Harnessing shared identities to mobilise resilient responses to the COVID-19 pandemic

Shared social identifications (family, community, nation, humanity) predict normative actions and psychological well-being, and can be invoked discursively by leaders to mobilise their followers. We illustrate the potential for harnessing shared identities to mobilise resilient public responses against COVID-19. Study 1 explored which patterns of social identification predicted protective behaviours (personal hygiene, physical distancing), prosocial actions (helping proximal and distal others), and psychological well-being (mental well-being, depressive symptoms, anxiety), among 560 UK adults surveyed during lockdown. Study 2 contrasted Prime Minister Ardern’s use of identity-based rhetoric to mobilise New Zealanders, with Prime Minister Johnson’s use of individualistic appeals to the UK public. Our findings suggest how political leaders might beneficially use social identities in communications about extreme events

GIUSEPPE LEO, "Ουσία μου". Passo dopo passo in un battito di ciglia

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Intergenerational transmission of worklessness: Evidence from the Millennium Cohort and the Longitudinal Study of Young People in England

This project investigated the extent of parental worklessness in families with young and teenage children, and determined how parental worklessness impacts on children’s cognitive ability, education attainment, behaviours, attitude to school, academic aspirations and experience of the transition from school to work. We found that parental worklessness was significantly associated with: • poorer academic attainment and behavioural adjustment of young children (at age 7) • poorer academic attainment (GCSE point scores) of young people (at Key Stage 4 (KS4)) • with being not in education, employment and training (NEET) and with being NEET for longer (months spent in NEET) in late adolescence. This result was obtained even after allowing for a number of other socio-economic risks facing these children and young people (e.g. low income, low parental education level). Though it must be stated that much of the association (but not all) between parental worklessness and these outcomes was attributable to these other risk factors facing workless families. Parental worklessness had no independent effect on a number of other outcomes, such as children’s wellbeing (not being happy at school, being bullied and bullying other children), feelings of lack of control, becoming a teen parent, and risky behaviour. This evidence provides limited support for a policy agenda targeted only at getting parents back into work. It was generally not parental worklessness per se that caused poorer outcomes in childhood and adolescence but rather the complex needs and numerous socio-economic risks faced by workless families. Our report cannot determine whether we should tackle the underlying sources of these risks (e.g. family poverty, poor parental education etc.) or deal directly with the consequences of these risks (e.g. poor achievement of young people at KS4; experience of NEET). What our research does clearly show is that policy needs to not only target getting parents back into work but also to address the other risks that these children and their families face

Reconciling social norms with personal interests: indigenous styles of identity formation among Pakistani youth

Research on identity formation has been conducted mostly in Western contexts. We extend and complement such research by exploring qualitatively the strategies and styles of identity formation employed by emerging adults in Pakistan. Whereas Western theories of identity formation often provide a negative view of normative orientation as “blind obedience” without exploring alternatives, our thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews with 12 Pakistani emerging adults suggests a much more complex interplay between personal interests and normative influences on identity formation. Participants described various ways of reconciling normative expectations (parental, religious, and cultural) with their personal interests, preferences, and explorations, when deciding about their careers, relationships, and values. In Pakistani culture, normative influences seem to play a more positive and flexible role in identity formation than is suggested by previous Western research

Nation-level moderators of the extent to which self-efficacy and relationship harmony predict students’ depression and life satisfaction: evidence from ten cultures

Previous two-nation comparisons have provided evidence that self-efficacy may be a protective factor against depression in individualist cultures, whereas relationship harmony may be a stronger protective factor in collectivist cultures. However, wider sampling and more specific measures of cultural difference are required to test these conclusions. Student ratings of depression and life satisfaction were surveyed in 10 samples drawn from nine nations. Culture-level individualism positively moderated the relationship of self-efficacy to low depression. However, culture-level collectivism negatively moderated the linkage of relationship harmony to depression. To better understand these effects, four separate nation-level predictors derived from dimensions of self-construal were employed. Effects of self-efficacy were strongest where cultural models of selfhood emphasized self-direction (vs. receptiveness to influence); effects of relationship harmony were strongest where cultural models of selfhood emphasized dependence on others (vs. self-reliance). These results illustrate the value of unpackaging the diffusely defined concept of individualism-collectivism

