leigh Thompson
Organization Science, January/February 2012, Pages 67-82
Abstract:
We develop a dynamic cognitive model of network activation and show that people at different status levels spontaneously activate, or call to mind, different subsections of their networks when faced with job threat. Using a multimethod approach (General Social Survey data and a laboratory experiment), we find that, under conditions of job threat, people with low status exhibit a winnowing response (i.e., activating smaller and tighter subsections of their networks), whereas people with high status exhibit a widening response (i.e., activating larger and less constrained subsections of their networks). We integrate traditional network theories with cognitive psychology, suggesting that cognitively activating social networks is a precondition to mobilizing them. One implication is that narrowing the network in response to threat might reduce low-status group members' access to new information, harming their chances of finding subsequent employment and exacerbating social inequality.
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DRD4 Polymorphism Moderates the Effect of Alcohol Consumption on Social Bonding
Kasey Creswell et al.
PLoS ONE, February 2012, e28914
Abstract:
Development of interpersonal relationships is a fundamental human motivation, and behaviors facilitating social bonding are prized. Some individuals experience enhanced reward from alcohol in social contexts and may be at heightened risk for developing and maintaining problematic drinking. We employed a 3 (group beverage condition) ×2 (genotype) design (N = 422) to test the moderating influence of the dopamine D4 receptor gene (DRD4 VNTR) polymorphism on the effects of alcohol on social bonding. A significant gene x environment interaction showed that carriers of at least one copy of the 7-repeat allele reported higher social bonding in the alcohol, relative to placebo or control conditions, whereas alcohol did not affect ratings of 7-absent allele carriers. Carriers of the 7-repeat allele were especially sensitive to alcohol's effects on social bonding. These data converge with other recent gene-environment interaction findings implicating the DRD4 polymorphism in the development of alcohol use disorders, and results suggest a specific pathway by which social factors may increase risk for problematic drinking among 7-repeat carriers. More generally, our findings highlight the potential utility of employing transdisciplinary methods that integrate genetic methodologies, social psychology, and addiction theory to improve theories of alcohol use and abuse.
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Friendship and Conformity in Group Opinions: Juror Verdict Change in Mock Juries
Clayton Peoples et al.
Sociological Spectrum, March/April 2012, Pages 178-193
Abstract:
Social psychological research on group processes has consistently shown that group members adjust their views to conform to dominant and/or socially desirable stances. Studies are less clear, though, on how friendships within groups impact this tendency. Some studies suggest greater group cohesion leads to more conformity; other studies suggest friendship lessens the pressure to agree on certain issues. In this study, we use mock juries to test the impact of varying levels of friendship on jurors' propensities to change their verdicts to the dominant position (in this case acquittal, or a "not guilty" verdict). Our findings show that distant friendships among jurors increase the odds of conforming to acquittal; but close friendships decrease the odds of conformity. We discuss the implications of our findings for understanding group processes and conformity as well as for jury research.
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Nancy Welsh
Negotiation Journal, January 2012, Pages 117-145
Abstract:
Lawyers should care about their reputations. But exactly what sort of reputation should lawyers seek to establish and maintain in the largely nontransparent context of legal negotiation? And even if a lawyer has developed a reputation as a negotiator, how will he/she know what it is and how it came to be? I force my students to grapple with these questions by incorporating the issues of reputation and reputation development into my negotiation/mediation course. I introduced this innovation at the same time that I decided to increase my focus on developing students' skills in distributive (or value-claiming) negotiation. Although legal negotiation certainly offers frequent opportunities for the creation of integrative joint and individual gains, the process will almost inevitably involve distribution. The pie, once baked, must be cut. As a result, I now base a portion of my students' final grade on the objective results they achieve in two negotiation simulations. Two dangers of this assessment choice are that it can encourage students to focus only on the numbers and, even worse, engage in "sharp practice"- an extreme form of hard bargaining that tests ethical boundaries - in order to achieve the best short-term distributive outcomes. Of course, neither a quantitative focus nor sharp practice is synonymous with a distributive approach to negotiation. Nonetheless, to counterbalance the temptations posed by the focus on, and ranking of, objective results, I also base part of students' final grades on their scores on a "Reputation Index." These scores are based on students' nominations of their peers, accompanied by explanatory comments. This article describes the Reputation Index and how I use it. It also explores the empirical support for the validity of the Reputation Index as a tool for simulating the development and assessment of lawyers' reputations in the "real world." To that end, the article considers research regarding the bases for lawyers' perceptions of effectiveness in legal negotiation, the sometimes counterintuitive distinction between negotiation "approach" and negotiation "style," and the relationships among perceptions of negotiation style, procedural justice, trustworthiness, and reputation.
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Enhanced amygdala reactivity to emotional faces in adults reporting childhood emotional maltreatment
Anne-Laura van Harmelen et al.
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, forthcoming
Abstract:
In the context of chronic childhood emotional maltreatment (CEM; emotional abuse and/or neglect), adequately responding to facial expressions is an important skill. Over time, however, this adaptive response may lead to a persistent vigilance for emotional facial expressions. The amygdala and the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) are key regions in face processing. However, the neurobiological correlates of face processing in adults reporting CEM are yet unknown. We examined amydala and mPFC reactivity to emotional faces (Angry, Fearful, Sad, Happy, Neutral) versus scrambled faces in healthy controls and unmedicated patients with depression and/or anxiety disorders reporting CEM before the age of 16 (n=60), and controls and patients who report no childhood abuse (n=75). We found that CEM is associated with enhanced bilateral amygdala reactivity to emotional facial expressions in general, independent of psychiatric status. Furthermore, we found no support for differential mPFC functioning, suggesting that amygdala hyperresponsivity to emotional facial perception in adults reporting CEM may be independent from top-down influences of the mPFC. These findings may be key in understanding the increased emotional sensitivity, and interpersonal difficulties, that has been reported in individuals with a history of CEM.
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Preschoolers' social dominance, moral cognition, and moral behavior: An evolutionary perspective
Patricia Hawley & John Geldhof
Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Various aspects of moral functioning, aggression, and positive peer regard were assessed in 153 preschool children. Our hypotheses were inspired by an evolutionary approach to morality that construes moral norms as tools of the social elite. Accordingly, children were also rated for social dominance and strategies for its attainment. We predicted that aspects of moral functioning would be only loosely related to each other and that moral cognitions about rules (unlike emotion attributions and moral internalization) would demonstrate patterns suggestive of instrumentality. Results showed that cognitions about moral rules and internalized conscience were unrelated and that sociomoral behavior was more strongly related to the latter than to the former. In addition, promoting group norms (Selective Moral Engagement) positively predicted social dominance, whereas internalized conscience negatively predicted social dominance. Children who controlled resources via both prosocial and coercive means (i.e., bistrategic) showed enhanced moral cognitions about rules (despite high levels of aggression) but had deficits in emotional aspects of moral functioning in the eyes of teachers. Patterns of Selective Moral Engagement invite comparisons to tattling and impression management. The findings are contrasted with alternative hypotheses that are advanced from traditional yet prevailing approaches.
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Evidence for social working memory from a parametric functional MRI study
Meghan Meyer et al.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 7 February 2012, Pages 1883-1888
Abstract:
Keeping track of various amounts of social cognitive information, including people's mental states, traits, and relationships, is fundamental to navigating social interactions. However, to date, no research has examined which brain regions support variable amounts of social information processing ("social load"). We developed a social working memory paradigm to examine the brain networks sensitive to social load. Two networks showed linear increases in activation as a function of increasing social load: the medial frontoparietal regions implicated in social cognition and the lateral frontoparietal system implicated in nonsocial forms of working memory. Of these networks, only load-dependent medial frontoparietal activity was associated with individual differences in social cognitive ability (trait perspective-taking). Although past studies of nonsocial load have uniformly found medial frontoparietal activity decreases with increasing task demands, the current study demonstrates these regions do support increasing mental effort when such effort engages social cognition. Implications for the etiology of clinical disorders that implicate social functioning and potential interventions are discussed.
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Thomas Schultze, Andreas Mojzisch & Stefan Schulz-Hardt
Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, forthcoming
Abstract:
One prominent finding in research on group judgment is that groups often outperform the average of their members' individual judgments. Previous research attributed this finding to groups weighting their more competent members more strongly (differential weighting explanation). We postulate an alternative explanation, namely that groups outperform individuals due to group-to-individual (G-I) transfer, which denotes group members becoming more accurate individually during group interaction. In Experiment 1, we demonstrate that individual accuracy in an estimation task strongly increases due to interaction, leading to high accuracy at the group level. Experiment 2 replicates this finding and shows that G-I transfer can be enhanced by expertise feedback. In both experiments, when controlling for G-I transfer during group interaction, group judgments were not better than the average model. The findings imply that previously observed superior performance by groups compared to individuals may have been due to G-I transfer and not necessarily due to differential weighting.
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Friends with Benefits: The Evolved Psychology of Same- and Opposite-Sex Friendship
David Lewis et al.
Evolutionary Psychology, December 2011, Pages 543-563
Abstract:
During human evolution, men and women faced distinct adaptive problems, including pregnancy, hunting, childcare, and warfare. Due to these sex-linked adaptive problems, natural selection would have favored psychological mechanisms that oriented men and women toward forming friendships with individuals possessing characteristics valuable for solving these problems. The current study explored sex-differentiated friend preferences and the psychological design features of same- and opposite-sex friendship in two tasks. In Task 1, participants (N = 121) categorized their same-sex friends (SSFs) and opposite-sex friends (OSFs) according to the functions these friends serve in their lives. In Task 2, participants designed their ideal SSFs and OSFs using limited budgets that forced them to make trade-offs between the characteristics they desire in their friends. In Task 1, men, more than women, reported maintaining SSFs for functions related to athleticism and status enhancement and OSFs for mating opportunities. In Task 2, both sexes prioritized agreeableness and dependability in their ideal SSFs, but men prioritized physical attractiveness in their OSFs, whereas women prioritized economic resources and physical prowess. These findings suggest that friend preferences may have evolved to solve ancestrally sex-linked adaptive problems, and that opposite-sex friendship may directly or indirectly serve mating functions.
