Does depression co-occur within households? The moderating effects of financial resources and job insecurity on psychological contagion.

The empirically related psychopathologies of stress and depression exact an enormous economic toll and have many physical and behavioral health effects. Most studies of the effects of stress and depression focus on their causes and consequences for a single, focal individual. We examine the extent to which depression, as indicated by filling antidepressant prescriptions (SSRI and Benzodiazepines), co-occurs across spouses, constituting a negative spillover effect. To better understand the conditions that affect within-household contagion of depression, we examine whether the stress and uncertainty occasioned by job change and financial stress (net worth) increases spillover effects among spouses. We use panel data from various Danish administrative registers from the year 2001-2015 with more than 4.5 million observations on more than 900,000 unique individuals and their spouses from Danish health registers. Spouses in a household with their partner using antidepressants have a 62.1% higher chance of using antidepressants themselves, with the one year lagged effect being 29.3% and a two-year lagged effect of 15.1%. The effects become larger by 14.8% contemporaneously and 20% in the two-year lagged model if the focal individual changed employers. There was also a substantively unimportant effect of lower financial wealth to increase inter-spousal contagion.

Volunteering Improves Employee Health and Organizational Outcomes Through Bonding With Coworkers and Enhanced Identification With Employers.

OBJECTIVE: To understand the consequences of employee volunteering and possible psychological mechanisms that produce these effects. METHODS: Using data from more than 50,000 responses to Britain's Healthiest Workplace survey, we employed structural equation modeling to investigate the effects of people volunteering. RESULTS: Net of a number of controls, people who volunteered reported better self-reported health, less risk of depression, and higher levels of engagement and satisfaction. These results were partly explained by volunteering creating higher levels of interpersonal social bonding and greater identification with their employers. CONCLUSION: Employers Employers should sponsor volunteer activities and provide workplace flexibility, because employees who volunteer have greater individual wellbeing and also higher levels of pro-employer outcomes such as engagement and job satisfaction.

Lichenoid Keratosis Skin Biopsy: A Case Report of Malignant Hospital Charges.

Skin cancers are the most common malignancy and are especially common among light-skinned individuals in sun-exposed areas. While in many cases, a characteristic or classic appearance of the lesion is sufficient to make a definitive diagnosis, shave biopsy remains an important procedure when diagnosing many such raised lesions. Over the span of two months, a 66-year-old Caucasian male noted the appearance of a small, raised pruritic scaly lesion over his right upper chest. The differential diagnosis included both cancerous and benign lesions. During a 15-minute clinic visit, a simple shave biopsy was performed, and additionally, 10 small actinic keratoses on the patient's arms, legs, and back were treated with cryotherapy using liquid nitrogen. Later, a histologic examination of the biopsied lesion revealed a benign lichenoid keratosis. The patient was billed $10,187 for this outpatient experience.

Employers' Role in Employee Health: Why They Do What They Do.

OBJECTIVE: Employers affect the health of employees and their families through work environments and employee benefits. We sought to understand employer decisions around those topics. METHODS: Interviews with 21 executives from diverse, purposely-sampled, progressive companies with transcripts analyzed using inductive and deductive methods. RESULTS: Companies often viewed keeping employees healthy primarily as a means to profitability rather than an end in itself and rationalized stressful workplaces as necessary and non-changeable. Many possible actions including job redesign and changing benefits administrators were seen as infeasible. Even large, resource-rich organizations were strikingly non-agentic. CONCLUSIONS: Companies seem less committed to the goal of increasing employee health than they claim or than they should be, given the significant relationship between employee health and economic performance, and see external and internal barriers to improving health that are often self-created.

Using longitudinal prescription data to examine the incidence of other chronic diseases following antidepressant use.

Depression not only creates enormous costs for treatment and lost work time, but also increases the risk for other costly chronic diseases such as cardiovascular disease and diabetes. The magnitude of these risks remains unclear, with existing prospective studies using small sample sizes with limited diversity and reliant on surveys. We use 2 billion prescription fill records to quantify depression by antidepressant fill records. We track each patient's prescriptions longitudinally and use Cox's time varying proportional hazard model to quantify the effect of taking antidepressants on the hazard rate of taking drugs associated with other chronic diseases quantified similarly by disease-relevant fill records. Controlling for socioeconomic variables, antidepressant use increased the hazard rate for drugs used for cardiovascular disease (1.59 fold), diabetes (1.30) and cancer (1.50). Antidepressant use also predicted substantially higher use of sedatives (3.06) and amphetamines (4.11). Antidepressant use, as a proxy for depression, is a significant risk factor for the most prevalent and costly chronic diseases, and should be treated as a disease with quantifiable and significant implications for individual health.

Power and death: Mortality salience increases power seeking while feeling powerful reduces death anxiety.

