A new study suggests that the genetic contribution to the risk of being diagnosed with antisocial personal disorder comes not from a single gene or genetic risk factor, but from two distinct dimensions of genetic risk.

Currently, antisocial personality disorder is defined as “a pervasive pattern of disregard for, and violation of, the rights of others that begins in childhood or early adolescence and continues into adulthood.”

This definition is found in the fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) of the American Psychiatric Association.

DSM-IV i provides formal diagnostic criteria for every psychiatric disorder. This process may be guided by rating scales that measure the traits and features associated with a personality disorder.

But, until now, no one has studied the dimensional structure associated with the DSM antisocial personality disorder criteria.

Dr. Kenneth Kendler of Virginia Commonwealth University and colleagues examined questionnaire and genetic data from adult twins. They found that the DSM-IV criteria do not reflect a single dimension of liability but rather are influenced by two dimensions of genetic risk reflecting aggressive-disregard and disinhibition.

“When psychiatrists, as clinicians or researchers, think about our psychiatric disorders, we tend to think of them as one thing – one kind of disorder – a reflection of one underlying dimension of liability,” said Dr. Kendler.
“This is also true of genetics researchers. We tend to want to identify and then detect ‘the’ risk genes underlying disorder X or Y.”

Kendler added, “What is most interesting about the results of this paper is that they falsify this inherent and rather deeply held assumption. Genetic risk factors for antisocial personality disorder are not one thing. Rather, the disorder, as conceptualized by DSM-IV, reflects two distinct genetic dimensions of risk.”

Experts believe the study results make sense.

“The distinction between the two sets of heritable traits contributing to antisocial personality disorder, aggressive-disregard and disinhibition, highlights the complexity of unraveling the genes contributing to this personality style. We now have some puzzle pieces, but we have a long way to go to fit these pieces together,” commented Dr. John Krystal, editor of Biological Psychiatry.

Source: Elsevier

The program is called the School-wide Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (SWPBIS), and is widely used as an alternative to some schools zero-tolerance anti-bullying policies.

Bullying has gained greater national attention in recent years as specific events have brought it into the media spotlight. Bullying left unchecked can lead to academic, interpersonal, physical health and mental health problems.

Despite the concern, relatively few school-based programs have shown to be effective at preventing bullying. Even worse, zero-tolerance policies adopted at many schools have not been shown to be effective either.

An alternative to zero-tolerance policies is positive schoolwide prevention efforts. Tracy E. Waasdorp, Ph.D., of the Center for the Prevention of Youth Violence, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and her colleagues decided to evaluate one such program.

School-wide Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (SWPBIS) aims to alter the school environment by creating improved systems — such as discipline and data management — and procedures — such as office referral and behavioral reinforcement — that promote positive changes in staff and student behaviors.

“SWPBIS teaches behavioral expectations through direct instruction, positive reinforcement and consistent consequences, promoting acceptable social and classroom behaviors. This in turn is theorized to reduce the likelihood of engaging in and rewarding bullying behavior,” the authors note.

Data for the study came from a randomized controlled effectiveness trial of the universal SWPBIS model conducted in 37 Maryland public elementary schools to determine the impact on discipline problems and the school environment. The sample included 12,344 children.

“The hierarchical linear modeling results indicated that children in the SWPBIS schools displayed significantly less bullying behavior and experienced lower levels of rejection over time vs children in the comparison schools,” the study results indicate.

Researchers called the potential effects of SWPBIS on bullying encouraging and in line with policymakers’ and researchers’ emphasis on school climate and culture for bullying prevention as an alternative to zero-tolerance policies.

“These findings suggest that a universal SWPBIS model is a promising approach for preventing bullying. Although the rates of bullying tend to be the highest in middle school, when SWPBIS is implemented in elementary school, it may help children better prepare for the transition into adolescence,” the researchers conclude.

The new study appears in the February issue of Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine.

Source: JAMA

Canadian investigators determined female college students who have survived childhood abuse or domestic violence were significantly aided by a mentoring program.

Researchers from Concordia University have published their findings in the Journal of College Student Development.

“Studies have shown that childhood abuse unleashes a chain of negative emotions that can impact an individual’s future, producing feelings of shame, isolation, self-loathing and educational underachievement,” said first author Rosemary C. Reilly, Ph.D.

Reilly’s study builds on prior evidence which suggests that at least 20 per cent of all women are adult survivors of childhood abuse — that is, physical, psychological or sexual maltreatment during childhood.

According to experts, as many as half the women studying in educational programs in Canada are trying to learn while simultaneously dealing with the consequences of violence.

Researchers conducted detailed interview with 10 women who had experienced intense childhood abuse and were enrolled in an undergraduate program when interviewed.

