Mental health in the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic: A longitudinal examination of the ameliorating effect of meaning salience.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, various restrictions forced people around the world to socially isolate. People were asked to stay at home and were largely unable to do many of the activities that they derived meaning from. Since meaning is often related to mental health, these restrictions were likely to decrease mental health. The current study aimed to examine these effects and additionally benefit individuals' mental health by making their meaning salient. Specifically, the goal of the research was to design an intervention that could counter the potential negative effects of social distancing. We recruited a total of 96 U.S.A. residents (M age = 34.45, 92.7% Female) and assigned them to either the control group or to a meaning salience intervention. That is, participants either focused on the meaning of their daily activities (n = 45) or did not participate in any study-related activities during the week (n = 51). They completed various measures of mental health before and after this experimental period. Results suggested that the control group reported significantly greater anxiety, depression, and stress at the end of the week. In contrast, the experimental group reported less anxiety and trended toward less depression and stress at the end of that same week. In all, results suggest that simply focusing on one's daily activities and the meaning found in them protected people from the otherwise detrimental effects of the restrictions. This provides a promising and simple intervention that may assist both individuals and practitioners aiming to improve mental health, especially in challenging times.

Hospital Service Offerings Still Differ Substantially By Ownership Type.

Nonprofit, for-profit, and government hospitals are all more likely to offer services when they are relatively profitable than when they are relatively unprofitable. However, for-profit hospitals are considerably more likely than others to provide services based on profitability. After hospital and market characteristics are adjusted for, nonprofit hospitals offer relatively unprofitable services more than for-profit hospitals and less than government hospitals. Profitable services typically exhibit the opposite pattern. For-profit hospitals are also more likely to adopt or discontinue services consistent with changes in service profitability than are nonprofits, which in turn are more likely to do so than government hospitals. These results are similar to those we found before passage of the Affordable Care Act, when many more patients were uninsured. Policy makers and researchers tend to focus on whether nonprofit hospitals provide sufficient free care to justify tax benefits, thereby overlooking the significance of ownership for service provision, which likely has critical health and spending consequences.

The Importance of Awareness, Acceptance, and Alignment With the Self: A Framework for Understanding Self-Connection.

We provide a theoretical framework for what it means to be self-connected and propose that self-connection is an important potential contributor to a person's well-being. We define self-connection as consisting of three components: 1) an awareness of oneself, 2) an acceptance of oneself based on this awareness, and 3) an alignment of one's behavior with this awareness. First, we position the concept within the broader self literature and provide the empirical context for our proposed definition of self-connection. We next compare and contrast self-connection to related constructs, including mindfulness and authenticity. Following, we discuss some of the potential relationships between self-connection and various aspects of mental health and well-being. Finally, we provide initial recommendations for future research, including potential ways to promote self-connection. In all, we present this theory to provide researchers with a framework for understanding self-connection so that they can utilize this concept to better support the efforts of researchers and practitioners alike to increase individuals' well-being in various contexts.

Meaning gained versus meaning lost: The effects of meaning salience on anxiety and depression during the coronavirus pandemic.

People who have meaningful lives generally experience less anxiety and depression. Meaning salience, or the awareness of the meaning in one's life, is believed to partially explain this relationship. However, in times of isolation, what might be most salient to people are the meaningful aspects of their lives that have disappeared. This study seeks to understand how making gained versus lost meaning salient affects anxiety and depression. Participants either wrote for 5 minutes about how their life gained meaning (n = 29) or lost meaning (n = 30) due to the coronavirus restrictions, or about music (i.e., the control condition; n = 32). Those who wrote about gained meaning experienced less momentary anxiety than those who wrote about lost meaning. In addition, meaning salience moderated the relationship between meaning and both anxiety and depression. Those who wrote about gained meaning appeared to exhibit a positive relationship between meaning in life (MIL) and both anxiety and depression, while those who wrote about lost meaning exhibited negative relationships. In all, this suggests that meaning salience is not always positive and that researchers and practitioners should consider how making positive meaning salient may be more beneficial than a general focus on MIL.

Fostering Stress Resilience Among Business Students: The Role of Stress Mindset and Self-Connection.

Educators are becoming increasingly concerned about the high rates of burnout among their students. Although the solution may appear to be reducing the stress their students experience, simply reducing stress is a temporary solution and does not help students when they enter the workforce and encounter increased stressors. A better option may be to consider the ways in which students can increase stress resilience in ways that will help them long after they leave the classroom. With this idea in mind, we tested for relationships between two individual difference variables, stress mindset and self-connection, and burnout and life satisfaction among business students. The results showed there was a positive relationship between viewing stress as debilitating and prevalence of both personal and school-related burnout. Additionally, self-connection was negatively related to personal burnout and greater life satisfaction. Stress mindset and self-connection also interacted to predict both personal and school burnout. The results suggest that promoting adaptive views of stress and becoming more self-connected may lead to a better student experience.

