Tipping and harassment
Employees are more likely to be sexually harassed on the job if they both rely on tips and are pressured by their employer to provide “service with a smile.” This was the finding of an online study, reported in the Journal of Applied Psychology, in which researchers asked 92 participants who worked jobs where they regularly received tips how much they were financially dependent on tips, how much they were required to project a positive attitude toward customers, how much they felt customers held power over them, and how often they experienced sexual harassment from customers. In a second online study with 171 male participants who visited a simulated restaurant, those whose waitresses worked for tips and were told to be friendly all the time were more likely to report having a higher sense of power over the waitstaff than those whose waitresses worked for a flat wage and weren’t asked to smile all the time. DOI: 10.1037/apl0000895opens in new window
Original colors, please
Research in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance indicates that systematically changing all the colors in an abstract painting leads viewers to rate the artwork as less colorful and less appealing. Researchers rotated the colors of 100 abstract artworks by well-known artists through a 360-degree wheel of colors, in steps of 60 degrees at a time, providing six alternately colored versions of each artwork. Twenty German participants with normal vision rated each version of every artwork for colorfulness and, on another day, for how much they liked each piece. The researchers found that 81% of the original images were judged as both more colorful and more liked than the altered versions. They also found that yellow and orange hues are overly represented in the original works and suggested a couple reasons why: First, those colors imply a scene lit by natural daylight; also, the visual system is less sensitive to yellow, so artists use more of it to make it noticeable. DOI: 10.1037/xhp0000771opens in new window
Caffeine boost?
While sleep-deprived people can expect caffeine to give them a boost in simple cognitive tests, it has no effect on improving performance on more challenging tasks, suggests research in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition. Researchers asked 276 U.S. undergraduate students to perform a simple visual attention task as well as a more challenging “place-keeping” task that required completing activities in a specific order without skipping or repeating steps. Half of the participants then stayed up all night while half had a regular night’s sleep. In the morning, the researchers randomly gave each participant either a pill with 200 milligrams of caffeine or a placebo and had them engage in the tasks again. The researchers found sleep deprivation impaired performance on both types of tasks and that having caffeine helped people with the simple attention-based task. However, the caffeine had little effect on performance of the more difficult place-keeping task. DOI: 10.1037/xlm0001023opens in new window
Algorithms predict self-harm
Warning signs of self-harm can appear in some children nearly a decade before self-harming activities begin, suggests research in the Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry. Researchers identified adolescents who reported self-harm at age 14 from a nationally representative United Kingdom cohort of 10,827 individuals. They then used machine-learning algorithms to reveal characteristics that were more frequent among the 1,580 who reported self-harm. In general, these adolescents experienced sleep difficulties and low self-esteem. Beyond that, the adolescents who reported self-harm clustered into two distinct groups. Those in the first group often were victims of bullying, had difficulty controlling their emotions, and had parents with mental health challenges; these characteristics could be observed as early as age 5. Those in the second group showed more risk-taking and difficulties in relations with family and peers, with these characteristics often emerging closer to age 14. DOI: 10.1016/j.jaac.2021.03.010opens in new window
More gut bug diversity, less fear
The magnitude of infants’ fear responses is associated with the composition of their gut microbiome, indicates research in Nature Communications. Researchers characterized the gut microbiomes of 32 infants at ages 1 month and 1 year. They also assessed their fear responses at 1 year by observing and coding their reactions to people wearing nonhuman (e.g., alien and horse) masks and to unmasked strangers. The children who at either 1 month or 1 year had uneven microbiomes (i.e., dominated by a smaller set of bacterial species) were more fearful of the masked people at 1 year than were those with more balanced microbiomes, though no difference was observed in fear of the unmasked strangers. The researchers also imaged the infants’ brains and found preliminary evidence for associations between gut microbiome composition and size of the amygdala—a brain region involved in processing fear. DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-23281-yopens in new window
Kids shun dirty money
