Category: Social Psychology

Only in very few life phases do individuals face as many life transitions in such a short time as young adults at the age of 19-30. The transition from adolescence to adulthood is characterised by frequent changes in status or social roles, such as leaving the parental home, starting a career, entering into working life, forming a partnership and becoming a parent. Assuming civic and social responsibility is also an integral part of the lives of young adults at this particular life phase.

Professor Katariina Salmela-Aro's research team has investigated the transition from adolescence to adulthood through key changes in social roles. Funded by the Academy of Finland, the longitudinal study has investigated how young adults have found their place in the different life domains of education, employment, residence, partnership and parenthood. This is a complex set of domains involving a number of different overlapping phases and transitions.

Salmela-Aro's team has identified six different pathways to adulthood among Finnish university students. The largest group is formed by those with a career and a family (referred to as traditionalists, 24% of respondents) who experienced all key life transitions from adolescence to adulthood in an expected order. Fast starters (15%) were characterised by a fast transition in all of the key life domains (studies, work, partnership, parenthood). People in the fast partnership and late parenthood pathway (15%) started their partnership early, already during their university studies, but became parents relatively late.

People in the career with unsteady partnerships pathway (15%) moved early from studies to employment but entered into a partnership relatively late and experienced several partnerships and repeated break-ups. Those in the single with slow career ("floundering") pathway (15%) were young adults who had difficulties in the key developmental task of forming and committing to a partnership but were also slow in starting their careers. The slow starters (19%) typically postponed both their career and their family transitions compared to the other groups.

"Our results reveal that young adults with fast or on-time achievement of age-graded developmental tasks experienced higher life satisfaction at the end of the follow-up than those with off-time and postponed major role transitions. Those with prolonged university studies and who were single experienced lower life satisfaction later in their lives, whereas those who combined career and family experienced higher life satisfaction," Salmela-Aro sums up.

The Pathways to Adulthood research project involved a sample of 182 students at the University of Helsinki who had started their university studies in 1991. The project is part of the ongoing Helsinki Longitudinal Student Study (HELS).

The results of the study will be published in an article in the Advances in Life Course Research: Salmela-Aro, K. et al., Mapping pathways to adulthood among Finnish university students: Sequences, patterns, variations in family- and work-related roles. Advances in Life Course Research (2011)

 Death can be terrifying. Recognizing that death is inescapable and unpredictable makes us incredibly vulnerable, and can invoke feelings of anxiety, hatred and fear. But new research by George Mason University psychology professor Todd Kashdan shows that being a mindful person not only makes you generally more tolerant and less defensive, but it can also actually neutralize fears of dying and death.

"Mindfulness is being open, receptive, and attentive to whatever is unfolding in the present moment," says Kashdan. In his latest research, Kashdan and his colleagues wanted to find out if mindful people had different attitudes about death and dying.

"Generally, when reminded of our mortality, we are extremely defensive. Like little kids who nearly suffocate under blanket protection to fend off the monster in the closet, the first thing we try to do is purge any death-related thoughts or feelings from our mind," says Kashdan.

"On the fringes of this conscious awareness, we try another attempt to ward off death anxiety. We violently defend beliefs and practices that provide a sense of stability and meaning in our lives."

Kashdan says this practice often has an ugly side — intolerance and abuse. "When people are reminded that death is impending, their racist tendencies increase," he says. In a series of experiments conducted by the University of Missouri-Columbia, for example, white people asked to read about a crime committed by another person give harsher penalties for black compared with white defendants after being reminded of their mortality.

Kashdan wondered what might prevent these defensive, intolerant reactions from occurring. In a recent study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, he and his colleagues looked at what might happen when mindfulness and the terror of death collide.

"A grudge match between humanity and death," says Kashdan.

If mindful people are more willing to explore whatever happens in the present, even if it uncomfortable, will they show less defensiveness when their sense of self is threatened by a confrontation with their own mortality?