All but one participant had been mentored at different stages in her life. Reilly and D’Amico found that the timing of women’s mentoring was contingent on the impact the abuse had on their sense of identity.

Investigators determined four major themes emerged from the mentorship: fantasy mentors, mentors as mirrors, mentors as nurturers and supporters, and mentors as embodiments of a particular profession.

Although the researchers caution that these themes should be viewed as atypical, they enrich the understanding of mentoring for women marginalized by violence and demonstrate the malleable nature of mentorship. The mentoring, in its various guises, clearly played a significant role in these women’s healing processes.

Study authors believe the findings should encourage universities to consider establishing a formalized mentoring program for survivors of trauma.

As an example, student services departments could support the education of this population by creating multiple opportunities for mentorship from different individuals, at various stages, as survivors’ needs evolve.

“For survivors of childhood abuse, relationship and connection are what really matters and what successful mentorship is all about,” said Reilly.

Source: Concordia University

Young woman helping photo by shutterstock.

University of Texas at Dallas criminologist Dr. J.C. Barnes and two fellow professors studied if genes can cause an individual to become a life-time persistent offender.

The paper detailed the study’s findings in the journal Criminology.

Researchers focused on whether genes are likely to cause a person to become a life-course persistent offender — characterized by antisocial behavior during childhood that can later progress to violent or serious criminal acts later in life.

Barnes says the framework for the research was based on the developmental taxonomy of antisocial behavior, a theory developed by Dr. Terrie Moffitt, a prominent researcher into the origins of criminality.

Moffitt identified three groups, or pathways, found in the population: life-course persistent offenders, adolescent-limited offenders and abstainers. She suggested that environmental, biological and, perhaps, genetic factors could cause a person to fall into one of the paths.

“That was the motivation for this paper. No one had actually considered the possibility that genetic factors could be a strong predictor of which path you end up on,” said Barnes.

“In her (Moffitt’s) theory, she seems to highlight and suggest that genetic factors will play a larger role for the life-course persistent offender pathway as compared to the adolescence-limited pathway.”

Adolescent-limited offenders exhibit behaviors such as alcohol and drug use and minor property crime during adolescence. Abstainers represent a smaller number of people who don’t engage in any deviant behavior.

The researchers studied data from 4,000 participants in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health with an objective of identifying how people fell into each of the three groups.

Investigators then compared the information using what is known as the twin methodology, a study design that analyzed to what extent genetic and environmental factors influenced a trait.

“The overarching conclusions were that genetic influences in life-course persistent offending were larger than environmental influences,” he said.

“For abstainers, it was roughly an equal split: genetic factors played a large role and so too did the environment. For adolescent-limited offenders, the environment appeared to be most important.”

The analysis doesn’t identify the specific genes that underlie the different pathways, which Barnes said would be an interesting area for further research.

“If we’re showing that genes have an overwhelming influence on who gets put onto the life-course persistent pathway, then that would suggest we need to know which genes are involved and at the same time, how they’re interacting with the environment so we can tailor interventions,” he said.

Barnes said that although there is no specific gene for criminal behavior, genes can influence your likelihood of committing a crime. In fact, Barnes believes crime is a learned behavior.

“But there are likely to be hundreds, if not thousands, of genes that will incrementally increase your likelihood of being involved in a crime even if it only ratchets that probability by 1 percent,” he said. “It still is a genetic effect. And it’s still important.”

The association between genes, the environment and behavior is a ripe area of criminology study. In fact, the issue is divisive as criminologists have primarily focused on environmental and social factors that cause or influence deviant behavior.

“Honestly, I hope people when they read this, take issue and start to debate it and raise criticisms because that means people are considering it and people are thinking about it,” Barnes said.

Source: UT Dallas

Teenager in jail photo by shutterstock.

Michigan State University researchers discovered that throughout the course of history, men have been the primary aggressors against different groups as well as the primary victims of group-based aggression and discrimination.

“There is evidence going back thousands of years of bands of men getting together and attacking other bands of men, eliminating them and keeping the women as the spoils of war,” said Carlos David Navarrete, Ph.D., evolutionary psychologist at MSU.

This primordial behavior has been demonstrated in modern times among wars in Central Africa and the Balkans that were marred by rape and genocide, said Navarrete.

The research appears in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, a London-based research journal.

Investigators analyzed current academic literature on war and conflict and found that the standard social science theory did not explain the sex differences in aggressive or discriminatory behavior between groups.

Researchers offer a new theory that integrates psychology with ecology and evolutionary biology.

Their “male warrior hypothesis” explains how a deep evolutionary history of group conflict may have provided the backdrop for natural selection to shape the social psychologies and behaviors of men and women in fundamentally distinct ways.

