Objective: Evidence suggests that perseverative cognition (PC), the cognitive representation of past stressful events (rumination) or feared future events (worry), mediates the relationship between ...stress and physical disease. However, the experimental evidence testing methods to influence PC and the subsequent relationship with health outcomes has not been synthesized. Therefore, the current review addressed these gaps. Method: Studies randomly assigning participants to treatment and control groups, measuring PC and a physical and/or behavioral health outcome after exposure to a nonpharmacological intervention, were included in a systematic review. Key terms were searched in Medline, PsycINFO and CINAHL databases. Of the screened studies (k = 10,703), 36 met the eligibility criteria. Results: Random-effects meta-analyses revealed the interventions, relative to comparison groups, on average produced medium-sized effects on rumination (g = −.58), small-to-medium sized effects on worry (g = −.41) and health behaviors (g = .31), and small-sized effects on physical health outcomes (g = .23). Effect sizes for PC were negatively associated with effect sizes for health behaviors. (following outlier removal). Effect sizes for PC were significantly larger when interventions were delivered by health care professionals than when delivered via all other methods. No specific intervention type (when directly compared against other types) was associated with larger effect sizes for PC. Conclusions: Psychological interventions can influence PC. Medium-sized (negative) effect sizes for PC correspond with small (but positive) health behavior effect sizes.
Every day, millions of individuals rely on fluctuating financial rewards in the form of customer tips, commissions, piece-rate, and performance-based pay. While these compensation systems are ...increasingly common, the volatility in pay that they create may harm employee health. Based on conservation of resource theory assumptions that money is a valued resource, I propose that volatility in pay represents resource insecurity, with costs to health. Across an experience sampling study of tipped workers (Study 1) and longitudinal studies of gig workers (Study 2) and those in sales, marketing, and finance (Study 3), findings demonstrate the harmful effects of pay volatility. Specifically, pay volatility had direct or indirect effects on physical symptoms, insomnia, sleep quality, and sleep quantity. Volatile pay was found to induce a scarcity mindset, where individuals ruminate and direct cognitive resources toward remedying the source of scarcity, with worse health outcomes as a result. Neither mindfulness nor savings rate moderated the effect. Exploratory analyses in Studies 2 and 3 revealed that one's dependence on volatile pay acted as a moderator that strengthened effects. Overall, performance-based pay creates pay volatility, which is linked to psychological threat and poor physical health for employees in a broad range of industries.
During the first months of 2020, the world, and Italy at an early stage, went through the COVID-19 emergency that had a great impact on individual and collective health, but also on working ...processes. The mandatory remote working and the constant use of technology for employees raised different implications related to technostress and psycho-physical disorders. This study aimed to detect, in such a period of crisis and changes, the role of organizational communication considering the mediating role of both technostress and self-efficacy, with psycho-physical disorders as outcome. The research involved 530 workers working from home. A Structural Equations Model was estimated, revealing that organizational communication is positively associated with self-efficacy and negatively with technostress and psycho-physical disorders. As mediators, technostress is positively associated with psycho-physical disorders, whereas self-efficacy is negatively associated. As regards mediated effects, results showed negative associations between organizational communication and psycho-physical disorders through both technostress and self-efficacy. This study highlighted the potential protective role of organizational communication that could buffer the effect of technostress and enhance a personal resource, self-efficacy, which is functional to the reduction of psycho-physical disorders. This study contributed to literature underlying the role of communication in the current crisis and consequent reorganization of the working processes.
In this poem, the author describes spending summers with her grandfather in Beijing. When he became sick, she and her sister would feed him soup. She was always scared by the tubes in his nose, his ...varicose veins, and how he would cough fistfuls of air. Soon her mother stopped taking them to see him. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)
The vestibular (inner ear balance) system senses head movement and orientation in space. Vestibular sensory input plays a critical role in spatial cognitive abilities such as spatial memory and ...spatial navigation. Vestibular function declines with age, and recent studies have shown that age-related vestibular impairment is associated with poorer spatial cognitive skills in healthy older adults. Moreover, vestibular impairment is disproportionately prevalent among individuals with mild cognitive impairment and Alzheimer's disease, and specifically in cognitively-impaired individuals who have spatial deficits such as disorientation and difficulty driving. Indeed, emerging evidence suggests that age-related vestibular impairment contributes to a 'spatial' subtype of Alzheimer's disease, characterized by highly morbid symptoms such as wandering and falls. Given that vestibular impairment can be treated through simple, physical-therapy based exercises, identifying and treating vestibular deficits in older adults with and without cognitive impairment may offer substantial benefit in preventing, mitigating and forestalling cognitive decline.
Most psychologists who provide services to older adults have not received professional training and education in geropsychology. To meet the mental health needs of the growing population of older ...adults, psychologists without specialty training would benefit from developing foundational knowledge competencies for clinical practice with older adults. Clinical care of older adults offers unique challenges as mental disorders are often complicated by medical illnesses, functional impairments, and late-life stressors, which contribute to under-detection and under-treatment. Age- and disease-related cognitive, sensory, and functional changes necessitate treatment adaptations and a holistic approach to care to maximize older adults' adjustment to aging and overall well-being. This article reviews the foundations of clinical practice with older adults. Specific topics covered are psychopathology in late life, neuroscience of aging, functional changes in late life, common medical illnesses in older adults, and the concept of person-environment interaction as it relates to adaptation in the context of functional changes.
