The Dynamics of Unemployment for Social Assistance Recipients

In this exploratory research study, the experience of unemployment and helping or hindering factors for social assistance recipients is examined.     

The Social and Psychological Impact of Unemployment

This article reviews recent studies on the social and psychological impact of unemployment. Included are the economic costs of unemployment, the impact on the family and the individual, and recommended methods for providing services.     

The Role of Psychological Stigmatization in Unemployment Discrimination

Abstract

Discrimination against the unemployed operates through attributions, is unjustifiable, and is nearly instantaneous. Experimental Studies 1 and 2 find that unemployment discrimination operates through attributions, as emphasizing an uncontrollable and external cause for unemployment onset alleviates discrimination. Experimental Studies 3 and 4 find that unemployment stigma is unjustifiable on productivity grounds, as formerly unemployed workers are judged negatively once on the job, even when we control for on-the-job performance. Across the studies, unemployed workers are perceived not only as less competent but also as less warm. Study 5 is a field study in which fictionalized resumes are sent to real employers. Controlling for qualifications, it finds that discrimination against the unemployed occurs nearly instantaneously to becoming unemployed.     

A Primer on Unemployment

This article discusses the definition and causes of unemployment, national unemployment rates since 1929, and workers who typically experience the highest incidence of job loss.     

Negotiating Identity During Unemployment

The unemployment experience is viewed from the perspective of identity negotiation during a time of transition. Within this process, elements such as support from others, self-talk, marketing strategies, and focused and persistent effort play an important role. Employment counseling strategies are discussed in terms of how they promote successful negotiation.     

The Dynamics of Indexical Belief

Indexical beliefs pose a special problem for standard theories of Bayesian updating. Sometimes we are uncertain about our location in time and space. How are we to update our beliefs in situations like these? In a stepwise fashion, I develop a constraint on the dynamics of indexical belief. As an application, the suggested constraint is brought to bear on the Sleeping Beauty problem.     

The Dynamics of Job-Seeking Behavior

Job placement readiness as a continuum is discussed. High and low readiness are specifically treated. Personality characteristics and case histories of the two types are given.     

The Dynamics of Argumentative Discourse

Journal of Philosophical Logic - Arguments have always played a central role within logic and philosophy. But little attention has been paid to arguments as a distinctive kind of discourse, with...     

The Dynamics of Vocational Sponsorship

Five forms of job entry and retention dealing with sponsoring authority are discussed. Based on personality types, they are compared to Heath's psychological model. Implications for vocational planning of clients are considered.     

A Typology of Adaptations to Unemployment

A typology of adaptations to unemployment was constructed using data taken from a 15-week longitudinal investigation of the experiences of 153 unemployed people. The typology was split between low-stress and high-stress adaptations.     

The Emotional Timeline of Unemployment: Anticipation,Reaction, and Adaptation

Unemployment continues to be one of the major challenges in industrialized societies. Aside from its economic and societal repercussions, questions concerning the subjective experience of unemployment have recently attracted increasing attention. Although existing studies have documented the detrimental effects of unemployment for cognitive (life satisfaction) and affective well-being, studies directly comparing these two dimensions of subjective well-being and their temporal dynamics in anticipation of and response to unemployment are absent from the literature. Using longitudinal data of the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) and applying fixed effects regressions, we investigate changes in cognitive and affective well-being prior to and after job loss. Extending previous studies, we use discrete emotion measures instead of affect balance indicators to assess affective well-being. Our results support existing findings that unemployment leads to decreases in life satisfaction and that the unemployed do not adapt towards previous levels of life satisfaction. We also find that individuals more often experience sadness and anxiety, and less often happiness when transitioning into unemployment. Importantly, changes in affective well-being are less enduring compared to the changes in life satisfaction.     

Unemployment and Health: Selection Effects

A large number of studies have shown that the unemployed are less healthy, both physically and psychologically, than the employed. The explanation may be that unemployment has negative health effects. An alternative, or additional, explanation is that healthy persons are less likely to become unemployed or more likely to find new employment if they become unemployed. Such effects of health on employment status are generally referred to as selection effects. The present paper analyses to what extent such selection effects are present in the Norwegian labour market. Panel data with observations made in 1989 and 1993 are used. The analyses show that people with psychological problems are more likely to be laid off, and there is also some evidence that psychological or physical health problems may reduce the chances of finding a new job if one has become unemployed. It is of particular interest that these selection effects can be documented for a country like Norway, which has strong legislation supporting worker rights and a quite high degree of unionization.     

The Dynamics of Visual Word Recognition

This article provides an overview of a dynamical systems approach to visual word recognition. In this approach, the dynamics of word recognition are characterized in terms of a connectionist network model. According to this model, seeing a word results in changes in the pattern of activation over the nodes in the lexical network such that, over time, the network moves into an attractor state representing the orthographic, phonological, and semantic properties of that word. At a slower timescale, a learning process modifies the strengths of the connections among the nodes in a way that attunes the network to the statistical regularities in its environment. This view of word identification accommodates a wide body of empirical results, a representative sampling of which is discussed here. Finally, the article closes with a discussion of some of the theoretical issues that should be addressed as the dynamical approach continues to develop.     

Unemployment impairs mental health: Meta-analyses

The effect of unemployment on mental health was examined with meta-analytic methods across 237 cross-sectional and 87 longitudinal studies. The average overall effect size was d = 0.51 with unemployed persons showing more distress than employed persons. A significant difference was found for several indicator variables of mental health (mixed symptoms of distress, depression, anxiety, psychosomatic symptoms, subjective well-being, and self esteem). The average number of persons with psychological problems among the unemployed was 34%, compared to 16% among employed individuals. Moderator analyses demonstrated that men and people with blue-collar-jobs were more distressed by unemployment than women and people with white-collar jobs. Linear and curvilinear moderating effects of the duration of unemployment were also identified. Furthermore, the negative effect of unemployment on mental health was stronger in countries with a weak level of economic development, unequal income distributions, or weak unemployment protection systems compared to other countries. Meta-analyses of longitudinal studies and natural experiments endorsed the assumption that unemployment is not only correlated to distress but also causes it. Seemingly inconsistent longitudinal results of older meta-analyses can be explained by retest artifacts. We also identified mental-health related selection effects during job loss and job search, but they are weak. With an effect size of d = −.35 intervention programs for unemployed people were found to be moderately effective in ameliorating unemployment-related distress among continuously unemployed persons.     

The Dynamics of Perceived Financial Difficulties

The perceptions of individuals regarding their own economic situation are sometimes used to measure individuals’ welfare or standard of living, thereby complementing the conventional income-based approach. While the importance of using longitudinal data when analysing the determinants of perceptions has recently been emphasized, the question of state dependence—the extent to which the past affects the present—has rarely been accounted for in the subjective economic well-being literature. The main contribution of the current paper is precisely to investigate the issue of state dependence in perceived financial difficulties. The application of an endogenous switching Markov model to data from the Luxembourg socioeconomic panel ‘Liewen zu Lëtzebuerg’ for the period 2003–2009 leads to the conclusion that there is a sizeable proportion of genuine state dependence, which confirms the importance of appropriately taking into account dynamic issues when modelling subjective variables.