BACKGROUND The unfair treatment of individuals with severe mental illness has been linked to poorer physical and mental health outcomes. Additionally, anticipation of discrimination may lead some individuals to avoid participation in particular life areas, leading to greater isolation and social marginalisation. This study aimed to establish the levels and clinical and socio-demographic associa...

This paper discusses social mechanisms of discrimination and reviews existing field experimental designs for their identification. We first explicate two social mechanisms proposed in the literature, animus-driven and statistical discrimination, to explain differential treatment based on ascriptive characteristics. We then present common approaches to study discrimination based on observational...

Current models of attention, typically claim that vision and audition are limited by a common attentional resource which means that visual performance should be adversely affected by a concurrent auditory task and vice versa. Here, we test this implication by measuring auditory (pitch) and visual (contrast) thresholds in conjunction with cross-modal secondary tasks and find that no such interfe...

Social stress theory proposes that stress resulting from one's social position in society leads to fewer coping resources, and subsequently causes an increase in mental health problems. Guided by this framework, we investigated whether the relationship between perceived discrimination and depressive symptoms was moderated by spousal social support in a sample of 487 African American heterosexua...

BACKGROUND Racial discrimination is a pervasive social problem in several advanced countries such as the U.S., U.K., and Australia. Public health research also indicates a range of associations between exposure to racial discrimination and negative health, particularly, mental health including depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). However, the direct negative health im...

Aging is commonly accompanied by a decline in cognitive functions such as learning and memory. In social insects, aging is tightly linked to social role. The honeybee (Apis mellifera L.) offers the unique opportunity to separate chronological age from social role. In the present paper, we tested whether chronological age, social role and the duration of performing this role affect tactile learn...

Environmental enrichment (E) can change neuronal structure, improves learning in various tasks and increases cerebral plasticity. However, no E effects were found in a test measuring social olfactory discrimination memory and, although they have been mainly measured in males, gender differences have been reported in other tests. The aims of the present study were to evaluate gender differential...

We used fMRI to examine the neural responses that occur during experiences of perceived racial discrimination. Previous neuroimaging studies have focused exclusively on the processes underlying racial bias from the perpetrator's perspective and have yet to examine the processes that occur when individuals are being discriminated against. To extend this work, we examined the neural correlates as...

The theory and measurement of the social determinants of health featured in a three-part seminar series on Social Determinants of Health, Law and Policy held at the Taubman Center for Public Policy, Brown University in February 2012. The seminar series represents a broader commitment to engage the public, health providers, researchers, and policy makers in dialogue for the purposes of identifyi...