Based on the results of 7 different experiments, the answer appears to be yes. When reminded about their death and asked to write about what will happen when their bodies decompose (in grisly detail), less mindful people showed an intense dislike for foreigners that mention what's wrong with the United States (pro-U.S. bias), greater prejudice against black managers who discriminated against a white employee in a promotion decision (pro-white bias), and harsher penalties for social transgressions such as prostitution, marital infidelities, and drug use by physicians that led to surgical mishaps.

Across these various situations, on the contrast, mindful people showed a lack of defensiveness toward people that didn't share their worldview. Mindful people were diplomatic and tolerant regardless of whether they were prompted to think about their slow, systematic decline toward obliteration.

"What we found was that when asked to deeply contemplate their death, mindful people spent more time writing (as opposed to avoiding) and used more death-related words when reflecting on the experience. This suggests that a greater openness to processing the threat of death allows compassion and fairness to reign. In this laboratory staged battle, mindfulness alters the power that death holds over us," Kashdan says.

---

Journal Reference:

1. Christopher P. Niemiec, Kirk Warren Brown, Todd B. Kashdan, Philip J. Cozzolino, William E. Breen, Chantal Levesque-Bristol, Richard M. Ryan. Being present in the face of existential threat: The role of trait mindfulness in reducing defensive responses to mortality salience.. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2010; 99 (2): 344 DOI: 10.1037/a0019388

— Who do you look at in a group photo? If you're like most adults, you'll look at yourself first — unless your boss is also in the picture.

A study in PLoS ONE by researchers from the Brain and Creativity Institute at USC and Peking University examines how White Americans and Chinese people in China respond to pictures of their boss, suggesting cultural differences in our responses to authority figures.

Unlike people in China, who responded fastest to pictures of their direct supervisor, White Americans responded faster to pictures of their own face than to pictures of their boss, the study found. However, the American tendency toward individualism is less pronounced if the supervisor is considered someone with high social status.

"What constitutes a social threat may differ across cultures," said Sook-Lei Liew, a doctoral student with the Brain and Creativity Institute at USC and lead author of the study. "Americans may be influenced more by one's social status than one's hierarchical position as a boss."

Past research has shown that people respond faster to their own faces than to the faces of others, suggesting "we have a different — and privileged — system for processing ourselves versus others," Liew explained.

In other words, we are quicker to react to faces we think are important. Most of the time this is our own face, but certain individuals may interfere with how one thinks of oneself, the researchers said.

"The very concept of a "boss" may be different in different cultures," said Lisa Aziz-Zadeh, assistant professor with the Brain and Creativity Institute at USC. "These findings are particularly salient as globalization increases and, along with it, the prevalence of multicultural collaboration, particularly between East Asian and Western partners."

While Americans did not respond faster to photos of their boss than to themselves, they did respond faster to photos of their boss compared to photos of their peers, suggesting that for Americans, the boss figure is influential in the social arena without directly affecting one's self-concept.

The so-called "boss effect" among people in China was first identified in 2009 by Yina Ma and Shihui Han of Peking University, both authors on this study.

---

Journal Reference:

1. Sook-Lei Liew, Yina Ma, Shihui Han, Lisa Aziz-Zadeh. Who's Afraid of the Boss: Cultural Differences in Social Hierarchies Modulate Self-Face Recognition in Chinese and Americans. PLoS ONE, 2011; 6 (2): e16901 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0016901

 Great works and praiseworthy behavior may bring respect and admiration, but these won't help us to escape blame when we do something wrong, says a new study by researchers at the University of Maryland and Harvard University. To do that, the researchers say, one needs to be a victim not a hero!

In the study, participants responded to a number of scenarios that mirrored real-life moral transgressions, from stealing money to harming someone. Results revealed that, no matter how many previous good deeds someone had done, they received just as much blame — if not more — than someone with a less heroic background.