The theory explains that men are more likely to start wars and to defend their own group, sometimes in very risky and self-sacrificial ways. Attacking other groups represents an opportunity to offset these costs by gaining access to mates, territory, resources and increased status.

The authors complement these findings with lab research that shows men are more prejudiced toward other groups.

The researchers explain women’s prejudice as resulting from a threat of continual sexual coercion by foreign aggressors. Women are apt to display a “tend-and-befriend response” toward members of their own group, while maintaining a fear of strangers in order to protect themselves and their offspring.

Researchers say that while evolutionary challenges fostered the prejudicial behavioral responses, the vestige is detrimental to current society.

“Although these sex-specific responses may have been adaptive in ancestral times,” said doctoral student and lead author Melissa McDonald, “they have likely lost this adaptive value in our modern society, and now act only to needlessly perpetuate discrimination and conflict among groups.

Navarrete added that the behavior is seen in humans’ closest relative, the chimpanzee. “Just like humans, they’ll attack and kill the males of other groups. They’ll also attack females – not to the point of killing them, but more to get them to join their group,” he said.

Since the behaviors are common among both humans and chimps, they are likely to have existed in our common ancestor millions of years ago, Navarrete said.

“This would have provided eons of time for the deepest workings of our minds to have been fundamentally shaped by these cruel realities,” he said.

“Coming to grips with this history and how it still affects us in modern times may be an important step into improving the problems caused by our darker predispositions.”

Source: Michigan State University

Drs. Emile Bruneau and Rebecca Saxe of Massachusetts Institute of Technology are studying why empathy — the ability to feel compassion for another person’s suffering — often fails between members of opposing groups.

“What are the psychological barriers that are put up between us in these contexts of intergroup conflict, and then, critically, what can we do to get past them?” Bruneau said.

Bruneau and Saxe are also trying to locate patterns of brain activity that correlate with empathy, in hopes of eventually using such measures to determine how well people respond to reconciliation programs aimed at boosting empathy between groups in conflict.

“We’re interested in how people think about their enemies, and whether there are brain measures that are reliable readouts of that,” said Saxe. “This is a huge vision, of which we are at the very beginning.”

Before researchers can use tools such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to evaluate whether conflict-resolution programs are having any effect, they need to identify brain regions that respond to other people’s emotional suffering.

In an earlier study, Saxe and Bruneau scanned people’s brains as they read stories in which the protagonist experienced either physical or emotional pain. The brain regions that responded uniquely to emotional suffering overlapped with areas known to be involved in the ability to perceive what another person is thinking or feeling.

From this knowledge, the researchers designed an experiment that they hoped would show a correlation between empathy levels and amount of activity in those brain regions.

They recruited Israelis and Arabs for a study in which subjects read stories about the suffering of members of their own groups or that of conflict-group members. The study participants also read stories about a distant, neutral group — South Americans.

As expected, Israelis and Arabs reported feeling much more compassion in response to the suffering of their own group members than that of members of the conflict group.

However, the brain scans revealed something surprising: Brain activity in the areas that respond to emotional pain was identical when reading about suffering by one’s own group or the conflict group.

Also, those activity levels were lower when Arabs or Israelis read about the suffering of South Americans, even though Arabs and Israelis expressed more compassion for South Americans’ suffering than for that of the conflict group.

This suggests particular brain regions are sensitive to the importance of the opposing group, not whether or not you like them.

These findings are published in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences. A short video interview with Bruneau and Saxe about their groundbreaking work can be found on the MIT website.

Joan Chiao, an assistant professor of psychology at Northwestern University, said those brain regions may be acting as a “thermometer” for conflict.

“It’s a really fascinating study because it’s the first to examine the neural basis of people’s behavior in longstanding conflicts, as opposed to groups that are distant and don’t have a long history of intergroup strife,” said Chiao, who was not involved in the research.

However, because the study did not reveal any correlation between the expression of empathy and the amount of brain activity, more study is needed before MRI can be used as a reliable measure of empathy levels, Saxe says.

“We thought there might be brain regions where the amount of activity was just a simple function of the amount of empathy that you experience,” Saxe said.

“Since that’s not what we found, we don’t know what the amount of activity in these brain regions really means yet. This is basically a first baby step, and one of the things it tells us is that we don’t know enough about these brain regions to use them in the ways that we want to.”

Bruneau is now testing whether these brain regions send messages to different parts of the brain depending on whether the person is feeling empathy or not.

It could be that when someone reads about the suffering of an in-group member, the brain regions identified in this study send information to areas that process unpleasant emotions, while stories about suffering of a conflict-group member activate an area called the ventral striatum, which has been implicated in schadenfreude — taking pleasure in the suffering of others.