Children as young as 5 disapprove of accepting “dirty” money, suggests research in Cognitive Science. Researchers presented 327 participants in the United States from two age groups—5- to 6-year-olds and 8- to 9-year-olds—with various scenarios in which a person offered them one dollar: an “okay” person offering them a stolen dollar that they had found, a “bad” person who stole a dollar but was offering them a different dollar that wasn’t stolen, and a “bad” person offering them a dollar that they had stolen. The researchers found that the children, especially in the older group, preferred nonstolen money offered by a “bad” person over stolen money offered by an “okay” person. DOI: 10.1111/cogs.12950opens in new window
Talking about racism helps
Black parents’ experiences of racial discrimination can have negative consequences for their children’s mental health, but parents can reduce such outcomes by talking skillfully and confidently about their experiences and how they dealt with them, according to research in Child Development. Surveying 186 Black parents of adolescents ages 10 to 18 in the United States, researchers found that parents who had experienced more racial discrimination were more worried that their children would also experience it. Further, the more worried the parents were, the more likely their children were to have symptoms of depression and anxiety. However, when parents reported feeling competent in reducing their stress related to discrimination and in speaking about discrimination with their children, it was less likely that their worries would lead to negative psychological outcomes in their children. DOI: 10.1111/cdev.13607opens in new window
Powerless, paranoid, and aggressive
Employees lacking power at work can feel vulnerable and paranoid, resulting in aggressive behavior, suggests research in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes. In the first of five studies, 298 online participants in the United States were placed in work hierarchies in which their power was varied. Those in positions of lower power reported experiencing higher levels of paranoia. Two other studies, with 580 participants in the United States and with 530 participants in India, replicated the first study and also showed that paranoia sparked mild forms of aggression at work, like purposely wasting company resources, and at home, with anger directed toward a family member. In addition, two studies, with 217 undergraduate students in Singapore and with 1,217 online participants, showed that the effect of low power on paranoia was weaker when socioeconomic status was higher or when people felt supported by their company and manager. DOI: 10.1016/j.obhdp.2021.03.005opens in new window
I was where? When?
According to a study in Psychological Science, people misremember where they were on a specific date and time in more than one third of instances. Researchers used a smartphone app to record location data of 51 adult participants in Australia for a month. On a subsequent memory test, participants indicated where they were on a given date and time by choosing from four locations on a map (each of which they had visited at some point within the previous month). For each response, they also reported their level of confidence. Participants were incorrect 36% of the time, though higher confidence was associated with greater likelihood of a correct response. DOI: 10.1177/0956797620980752opens in new window
Stress, glutamate, and depression
Levels of glutamate in the brain adapt to chronic stress in healthy people but not in those with major depressive disorder (MDD), suggests a study in Nature Communications. Researchers asked a total of 88 participants in the United States—including both people with and without MDD—about recent stress in their lives. They then measured levels of the neurotransmitter glutamate within the medial prefrontal cortex—an area of the brain involved with thinking about one’s situation and forming expectations—before and after the participants completed stressful tasks (such as putting one’s hand in ice water and counting backward by intervals of 17). Participants without MDD and with low prestudy stress showed an increased glutamate response to the stressful tasks, while participants without MDD and with high prestudy stress showed a reduced glutamate response to the tasks. This adaptive change in the glutamate response was generally absent in the participants with MDD. Further, the lack of an adaptive glutamate response was associated with participants having pessimistic expectations as measured over 4 weeks following the stressful tasks. DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-23284-9opens in new window
Child-free and happy
Adults who choose not to have children are just as satisfied with life as those who have had children, suggests research in PLOS ONE. Researchers analyzed data from about 1,000 participants accounting for a representative sample of adults in the state of Michigan. They found that 27% identified as child-free; that is, they did not have children and did not plan or want to have children. The researchers found no differences in life satisfaction among child-free adults, adults who had children, those who planned to have children, and those who wanted children but were not able to have them. Little variation in personality traits was observed among the groups, although child-free adults tended to be more liberal than those who had children. Those who had or wanted children felt less warm toward child-free adults than child-free adults felt toward one another. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0252528opens in new window
Early risers, less depression