Rising Income Inequality Through a Disability Lens: Trends in the United States 1981-2018.

OBJECTIVES: In a context of rising income inequality and policies to improve rights and inclusion for persons with disabilities, this paper examines income inequality trends by household work limitation status in the United States from 1981-2018. METHODS: Data comes from the March Supplement of the Current Population Survey using the work limitation disability measure to estimate decomposable Generalized Entropy measures of income inequality, and progressivity of government transfers and disability payments. RESULTS: Over the 1981-2018 period, inequality within the group of households with work limitations has been around 30 percent higher than inequality within the group of households without work limitations. Both households with and without work limitations have seen a similar 70 percent rise in income inequality since 1981. Progressivity of government transfers and disability payments increased among households with limitations, but not among other households. CONCLUSIONS: Income inequality is higher within the group of households with work limitations compared to other households and has been rising for both groups. Policies aimed to enhance the economic and social participation of persons with disabilities over this period may have mitigated this rising trend. Disability considerations should be part of research and policy on income inequality.

Muscle-specific sirtuin1 gain-of-function ameliorates skeletal muscle atrophy in a pre-clinical mouse model of cerebral ischemic stroke.

Stroke causes severe long-term disability in patients due to the induction of skeletal muscle atrophy and weakness, but the molecular mechanisms remain elusive. Using a preclinical mouse model of cerebral ischemic stroke, we show that stroke robustly induced atrophy and significantly decreased SirT1 gene expression in the PTA (paralytic tibialis anterior) muscle. Muscle-specific SirT1 gain-of-function mice are resistant to stroke-induced muscle atrophy and this protective effect requires its deacetylase activity. Although SirT1 counteracts the stroke-induced up-regulation of atrogin1, MuRF1 and ZNF216 genes, we found a mechanism that regulates the ZNF216 gene transcription in post-stroke muscle. Stroke increased the expression of the ZNF216 gene in PTA muscle by activating PARP-1, which binds on the ZNF216 promoter. The SirT1 gain-of-function or SirT1 activator, resveratrol, reversed the PARP-1-mediated up-regulation of ZNF216 expression at the promoter level, suggesting a contradicted role for SirT1 and PARP-1 in the regulation of ZNF216 gene. Overall, our study for the first-time demonstrated that (a) stroke causes muscle atrophy, in part, through the SirT1/PARP-1/ZNF216 signaling mechanism; (b) SirT1 can block muscle atrophy in response to different types of atrophic signals via different signaling mechanisms; and (c) SirT1 is a critical regulator of post-stroke muscle mass.

The Role of Self-Connection in the Relationship between Mindfulness and Meaning: A Longitudinal Examination.

BACKGROUND: Researchers have rarely examined mindfulness and meaning in a way that informs the causality and directionality of this relationship. The current research examines this relationship across time, further validates the Self-Connection Scale (SCS), and examines the role of self-connection in both moderating and mediating this relationship. This allows for researchers and practitioners alike to utilise self-connection to help increase their own and others' well-being. METHODS: One hundred and fifty-four participants completed measures of mindfulness, self-connection, and meaning over 4 weeks. We also included various measures related to well-being to further examine the nomological network of the SCS. RESULTS: Multi-level models examined a total of 432 observations across 108 participants. Mindfulness predicted an increase in the presence of but not search for meaning. Self-connection partially mediated the effect on the presence of meaning and moderated the effect on the search for meaning. Furthermore, the SCS demonstrated good validity and reliability across time. CONCLUSIONS: Self-connection, as measured by the SCS, has an important role in positive psychology, and those with a deficit are likely to benefit the most from increased mindfulness. Together, this provides several implications for using mindfulness and self-connection research in personal and professional practice.

When thinking back can hold us back: How being a follower can affect women's loss-aversion.

Despite the persistent gender gap in many organizational leadership positions, researchers have not yet examined objective predictors of this gap. A fully crossed 3 (Role Prime: leader, follower, control) × 2 (Gender Prime: present, absent) × 2 (Sex: male, female) experimental design examined the effect of group role (i.e., leader or follower) and gender on loss-aversion. Participants (192 total; 96 female) were asked to name either their former or current leader ("superior") or follower ("subordinate"), compared with a no prime condition. Results suggest that women primed with a follower role were more loss-averse than men primed with a follower role, and were more loss-averse than women primed with the leader role or in the control condition. However, the role prime did not affect men's loss-aversion. The current research suggests that researchers and practitioners should consider the effects of group role on loss-aversion, as this may contribute to gender gaps in the workplace. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Sex differences in jealousy: the (lack of) influence of researcher theoretical perspective.