Source: MIT

“Narcissistic men may be paying a high price in terms of their physical health, in addition to the psychological cost to their relationships,” said Sara Konrath, Ph.D., a study co-author.

Earlier studies by Konrath and others have shown that narcissism is rising in American culture, and that narcissism tends to be more prevalent among males. Narcissism is characterized by an inflated sense of self-importance, over-estimations of uniqueness, and a sense of grandiosity.

In the new study, researchers examined the role of narcissism and gender on cortisol levels in a sample of 106 undergraduate students. Cortisol, measured through saliva, is a widely used biomarker of physiological stress.

Investigators assessed cortisol levels at two points in time in order to assess baseline levels of the hormone, which signals the level of activation of the body’s key stress response system, the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis.

Participants were not asked to complete any tasks that would elevate their stress. Elevated levels of cortisol in a relatively stress-free situation would indicate chronic HPA activation, which has significant health implications, increasing the risk of cardiovascular problems.

Researchers also administered a 40-item narcissism questionnaire that measures five different components of the personality trait. Researchers have found that two of these components are more maladaptive, or unhealthy — exploitativeness and entitlement.

Conversely, other trait components are associated with more adaptive, or healthy behaviors — leadership/authority,  self-sufficiency, superiority and vanity. “Even though narcissists have grandiose self-perceptions, they also have fragile views of themselves, and often resort to defensive strategies like aggression when their sense of superiority is threatened,” said co-author and graduate student David Reinhard.

“These kinds of coping strategies are linked with increased cardiovascular reactivity to stress and higher blood pressure, so it makes sense that higher levels of maladaptive narcissism would contribute to highly reactive stress response systems and chronically elevated levels of stress.”

Reinhard, Konrath and colleagues found that the most toxic aspects of narcissism were indeed associated with higher cortisol in male participants, but not in females. In fact, unhealthy narcissism was more than twice as large a predictor of cortisol in males as in females.

They also found that there was no relationship between healthy narcissism and cortisol in either males or females.

“These findings extend previous research by showing that narcissism may not only influence how people respond to stressful events, but may also affect how they respond to their regular day-to-day routines and interactions,” said Konrath. “Our findings suggest that the HPA axis may be chronically activated in males high in unhealthy narcissism, even without an explicit stressor.”

Investigators wanted to know why narcissism affects males differently.

“Given societal definitions of masculinity that overlap with narcissism – for example, the belief that men should be arrogant and dominant – men who endorse stereotypically male sex roles and who are also high in narcissism may feel especially stressed,” Konrath suggested.

Additional research will examine why narcissism is not as physiologically taxing for women as it is for men, and also to examine the potential links between maladaptive narcissism and other physiological responses related to stress and poor coping.

Source: University of Michigan

“The way we read another person’s intentions changes our physical experience of the world,” said researcher and University of Maryland Assistant Professor Kurt Gray. His study found good intentions can soothe pain, increase pleasure, and even make cookies and candy taste sweeter.

In his study, Gray demonstrated the power of good intentions in three separate experiments: The first examined pain, the second examined pleasure, and the third examined the taste of a sweet treat.

In the first experiment, three groups of participants received identical electric shocks at the hand of a partner. Members of the first group were in the “accidental” condition: They thought they were being shocked without their partner’s awareness.

The second, or “malicious” condition, group thought they were being shocked on purpose, for no good reason. The final group (“benevolent” condition) also thought they were being shocked on purpose, but because another person was trying to help them win money.

The result: Participants in the “benevolent” group experienced significantly less pain than both the “malicious” and “accidental” participants.

In the second experiment, people sat on an electric massage pad that was repeatedly turned on, either by a computer or a caring partner. Although the massages were identical, Gray found that partner massages caused significantly more pleasure than those administered by a computer.

“Although computers may be more efficient than humans at many things, pleasure is still better coming from another person,” he said.

In the third experiment, participants were given candy with a note attached. For the benevolent group, the note read: “I picked this just for you. Hope it makes you happy.” The non-benevolent group got a note that read: “Whatever. I just don’t care. I just picked it randomly.”

Gray reports that the candy not only tasted better to the benevolent group, but it also tasted significantly sweeter.

The study’s findings have some clear applications in the real world, according to the researcher. For example, medical personnel should brush up on their bedside manner, he said.

“How painful people find medical procedures depends in part upon the perceived intentions of the person administering it,” Gray said. “Getting blood taken from a stony-faced nurse hurts more than from an empathic one.”

For those in relationships, the message is to make sure your partner, family member, or friend know you care.

