The Impact of Mindfulness and Perspective-Taking on Implicit Associations Toward the Elderly: a Relational Frame Theory Account

Just-in-Time Strategies to Reduce the Effect of Interviewer Bias During Trainee Recruitment

Bias impacts all aspects of medical trainee applications, from grades to narrative reviews. Interviews provide an avenue to become acquainted with applicants beyond their written application, but even the most egalitarian interviewers are subject to implicit biases, including those who hold marginalized identities themselves. Simply building awareness around implicit bias is inadequate to reduce the effect. Here, 5 evidence-informed strategies are presented that can be implemented by faculty on-the-spot to mitigate the impact of implicit bias during the short interview interaction: individuation, mindfulness, perspective taking, stereotype replacement, and counter-stereotypic imaging. These strategies can be used by individual interviewers as one component of a comprehensive plan including institutional changes to promote more equitable recruitment processes.

The effects of perspective taking primes on the social tuning of explicit and implicit views toward gender and race

The current research aims to investigate whether perspective taking influences social tuning, or the alignment of one's self-views, explicit attitudes, and/or implicit attitudes with those of an interaction partner. In six different experiments, participants believed they would interact with a partner to complete a task. Prior to this ostensible interaction, participants were given a perspective taking mindset prime, or not, and information about their ostensible interaction partners views. Participants then completed attitude measures related to the partner's perceived views. Experiments 1a, 1b, and 2 examined whether perspective taking with an ostensible interaction partner who endorses gender traditional (or non-traditional) views align their self-views with this partner, including implicit self-views (Experiment 2). Experiments 3-5 investigated whether perspective taking leads to social tuning for egalitarian racial attitudes, including when the partner's expectations of how others will be and when the participant learns their ostensible IAT score at the beginning of the session. We predicted perspective takers would be more likely to social tune their explicit and implicit attitudes to the attitudes of their interaction partner than non-perspective takers. Across all experiments, perspective takers were more likely to social tune their self-views and explicit attitudes than non-perspective takers. However, social tuning never occurred for implicit attitudes. Thus, future research is needed to understand why perspective taking does not influence the tuning of implicit attitudes, but other motivations, like affiliative and epistemic, do.

Using Relational Frame Theory to Examine Racial Prejudice: A Tool for Educators and an Appeal for Future Research

Canadian colleges and universities have begun to acknowledge systemic and institutionalized racism by developing equity statements and policies in support of diverse and accessible learning environments. To encourage these equitable statements and policies as actionable, analysis of racial bias and methods for reducing its occurrence are warranted. In this article, literature on relational frame theory in the context of racial prejudice is reviewed, including treatment approaches shown to be less effective and those that appear promising. The integration of a functional contextual approach into pedagogy is considered with an aim to better understand the origins of racial prejudice. Finally, recommendations on the examination of personal and sociocultural bias among educators and their students are provided.

Mindfulness and intergroup bias: A systematic review

People’s proclivity for favoring their ingroups over outgroups has negative consequences for individuals, groups, and societies. Social psychologists have explored a variety of techniques to reduce these intergroup biases. Emerging research suggests that mindfulness may be effective for this purpose. Mindfulness is defined as present-moment attention and awareness with an accepting attitude, and it is often cultivated through meditation. Our systematic review of the mindfulness-intergroup literature suggests that, across the heterogeneity of paradigms, mindfulness attenuates intergroup bias. Supporting this supposition, for all studies in the current review, regardless of operationalization of mindfulness (i.e., mindfulness-based intervention, brief mindfulness induction, expert meditators, dispositional mindfulness), the overall effect size was g = +.29 ( k-number of studies = 36; 95% CI [0.20, 0.39]; Z = 5.94, p < .0001), suggesting a small but significant effect of mindfulness on improved levels of intergroup bias. In the current work, we review the eligible studies and their findings in detail and conclude by discussing critical issues and implications for future research.

Associations Between Mental Health, Interoception, Psychological Flexibility, and Self-as-Context, as Predictors for Alexithymia: A Deep Artificial Neural Network Approach

Background: Alexithymia is a personality trait which is characterized by an inability to identify and describe conscious emotions of oneself and others.

Aim: The present study aimed to determine whether various measures of mental health, interoception, psychological flexibility, and self-as-context, predicted through linear associations alexithymia as an outcome. This also included relevant mediators and non-linear predictors identified for particular sub-groups of participants through cluster analyses of an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) output.

