The influence of power and solidarity on emotional display rules at work

This study examined the influence of two interpersonal relationship dimensions, relative power and solidarity (closeness), on the emotional display rules that employees report they would adopt in work situations in which they felt happiness or anger. Results demonstrated that display rules involved more control over emotional expressions (i.e., more deamplification and masking of emotion and less expressing and amplification of emotion) when the interaction partner had higher relative power compared to when the interaction partner had equal or lower relative power. This pattern of results was present for both happiness and anger, though the effects were larger for anger. Display rules also involved more control when the interaction partner was low in solidarity compared to when the interaction partner was high in solidarity, with this effect being similar in magnitude for anger and happiness.     

Environmental Influences on Fighting Versus Nonviolent Behavior in Peer Situations: A Qualitative Study with Urban African American Adolescents

This qualitative study explored environmental factors that influence adolescents’ responses to problem situations involving peers. Interviews were conducted with 106 middle school students (97% African American) from an urban school system. Participants were asked to describe factors that would make it easier and those that would make it more difficult for adolescents to make specific responses to problem situations. Two types of responses were presented: nonviolent responses identified as effective in a previous study, and fighting responses. Qualitative analysis identified 24 themes representing family, peer, school, and neighborhood and broader social factors that were related to both nonviolent behavior and fighting. The identification of environmental influences on fighting and nonviolent responses has important implications for efforts to reduce aggression and promote effective nonviolent responses to problem situations encountered by adolescents.     

Substance Use, Criminal Activity, and Mental Health Among Violent and Nonviolent Rural Probationers

Differences between violent and nonviolent probationers were examined in the growing, yet understudied, rural probation population. Violent rural probationers had higher rates of substance use, criminal activity, and mental health symptoms than did nonviolent rural probationers. Implications for practitioners are discussed.     

Examining the consequences of exposure to racism for the executive functioning of Black students

Recent research has demonstrated that interracial interactions, reminders of stigmatized identities, and exposure to ambiguous racism can deplete the self-control resources of minority group members. In the current study we examined whether hearing blatant racism expressed in an interracial context would deplete the self-control of Black participants and whether this depletion would be moderated by participants’ level of racial centrality. After listening to a Black or a White confederate express either support for racial profiling (racist condition) or increased campus parking fees (neutral condition), Black participants completed a Stroop color-naming task to assess self-control depletion. Participants experienced self-control depletion following interracial encounters, regardless of whether the views expressed were racist. As expected, however, racial centrality moderated the depletion effect when racism was involved, with participants higher in centrality showing greater depletion following an encounter with racism from a White partner.     

Seeing the silver lining: cognitive reappraisal ability moderates the relationship between stress and depressive symptoms

Individuals differ in their adjustment to stressful life events, with some exhibiting impaired functioning, including depression, while others exhibit impressive resilience. The present study examined the hypothesis that the ability to deploy a particularly adaptive type of emotion regulation-cognitive reappraisal-may be a protective factor. It expands upon existing research in three ways. First, participants' ability to use reappraisal (cognitive reappraisal ability: CRA) was measured by using a behavioral challenge that assessed changes in experiential and physiological domains, rather than questionnaires. Second, all participants had been exposed to one or more recent stressful life events, a context in which emotion regulation may be particularly important. Third, a community sample of 78 women aged 20 to 60 was recruited, as opposed to undergraduates. Results indicate that, at low levels of stress, participants' CRA was not associated with depressive symptoms. However, at high levels of stress, women with high CRA exhibited less depressive symptoms than those with low CRA, suggesting that CRA may be an important moderator of the link between stress and depressive symptoms.     

Examining interrelationships between the Cigarette Purchase Task and delay discounting among pregnant women

Two common behavioral economic simulation tasks used to study cigarette smoking are the Cigarette Purchase Task, a measure of cigarette demand, and delay discounting, a measure of the subjective value of rewards as a function of delays to delivery. Few studies have evaluated whether combining these tasks enhances understanding of smoking beyond either alone. The current study represents an initial evaluation of the intersection between cigarette demand indices and delay discounting among pregnant smokers by examining associations between these measures and whether a woman makes antepartum quit attempts before entering prenatal care (a reliable predictor of eventual quitting). Participants were 159 pregnant women enrolled in a smoking‐cessation trial. Low O _max and shallow discounting were each associated with antepartum quit attempts. Participants were next categorized into four subgroups (low O _max, shallow discounting; low O _max, steep discounting; high O _max, shallow discounting; high O _max, steep discounting) using median splits. Those with shallow discounting and low O _max were more likely to have made quit attempts than each of the other three subgroups. That is, steep discounting appears to undermine the association of low O _max and efforts to quit smoking during pregnancy while high O _max overshadows any protective influence associated with shallow discounting.     

Symptom reduction and termination: client change and therapist identified reasons for saying goodbye

Empirical efforts have focused on predicting whether or not clients prematurely terminate therapy, with nonattendance of last session equated to premature termination. However, this fails to explore the relationship between clients’ distress reduction and reasons for termination. With this study, we aimed to understand how clients’ distress change relates to premature termination and examine clients’ distress change in conjunction with therapists’ perceptions of termination reasons. We collected data from 797 clients who prematurely terminated or attended termination but completed therapy a minimum of three individual sessions provided by 38 therapists. Clients completed an assessment of psychological symptoms before each session. At the end of treatment, therapists identified the reasons they believed termination occurred for all clients in the sample. Results demonstrate that total sessions attended and missed predict premature termination, whereas distress change does not. Additionally, clients who were believed to accomplish goals do show greater change. However, therapists’ indicated that over half of clients did not reach goals at termination and they did not perceive nonattendance at last session to equate to drop out in all cases. Implications are discussed with respect to understanding why clients’ terminate, therapeutic goal conceptualization, and review of goals during termination in time-limited psychotherapy.     

The Art of Living by Dispositionally Happy People

The cognitive and motivational processes by which happy people are able to artfully sustain their happiness are examined within a subjectivist construal approach. Individuals who perceive themselves as happy respond to ordinary experiences differently than their less happy peers. Research from our laboratory has revealed these differences in a variety of contexts, including people's responses to decisions, their reactions to social comparisons, and their interpretations of life events. Our research has also shown that, after experiencing failure, happy people tend not to engage in negative self-reflection and are able to perform subsequent tasks without dwelling. Although happy people experience negative moods and negative life events similar to those of less happy people, they evaluate these events less negatively and respond to them in more positive, affirming ways. These group differences suggest a number of possible ways to sustainably enhance happiness, and current experimental interventions designed to test the effectiveness of several intentional happiness-increasing strategies are discussed. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

9 Suicide in San Francisco,CA: A Comparison of Caucasian and Asian Groups, 1987–1994

Completed suicides in the city of San Francisco, California, were examined across all ages in the racial groups of Caucasians (n = 798) and Asians (n = 124) from 1987 to 1994. A comparison of Caucasians and Asians showed that there were differences between them in their rates across all age groups. The major findings are: (1) Caucasians predominately used gunshot to complete suicide whereas Asians predominately used hanging to complete suicide, (2) Asian women over the age of 85 have the highest rates across both groups and genders, (3) Asians, as compared to Caucasians, used fewer drugs and alcohol at time of death. Theoretical connections between differences in suicide and definition of the self, as influenced by culture, are discussed.     

PTSD and the influence of context: The self as a social mirror

The principal accepted models of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are based on both memory processing and biological/brain changes occurring when one's life or well-being is threatened. It is our thesis that these models would be greatly informed by community studies indicating that PTSD is predicted to a greater extent by earlier life experience and experiences that occur distant from the threatening event. These findings suggest posttraumatic responding is best conceptualized through the lens of the self-in-context, as opposed to imprinting that results from a given event at a given time. Moreover, studies of non-Western populations often do not express trauma as PTSD, or at least not primarily as PTSD, which argues against specific neural or memory encoding processes, but rather for a more plastic neural process that is shaped by experience and how the self develops in its cultural context, as a product of a broad array of experiences. We posit that fear and emotional conditioning as well as the ways traumas are encoded in memory are only partial explanatory mechanisms for trauma responding, and that issues of safety and harm, which are long term and developmental, are the common and principal underpinnings of the occurrence of posttraumatic distress, including PTSD.