Unemployment, Employability and COVID19: How the Global Socioeconomic Shock Challenged Negative Perceptions Toward the Less Fortunate in the Australian Context.

Unemployed benefit recipients are stigmatized and generally perceived negatively in terms of their personality characteristics and employability. The COVID19 economic shock led to rapid public policy responses across the globe to lessen the impact of mass unemployment, potentially shifting community perceptions of individuals who are out of work and rely on government income support. We used a repeated cross-sections design to study change in stigma tied to unemployment and benefit receipt in a pre-existing pre-COVID19 sample ( = 260) and a sample collected during COVID19 pandemic ( = 670) by using a vignette-based experiment.

The impact of self-control training on neural responses following anger provocation.

Self-control training (SCT) is one way to enhance self-controlled behavior. We conducted a novel and exploratory functional magnetic resonance imaging experiment to examine how SCT affects neural responses in a situation that elicits a self-control response: anger provocation. Forty-five healthy young men and women completed two-weeks of SCT or a behavioral monitoring task and were then insulted during scanning.

The neural correlates of alcohol-related aggression.

Alcohol intoxication is implicated in approximately half of all violent crimes. Over the past several decades, numerous theories have been proposed to account for the influence of alcohol on aggression. Nearly all of these theories imply that altered functioning in the prefrontal cortex is a proximal cause.

Using Longitudinal Survey Data to Estimate Mental Health Related Transitions to a Disability Pension: Analysis of an Australian Household Panel Study.

Objective: This study examined the association between mental ill-health and subsequent receipt of a disability pension in Australia, and assessed how the strength of the association varied in relation to the duration between mental health measurement and reported disability pension receipt.

Methods: Eight thousand four hundred seventy-four working-age adults not receiving a disability pension at baseline were followed for up to 11 years; 349 transitioned onto a disability pension. Discrete-time survival analysis considered baseline and time-varying (12-month lagged) measures of mental ill-health.

No experimental evidence for visual prior entry of angry faces, even when feeling afraid.

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.

Time-of-day effects in implicit racial in-group preferences are likely selection effects, not circadian rhythms.

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.

Patterns of Welfare Attitudes in the Australian Population.

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).

Brief mindfulness induction reduces inattentional blindness.

Prior research has linked mindfulness to improvements in attention, and suggested that the effects of mindfulness are particularly pronounced when individuals are cognitively depleted or stressed. Yet, no studies have tested whether mindfulness improves declarative awareness of unexpected stimuli in goal-directed tasks. Participants (N=794) were either depleted (or not) and subsequently underwent a brief mindfulness induction (or not).

Temporal alcohol availability predicts first-time drunk driving, but not repeat offending.

Alcohol availability has been linked to drunk driving, but research has not examined whether this relationship is the same for first-time and repeat offenses. We examined the relationship between the business hours of alcohol outlets licensed to serve alcohol for on-premises consumption and misdemeanor-level (first offense) and felony-level drunk driving (repeat offense) charges in New York State in 2009. Longer outlet business hours were associated with more misdemeanor drunk driving charges, but were not associated with felony drunk driving charges.

Alcohol outlet business hours and violent crime in New York state.

Aims: Alcohol-related harm places a significant strain on victims, perpetrators and society. The present research reports on how licensed alcohol outlet business hours may influence the reported incidence of interpersonal violence and the associated burden of disease.

Methods: We examined the relationship between alcohol outlet business hours and violent crime in 2009 in New York State (excluding New York City).