Get a life
People search for meaning when they approach a new decade in chronological age
Adam Alter & Hal Hershfield
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, forthcoming
Abstract:
Although humans measure time using a continuous scale, certain numerical ages inspire greater self-reflection than others. Six studies show that adults undertake a search for existential meaning when they approach a new decade in age (e.g., at ages 29, 39, 49, etc.) or imagine entering a new epoch, which leads them to behave in ways that suggest an ongoing or failed search for meaning (e.g., by exercising more vigorously, seeking extramarital affairs, or choosing to end their lives).
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Availability of Outpatient Care From Psychiatrists: A Simulated-Patient Study in Three U.S. Cities
Monica Malowney et al.
Psychiatric Services, forthcoming
Objectives: The study examined availability of psychiatrists for outpatient appointments in three U.S. cities.
Methods: Posing as patients, investigators called 360 psychiatrists listed in a major insurer’s database in Boston, Houston, and Chicago (N=120 per city) and attempted to make appointments. Callers claimed to have Blue Cross Blue Shield or Medicare or said they would pay out of pocket (N=120 per payer type, divided evenly across cities).
Results: In round 1 of calling, investigators were able to reach 119 of the 360 psychiatrists (33%). Of 216 unanswered calls, 35 were returned. After two calling rounds, appointments were made with 93 psychiatrists (26%). Significant differences were noted between cities but not between payer type.
Conclusions: Obtaining outpatient appointments with psychiatrists in three cities was difficult, irrespective of payer. Results suggest that expanding insurance coverage alone may do little to improve access to psychiatrists — or worse, expansion might further overwhelm the capacity of available services.
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Kate Scott et al.
JAMA Psychiatry, forthcoming
Importance: The inverse social gradient in mental disorders is a well-established research finding with important implications for causal models and policy. This research has used traditional objective social status (OSS) measures, such as educational level, income, and occupation. Recently, subjective social status (SSS) measurement has been advocated to capture the perception of relative social status, but to our knowledge, there have been no studies of associations between SSS and mental disorders.
Design, Setting, and Participants: Face-to-face cross-sectional household surveys of community-dwelling adults in 18 countries in Asia, South Pacific, the Americas, Europe, and the Middle East (N = 56 085). Subjective social status was assessed with a self-anchoring scale reflecting respondent evaluations of their place in the social hierarchies of their countries in terms of income, educational level, and occupation. Scores on the 1 to 10 SSS scale were categorized into 4 categories: low (scores 1-3), low-mid (scores 4-5), high-mid (scores 6-7), and high (scores 8-10). Objective social status was assessed with a wide range of fine-grained objective indicators of income, educational level, and occupation.
Results: The weighted mean survey response rate was 75.2% (range, 55.1%-97.2%). Graded inverse associations were found between SSS and all 16 mental disorders. Gross odds ratios (lowest vs highest SSS categories) in the range of 1.8 to 9.0 were attenuated but remained significant for all 16 disorders (odds ratio, 1.4-4.9) after adjusting for OSS indicators. This pattern of inverse association between SSS and mental disorders was significant in 14 of 18 individual countries, and in low-, middle-, and high-income country groups but was significantly stronger in high- vs lower-income countries.
Conclusions and Relevance: Significant inverse associations between SSS and numerous DSM-IV mental disorders exist across a wide range of countries even after comprehensive adjustment for OSS. Although it is unclear whether these associations are the result of social selection, social causation, or both, these results document clearly that research relying exclusively on standard OSS measures underestimates the steepness of the social gradient in mental disorders.
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Psychiatric disorders and left-handedness in children living in an urban environment
Dora Due Logue et al.
Laterality: Asymmetries of Body, Brain and Cognition, forthcoming
Abstract:
The objective of this study was to conduct an analysis of left-handed children treated in an urban mental health clinic to investigate the frequency and severity of psychiatric disorders compared to right-handed peers. Data on handedness, diagnoses, hospitalizations and severity of mental disorders were collected on 692 consecutive children, 4–18 years old (M = 10.1, SD = 3.2), referred for psychiatric evaluation. Left-handed children were 18.2% of patients in the study, a rate significantly higher than left-hand dominance in the USA (p < .05). Compared to children with right-handedness, logistic regression analysis yielded 31% [odds ratio (OR) = 1.31, 95% confidence interval (CI): 1.15–1.50] higher odds of having more psychiatric diagnosis, 70% (OR = 1.70, 95% CI: 1.10–2.62) increased odds of anxiety, 53% (OR = 1.53, 95% CI: 1.03–2.27) increased odds of depression and 78% (OR = 1.78, 95% CI: 1.21–2.62) increased odds of oppositional defiant disorder for children who were left-handed. Left-handed children had increased odds of being prescribed antipsychotic and anxiolytic medication uses, 53% and 86% increased odds, respectively, and 66% (OR = 1.66, 95% CI: 1.08–2.55) increased odds of psychiatric hospitalizations. Left-handedness was a phenotypic risk factor for psychiatric disorders and increased severity of psychiatric disorders.
