Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research - Research Publications
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ItemPatterns of Welfare Attitudes in the Australian Population(PUBLIC LIBRARY SCIENCE, 2015-11-10)The study of community attitudes toward welfare and welfare recipients is an area of increasing interest. This is not only because negative attitudes can lead to stigmatization and discrimination, but because of the relevance of social attitudes to policy decisions. We quantify the attitudes toward welfare in the Australian population using attitude data from a nationally representative survey (N = 3243). Although there was broad support for the social welfare system, negative attitudes are held toward those who receive welfare benefits. Using canonical correlation analysis we identify multivariate associations between welfare attitudes and respondent demographic characteristics. A primary attitudinal dimension of welfare positivity was found amongst those with higher levels of education, life instability, and personal exposure to the welfare system. Other patterns of negative welfare attitudes appeared to be motivated by beliefs that the respondent's personal circumstances indicate their deservingness. Moreover, a previously unidentified and unconsidered subset of respondents was identified. This group had positive attitudes toward receiving government benefits despite having no recent experience of welfare. They did, however, possess many of the characteristics that frequently lead to welfare receipt. These results provide insights into not only how attitudinal patterns segment across the population, but are of relevance to policy makers considering how to align welfare reform with community attitudes.
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ItemNo Experimental Evidence for Visual Prior Entry of Angry Faces, Even When Feeling Afraid(AMER PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSOC, 2017-02)Threatening stimuli prevent attentional disengagement. Less clear is whether threat captures attention in addition to holding it. One way to measure attentional capture is to examine visual prior entry. Visual prior entry occurs when one stimulus is consciously recognized as appearing prior to other stimuli. Using a temporal order judgments paradigm, we examined whether threatening, angry faces would experience visual prior entry. Such a finding would provide evidence for attentional capture by threat. We further examined whether such attentional capture by threat was contingent on feeling afraid. Using Bayesian analyses, we found moderate support for the null hypothesis in 2 experiments (Ns = 44, 63). Angry faces did not capture attention, and there was no effect of feeling afraid because of watching a horror movie (Experiment 1) or anticipatory fear about giving a speech in front of an expert panel (Experiment 2). These studies were supplemented with a meta-analysis that suggests the visual prior entry effect is very small, if indeed it exists. Thus, the visual prior entry effect for threatening faces is likely a much smaller effect than the extant literature suggests. (PsycINFO Database Record
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ItemWithin-person analysis of welfare transitions in a longitudinal panel survey reveals change in mental health service use(OXFORD UNIV PRESS, 2017-12)BACKGROUND: While international research shows that receipt of welfare benefits is associated with poor mental health, less is known about the relationship between welfare receipt and mental health service use. We investigate whether within-person change in welfare recipient status is associated with change in mental health service use. METHODS: Analysis of two waves of data from an Australian national household survey. Random- and fixed-effect models considered the effect of change in welfare receipt status, and assessed whether change in mental health service use differed by type of welfare benefit or the direction of welfare transition. RESULTS: Individuals were more likely to report greater mental health service use at times of welfare receipt. These associations were attenuated, but remained significant, after adjusting for mental health. Increased health service use was not tied to specific types of welfare benefits. The increase in mental health service use associated with a transition onto welfare benefits was much greater than the decline in service use associated with the transition off benefits. CONCLUSIONS: Within individuals, welfare receipt is associated with greater mental health service use. While this does reflect poorer mental health at the time of welfare receipt, other factors seem to facilitate health service use.
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ItemTime-of-day effects in implicit racial in-group preferences are likely selection effects, not circadian rhythms(PEERJ INC, 2016-04-18)Time-of-day effects in human psychological functioning have been known of since the 1800s. However, outside of research specifically focused on the quantification of circadian rhythms, their study has largely been neglected. Moves toward online data collection now mean that psychological investigations take place around the clock, which affords researchers the ability to easily study time-of-day effects. Recent analyses have shown, for instance, that implicit attitudes have time-of-day effects. The plausibility that these effects indicate circadian rhythms rather than selection effects is considered in the current study. There was little evidence that the time-of-day effects in implicit attitudes shifted appropriately with factors known to influence the time of circadian rhythms. Moreover, even variables that cannot logically show circadian rhythms demonstrated stronger time-of-day effects than did implicit attitudes. Taken together, these results suggest that time-of-day effects in implicit attitudes are more likely to represent processes of selection rather than circadian rhythms, but do not rule out the latter possibility.