Methodology: Two hundred and thirty participants completed an online survey which included the following questionnaires: Toronto alexithymia scale; Acceptance and Action Questionnaire 2 (AQQII); Positive and Negative Affect Scale (PANAS-SF), Depression, Anxiety, and Stress Scale 21 (DAS21); Multidimensional Assessment of Interoceptive Awareness (MAIA); and the Self-as-Context (SAC) scale. A stepwise backwards linear regression and mediation analysis were performed, as well as a cluster analysis of the non-linear ANN upper hidden layer output.

Results: Higher levels of alexithymia were associated with increased psychological inflexibility, lower positive affect scores, and lower interoception for the subscales of “not distracting” and “attention regulation.” SAC mediated the relation between emotional regulation and total alexithymia. The ANNs accounted for more of the variance than the linear regressions, and were able to identify complex and varied patterns within the participant subgroupings.

Conclusion: The findings were discussed within the context of developing a SAC processed-based therapeutic model for alexithymia, where it is suggested that alexithymia is a complex and multi-faceted condition, which requires a similarly complex, and process-based approach to accurately diagnose and treat this condition.

Examining the effectiveness of brief interventions to strengthen a positive implicit relation between women and STEM across two timepoints

The current study assessed the impact of three brief interventions aimed at influencing implicit gender bias in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) fields. The reduction of this bias is a key consideration as it remains a major barrier to gender equality in STEM. The interventions (psychoeducation, exposure to positive counter-stereotypical exemplars and perspective-taking) were compared to a control group at two timepoints. Gender-STEM bias was assessed at the implicit level (via the Implicit Relational Assessment Procedure; IRAP) and the explicit level (via rating scales). Two hundred and ten adults (58.1% women) completed one of the four study conditions. Results indicated that implicit gender-STEM bias is malleable, at least in the short term. At Time 1, intervention groups showed higher levels of implicit pro-Women-STEM bias and lower levels of pro-Men-STEM bias than the Control group. Psychoeducation appeared most effective, followed by exposure to positive counter-stereotypical exemplars. Results from Time 2 presented a more complex picture of implicit bias change, as the control group exhibited an increased pro-Women-STEM bias that was unexpected. The implications of these findings are discussed in relation to refining the interventions, the malleability of gender-STEM bias and the measurement of implicit bias across contexts.

Addressing Racial Biases in Medicine: A Review of the Literature, Critique, and Recommendations

This article reviews the literature on racism in medicine in the United States and reflects on the persistent barriers to diminishing racial biases in the U.S. health care system. Espoused strategies for decreasing racial disparities and reducing racial biases among physicians are critiqued, and recommendations are offered. Those recommendations include increasing the number of minority students in medical school, using Xavier University in New Orleans, Louisiana, as the model for medical school preparation; revamping the teaching of cultural competence; ensuring the quality of non-clinical staff; and reducing the risk of burnout among medical providers.

Can Behavior Analysis Help Us Understand and Reduce Racism? A review of the Current Literature

Despite ongoing efforts to eradicate racism, it persists globally, negatively affecting education, mental health, community relations, and economic development. Every behavior analyst can, and should, contribute to the reduction of racism in some way. Unfortunately, little behavior-analytic research exists to guide us. This article proposes ways that members of our scientific community can learn about racism from a behavioral perspective, extend experimental analyses of prejudice, and intervene to reduce racism in varied settings. It describes both traditional behavior-analytic and functional-contextualist accounts of racism and summarizes the small amount of related empirical and applied research. The review suggests that combining traditional behavior-analytic methods with acceptance and commitment training techniques may attenuate racism more effectively. The article ends with a call to collaborate around this globally important issue-and to do more to reduce racism.

Mindfulness - The Missing Link in the Relationship Between Leader-Follower Strategic Optimism (Mis)match and Work Engagement

Assuming a followership perspective and building on implicit leadership theory, this study examines the mediating role of followers' mindfulness in the relationship between leader-follower strategic optimism (mis)match and work engagement. Specifically, we propose that a discrepancy between the respective levels of leaders' and followers' strategic optimism correlates with low levels of mindfulness and work engagement. A field study of 291 working professionals, using polynomial regression and response surface analysis, supports the (mis)match hypotheses. The results demonstrate that followers' mindfulness mediates the relationship between leaders' and followers' matching levels of strategic optimism (whether at high-high and low-low leader-follower strategic optimism conditions) and work engagement. These findings have important implications for training and the extent to which interventions based on personal resources, such as strategic optimism and therefore mindfulness, foster higher work engagement.