Pathways linking adverse environments to emerging adults’ substance abuse and depressive symptoms: A prospective analysis of rural African American men

For African American emerging adult men, developmental challenges are evident in their escalating substance abuse and depressive symptoms; this is particularly true for men from low-resource communities. The present study tests a developmental model linking childhood adversity and contemporaneous contextual stressors to increases in emerging adults’ substance use and depressive symptoms, indirectly, via increases in defensive/hostile relational schemas and social developmental risk factors (e.g., risky peers and romantic partners, lack of involvement in school or work). We also advance exploratory hypotheses regarding DNA methylation in the oxytocin receptor gene (OXTR) as a moderator of the effects of stress on relational schemas. Hypotheses were tested with three waves of data from 505 rural African American men aged 19–25 years. Adverse childhood experiences predicted exposure to emerging adult contextual stressors. Contextual stressors forecast increases in defensive/hostile relational schemas, which increased social developmental risk factors. Social developmental risk factors proximally predicted increases in substance abuse and depressive symptoms. OXTR DNA methylation moderated the effects of contextual stressors on defensive/hostile relational schemas. Findings suggest that early exposures to stress carry forward to affect the development of social developmental risk factors in emerging adulthood, which place rural African American men at risk for increased substance abuse and depressive symptoms during the emerging adult years.

Maintaining the Relationship: Relational Schemas and Women’s Intent to Seek Couple Therapy

Women face more negative health outcomes than men due to relationship distress, but little is understood about why heterosexual women do or do not seek couple therapy. The present study addressed this gap by using the theory of planned behavior within an alternative structural equation modeling framework to examine the links between relational schemas and intention to seek couple therapy in a sample of heterosexual women ( N = 302) who were unhappy in their romantic relationships. Women who suppressed their own needs (i.e., self-silence), defined themselves in the context of important relationships (i.e., relational-interdependent self-construal), valued not asking for help (i.e., self-reliance), and preferred not to disclose their feelings (i.e., emotional control) were both less and more likely to intend to seek couple therapy. Results illustrate how relational schemas create conflicting messages for women about seeking couple therapy.

The perception of status: How we infer the status of others from their social relationships

This paper investigates how we infer the status of others from their social relationships. In a series of experimental studies, we test the effects of a social relationship's type and direction on the status judgments of others. We demonstrate empirically, possibly for the first time, a widely-assumed connection between network structure and perceptions of status; that is, that observers do infer the status positions of group members from their relationships. Moreover, we find that observers' status judgments vary with the direction and type of social relationship. We theorize that underlying this variance in status judgments are two relational schemas which differentially influence the processing of the observed social ties. Our finding that only the linear-ordering schema leads to status inferences provides an important scope condition to prior research on network cognition, and specifically on the perceptions of social status.