Subjective socioeconomic status and agreement that health is determined by distal and proximal factors

This report examines whether a person's subjective view of their rank relative to others in society-subjective socioeconomic status (SES)-is systematically related to views on distal and proximal determinants of ill-health. This was tested using cross-sectional data from 28,718 respondents from 27 countries who took part in the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) in 2011. Adjusting for age and gender as well as income and education, mixed logistic regression models showed that subjective SES was negatively associated with the likelihood of agreeing with distal explanations for poor health (being poor or because of work/life environment) and positively associated with the likelihood of agreeing with health-related behaviours as a cause for poor health. Subjective SES was not related to agreement that genes influence health. These analyses introduce a social psychological factor into the lay understanding of health determinants and extend models of subjective status and attributional style to health explanations.

Perceived health inequalities: are the UK and US public aware of occupation-related health inequality, and do they wish to see it reduced?

BACKGROUND

One underexamined factor in the study of lay views of socioeconomic health inequalities is occupation-related health. Examining health by occupational social class has a long history in the UK but has been comparatively overlooked in US public health literatures, where the relationship between health and work has attended more to hazard exposure.

METHODS

Representative samples of the UK and US indicated the perceived and ideal lifespan of people working in "higher managerial/professional" and "routine" occupations. We examine perceptions of inequality and desires for equality across occupation groups as a function of country and key socio-demographic variables.

RESULTS

67.8% of UK and 53.7% of US participants identified that professionals live longer than routine workers. Multivariate models indicated that US participants were markedly less likely to be aware of occupation-related inequalities after controlling for age, gender, and education. Awareness was negatively related to age (in the US) and recent voting behaviours (both samples). Desiring equal life expectancy was less likely in the US sample, and less likely across both samples among older participants and those with lower levels of education.

CONCLUSION

Employing a novel approach to measuring perceived and ideal life expectancy inequality, this is the first study to examine perceptions of lifespan inequality by occupational groups. It reports widespread understanding of the occupation-related gradient in lifespan and a desire that these inequalities be eliminated in the UK, but considerably less awareness and desire for equality in the US. Greater tolerance for social status inequalities in the US than other similar countries appear to also extend to differences in life expectancy.

The beneficial effect of testing: an event-related potential study

The enhanced memory performance for items that are tested as compared to being restudied (the testing effect) is a frequently reported memory phenomenon. According to the episodic context account of the testing effect, this beneficial effect of testing is related to a process which reinstates the previously learnt episodic information. Few studies have explored the neural correlates of this effect at the time point when testing takes place, however. In this study, we utilized the ERP correlates of successful memory encoding to address this issue, hypothesizing that if the benefit of testing is due to retrieval-related processes at test then subsequent memory effects (SMEs) should resemble the ERP correlates of retrieval-based processing in their temporal and spatial characteristics. Participants were asked to learn Swahili-German word pairs before items were presented in either a testing or a restudy condition. Memory performance was assessed immediately and 1-day later with a cued recall task. Successfully recalling items at test increased the likelihood that items were remembered over time compared to items which were only restudied. An ERP subsequent memory contrast (later remembered vs. later forgotten tested items), which reflects the engagement of processes that ensure items are recallable the next day were topographically comparable with the ERP correlate of immediate recollection (immediately remembered vs. immediately forgotten tested items). This result shows that the processes which allow items to be more memorable over time share qualitatively similar neural correlates with the processes that relate to successful retrieval at test. This finding supports the notion that testing is more beneficial than restudying on memory performance over time because of its engagement of retrieval processes, such as the re-encoding of actively retrieved memory representations.

Control over recollection varies with context-type: ERP evidence from the exclusion task

The left-parietal ERP old/new effect—an index of recollection—is often larger for classes of item to-be-endorsed as old (targets) than to-be-rejected items (nontargets), and this has been interpreted as an index of selective retrieval. The question of interest here was whether selective retrieval would be more pronounced when targets are allocated according to distinct conceptual encoding tasks than when designated according to spatial location. Participants saw words on the left/right side of fixation and made a pleasantness or function judgment to each. Across test-blocks, target designation varied according to the kind of task judgment or the study location. Robust target old/new effects were observed for both classes of target designation but the nontarget amplitude was smaller when conceptual information was targeted. The current data indicate that the class of to-be-retrieved information determines the extent to which recollection can be controlled when all other factors are held constant.

Electrophysiologically Dissociating Episodic Preretrieval Processing

Contrasts between ERPs elicited by new items from tests with distinct episodic retrieval requirements index preretrieval processing. Preretrieval operations are thought to facilitate the recovery of task-relevant information because they have been shown to correlate with response accuracy in tasks in which prioritizing the retrieval of this information could be a useful strategy. This claim was tested here by contrasting new item ERPs from two retrieval tasks, each designed to explicitly require the recovery of a different kind of mnemonic information. New item ERPs differed from 400 msec poststimulus, but the distribution of these effects varied markedly, depending upon participants' response accuracy: A protracted posteriorly located effect was present for higher performing participants, whereas an anteriorly distributed effect occurred for lower performing participants. The magnitude of the posterior effect from 400 to 800 msec correlated with response accuracy, supporting the claim that preretrieval processes facilitate the recovery of task-relevant information. Additional contrasts between ERPs from these tasks and an old/new recognition task operating as a relative baseline revealed task-specific effects with nonoverlapping scalp topographies, in line with the assumption that these new item ERP effects reflect qualitatively distinct retrieval operations. Similarities in these effects were also used to reason about preretrieval processes related to the general requirement to recover contextual details. These insights, alongside the distinct pattern of effects for the two accuracy groups, reveal the multifarious nature of preretrieval processing while indicating that only some of these classes of operation are systematically related to response accuracy in recognition memory tasks.