Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences - Research Publications
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ItemNo Preview AvailableIll-defined: Concepts of mental health and illness are becoming broader, looser, and more benign(SAGE PUBLICATIONS LTD, 2022-08)OBJECTIVES: We argue that mental health-related concepts have become degraded within professional circles and in the wider community. We identify three trends: concept creep, the rise of broad umbrella concepts (e.g. distress and trauma), and the conflation of mental health with well-being, which marginalises serious mental illness. We speculate on the causes of these trends, including cultural shifts towards greater sensitivity to harm and the rise of wellness industries. Contributing factors within psychiatry include overdiagnosis, dimensional models and transdiagnostic perspectives. CONCLUSIONS: These trends may lead to inflated demands on services from those at the milder end of the psychopathological spectrum. We set out seven measures that mental health professionals can take to resist trends towards broad concepts of mental illness and limit some of their adverse consequences.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableNegative Emotion and Nonacceptance of Emotion in Daily Life(AMER PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSOC, 2022-08)Nonacceptance of emotion is consistently linked with increased levels of psychopathology and diminished well-being. Research has found that negative emotion and nonacceptance of emotion are positively associated cross-sectionally but has yet to directly investigate temporal associations between these constructs. Given that negative emotions are frequently the target of negative thoughts and other emotions, and that acceptance of emotion is associated with prospective decreases in negative emotion, we hypothesized that the temporal relation between negative emotion and nonacceptance of emotion is bidirectional. The present study examined the association between these variables during people's daily lives using an experience sampling methodology. Multilevel modeling was used for all analyses, including hierarchical generalized linear modeling and log-normal hurdle modeling. A total of 187 women from the United States and Australia reported negative emotion and nonacceptance of emotion 14 times a day for 5 days. Negative emotion and nonacceptance of emotion were positively associated contemporaneously. Across time, nonacceptance of emotion was prospectively and positively associated with the intensity of negative emotion independent of immediately prior negative emotion, and negative emotion intensity was prospectively and positively associated with nonacceptance of emotion independent of immediately prior nonacceptance. Results support a bidirectional model of negative emotion and nonacceptance of emotion wherein each variable predicts increases in the other across time. Our findings elucidate how individuals fall into maladaptive emotional patterns that are difficult to break and could possibly pave the way to the development and maintenance of psychopathology. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).
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ItemThe effects of Aboriginal tertiary students' perceived experiences of racism and of cultural resilience on educational engagement(Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Studies Unit, Univ Queensland, 2022-12)Racism pervasively impacts the lives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and is a substantial barrier to accessing, engaging and succeeding within secondary education. Cultural resilience and support have been identified as critical to Aboriginal success within racist institutions. However, research examining experiences of racism and cultural resilience among Aboriginal tertiary students is limited. This study explored the relationship between racism, cultural resilience, and educational engagement and academic outcomes in a sample of these students (N = 63). We proposed that higher perceived racism would be associated with lower engagement and academic outcomes. The study also developed a new measure of Aboriginal tertiary students’ experience of racism during their studies, which demonstrated good reliability and validity. Experiencing racism was associated with perceiving a less supportive learning environment, and with lower learning outcomes, developmental outcomes and overall student satisfaction.
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ItemMotivated inquiry: ideology shapes responses to the Christian Porter rape allegation(TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 2022-12-31)
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ItemTrends of research productivity across author gender and research fields: A multidisciplinary and multi-country observational study(PUBLIC LIBRARY SCIENCE, 2022-08-10)Bibliographic properties of more than 75 million scholarly articles, are examined and trends in overall research productivity are analysed as a function of research field (over the period of 1970-2020) and author gender (over the period of 2006-2020). Potential disruptive effects of the Covid-19 pandemic are also investigated. Over the last decade (2010-2020), the annual number of publications have invariably increased every year with the largest relative increase in a single year happening in 2019 (more than 6% relative growth). But this momentum was interrupted in 2020. Trends show that Environmental Sciences and Engineering Environmental have been the fastest growing research fields. The disruption in patterns of scholarly publication due to the Covid-19 pandemic was unevenly distributed across fields, with Computer Science, Engineering and Social Science enduring the most notable declines. The overall trends of male and female productivity indicate that, in terms of absolute number of publications, the gender gap does not seem to be closing in any country. The trends in absolute gap between male and female authors is either parallel (e.g., Canada, Australia, England, USA) or widening (e.g., majority of countries, particularly Middle Eastern countries). In terms of the ratio of female to male productivity, however, the gap is narrowing almost invariably, though at markedly different rates across countries. While some countries are nearing a ratio of .7 and are well on track for a 0.9 female to male productivity ratio, our estimates show that certain countries (particularly across the Middle East) will not reach such targets within the next 100 years. Without interventional policies, a significant gap will continue to exist in such countries. The decrease or increase in research productivity during the first year of the pandemic, in contrast to trends established before 2020, was generally parallel for male and female authors. There has been no substantial gender difference in the disruption due to the pandemic. However, opposite trends were found in a few cases. It was observed that, in some countries (e.g., The Netherlands, The United States and Germany), male productivity has been more negatively affected by the pandemic. Overall, female research productivity seems to have been more resilient to the disruptive effect of Covid-19 pandemic, although the momentum of female researchers has been negatively affected in a comparable manner to that of males.
