Community Attitudes Toward People Receiving Unemployment Benefits: Does Volunteering Change Perceptions?

People receiving government income support due to unemployment are sometimes required to participate in activities such as volunteering. These “mutual obligation” requirements have community support, but the effect of volunteering on benefit recipients is unclear. In three person-perception experiments (N = 222, 533, 934), we considered whether volunteering overcomes negative evaluations of unemployed benefit recipients. Volunteering increased the extent to which benefit recipients were considered suitable workers and likeable, but these effects also generalized to non-recipients. Results suggest that volunteering may compensate for attitudinal barriers arising from welfare stigma that represents a barrier for employment.     

Exploring Culture-Specific Differences in Beliefs about Causes, Kinship and the Heritability of Major Depressive Disorder: The Views of Anglo-Celtic and Chinese-Australians

The aim of this study was to explore cultural differences in causal attributions and beliefs about heritability of major depressive disorder (MDD). Face-to-face interviews with Anglo-Celtic- and Chinese-Australians community members with a family history of MDD were conducted and subjected to a rigorous qualitative analysis, using the computer software NVivo. Sixteen Anglo-Celtic-Australians and 16 Chinese-Australians were interviewed. Both groups believed that a combination of genetic and environmental factors contributed to MDD, that stress was an important cause of MDD, and that coping factors were significant moderators of the impact of stress on MDD. Both cultural groups believed that the causes of MDD affecting multiple family members included a shared family environment and a “contagion effect”, in addition to genetics. Unique to the Chinese-Australian group was the beliefs that parental pressures to exceed academically contributed to MDD; this cultural group also reported beliefs that depression was due to God’s will or alternatively fate, which in turn was related to attributions to feng shui and auspicious dates. This study documented key culture-specific differences in beliefs about causes and inheritance of MDD; such differences have major implications for clinician-patient communication about genetic risk associated with having a family history of MDD.     

Interpretation of facial expressions and social anxiety: Specificity and source of biases

Cognitive-behavioural models of social phobia (Clark & Wells, 1995; Rapee & Heimberg, 1997) propose that biased information processing contributes to the maintenance of social phobia. Given the importance of facial expressions in social interactions, recent investigations of these information-processing biases have increasingly used facial stimuli. The current study utilised schematic faces of emotional expressions to investigate interpretations of facial expressions and specific facial features in individuals with high and low social anxiety. Individuals with elevated social anxiety demonstrated biases in their perceptions of negative valence from the faces, whereas group differences were not observed for perceptions of activity or potency. Further, although the two groups generally utilised the same facial features to interpret facial expressions, the results suggested that individuals with high social anxiety may be more lenient in perceiving threat in faces than individuals without social anxiety.     

An exploratory study of the draw-a-person as a measure of racial identity.

The race of the figure drawn on the Draw-A-Person Test is proposed as a measure of acceptance of racial identity. Reliability and validity of this measure were explored in a two-part study. Part 1 confirmed the hypothesis that the race of the figure drawn is related to the race of the child producing the drawing. Comparison of the figures drawn by black (n = 157) and white (n = 167) children confirmed three other hypotheses based on the voluminous literature suggesting that black children are less accepting of their racial group membership than whites. These hypotheses were: (a) whites should be more likely to draw figures that are clearly white than blacks are to draw figures that are clearly black, (b) whites should be less likely to draw blacks than blacks are to draw whites, and (c) blacks should be more likely to avoid giving clear indication of the race of the figures they draw than are whites. Inter-rater reliability for the race of the figure drawn was .79. Five weeks after the initial drawing, a subsample of 28 black children drew a second figure and performed a picture choice task designed to assess acceptance of racial identity. The race of the figure drawn showed a test-retest reliability of .53 and correlated significantly with the other measure of racial identity (r27 = .39).     

Does Motivation Impact OCD Symptom Severity? An Exploration of Longitudinal Effects

Understanding the role of patient motivation in OCD treatment is of clinical importance given the requisite autonomous role of patients in Exposure and Response Prevention. The present study investigated state- and trait-like relations between three variables: two previously established motivational constructs, readiness to change (RTC) and committed action (CA), derived from the University of Rhode Island Change Assessment, and OCD symptom severity as measured by the self-report Yale-Brown Obsessive Compulsive Scale (Y-BOCS-SR). Utilizing a random-intercept cross-lagged panel model (RI-CLPM) design, we assessed autoregressive, within-time correlations, and cross-lagged effects of RTC, CA, and Y-BOCS-SR scores at admission, month 1 of treatment, and discharge from an intensive/residential treatment program for OCD. Results revealed significant autoregressive (i.e., state-like) effects for CA and Y-BOCS-SR, negative within-time correlations between state CA and Y-BOCS-SR across all time points, a positive within-time correlation between state CA and RTC at admission, and a cross-lagged effect between state Y-BOCS-SR at month 1 of treatment and state RTC at discharge. Results also demonstrated that the stability of the RTC variable was attributable to trait-like factors in the present sample. This study is novel in its use of RI-CLPM in an OCD sample and represents an important addition to the literature on the longitudinal impacts of dynamic constructs of motivation. Our findings may provide future researchers with strategies to supplement ERP with CA-driven motivational interviewing.     