“It’s not enough just to do good things for your partner — they have to know you want them to feel good,” he said. “Just imagine saying, ‘fine, here’s your stupid hug’ — hardly comforting.”

The same would also seem to apply to cooking, where emphasizing your concern about the experience of the diners makes things taste better, he added.

The study also suggests the general benefits of thinking that others mean well.

“To the extent that we view others as benevolent instead of malicious, the harms they inflict upon us should hurt less, and the good things they do for us should cause more pleasure,” Gray said. “Stolen parking places cut less deep and home-cooked meals taste better when we think well of others.”

The study was published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science.

Source: University of Maryland

Experts say that gangs accounted for 20 percent of the murders in 88 of the largest cities in the U.S. between 2002 and 2006.

Researchers looked at methods to actively discourage gang participation beginning with an analysis of cross-sectional data provided by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Youth Violence Survey.

This survey included more than 4,000 teens at 16 government-funded schools, mostly between the ages of 14 and 18, and at high risk of being involved in violence as a result of coming from areas with high levels of serious crime and deprivation.

The responses showed that almost half (48 percent) had drunk alcohol and just over three out of five (62 percent) said they had participated in antisocial or delinquent behaviors during the past year. More than half (55 percent) said they had been bullied by a peer.

Positively, almost two thirds of the students said they either had the confidence to cope with conflict (just over 64 percent) or had parents who had provided positive reinforcement in the past month (63 percent).

A similar proportion said they were subject to at least moderate parental monitoring (64 percent), while most said they were supported at school (94 percent) and felt connected to their school (79 percent).

As a bottom-line, researcher found that just over 7 percent of the teens said they were in, or thinking of joining, a gang.

Most of these respondents had two or more risk factors (63 percent). But those with four or more were nearly six times as likely to be in, or want to join, a gang as their peers with no or only one risk factor.

And those teens with three or fewer protective factors were more than 5.5 times as likely to be in, or thinking of joining, a gang as those with four or more of them.

Researchers discovered regular drug and alcohol use and skipping school were key risk factors for gang affiliation, while moderate parental monitoring and good coping skills emerged as the strongest protective factors.

The protective factors were found to reduce the risk of gang involvement even among high risk teens.

Additionally, those who had at least one protective factor (good coping skills), were no more likely to get involved than their peers at low risk with neither protective factor.

Researchers believe the findings suggest that while it may not always be possible to reduce risk factors, parental monitoring and training on resiliency may significantly curb the lure of gangs.

The new study is published online in the journal Injury Prevention.

Source: British Medical Journal

“What we see in other animals is that when females are scarce, males become more competitive. They compete more for access to mates,” said Vladas Griskevicius, Ph.D., an assistant professor of marketing at the University of Minnesota and lead author of the study.

“How do humans compete for access to mates? What you find across cultures is that men often do it through money, through status and through products.”

Researchers tested the theory that the sex ratio affects economic decisions, by having participants read news articles that described their local population as having more men or more women.

They were then asked to indicate how much money they would save each month from a paycheck, as well as how much they would borrow with credit cards for immediate expenditures. When men were led to believe women were scarce, the savings rates for men decreased by 42 percent. Men were also willing to borrow 84 percent more money each month.

In another study, participants saw photo rolls of men and women that had more men, more women, or were neutral.

After looking at the photographs, participants were asked to choose between receiving some money tomorrow or a larger amount in a month. When women were scarce in the photos, men were much more likely to take an immediate $20 rather than wait for $30 in a month.

Researchers said such behavior occurs subconsciously — that participants were unaware that sex ratios were having any effect on their behavior. Merely seeing more men than women automatically led men to simply be more impulsive and want to save less while borrowing more to spend on immediate purchases.

“Economics tells us that humans make decisions by carefully thinking through our choices; that we’re not like animals,” said Griskevicius.

“It turns out we have a lot in common with other animals. Some of our behaviors are much more reflexive and subconscious. We see that there are more men than women in our environment and it automatically changes our desires, our behaviors, and our entire psychology.”

Researchers then flipped roles in the study to see if sex ratios would influence the financial choices of women. They learned that although ratios did not influence how women spent their money, they do shape women’s expectations of how men should spend their money when courting.

For example, when women learned that males were in the majority, the women expected men to spend more on dinner dates, Valentine’s gifts, and engagement rings.

“When there’s a scarcity of women, women felt men should go out of their way to court them,” said Griskevicius.

In a male-biased environment, men also expected they would need to spend more in their mating efforts.

Researchers next decided to test their hypothesis with a review of real world data. To do this, they calculated the sex ratios of more than 120 U.S. cities and discovered that in communities with an abundance of single men, men showed greater ownership of credit cards and had higher debt levels.