Public Health Significance Statement
Generalist psychologists without specialty training in geropsychology will be tasked with providing care to a growing patient population of adults 65 years of age and older. To meet this demand, all providers should attain foundational knowledge competencies in clinical practice with older adults. Dissemination of foundational knowledge competencies in geropsychology is a vital step in enhancing the mental health workforce in preparation to meet the unprecedented growth in the number of older adult patients and their families.
Growing diversity in the workforce has compelled scholars and managers to create inclusive organizational environments for employees who belong to marginalized groups. Yet, little is known about how ...employees with stigmatized medical conditions manage their job demands. In this article, we examine the role of stigma associated with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) in shaping the ability of employees with HIV to contribute to their organizations. Drawing on stigma and emotions literatures, we investigate the influence of HIV stigma on job effectiveness (i.e., in-role performance and organizational citizenship behaviors) through the mediated paths of fear and shame. We further examine whether a psychological (i.e., core self-evaluation CSE) and a physiological (i.e., CD4 cell count, defined as the biological indicator of HIV severity) factor would moderate these mediating relationships at the first and second stages, respectively. Using a sample of 225 employees with HIV surveyed across three measurement periods with a time lag of 3 months, we found support for the dual-stage moderated mediation model linking HIV stigma and job effectiveness via shame under lower (vs. higher) levels of CSE and CD4 cell count. By contrast, we did not find evidence for the mediating role of fear. Implications of our findings for theory and practice are discussed.
Objective: The Cancer Threat Interpretation model proposes that clinically significant fear of cancer recurrence/progression (FCR/P) can occur when people misinterpret ambiguous physical symptoms as ...a sign of recurrence. The aim of this research is to test whether interpretation biases moderate the relationship between pain and FCR/P in women with breast cancer, as predicted. Method: One hundred forty-seven women with breast cancer completed questionnaire measures of demographic and medical information, FCR/P, interpretation bias, and symptom burden, as well as other known predictors of FCR/P. Results: Women with clinically significant levels of FCR/P were more likely to interpret ambiguous words as health-related and experienced more pain than women with levels of FCR/P in the nonclinical range. FCR was associated with both pain (r = .40, p < .001) and interpretation bias (r = .45, p < .001). Interpretation bias and pain (r = .31, p < .001) were also associated with each other. Moderation analyses confirmed that interpretation bias moderated the relationship between pain and FCR (F(1, 143) = 5.76; p = .01). However, this was not the case with FOP (F(1, 143) = .21; p = .65). Conclusion: We found that women with breast cancer with clinically significant FCR/P interpreted ambiguous words as health-related more often and experienced more pain than those with nonclinical FCR/P. Moreover, we found that among those with higher levels of pain, FCR was also higher only among those with higher levels of interpretation bias, as the threat interpretation model predicts.
Prior research shows that daily stressors lead to greater psychological distress. A separate body of research links daily stressors to physical symptoms such as backaches and stomach problems. We ...integrate these literatures by positing an interconnected causal system, whereby stressors lead to psychological distress which, in turn, leads to physical symptoms. Our integrated approach also includes causal effects in the opposing directions: Psychological distress can increase physical symptoms and physical symptoms can increase psychological distress. Put simply, causal effects are bidirectional. This finding illuminates the concept of feedback loops, which have never been investigated in the stress literature until now. We find that reverberating feedback between stressors and distress equilibrates after just one and a half loops and that feedback between stressors and physical symptoms does not actually reach a full loop. Because of this, feedback loops have only minor consequences for physical symptoms by the end of the day. Finally, we discuss the aforementioned phenomena with between-person differences at the forefront, showing how some people are as much as four times as reactive as the average person, some people are not reactive at all, and other people are reactive in reverse directions (e.g., distress leads to fewer physical symptoms). We empirically support these claims using daily diary data from three separate studies that together represent diverse ages, geographic regions, relationship statuses, and racial identities. Once established, we consider the implications of our integrated causal feedback system in relation to existing knowledge and highlight critical areas for future study.
Interest in the construct of mindfulness has steadily increased in recent years. The current investigation characterized mindfulness as a personal resource that has the potential to help individuals ...deal with stressors at work, thereby reducing the likelihood that those stressors will result in personal and job-related strain outcomes. This possibility was examined by considering mindfulness in relation to various stressors (i.e., workload, organizational constraints, experienced incivility) and strain outcomes (i.e., mental symptoms of strain, physical symptoms of strain, job dissatisfaction). Data were collected via an online survey administered to a sample of police officers (n = 239). Two statistically significant interactions were observed, whereby mindfulness moderated the relationship between workload and both mental and physical symptoms of strain.
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