"People may come down even harder on someone like the Dalai Lama, than they do on 'Joe Blow,' said author Kurt Gray, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Maryland." However, in our research those who have suffered in the past received significantly less blame — even if such suffering was both totally unrelated to the misdeed and long since past."

The article, titled "To Escape Blame, Don't be a Hero — be a Victim" is published in the March issue of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. The findings are based on three experiments conducted by Gray and Daniel Wegner, professor of psychology at Harvard University.

"Our research suggests that morality is not like some kind of cosmic bank, where you can deposit good deeds and use them to offset future misdeeds," said Gray, who directs the Mind Perception and Morality Lab at the University of Maryland. "Instead, people ignore heroic pasts — or even count them against you — when assigning blame."

Gray suggests that the explanation for these findings is our tendency to divide the world up into moral agents — those who do good and evil — and moral patients — those who receive good or evil. "Psychologically, the perceived distance between a hero and a villain is quite small, whereas there's a wide gap between a villain and a victim. This means that heroes are easily recast as evil doers, whereas it's very hard to turn a victim into a villain."

Favorite Strategies of Fallen Celebs Confirmed

In the experiments involved in this study, those who highlighted past suffering were held less responsible for transgressions and given less punishment. According to the authors, this fact suggests an explanation for why many celebrities immediately go into rehab or claim victimhood after being caught doing something wrong. Of course, this research doesn't address whether someone is actually blameworthy, but it does indicate a clear strategy for escaping blame.

In fact their research finds that people had trouble even remembering the misdeeds of victims. In one experiment, people read about either a hero, normal person, or a victim stealing some money, and then were given a surprise memory test after. Far fewer people remembered the victim stealing money.

The authors note that there certainly are benefits from good deeds for both individuals and society. For example they say, "not only do virtuous deeds help the recipient of the deed, but research suggests that even small acts of good can serve to significantly improve the doers mood."

But "whether you are trying to defend yourself against a spouse's wrath for a missed birthday or save yourself from execution for a grisly murder, your task is to become the ultimate victim . . . with stories of childhood abuse, of broken hearts and broken arms," Gray and Wegner write.

This research was supported by the National Science Foundation, the Institute for Humane Studies and by a fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

---

Journal Reference:

1. Kurt Gray, Daniel M. Wegner. To escape blame, don't be a hero — Be a victim. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 2010; DOI: 10.1016/j.jesp.2010.12.012

Latino siblings of children developmental disabilities such as Down syndrome and autism may face their own challenges, including anxiety and lower school performance, according to a new study led by researchers with the Bradley Hasbro Children's Research Center.

"When a child has a disability, all members of the family are affected, including siblings," said lead author Debra Lobato, Ph.D., of the Bradley Hasbro Children's Research Center. "However, little attention has been paid to the influence of cultural factors on the functioning of siblings. Our cultural backgrounds influence who we consider to be our siblings, as well as the expectations and relationships we have with our brothers and sisters."

"In order to understand the impact of a child's disability on siblings it is important to understand the social and cultural context in which they are raised," Lobato added.

According to the study in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, now available online, Latino children who have a brother or sister with developmental disabilities experienced significantly more symptoms of internalizing psychological disorders, such as anxiety, than comparison children. These siblings also had more problems with their adjustment and coping skills including difficulties with their relationships, particularly with their parents. Latino children showed a greater reluctance to express any negative experiences or feelings that they had about their siblings' disability. In school, they had more absences and lower academic performances compared to their peers.

Latinos represent the largest minority population in the United States, where they share higher rates of sociodemographic stress, such as poverty, which has been associated with higher rates of anxiety symptoms and disorders among samples of Latino children. Latinos also share significant family-centric cultural values that may heighten the significance of sibling relationships and caretaking responsibilities while discouraging open verbal expression of sibling-related distress.