One striking example was found in two communities located less than 100 miles apart. In Columbus, Ga., where there are 1.18 single men for every single woman, the average consumer debt was $3,479 higher than it was in Macon, Ga., where there were 0.78 single men for every woman.

Griskevicius said the effects of sex ratios go beyond marketing and influence all sorts of behavior. He cites other studies showing the strong correlation between male-biased sex ratios and aggressive behavior.

“We’re just scratching the tip of the iceberg when it comes to financial behavior,” said Griskevicius. “One of the troubling implications of sex ratios for the world in general is that it’s about more than just money. It’s about violence and survival.”

Source: University of Minnesota

Man and woman shopping photo by shutterstock.

Provocative new research suggests our subsequent feelings and actions vary by gender and are different depending on whether the coworker is male or female.

Investigators from Texas A&M and Buena Vista University discovered workers who witness incivility towards colleagues feel negative emotions – especially when the incivility is aimed at workers of the same sex.

The study, by Kathi Miner, Ph.D., and Angela Eischeid, analyzes the relationship between employees’ observations of incivility towards same-gender co-workers and negative emotions.

Experts say that workplace incivility or rudeness is commonplace and violates conventional workplace norms for mutual respect. The behavior also displays a lack of regard for others. Although our first thoughts are likely to be for the victim of this “abuse,” it can also affect our own feelings as observers.

In the study, a total of 453 restaurant employees responded to an online survey examining the “quality of life in the restaurant industry.” Investigators examined how observed workplace incivility towards female and male co-workers relates to four negative emotions — anger, demoralization, fear and anxiety — for both female and male observers.

Researchers determined that female observers reported significantly higher levels of anger, demoralization, fear and anxiety when they observed other female employees being treated rudely and discourteously at work. Demoralization was the strongest negative emotion experienced by observing women.

Similarly, male observers were significantly angrier, fearful and anxious the more they observed other men being treated uncivilly at work, compared to females. Interestingly, demoralization was not a negative emotion experienced by male observers in these situations.

Researchers believe the observations accurately depict the gender differences in how individuals respond to personal attacks upon both themselves and others.

The authors conclude: “Our results paint a complex picture about the experience of specific negative emotions in response to observed incivility toward same gender co-workers.

“In some cases, women are more affected (demoralized) and in others, men are more affected (angry, fearful and anxious).”

The study is published online in Springer’s journal Sex Roles.

Source: Springer

The Rhode Island Hospital study, available online in the journal Addiction, has important implications as over 700,000 inmates leave prisons each year and over two-thirds of those inmates have a drug problem.

Experts caution that the return of inmates to the community is a critical issue for public health and safety. Moreover, the economic impact of incarceration and re-incarceration, including inmate medical and mental health costs, are issues that states and communities can no longer absorb.

Currently, relapse following release contributes to the re-arrest of more than two-thirds of parolees and re-incarceration of over half of inmates in the three years after release.

While treatment can reduce relapse, drug-involved ex-inmates are given limited priority to addiction treatment. Surveillance with the threat of sanction by parole officers is the traditional method of following parolees, yet many ex-offenders fall into the same pattern and are arrested again.

Building on the success of contingency management (a strategy that rewards desired behavior and may punish undesirable behavior) researchers, led by Peter D. Friedmann, M.D., performed a clinical trial called “Step ‘n Out” to determine whether collaborative behavioral management would be effective in reducing substance abuse, crime and re-arrest among drug-involved parolees.

Friedmann explains, “Because of the so-called ‘War on Drugs,’ an unprecedented number of people have been put in prison for drug use and the great majority of them return to the community. Community reentry is a difficult period – having a criminal record makes it hard to get a job and you usually return to the same environment you came from with the same people and temptations. Thus, a large proportion of drug-involved ex-offenders return to drugs and crime.”

Addiction treatment during the transition period can reduce relapse, but competing priorities such as the need for housing and finding work often limit ex-offenders’ willingness to participate in treatment.

Parole and probation are supposed to encourage treatment and prevent a return to drugs and crime, but they are poorly designed to do so. Probation and parole are based on supervision and punishment for bad behavior. For example, if a parolee tests positive for drugs, he/she might be returned to jail.

Behavioral theory holds that effective reinforcers or punishments must be both immediate (close in time to the behavior) and reliable (happen every time the behavior happens).

“Any parent knows that punishment alone is not the optimal way to motivate behavior – it is best to have both carrots and sticks,” Friedmann says.

“The problem is that punishment is neither immediate nor reliable — in part because of due process, but also because surveillance is imperfect and offenders have a disincentive to get caught. Conversely, drug use produces both immediate and reliable reinforcement, where a user gets a good feeling with every use.”

