Social Incongruity Research Articles

Stress and Psychologic and Environmental Factors in Functional Dyspepsia

Patients with functional dyspepsia are a heterogeneous group in whom psychologic and environmental factors and stress may contribute to their reports of symptoms. There is no unique personality profile in patients with functional dyspepsia. Although they have more anxiety, neuroticism, and depression than healthy subjects, their personality scores are no different than other patients with chronic abdominal pain syndromes, be they organic or functional in nature. Social factors including older age, male gender, unmarried status, and social incongruity are associated with increased frequency and severity of symptoms but not health-care-seeking behavior. Childhood role models with abdominal pain and the tendency to perceive negative life events as having great impact on their lives may affect the coping skills of these patients. Although patients with functional dyspepsia react to acute experimental stress with gastric physiologic changes similar to healthy subjects, their visceral pain thresholds are lower, which may contribute to their reports of symptoms. Despite common beliefs, most environmental factors such as smoking, alcohol, coffee, or use of nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs are not important contributors to these patients' symptoms.

Psychosocial and childhood factors in essential dyspepsia. A case-control study.

A subgroup of patients with endoscopically diagnosed non-ulcer dyspepsia have no definite cause for their symptoms, termed essential dyspepsia; such patients have been considered to have 'nervous dyspepsia'. To determine whether social and environmental factors are of importance, both in childhood (before the onset of symptoms) and in adult life, 109 patients with essential dyspepsia and 109 randomly selected dyspepsia-free community controls (matched for age, sex, and one measure of social grade-suburb of residence) were studied. Socioeconomic status, marital status, childhood environment, family structure, and migration were measured. An increased risk of essential dyspepsia was associated with one aspect of social status incongruity; compared with controls, patients had a lower occupational status than their place of residence indicated (OR = 2.3; 95% CI, 1.5-3.5). There was a trend for patients to report an unhappy childhood (OR = 2.4; 95% CI, 0.9-6.7). Being unmarried, undergoing parental separation during childhood, the patient's age at parental separation, the number of siblings, birth order, country of birth, and years of residence were not significantly associated with essential dyspepsia. The importance of psychosocial and childhood factors in essential dyspepsia is probably small.

A REVIEW OF OBSERVATIONS ON CHRONIC GASTRIC ULCER PATIENTS IN AUSTRALIA

A study has been made of demographic and extragastric variables in a gastric ulcer population; a comparison has been made with a control community population matched for age, sex and social grade.There are 600–700 ulcer deaths annually in Australia, chiefly due to bleeding. Those who die of an ulcer have their lives shortened by 13 years on the average, and the yearly cost of ulcer disease in Australia is approximately $174,000,000.As has been observed previously, there is a predominance of females in the gastric ulcer population, with a male:female ratio not exceeding 1 at all ages; in other countries, the ratio is 2–3:1.Female ulcer patients take analgesics more commonly and male ulcer patients smoke more commonly and drink less commonly than controls. Gastric ulcer is not associated with any characteristic personality traits nor is it associated with emotional stress. Patients with gastric ulcer tend to occupy positions of lower social grade and show social incongruity. Ulcers in smokers tend to be situated in the lower third of the stomach, but alcohol and analgesic ingestion do not influence ulcer site.The complete healing of an ulcer favourably alters its course for at lest four years. If it has healed, smoking, analgesics and alcohol exert no adverse effect. Socially, ulcer patients tend to be single, and on diagnosis gastric ulcer is associated with considerable social disability; with medical or surgical treatment, this disability disappears six months later.With the aid of early endoscopy, intensive care ward supervision and planned surgery, the mortality from acute upper gastrointestinal haemorrhage due to ulcer has fallen, now being les than 5% overall and less than 1% in those less than 60 years of age.

Judgments of Assertive Behavior as a Function of Speech Loudness, Latency, Content, Gestures, Inflection, and Sex

Ninety-six undergraduate males and females judged 112 videotaped scenes of male-male, male-female, female-male, and female-female dyads involved in a line or restaurant scene in which the responses to confrontations varied systematically in voice loudness, latency to reply, speech content, gestures, and voice inflection. It was found that each of these variables substantially altered judgments along a subassertive-assertive-aggressive continuum. While the sex of the rater was never important, the sex of the stimulus dyad was always important. Females responding were rated higher than males, perhaps demonstrating that raters saw greater social incongruence for females to be reacting assertively than for males. Line scenes were always rated slightly higher than restaurant scenes, perhaps because standing is a more dominant posture than sitting.

The Black Urban Population of the Pre-Civil War South

T HE PRE-CIVIL WAR black population of the South was predominantly rural. Only one in forty blacks resided in an urban place of the slave states in 1790, and by 1860 this proportion had only slightly more than doubled. But this small group of Southern black urban dwellers has attracted a disproportionate share of scholarly interest because it provides a key to both the viability of the institution of slavery and the origins of the black urban ghetto. At the founding of the nation the slave states, with 40 percent of the nation's population, held only 20 percent of the urban population and by the outbreak of the Civil War those proportions were the same. But five cities had reached metropolitan status by 1860 and the slave states held over 70 urban places. In the fast-growing cities of Baltimore, New Orleans, St. Louis, Louisville, and Washington black workers learned the skills and trades that would prepare them for emancipation and slaves, as Frederick Douglass wrote,1 were almost free. The black population of all these major cities and of 40 percent of all urban places in the slave states, however, declined numerically in the decade before the Civil War. This decline has been interpreted as evidence of both the disintegration and the viability of slavery. Wade2 argues that in the urban environment the division of slave and free, black and white, could not be maintained. City life changed the relationship of slaves and masters to that of workers and employers, undermining the social distance established between blacks and whites under slavery.3 Slaves in the city, freer to congregate, with more opportunity for trained and less supervised jobs, and with greater access to the influence of free blacks were harder to control. The increasing costs of controlling slaves in the cities, the incongruity between slavery and urban employment and the increasing fear of slave rebellions led to a shift of slaves from urban to rural areas in an effort to maintain an institution undermined in the urban environment. Wade thus locates the cause of the urban decline of blacks in the response of slave owners to a threatened breakdown in institutionalized race relations. Goldin,4 and following her Fogel and Engerman,5 see the decline in urban slavery as the result of an economically rational shift of labor in response to differences in urban and rural supply and demand. Rather than urban slavery declining due to its social and economic incongruity, slaves were shifted from urban to rural areas because the demand for

Social Cost, Belief Incongruence, and Race—Experiments in Choice Behavior

Summary Seven studies investigated the relative importance of social cost, belief incongruence, and race in the preference for “types” of people or stooges. The Ss in five studies completed a “Person Preference Test.” The test required the Ss to state their preference for eight person types, composed of all possible variations of the three variables across six relationships varying in intimacy. The Ss ranked in order of preference the eight person types, and one study asked the Ss to indicate preference for each of all possible pairs. The results showed that complete congruency (same beliefs, race, and low social costs) is the most important factor. Race is particularly important for the most intimate relationship. Excluding a consideration of complete congruence, the relative importance of the variables were the following: social cost, belief incongruence, and race. Two laboratory studies tended to support the relative importance of social cost, in the preference for stooges differing in social cost, bel...