The study included 100 siblings and parents of children with developmental disabilities, and 100 siblings and parents of typically developing children. Each group was divided evenly between Latinos and non-Latinos. Siblings were between the ages of 8 and 15 years old.

Researchers interviewed siblings, parents and teachers to fully examine the psychological and school functioning of Latino and non-Latino siblings of children with developmental disabilities. Parents or teachers provided copies of the most recent report card for all siblings to gather information about siblings' grades and number of school absences.

According to the findings, Latino siblings of children with a disability were at higher risk for negative outcomes. In addition to experiencing impoverished economic conditions and more difficulties in their personal functioning and relationships, they also reported higher internalizing behaviors — particularly separation anxiety and agoraphobia — and were less likely to express their emotions.

"We can only speculate about why Latino brothers and sisters of special needs children respond by internalizing their emotions," said Lobato, adding that there may be both direct (e.g. sibling worry about their brother or sister) as well as indirect (disruptions in the parent-sibling relationship) ways that a child's disability affects Latino siblings.

When researchers looked at school functioning, they found Latino siblings of children with developmental disabilities had significantly more school absences, which their parents were more likely to attribute to the child with the disability. Greater family obligations, such as providing translation for parents at their sibling's medical appointments, as well as siblings' anxiety regarding separation from their parents may have influenced school attendance. Siblings were also less likely to have above average or excellent grades in language arts compared to other children in the study, which appeared to be unrelated to language proficiency.

According to researchers, this combination of greater anxiety, worse attendance and lower performance may place Latino siblings of children with developmental disabilities at risk for poor academic outcomes.

Lobato says the study's findings have clinical implications for children with developmental disabilities — especially among Latino families, where siblings appear to be most vulnerable. "Our findings suggest that family-based, culturally sensitive services acknowledge the importance of siblings every step of the way," she said. "This might include proactively conducting screening assessments of sibling functioning as well as active consideration of siblings' perspectives and needs when treatment plans are developed and renewed."

Lobato is the founder and creator of SibLink — one of the only support groups in the nation for siblings of children with chronic illnesses or disabilities. The six-week program, offered by the Bradley Hasbro Children's Research Center, focuses on sibling education, peer support and fun.

The study was funded by a grant from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. Co-authors included Wendy Plante, Ph.D. and Ronald Seifer, Ph.D., from the Bradley Hasbro Children's Research Center and Alpert Medical School; Barbara Kao, Ph.D., from Hasbro Children's Hospital and Alpert Medical School; Edicta Grullon, M.A., and Lydia Cheas, B.A., of the Bradley Hasbro Children's Research Center; and Glorisa Canino, Ph.D., from the University of Puerto Rico.

---

Journal Reference:

1. Debra Lobato, Barbara Kao, Wendy Plante, Ronald Seifer, Edicta Grullon, Lydia Cheas, Glorisa Canino. Psychological and school functioning of Latino siblings of children with intellectual disability. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 2011; DOI: 10.1111/j.1469-7610.2010.02357.x

Previous studies have shown a strong link between neighborhood alcohol environments and outcomes such as drunk driving and violence. This study investigated linkages between neighborhood liquor stores, on-premise outlets, convenience stores, and supermarket densities and at-risk drinking among African Americans. Researchers found that a neighborhood's liquor-store density had a significant impact on at-risk drinking among African Americans who consumed alcohol, particularly for women who drink.

Results will be published in the May 2011 issue of Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research and are currently available at Early View.

"There has been limited research on this topic among specific minority groups or by sex," said Katherine P. Theall, associate professor in the department of community health sciences at Tulane University School of Public Health & Tropical Medicine. "Researchers have only recently begun to examine in greater detail the impact of the neighborhood and other distal factors on health outcomes."

It was not because researchers did not think distal influences were important, explained Theall, also corresponding author for the study, but because methods for testing the role of social and physical neighborhood context in human health have only become available during the last decade.

