Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences - Research Publications
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ItemSemantic Shifts in Mental Health-Related Concepts(Association for Computational Linguistics, 2023)The present study evaluates semantic shifts in mental health-related concepts in two diachronic corpora spanning 1970-2016, one academic and one general. It evaluates whether their meanings have broadened to encompass less severe phenomena and whether they have become more pathology related. It applies a recently proposed methodology (Baes et al., 2023) to examine whether words collocating with a sample of mental health concepts have become less emotionally intense and develops a new way to examine whether the concepts increasingly co-occur with pathology-related terms. In support of the first hypothesis, mental health-related concepts became associated with less emotionally intense language in the psychology corpus (addiction, anger, stress, worry) and in the general corpus (addiction, grief, stress, worry). In support of the second hypothesis, mental health-related concepts came to be more associated with pathology-related language in psychology (addiction, grief, stress, worry) and in the general corpus (grief, stress). Findings demonstrate that some mental health concepts have become normalized and/or pathologized, a conclusion with important social and cultural implications.
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ItemHimpathy and status: Attitudes to social hierarchy predict reactions to sexual harassment(PUBLIC LIBRARY SCIENCE, 2023-12-06)In three studies, we tested whether hierarchical preferences could explain differences in punishment recommendations for sexual harassment. Building on research that suggests punishment is used to regulate social hierarchies, we argue that individuals who are motivated to maintain existing hierarchies will treat male perpetrators of sexual harassment with greater leniency, especially when judging perpetrators of high social status. Conversely, we predict that egalitarians-who are motivated to reduce group-based hierarchies-will judge male perpetrators more harshly, especially those of high social status. Given competing theories in the existing literature, we make no predictions about how perpetrator status will affect punishment recommendations overall. Supporting our hypotheses, we found that individuals high on gender system justification and social dominance orientation recommended more lenient punishments to perpetrators. Moreover, an integrative data analysis uncovered an interaction between social dominance orientation and perpetrator status. This interaction was primarily driven by egalitarians, who provided more lenient punishment recommendations to low status perpetrators when compared to high status perpetrators. Contrary to our predictions, we did not find strong evidence that individuals high on social dominance orientation provided harsher judgements to low status perpetrators. Nor did we find strong evidence for a main effect of perpetrator status on punishment recommendations. Taken together, these findings suggest that people punish sexual harassment to bolster or attenuate power structures. This is particularly true of egalitarians, whose emphasis on social equality leads them to judge high status perpetrators of sexual harassment with particular severity.
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ItemAssociations between diet quality and anxiety and depressive disorders: A systematic review(Elsevier, 2023-12-01)Background: Emerging evidence suggests that a healthier diet is associated with a reduced risk for depressive symptoms. However, the relationships between diet quality and clinical depression and anxiety have not been established. This systematic review is the first to examine whole-of-diet associations in cohorts with diagnosed depression and/or anxiety disorders. Methods: Literature searches captured 44 studies reporting on diet quality (22 cross-sectional, 12 prospective, seven combining cross-sectional/longitudinal data) OR using a dietary intervention in adults with depression and/or anxiety diagnoses (3 RCTs). A best-evidence synthesis of 25 observational studies of higher methodological quality was conducted. Results: There was strong evidence that adherence to a Mediterranean diet was associated with lower depression incidence in prospective studies. Level of adherence to national dietary guidelines was not consistently associated with anxiety and depression. Studies which examined other dietary quality measures reported conflicting or limited evidence in relation to both anxiety and depression, with considerably fewer studies reported in anxiety. Some dietary interventions showed promising findings in relation to improvements in depression/anxiety outcomes, however, a range of methodological limitations warrant further consideration. Limitations: Heterogeneity across studies was high which limited the ability to compare findings and precluded meta-analysis. Conclusions: High-quality prospective studies generally support evidence that increased adherence to a Mediterranean diet may be a cost-effective and safe adjunct to existing therapies for clinical depression, which is supported by the findings of several dietary interventions.
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ItemDehumanization: Beyond the Intergroup to the Interpersonal(SAGE Publications, 2023)Over the past two decades, there has been a significant shift in how dehumanization is conceptualized and studied. This shift has broadened the construct from the blatant denial of humanness to groups to include more subtle dehumanization within people’s interpersonal relationships. In this article, we focus on conceptual and empirical advances in the study of dehumanization in interpersonal relationships, with a particular focus on dehumanizing behaviors. In the first section, we describe the concept of interpersonal dehumanization. In the second section, we review social cognitive and behavioral research into interpersonal dehumanization. Within this section, we place special emphasis on the conceptualization and measurement of dehumanizing behaviors. We then propose a conceptual model of interpersonal dehumanization to guide future research. While doing so, we provide a novel review and integration of cutting-edge research on interpersonal dehumanization.
