Help-Seeking Attitudes and Distress Disclosure Among Syrian Refugees in Germany

Many refugees experience a wide range of mental health problems, but typically use mental health services less often than settled residents. Practical constraints like limited access to mental health care and language barriers largely account for this discrepancy. However, little is known about the psychological aspects explaining this difference in mental health service usage, like attitudes toward psychological help-seeking and the disclosure of distress. The present study compares German residents’ and Syrian refugees’ attitudes toward seeking professional psychological help ( N = 384). Refugees reported more depressive symptoms and functional impairment than residents. Crucially, refugees also held more negative attitudes toward professional psychological help-seeking than residents. These group differences in attitudes were to a large part mediated by distress disclosure. We conclude that it is important to achieve a thorough understanding of how to address help-seeking attitudes and to encourage distress disclosure to promote treatment of mental health issues among many refugees.</jats:p

Abundance and scarcity: classical theories of money, bank balance sheets and business models, and the British restriction of 1797‐1818.

The thesis looks through the lens of bank balance sheet accounting to investigate the structural change in the British banking system between 1780 and 1832, and how classical quantity theorists of money attempted to respond to the ensuing financialisation of the wartime economy with its growing reliance on credit funded with paper-based instruments (the ‘Vansittart system’ of war finance). The thesis combines contributions to three separate fields to construct a holistic historical example of the challenges faced by monetary economists when ‘modelling’ financial innovation, credit growth, ‘fringe’ banking, and agent incentives – at a time of radical experimentation: the suspension of the 80-year-old gold standard (“the Restriction”). First, critical text analysis of the history of economics argues that the 1809-10 debate between Ricardo and Bosanquet at the peak of the credit boom, bifurcated classical theory into two timeless competing policy paradigms advocating the ‘Scarcity’ or ‘Abundance’ of money relative to exchange transactions. The competing hypotheses regarding the role of money and credit are identified and the rest of the thesis examines the archival evidence for each. Second, the core of the thesis contributes to the historical literature on banking in relation to money by reconstructing a taxonomy of bank business models, their relationships with the London inter-bank settlement system, and their responses to the Restriction - drawing on some 17,000 mostly new data points collected from the financial records of London and Country banks. The final section contributes to the economic history of money by constructing aggregated views of total bank liabilities from the firm-level data, scaled to recently available British GDP estimates. These are examined to establish (with hindsight) the relative merits and lacuna of the competing theoretical hypotheses postulated by political economists. It was the period of deleveraging after 1810 that revealed the lacuna of both paradigms

I belong but I’m still sad: Reminders of Facebook increase feelings of belonging but do not facilitate coping with sadness

One way in which people may cope with sadness is to seek positive social contact. We examined whether subtle reminders of Facebook increase positive mood and thus attenuate the interest in social activities that is typically enhanced by sad mood induction. Participants watched either a loss-related sad or neutral video and were afterwards presented with either a Facebook, positive (sun) or neutral (Word) icon. We then examined their mood and their desire to engage in social activities as well as their feeling of belonging. The presentation of the Facebook icon increased feelings of belonging, but it did not influence participants’ other responses to the sad video. Participants reported more negative mood and a greater desire to engage in social activities after the sad (vs. control) video regardless of the icon condition. The results suggest that the activation of thoughts about Facebook can enhance users’ feeling of belonging; however, this effect might not be sufficient to facilitate coping with loss-related sadness

The Joint Action Effect on Memory as a Social Phenomenon: The Role of Cued Attention and Psychological Distance

In contrast to individual tasks, a specific social setting is created when two partners work together on a task. How does such a social setting affect memory for taskrelated information? We addressed this issue in a distributed joint-action paradigm, where two team partners respond to different types of information within the same task. Previous work has shown that joint action in such a task enhances memory for items that are relevant to the partner’s task but not to the own task. By removing critical, non-social confounds, we wanted to pinpoint the social nature of this selective memory advantage. Specifically, we created joint task conditions in which participants were aware of the shared nature of the concurrent task but could not perceive sensory cues to the other’s responses. For a differentiated analysis of the social parameters, we also varied the distance between partners. We found that the joint action effect emerged even without sensory cues from the partner, and it declined with increasing distance between partners. These results support the notion that the joint-action effect on memory is in its core driven by the experience of social co-presence, and does not simply emerge as a by-product of partner-generated sensory cues.</p

