Improving Maternal Mental Health as a Pathway to Economic Mobility in the TANF System.

OBJECTIVE: The authors sought to evaluate the acceptability, feasibility, and initial outcomes of the delivery of a group cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) mental health intervention for mothers in the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program. METHODS: An 8-week group CBT program was made available to parenting women (N=40) in a large, urban TANF system from April to August 2019. Participants completed baseline and endpoint measures to assess depressive symptoms, perceived stress, social support, employment, and program acceptability. TANF administrative data were examined to assess TANF engagement. RESULTS: TANF staff were successfully trained to deliver CBT. The participants reported significantly reduced depressive symptoms and perceived stress; perceived social support significantly increased from the beginning to the end of the intervention. CONCLUSIONS: A model that fully embedded CBT delivery in a TANF system was acceptable to low-income parenting women and TANF staff and reduced depressive symptoms among the women. The scalability of interventions to address maternal depression among low-income women has presented a challenge. Delivering mental health interventions in the U.S. TANF system may offer a scalable method to reduce depression and increase employment in a population bearing a high mental health burden.

Cultures of moderation and expression: emotional experience, behavior, and physiology in Chinese Americans and Mexican Americans.

Ethnographic accounts suggest that emotions are moderated in Chinese cultures and expressed openly in Mexican cultures. The authors tested this notion by comparing subjective, behavioral, and physiological aspects of emotional responses to 3 (warned, unwarned, instructed to inhibit responding) aversive acoustic startle stimuli in 95 Chinese Americans and 64 Mexican Americans. Subjective reports were consistent with ethnographic accounts; Chinese Americans reported experiencing significantly less emotion than Mexican Americans across all 3 startle conditions. Evidence from a nonemotional task suggested that these differences were not artifacts of cultural differences in the use of rating scales. Few cultural differences were found in emotional behavior or physiology, suggesting that these aspects of emotion are less susceptible to cultural influence.