Kaitlin Mae Fernandez
Graduate Student, UC Berkeley Psychology
Emotional acceptance, suppression, and psychological health across cultures
Emotional acceptance is an emotion regulation strategy that involves not judging one's emotions or trying to change them. It has been linked to better psychological health outcomes in previous research. There is limited work as to how acceptance functions across cultures. In contrast, suppression is an emotion regulation strategy that involves the inhibition of one’s emotional expression. Suppression has typically been linked to worse psychological health outcomes. Notably, cross-cultural research findings regarding the relationship between suppression and psychological health have been mixed. My past work replicated past findings about the links between acceptance, suppression, and psychological health in a diverse student sample. We also found that participants of Asian and Latiné heritage reported lower acceptance and greater use of suppression than participants of European heritage. We plan to follow up on this work using an older, community-based sample and examining these patterns among Chinese, Mexican, and European Americans.
Darby Lowe
Graduate Student, UC Berkeley Psychology
Public stigma and models of addiction: Investigating effects through causal and prognostic beliefs
Substance use disorders (SUD) are the most prevalent and devastating mental health disorders. Public stigma exacerbates the harms associated with SUD, influencing outcomes such as reduced help-seeking and treatment engagement. One proposed strategy for reducing stigma is to influence one’s understanding of the cause and course of SUD through different models of addiction. For example, the brain disease model – emphasizing neurobiological and genetic mechanisms– is widely endorsed, though it remains unclear whether this model reduces stigma or reinforces it. This project will experimentally test the influence of the brain disease and other models on public stigma toward SUD, and whether changes in causal and prognostic beliefs help to explain this influence.
Gillian Ozawa
Graduate Student, UC Berkeley Psychology
Understanding the relationship between sleep, loneliness, and structural brain changes in older adults
As adults age, they may encounter fewer opportunities to engage in regular social activities. Loneliness has been shown to be an important factor in both physical and cognitive health - in aging adults, loneliness has been linked to greater dementia risk and reduced brain volume. The goal of this study is to examine how loneliness and objective sleep quality are intertwined, and to conduct pilot work to examine the conjoint influences of these variables on atrophy over time. Pinpointing sleep characteristics that most strongly influence loneliness could then point toward which intervention targets are most effective.
Deborah Qu
Graduate Student, UC Berkeley Psychology
Negative emotional responding is a function of situational context, personality, and their interactions
Personality shapes how people interpret situations and react emotionally. This research examines how Neuroticism and Agreeableness influence negative affect in different contexts. Neuroticism is thought to be associated with heightened sensitivity to threats that affect oneself, such as danger or personal harm, whereas Agreeableness may increase emotional responses to the suffering or distress of others. Thus, we hypothesize that for Neuroticism, stronger negative reactions will be found in self-relevant threatening situations, whereas for Agreeableness they will be found when others are suffering. We also investigate underlying socio-emotional processes, such as self-focused emotions (like fear) for Neuroticism, and other-directed emotions (like empathic pain) for Agreeableness.
Kyra Rodriguez
Graduate student, UC Berkeley Haas Micro Management of Organizations
To accommodate or not to accommodate: How preferences for hierarchy impact the implementation of disability accommodations
The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA, 1990) mandated “reasonable” workplace accommodations for people with disabilities in the US with the hopes of improving their success in the labor market. Yet, employment rates for people with disabilities have remained stagnant, suggesting that these accommodations are not being granted by organizational decision makers. How can we explain this resistance? This project will investigate whether greater preferences for social hierarchy relates to greater resistance to granting disability accommodations, and whether perceptions of reasonableness explain this effect. Our findings have important implications for improving policy enforcement and labor market outcomes for people with disabilities.