Research in JAMA Psychiatry suggests that a tendency to go to bed or wake up earlier leads to a lower risk of major depressive disorder (MDD). Drawing from databases that included nearly 700,000 individuals of European ancestry, researchers identified 340 genetic variants associated with sleep timing preferences (as represented by the midpoint of the preferred sleep period). The researchers then turned to a different sample of about 500,000 individuals of European ancestry, including about 170,000 with MDD. They found a 23% lower likelihood of having MDD for each earlier hour of preferred sleep period as indicated by participants’ genetic markers. These results suggest that interventions that modify sleep timing patterns might be effective for preventing depression. DOI: 10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2021.0959opens in new window
Prenatal acetaminophen risk
According to research in the European Journal of Epidemiology, children who have been exposed to acetaminophen before birth are more likely to develop symptoms of autism spectrum conditions (ASC) or attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) than children who have not been exposed. Researchers examined six European samples comprising a total of 73,881 children. Across samples, 14% to 56% of mothers reported taking acetaminophen while pregnant. The researchers found that children exposed to acetaminophen prenatally were 19% more likely to develop ASC symptoms and 21% more likely to develop ADHD symptoms than children who were not exposed. No associations were observed between administration of acetaminophen to children during the first 18 months following birth and subsequent ASC or ADHD symptoms. DOI: 10.1007/s10654-021-00754-4opens in new window
Higher suicide risk for schizophrenia patients
In the United States, adults with schizophrenia, especially young adults, have a much higher rate of suicide than does the general adult population, according to a study in JAMA Psychiatry. Researchers analyzed data from five national longitudinal cohorts of adult patients with schizophrenia collected from 2007 through 2016. Among the 668,836 patients, the suicide rate was 74.0 per 100,000 person-years, which is 4.5 times higher than the rate for the general population. The suicide rate was highest among those ages 18 to 34 (141.9) and lowest for those age 65 and older (24.0). For male patients the suicide rate was 88.9 and for female patients it was 56.3 (3.4 and 8.2 times higher than the general male and female populations, respectively). Suicide rates were lower for Black and Hispanic patients than for White patients. DOI: 10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2021.0841opens in new window
The double standard of casual sex
Women, but not men, who engage in casual sex are perceived to have low self-esteem, indicates research in Psychological Science. Across four U.S. studies with 164 undergraduates and 786 online participants, researchers found that both women and men stereotype women who have casual sex as having low self-esteem, but they don’t view men who have casual sex the same way. A fifth study with 283 U.S. undergraduates indicated that the stereotype persists even when participants are explicitly told that women having casual sex pursue and enjoy it. A sixth study with 210 U.S. undergraduates suggested that expectations that women are dissatisfied with having casual—versus committed—sex propels the low self-esteem stereotype. By contrast, no connection between casual sex and low self-esteem was found in participants’ reports of their own behavior and self-esteem. DOI: 10.1177/0956797620983829opens in new window
Friends first
Two in three romantic couples today start out as friends, suggests research in Social Psychological and Personality Science. In the first of two studies, researchers surveyed seven separate groups of university students and adults in Canada and the United States from 2002 to 2020 for a total of 1,897 participants. Two thirds of the participants reported that their current or most recent romantic relationship began as a friendship, with little variation across gender, level of education, or ethnic group. The rate of friends-first initiation, however, was even higher among those under 30 and within LGBTQ+ communities. Among a group of 298 university students from the first study, 210 participants from friends-first couples reported being friends for about 22 months, on average, before beginning a romantic relationship. About 47% of the students in that group reported that starting as friends was their preferred way of developing a romantic relationship, beating out other options such as meeting at a party or online. DOI: 10.1177/19485506211026992opens in new window
Narcissism and aggression
Narcissism is associated with aggression, according to a meta-analysis in Psychological Bulletin. Researchers looked at 437 studies from around the world, with a total of 123,043 participants. They found that people higher in narcissism show a 21% increase in aggression overall and an 18% increase in violent aggression compared with people lower in narcissism. People higher in narcissism were not only more likely to lash out in anger but were also more likely to be deliberate and proactive in their aggression. Risk for aggression was higher when people with narcissism felt provoked, such as being ignored or insulted. The link between narcissism and aggression was found for various dimensions of narcissism (e.g., entitlement, grandiosity, and vulnerability) and for a variety of types of aggression (e.g., physical, verbal, and online bullying). Results were similar across gender, age, and country of residence. DOI: 10.1037/bul0000323opens in new window