Societal emotional environments and cross-cultural differences in life satisfaction: A forty-nine country study

In this paper, we introduce the concept of ‘societal emotional environment’: the emotional climate of a society (operationalized as the degree to which positive and negative emotions are expressed in a society). Using data collected from 12,888 participants across 49 countries, we show how societal emotional environments vary across countries and cultural clusters, and we consider the potential importance of these differences for well-being. Multilevel analyses supported a ‘double-edged sword’ model of negative emotion expression, where expression of negative emotions predicted higher life satisfaction for the expresser but lower life satisfaction for society. In contrast, partial support was found for higher societal life satisfaction in positive societal emotional environments. Our study highlights the potential utility and importance of distinguishing between positive and negative emotion expression, and adopting both individual and societal perspectives in well-being research. Individual pathways to happiness may not necessarily promote the happiness of others.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Introduction to a culturally sensitive measure of well-being: Combining life satisfaction and interdependent happiness across 49 different cultures

How can one conclude that well-being is higher in country A than country B, when well-being is being measured according to the way people in country A think about well-being? We address this issue by proposing a new culturally sensitive method to comparing societal levels of well-being. We support our reasoning with data on life satisfaction and interdependent happiness focusing on individual and family, collected mostly from students, across forty-nine countries. We demonstrate that the relative idealization of the two types of well-being varies across cultural contexts and are associated with culturally different models of selfhood. Furthermore, we show that rankings of societal well-being based on life satisfaction tend to underestimate the contribution from interdependent happiness. We introduce a new culturally sensitive method for calculating societal well-being, and examine its construct validity by testing for associations with the experience of emotions and with individualism-collectivism. This new culturally sensitive approach represents a slight, yet important improvement in measuring well-being.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Mental Health of Parents and Life Satisfaction of Children: A Within-Family Analysis of Intergenerational Transmission of Well-Being

This paper addresses the extent to which there is an intergenerational transmission of mental health and subjective well-being within families. Specifically it asks whether parents’ own mental distress influences their child’s life satisfaction, and vice versa. Whilst the evidence on daily contagion of stress and strain between members of the same family is substantial, the evidence on the transmission between parental distress and children’s well-being over a longer period of time is sparse. We tested this idea by examining the within-family transmission of mental distress from parent to child’s life satisfaction, and vice versa, using rich longitudinal data on 1,175 British youths. Results show that parental distress at year t-1 is an important determinant of child’s life satisfaction in the current year. This is true for boys and girls, although boys do not appear to be affected by maternal distress levels. The results also indicated that the child’s own life satisfaction is related with their father’s distress levels in the following year, regardless of the gender of the child. Finally, we examined whether the underlying transmission correlation is due to shared social environment, empathic reactions, or transmission via parent-child interaction

Social norms, social identities and the COVID-19 pandemic:Theory and recommendations

Funding information: Economic and Social Research Council grant awarded to FGN: ES/V005383/1.Sustained mass behaviour change is needed to tackle the COVID‐19 pandemic, but many of the required changes run contrary to existing social norms (e.g., physical closeness with in‐group members). This paper explains how social norms and social identities are critical to explaining and changing public behaviour. Recommendations are presented for how to harness these social processes to maximise adherence to COVID‐19 public health guidance. Specifically, we recommend that public health messages clearly define who the target group is, are framed as identity‐affirming rather than identity‐contradictory, include complementary injunctive and descriptive social norm information, are delivered by in‐group members and that support is provided to enable the public to perform the requested behaviours.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe