Associations of spontaneous self-affirmation with health care experiences and health information seeking in a national survey of US adults

Objective: Self-affirming – such as by reflecting on one’s strengths and values – reduces defensiveness to threatening information, reduces negative effects of stereotype threat and promotes prosociality. These outcomes may promote physical health, highlighting a need to examine the role of self-affirmation in medical and health contexts.

Design: Data were collected as part of the nationally representative, cross-sectional, 2013 Health Information National Trends Survey. Items were completed by 2731 respondents.

Main Outcome Measures: Respondents answered questions about spontaneous self-affirmation tendencies, perceptions of providers and health care, involvement in medical appointments, health information seeking and engagement in medical research.

Results: Spontaneous self-affirmation was associated with more positive perceptions of communication with one’s provider, better perceived quality of care, greater likelihood of asking questions in a medical appointment, greater information seeking for oneself and multiple indices of surrogate information seeking (i.e. seeking information for others). Four of eight significant associations remained significant when controlling for optimism. The associations of self-affirmation with aspects of the patient–provider relationship were not modified by factors likely to be associated with stereotype threat (e.g. race or BMI).

Conclusion: Spontaneous self-affirmation was related to positive outcomes in health contexts. Experimental research is needed to further explore the causal nature of these associations.     

Autonoetic consciousness: Reconsidering the role of episodic memory in future-oriented self-projection

Following the seminal work of Ingvar (1985. “Memory for the future”: An essay on the temporal organization of conscious awareness. Human Neurobiology, 4, 127–136), Suddendorf (1994. The discovery of the fourth dimension: Mental time travel and human evolution. Master's thesis. University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand), and Tulving (1985. Memory and consciousness. Canadian Psychology/PsychologieCanadienne, 26, 1–12), exploration of the ability to anticipate and prepare for future contingencies that cannot be known with certainty has grown into a thriving research enterprise. A fundamental tenet of this line of inquiry is that future-oriented mental time travel, in most of its presentations, is underwritten by a property or an extension of episodic recollection. However, a careful conceptual analysis of exactly how episodic memory functions in this capacity has yet to be undertaken. In this paper I conduct such an analysis. Based on conceptual, phenomenological, and empirical considerations, I conclude that the autonoetic component of episodic memory, not episodic memory per se, is the causally determinative factor enabling an individual to project him or herself into a personal future.     

The impact of childbirth settings and maternal medication on infant behaviors

The Brazelton Neonatal Behavioral Assessment Scale (BNBAS) was administered to 61 full-term, healthy newborns between 7–10 days of age. Three groups of newborns made up the sample: 23 babies were born at planned home births to nonmedicated mothers, 22 were born in the hospital to nonmedicated mothers, and 16 neonates were born in the hospital to mothers who received obsteric medication. Analysis of variance indicated a significant F ratio on the BNBAS cluster for orienting behaviors; comparison of the BNBAS scores of the three groups revealed a significant difference on the BNBAS cluster for orienting behavior between the home-born babies and infants born in the hospital to mothers who received obsteric medication. There was no significant difference between groups for medication or birth setting alone, suggesting these perinatal factors have a complex, perhaps synergistic effect on newborn behavior.     

When History Seems to Repeat Itself: Exposure to Perceived Lessons of the Past Influences Predictions About Current Political Events

The idea that the past holds lessons for the present, under the guise of historical analogies, is prevalent in political and public discourse. Those analogies are often accompanied by dire warnings befalling those who “forget” or otherwise neglect the powerful lessons of History—and would then be “doomed to repeat it”, as the saying goes. So, Would remembering history make it seem more OR LESS likely to repeat itself in the future? In other words, does exposure to specific lessons about past events, especially ones involving causal claims, affect how people expect real-life events to turn out? Four studies (three preregistered) tested this experimentally. In Studies 1 and 2, participants expected the same behavior (the US adopting a harsh stance against Iran in the Nuclear Treaty) to result in a more negative outcome when this current stance seemed to match a “lesson” they had read about the break-out of World War II (European leaders adopting a harsh approach against Germany in the 1919 Versailles Treaty vs. a conciliatory approach in the 1938 Munich Agreement). Studies 3 and 4 attempted to eliminate some confounds present in the first two studies and to generalize the effect to different events. While results varied across studies, an internal meta-analysis indicated that the analogical effect on predictions (d = –.08) tended to become stronger as participants’ knowledge about the target situation decreased (d-1SD = –.24). These findings support the possibility of analogical-based predictive effects for real-life political events, and are discussed in light of their research and political implications.     

Social anxiety and perceptions of likeability by peers in children

The current study aimed to investigate the discrepancy between self-reported and peer-reported likeability among children, and the relation with social anxiety, depression, and social support. In total, 532 children between 7 and 12 years completed questionnaires about social anxiety symptoms, depressive symptoms, and social support, estimated their own likeability, and indicated how much they liked their classmates. Children with higher levels of social anxiety or depression overestimated their likeability less or even underestimated their likeability. Social anxiety symptoms, but not depressive symptoms, were significant predictors of the discrepancy. Social support was positively related to likeability and negatively related to social anxiety, but did not moderate the association between social anxiety symptoms and perception accuracy of likeability. These results are in line with cognitive theories of childhood social anxiety, and they stress the importance of using multi-informant measures when studying the relation between social anxiety and social functioning in children.     

When views about alternative medicine,nature and god come in the way of people's vaccination intentions

In spite of the safety and efficiency of the COVID-19 vaccines and the many promotion efforts of political and expert authorities, a fair portion of the population remained hesitant if not opposed to vaccination. Public debate and the available literature point to the possible role of people's attitudes towards medical institutions as well as their preference for complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) on their motivations and intentions to be vaccinated. Other potential ideological factors are beliefs about environmental laissez-faire and divine providence insofar as they encourage people to let the pandemic unfold without human interference. In three cross-sectional samples (total N = 8214), collected at successive moments during the Belgian vaccination campaign, the present research examines the distal role of these psychological and ideological factors on vaccination intentions via motivational processes. Study 1 gauges the relation between trust in medical institutions and preference for CAM on intentions to get vaccinated via motivations. Study 2 examined the role of beliefs in the desirability of letting nature take its course (‘environmental laissez-faire beliefs’) on vaccination intention via motivations. Study 3 tests whether people's adherence to environmental laissez-faire and beliefs about divine providence are linked to their motivations for vaccination via trust in the medical institutions and CAM. Results show that adherence to CAM has a deleterious effect on vaccination intentions, whereas trust in medical institutions has a positive effect. Both ideological factors pertaining to external control are only moderately related, with environmental laissez-faire beliefs having stronger effects on CAM, medical trust and vaccination motivations. We discuss the importance of this set of results in light of the growing interest in CAM and the increasing presence of messages appealing to the environment.