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Forgiveness Results From Integrating Information About Relationship Value and Exploitation Risk
Jeni Burnette et al.
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, forthcoming
Abstract:
Exploitation is a fact of life for social organisms, and natural selection gives rise to revenge mechanisms that are designed to deter such exploitations. However, humans may also possess cognitive forgiveness mechanisms designed to promote the restoration of valuable social relationships following exploitation. In the current article, the authors test the hypothesis that decisions about forgiveness result from a computational system that combines information about relationship value and exploitation risk to produce decisions about whom to forgive following interpersonal offenses. The authors examined the independent and interactive effects of relationship value and exploitation risk across two studies. In Study 1, controlling for other constructs related to forgiveness, the authors assessed relationship value and exploitation risk. In Study 2, participants experienced experimental manipulations of relationship value and exploitation risk. Across studies, using hypothetical and actual offenses and varied forgiveness measures, the combination of low exploitation risk and high relationship value predicted the greatest forgiveness.
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The Power of Words: A Model of Honesty and Fairness
Raúl López-Pérez
Journal of Economic Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
We develop a game-theoretical model of honesty and fairness to study cooperation in social dilemma games with communication. It is based on two key intuitions. First, players suffer a utility cost if they break norms of honesty and fairness, and this cost is highest if most others comply with the norm. Second, people are heterogeneous with regard to their concern for norms. We show that a model based on honesty norms alone cannot explain why pre-play communication fosters cooperation in simultaneous social dilemmas. In contrast, the model based on norms of honesty and fairness can. We also illustrate other predictions of the model, offering experimental evidence in line with them - e.g., the effect of communication on cooperation depends on how many players communicate, and whether the social dilemma is played simultaneously or sequentially. In addition, ideas for new experiments are suggested.
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Jan McAllister, Jacqueline Collier & Lee Shepstone
Journal of Fluency Disorders, forthcoming
Purpose: In interview and survey studies, people who stutter report the belief that stuttering has had a negative impact on their own education and employment. This population study sought objective evidence of such disadvantage for people who stutter as a group, compared with people who do not stutter.
Method: A secondary analysis of a British birth cohort dataset was used in the study. At age 16, there were 217 cohort members who were reported by their parents to stutter, and 15,694 cohort members with no known history of stuttering or other speech problems. Data were analysed concerning factors associated with report of stuttering at 16, school leaving age, highest qualification, unemployment early in working life, pay at age 23 and 50, and social class of job at age 23 and 50.
Results: Those who stuttered at 16 were statistically more likely than those who did not stutter to be male, to have poorer cognitive and reading test scores, and to have been bullied. There were no significant effects of stuttering on educational outcomes. For employment outcomes, the only significant association with stuttering concerned socioeconomic status of occupation at 50, with those who had been reported to stutter having lower-status jobs.
Discussion: These findings fail to support the belief that stuttering has a negative impact on education and employment. The higher likelihood of those who stutter working in lower-status positions may reflect their preference for avoiding occupations perceived to require good spoken communication abilities. Therapeutic implications are discussed.
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Benjamin DiCicco-Bloom & Daniel Romer
Youth & Society, March 2012, Pages 141-170
Abstract:
The authors argue that the recent increase in poker play among adolescent males in the United States was primarily attributable to high-status male youth who are more able to organize informal gambling games (e.g., poker and sports betting) than are low-status male youth who are left to gamble on formal games (e.g., lotteries and slot machines). Using participation in sports as a proxy for status, the authors test the prediction that male athletes were more likely to engage in informal gambling and were largely responsible for the recent and much-discussed poker craze among adolescents. These and related predictions are supported using data from consecutive cross-sectional surveys of American youth from 2002 to 2008. Despite their social status, however, male youth engaging in informal gambling are more at risk for gambling problems than are those engaging in formal gambling. The authors discuss the dilemmas that their findings present for the prevention of problem gambling in young people.
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Social learning spreads knowledge about dangerous humans among American crows
Heather Cornell, John Marzluff & Shannon Pecoraro
Proceedings of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences, 7 February 2012, Pages 499-508
Abstract:
Individuals face evolutionary trade-offs between the acquisition of costly but accurate information gained firsthand and the use of inexpensive but possibly less reliable social information. American crows (Corvus brachyrhynchos) use both sources of information to learn the facial features of a dangerous person. We exposed wild crows to a novel ‘dangerous face' by wearing a unique mask as we trapped, banded and released 7-15 birds at five study sites near Seattle, WA, USA. An immediate scolding response to the dangerous mask after trapping by previously captured crows demonstrates individual learning, while an immediate response by crows that were not captured probably represents conditioning to the trapping scene by the mob of birds that assembled during the capture. Later recognition of dangerous masks by lone crows that were never captured is consistent with horizontal social learning. Independent scolding by young crows, whose parents had conditioned them to scold the dangerous mask, demonstrates vertical social learning. Crows that directly experienced trapping later discriminated among dangerous and neutral masks more precisely than did crows that learned through social means. Learning enabled scolding to double in frequency and spread at least 1.2 km from the place of origin over a 5 year period at one site.
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Dealing With Task Interruptions in Complex Dynamic Environments: Are Two Heads Better Than One?
Sébastien Tremblay et al.
Human Factors: The Journal of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, February 2012, Pages 70-83
Objective: This study examined whether teaming up mitigates individual vulnerability to task interruptions in complex dynamic situations.
Background: Omnipresent in everyday multitasking environments, task interruptions are usually detrimental to individual performance. This is particularly crucial in dynamic command and control (C2) safety-critical contexts because of the additional challenge imposed by the continually evolving situation during the interruption.
Method: We employed a firefighting microworld to simulate C2 in the context of supervisory control to examine the relative impact of interruptions on participants working in a functional dyad versus operators working alone.
Results: Although task interruption was detrimental to participants' efficacy of monitoring resources, the negative impact of interruption was reduced for those working in teams. Teaming up translated into faster resumption time, but only if both teammates were interrupted simultaneously. Interrupting only one team member was associated with increased postinterruption communications and slower resumption time.
Conclusion: These findings suggest that in complex dynamic situations working in a small team confers more resistance to task interruption than working alone by virtue of the reduced individual workload typical of teamwork. The benefit of collaborative work seems nevertheless mediated by the coordination and communication overhead associated with teamwork.
Monday, February 13, 2012
Globalized
The Declining Influence of the United States Constitution
David Law & Mila Versteeg
NYU Law Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
It has been suggested, with growing frequency, that the United States may be losing its influence over constitutionalism in other countries because it is increasingly out of sync with an evolving global consensus on issues of human rights. Little is known in an empirical and systematic way, however, about the extent to which the U.S. Constitution influences the revision and adoption of formal constitutions in other countries. In this Article, we show empirically that other countries have, in recent decades, become increasingly unlikely to model either the rights-related provisions or the basic structural provisions of their own constitutions upon those found in the U.S. Constitution. Analysis of sixty years of comprehensive data on the content of the world's constitutions reveals that there is a significant and growing generic component to global constitutionalism, in the form of a set of rights provisions that appear in nearly all formal constitutions. On the basis of this data, we are able to identify the world's most and least generic constitutions. Our analysis also confirms, however, that the U.S. Constitution is increasingly far from the global mainstream. The fact that the U.S. Constitution is not widely emulated raises the question of whether there is an alternative paradigm that constitutional drafters in other countries now employ as a model instead. One possibility is that their attention has shifted to some other prominent national constitution. To evaluate this possibility, we analyze the content of the world's constitutions for telltale patterns of similarity to the constitutions of Canada, Germany, South Africa, and India, which have often been identified as especially influential. We find some support in the data for the notion that the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms has influenced constitution-making in other countries. This influence is neither uniform nor global in scope, however, but instead reflects an evolutionary path shared primarily by other common law countries. By comparison, we uncover no patterns that would suggest widespread constitutional emulation of Germany, South Africa, or India. Another possibility is that international and regional human rights instruments have become especially influential upon the manner in which national constitutions are written. We find little evidence to indicate that any of the leading human rights treaties now serves as a dominant model for constitutional drafters. Some noteworthy patterns of similarity between national constitutions and international legal instruments do exist: For example, the constitutions of undemocratic countries tend to exhibit greater similarity to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, while those of common law countries manifest the opposite tendency. It is difficult to infer from these patterns, however, that countries have actually emulated international or regional human rights instruments when writing their constitutions.
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Exportability of Films in a Globalizing Market: The Intersection of Nation and Genre
Diane Barthel-Bouchier
Cultural Sociology, March 2012, Pages 75-91
Abstract:
While the dominance of the Hollywood major studios in the global film market is a well-known fact, less is known about the patterns of exportability by film genre and by nation. Here I present data pertaining to cross-national comparisons between France and the United States, as well as relevant global market figures for US films by genre. The findings challenge the assumption that specific genres, notably comedy, do not export. Rather, it appears that most US comedies that are successful in the States, like most other genres of US films, do and are exported. The case for France, however, appears quite different, insofar as the top films, which were overwhelmingly also comedies, did not export. Exports in the French case were more characteristic of niche marketing: namely quality nature films that could be easily translated, and films that fit specific cultural expectations (Barnier and Moine, 2002; Frodon, 1998). This research also suggests that the traditional confrontation of theoretical approaches (cultural imperialist, cultural studies, and the economic approach) fits neither the current situation of a globalizing industry nor the cultural complexity of many films, but that a more nuanced approach should focus on strategies available to different players and relationships formed among producers and between producers and specific markets.