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ItemScientific eminence and scientific hierarchy: bibliometric prediction of fellowship in the Australian Academy of Science(Springer, 2023)Research metrics are known to predict many markers of scientific eminence, but fellowship in learned academies has not been examined in this context. The present research used Scopus-based citation indices, including a composite index developed by Ioannidis et al., (PLoS Biol 14:e1002501, 2016, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.1002501) that improves cross-field comparison, to predict fellowship in the Australian Academy of Sciences (AAS). Based on ideas of a hierarchy of the sciences, the study also examined whether researchers from natural science fields were advantaged in achieving AAS fellowship relative to researchers from fields toward the social science end of the hierarchy. In a comprehensive sample of top global researchers, the composite index and its components all strongly differentiated Australian researchers who were elected as AAS fellows from those who were not. As predicted, when composite index scores were statistically controlled, researchers in physical and mathematical sciences were more likely to achieve fellow status than biological scientists, who were much more likely to achieve it than psychological, cognitive, and social scientists. Researchers in basic science fields also had an election advantage over those in more applied and technological fields. These findings suggest that recognition by learned academies may be predicted by citation indices, but may also be influenced by the perceived hardness, prestige, and purity of research fields.
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ItemIndividual differences in the expansiveness of mental disorder concepts: development and validation of concept breadth scales(BMC, 2023)Background: What people consider to be a mental disorder is likely to influence how they perceive others who are experiencing problems and whether they seek help for their own problems. However, no measure is available to assess individual differences in the expansiveness or breadth of concepts of mental disorder. Four studies aimed to develop and validate two such measures. The Concept Breadth-Vertical (CB-V) scale assesses variability in the severity threshold at which unusual behavior or experience is judged to reflect disorder, whereas the Concept Breadth-Horizontal (CB-H) scale assesses variability in the range of phenomena judged to be disorders. Methods: In a pilot study (N = 201) for the CB-V, participants read vignettes of varying severity for each of the 10 mental disorders, and rated whether the subject had a disorder. Study 1 (N = 502) used exploratory factor analyses to examine 10 CB-V items from the pilot study and 20 vignette-based items for constructing the CB-H. Study 2 (N = 298) employed confirmatory factor analysis to validate the scales’ structure and examined their convergent validity with a measure of harm concept breadth and their discriminant validity with measures of mental health literacy. Study 3 (N = 298) explored associations of the scales with other mental health variables, including stigma and help-seeking attitudes. Results: Study 1 supported the unifactorial structure of each item set, refined each set into a scale, and demonstrated acceptable reliabilities. Study 2 provided support for the scales’ convergent and discriminant validities. Study 3 showed that the scales were associated negatively with stigma, and positively with help-seeking attitudes and self-reported mental health problems. Studies 2 and 3 further indicated that younger and more politically liberal participants hold broader concepts of mental disorder. Conclusions: The new concept breadth scales are psychometrically sound measures of a promising new concept in the study of beliefs and attitudes about mental health. Potential future research directions are discussed.
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ItemHave the concepts of 'anxiety' and 'depression' been normalized or pathologized? A corpus study of historical semantic change(PUBLIC LIBRARY SCIENCE, 2023-06-29)Research on concept creep indicates that the meanings of some psychological concepts have broadened in recent decades. Some mental health-related concepts such as 'trauma', for example, have acquired more expansive meanings and come to refer to a wider range of events and experiences. 'Anxiety' and 'depression' may have undergone similar semantic inflation, driven by rising public attention and awareness. Critics have argued that everyday emotional experiences are increasingly pathologized, so that 'depression' and 'anxiety' have broadened to include sub-clinical experiences of sadness and worry. The possibility that these concepts have expanded to include less severe phenomena (vertical concept creep) was tested by examining changes in the emotional intensity of words in their vicinity (collocates) using two large historical text corpora, one academic and one general. The academic corpus contained >133 million words from psychology article abstracts published 1970-2018, and the general corpus (>500 million words) consisted of diverse text sources from the USA for the same period. We hypothesized that collocates of 'anxiety' and 'depression' would decline in average emotional severity over the study period. Contrary to prediction, the average severity of collocates for both words increased in both corpora, possibly due to growing clinical framing of the two concepts. The study findings therefore do not support a historical decline in the severity of 'anxiety' and 'depression' but do provide evidence for a rise in their pathologization.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableBroadened Concepts of Harm Appear Less Serious(SAGE PUBLICATIONS INC, 2023-01)Harm-related concepts have progressively broadened their meanings to include less severe phenomena, but the implications of this expansion are unclear. Across five studies involving 1,819 American participants recruited on MTurk or Prolific, we manipulated whether participants learned about marginal, prototypical (severe), or mixed examples of workplace bullying (Studies 1 and 3a), trauma (Studies 2 and 3b), or sexual harassment (Study 4). We hypothesized that exposure to marginal examples of a concept would lead participants to view the harm associated with it as less serious than those exposed to prototypical examples ( trivialization hypothesis). We also predicted that mixing marginal examples with prototypical examples would disproportionately reduce perceived seriousness ( threshold shift hypothesis). All studies supported the trivialization hypothesis, but threshold shift was not consistently supported. Our findings suggest that broadened concepts of harm may dilute the perceived severity and urgency of the harms they identify.
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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).