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So what if the clock strikes? Scheduling style, control, and well-being
Anne-Laure Sellier & Tamar Avnet
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, November 2014, Pages 791-808
Abstract:
Individuals vary in the way they schedule their daily tasks and activities. In particular, 2 scheduling styles are commonly followed: clock-time (where tasks are organized based on a clock) and event-time (where tasks are organized based on their order of completion). This research shows that adopting a clock-time or an event-time scheduling style has consequences that go beyond the direct effect on task organization. In particular, adopting 1 scheduling style versus the other is shown to potentially influence personal control and well-being. We demonstrate that the reliance on clock- versus event-time affects individuals’ perception of the causal relationship between events in the social world (Experiments 1 and 2). Specifically, we show that individuals following clock-time rather than event-time discriminate less between causally related and causally unrelated events, which in turn increases their belief that the world is controlled by chance or fate. In contrast, individuals following event-time (vs. clock-time) appear to believe that things happen more as a result of their own actions. We further show that this difference in internal locus of control compromises the ability of individuals following clock-time to savor positive emotions (Experiments 3a–5). We discuss the implications of these findings for future research in social and cognitive psychology.
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The Great Recession, unemployment and suicide
Thor Norström & Hans Grönqvist
Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health, forthcoming
Background: How have suicide rates responded to the marked increase in unemployment spurred by the Great Recession? Our paper puts this issue into a wider perspective by assessing (1) whether the unemployment-suicide link is modified by the degree of unemployment protection, and (2) whether the effect on suicide of the present crisis differs from the effects of previous economic downturns.
Methods: We analysed the unemployment-suicide link using time-series data for 30 countries spanning the period 1960–2012. Separate fixed-effects models were estimated for each of five welfare state regimes with different levels of unemployment protection (Eastern, Southern, Anglo-Saxon, Bismarckian and Scandinavian). We included an interaction term to capture the possible excess effect of unemployment during the Great Recession.
Results: The largest unemployment increases occurred in the welfare state regimes with the least generous unemployment protection. The unemployment effect on male suicides was statistically significant in all welfare regimes, except the Scandinavian one. The effect on female suicides was significant only in the eastern European country group. There was a significant gradient in the effects, being stronger the less generous the unemployment protection. The interaction term capturing the possible excess effect of unemployment during the financial crisis was not significant.
Conclusions: Our findings suggest that the more generous the unemployment protection the weaker the detrimental impact on suicide of the increasing unemployment during the Great Recession.
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Sick in the head? Pathogen concerns bias implicit perceptions of mental illness
Erik Lund & Ian Boggero
Evolutionary Psychology, Fall 2014, Pages 706-718
Abstract:
Biases against the mentally ill are historically and cross-culturally pervasive, suggesting they may have an evolutionary basis. The prevailing view is that people seek to distance themselves from the mentally ill because they are perceived as dangerous, violent, and incompetent. However, because of similarities between sickness behaviors and symptoms of some mental disorders, it was hypothesized that mental illness stigma could be partially explained as a function of behavioral immune system biases designed to avoid potential sources of contagion. In two experiments, it was found that mental illness was implicitly associated more with disease than danger. In Experiment 1, this implicit association was exacerbated among people who have had their biological immune system activated by a recent illness. In Experiment 2, experimentally priming disease salience increased implicit association between mental illness and disease. Implications for the evolutionary origins of prejudice and the prevention of mental illness stigma are discussed.
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Suicide and the Creative Class
Matthew Moore, Nicholas Recker & Mark Heirigs
Social Indicators Research, December 2014, Pages 1613-1626
Abstract:
The tenth leading cause of death in the United States in 2009 was suicide. Emile Durkheim demonstrated that suicide can be studied as a social phenomenon. However, sociologists have been oddly silent on the subject in recent years. Research that has been done by sociologists on suicide has examined the role social capital plays in reducing suicide. However, Richard Florida has argued that today communities are not developing around social capital, but instead moving toward his creative capital model. No study has been done examining the association between creative capital and suicide. This analysis examined what developing around a creative capital model means for suicide. The findings demonstrate that there is a positive association between creative capital and suicide. The current analysis should give pause to communities attempting to develop around the creative capital model.