Improving Attitudes Toward Psychotherapy in Residents and Syrian Refugees in Germany: An Interview Vignette Intervention Study

Peer reviewed: True Syrian refugees underutilize mental health services in Western receiving countries, which is partly attributable to negative attitudes toward seeking professional psychological help (APPH) and denial of the need for psychological help (DNPH). Interventions tailored to culture-specific characteristics of Syrian refugees are needed. We tested an intervention that disseminated information about the benefits of psychotherapy via ostensible interview vignettes to 205 German residents and 187 Syrian refugees residing in Germany. We used a 2 (group: residents vs. refugees) × 2 (source of information: ingroup vs. outgroup member) × 2 (therapy content: skill training vs. emotion regulation) × 2 (gender: women vs. men) between-participants design with the dependent variables APPH and DNPH. We measured adherence to masculine norms, support by religious faith, and distress disclosure as additional predictors. Refugees reported more negative APPH and higher DNPH than residents. Source of information and therapy content had no detectable effect. Men reported more negative APPH and higher DNPH than women. Adherence to masculine norms emerged as the strongest predictor of APPH. Masculine norms and support by religious faith partly explained differences between refugees and residents in APPH and DNPH. Exploratory post hoc analyses with nonintervention samples of 182 Syrian refugees and 202 residents from a similar study indicated that Syrian refugees who received an intervention (vs. no intervention) reported more positive APPH. No such difference was found for residents. Disseminating information about psychotherapy could positively impact APPH/DNPH in refugees but needs to be tailored to their sociocultural context. We outline recommendations for further research. </jats:p

Depressive and anxiety symptoms in refugees: Insights from classical test theory, item response theory and network analysis

Schlechter P, Wilkinson PO, Knausenberger J, et al. Depressive and anxiety symptoms in refugees: Insights from classical test theory, item response theory and network analysis. Clinical Psychology &amp; Psychotherapy. 2021;28(1):169-181.Screening tools developed for Western populations have produced heterogeneous prevalence estimates for depression and anxiety disorders among refugees. The use of these instruments assumes that psychopathological symptoms are manifested similarly across different cultural groups. Here, we scrutinized whether depressive and anxiety symptoms are manifested similarly between German residents and refugees in Germany. We tested measurement invariance, test information and specifics of symptom interrelations in 200 refugees and 202 German residents with classical test theory (CTT), item response theory (IRT) and network analysis. Participants completed the Patient Health Questionnaire regarding depressive and anxiety symptoms in either Arabic or German. Measurement invariance was only present to a certain extent. Questionnaires were most informative on different spectrums of the latent traits for the two groups. Network analysis demonstrated that symptom interrelations of depressive and anxiety symptoms differed across residents and refugees. This was especially true for core symptoms of common nosological systems, such as losing interest or feeling depressed. Surprisingly, traumatic events in the past were not central in refugees' anxiety networks. Core symptoms of nosological systems seem to be differently pronounced in refugees and residents, which has important implications for our understanding of mental health symptoms in refugees

Grazing lands in Sub-Saharan Africa and their potential role in climate change mitigation: What we do and don't know

In 2014, the USAID project ‘Grazing lands, livestock and climate resilient mitigation in Sub-Saharan Africa’ held two workshops, hosted by the Colorado State University, which brought together experts from around the world. Two reports resulted from these workshops, one an assessment of the state of the science, and the other an inventory of related activities in the region to date.. In this short communication we summarize the main points of the first report – The state of the science (Milne and Williams, 2015). A second report is in preparation