"Investigations that examine neighborhood influences according to specific demographic characteristics such as differential impacts by gender or race," she said, "are still emerging as we think of ways to best intervene and prevent adverse health outcomes based on neighborhood changes or polices."

Researchers recruited 321 African Americans (229 women, 92 men), ages 21 to 65 years of age, during April 2002 through to May 2003 from three community-based healthcare clinics in New Orleans, Louisiana. All participants answered quantitative questionnaires. Individuals with hazardous or harmful patterns of alcohol consumption were classified as engaging in at-risk drinking based on the Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test (AUDIT).

"Among African Americans in our sample who drank, those who lived in neighborhoods with a greater concentration of liquor stores were more likely to be classified as at-risk drinkers compared to those living in neighborhoods with fewer liquor stores per population," said Theall. "Furthermore, the influence of liquor store concentration on at-risk drinking was much greater for African American women."

Theall noted that liquor stores are the dominant alcohol establishment in many minority communities, as opposed to supermarkets. "Therefore they may play a larger role in risky drinking among those who already drink," she said. "Other studies have shown high concentrations of liquor stores, as well as physical shelf space devoted to alcohol, in minority and lower-income neighborhoods."

As far as the gender differences were concerned, Theall hypothesized that stress was a factor.

"Women and men differ in their response to stress and I think that one primary reason for this finding was due to differential psychological coping among women who do drink," she explained. "While we do not know the specific neighborhood characteristics of the at-risk drinkers, our guess is that many were dealing with cumulative ecologic, family/household, and individual stressors. If drinking is a coping mechanism, then greater availability of alcohol may lead to riskier consumption patterns."

Theall said these findings would suggest to clinicians that they take into account not only individual and interpersonal influences on their patient's consumption patterns, but also ecologic factors that may lead to riskier drinking.

"As well, individuals themselves can examine the broader social and physical environment of their neighborhood and consider what role it plays in their lives — shaping behavior, increasing disorders, or bringing something positive to the neighborhood. If the role is a negative one, then individuals might consider what steps can be taken to help change the environment or how to become more resilient in such an environment."

---

Journal Reference:

1. Katherine P. Theall, Brooke P. Lancaster, Sara Lynch, Robert T. Haines, Scott Scribner, Richard Scribner, Vimal Kishore. The Neighborhood Alcohol Environment and At-Risk Drinking Among African-Americans. Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research, 2011; DOI: 10.1111/j.1530-0277.2010.01430.x

 The applications you add to your smartphone can label you as a specific "appitypes," says Trevor Pinch, professor of science and technology studies, who worked as a consultant for the Finnish telecomm giant Nokia.

Pinch used survey data on app usage from 5,000 smartphone users in 10 countries to create appitypes to help define user profiles. Appitypes play into people's desire to project an identity and could be of use to developers and users alike.

Know your appitype: http://blog.ovi.com/dailyapp/appitype/

For example, Pinch said an "appcentric" is an extreme user who uses the mobile phone as their main computing device for anything from data management to playing games. The "appthusiast" is someone who feels the need to search out and download the latest apps. The "live wire" downloads a mix of fitness, social and travel apps.

The Creator appitype is "The Picasso of personality types when it comes to app habits," says Pinch. "Creators are very expressive and carry a multitude of apps that allow them to be spontaneously creative. They could be art teachers, therapists with a penchant for drawing or heavy metal heads. The entertainment industry is full of Creators."

The survey found that Germans were downloading flashlight and alarm clock apps, Pinch said, while Brazilians download lots of music and social networking apps. The Chinese download news apps. South Africans prefer social networking apps. India goes in for business apps.

While previous data had been collected on the number of apps users have, there was no global survey of smartphone users, until now.

"Think about connections between humans and technology," Pinch said. "You can have smartphones with you all the time. You can sleep with the thing if you want. These apps capture people's imagination and add mobility. There is nothing inevitable about the path technology takes. We need more research on how people and technology together can produce meaningful change in our lives."