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Does Childhood Predict Adult Life Satisfaction? Evidence from British Cohort Surveys
Paul Frijters, David Johnston & Michael Shields
Economic Journal, November 2014, Pages F688–F719
Abstract:
We investigate the extent to which childhood characteristics are predictive of adult life satisfaction using data from two British cohort studies. In total, variables observed up to age 16 predict around 7% of the variation in average adult life satisfaction. Adding contemporaneous adulthood variables increases the predictive power to 15.6%, while adding long lags of life satisfaction increases it to 35.5%. Overall, we estimate that around 30–45% of adult life satisfaction is fixed, suggesting that 55–70% is transitory in nature, and that a wide range of observed childhood circumstances capture about 15% of the fixed component.
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What Predicts a Successful Life? A Life-course Model of Well-being
Richard Layard et al.
Economic Journal, November 2014, Pages F720–F738
Abstract:
Policy makers who care about well-being need a recursive model of how adult life-satisfaction is predicted by childhood influences, acting both directly and (indirectly) through adult circumstances. We estimate such a model using the British Cohort Study (1970). We show that the most powerful childhood predictor of adult life-satisfaction is the child's emotional health, followed by the child's conduct. The least powerful predictor is the child's intellectual development. This may have implications for educational policy. Among adult circumstances, family income accounts for only 0.5% of the variance of life-satisfaction. Mental and physical health are much more important.
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Spyros Christou-Champi, Tom Farrow & Thomas Webb
Cognition and Emotion, Winter 2014, Pages 319-331
Abstract:
Emotion regulation (ER) is vital to everyday functioning. However, the effortful nature of many forms of ER may lead to regulation being inefficient and potentially ineffective. The present research examined whether structured practice could increase the efficiency of ER. During three training sessions, comprising a total of 150 training trials, participants were presented with negatively valenced images and asked either to “attend” (control condition) or “reappraise” (ER condition). A further group of participants did not participate in training but only completed follow-up measures. Practice increased the efficiency of ER as indexed by decreased time required to regulate emotions and increased heart rate variability (HRV). Furthermore, participants in the ER condition spontaneously regulated their negative emotions two weeks later and reported being more habitual in their use of ER. These findings indicate that structured practice can facilitate the automatic control of negative emotions and that these effects persist beyond training.
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Prevalence rates for depression by industry: A claims database analysis
Lawson Wulsin et al.
Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology, November 2014, Pages 1805-1821
Purpose: To estimate and interpret differences in depression prevalence rates among industries, using a large, group medical claims database.
Methods: Depression cases were identified by ICD-9 diagnosis code in a population of 214,413 individuals employed during 2002–2005 by employers based in western Pennsylvania. Data were provided by Highmark, Inc. (Pittsburgh and Camp Hill, PA). Rates were adjusted for age, gender, and employee share of health care costs. National industry measures of psychological distress, work stress, and physical activity at work were also compiled from other data sources.
Results: Rates for clinical depression in 55 industries ranged from 6.9 to 16.2 %, (population rate = 10.45 %). Industries with the highest rates tended to be those which, on the national level, require frequent or difficult interactions with the public or clients, and have high levels of stress and low levels of physical activity.
Conclusions: Additional research is needed to help identify industries with relatively high rates of depression in other regions and on the national level, and to determine whether these differences are due in part to specific work stress exposures and physical inactivity at work.
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Andreas Olsson et al.
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, forthcoming
Abstract:
Although recent research has begun to describe the neural and genetic processes underlying variability in responses to trauma, less is known about how these processes interact. We addressed this issue by using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine the relationship between post-traumatic stress symptomatology (PTSS), a common genetic polymorphism of the serotonin transporter (5-HTT) gene, and neural activity in response to viewing images associated with the 9/11 terrorist attack among a rare sample of high-exposure 9/11 survivors (n=17). Participants varied in whether they carried a copy of the short allele in the promoter region of the 5-HTT gene. During scanning, participants viewed images of the 9/11 attack, non-9/11 negative, and neutral images. Three key findings are reported. First, carriers of the short allele displayed higher levels of PTSS. Second, both PTSS and the presence of the short allele correlated negatively with activity in a network of cortical midline regions (e.g. the retrosplenal and more posterior cingulate corticies [PCC]) implicated in episodic memories and self-reflection when viewing 9/11 versus non-9/11 negative control images. Finally, exploratory analyses indicated that PCC activity mediated the relationship between genotype and PTSS. These results highlight the role of PCC in distress following trauma.