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The China Syndrome: Local Labor Market Effects of Import Competition in the United States
David Autor, David Dorn & Gordon Hanson
MIT Working Paper, August 2011
Abstract:
We analyze the effect of rising Chinese import competition between 1990 and 2007 on local U.S. labor markets, exploiting cross-market variation in import exposure stemming from initial differences in industry specialization while instrumenting for imports using changes in Chinese imports by industry to other high-income countries. Rising exposure increases unemployment, lowers labor force participation, and reduces wages in local labor markets. Conservatively, it explains one-quarter of the contemporaneous aggregate decline in U.S. manufacturing employment. Transfer benefits payments for unemployment, disability, retirement, and healthcare also rise sharply in exposed labor markets. The deadweight loss of financing these transfers is one to two-thirds as large as U.S. gains from trade with China.
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Management Practices Across Firms and Countries
Nicholas Bloom et al.
Harvard Working Paper, December 2011
Abstract:
For the last decade we have been using double-blind survey techniques and randomized sampling to construct management data on over 10,000 organizations across twenty countries. On average, we find that in manufacturing American, Japanese, and German firms are the best managed. Firms in developing countries, such as Brazil, China and India tend to be poorly managed. American retail firms and hospitals are also well managed by international standards, although American schools are worse managed than those in several other developed countries. We also find substantial variation in management practices across organizations in every country and every sector, mirroring the heterogeneity in the spread of performance in these sectors. One factor linked to this variation is ownership. Government, family, and founder owned firms are usually poorly managed, while multinational, dispersed shareholder and private-equity owned firms are typically well managed. Stronger product market competition and higher worker skills are associated with better management practices. Less regulated labor markets are associated with improvements in incentive management practices such as performance based promotion.
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Birth Rates and Border Crossings: Latin American Migration to the US, Canada, Spain, and the UK
Gordon Hanson & Craig McIntosh
Economic Journal, forthcoming
Abstract:
We use census data for the US, Canada, Spain, and UK to estimate bilateral migration rates to these countries from 25 Latin American and Caribbean nations over the period 1980 to 2005. Latin American migration to the US is responsive to labour supply and demand shocks as well as natural disasters. Latin American migration to Canada, Spain, and the UK, in contrast, is largely insensitive to these shocks, responding only to civil and military conflict. The results are consistent with US immigration being mediated by market forces and immigration to the other countries being insulated from labour market shocks.
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Immigration, Wages, and Compositional Amenities
David Card, Christian Dustmann & Ian Preston
Journal of the European Economic Association, February 2012, Pages 78-119
Abstract:
There is strong public opposition to increased immigration throughout Europe. Given the modest economic impacts of immigration estimated in most studies, the depth of anti-immigrant sentiment is puzzling. Immigration, however, does not just affect wages and taxes. It also changes the composition of the local population, threatening the compositional amenities that natives derive from their neighborhoods, schools, and workplaces. In this paper we use a simple latent-factor model, combined with data for 21 countries from the 2002 European Social Survey (ESS), to measure the relative importance of economic and compositional concerns in driving opinions about immigration policy. The ESS included a unique battery of questions on the labor market and social impacts of immigration, as well as on the desirability of increasing or reducing immigrant inflows. We find that compositional concerns are 2-5 times more important in explaining variation in individual attitudes toward immigration policy than concerns over wages and taxes. Likewise, most of the difference in opinion between more- and less-educated respondents is attributable to heightened compositional concerns among people with lower education.
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The Economic Origins of Democracy Reconsidered
John Freeman & Dennis Quinn
American Political Science Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
The effects of inequality and financial globalization on democratization are central issues in political science. The relationships among economic inequality, capital mobility, and democracy differ in the late twentieth century for financially integrated autocracies vs. closed autocracies. Financial integration enables native elites to create diversified international asset portfolios. Asset diversification decreases both elite stakes in and collective action capacity for opposing democracy. Financial integration also changes the character of capital assets - including land - by altering the uses of capital assets and the nationality of owners. It follows that financially integrated autocracies, especially those with high levels of inequality, are more likely to democratize than unequal financially closed autocracies. We test our argument for a panel of countries in the post-World War II period. We find a quadratic hump relationship between inequality and democracy for financially closed autocracies, but an upward sloping relationship between inequality and democratization for financially integrated autocracies.
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When is it Optimal to Delegate: The Theory of Fast-track Authority
Levent Celik, Bilgehan Karabay & John McLaren
NBER Working Paper, February 2012
Abstract:
With fast-track authority (FTA), the US Congress delegates trade-policy authority to the President by committing not to amend a trade agreement. We suggest an interpretation in which Congress uses FTA to forestall destructive competition between its members for protectionist rents. We show that FTA is never granted if an industry is operating in the majority of districts. Second, the more equally distributed are the industries across districts and the more similar are the industries' sizes, the more likely it is that FTA is granted. This is true since competition over rents is most punishing when bargaining power is symmetrically distributed, and in that case the ex ante expected welfare of each district is lower without FTA. Third, if existing levels of protection are very different across industries, even if FTA is granted, it may not lead to free trade because a majority of industries may prefer the status quo to free trade.
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Student-Centeredness in Social Science Textbooks, 1970-2008: A Cross-National Study
Patricia Bromley, John Meyer & Francisco Ramirez
Social Forces, December 2011, Pages 547-570
Abstract:
A striking feature of modern societies is the extent to which individual persons are culturally validated as equal and empowered actors. The expansion of a wide range of rights in recent decades, given prominence in current discussions of world society, supports an expanded conception of the individual. We examine the extent to which broad global changes promoting human empowerment are associated with expanded ideas of the status and capacities of students. We hypothesize that there are substantial increases in student-centered educational foci in countries around the world. First, the rights of students as children are directly asserted. Second, an emphasis on empowered human agency supports forms of socialization that promote active participation as well as the capacities and interests of the student. Examining a unique dataset of 533 secondary school social science textbooks from 74 countries published over the past 40 years, we find that textbooks have indeed become more student-centered, and that this shift is associated with the rising status of individuals and children in global human rights treaties and organizations. Student-centered texts are more common in countries with greater individualism embodied in political and socio-economic institutions and ideologies, and with more links to world society. The study contributes to both political and educational sociology, examining how global changes lead to increased emphasis on empowered individual agency in intended curricula.
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How important is cultural background for the level of intergenerational mobility?
Daniel Schnitzlein
Economics Letters, March 2012, Pages 335-337
Abstract:
Based on brother correlations in permanent earnings for different groups of second generation immigrants, the findings in this paper indicate that cultural background is not a major determinant of the level of intergenerational economic mobility.
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The role of the United States in the global economy and its evolution over time
Stephane Dees & Arthur Saint-Guilhem
Empirical Economics, December 2011, Pages 573-591
Abstract:
This article aims at assessing the role of the United States in the global economy and its evolution over time. Based on a Global VAR modeling approach, this article shows first that countries with a large trade exposure with the U.S. economy have a relatively larger sensitivity to U.S. developments. However, even for countries that do not trade so much with the U.S., they are largely influenced by its dominance through other partners' trade. Moreover, while no clear trend seems to emerge, it seems that the role of the U.S. in the global economy has changed over time. Overall, for most countries - the latest recession excluded - a change in U.S. GDP had weaker impacts - though more persistent - for most recent periods. The latest recession, however, led to some renewed increase in the sensitivity of the economies to U.S. developments.
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Prasanna Tambe & Lorin Hitt
Management Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
We combine new information technology (IT) offshoring and IT workforce microdata to investigate how the use of IT offshore captive centers is affecting the skill composition of the U.S. onshore IT workforce. The analysis is based on the theory that occupations involving tasks that are "tradable," such as tasks that require little personal communication or hands-on interaction with U.S.-based objects, are vulnerable to being moved offshore. Consistent with this theory, we find that firms that have offshore IT captive centers have 8% less of their onshore IT workforce involved in tradable occupations; those without offshore captive centers have increased the proportion of onshore employment in these same occupations by 3%. In addition, we find that hourly IT workers (e.g., IT contractors) are disproportionately employed in tradable jobs, and their onshore employment is 2%-3% lower in firms with offshore captive centers. These findings persist after considering different measures of employment composition, including controls for human capital, firm performance, domestic outsourcing, and whether firms choose to build or buy software. Instrumental variables and corroborating regressions suggest that our estimates are conservative - the magnitude of the effect generally rises after accounting for reverse causality and measurement error.
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Internationalization, competitiveness and performance in athletics (1984-2006)
V. De Bosscher, C. Du Bois & B. Heyndels
Sport in Society, Winter 2012, Pages 88-102
Abstract:
This study examines whether a process of internationalization has affected the level of athletic performance amongst high-level athletes competing on the world stage. Top 100 International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) rankings were compared at two time points: 1984 and 2006, by event and by gender. We identified internationalization as a determinant of the level of athletic performances. This level increased more in events that witnessed more important shifts in market shares (dynamic internationalization or competitiveness) and where dominance by a subset of countries (static internationalization) decreased. This internationalization clearly affects performances in men's athletics (as the performance has clearly gone up since 1984), but not in women's athletics. Here the general level of women's athletics has actually decreased.
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Globalization, Gender, and Growth
Ray Rees & Ray Riezman
Review of Income and Wealth, March 2012, Pages 107-117
Abstract:
We consider the effect of globalization on fertility, human capital, and growth. We view globalization as creating market opportunities for employment in less developed countries. We construct a specific model of household decision making, drawing on empirical observations in the development economics literature, and show that if the market opportunities produced by globalization are for women, then globalization reduces fertility and increases human capital formation. If the opportunities are for men, then fertility increases and human capital formation falls. We then show that globalization that produces job opportunities for women increases growth and produces a long run steady state with higher per capita consumption than would prevail either without globalization, or with globalization that creates jobs only for men.