The shared and unique genetic relationship between mental well-being,depression and anxiety symptoms and cognitive function in healthy twins

Alterations to cognitive function are often reported with depression and anxiety symptoms, yet few studies have examined the same associations with mental well-being. This study examined the association between mental well-being, depression and anxiety symptoms and cognitive function in 1502 healthy adult monozygotic (MZ) and dizygotic (DZ) twins, and the shared/unique contribution of genetic (G) and environmental (E) variance. Using linear mixed models, mental well-being was positively associated (p?β?=?0.127), inhibition (β?=?0.096), cognitive flexibility (β?=?0.149), motor coordination (β?=?0.114) and working memory (β?=?0.156), whereas depression and anxiety symptoms were associated (p?β?=??0.134), inhibition (β?=??0.139), cognitive flexibility (β?=??0.116) and executive function (β?=??0.139). Bivariate twin modelling showed well-being shared a small environmental correlation with motor coordination and a small genetic correlation with working memory. Trivariate twin modelling showed well-being shared a small genetic correlation with inhibition, whereas depression and anxiety symptoms shared a small environmental correlation with inhibition. The remaining variance was mostly driven by unique G and/or E variance. Overall, well-being and depression and anxiety symptoms show both independent and shared relationships with cognitive functions but this is largely attributable to unique G or E variance and small shared G/E variance between pairs of variables.     

Bridging the acculturation gap: parent-child relationship quality as a moderator in Mexican American families

The authors examined the degree to which disparities in parent and child acculturation are linked to both family and child adjustment. With a sample of 1st- and 2nd-generation Mexican American children, acculturation and parent-child relationship quality at 5th grade, and parent-child conflict, child internalizing, and child externalizing at 7th grade were measured. Acculturation gaps with fathers were found to be related to later father-child conflict as well as internalizing and externalizing outcomes. Many of the associations between father-child acculturation gaps and outcomes were moderated by the child's report of the relationship quality between the child and his or her father. Father-child acculturation gaps were associated with negative outcomes only when children reported a poor relationship with their fathers. Mother-child acculturation gaps were not associated with mother-child conflict or adjustment indices.     

Social anxiety and interpretation biases for facial displays of emotion: emotion detection and ratings of social cost

The current study assessed the processing of facial displays of emotion (Happy, Disgust, and Neutral) of varying emotional intensities in participants with high vs. low social anxiety. Use of facial expressions of varying intensities allowed for strong external validity and a fine-grained analysis of interpretation biases. Sensitivity to perceiving negative evaluation in faces (i.e., emotion detection) was assessed at both long (unlimited) and brief (60 ms) stimulus durations. In addition, ratings of perceived social cost were made indicating what participants judged it would be like to have a social interaction with a person exhibiting the stimulus emotion. Results suggest that high social anxiety participants did not demonstrate biases in their sensitivity to perceiving negative evaluation (i.e. disgust) in facial expressions. However, high social anxiety participants did estimate the perceived cost of interacting with someone showing disgust to be significantly greater than low social anxiety participants, regardless of the intensity of the disgust expression. These results are consistent with a specific type of interpretation bias in which participants with social anxiety have elevated ratings of the social cost of interacting with individuals displaying negative evaluation.     

Nonstable concurrent choice in pigeons

Six pigeons were trained on concurrent variable-interval schedules in which the arranged reinforcer ratios changed from session to session according to a 31-step pseudorandom binary sequence. This procedure allows a quantitative analysis of the degree to which performance in an experimental session is affected by conditions in previous sessions. Two experiments were carried out. In each, the size of the reinforcer ratios arranged between the two concurrent schedules was varied between 31-step conditions. In Experiment 1, the concurrent schedules were arranged independently, and in Experiment 2 they were arranged nonindependently. An extended form of the generalized matching law described the relative contribution of past and present events to present-session behavior. Total performance in sessions was mostly determined by the reinforcer ratio in that session and partially by reinforcers that had been obtained in previous sessions. However, the initial exposure to the random sequence produced a lower sensitivity to current-session reinforcers but no difference in overall sensitivity to reinforcement. There was no evidence that the size of the reinforcer ratios available on the concurrent schedules affected either overall sensitivity to reinforcement or the sensitivity to reinforcement in the current session. There was also no evidence of any different performance between independent and nonindependent scheduling. Because of these invariances, this experiment validates the use of the pseudorandom sequence for the fast determination of sensitivity to reinforcement.