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Robert Genter
Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, forthcoming
Abstract:
Facing accusations about weak military discipline following the supposedly poor behavior of American soldiers held captive during the Korean War, President Dwight Eisenhower instituted a Code of Conduct for the Armed Services in 1955. In response, military leaders hired numerous social and behavioral scientists to investigate the nature of the prisoner-of-war (POW) experience. These researchers not only challenged official government accounts of POW activities but opened up a new field of study — stress research. They also changed military training policy, which soon focused more on stress inoculation training, and, in so doing, helped lead the shift in psychology away from behaviorism to ego and cognitive psychology. In this sense, my article ties shifts within the social and behavioral sciences in the 1950s to the military history of the early Cold War, a connection generally missing from most accounts of this period.
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Working memory training improves emotional states of healthy individuals
Hikaru Takeuchi et al.
Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience, October 2014
Abstract:
Working memory (WM) capacity is associated with various emotional aspects, including states of depression and stress, reactions to emotional stimuli, and regulatory behaviors. We have previously investigated the effects of WM training (WMT) on cognitive functions and brain structures. However, the effects of WMT on emotional states and related neural mechanisms among healthy young adults remain unknown. In the present study, we investigated these effects in young adults who underwent WMT or received no intervention for 4 weeks. Before and after the intervention, subjects completed self-report questionnaires related to their emotional states and underwent scanning sessions in which brain activities related to negative emotions were measured. Compared with controls, subjects who underwent WMT showed reduced anger, fatigue, and depression. Furthermore, WMT reduced activity in the left posterior insula during tasks evoking negative emotion, which was related to anger. It also reduced activity in the left frontoparietal area. These findings show that WMT can reduce negative mood and provide new insight into the clinical applications of WMT, at least among subjects with preclinical-level conditions.
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A Pilot Examination of the Use of Narrative Therapy With Individuals Diagnosed With PTSD
Christopher Erbes et al.
Journal of Traumatic Stress, forthcoming
Abstract:
Narrative therapy is a postmodern, collaborative therapy approach based on the elaboration of personal narratives for lived experiences. Many aspects of narrative therapy suggest it may have great potential for helping people who are negatively affected by traumatic experiences, including those diagnosed with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The potential notwithstanding, narrative therapy is relatively untested in any population, and has yet to receive empirical support for treatment among survivors of trauma. A pilot investigation of the use of narrative therapy with 14 veterans with a diagnosis of PTSD (11 treatment completers) is described. Participants completed structured diagnostic interviews and self-report assessments of symptoms prior to and following 11 to 12 sessions of narrative therapy. After treatment, 3 of 11 treatment completers no longer met criteria for PTSD and 7 of 11 had clinically significant decreases in PTSD symptoms as measured by the Clinician Administered PTSD Scale. Pre- to posttreatment effect sizes on outcomes ranged from 0.57 to 0.88. These preliminary results, in conjunction with low rates of treatment dropout (21.4%) and a high level of reported satisfaction with the treatment, suggest that further study of narrative therapy is warranted as a potential alternative to existing treatments for PTSD.
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Free Will, Counterfactual Reflection, and the Meaningfulness of Life Events
Elizabeth Seto et al.
Social Psychological and Personality Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Research has found that counterfactual reflection, the act of mentally undoing past events, imbues major life experiences with meaning. The current studies examined whether individual differences in free will beliefs moderate this relationship. Participants described a significant event in their lives, were randomly assigned to counterfactual or factual reflection about the event, and completed measures of meaning and free will. Two studies found that counterfactual reflection enhanced the meaningfulness of life events for people with high belief in free will but not for people with low belief in free will. These studies suggest that beliefs in free will are an important factor in meaning-making processes.
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Ezra Golberstein, Daniel Eisenberg & Marilyn Downs
Health Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Spillover effects in health service use may represent an important externality of individual treatment decisions and are important for understanding the consequences of interventions to improve access to health care. This study is the first to our knowledge to examine causal spillover effects for mental health service use. We exploit the natural experiment of first-year student housing assignments at two universities using survey data that we collected. When the peer group is defined at the roommate level, we do not find any spillover effects on service use. When the peer group is defined at the hall level, we find positive spillover effects — peers' service use increases one's own service use — and this effect is driven by individuals with prior experience with mental health services. We also find some evidence that the mechanism behind this effect is improved beliefs about treatment effectiveness.