Friedmann explains, “The everyday reinforcers of daily life such as a good job and good family life can’t compete – they are delayed and not guaranteed.” Thus, behavioral theory explains what we see – the reentry period is extremely challenging and many ex-offenders end up returning to drugs and crime.”

Through the Step’n Out study, the researchers developed a system of “bridge reinforcement” to provide incentives for good behavior.

Weekly over 12 weeks, officers, treatment counselors and clients worked together to agree on a behavioral contract in which there were three target behaviors.

If the client met the behaviors then they were rewarded through a system of points that led to positive social reinforcers or material reinforcers like gift cards. A computer program helped track and manage the points and reinforcers.

The motto of the study was “Catching People Doing Things Right” because the clients now had a reason to report their successes and the parole officers to recognize them. This intervention was studied in a randomized clinical trial in six parole offices in five states.

The Step ‘n Out trial reported that collaborative behavioral management worked to reduce primary drug use among “non-hard drug” users, primarily marijuana.

Since marijuana users comprise a large proportion of individuals arrested for drug use, this study suggests that this behavioral approach to community corrections might reduce drug use and ultimately reincarceration. The findings, however, could not demonstrate benefit among parolees who preferred stimulants or opiates.

Friedmann notes, “Since the majority of drug violation arrests in the U.S. are for marijuana, these findings have important implications for the management of a substantial proportion of parolees. The study shows that an intervention grounded in behavioral science is feasible and effective in real-world correctional settings.”

Source: Lifespan

A new study reviews traditional coping strategies and finds they are rarely effective and often contribute to increased stress and anxiety.

“Abusive supervision is highly distressing for employees. Our study shows that the strategies being used by employees to cope with the stress caused by such behavior do not lead to the most positive outcomes,” said Dana Yagil, Ph.D., from the University of Haifa in Israel.

According to the authors, prior studies have looked at the effect of abusive supervision on employee performance. But research on the effect of different coping strategies on employee well-being is lacking.

The current study examined five types of strategies used for coping with the stress of abusive treatment: directly communicating with the abusive supervisor to discuss the problems; using forms of ingratiation – i.e., doing favors, using flattery and compliance; seeking support from others; avoiding contact with the supervisor; and what is known as “reframing” — mentally restructuring the abuse in a way that decreases its threat.

Researchers followed 300 employees asking them to rate the frequency of abusive behavior by a supervisor — such as ridicule, invasion of privacy, rudeness and lying.

The participants were also asked to rate the frequency of engaging in each of 25 strategies that belong to the five categories.

For example: “I tell the supervisor directly that he/she must not treat me like that” (direct communication category) ; “I support the supervisor in matters that are important to him/her, so that he/she will see I am on his/her side” (ingratiation); “I try to have the least possible contact with the supervisor (avoidance of contact); “I relieve myself by talking to other people about the supervisor’s behavior” (support-seeking); and “I remind myself that there are more important matters in my life” (reframing).

Investigators found that abusive treatment from a superior was most strongly associated with avoiding contact; disengaging from the supervisor as much as possible and seeking social support.

Further, direct communication with a supervisor confronting the abuse was the least strongly associated communication strategy.

Researchers found these strategies to be ineffective as avoidance and that seeking support elevated employees’ negative emotions. Moreover, communicating with the supervisor – which employees do less – was the strategy most strongly related to employees’ positive emotions.

“It is understandable that employees wish to reduce their contact with an abusive boss to a minimum,” said Yagil. “However, this strategy further increases the employee’s stress because it is associated with a sense of weakness and perpetuates their fear of the supervisor.”

Researchers said that although the study focused on the behaviors expressed by an employee as a result of actions by a supervisor, managers should watch for signs of employee detachment — as it might indicate that their own behavior is considered offensive by an employee.

The study is published in the International Journal of Stress Management .

Source: University of Haifa

“People who focus on the here and now, without thinking about the impact on the future, are more aggressive than others when they are sober, but the effect is magnified greatly when they’re drunk,” said Brad Bushman, Ph.D., lead author of the study and a professor of communication and psychology at The Ohio State University.

“If you carefully consider the consequences of your actions, it is unlikely getting drunk is going to make you any more aggressive than you usually are.”

Bushman said it makes sense that alcohol would make these people more aggressive.

“Alcohol has a myopic effect — it narrows your attention to what is important to you right now,” he said. “That may be dangerous to someone who already has that tendency to ignore the future consequences of their actions and who is placed in a hostile situation.”

Dr. Peter Giancola, a professor of psychology at the University of Kentucky, co-authored the paper with Bushman and led the experiments used in the study.