According to Terror Management Theory, people respond to reminders of mortality by seeking psychological security and bolstering their self-esteem. Because previous research suggests that having power can provide individuals a sense of security and self-worth, we hypothesize that mortality salience leads to an increased motivation to acquire power, especially among men. Study 1 found that men (but not women) who wrote about their death reported more interest in acquiring power. Study 2A and Study 2B demonstrated that when primed with reminders of death, men (but not women) reported behaving more dominantly during the subsequent week, while both men and women reported behaving more prosocially during that week. Thus, mortality salience prompts people to respond in ways that help them manage their death anxiety but in ways consistent with normative gender expectations. Furthermore, Studies 3-5 showed that feeling powerful reduces anxiety when mortality is salient. Specifically, we found that when primed to feel more powerful, both men and women experienced less mortality anxiety. (PsycINFO Database Record

Exposure To Harmful Workplace Practices Could Account For Inequality In Life Spans Across Different Demographic Groups.

The existence of important socioeconomic disparities in health and mortality is a well-established fact. Many pathways have been adduced to explain inequality in life spans. In this article we examine one factor that has been somewhat neglected: People with different levels of education get sorted into jobs with different degrees of exposure to workplace attributes that contribute to poor health. We used General Social Survey data to estimate differential exposures to workplace conditions, results from a meta-analysis that estimated the effect of workplace conditions on mortality, and a model that permitted us to estimate the overall effects of workplace practices on health. We conclude that 10-38 percent of the difference in life expectancy across demographic groups can be explained by the different job conditions their members experience.

Time is tight: how higher economic value of time increases feelings of time pressure.

The common heuristic association between scarcity and value implies that more valuable things appear scarcer (King, Hicks, & Abdelkhalik, 2009), an effect we show applies to time as well. In a series of studies, we found that both income and wealth, which affect the economic value of time, influence perceived time pressure. Study 1 found that changes in income were associated with changes in perceived time pressure. Studies 2-4 showed that experimentally manipulating time's perceived economic value caused greater feelings of time pressure and less patient behavior. Finally, Study 5 demonstrated that the relationship between income and time pressure was strengthened when participants were randomly assigned to think about the precise economic value of their time.

The stingy hour: how accounting for time affects volunteering.

These studies examined how the practice of accounting for one's time-so that work can be billed or charged to specific clients or projects-affects the decision to allocate time to volunteer activities. Using longitudinal data collected from law students transitioning to their first jobs, Study 1 showed that exposure to billing time diminished individuals' willingness to volunteer, even after controlling for attitudes about volunteering held before entering the workforce as well as the individual's specific opportunity costs of volunteering time. Studies 2-5 experimentally manipulated billing time and confirmed its causal effect on individuals' willingness to volunteer and actual volunteering behavior. Study 5 showed that the effect of exposure to billing time on volunteering occurred above and beyond any effects on general self-efficacy or self-determination. Individual differences moderated the effects of billing, such that people who did not value money as much were less affected.

When is happiness about how much you earn? The effect of hourly payment on the money--happiness connection.

The authors argue that the strength of the relationship between income and happiness can be influenced by exposure to organizational practices, such as being paid by the hour, that promote an economic evaluation of time use. Using cross-sectional data from the United States, two studies found that income was more strongly associated with happiness for individuals paid by the hour compared to their non-hourly counterparts. Using panel data from the United Kingdom, Study 3 replicated these results for a multi-item General Health Questionnaire measure of subjective well-being. Study 4 showed that experimentally manipulating the salience of someone's hourly wage rate caused non-hourly paid participants to evince a stronger connection between income and happiness, similar to those participants paid by the hour. Although there were highly consistent results across multiple studies employing multiple methods, overall the effect size was not large.

Overcoming the self-promotion dilemma: interpersonal attraction and extra help as a consequence of who sings one's praises.

Prior research has shown that positive information presented by a third party shields people from the negative consequences of being perceived as self-promoting. But in many contexts, those third parties are intermediaries with a financial interest in the person being promoted rather than neutral parties. In three experimental studies, the authors demonstrate that even when intermediaries are not neutral, they can be helpful for overcoming the self-promotion dilemma--the need to assert one's competence but not be harmed by the fact that people who self-promote are viewed negatively. The authors find that hiring an agent to sing one's praises results in more favorable perceptions of the client, which contributes, in turn, to a greater willingness to offer that person assistance. It is also shown that even when the intermediary is physically present and seen to be complicit with the client, the positive effects of having someone else speak on one's behalf persist.

Evidence-based management.

For the most part, managers looking to cure their organizational ills rely on obsolete knowledge they picked up in school, long-standing but never proven traditions, patterns gleaned from experience, methods they happen to be skilled in applying, and information from vendors. They could learn a thing or two from practitioners of evidence-based medicine, a movement that has taken the medical establishment by storm over the past decade. A growing number of physicians are eschewing the usual, flawed resources and are instead identifying, disseminating, and applying research that is soundly conducted and clinically relevant. It's time for managers to do the same. The challenge is, quite simply, to ground decisions in the latest and best knowledge of what actually works. In some ways, that's more difficult to do in business than in medicine. The evidence is weaker in business; almost anyone can (and many people do) claim to be a management expert; and a motley crew of sources--Shakespeare, Billy Graham,Jack Welch, Attila the Hunare used to generate management advice. Still, it makes sense that when managers act on better logic and strong evidence, their companies will beat the competition. Like medicine, management is learned through practice and experience. Yet managers (like doctors) can practice their craft more effectively if they relentlessly seek new knowledge and insight, from both inside and outside their companies, so they can keep updating their assumptions, skills, and knowledge.