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ItemHas Psychology Become More Positive? Trends in Language Use in Article Abstracts(FRONTIERS MEDIA SA, 2022-05-30)The positive psychology movement, launched near the start of the twenty-first century, aimed to shift the focus of psychology away from misery, conflict, and pathology toward happiness, human flourishing, and wellbeing. However, there have been few attempts to gauge whether psychology as a whole has become more positive in its focus. This study tested this possibility by examining a corpus of 829,701 abstracts from articles published in 875 psychology journals between 1970 and 2017. Positivity was indexed by the positive emotion dictionary using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count tool and a newly constructed positive character dictionary. Both indices showed a steep rise through the study period, with the positive character index's rise occurring since 2000. A Negative Emotion index also rose linearly over the study period, suggesting that the rise in positive emotion might reflect in part a general increase in affective or evaluative language use. While there appears to have been an increase in psychology's positivity, that increase is complex, non-linear, and the degree to which it can be ascribed to positive psychology remains uncertain.
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ItemGenetic factors and shared environment contribute equally to objective singing ability(CELL PRESS, 2022-06-17)Singing ability is a complex human skill influenced by genetic and environmental factors, the relative contributions of which remain unknown. Currently, genetically informative studies using objective measures of singing ability across a range of tasks are limited. We administered a validated online singing tool to measure performance across three everyday singing tasks in Australian twins (n = 1189) to explore the relative genetic and environmental influences on singing ability. We derived a reproducible phenotypic index for singing ability across five performance measures of pitch and interval accuracy. Using this index we found moderate heritability of singing ability (h 2 = 40.7%) with a striking, similar contribution from shared environmental factors (c 2 = 37.1%). Childhood singing in the family home and being surrounded by music early in life both significantly predicted the phenotypic index. Taken together, these findings show that singing ability is equally influenced by genetic and shared environmental factors.
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ItemIs unemployment benefit stigma related to poverty, payment receipt, or lack of employment? A vignette experiment about Australian views(Wiley, 2022-05-06)The present study sought to better understand the extent to which negative perceptions of people who receive unemployment benefits is due to their poverty status, their unemployment, and/or their receipt of income support payments. We sought to differentiate these three factors in a vignette-based experiment drawing on a large Australian general population sample (N = 778). Participants rated the personality and capability of two fictional characters. The key experimental manipulation of employment status and benefit receipt was embedded in description of other characteristics. Participants rated vignette characters who received unemployment benefits less favorably on personality (conscientiousness, emotional stability, agreeableness), competence, and warmth than characters described as having a job, as being poor, or as not having a job but without mention of receiving benefits. There was a gradient in the strength of negative assessments across these conditions, but only warmth, conscientiousness and employability distinguished between individuals receiving unemployment benefits and individuals without a job but no reference to benefit receipt. This study provides new insights showing that receiving benefits due to unemployment contributes to negative perceptions over and above the effects of poverty or being unemployed.
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ItemThe Her Tribe and His Tribe Aboriginal-Designed Empowerment Programs(MDPI, 2022-02)This study documents evaluation of the Her Tribe and His Tribe Aboriginal-designed empowerment pilot programs. The programs were designed to support Victorian Aboriginal people to strengthen mental health, social and emotional wellbeing, community connection, and to reduce psychological distress. A second aim was to explore participants' experiences of the programs, including the feasibility and acceptability of the evaluation component. Her Tribe ran for 16 weeks and His Tribe for 12 weeks. In total, 43 women and 26 men completed assessments at pre- and post-program completion, and 17 and 10, respectively, participated in yarning circles at the 6-month follow up. For both programs, there were significant increases in participants' access to personal strengths and resources, relationship-community-cultural strengths and resources, and decreases in psychological distress. These changes were associated with small to moderate effects that were maintained at the 6-month follow up. There was a significant increase in aerobic fitness for female but not male participants, and no significant changes in weight for either group. Participants described a range of benefits from the programs, including positive elements and areas for improvement. They also viewed the evaluation as feasible and acceptable, and the findings of value. The outcomes from both pilot programs provide evidence that Aboriginal-designed programs, with a focus on physical and cultural activities, can help to strengthen mental health and wellbeing, community connection, and reduce psychological distress in Victorian Aboriginal communities.
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ItemConcept Creep and Psychiatrization(FRONTIERS MEDIA SA, 2021-12-16)Some aspects of psychiatrization can be understood as forms of concept creep, the progressive expansion of concepts of harm. This article compares the two concepts and explores how concept creep sheds light on psychiatrization. We argue that although psychiatrization is in some respects a broader concept than concept creep, addressing institutional and societal dimensions of the expanding reach of psychiatry in addition to conceptual change, concept creep is broader in other respects, viewing the expansion of psychiatric concepts as examples of the broadening of a more extensive range of harm-related concepts. A concept creep perspective on psychiatrization clarifies the different forms of expansion it involves, the centrality of harm to it, its benefits as well as its costs, its variations across individuals and groups, and the drivers of psychiatrization in the general public and in fields beyond psychiatry.