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David Hummels & Georg Schaur
NBER Working Paper, January 2012
Abstract:
A large and growing share of international trade is carried on airplanes. Air cargo is many times more expensive than maritime transport but arrives in destination markets much faster. We model firms' choice between exporting goods using fast but expensive air cargo and slow but cheap ocean cargo. This choice depends on the price elasticity of demand and the value that consumers attach to fast delivery and is revealed in the relative market shares of firms who air and ocean ship. We use US imports data that provide rich variation in the premium paid for air shipping and in time lags for ocean transit to identify these parameters and extract consumer's valuation of time. By exploiting variation across US entry coasts we are able to control for selection and for unobserved shocks to product quality and variety that affect market shares. We estimate that each day in transit is equivalent to an ad-valorem tariff of 0.6 to 2.3 percent and that the most time-sensitive trade flows are those involving parts and components trade. These results suggest a link between sharp declines in the price of air shipping and rapid growth in trade as well as growth in world-wide fragmentation of production. Our estimates are also useful for assessing the economic impact of policies that raise or lower time to trade such as security screening of cargo, port infrastructure investment, or streamlined customs procedures.
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On the Economic Consequences of the Peace: Trade and Borders After Versailles
Nikolaus Wolf, Max-Stephan Schulze & Hans-Christian Heinemeyer
Journal of Economic History, December 2011, Pages 915-949
Abstract:
The First World War radically altered the political landscape of Central Europe. The new borders after 1918 are typically viewed as detrimental to the region's economic integration and development. We argue that this view lacks historical perspective. It fails to take into account that the new borders followed a pattern of economic fragmentation that had emerged during the late nineteenth century. We estimate the effects of the new borders on trade and find that the "treatment effects" of these borders were quite limited. There is strong evidence that border changes occurred systematically along barriers which existed already before 1914.
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International Negotiations and Domestic Politics: The Case of IMF Labor Market Conditionality
Teri Caraway, Stephanie Rickard & Mark Anner
International Organization, January 2012, Pages 27-61
Abstract:
What is the role of international organizations (IOs) in the formulation of domestic policy, and how much influence do citizens have in countries' negotiations with IOs? We examine these questions through a study of labor-related conditionality in International Monetary Fund (IMF) loans. Using new data from IMF loan documents for programs from 1980 to 2000, we test to see if citizens' economic interests influence IMF conditionality. We examine the substance of loan conditions and identify those that require liberalization in the country's domestic labor market or that have direct effects on employment, wages, and social benefits. We find evidence that democratic countries with stronger domestic labor receive less intrusive labor-related conditions in their IMF loan programs. We argue that governments concerned about workers' opposition to labor-related loan conditions negotiate with the IMF to minimize labor conditionality. We find that the IMF is responsive to domestic politics and citizens' interests.
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Does immigration weaken natives' support for the unemployed? Evidence from Germany
Holger Stichnoth
Public Choice, June 2012, Pages 631-654
Abstract:
Using data from the 1997 and 2002 waves of the German Socio-Economic Panel and from official statistics, I study whether natives are less supportive of state help for the unemployed in regions where the share of foreigners among the unemployed is high. Unlike previous studies, I use individual-level panel data, which allows a more convincing identification of a causal effect. I find that the negative bivariate association is mainly driven by observed individual differences, such as East German origin or income. While there remains some evidence of a negative association even after adjusting for observed and unobserved individual differences, the association is relatively weak.
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Investment and Growth in Rich and Poor Countries
Yin-Wong Cheung, Michael Dooley & Vladyslav Sushko
NBER Working Paper, January 2012
Abstract:
This paper revisits the association between investment and growth. The empirical findings highlight substantial heterogeneity for the effect of investment on growth and suggest a possible negative association. Results based on a battery of cross-sectional and time-series regressions show that the link between investment and growth has weakened over time and that investment in high-income countries is more likely to have a negative effect on growth. The adverse effect for high-income countries appears to have increased over time. An implication is that uphill capital flows could be associated with negative or zero returns. The result is robust to the presence of control variables that are commonly included in growth studies.
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Which Sectors Make Poor Countries So Unproductive?
Berthold Herrendorf & Ákos Valentinyi
Journal of the European Economic Association, forthcoming
Abstract:
Which sectors are most responsible for the low total factor productivities of developing countries? To answer this question we develop a new framework for sectoral development accounting. Applying this framework to the Penn World Table, we find that in equipment, construction, and food the sectoral TFP differences between developing countries and the United States are much larger than in the aggregate. However, in manufactured consumption the sectoral TFP differences are about equal to the aggregate TFP differences, and in services they are much smaller. We show that our level of disaggregation allows us to reconcile the results of existing studies of sectoral productivity differences, which have focused on noncomparable two-sector decompositions of the aggregate data. We also show that our results help shed light on existing theories of aggregate TFP differences.
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Brain drain in the age of mass migration: Does relative inequality explain migrant selectivity?
Yvonne Stolz & Joerg Baten
Explorations in Economic History, forthcoming
Abstract:
Brain drain is a core economic policy problem for many developing countries today. Does relative inequality in source and destination countries influence the brain-drain phenomenon? We explore human capital selectivity during the period 1820-1909.We apply age heaping techniques to measure human capital selectivity of international migrants. In a sample of 52 source and five destination countries we find selective migration determined by relative anthropometric inequality in source and destination countries. Other inequality measures confirm this. The results remain robust in OLS and Arellano-Bond approaches. We confirm the Roy-Borjas model of migrant self-selection. Moreover, we find that countries like Germany and UK experienced a small positive effect, because the less educated emigrated in larger numbers.
Sunday, February 12, 2012
Carnal Knowledge
Sex ratio dynamics and fluctuating selection on personality
Marco Del Giudice
Journal of Theoretical Biology, 21 March 2012, Pages 48-60
Abstract:
Fluctuating selection has often been proposed as an explanation for the maintenance of genetic variation in personality. Here I argue that the temporal dynamics of the sex ratio can be a powerful source of fluctuating selection on personality traits, and develop this hypothesis with respect to humans. First, I review evidence that sex ratios modulate a wide range of social processes related to mating and parenting. Since most personality traits affect mating and parenting behavior, changes in the sex ratio can be expected to result in variable selection on personality. I then show that the temporal dynamics of the sex ratio are intrinsically characterized by fluctuations at various timescales. Finally, I address a number of evolutionary genetic challenges to the hypothesis. I conclude that the sex ratio hypothesis is a plausible explanation of genetic variation in human personality, and may be fruitfully applied to other species as well.
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Anna Ziomkiewicz et al.
Hormones and Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
Personality and temperament were hypothesized to function as important factors affecting life history strategies. Recent research has demonstrated the association between temperamental traits and reproduction in humans, however, the underlying mechanisms are still poorly understood. This study presents evidence for an association between temperamental traits and woman's fecundity, as indicated by levels of ovarian steroid hormones during the menstrual cycle. On a large sample of urban, reproductive age women (n=108) we demonstrated that activity, endurance and emotional reactivity are associated with levels of estrogen and with a pattern of change of progesterone levels. Women high in activity, high in endurance and low in emotional reactivity had up to twice as high estradiol levels and more favorable progesterone profiles as women low in activity, low in endurance and high in emotional reactivity. The temperamental traits we measured highly overlap with extraversion, neuroticism and negative emotionality that were reported to correlate with reproductive success. Our findings thus suggest a possible explanation for these relationships, linking personality and women's reproductive success through a hormonal pathway.
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Changes in Women's Condom Use over the First Year of College
Jennifer Walsh et al.
Journal of Sex Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
Most college students are sexually active, engage in serially monogamous relationships, and use condoms inconsistently. Little is known about how condom use changes during college, and even less about variables predicting changes in use. Latent growth modeling (LGM) was used to examine changes in condom use during the first year of college among 279 women (mean age = 18.0; 74% White), who provided monthly reports on condom use frequency. At study entry, participants also reported on theoretically suggested risk and protective factors. Predictors of changes in use were examined after controlling for use of alternative contraception and partner type. LGM showed that women decreased their condom use during the first year of college. Levels of condom use were initially lower among women with strong alcohol-sexual risk expectancies, women with more previous sexual partners, women who did not smoke marijuana, and African American women. Decreases in condom use were greater among women with lower grade point averages, women from lower socioeconomic status families, and women who engaged in binge drinking. Reductions in condom use may place women at greater risk of unplanned pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections. Identification of factors associated with decreases in condom use will enable targeted educational and intervention efforts.
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I like who you like, but only if I like you: Female character affects mate-choice copying
Simon Chu
Personality and Individual Differences, April 2012, Pages 691-695
Abstract:
Mate-choice copying is shown when women imitate the mate-choice preferences of other women. We propose that the preferences of women with a pleasant character should be more influential than those of women with an unpleasant character and further suggest that this should apply only when the female demonstrates active interest in the male, rather than disinterest. Here, we presented women as having either a pleasant or unpleasant character and found that observing pleasant women looking at men increased women's preferences for those men, while observing unpleasant women looking at men had no effect on women's preferences. Furthermore, the effect of being looked at by a pleasant woman was heightened when she was smiling. This suggests that judgements of facial attractiveness can be socially influenced and that character affects the degree of influence.
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Consequences of Sex Education on Teen and Young Adult Sexual Behaviors and Outcomes
Laura Lindberg & Isaac Maddow-Zimet
Journal of Adolescent Health, February 2012, Page S26
Purpose: Formal sex education is a key strategy for promoting safer sexual behaviors and improved outcomes for American adolescents and young adults. This study examined whether formal sex education, particularly receipt of comprehensive sex education or abstinence-only instruction, is associated with safer sexual and reproductive health behaviors and outcomes using recent nationally-representative survey data.