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Michael Busseri & Emily Peck
Clinical Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
We investigated the widespread belief that life gets better and better over time — as revealed in individuals’ “subjective trajectories” for life satisfaction (LS) derived from their ratings of recollected past, current, and anticipated future LS — among depressed (i.e., current major depressive disorder, fully remitted, partially remitted) and nondepressed groups using a two-wave longitudinal sample of American adults. Linear and inclining subjective trajectories (past LS < current LS < future LS) were normative among nondepressed individuals, as were nonlinear but inclining subjective trajectories (past LS ~ current LS < future LS) among depressed individuals. Furthermore, Wave 1 temporal-perspective LS ratings uniquely predicted risk of depression 10 years later (Wave 2), even after we controlled for baseline depression status. Thus, the use of a novel temporally expanded perspective revealed that even depressed individuals view their lives as improving over time and that such beliefs predict heightened (rather than less) risk of future depression.
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Paul Glavin & Scott Schieman
Social Psychology Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
The mental health benefits of the sense of personal control are well documented, but do these benefits persist in social contexts of powerlessness and uncertainty? Drawing from two national panel surveys of American and Canadian workers, we examine whether the association between perceived control and reduced distress is undermined by the uncertainty of threatened employment. While we find evidence that higher levels of perceived control are associated with reduced distress, the association is curvilinear among insecure workers, such that subsequent increases in control produce diminishing reductions in distress for workers reporting the threat of job loss. This curvilinear pattern is particularly prominent among American insecure workers, with higher than moderate levels of control associated with more rather than less distress for this group. We draw from Mirowsky and Ross’s “instrumental realism” model to interpret these patterns and suggest that high control beliefs may be less beneficial for mental health in uncertain role contexts.
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Caroline Nievergelt et al.
Psychoneuroendocrinology, forthcoming
Background: Research on the etiology of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) has rapidly matured, moving from candidate gene studies to interrogation of the entire human genome in genome-wide association studies (GWAS). Here we present the results of a GWAS performed on samples from combat-exposed US Marines and Sailors from the Marine Resiliency study (MRS) scheduled for deployment to Iraq and/or Afghanistan. The MRS is a large, prospective study with longitudinal follow-up designed to identify risk and resiliency factors for combat-induced stress-related symptoms. Previously implicated PTSD risk loci from the literature and polygenic risk scores across psychiatric disorders were also evaluated in the MRS cohort.
Methods: Participants (N = 3,494) were assessed using the Clinician-Administered PTSD Scale and diagnosed using the DSM-IV diagnostic criterion. Subjects with partial and/or full PTSD diagnosis were called cases, all other subjects were designated controls, and study-wide maximum CAPS scores were used for longitudinal assessments. Genomic DNA was genotyped on the Illumina HumanOmniExpressExome array. Individual genetic ancestry was determined by supervised cluster analysis for subjects of European, African, Hispanic/Native American, and other descent. To test for association of SNPs with PTSD, logistic regressions were performed within each ancestry group and results were combined in meta-analyses. Measures of childhood and adult trauma were included to test for gene-by-environment (GxE) interactions. Polygenic risk scores from the Psychiatric Genomic Consortium were used for major depressive disorder (MDD), bipolar disorder (BPD), and schizophrenia (SCZ).
Results: The array produced >800 K directly genotyped and >21 M imputed markers in 3,494 unrelated, trauma-exposed males, of which 940 were diagnosed with partial or full PTSD. The GWAS meta-analysis identified the phosphoribosyl transferase domain containing 1 gene (PRTFDC1) as a genome-wide significant PTSD locus (rs6482463; OR = 1.47, SE = 0.06, p = 2.04 × 10−9), with a similar effect across ancestry groups. Association of PRTFDC1 with PTSD in an independent military cohort showed some evidence for replication. Loci with suggestive evidence of association (n = 25 genes, p < 5 × 10−6) further implicated genes related to immune response and the ubiquitin system, but these findings remain to be replicated in larger GWASs. A replication analysis of 25 putative PTSD genes from the literature found nominally significant SNPs for the majority of these genes, but associations did not remain significant after correction for multiple comparison. A cross-disorder analysis of polygenic risk scores from GWASs of BPD, MDD, and SCZ found that PTSD diagnosis was associated with risk sores of BPD, but not with MDD or SCZ.
Conclusions: This first multi-ethnic/racial GWAS of PTSD highlights the potential to increase power through meta-analyses across ancestry groups. We found evidence for PRTFDC1 as a potential novel PTSD gene, a finding that awaits further replication. Our findings indicate that the genetic architecture of PTSD may be determined by many SNPs with small effects, and overlap with other neuropsychiatric disorders, consistent with current findings from large GWAS of other psychiatric disorders.