It's lonely at the bottom (too): The effects of experienced powerlessness on social closeness and disengagement

Relationships Between Power, Communication About Work and Sex, and Emotion Expression: A Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count Analysis

Few experiences direct affect, behavior, and cognition as thoroughly as feelings of power and powerlessness. The present study examined 403 participants' narrated experiences feeling powerful (n = 196) or powerless (n = 207) using Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) analysis to identify social contexts that might explain the effects of power on emotion expression. Powerful narratives contained more frequent communication about work, whereas powerless narratives contained more frequent communication about sex. Moreover, powerless narratives conveyed greater negative emotionality. A parallel mediation analysis revealed that communication about work and sex helped to explain the association between self-reported feelings of power and expressions of negative emotionality. When participants felt powerful and communicated about work, they expressed lower negative emotionality; when participants felt powerless and communicated about sex, they expressed higher negative emotionality. Modest differences in emotional expression between women and men indicated that power research should report analyses including gender as a control variable. Findings provide direction to the next wave of power research, which should examine organizations and intimate relationships as contexts in which power dynamics are salient.

Double jeopardy: Exploring the moderating effect of educational mismatch in the relationship between work-family conflict and depressive symptoms among Korean working women

RATIONALE

Despite a growing body of empirical evidence on the detrimental effects of work-family conflict (WFC) on psychological health, little attention has been given to whether educational mismatch in the workplace, which refers to the perceived level of match between one's attained education and the required educational level for a position, may exacerbate these effects.

OBJECTIVE

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between WFC, educational mismatch, and depressive symptoms in Korean working women, with a particular focus on the potential moderating effects of educational mismatch on the association between WFC and depressive symptoms.

METHODS

The data utilized for this study were collected from 5174 married working women over five waves (16,610 person-observations) of the Korean Longitudinal Survey of Women and Families spanning 8 years between 2012 and 2020. Fixed effects (FE) models were estimated to account for unobserved individual-level heterogeneity.

RESULTS

FE estimates indicated that WFC is associated with an increase in depressive symptoms, even after accounting for unobserved confounding factors and time-varying covariates. The interaction model provides evidence for the moderating role of educational mismatch in the association between WFC and depressive symptoms. The positive association between WFC and depressive symptoms was more pronounced among those who perceive themselves as "overeducated." The estimated coefficient for the association was about 45% larger for those who perceive themselves as "overeducated" than their "well-matched" counterparts.

CONCLUSION

The study's findings suggest a robust link between WFC and depressive symptoms and further elaborate on how this association varies depending on educational mismatch. In Korea, where conservative gender role norms of female-caregiver ideology are still prevalent, WFC and educational mismatch can act as double jeopardy, exacerbating the mental health of working women.