Methods: Data used were from 4,691 males and females ages 15-24 from the 2006-08 National Survey of Family Growth. Weighted bivariate and multivariate analyses were conducted by gender using STATA, to estimate the associations of receipt of comprehensive (CSE) or only abstinence sex education before first sexual intercourse, and sexual behaviors and outcomes. We estimated a discrete-time logistic hazard rate model to examine the association between type of sex education received and the transition to first sexual intercourse, by age 19 and by age 24, incorporating censored cases.
Results: Two-thirds of females and 55% of males received CSE prior to first vaginal sex; about one in five respondents reported receiving only abstinence education prior to first sex. Sixteen percent of sexually experienced females and 24 % of sexually experienced males reported not receiving instruction in either topic prior to first sex. Receipt of formal sex education, regardless of type, was associated with a later onset of first sex for both genders, as compared to receiving no sex education. Receipt of comprehensive sex education was associated with being significantly more likely at first sex to use any contraception (OR=1.73, females, OR=1.91, males) or a condom (OR=1.62, females, OR=1.90, males), and being less likely to have an age discrepant partner (OR=.67, females, OR=.48, males). Females receiving comprehensive sex education were less likely to report that their first sex was unwanted (OR=.46). There were no significant associations between receiving only abstinence education and these outcomes. While there were no direct associations between receipt of comprehensive sex education and longer term behaviors and outcomes, there were indirect influences through later age at first sex, particularly among males, reducing their likelihood of having gotten a partner pregnant, multiple partnerships, and recent STD treatment, and indirectly increasing the likelihood of condom use at most recent sex.
Conclusions: Comprehensive sex education was associated with healthier sexual behaviors and outcomes as compared to not receiving instruction about either abstinence or methods of birth control. The protective influence of sex education is not limited to the questions of if or when to have sex, but extends to issues of partner selection, contraceptive use, and reproductive health outcomes. Creating access to medically accurate comprehensive sex education, and reducing socio-demographic disparities in the receipt of this education, should remain a primary goal of those concerned with the well-being of teens and young adults. Formal sex education offers one important opportunity to build a foundation of sexual health. At the same time, recognizing that maintaining sexual and reproductive health is a lifetime process, access to relevant information, services and support should remain available over the course of a lifetime.
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Unfortunate First Names: Effects of Name-Based Relational Devaluation and Interpersonal Neglect
Jochen Gebauer, Mark Leary & Wiebke Neberich
Social Psychological and Personality Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Can negative first names cause interpersonal neglect? Study 1 (N = 968) compared extremely negatively named online-daters with extremely positively named online-daters. Study 2 (N = 4,070) compared less extreme groups - namely, online-daters with somewhat unattractive versus somewhat attractive first names. Study 3 (N = 6,775) compared online-daters with currently popular versus currently less popular first names, while controlling for name-popularity at birth. Across all studies, negatively named individuals were more neglected by other online-daters, as indicated by fewer first visits to their dating profiles. This form of neglect arguably mirrors a name-based life history of neglect, discrimination, prejudice, or even ostracism. Supporting this argument, neglect mediated the relation between negative names and lower self-esteem, more frequent smoking, and less education. These results are consistent with the name-based interpersonal neglect hypothesis: Negative names evoke negative interpersonal reactions, which in turn influence people's life outcomes for the worse.
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Relationship Formation and Stability in Emerging Adulthood: Do Sex Ratios Matter?
Tara Warner et al.
Social Forces, September 2011, Pages 269-295
Abstract:
Research links sex ratios with the likelihood of marriage and divorce. However, whether sex ratios similarly influence precursors to marriage (transitions in and out of dating or cohabiting relationships) is unknown. Utilizing data from the Toledo Adolescent Relationships Study and the 2000 U.S. Census, this study assesses whether sex ratios influence the formation and stability of emerging adults' romantic relationships. Findings show that relationship formation is unaffected by partner availability, yet the presence of partners increases women's odds of cohabiting, decreases men's odds of cohabiting, and increases number of dating partners and cheating among men. It appears that sex ratios influence not only transitions in and out of marriage, but also the process through which individuals search for and evaluate partners prior to marriage.
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Jeni Loftus & Brian Kelly
Journal of Adolescent Health, February 2012, Pages 195-197
Purpose: To examine the short-term effects on the sexual health of adolescent boys in age discordant relationships.
Methods: Weighted logistic regression analyses were conducted using data from waves 1 and 2 of the National Survey of Adolescent Health to determine the health effects of entry into an age discordant relationship on adolescent boys.
Results: Results indicate that boys involved in an age discordant relationship, in comparison with boys in a similar age relationship, had higher odds of having had sexual intercourse (OR = 2.92), having got a partner pregnant (OR = 1.89), having been diagnosed with STD (OR = 4.41), and having lost one's virginity (OR = 3.39). Analyses on the sexually active subset reveal no significant relationship between involvement in an age discordant relationship and birth control use broadly, or condom use specifically, at their most recent sexual intercourse.
Conclusion: In general, entering into an age discordant relationship as a younger partner is associated with some adverse sexual health effects for adolescent boys. Thus, some outcomes that were demonstrated in previous research to be problematic for adolescent girls dating significantly older males are similarly problematic for adolescent boys dating older females.
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Managing an Attractive Impression by Using Alcohol: Evidence From Two Daily Diary Studies
Megan O'Grady et al.
Basic and Applied Social Psychology, Winter 2012, Pages 76-87
Abstract:
Two studies investigate impression management processes and alcohol use. In both studies, participants completed the Fear of Negative Evaluation scale and then a 21-day survey. In Study 1, participants reported daily desired impression and drinking. Men drank more than women; however, this effect was stronger on days in which they wanted to appear attractive as compared to other desired impressions. In Study 2, participants reported desired attractiveness, sex-composition, and drinking during social interactions. Attractiveness desires during social interactions related positively to drinking for men when interacting with mixed-sex others, and for women when interacting with mixed- and single-sex others.
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Social Exchange and the Progression of Sexual Relationships in Emerging Adulthood
Sharon Sassler & Kara Joyner
Social Forces, September 2011, Pages 223-245
Abstract:
Research has extensively examined matching on race and other characteristics in cohabitation and marriage, but it has generally disregarded sexual and romantic relationships. Using data from the 2002 National Survey of Family Growth and the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, we examine the tempo of key transitions in the recent relationships of young adults ages 18-24. We focus on how the racial mix of partners in relationships is associated with the timing of sex, cohabitation and marriage. We find evidence that relationships between white men and minority women proceed more rapidly from romance to sexual involvement and from sexual involvement to cohabitation compared to relationships involving other racial combinations. Our findings have important implications for social exchange perspectives on mate selection.
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The Role of Skin Color on Hispanic Women's Perceptions of Attractiveness
Dionne Stephens & Paula Fernández
Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Sciences, February 2012, Pages 77-94
Abstract:
This study relies on qualitative methods to investigate Hispanic women's skin color perceptions. The primary goal is to identify the relevance of these perceptions on their beliefs about their own physical attractiveness. Thirty-four self-identified White-Hispanic women attending a large Hispanic Serving Institution in the southeastern United States were interviewed for this study. Unlike previous research findings on Hispanic women's skin color preferences, findings identified a "tan" skin color as preferred; pale skin was viewed as "plain" and unattractive. This preference was associated with four themes about physical attractiveness: (1) desirability among their peer groups, (2) increased value in dating contexts, (3) sexual appeal to men, and (4) marker of Hispanic identity in social contexts. Findings from this study are important for those researchers addressing identity development and relationship issues among Hispanic populations in the United States.
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Megan Dillow, Walid Afifi & Masaki Matsunaga
Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, February 2012, Pages 28-51
Abstract:
This four-study investigation examines the role of perceived partner uniqueness (PPU) in determining the immediate communicative and relational consequences of transgressions in romantic relationships. Study 1 reports a psychometrically sound PPU measure distinct from similar constructs. Study 2 reveals that PPU is associated with conflict responses following the discovery of infidelity, which then predict termination intentions. Study 3 involves an experimentally manipulated flirting transgression between one partner and a confederate, witnessed by the other partner, which provides a controlled examination of PPU on partners' non-verbal immediacy. Study 4 expands and refines PPU measurement, and tests PPU's ability to predict relational decisions beyond other partner-focused constructs. Results support the utility of PPU as a unique construct with communicative and relational impacts.
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Evolution of ape and human mating systems
Wataru Nakahashi & Shiro Horiuchi
Journal of Theoretical Biology, 7 March 2012, Pages 56-64
Abstract:
Humans (Homo sapiens) generally form multiple-male-multiple-female groups that include multiple family units. This social structure is maintained because dominant males do not monopolize females and, thus, allow subordinate males to mate, and human females are not generally promiscuous. Although apes show great variation in mating systems, the human-type mating system is unique among primates. The mating systems of apes and humans have evolved in response to their adaptation to different ecological conditions. We created and analyzed a mathematical model to investigate the conditions for each type of mating system to evolve. We focused on the mating strategy of alpha males and the mating and grouping strategies of females. We defined the human-type mating system as one with multiple-male-multiple-female groups in which alpha males do not monopolize females and females are not promiscuous. We demonstrated that the human-type mating system could evolve when a large group is advantageous and the cost of female promiscuity is great. Moreover, the human- and Pan-type mating systems can be bistable. Our results shed light on the origin of the human family.