The sex difference in jealousy is an effect that has generated significant controversy in the academic literature (resulting in two meta-analyses that reached different conclusions on the presence or absence of the effect). In this study, we had a team of researchers from different theoretical perspectives use identical protocols to test whether the sex difference in jealousy would occur across many different samples (while testing whether mate value would moderate the effect). In our samples, we found the sex difference in jealousy to occur using both forced choice and continuous measures, this effect appeared in several different settings, and, we found that mate value moderated participant responses. The results are discussed in light of the controversy surrounding the presence of the effect.

The Brief Aggression Questionnaire: Structure, Validity, Reliability, and Generalizability.

In contexts that increasingly demand brief self-report measures (e.g., experience sampling, longitudinal and field studies), researchers seek succinct surveys that maintain reliability and validity. One such measure is the 12-item Brief Aggression Questionnaire (BAQ; Webster et al., 2014), which uses 4 3-item subscales: Physical Aggression, Verbal Aggression, Anger, and Hostility. Although prior work suggests the BAQ's scores are reliable and valid, we addressed some lingering concerns. Across 3 studies (N = 1,279), we found that the BAQ had a 4-factor structure, possessed long-term test-retest reliability across 12 weeks, predicted differences in behavioral aggression over time in a laboratory experiment, generalized to a diverse nonstudent sample, and showed convergent validity with a displaced aggression measure. In addition, the BAQ's 3-item Anger subscale showed convergent validity with a trait anger measure. We discuss the BAQ's potential reliability, validity, limitations, and uses as an efficient measure of aggressive traits.

Establishing versus preserving impressions: Predicting success in the multiple audience problem.

People sometimes seek to convey discrepant impressions of themselves to different audiences simultaneously. Research suggests people are generally successful in this "multiple audience problem." Adding to previous research, the current research sought to examine factors that may limit this success by measuring social anxiety and placing participants into situations requiring them to either establish or preserve multiple impressions simultaneously. In general, participants were more successful when preserving previously conveyed impressions than when establishing impressions for the first time. In contrast, social anxiety did not affect multiple audience success. In all, this research offers valuable insight into potential challenges that people face in many social situations.

The prevalence and prevention of crosstalk: a multi-institutional study.

It is a common problem in psychology subject pools for past study participants to inform future participants of key experimental details (also known as crosstalk). Previous research (Edlund, Sagarin, Skowronski, Johnson, & Kutter, 2009) demonstrated that a combined classroom and laboratory treatment could significantly reduce crosstalk. The present investigation tested a laboratory-only treatment for the prevention of crosstalk at five universities, along with institutional-level moderators of crosstalk. Results indicated the presence of crosstalk at all universities and that the laboratory-based treatment was effective in reducing crosstalk. Importantly, crosstalk rates were higher (but successfully neutralized) in research pools with higher research credit requirements. Therefore, this research provides valuable guidance regarding crosstalk prevalence and its minimization by researchers.

The brief aggression questionnaire: psychometric and behavioral evidence for an efficient measure of trait aggression.

A key problem facing aggression research is how to measure individual differences in aggression accurately and efficiently without sacrificing reliability or validity. Researchers are increasingly demanding brief measures of aggression for use in applied settings, field studies, pretest screening, longitudinal, and daily diary studies. The authors selected the three highest loading items from each of the Aggression Questionnaire's (Buss & Perry, 1992) four subscales--Physical Aggression, Verbal Aggression, anger, and hostility--and developed an efficient 12-item measure of aggression--the Brief Aggression Questionnaire (BAQ). Across five studies (N = 3,996), the BAQ showed theoretically consistent patterns of convergent and discriminant validity with other self-report measures, consistent four-factor structures using factor analyses, adequate recovery of information using item response theory methods, stable test-retest reliability, and convergent validity with behavioral measures of aggression. The authors discuss the reliability, validity, and efficiency of the BAQ, along with its many potential applications.

Expansion of invasive cardiac services in the United States.

BACKGROUND: The number of hospitals offering invasive cardiac services (diagnostic angiography, percutaneous coronary intervention, and coronary artery bypass grafting) has expanded, yet national patterns of service diffusion and their effect on geographic access to care are unknown. METHODS AND RESULTS: This is a retrospective cohort study of all hospitals in fee-for-service Medicare, 1996 to 2008. Logistic regression identified the relationship between cardiac service adoption and the proportion of neighboring hospitals within 40 miles already offering the service. From 1996 to 2008, 397 hospitals began offering diagnostic angiography, 387 percutaneous coronary intervention, and 298 coronary artery bypass grafting (increasing the proportion with services by 3%, 11%, and 4%, respectively). This capacity increase led to little new geographic access to care; the population increase in geographic access to diagnostic angiography was 1 percentage point; percutaneous coronary intervention 5 percentage points, and coronary artery bypass grafting 4 percentage points. Controlling for hospital and market characteristics, a 10 percentage point increase in the proportion of nearby hospitals already offering the service increased the odds by 10% that a hospital would add diagnostic angiography (odds ratio, 1.102; 95% confidence interval, 1.018-1.193), increased the odds by 79% that it would add percutaneous coronary intervention (odds ratio, 1.794; 95% confidence interval, 1.288-2.498), and had no significant effect on adding coronary artery bypass grafting (odds ratio, 0.929; 95% confidence interval, 0.608-1.420). CONCLUSIONS: Hospitals are most likely to introduce new invasive cardiac services when neighboring hospitals already offer such services. Increases in the number of hospitals offering invasive cardiac services have not led to corresponding increases in geographic access.

