Social desirability effects in male prisoners

The Affective Paradox

Despite generally more challenging developmental, environmental, economic, health, and social contexts, minority populations in the United States often report a lower frequency of many negative affects. In some views, such findings reflect a reporting or response bias among minority groups. However, an alternate view suggests that reports of negative emotion differ because minorities do not consciously experience certain discrete emotions as frequently. A study of 1,364 women from six ethnic subpopulations tested this thesis using trait anger as an exemplar. As expected, linear regressions demonstrated that while social desirability explained some ethnic variance in anger reports, a measure of repressive coping explained additional variance in trait anger and eliminated ethnic effects; social desirability no longer predicted trait anger once repressive coping was controlled. Results are discussed in terms how of how developmentally oriented, emotion regulation theories may supplement reporting bias conceptualizations of affective differences across ethnic groups. Implications and directions for future research are given.

Stress versus discrete negative emotions in the prediction of physical complaints: Does predictive utility vary across ethnic groups?

Reports of stress and negative emotion are important predictors of health. However, whether discrete emotions or stress measures are more useful, whether they contribute independently to outcome, and whether they relate to health equally across ethnic groups remain unclear. In the current study, 207 US-born European American, US-born African American, Black English-speaking Caribbean, and Dominican men aged 40 years and older completed measures of somatic symptoms, trait emotions, and stress. Sadness and stress independently predicted symptom reports, even when examined concurrently, and with demographics controlled; trait anger did not predict symptoms. Moreover, the relations between trait emotions and symptoms varied across groups. Levels of sadness were associated with greater symptoms among US-born European American and Dominican men, but negatively associated among Black English-speaking Caribbean men, and the relations for anger also differed marginally across groups. The results underscore the importance of differentiating among discrete emotions and stress and considering ethnic interactions when examining reports of somatic symptomology. We suggest that the impact of psychological characteristics on health must be considered within cultural and ethnic contexts to be fully understood.

Patients misrepresenting their risk factors for AIDS

To determine the truthfulness of patients' and research subjects' self-reports of their sexual and drug use histories in studies of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) transmission and acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) risk factors, studies of or pertinent to lying about AIDS risk factors were extracted from MEDLINE and PSYCLIT. The present paper describes normal and pathological motives for misrepresenting risk factors, and reviews the literature on such underreporting. There is much evidence for lying about anal intercourse and intravenous drug use risk factors, implying that the estimates of risk for vaginal transmission of HIV (particularly in Pattern-I industrialized countries) have been inflated. Research on HIV/AIDS behavioural risk factors must include sophisticated methods for the assessment of self-report validity, such as the use of behavioural markers, improved lie scales and interview methods, and physical methods.

Socially desirable responding and self-reported HIV infection risk behaviors among intravenous drug users

This study examined the extent to which self-report of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) risk behaviors might depend upon socially desirable response tendencies, and whether socially desirable responding might serve as a confounding variable in the study of risk behaviors and HIV serostatus. The subjects were 2885 intravenous drug users participating in the ALIVE study in Baltimore, Maryland. Participants completed an interview and were tested for HIV serostatus. The interview covered HIV risk behaviors, and included established scales to measure 'self-deception' and 'impression management', two separate dimensions of socially desirable responding. Seven items for each scale were scored true/false, with a summary score used for analysis. Scores on self-deception and impression management were inversely related to self-reports of sharing injection equipment, injecting at shooting galleries, and injecting more than once a day. Neither self-deception nor impression management was associated with cocaine use. Self-reported receptive anal intercourse was associated inversely with self-deception but not with impression management. HIV serostatus was not associated with social desirability, and statistically controlling for social desirability had a negligible impact on the magnitude of associations between risk behaviors and HIV serostatus. The results indicate that measures of social desirability may be used to ascertain sensitive areas of inquiry in interviews of intravenous drug users.