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Intrasexual competition among males: Competitive towards men, prosocial towards women
Abraham Buunk & Karlijn Massar
Personality and Individual Differences, forthcoming
Abstract:
In a study among 40 males and 56 females, participants engaged in a series of decomposed social games in which they had to divide resources between themselves and either a same-sex or an opposite sex other. As predicted on the basis of theorizing on sexual selection, males behaved more competitively towards another man than towards a woman, whereas women did not distinguish between men and women in their degree of competitiveness. At the same time, men behaved more prosocially towards women than women did towards men. In addition, after dividing resources between themselves and another man in the decomposed game task, men showed higher levels of intrasexual competition (assessed with a questionnaire) than after dividing resources between themselves and a woman, whereas for women the sex of the other did not affect their level of intrasexual competition.
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Pulling the strings: Effects of friend and parent opinions on dating choices
Brittany Wright & Colleen Sinclair
Personal Relationships, forthcoming
Abstract:
The current study examined how dating choices are affected when individuals are faced with social network opinions that are in agreement or disagreement about the quality of potential dates. In a virtual dating game paradigm, participants spoke to 2 potential romantic partners online and received positive and/or negative feedback ostensibly from their friend and parent about 1 of the partners. The study employed a 2 (parent opinion: approve, disapprove) × 2 (friend opinion: approve, disapprove) × 2 (interaction partner: evaluated target, control target-within subjects) mixed factorial design. Friend opinion influenced who the participants liked, whereas parental opinion was influential when participants relied on their parent for more resources than their friend. In the end, though, only friend opinion predicted dating choice.
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Jenée James et al.
Developmental Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
The current study tested sex-specific pathways to early puberty, sexual debut, and sexual risk taking, as specified by an integrated evolutionary-developmental model of adolescent sexual development and behavior. In a prospective study of 238 adolescents (n = 129 girls and n = 109 boys) followed from approximately 12-18 years of age, we tested for longitudinal relations between ecological stressors, family relationships, pubertal maturation, self-perceived mate value, and sexual risk taking in both boys and girls. Consistent with the theory, (a) higher levels of familial and ecological stress predicted earlier sexual debut and greater sexual risk taking; (b) pubertal maturation partially mediated these relations among girls but not among boys; (c) father absence had unique effects on female sexual outcomes but not on male sexual outcomes; (d) higher self-perceived mate value directly predicted earlier sexual debut and, through it, greater sexual risk taking; and (e) relations between pubertal maturation and early sexual debut were partially mediated by higher self-perceived mate value in boys but not in girls. Discussion focuses on the contribution of an integrated evolutionary-developmental theory to the adolescent sexual health literature.
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Race and sexual behavior predict uptake of the human papillomavirus vaccine
Kate Keenan, Alison Hipwell & Stephanie Stepp
Health Psychology, January 2012, Pages 31-34
Objective: To identify predictors of human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination initiation by girls at high risk for HPV infection.
Method: Participants were 2,098 girls enrolled in the ongoing Pittsburgh Girls Study, who were between the ages of 12 and 15 years in 2008, and their primary caregivers. The study was conducted in the 2 years after the deployment of the first HPV vaccine approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Primary caregivers were asked about HPV vaccine uptake. Girls were interviewed about pubertal development and sexually intimate behavior.
Results: Approximately 60% of the girls had initiated the HPV vaccine in the past year. Among the hypothesized predictors of initiation, African-American race decreased the likelihood and level of sexually intimate behavior in the previous year increased the likelihood of uptake. Controlling for receipt of public assistance, African-American girls were close to 40% less likely to be vaccinated than European-American girls.
Conclusion: Racial disparities in use of preventive interventions such as the HPV vaccine exist. Lack of information about public financing of the vaccine, timing of vaccination relative to sexual activity, and perceptions of preventive value may limit uptake among those at highest risk for infection and negative sequelae from infection. Further research to probe knowledge and attitudes toward HPV vaccination and the impact of the media on vaccine initiation and uptake may reveal specific targets of intervention.
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Sarah Clark, Peter Kilmarx & Katrina Kretsinger
Health Affairs, December 2011, Pages 2355-2361
Abstract:
Studies have shown that male circumcision greatly reduces the risk for heterosexual transmission of HIV, other sexually transmitted infections, infant urinary tract infections, penile cancer, and other adverse health outcomes. Given recent data regarding these health benefits and the cost-effectiveness of newborn male circumcision, national policy makers are developing new recommendations regarding circumcision for newborn, adolescent, and adult males. To investigate the implications, this study assessed insurance coverage and reimbursement for routine newborn and adult male circumcision in private and public health plans in 2009. We found that coverage varies across private and public payers. Private insurance provides far broader coverage than state Medicaid programs for routine newborn male circumcision. Specifically, Medicaid programs in seventeen states do not cover it, even though low-income populations have a higher risk of HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases compared to higher-income groups. For adult male circumcision, coverage is generally sparse across public and private plans. Presentation of evidence-based recommendations-for example, from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention-may be necessary if coverage for newborn and adult male circumcision is to be expanded.
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Lauren Papp, Jennifer Danielewicz & Crystal Cayemberg
Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, February 2012, Pages 85-90
Abstract:
Extending previous research on positive and negative correlates of Facebook use for individuals' outcomes, this study examined male and female dating partners' (n=58 couples) Facebook use and portrayals of their intimate relationship on the Facebook profile. Confirming hypotheses from compatibility theories of mate selection, partners demonstrated similar Facebook intensity (e.g., usage, connection to Facebook), and were highly likely to portray their relationship on their Facebook profiles in similar ways (i.e., display partnered status and show their partner in profile picture). These Facebook profile choices played a role in the overall functioning of the relationship, with males' indications of a partnered status linked with higher levels of their own and their partners' (marginal) relationship satisfaction, and females' displays of their partner in their profile picture linked with higher levels of their own and their partners' relationship satisfaction. Finally, male and female reports of having had disagreements over the Facebook relationship status was associated with lower level of females' but not males' relationship satisfaction, after accounting for global verbal conflict. Thus, the findings point to the unique contribution of Facebook disagreements to intimate relationship functioning. Results from this study encourage continued examination of technology use and behaviors in contexts of intimate relationships.
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Female Self-Sexualization in MySpace.com Personal Profile Photographs
Cougar Hall, Joshua West & Emily McIntyre
Sexuality & Culture, March 2012, Pages 1-16
Abstract:
This article reports the results of a content analysis of female self-sexualization in personal profile pictures on MySpace.com (N = 24,000). Photographs were analyzed according to three measures: ritualization of subordination, body display, and objectification. Trained evaluators coded the photographs for each measure by race/ethnicity, body type, sexual orientation, and education level. Findings reveal that rates of ritualization of subordination were significantly higher for Hispanics, average body types, and bisexuals. Body display and objectification were both significantly higher for Blacks and Hispanics, bisexuals, and women with higher education levels. Body display and objectification rates were significantly lower for larger body types while body display alone was significantly lower for lesbians. Overall self-sexualizing behavior in this study sample is low based upon study measures. Images presented on MySpace.com do reveal, however, an acceptance of constrained and stereotypical notions regarding both gender and sex roles.
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Ink and Holes: Correlates and Predictive Associations of Body Modification Among Adolescents
Richard Dukes & Judith Stein
Youth & Society, December 2011, Pages 1547-1569
Abstract:
We examined correlates and predictive associations of tattoos and body piercings among 1,462 Colorado students in grades 9 to 12. More boys (19%) than girls (17%) reported tattoos, but more girls (42%) than boys (16%) reported piercings (earlobes not included). Older students reported more body modification. Structural equation models showed that although girls generally reported less deviant behavior, the indirect effect of female gender mediated through piercings was toward greater deviance that was not an artifact of girls having more piercings. Pierced girls were less school oriented than girls without piercings; they reported more substance use than boys without piercings, and pierced girls did not differ from boys in weapons possession and delinquency. However, among pierced respondents, boys still reported a greater number of deviant behaviors than girls. Educators and other adults should become aware of the possible at-risk status of body-modified adolescents, especially among girls who have piercings.
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Female reproductive tract form drives the evolution of complex sperm morphology
Dawn Higginson et al.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, forthcoming
Abstract:
The coevolution of female mate preferences and exaggerated male traits is a fundamental prediction of many sexual selection models, but has largely defied testing due to the challenges of quantifying the sensory and cognitive bases of female preferences. We overcome this difficulty by focusing on postcopulatory sexual selection, where readily quantifiable female reproductive tract structures are capable of biasing paternity in favor of preferred sperm morphologies and thus represent a proximate mechanism of female mate choice when ejaculates from multiple males overlap within the tract. Here, we use phylogenetically controlled generalized least squares and logistic regression to test whether the evolution of female reproductive tract design might have driven the evolution of complex, multivariate sperm form in a family of aquatic beetles. The results indicate that female reproductive tracts have undergone extensive diversification in diving beetles, with remodeling of size and shape of several organs and structures being significantly associated with changes in sperm size, head shape, gains/losses of conjugation and conjugate size. Further, results of Bayesian analyses suggest that the loss of sperm conjugation is driven by elongation of the female reproductive tract. Behavioral and ultrastructural examination of sperm conjugates stored in the female tract indicates that conjugates anchor in optimal positions for fertilization. The results underscore the importance of postcopulatory sexual selection as an agent of diversification.
Saturday, February 11, 2012
Stay Positive
Michael Dodd et al.
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences, 5 March 2012, Pages 640-649
Abstract:
We report evidence that individual-level variation in people's physiological and attentional responses to aversive and appetitive stimuli are correlated with broad political orientations. Specifically, we find that greater orientation to aversive stimuli tends to be associated with right-of-centre and greater orientation to appetitive (pleasing) stimuli with left-of-centre political inclinations. These findings are consistent with recent evidence that political views are connected to physiological predispositions but are unique in incorporating findings on variation in directed attention that make it possible to understand additional aspects of the link between the physiological and the political.
