Family relationships and familism among Mexican Americans on the U.S.-Mexico border during the COVID-19 pandemic.

OBJECTIVES: Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has had a disproportionately negative impact on communities of color across the U.S., including Mexican Americans. The present study examined the influence of the pandemic on family relationships among individuals living in the U.S.-Mexico border region and how changes in family relationships were related to both familism values and mental health. METHOD: Two hundred ninety-one college Latino students participated in a survey that asked about changes in family relationships and mental health since the beginning of the pandemic. RESULTS: Contrary to our initial hypothesis, the majority of respondents indicated their family relationships had not changed since the beginning of the pandemic. However, those who reported negative changes in their family relationships also reported worse mental health whereas those who reported positive changes reported higher familism values. Mediational models revealed an indirect effect of familism support values on depression via changes in family relationships. CONCLUSIONS: Although cross-sectional, these results provide preliminary evidence of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the mental health of Mexican Americans in the border region, as well as cultural factors that promote resilience in times of stress. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Drug Use Homophily in Adolescent Offenders' Close Friendship Groups.

Adolescents who befriend drug using peers may be at risk for initiated and continued substance use. The present secondary data analysis examined how drug use homophily (i.e., similarity) in justice-involved boys' friendship groups relates to their subsequent substance use variety across a period of five years. Participants were 1216 first-time adolescent offenders (Mage Baseline = 15.29; 100% male). Multilevel model analyses revealed that, among participants who entered the study with a history of substance use, drug use homophily was associated with greater subsequent substance use variety. Among participants who entered the study without a history of substance use, this association was no longer significant. The findings have implications for guiding justice system programming aimed at decreasing adolescent offenders' substance use.

Stress and Cardiometabolic Disease Risk for Indigenous Populations throughout the Lifespan.

BACKGROUND: Indigenous people experience the greatest cardiometabolic disease disparity in the Unites States, yet high cardiometabolic disease risk factors do not fully explain the extent of the cardiometabolic disease disparity for Indigenous people. Stress, trauma, and racism occur at high rates within Indigenous communities and have not been well explored as significant contributors to cardiometabolic disease disparities despite emerging literature, and therefore will be described here. METHODS: This descriptive study explores the relationship between cardiometabolic disease risks and Indigenous-specific stressors (e.g., early childhood stress and trauma, adulthood stress and trauma, and historical and intergenerational trauma) using current literature. Indigenous-specific protective factors against cardiometabolic disease are also reviewed. RESULTS: Increasing research indicates that there is a relationship between Indigenous-specific stressful and traumatic life experiences and increased cardiometabolic disease risk. Mental health and psychophysiology play an important role in this relationship. Effective interventions to reduce cardiometabolic disease risk in Indigenous communities focus on ameliorating the negative effects of these stressors through the use of culturally specific health behaviors and activities. CONCLUSIONS: There is increasing evidence that cultural connection and enculturation are protective factors for cardiometabolic disease, and may be galvanized through Indigenous-led training, research, and policy change.

Using multilevel models for the analysis of event-related potentials.

Multilevel modeling (MLM) is becoming increasingly accessible and popular in the analysis of event-related potentials (ERPs). In this article, we review the benefits of MLM for analyzing psychophysiological data, which often contains repeated observations within participants, and introduce some of the decision-making points in the analytic process, including how to set up the data set, specify the model, conduct hypothesis tests, and visualize the model estimates. We highlight how the use of MLM can extend the types of theoretical questions that can be answered using ERPs, including investigations of how ERPs vary meaningfully across trials within a testing session. We also address reporting practices and provide tools to calculate effect sizes and simulate power curves. Ultimately, we hope this review contributes to emerging best practices for the use of MLM with psychophysiological data.

A Functional Coupling of Brain and Behavior During Social Categorization of Faces.

Considerable research has focused on how people derive information about others' social category memberships from their faces. Theoretical models posit that early extraction of task-relevant information from a face should determine the efficiency with which that face is categorized, but evidence supporting this idea has been elusive. Here, we used a novel trial-level data analytic approach to examine the relationship between two event-related potential components-the P2, indexing early attention to category-relevant information, and the P3, indexing stimulus evaluation-and the speed of overt categorization judgments. As predicted, a larger face-elicited P2 on a particular trial was associated with faster overt race or gender categorization of that face. Moreover, this association was mediated by P3 latency, indicating that extraction of more category-relevant information early in processing facilitated stimulus evaluation. These findings support continuous flow models of information processing and the long-theorized functional significance of face-elicited neurophysiological responses for social categorization.

Dissociating Automatic Associations: Comparing Two Implicit Measurements of Race Bias.

Weak correspondence across different implicit bias tasks may arise from the contribution of unique forms of automatic and controlled processes to response behavior. Here, we examined the correspondence between estimates of automatic and controlled processing derived from two sequential priming tasks with identical structure and timing designed to separately measure stereotypic (Weapons Identification Task; WIT) and evaluative (Affective Priming Task; APT) associations. Across two studies using predominantly White samples, three consistent patterns emerged in the data: (1) stereotypic bias was stronger for Black targets, whereas evaluative bias was stronger for White targets; (2) overall response accuracy bias correlated modestly across the two tasks; and (3) multinomial processing tree estimates of controlled processing corresponded much more strongly than estimates of automatic processing. These findings support models positing distinct learning and memory systems for different forms of race bias, and suggest that these differing forms contribute to estimates of automatic associations.