Does personality predict driving performance in middle and older age? An evidence-based literature review.

OBJECTIVE: To conduct a literature review of the relationship between personality and driving performance among middle-aged and older adults. METHODS: We searched for relevant literature using Web of Science, PsycInfo, and PubMed and consulted with experts for recently published literature not yet catalogued in those databases. Using the American Academy of Neurology's classification criteria, we extracted data from 13 studies and assigned a class (I-IV) to each study. We grouped primary studies into 3 main categories of driving assessment (behavioral assessment: comprehensive driving evaluations, alternative on-road driving evaluations, driving simulations; automobile crashes: state-recorded crashes, self-reported crashes; self-report measures: self-reported driving behaviors). In all, we synthesized the relationship between personality and driving performance for middle-aged and older adults. RESULTS: To assist clinicians and researchers in future considerations of the relationship between personality and driving performance, we provide specific evidence-based recommendations for several driving assessments: on-road driving evaluations (Level B), driving simulations (Level U), state-recorded crashes (Level C), self-reported crashes (Level C), and self-reported driving behaviors (Level C). CONCLUSIONS: Overall, we found evidence for personality as a reliable predictor of driving performance among older drivers. However, 2 caveats qualify our conclusions: the research considered only a limited number of personality variables and largely consisted of less valid tests of driving performance. Therefore, to truly understand the relationship between personality and driving performance, future research must consider a wider range of individual differences and employ more stringent tests and methodological designs to measure driving performance.

Rural hospital ownership: medical service provision, market mix, and spillover effects.

OBJECTIVE: To test whether nonprofit, for-profit, or government hospital ownership affects medical service provision in rural hospital markets, either directly or through the spillover effects of ownership mix. DATA SOURCES/STUDY SETTING: Data are from the American Hospital Association, U.S. Census, CMS Healthcare Cost Report Information System and Prospective Payment System Minimum Data File, and primary data collection for geographic coordinates. The sample includes all nonfederal, general medical, and surgical hospitals located outside of metropolitan statistical areas and within the continental United States from 1988 to 2005. STUDY DESIGN: We estimate multivariate regression models to examine the effects of (1) hospital ownership and (2) hospital ownership mix within rural hospital markets on profitable versus unprofitable medical service offerings. PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: Rural nonprofit hospitals are more likely than for-profit hospitals to offer unprofitable services, many of which are underprovided services. Nonprofits respond less than for-profits to changes in service profitability. Nonprofits with more for-profit competitors offer more profitable services and fewer unprofitable services than those with fewer for-profit competitors. CONCLUSIONS: Rural hospital ownership affects medical service provision at the hospital and market levels. Nonprofit hospital regulation should reflect both the direct and spillover effects of ownership.

Hospital ownership and medical services: market mix, spillover effects, and nonprofit objectives.

Hospitals operate in markets with varied demographic, competitive, and ownership characteristics, yet research on ownership tends to examine hospitals in isolation. Here we examine three hospital ownership types -- nonprofit, for-profit, and government -- and their spillover effects. We estimate the effects of for-profit market share in two ways, on the provision of medical services and on operating margins at the three types of hospitals. We find that nonprofit hospitals' medical service provision systematically varies by market mix. We find no significant effect of market mix on the operating margins of nonprofit hospitals, but find that for-profit hospitals have higher margins in markets with more for-profits. These results fit best with theories in which hospitals maximize their own output.

The good-subject effect: investigating participant demand characteristics.

Although researchers are often concerned with the presence of participant demand, few have directly examined effects of demand on participant behavior. Before beginning the present study, a confederate informed participants (N = 100) of the study's purported hypothesis. Participants then performed a laboratory task designed to evaluate the extent to which they would respond in ways that may confirm or disconfirm the hypothesis of the study. The authors found that participants tended to respond in ways that confirmed the hypothesis, yet this tendency depended on attitudes toward the experiment or experimenter and other individual differences. In addition, results suggested that suspicion probes may be ineffective in measuring participants' previous knowledge and suspicion. Findings indicate the need for more research and consideration of demand in the design of studies and analysis of data.