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How Power Corrupts Relationships: Cynical Attributions for Others' Generous Acts
Ena Inesi, Deborah Gruenfeld & Adam Galinsky
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Five studies explored whether power undermines the quality of relationships by creating instrumental attributions for generous acts. We predicted that this cynical view of others' intentions would impede responses that nurture healthy relationships. In the first three studies, the powerful were more likely to believe that the favors they received were offered for the favor-giver's instrumental purposes, thereby reducing power-holders' thankfulness, desire to reciprocate, and trust. These effects emerged when power was manipulated through hierarchical roles or primed semantically, and when participants recalled past favors or imagined future ones. Using income disparity as a proxy for power, Study 4 found that instrumental attributions for favors in marriages led to lower levels of relationship commitment among high-power spouses. Study 5 provided evidence that favors are critical in triggering power-holders' diminished trust. We connect our theory and findings to both a political scientist's writings on the nature of love and power almost half a century ago as well as the dilemma voiced by many celebrities who find true relatedness elusive. Overall, power provides a reason to doubt the purity of others' favors, creating a cynical perspective on others' generosity that undermines relationships.
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Shame for money: Shame enhances the incentive value of economic resources
Chia-Chi Wang et al.
Judgment and Decision Making, January 2012, Pages 77-85
Abstract:
Shame leads to devaluation of the social self, and thus to a desire to improve self-esteem. Money, which is related to the notion of one's ability, may help people demonstrate competence and gain self-esteem and respect from others. Based on the perspectives of feelings-as-information and threatened ego, we tested the hypothesis that a sense of shame heightens the desire for money, prompting self-interested behaviors as reflected by monetary donations and social value orientation. The results showed that subjects in the shame condition donated less money (Experiment 1) and exhibited more self-interested choices in the modified decomposed game (Experiment 2). The desire for money as reflected in overestimated coin sizes mediated the effect of shame on self-interested behavior. Our findings suggest that shame elicits the desire to acquire money to amend the threatened social self and improve self-esteem; however, it may induce a self-interested inclination that could harm social relationships.
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Temporal Patterns of Happiness and Information in a Global Social Network: Hedonometrics and Twitter
Peter Sheridan Dodds et al.
PLoS ONE, December 2011, e26752
Abstract:
Individual happiness is a fundamental societal metric. Normally measured through self-report, happiness has often been indirectly characterized and overshadowed by more readily quantifiable economic indicators such as gross domestic product. Here, we examine expressions made on the online, global microblog and social networking service Twitter, uncovering and explaining temporal variations in happiness and information levels over timescales ranging from hours to years. Our data set comprises over 46 billion words contained in nearly 4.6 billion expressions posted over a 33 month span by over 63 million unique users. In measuring happiness, we construct a tunable, real-time, remote-sensing, and non-invasive, text-based hedonometer. In building our metric, made available with this paper, we conducted a survey to obtain happiness evaluations of over 10,000 individual words, representing a tenfold size improvement over similar existing word sets. Rather than being ad hoc, our word list is chosen solely by frequency of usage, and we show how a highly robust and tunable metric can be constructed and defended.
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Happy as a lark: Morning-type younger and older adults are higher in positive affect
Renée Biss & Lynn Hasher
Emotion, forthcoming
Abstract:
A literature on young adults reports that morning-type individuals, or "larks," report higher levels of positive affect compared with evening-type individuals, or "owls" (Clark, Watson, & Leeka, 1989; Hasler et al., 2010). Morning types are relatively rare among young adults but frequent among older adults (May & Hasher, 1998; Mecacci et al., 1986), and here we report on the association between chronotype and affect in a large sample of healthy younger and older adults. Overall, older adults reported higher levels of positive affect than younger adults, with both younger and older morning types reporting higher levels of positive affect and subjective health than age mates who scored lower on morningness. Morningness partially mediated the association between age and positive affect, suggesting that greater morningness tendencies among older adults may contribute to their improved well-being relative to younger adults.
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Amanda Forest & Joanne Wood
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
The popular media have publicized the idea that social networking websites (e.g., Facebook) may enrich the interpersonal lives of those who struggle to make social connections. The opportunity that such sites provide for self-disclosure - a necessary component in the development of intimacy - could be especially beneficial for people with low self-esteem (LSEs), who are normally hesitant to self-disclose and who have difficulty maintaining satisfying relationships. We suspected that the Facebook context would reduce the perceived riskiness of self-disclosure, thus encouraging LSEs to express themselves more openly. Three studies examined whether LSEs see Facebook as a "safe" and appealing medium for self-disclosure, and whether their actual Facebook posts enable LSEs to reap social rewards. Although LSEs considered Facebook an appealing venue for self-disclosure, the low positivity and high negativity of their disclosures elicited undesirable responses from others.
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Two Types of Value-Affirmation: Implications for Self-Control Following Social Exclusion
Aleah Burson, Jennifer Crocker & Dominik Mischkowski
Social Psychological and Personality Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
The authors tested the hypothesis that affirming self-transcendent values attenuates negative consequences of self-threat better than affirming self-enhancement values. If value-affirmation buffers against threat because it bolsters the self, then affirming either a self-transcendent or self-enhancement value should similarly prevent typical decreased self-control after exclusion. However, if value-affirmations buffer the effects of threat because they promote self-transcendence, then affirming values related to self-transcendence should provide a better buffer against decreased self-control after exclusion. Ninety-two undergraduate students received either intentional or unintentional social exclusion. Participants then affirmed either a self-transcendent or self-enhancement value, or wrote about their daily routine. Consistent with predictions, participants ate more cookies when they were intentionally rather than unintentionally excluded; this effect was attenuated by affirming an important value, especially a self-transcendent value. This suggests that value-affirmation may be a particularly effective method of coping with self-threats when it increases self-transcendence.
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Jessica Chiang et al.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 7 February 2012, Pages 1878-1882
Abstract:
Research has consistently documented that social relationships influence physical health, a link that may implicate systemic inflammation. We examined whether daily social interactions predict levels of proinflammatory cytokines IL-6 and the soluble receptor for tumor necrosis factor-α (sTNFα RII) and their reactivity to a social stressor. One-hundred twenty-two healthy young adults completed daily diaries for 8 d that assessed positive, negative, and competitive social interactions. Participants then engaged in laboratory stress challenges, and IL-6 and sTNFαRII were collected at baseline and at 25- and 80-min poststressor, from oral mucosal transudate. Negative social interactions predicted elevated sTNFαRII at baseline, and IL-6 and sTNFαRII 25-min poststressor, as well as total output of sTNFα RII. Competitive social interactions predicted elevated baseline levels of IL-6 and sTNFαRII and total output of both cytokines. These findings suggest that daily social interactions that are negative and competitive are associated prospectively with heightened proinflammatory cytokine activity.
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The Neural Bases of Social Pain: Evidence for Shared Representations With Physical Pain
Naomi Eisenberger
Psychosomatic Medicine, February-March 2012, Pages 126-135
Abstract:
Experiences of social rejection or loss have been described as some of the most "painful" experiences that we, as humans, face and perhaps for good reason. Because of our prolonged period of immaturity, the social attachment system may have co-opted the pain system, borrowing the pain signal to prevent the detrimental consequences of social separation. This review summarizes a program of research that has explored the idea that experiences of physical pain and social pain rely on shared neural substrates. First, evidence showing that social pain activates pain-related neural regions is reviewed. Then, studies exploring some of the expected consequences of such a physical pain-social pain overlap are summarized. These studies demonstrate that a) individuals who are more sensitive to one kind of pain are also more sensitive to the other and b) factors that increase or decrease one kind of pain alter the other in a similar manner. Finally, what these shared neural substrates mean for our understanding of socially painful experience is discussed.
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Social laughter is correlated with an elevated pain threshold
R.I.M. Dunbar et al.
Proceedings of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences, 22 March 2012, Pages 1161-1167
Abstract:
Although laughter forms an important part of human non-verbal communication, it has received rather less attention than it deserves in both the experimental and the observational literatures. Relaxed social (Duchenne) laughter is associated with feelings of wellbeing and heightened affect, a proximate explanation for which might be the release of endorphins. We tested this hypothesis in a series of six experimental studies in both the laboratory (watching videos) and naturalistic contexts (watching stage performances), using change in pain threshold as an assay for endorphin release. The results show that pain thresholds are significantly higher after laughter than in the control condition. This pain-tolerance effect is due to laughter itself and not simply due to a change in positive affect. We suggest that laughter, through an endorphin-mediated opiate effect, may play a crucial role in social bonding.
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Social strain and cortisol regulation in midlife in the US
Esther Friedman et al.
Social Science & Medicine, February 2012, Pages 607-615
Abstract:
Chronic stress has been implicated in a variety of adverse health outcomes, from compromised immunity to cardiovascular disease to cognitive decline. The hypothalamic pituitary adrenal (HPA) axis has been postulated to play the primary biological role in translating chronic stress into ill health. Stressful stimuli activate the HPA-axis and cause an increase in circulating levels of cortisol. Frequent and long-lasting activation of the HPA-axis, as occurs in recurrently stressful environments, can in the long run compromise HPA-axis functioning and ultimately affect health. Negative social interactions with family and friends may be a significant source of stress in daily life, constituting the type of recurrently stressful environment that could lead to compromised HPA functioning and altered diurnal cortisol rhythms. We use data from two waves (1995 and 2004-2005) of the Midlife in the U.S. (MIDUS) study and from the National Study of Daily Experiences (NSDE) and piecewise growth curve models to investigate relationships between histories of social strain and patterns of diurnal cortisol rhythms. We find that reported levels of social strain were significantly associated with their diurnal cortisol rhythm. These effects were more pronounced for individuals with a history of greater reported strain across a ten-year period.
