Showing papers in "Psychological Science in the Public Interest in 2010"

Weighing the Costs of Disaster: Consequences, Risks, and Resilience in Individuals, Families, and Communities

Abstract: Disasters typically strike quickly and cause great harm. Unfortunately, because of the spontaneous and chaotic nature of disasters, the psychological consequences have proved exceedingly difficult to assess. Published reports have often overestimated a disaster's psychological cost to survivors, suggesting, for example, that many if not most survivors will develop posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD); at the same time, these reports have underestimated the scope of the disaster's broader impact in other domains. We argue that such ambiguities can be attributed to methodological limitations. When we focus on only the most scientifically sound research--studies that use prospective designs or include multivariate analyses of predictor and outcome measures--relatively clear conclusions about the psychological parameters of disasters emerge. We summarize the major aspects of these conclusions in five key points and close with a brief review of possible implications these points suggest for disaster intervention. 1. Disasters cause serious psychological harm in a minority of exposed individuals. People exposed to disaster show myriad psychological problems, including PTSD, grief, depression, anxiety, stress-related health costs, substance abuse, and suicidal ideation. However, severe levels of these problems are typically observed only in a relatively small minority of exposed individuals. In adults, the proportion rarely exceeds 30% of most samples, and in the vast majority of methodologically sound studies, the level is usually considerably lower. Among youth, elevated symptoms are common in the first few months following a high-impact disaster, but again, chronic symptom elevations rarely exceed 30% of the youth sampled. 2. Disasters produce multiple patterns of outcome, including psychological resilience. In addition to chronic dysfunction, other patterns of disaster outcome are typically observed. Some survivors recover their psychological equilibrium within a period ranging from several months to 1 or 2 years. A sizeable proportion, often more than half of those exposed, experience only transient distress and maintain a stable trajectory of healthy functioning or resilience. Resilient outcomes have been evidenced across different methodologies, including recent studies that identified patterns of outcome using relatively sophisticated data analytic approaches, such as latent growth mixture modeling. 3. Disaster outcome depends on a combination of risk and resilience factors. As is true for most highly aversive events, individual differences in disaster outcomes are informed by a number of unique risk and resilience factors, including variables related to the context in which the disaster occurs, variables related to proximal exposure during the disaster, and variables related to distal exposure in the disaster's aftermath. Multivariate studies indicate that there is no one single dominant predictor of disaster outcomes. Rather, as with traumatic life events more generally, most predictor variables exert small to moderate effects, and it is the combination or additive total of risk and resilience factors that informs disaster outcomes. 4. Disasters put families, neighborhoods, and communities at risk. Although methodologically complex research on this facet of disasters' impact is limited, the available literature suggests that disasters meaningfully influence relationships within and across broad social units. Survivors often receive immediate support from their families, relatives, and friends, and for this reason many survivors subsequently claim that the experience brought them closer together. On the whole, however, the empirical evidence suggests a mixed pattern of findings. There is evidence that social relationships can improve after disasters, especially within the immediate family. However, the bulk of evidence indicates that the stress of disasters can erode both interpersonal relationships and sense of community. Regardless of how they are affected, postdisaster social relations are important predictors of coping success and resilience. 5. The remote effects of a disaster in unexposed populations are generally limited and transient. Increased incidence of extreme distress and pathology are often reported in remote regions hundreds if not thousands of miles from a disaster's geographic locale. Careful review of these studies indicates, however, that people in regions remote to a disaster may experience transient distress, but increased incidence of psychopathology is likely only among populations with preexisting vulnerabilities (e.g., prior trauma or psychiatric illness) or actual remote exposure (e.g., loss of a loved one in the disaster). Finally, we review the implications for intervention. There is considerable interest in prophylactic psychological interventions, such as critical incident stress debriefing (CISD), that can be applied globally to all exposed survivors in the immediate aftermath of disaster. Multiple studies have shown, however, that CISD is not only ineffective but in some cases can actually be psychologically harmful. Other less invasive and more practical forms of immediate intervention have been developed for use with both children and adults. Although promising, controlled evaluations of these less invasive interventions are not yet available. The available research suggests that psychological interventions are more likely to be effective during the short- and long-term recovery periods (1 month to several years postdisaster), especially when used in combination with some form of screening for at-risk individuals. Such interventions should also target the maintenance and enhancement of tangible, informational, and social-emotional support resources throughout the affected community. Language: en

