The influence of mortality and socioeconomic status on risk and delayed rewards: a life history theory approach

Why do some people take risks and live for the present, whereas others avoid risks and save for the future? The evolutionary framework of life history theory predicts that preferences for risk and delay in gratification should be influenced by mortality and resource scarcity. A series of experiments examined how mortality cues influenced decisions involving risk preference (e.g., $10 for sure vs. 50% chance of $20) and temporal discounting (e.g., $5 now vs. $10 later). The effect of mortality depended critically on whether people grew up in a relatively resource-scarce or resource-plentiful environment. For individuals who grew up relatively poor, mortality cues led them to value the present and gamble for big immediate rewards. Conversely, for individuals who grew up relatively wealthy, mortality cues led them to value the future and avoid risky gambles. Overall, mortality cues appear to propel individuals toward diverging life history strategies as a function of childhood socioeconomic status, suggesting important implications for how environmental factors influence economic decisions and risky behaviors.     

A biopsychosocial formulation of pain communication

We present a detailed framework for understanding the numerous and complicated interactions among psychological and social determinants of pain through examination of the process of pain communication. The focus is on an improved understanding of immediate dyadic transactions during painful events in the context of broader social phenomena. Fine-grain consideration of social transactions during pain leads to an appreciation of sociobehavioral events affecting both suffering persons as well as caregivers. Our examination considers knowledge from a variety of perspectives, including clinical health psychology, social and developmental processes, evolutionary psychology, communication studies, and behavioral neuroscience.     

The future-orientation of memory: planning as a key component mediating the high levels of recall found with survival processing

In a series of papers, Nairne and colleagues have demonstrated that tasks encouraging participants to judge words for relevance to survival led to better recall than did tasks lacking survival relevance. Klein, Robertson, and Delton (2010) presented data suggesting that the future-directed temporal orientation of the survival task (e.g., planning), rather than survival per se, accounts for the good recall found with the task. In the present studies we manipulated the amount of survival and planning processing encouraged by a set of encoding tasks. Participants performed tasks that encouraged processing stimuli for their relevance to (a) both survival and planning, (b) planning, but not survival, or (c) survival but not planning. We predicted, and found, that recall performance associated with tasks encouraging planning (i.e., survival with planning and planning without survival) should exceed tasks that encouraged survival but not planning (i.e., survival without planning). We draw several conclusions. First, planning is a necessary component of the superior recall found in the survival paradigm. Second, memory, from an evolutionary perspective, is inherently prospective--tailored by natural selection to support future decisions and judgements that cannot be known in advance with certainty.     

Facing the future: Memory as an evolved system for planning future acts

All organisms capable of long-term memory are necessarily oriented toward the future. We propose that one of the most important adaptive functions of long-term episodic memory is to store information about the past in the service of planning for the personal future. Because a system should have especially efficient performance when engaged in a task that makes maximal use of its evolved machinery, we predicted that future-oriented planning would result in especially good memory relative to other memory tasks. We tested recall performance of a word list, using encoding tasks with different temporal perspectives (e.g., past, future) but a similar context. Consistent with our hypothesis, future-oriented encoding produced superior recall. We discuss these findings in light of their implications for the thesis that memory evolved to enable its possessor to anticipate and respond to future contingencies that cannot be known with certainty.     

Applying Social Empowerment Strategies as Tools for Self‐Advocacy in Counseling Lesbian and Gay Male Clients

Social empowerment is designed to prepare individuals to reconstruct their political, economic, psychological, and social environments. Addressing empowerment for lesbian and gay male populations is critical because of the numerous stereotypical situations that result in their powerlessness. The application of social empowerment strategies as tools for self‐advocacy with lesbian and gay male populations is presented as a consideration for counseling.     

Drop-in suicide prevention group decreases suicidal ideation among Veterans

This study examined the effectiveness of a weekly, drop-in therapy support group designed for Veterans identified at increased risk for suicide. Veterans were identified as at risk for suicide and referred to the group following hospitalization on the inpatient psychiatric unit after an increase in suicidal ideation (SI), presentation to a provider with SI with a plan, or having made a suicide attempt. An archival chart review was performed on 359 patients who were referred to the Coping, Understanding, Support, and Prevention Group from 2009 through 2011. Documented risk of suicide was collected from the chart including: frequency of inpatient psychiatric hospitalization, visits to the emergency department or mental health walk in clinic for SI, reported SI in clinical notes, consults resulting from calls to the Veteran’s Crisis Line, and assignment or removal of suicide risk behavior flags in the electronic medical record, for a period of 12 months prior to referral to the group and for a period of 12 months after referral to the group. Negative binomial regression models found that Veterans attending the support group showed a significantly greater reduction in frequency of endorsing SI post-referral compared to those who did not attend the group. Results imply that offering Veterans an ongoing therapeutic group format to give and receive support from peers also struggling with suicide risk factors is an effective way to reduce suicide-related thoughts.     

Enhancing the National Dialogue on the Prevention of Intimate Partner Violence

Little systematic information exists about how community‐based prevention efforts at the state and local levels contribute to our knowledge of intimate partner violence (IPV) prevention. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) DELTA FOCUS program funds ten state domestic violence coalitions to engage in IPV primary prevention through approaches addressing the outer layers of the social ecology. This paper explored the ways in which DELTA FOCUS recipients have contributed to a national‐level dialogue on IPV prevention. Previously undefined, the authors define national‐level dialogue and retrospectively apply the CDC Science Impact Framework (SIF) to describe contributions DELTA FOCUS recipients made to it. Authors conducted document review and qualitative content analysis of recipient semi‐annual progress reports from 2014 to 2016 (N = 40) using NVivo. A semi‐structured coding scheme was applied across the five SIF domains: Creating Awareness, Catalyzing Action, Effecting Change, Disseminating Science, and Shaping the Future. All recipients sought to promote IPV prevention by communicating and sharing with non‐CDC‐funded state coalitions, national partners, and other IPV stakeholders information and resources accumulated through practice‐based prevention efforts. Through implementing and disseminating their prevention work in myriad ways, DELTA FOCUS recipients are building practice‐based evidence on community‐based IPV prevention.     

Chewing gum while studying: Effects on alertness and test performance

Recent research has demonstrated chewing gum can enhance various cognitive processes associated with learning, but most studies have used cognitive functioning tasks (e.g., selective attention and working memory) as outcomes. Across two experiments, we investigated effects of chewing gum on self‐reports of alertness and test performance following study of realistic educational materials. In Experiment 1 (n = 40), adult participants who chewed gum while studying a 20‐min physiology lesson outperformed a nonchewing condition on subsequent terminology and comprehension tests, but did not report higher levels of postlesson alertness as hypothesised. In Experiment 2 (n = 39), adult participants who chewed gum while studying a 9‐min lesson on a mental mathematics strategy outperformed a nonchewing condition on a subsequent problem‐solving test, whereas also reporting higher levels of postlesson alertness. The results provide initial support for chewing gum while studying realistic educational materials across a range of topics and study durations.