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Life Regrets and the Need to Belong
Mike Morrison, Kai Epstude & Neal Roese
Social Psychological and Personality Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
The present research documents a link between regret and the need to belong. Across five studies, using diverse methods and samples, the authors established that regrets involving primarily social relationships (e.g., romance and family) are felt more intensely than less socially based regrets (e.g., work and education). The authors ruled out alternative explanations for this pattern and found that it is best explained by the extent to which regrets are judged to constitute threats to belonging. Threats to belonging at the regret level and the need to belong at the individual level were strong predictors of regret intensity across multiple regret domains. These findings highlight the central role social connectedness plays in what people regret most.
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Erik Giltay et al.
Journal of Psychosomatic Research, March 2012, Pages 205-213
Objective: Low circulating levels of testosterone have been associated with major depression, but there is more limited evidence for differences in patients with anxiety disorders. The use of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) and other antidepressants is associated with sexual side effects, warranting testing for interactions with testosterone.
Methods: Data are from 722 male and 1380 female participants of The Netherlands Study of Depression and Anxiety (NESDA), who were recruited from the community, general practice care, and specialized mental health care. Depressive and anxiety diagnoses were assessed using the DSM-IV Composite International Diagnostic Interview. To smooth the episodic secretion, the four morning saliva samples per participant and the two evening samples were pooled before testosterone analysis.
Results: Morning median testosterone levels were 25.2 pg/ml in men and 16.2 pg/ml in women, with lower evening levels of 18.2 and 14.1 pg/ml, respectively. Significant determinants of testosterone levels were sex, age, time of the day, use of contraceptives, and smoking status. Female patients with a current (1-month) depressive disorder (effect size 0.29; P = 0.002), generalized anxiety disorder (0.25; P = 0.01), social phobia (0.30; P < 0.001), and agoraphobia without panic disorder (0.30; P = 0.02) had lower salivary testosterone levels than female controls. Higher testosterone levels were found in male and female participants using SSRIs than in non-users (effect size 0.26; P < 0.001).
Conclusion: Salivary testosterone levels are lower in female patients with a depressive disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, social phobia, and agoraphobia as compared to female controls. SSRIs may increase salivary testosterone in men and women.
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Bert Uchino et al.
Health Psychology, forthcoming
Objectives: The quality of one's personal relationships has been linked to morbidity and mortality across different diseases. As a result, it is important to examine more integrative mechanisms that might link relationships across diverse physical health outcomes. In this study, we examine associations between relationships and telomeres that predict general disease risk. These questions are pursued in the context of a more comprehensive model of relationships that highlights the importance of jointly considering positive and negative aspects of social ties.
Method: One hundred thirty-six individuals from a community sample (ages 48 to 77 years) completed the social relationships index, which allows a determination of relationships that differ in their positive and negative substrates (i.e., ambivalent, supportive, aversive, indifferent). Telomere length was determined from peripheral blood mononuclear cells via quantitative polymerase chain reaction.
Results: Participants who had a higher number of ambivalent ties in their social networks evidenced shorter telomeres. These results were independent of other relationship types (e.g., supportive) and standard control variables (e.g., age, health behaviors, and medication use). Gender moderated the links between ambivalent ties and telomere length, with these associations seen primarily in women. Follow-up analyses revealed that the links between ambivalent ties and telomeres were primarily due to friendships, parents, and social acquaintances.
Conclusion: Consistent with epidemiological findings, these data highlight a novel and integrative biological mechanism by which social ties may affect health across diseases and further suggest the importance of incorporating positivity and negativity in the study of specific relationships and physical health.
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How Guilt and Pride Shape Subsequent Self-Control
Wilhelm Hofmann & Rachel Fisher
Social Psychological and Personality Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
The present research utilized experience sampling data to investigate how guilt and pride experiences in response to self-control failure versus success affect future self-control when encountering the same type of temptation (thematic self-control). Guilt showed signs of a "mixed blessing" such that previous guilt led to an increase in subsequent self-regulatory goal importance and conflict awareness; however, accounting for these beneficial effects, guilt also had a detrimental residual effect on the successful inhibition of recurring temptation. Pride, in contrast, had uniformly positive effects on subsequent self-control in the form of increased goal importance, increased conflict, and increased likelihood to use self-control to resist temptation. These results contrasted in theoretically important ways from an analysis of short-term spillover effects of incidental guilt and pride on thematically unrelated subsequent self-control. Potential mechanisms and implications of these findings are discussed.
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Bart Soenens & Bart Duriez
Personality and Individual Differences, forthcoming
Abstract:
Recent studies suggest that conservatism is beneficial for individuals' well-being and self-esteem, particularly in late adulthood. In the present article, it is argued that, although conservatism may have a self-esteem enhancing function, it may also relate to a contingent type of self-esteem, which, in turn, relates to ill-being. In a sample of 227 late adults, we examined associations between conservatism, contingent self-esteem, and indices of ill-being (i.e., depressive symptoms, despair, and death anxiety). Conservatism was related positively to contingent self-esteem and was related indirectly to ill-being through its association with contingent self-esteem. Participants' age did not moderate these associations. Our findings raise questions about the adaptive role of conservatism in late adults' personal adjustment and suggest that conservatism entails at least some vulnerability for ill-being.
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Adriana Manago, Tamara Taylor & Patricia Greenfield
Developmental Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Is there a trade-off between having large networks of social connections on social networking sites such as Facebook and the development of intimacy and social support among today's generation of emerging adults? To understand the socialization context of Facebook during the transition to adulthood, an online survey was distributed to college students at a large urban university; participants answered questions about their relationships by systematically sampling their Facebook contacts while viewing their Facebook profiles online. Results confirmed that Facebook facilitates expansive social networks that grow disproportionately through distant kinds of relationship (acquaintances and activity connections), while also expanding the number of close relationships and stranger relationships, albeit at slower rates. Those with larger networks estimated that larger numbers of contacts in their networks were observing their status updates, a form of public communication to one's entire contact list. The major function of status updates was emotional disclosure, the key feature of intimacy. This finding indicates the transformation of the nature of intimacy in the environment of a social network site. In addition, larger networks and larger estimated audiences predicted higher levels of life satisfaction and perceived social support on Facebook. These findings emphasize the psychological importance of audience in the Facebook environment. Findings also suggest that social networking sites help youth to satisfy enduring human psychosocial needs for permanent relations in a geographically mobile world - college students with higher proportions of maintained contacts from the past (primarily high school friends) perceived Facebook as a more useful tool for procuring social support.
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Profiling: Predicting Social Anxiety From Facebook Profiles
Katya Fernandez, Cheri Levinson & Thomas Rodebaugh
Social Psychological and Personality Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Research on Facebook has suggested that individuals' profiles are an accurate portrayal of the self and that it may be possible to identify traits such as narcissism and extraversion by viewing a Facebook profile. It has been suggested, however, that largely internal experiences, such as anxiety, should be less detectable in such contexts. In the current study, the authors tested if objective criteria (e.g., number of interests) on users' profiles (N = 62) could discriminate between individuals who were higher and lower in social anxiety. The authors asked six coders to view each participant's Facebook profile and rate the participant's level of social anxiety and then tested whether these ratings correlated with the participant's own self-reported social anxiety level. Our results suggest that social anxiety is recognizable both in objective criteria on the Facebook profile page and from raters' impressions of the Facebook profile. Clinical and research implications are discussed.
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Expensive Egos: Narcissistic Males Have Higher Cortisol
David Reinhard et al.
PLoS ONE, January 2012, e30858
Background: Narcissism is characterized by grandiosity, low empathy, and entitlement. There has been limited research regarding the hormonal correlates of narcissism, despite the potential health implications. This study examined the role of participant narcissism and sex on basal cortisol concentrations in an undergraduate population.
Methods and Findings: Participants were 106 undergraduate students (79 females, 27 males, mean age 20.1 years) from one Midwestern and one Southwestern American university. Narcissism was assessed using the Narcissistic Personality Inventory, and basal cortisol concentrations were collected from saliva samples in a laboratory setting. Regression analyses examined the effect of narcissism and sex on cortisol (log). There were no sex differences in basal cortisol, F(1,97) = .20, p = .65, and narcissism scores, F(1,97) = .00, p = .99. Stepwise linear regression models of sex and narcissism and their interaction predicting cortisol concentrations showed no main effects when including covariates, but a significant interaction, β = .27, p = .04. Narcissism was not related to cortisol in females, but significantly predicted cortisol in males. Examining the effect of unhealthy versus healthy narcissism on cortisol found that unhealthy narcissism was marginally related to cortisol in females, β = .27, p = .06, but significantly predicted higher basal cortisol in males, β = .72, p = .01, even when controlling for potential confounds. No relationship was found between sex, narcissism, or their interaction on self-reported stress.
Conclusions: Our findings suggest that the HPA axis is chronically activated in males with unhealthy narcissism. This constant activation of the HPA axis may have important health implications.
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The implications of adult identity for educational and work attainment in young adulthood
Janel Benson, Monica Kirkpatrick Johnson & Glen Elder
Developmental Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
This study investigates the relation of young adult identities (ages 18-22 years), reflecting subjective age and psychosocial maturity, to educational and career attainment in young adulthood (ages 25-29 years). Add Health data show that having an older subjective age alone does not curtail attainment; the critical issue is the level of psychosocial maturity that accompanies subjective age. Those with older subjective ages and low psychosocial maturation have the lowest attainment at ages 25-29 years, while those with older subjective ages and high psychosocial maturation show considerable progress toward work-related attainment. For those with younger subjective ages, a lower level of psychosocial maturity is not as detrimental to attainment.
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