A qualitative investigation of the impact of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) on emergency physicians\u27 emotional experiences and coping strategies

Study objective Throughout the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, emergency physicians in the United States have faced unprecedented challenges, risks, and uncertainty while caring for patients in an already vulnerable healthcare system. As such, the pandemic has exacerbated high levels of negative emotions and burnout among emergency physicians, but little systematic qualitative work has documented these phenomena. The purpose of this qualitative investigation was to study emergency physicians’ emotional experiences in response to COVID-19 and the coping strategies that they employed to navigate the pandemic. Methods From September 2020 to February 2021, we conducted semistructured interviews with 26 emergency physicians recruited from 2 early COVID-19 epicenters: New York City and the Metro Boston region. Interviews, coding, and analyses were conducted using a grounded theory approach. Results Emergency physicians reported heightened anxiety, empathy, sadness, frustration, and anger during the pandemic. Physicians frequently attributed feelings of anxiety to medical uncertainty around the COVID-19 virus, personal risk of contracting the virus and transmitting it to family members, the emergency environment, and resource availability. Emergency physicians also discussed the emotional effects of policies prohibiting patients’ family members from entering the emergency department (ED), both on themselves and patients. Sources of physician anger and frustration included changing policies and rules, hospital leadership and administration, and pay cuts. Some physicians described an evolving, ongoing coping process in response to the pandemic, and most identified collective discussion and processing within the emergency medicine community as an effective coping strategy. Conclusions Our findings underscore the need to investigate the effects of physicians’ pandemic-related emotional stress and burnout on patient care. Evidence-based interventions to support emergency physicians in coping with pandemic-related trauma are needed

What Are You Scared Of? How Social Media News Consumption Impacts Voter Fear

In the ideal world, all voters create the perfect democracy by voting through rational choice: logically comparing the available candidates, and selecting the one they perceive to best promote the public good. However, this is not always the case, and the rise of social media news has brought new levels of fear and distrust into the polls. In this piece, I will be examining whether those who reported getting their news from social media are likely to vote for a politician because of their fears. I will be using data collected by the 2020/21 edition of the Chapman Survey of American Fears, a national survey with over 1,000 participants, all of voting age. There is a strong correlation between the two variables, with the interesting addition of a high volume of fear based voting amongst those who consume no social media news whatsoever. However, those who range from getting their news from social media “once or twice a month” to “everyday” fall into a pattern of increased voting based on fear. I will additionally be including data regarding the correlation between fearing corrupt government officials and viewership of social media news, because a significant amount of psychology and media research reveals fear mongering media tactics to be a powerful tool for swaying more moderate voters. As social media use continues to increase, it is incredibly relevant to examine its effect on voters’ increasing fear and distrust of the government

Sexist humour and social identity: The role of sexist humour in men’s ingroup cohesion, sexual harassment, rape proclivity and victim blame

Jokes have been recognised as ways in which negative attitudes and prejudice can be communicated and enacted in hidden ways (e.g., Allport 1954; Freud 2004 [1905]). In this paper, we review the existing literature on the functions and effects of sexist humour, using Martineau’s (1972) model on the social functions of humour as well as Tajfel and Turner’s (2004 [1986]) Social Identity Theory (SIT) and Turner et al.’s (1987) Self Categorisation Theory. Within these frameworks, we particularly focus on sex as an intergroup context and on the way sexist humour functions to a) enhance male ingroup cohesion (sexist humour as a predictor) b) serves as a form of sexual harassment (sexist humour as an outcome) and c) amplifies self-reported rape proclivity and victim blame (sexist humour as a moderator). The paper concludes by highlighting gaps in the existing literature and providing directions for future research

Negative Affective Language in Politics

How do the words we use to talk about politics influence political attitudes and evaluations? I focus specifically on negative affective language; words which individuals have pre-existing negative reactions towards. Considering the Affect Infusion Model (AIM), processing style influences how individuals use affect when making decisions. The impact of affective language depends upon the complexity of the decision. In simpler processing tasks, individuals will use affect as a heuristic. This causes a misattribution of generalized negative affect onto a political target, leading to harsher evaluations. When a decision is complex, affective language influences how new information is stored in memory, along with improving information recall and abstract thinking. For those who are exposed to negative affective language, negative evaluations of politicians persist more strongly in memory, while these evaluations fade away when affect is used as a heuristic

Are People Motivated to Experience Emotions for their Cognitive Impacts? The Motivational Implications of Cognitive Appraisal Theories of Emotion