Intelligence and Personality as Predictors of Illness and Death: How Researchers in Differential Psychology and Chronic Disease Epidemiology Are Collaborating to Understand and Address Health Inequalities

Abstract: This monograph describes research findings linking intelligence and personality traits with health outcomes, including health behaviors, morbidity, and mortality. The field of study of intelligence and health outcomes, is called cognitive epidemiology, and the field of study of personality traits and health outcomes is known as personological epidemiology. Intelligence and personality traits are the principal research topics studied by differential psychologists, so the combined field could be called differential epidemiology. This research is important for the following reasons: The findings overviewed are relatively new, and many researchers and practitioners are unaware of them; the effect sizes are on par with better-known, traditional risk factors for illness and death; mechanisms of the associations are largely unknown, so they must be explored further; and the findings have yet to be applied, so we write this to encourage diverse interested parties to consider how applications might be achieved. To make this research accessible to as many relevant researchers, practitioners, policymakers, and laypersons as possible, we first provide an overview of the basic discoveries regarding intelligence and personality. We describe the nature and structure of the measured phenotypes (i.e., the observable characteristics of an individual) in both fields. Although both areas of study are well established, we recognize that this may not be common knowledge outside of experts in the field. Human intelligence differences are described by a hierarchy that includes general intelligence (g) at the pinnacle, strongly correlated broad domains of cognitive functioning at a lower level, and specific abilities at the foot. The major human differences in personality are described by five personality factors that are widely agreed on with respect to their number and nature: neuroticism, extraversion, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. As a foundation for health-related findings, we provide a summary of research showing that intelligence and personality differences can be measured reliably and validly and are stable across many years (even decades), substantially heritable, and related to important life outcomes. Cognitive and personality traits are fundamental aspects of a person, and they have relevance to life chances and outcomes, including health outcomes. We provide an overview of major and recent research on the associations between intelligence and personality traits and health outcomes. These outcomes include mortality from all causes, specific causes of death, specific illnesses, and others, such as health-related behaviors. Intelligence and personality traits are significantly and substantially (by comparison with traditional risk factors) related to all of these outcomes. The studies we describe are unusual in psychology: They have large sample sizes (typically thousands of subjects, sometimes ~1 million), the samples are more representative of the background population than in most studies, the follow-up times are long (sometimes many decades, almost the whole human life span), and the outcomes are objective health measures (including death), not just self-reports. In addition to the associations, possible mechanisms for the associations are described and discussed, and some attempts to test these mechanisms are illustrated. It is relatively early in this research field, so a significant amount of work remains to be done. Finally, we make some preliminary remarks about possible applications, with the knowledge that the psychological predictors addressed are somewhat stable aspects of the person, with substantial genetic causes. Nevertheless, we believe differential epidemiology can be a useful component of interventions to improve individual and public health. Intelligence and personality differences are possible causes of later health inequalities; the eventual aim of cognitive and personological epidemiology is to reduce or eliminate these inequalities, to the extent that it is possible, and provide information to help people toward their own optimal health through the life course. We present these findings to a wider audience so that more associations will be explored, a better understanding of the mechanisms of health inequalities will be produced, and inventive applications will follow on the basis of what we hope will be seen as practically useful knowledge.

Pitfalls and Opportunities in Nonverbal and Verbal Lie Detection

Abstract: The question of whether discernible differences exist between liars and truth tellers has interested professional lie detectors and laypersons for centuries. In this article we discuss whether people can detect lies when observing someone’s nonverbal behavior or analyzing someone’s speech. An article about detecting lies by observing nonverbal and verbal cues is overdue. Scientific journals regularly publish overviews of research articles regarding nonverbal and verbal cues to deception, but they offer no explicit guidance about what lie detectors should do and should avoid doing to catch liars. We will present such guidance in the present article.

