Browsing by Author "Smith-Lovin, Lynn"

Extensive evidence demonstrates how mental illness symptomatology can inhibit perceptions of and actual performance on important tasks. However, receiving treatment from the medical establishment for such symptomatology requires diagnosis, whereby the patient becomes labeled and subject to the stereotypes connected to that label. Mental illness labeling is associated with a variety of negative outcomes including inhibited access to unemployment, housing, health insurance, and marriage and parenthood opportunities and can disrupt interpersonal relationships. However, the repercussions of mental illness labeling for one area of life have remained largely overlooked; that area is task performance. Adults spend a substantial portion of their lives at work engaged in group-based or individual level tasks. This dissertation explores external perceptions of mental illness in task groups and the role of self-internalization of stereotypes about mental illness in individual task performance through two experimental studies.

Previous research has revealed that, on average, task partners with a mental illness are stigmatized and subject to diminished status when they are identified to participants as having been hospitalized for general psychological problems for an extended period of time. Study 1 of this dissertation explores the stigma- and status-based attributions triggered by engaging with a partner in a mutual task who is identified as having a specific mental illness label: none, Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD), Major Depressive Disorder (MDD), Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), or schizophrenia.

Additionally, research has revealed that members of a group about which negative stereotypes exist may face a situational threat in a domain relevant task--stereotype threat. Race, gender, social class, age, and a variety of other sociodemographic attributes can trigger stereotype threat. However, little research has considered the potential for stereotype threat to emerge on the basis of mental illness labeling. Study 2 of this dissertation focusing on individual-level performance, exploring the potential for ADHD to trigger stereotype threat in test-taking situations.

Results from Study 1 suggest that the specific mental illness labels studied, presented devoid of symptomatology severity, do not trigger stigmatized attributions but may trigger some negative status attributions in the case of a task relevant diagnosis. (ADHD). Study 2 suggests that a task relevant diagnosis may also trigger stereotype threat in a test-taking situation, negatively impacting performance. Taken together, the results indicate that task relevance of one's mental illness label may be a driving factor in negative external and internal perceptions of mental illness.

Black girls who attend elite, predominantly white schools face a host of unique challenges and tasks in achieving a positive, resolved gendered-racial identity; they must learn to reconcile external and potentially negative definitions of Black girlhood while making their own meaning of being a young, Black woman. I take an intracategorical approach to understanding the development and experience of this intersectional identity in a predominantly white, elite independent school. This study highlights Black girls lived experience in this specific context to reveal how their multidimensional identities develop, shape and are shaped by their schools. First, I explore the sources on which the girls relied to better understand their Black girl identities. Second, I examine the relationship between school context and the girls’ romantic experiences and romantic self-concept. Last, I investigate whether and in what manner school settings influence second-generation, Black immigrant girls’ identity development. Using data collected from fifty semi-structured, narrative style interviews, I find that in elite, white school settings, (i) Black girls were the most influential figures in one another’s identity development process; (ii) their white school contexts limited Black girls’ romantic opportunities in ways that contributed to a negative romantic self-concept; and (iii) in elite, white school settings, second-generation Black immigrant girls developed hybrid identities that integrated their ethnic heritage, their experiences in America as Black girls, and their experiences of difference and desire for racial community at school.

Though families come in all shapes and sizes, many people recognize the birth of their first child as the start of their new family. The transition to parenthood that expectant parents experience has important implications for their future health and the health of their children. This dissertation investigates the experiences of new and expectant parents as they develop their new roles. The findings draw on publicly-available conversations from parenting forums. Investigative phenomenology, descriptive phenomenology, and quantitative analysis are used to explore three research questions: 1) How do people experience perinatal loss? 2) What are parents’ experiences of working with nurses when their infant is in a neonatal critical care unit? 3) What emotions do men experience on their journey to fatherhood? The findings of this dissertation indicate that the transition to parenthood is a time of ambiguity, stress, and potentially, great joy for new parents. During this transition, people take on new identities, perform new roles, experience a broad range of emotions, and develop new relationships. The impacts of this transition are lifelong, so support is vital to promoting the formation of healthy, well-adjusted families. For healthcare providers and researchers, there is a great deal that can be done to help new and expectant parents feel supported and respected. A few of the many potential tools providers and researchers can use include mindfulness, non-judgement, and therapeutic communication.