I propose a novel framework for understanding why people want to feel different emotions. I argue that people may be motivated to experience emotions for the cognitive appraisals they are associated with. In an effort to lay the foundation for an appraisal-based model of emotional preferences, I drew upon research on cognitive appraisal theories of emotion, emotional preferences, and basic human motivation. I tested my proposed model by either measuring (Study 1) or manipulating (Studies 2-7) appraisals and measuring emotional preferences, using anger (Studies 1-6) and guilt (Study 7) as specific test cases. I predicted that uncertainty appraisals would lead participants to prefer to feel anger, an emotion associated with appraisals of certainty. I also predicted that low control appraisals would lead participants to prefer to feel guilt, an emotion associated with appraisals of personal control. First, using large surveys, I demonstrated that people who tend to be uncertain also tend to experience greater levels of anger (Study 1). I then found that experimental inductions of uncertainty led to stronger preferences for and experiences of anger (Study 4), particularly among those motivated to reduce uncertainty (Study 2) and who are aware of the association between anger and certainty (Study 3). Inducing a mindset of uncertainty tolerance, on the other hand, reduced anger experience (Study 5). Finally, people lacking a sense of control expressed a stronger preference for guilt (Study 7). These findings suggest that people are motivated to experience negative emotions when they can provide for their appraisal needs. I discuss the implications of these findings for research on cognitive appraisal theories of emotion and emotional preferences. In doing so, I aim to more fully integrate the affect-cognition and emotion regulation literatures

COGNITIVE MALLEABILITY: DOES DISGUST ACT AS A STOP SIGNAL ON CURRENTLY ACCESSIBLE COGNITIVE PROCESSING STYLES IN PERCEPTUAL AND CONCEPTUAL TASKS?

Much of the research on feeling and thought supports the notion of a fixed relationship between affect and cognition, specifically that particular affective experiences promote particular ways of thinking (i.e., information processing styles). Surprisingly, little is known about the relationship between disgust and cognition, and this dissertation sought to rectify this omission. The recently proposed Cognitive Malleability approach (Clore, et al., 2001; Huntsinger & Clore, 2007; Isbell, 2010; Isbell, Lair, & Rovenpor, 2013) calls the fixed nature of the affect-cognition relationship into question, and instead argues that affect confers value on whatever information processing style is currently dominant. This new approach suggests that contrary to the current view of a fixed relationship between affect and cognition, this relationship is instead highly malleable. This dissertation had three primary research goals: (1) to determine whether disgust interacts with initial cognitive processing styles, (2) to investigate if a malleable relationship between disgust and cognition exists for both basic cognition (perceptual tasks) and upper-level cognition (conceptual tasks), and (3) to determine if disgust and cognition interact in low-disgust relevant contexts (neutral stimuli, social judgments) and high-disgust relevant contexts (disgusting stimuli, moral judgments). Results reveal that disgust acts as a stop signal on currently dominant information processing styles to influence visual attention to emotional stimuli (Study 2), impression formation in a social context (Study 3), and impression formation in a moral context (Study 4). Results from Study 1, which investigated how disgust and initial processing styles interact to influence visual attention to neutral stimuli, were inconclusive

The State of Therapeutic Alliance Training in Clinical and Counseling Psychology Graduate Programs

The therapeutic alliance is an empirically-supported element of successful psychotherapy. However, the degree to which training programs incorporate alliance-centered components into their curricula and clinical practica remains unclear. The aims of this study were to (a) examine training programs’ awareness of alliance research; (b) determine the extent to which programs incorporate formal, evidence-based alliance training into their pedagogy; (c) determine whether there are differences in evidence-based alliance training practices between programs with different foci/terminal degrees and programs with different training models; and (d) cultivate an understanding of what training programs would consider ideal alliance training practices and the barriers that may interfere with them. Data derived from a quantitative survey of directors (or their designates) of APA-accredited clinical and counseling doctoral programs in the United States and Canada and a follow-up qualitative survey that examined participant reactions to the initial survey results. Generally, respondents indicated that their programs were aware of alliance research trends. However, respondents also largely indicated they do not incorporate systematic, evidence-based alliance training into their programs despite believing that such systematic elements would contribute to ideal alliance training practices. There were no statistically significant differences between graduate program degree type and training model in terms of awareness of alliance research or current alliance training practices. However, differences in views on gold-standard training emerged for training model; practitioner-scholar programs endorsed greater preferences for systematic alliance training relative to clinical scientist and scientist-practitioner programs. Qualitative responses to the findings provide additional context, and implications for training and future research directions are discussed

What Happens in Vegas Stays on TripAdvisor? A Theory and Technique to Understand Narrativity in Consumer Reviews

Many consumers base their purchase decisions on online consumer reviews. An overlooked feature of these texts is their narrativity: the extent to which they tell a story. The authors construct a new theory of narrativity to link the narrative content and discourse of consumer reviews to consumer behavior. They also develop from scratch a computerized technique that reliably determines the degree of narrativity of 190,461 verbatim, online consumer reviews and validate the automated text analysis with two controlled experiments. More transporting (i.e., engaging) and persuasive reviews have better developed characters and events as well as more emotionally changing genres and dramatic event orders. This interdisciplinary, multimethod research should help future researchers (1) predict how narrativity affects consumers’ narrative transportation and persuasion, (2) measure the narrativity of large digital corpora of textual data, and (3) understand how this important linguistic feature varies along a continuum