Learning New Ways to Do Good

Abstract: Bonanno, Brewin, Kaniasty, and LaGreca (2010, this issue) provide a comprehensive and authoritative review of research on risk and resilience following disaster, including the authors’ own ground-breaking work in this area. This review seems particularly timely given the apparent excess of natural and human-made disasters in the news in recent years. Images of hurricane victims in New Orleans, tsunami victims in Southeast Asia, earthquake victims in Haiti, and flood victims in Pakistan, as well as those who lost their livelihoods due to the Deep Horizon oil spill in the Gulf Coast, haunt us, moving us to want to do something. Bonanno et al. caution that some well-motivated attempts to prevent psychological harm in disaster victims may backfire, undermining the natural coping and healing processes that characterize the majority of victims. The authors persuasively demonstrate that the strong majority of victims are resilient, showing little evidence of long-term psychological harm. Still, there is a minority of individuals who suffer long-term distress—manifested in many ways in addition to posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD)—who could benefit from empirically informed interventions such as cognitive-behavioral therapy. Sadly, few of these individuals will have access to such interventions, particularly when their whole community has been ravaged by a disaster. The aspect of the review by Bonanno et al. that is probably most novel to many psychologists is their discussion of the impact of disasters on families and communities. We are accustomed to thinking about both risk factors and interventions at the level of the individual. The authors make clear, however, that some of the most potent risk factors for postdisaster psychological distress may be at the family and community level, such as decreased instrumental and emotional support. Further, some of the most potent (and safe) interventions may be to restore community and family resources and cohesion as soon as possible after the disaster. This suggests that psychologists should work with sociologists, political scientists, and economists, among other professionals, to study communityand family-level factors that most strongly impact individuals’ well-being after a disaster and to design new interventions to restore factors promoting resilience.

Commentary on “Intelligence and Personality as Predictors of Illness and Death” by Deary, Weiss, and Batty

Abstract: Congratulations to Deary, Weiss, and Batty (2010, this issue) for an encyclopedic and judicious survey of the literature and for their sensible recommendations as to how medical practitioners must tailor prescriptions to the personality and cognitive ability of patients they address. The suggestions for future research are state of the art in terms of analysis of the kind of data psychologists are likely to collect. However, I suggest that we approach sociologists with hypotheses that might motivate them to supplement our knowledge. The curse of any model is that it is underidentified and encourages us to think that we know what human behavior lies behind the numbers it generates. I will comment on what etiology might lie behind the correlation between low IQ and hospitalization for violence-inflicted injury. Others with broader knowledge will I hope make similar contributions. I was reared in a gang-organized area where gangs were staffed by ethnicity: Blacks versus an alliance of non-Black Catholics (Irish, Italian, Puerto Rican, Filipino). The culture was one of defense of honor and territory by fighting. Teenagers challenged other teenagers to fight: The path between IQ and injury was not a matter of being too unintelligent to have mediation or coping skills. If challenged, any resort to such was proof of cowardice, and the sanctions for that were to be outcast and bullied. If you won, you might have the high status of the best street fighter in your group; if you lost honorably, you were a member of the group in good standing. Gangs challenged each other: Failure to fight and risk injury meant having no place to ‘‘play’’ and low group esteem. Pub culture was a major leisure-time amusement and going to a pub was likely to lead to challenges. Football (gridiron) was a leisure sport that led to challenges. In sum, fighting for honor and territory was not a behavioral manifestation of low IQ. Yet as a group we undoubtedly had a lower mean IQ than Washington, D.C., as a whole. But it was our culture, not low-IQ, that was the active factor. It might seem that allowing for lower socioeconomic status (SES) would capture this etiology. Not entirely: Jewish boys in our neighborhood simply did not go out on the street after school; they socialized through the Synagogue. They would avoid risk because their self-esteem did not include honor as the rest of us defined it. We thought they were cowards, but they did not care. I doubt Swedish data would pick up any of this, and I am impressed that it shows a correlation between IQ and violence-inflicted injury after SES is allowed for. I suspect that functional or dysfunctional cognition is the answer. I suspect that U.S. data would show a stronger correlation, particularly before SES is allowed for. But it would be wrong to conclude that the extra is necessarily due to cognitive rather than ethnic or cultural factors. Therefore, let us have some investigation of behavior on the ground if we want a full understanding of our correlations. It is one thing to help people close the gap between functional and dysfunctional intelligence. It is another thing to assume that they will give up what, for them, defines personal self-esteem and a full life. The physician who wishes to communicate with a patient about reducing the incidence of violent injury may need consultation with a case worker familiar with his neighborhood rather than an IQ score.