Explicit Categorization Goals Affect Attention-Related Processing of Race and Gender During Person Construal.

Faces are categorized by gender and race very quickly, seemingly without regard to perceivers' goals or motivations, suggesting an automaticity to these judgments that has downstream consequences for evaluations, stereotypes, and social interactions. The current study investigated the extent to which early neurocognitive processes involved in the categorization of faces vary when participants' tasks goals were to categorize faces by race or by gender. In contrast to previous findings, task-related differences were found, such that differentiation in the P2 event-related potential (ERP) according to perceived gender was facilitated by having an explicit task goal of categorizing faces by gender; however, the P2 was sensitive to race regardless of task goals. Use of principal components analysis (PCA) revealed two underlying components that comprised the P2 and that were differentially sensitive to the gender and race of the faces, depending on participants' top-down task goals. Results suggest that top-down task demands facilitate discrimination of faces along the attended dimension within less than 200 ms, but that the effect of top-down task demands may not be evident when examining early ERP components that reflect more than one distinct underlying process.

Temporal dynamics of reactive cognitive control as revealed by event-related brain potentials.

Reactive cognitive control refers to a complementary set of cognitive operations by which individuals monitor for and detect the presence of goal-interfering conflict (i.e., conflict monitoring/evaluation) and, subsequently, initiate attention-focusing and response selection processes to bolster goal-directed action in the face of such conflict (regulative control). The purpose of the current study was to characterize the nature of conflict adaptation in both components of this dynamic process across sequences of trials and, more broadly, across time as participants complete a cognitive control task. Fifty-two young adults completed a standard arrow flanker task while behavioral and ERP data were recorded. Multilevel modeling of sequences of compatible and incompatible trials over time showed that, whereas response time data demonstrated a typical conflict adaptation effect throughout the task, N2 and frontal slow wave (FSW) indices of conflict monitoring and regulative control, respectively, demonstrated significant conflict adaptation only during the early part of the task. Moreover, although differential change in N2 and FSW over time suggested that conflict monitoring and regulative control were dissociable, a reciprocal relation between them was maintained throughout the task and was not present in a component theoretically unrelated to conflict adaptation (visual attention-related N1). Findings are discussed in terms of compensatory processes that help to maintain goal-directed performance even as control-related neural responses become fatigued.

University-Affiliated Alcohol Marketing Enhances the Incentive Salience of Alcohol Cues.

We tested whether affiliating beer brands with universities enhances the incentive salience of those brands for underage drinkers. In Study 1, 128 undergraduates viewed beer cues while event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded. Results showed that beer cues paired with in-group backgrounds (logos for students' universities) evoked an enhanced P3 ERP component, a neural index of incentive salience. This effect varied according to students' levels of identification with their university, and the amplitude of the P3 response prospectively predicted alcohol use over 1 month. In Study 2 ( N = 104), we used a naturalistic advertisement exposure to experimentally create in-group brand associations and found that this manipulation caused an increase in the incentive salience of the beer brand. These data provide the first evidence that marketing beer via affiliating it with students' universities enhances the incentive salience of the brand for underage students and that this effect has implications for their alcohol involvement.

Using trial-level data and multilevel modeling to investigate within-task change in event-related potentials.

EEG data, and specifically the ERP, provide psychologists with the power to examine quickly occurring cognitive processes at the native temporal resolution at which they occur. Despite the advantages conferred by ERPs to examine processes at different points in time, ERP researchers commonly ignore the trial-to-trial temporal dimension by collapsing across trials of similar types (i.e., the signal averaging approach) because of constraints imposed by repeated measures ANOVA. Here, we present the advantages of using multilevel modeling (MLM) to examine trial-level data to investigate change in neurocognitive processes across the course of an experiment. Two examples are presented to illustrate the usefulness of this technique. The first demonstrates decreasing differentiation in N170 amplitude to faces of different races across the course of a race categorization task. The second demonstrates attenuation of the ERN as participants commit more errors within a task designed to measure implicit racial bias. Although the examples presented here are within the realm of social psychology, the use of MLM to analyze trial-level EEG data has the potential to contribute to a number of different theoretical domains within psychology.

The iterative nature of person construal: Evidence from event-related potentials.

Recently, a dynamic-interactive model of person construal (DI model) has been proposed, whereby the social categories a person represents are determined on the basis of an iterative integration of bottom-up and top-down influences. The current study sought to test this model by leveraging the high temporal resolution of event-related brain potentials (ERPs) as 65 participants viewed male faces that varied by race (White vs Black), fixating either between the eyes or on the forehead. Within face presentations, the effect of fixation, meant to vary bottom-up visual input, initially was large but decreased across early latency neural responses identified by a principal components analysis (PCA). In contrast, the effect of race, reflecting a combination of top-down and bottom-up factors, initially was small but increased across early latency principal components. These patterns support the DI model prediction that bottom-up and top-down processes are iteratively integrated to arrive at a stable construal within 230 ms. Additionally, exploratory multilevel modeling of single trial ERP responses representing a component linked to outgroup categorization (the P2) suggests change in effects of the manipulations over the course of the experiment. Implications of the findings for the DI model are considered.