This study investigates how actor status, moral foundations theory and Schwartz values influence the moral judgments of guilt and punishment. I argue that to understand individual values consequences for actions, they must be considered within organizational values and larger institutional logics frameworks. Building off Zerubavel’s conception of a three level cognition (Zerubavel 1999), I argue for a tri level conception of values and morality in order to more fully understand how moral judgements work as well as the social context in which they are shaped. Using original research, I offer evidence of three levels of morality. First, I evaluate actor status on judgments of guilt and punishment. I then evaluate individual moral culture using Schwartz Values (Schwartz 2012; Vaisey and Miles 2014). I evaluate the impact of the organization on moral culture measure through the use of status hierarchies (Sauder, Lynn, and Podolny 2012). Finally, I evaluate broader cultural morality using Moral Foundations Theory (Graham et al. 2016; Kesebir and Haidt 2010). Taken together, these three levels of morality present a more ecologically valid understanding of the ways in which moral culture works from the individual, through the meso-social level and to the broader culture. I demonstrate the complex ways in which moral judgments are influenced by universal concerns, organizational influences and individual characteristics. I find that moral foundations theory conceptions of harm does not predict judgments of guilt and punishment but that Schwartz Values do influence these moral judgments. I also find that it is the actor status that most strongly predicts the outcomes of guilt and punishment. The research provides a foundation for future research of how actor status influences moral judgments of guilt and punishment beyond the limited moral community of the current study.

Affect Control Theory (ACT) conceives of affective sentiments as shared

meanings among individuals within a single culture. Recognizing the theory's potential

to explain cultural differences and behavior patterns, many researchers aim to test and

apply ACT's insights to within- and across-culture analysis. The growth of the theory's

popularity necessitates a review and exposition of the theory's fundamental

methodological assumptions and its causal mechanism, deflection. Using data from the

2003 Indiana EPA dictionary, I map the distribution of fundamental U.S. sentiments in

EPA space, define two new conceptions of deflection, map the universe of event

currently measureable deflections, and discuss the ramifications of these findings for

past and future research.

I critique ACT's operationalization of "shared meaning" as mean point estimates

calculated from individuals' numeric ratings on semantic differential scales. Past

research attributes variation in concept ratings to two sources: unsystematic error in the

measurement tool and imperfect cultural inculcation among respondents. By taking a

concept-focused approach, I show that variation between respondents is structured by

the institutional affiliation of identity concepts and concept labels' word difficulty. This

pattern exists even when controlling for individual-level characteristics, the traditionally

ascribed reason for variation in concept ratings.

I replicate a well-known ACT study that found support for the dynamic behavior

redefinition hypothesis and did not find support for ACT's redefinition hypothesis. I

make the design more robust and test both the original findings and my claims about

the role of institutions in ACT. I find support for the dynamic behavior hypothesis,

partial support for the ACT hypothesis, and support for the claim that individuals

depend on institutional information inherent in identity meanings.

Sociologists have for long explored how identities, the labels or categories people employ to define themselves and others, affect a number of processes. In this dissertation, I conduct three studies that deal with different aspects of identity and identity-related processes.

Chapter 2 deals with stigmatization and identity restoration after a wrongdoing. I investigate whether prosociality (i.e., helping others at a cost to oneself) can mitigate negative perceptions of a moral transgressor. I utilize affect control theory and its impression formation principles to derive hypotheses about how perceptions of the moral transgressor will change according to levels of future prosociality and perceptions of the goodness-badness and powerfulness-powerlessness of prosociality beneficiaries. I show prosociality positively can restore positive perceptions of the protagonist, depending on who benefits from prosociality. Benefitting people perceived as good has more of a restorative effect compared to benefitting people perceived as weak. Results suggest prosocial behaviors lead to positive perceptions to the extent that they benefit those seen as deserving the benefit.

Chapter 3 addresses the problem of identity structures by explicitly conceptualizing them as multilayer networks of interrelated identities. Using network analysis techniques, I map identity structures and investigate which (if any) elements lie at the center of the structure. In addition, investigate the claim that values, abstract ideals that guide action, connect identities from different domains. I show country citizenship emerges as the most central node in the between-nations network. Other nodes act as intermediate hubs, connecting domain-specific regions (e.g., family or occupation) with the rest of the network. Values reliably occupy a peripheral position in the observed networks.