The study involved 495 adults, with an average age of 23, who were social drinkers. Before participating, the participants were screened for any past or present drug, alcohol and psychiatric-related problems. Women were tested to ensure they weren’t pregnant.

All participants completed a measure of how much the person considers future consequences when thinking about current behavior. They indicated how much they agreed with statements like “I only act to satisfy immediate concerns, figuring the future will take care of itself.” Scores on this measure determined how much participants were present-focused or future-focused.

Men were more aggressive than women overall, but the effects of alcohol and personality were similar in both sexes. In other words, women who were present-focused were still much more aggressive when drunk than were women who were future-focused, just like men.

Half the participants were put in the alcohol group, where they received alcohol mixed with orange juice at a 1:5 ratio. The other half were given orange juice with just a tiny bit of alcohol. The rims of the glasses were also sprayed with alcohol so that they thought they were consuming a full alcoholic beverage.

Participants in the alcohol group had a mean blood alcohol level of 0.095 just before aggression was measured and 0.105 following, meaning they were legally drunk and that their alcohol levels were rising during the measurement of their aggressive behavior.

Those in the placebo group had mean blood alcohol levels that didn’t exceed 0.015, meaning they had very little alcohol in their systems and were well below standards of intoxication.

The aggression measure used in this study was developed in 1967 to test aggressiveness through the use of harmless but somewhat painful electric shocks. The researchers measured the participants’ threshold to the electric shock pain before the experiment began to ensure that no one received a shock that exceeded what they could take.

Each of the participants was told that he or she was competing with a same-sex opponent in a computer-based speed reaction test, with the winner delivering an electrical shock to the loser. The winner determined the intensity and the length of the shock delivered to the loser.

But there was actually no opponent, researchers said. There were 34 trials, and the participant “won” half of them (randomly determined). Each time they “lost,” the participants received electric shocks that increased in length and intensity over the course of the trials, and the researchers measured if they retaliated in kind.

“The participants were led to believe they were dealing with a real jerk who got more and more nasty as the experiment continued,” Bushman said. “We tried to mimic what happens in real life, in that the aggression escalated as time went on.”

Results were clear, Bushman said. “The less people thought about the future, the more likely they were to retaliate, but especially when they were drunk,” he said. “People who were present-focused and drunk shocked their opponents longer and harder than anyone else in the study. Alcohol didn’t have much effect on the aggressiveness of people who were future-focused.”

Bushman said the results should serve as a warning to people who live only in the moment without thinking too much about the future.

“If you’re that kind of person, you really should watch your drinking,” he said. “Combining alcohol with a focus on the present can be a recipe for disaster.”

Their results appear online in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology and will be published in a future print edition.

Source: The Ohio State University

Man drinking photo by shutterstock.

Conduct disorder, as defined by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) of the American Psychiatric Association, involves persistent symptoms including aggression or other violations of age-appropriate norms that cause significant clinical impairment.

Behaviors that characterize conduct disorder include bullying others, getting into fights, fighting with a weapon, cruelty to people or animals, stealing with confrontation, forced sex, property destruction, theft and rule breaking.

“Our study shows that there is a large difference in risk for conduct disorder between Mexicans living in Mexico and people of Mexican descent living in the United States,” said Sergio Aguilar-Gaxiola, a professor of clinical internal medicine at UC Davis.

“This increase in risk occurring across generations within a migrating population strongly points to the influence of early childhood environmental factors in the United States and the potential to intervene to reduce the prevalence of conduct disorder.”

For the study, UC Davis and RAND Corp. researchers evaluated the prevalence of conduct disorder associated with migration from Mexico to the United States.  Conduct disorder symptoms were assessed across four groups of people of Mexican origin with the following levels of exposure to American culture: non-immigrant households in Mexico with no exposure to the United States, Mexicans from migrant households who lived in Mexico until age 15, children of Mexican migrants raised in the United States and Mexican-American children of U.S.-born parents.

The researchers gathered data by performing face-to-face interviews with nearly 1,800 adults aged 18 to 44 years in the household populations of Mexico and those of Mexican descent in the United States.

The results show that, compared to the general population of Mexico with no history of migration to the United States and Mexicans from migrant households who lived in Mexico until age 15, 11.5 percent of Mexican-American children with at least one U.S.-born parent met the DSM-IV criteria for conduct disorder. This level is similar to the non-Mexican-American, U.S.-born frequency of 10.6 percent.

“We found a striking epidemiological pattern with differences across generations that are both larger in magnitude and more narrow in scope that anyone expected,” said Joshua Breslau, a researcher with the RAND Corp. in Pittsburgh.

“Future studies will be needed to identify the specific environmental factors that contribute to these differences.”

The study appears in the December issue of the Archives of General Psychiatry, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.

Source: University of California