Chapter 4 investigates political belief systems and their organization in European countries. I employ Belief Network Analysis (BNA), a recently developed method in the sociology of culture (Boutyline and Vaisey 2017), to identify central elements in political belief systems across Europe. In its first application, BNA showed political ideology lies at the center of a network of political beliefs in the United States. I examine whether a similar pattern is observed in European political belief systems. Contrary to the U.S. case, I do not find political ideology lies at the center of the observed structures. I discuss possible factors driving this finding as well as a number of future directions that could shed light on these contradictory results.

This dissertation aims to improve our understanding of identity structures and processes. The study in Chapter 2 informs how identity processes influence moral judgments and stigmatization. The study in Chapter 3 is an initial step of a research program that leverages the strengths of the networks approach to understand identity structures. The study of political beliefs in Chapter 4 sheds light on identity meanings attached (or not) to the ideological identity across cultural contexts.

This dissertation investigates the reciprocal relationship between micro‐levelbeliefs and behaviors involving identity categories and macro‐level features of social structure. Chapters 2 and 3 explore how social psychological processes intersect with persisting network exchange structures or environmental shifts to shape the beliefs or behaviors of embedded actors. Chapter 2 uses original survey data to show how beliefs about occupations shifted shortly after the Covid‐19 pandemic began, and finds these belief changes persist into the following year for occupations made salient as the pandemic began. Chapter 3 presents a novel experiment that assigned participants to exchange networks with different structures and identity compositions. The findings show that (a) persisting network arrangements effect pro‐social behaviors in a similar way regardless of whether the networks contain actors with homogeneous or heterogeneous social identities, and that (b) interacting with dissimilar others over an extended period of time increases an actor’s trust behavior toward unmet members of the out‐group identity. Chapter 4 extends insights from the first two. The results of an agent‐based computational experiment show that initial network arrangements can enable transitive tie formation between dissimilar others – shaping the macrostructure of the network and emergence of homophily, not merely the beliefs and behaviors of the actors within them.

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Gender and racial stereotypes are a pervasive aspect of social life arising from the consolidation of resources, statuses, and social roles and identities at the population level. They are widely shared group-level associations that influence how we perceive ourselves and others. Understanding how stereotypes influence the impressions we form about others, however, requires understanding how the association between statuses such as gender or race and the other identities we occupy influences impressions. This dissertation examines this process in three studies. In Studies 1 and 2, I model how people react to events using affect control theory’s impression change methodology. I estimate models using event stimuli collected in 1978 and 2010. I find that stereotypically female and male identities have affective profiles that influence how we form impressions. Affect control theory is best able to explain events involving identities that respondents perceived as associated with both genders. Study 3 analyzes perceptions of aggression among adolescents using longitudinal network data. I find (1) that the association between aggression and race grew as Black friend groups grew more homogeneous, (2) that both Black and White students held racialized status meanings, (3) that within-group similarities and between-group differences with respect to perceptions and behaviors grew over time, and (4) that Blacks were more likely to be identified as aggressive after controlling for self-perceptions of aggressiveness, violent behaviors, and peer perceptions of relational and social aggression. Combined, these studies suggest that the association between cultural meanings of goodness, potency, and aggression and statuses such as gender and race are mediated by identities.

In this dissertation, I present a set of studies that contribute to our understanding of the effects of uncertainty on social understanding and interaction. In chapter 2, I present a meaning measurement strategy that captures two types of uncertainty on two levels of analysis: that which exists within people and that which exists between them. I test this method by using it to measure meanings for 140 social identities and behaviors in an online survey. My results show that uncertainty within people is patterned differently and so needs to be measured separately than uncertainty within them. Additionally, I show that in general there is broad cultural consensus in within-person uncertainty. In chapter 3, I study the outcomes of conversations that take place in uncertain contexts. I ask to what extent subjective experiences of political conversation—people’s perceptions of their influence—align with the influence they actually have. I use data from two field experiments in which respondents were asked to discuss a political issue with an anonymous partner using a messaging app. I find that people’s subjective estimates of their conversation influence are not related to the influence they actually had. Instead, perceptions of influence are determined by political knowledge and ideology: people who know more about politics and who are more ideologically extreme perceive less influence in political conversation, though their actual influence is the same. These findings suggest that conversation outcomes are subject to substantial uncertainty and respondents “fill in the gaps” using general expectations about the utility of political engagement: expectations that may be affected by political knowledge.