Linda Isbell

University of Massachusetts Amherst | UMass Amherst · Department of Psychology

The aim of this umbrella review is to summarize evidence on factors that influence help-seeking and service utilization for professional mental healthcare among young people ages 0-30. The CINAHL, Cochrane, Epistemonikos, MEDLINE, PsycINFO, PubMed, and Web of Science databases were searched in December 2023 for systematic reviews in English. The se...

Importance Much remains unknown about the extent of and factors that influence clinician-level variation in rates of admission from the emergency department (ED). In particular, emergency clinician risk tolerance is a potentially important attribute, but it is not well defined in terms of its association with the decision to admit. Objective To fu...

Objectives Patients with mental illness are less likely to receive the same physical healthcare as those without mental illness and are less likely to be treated in accordance with established guidelines. This study employed a randomized experiment to investigate the influence of comorbid depression on diagnostic accuracy. Methods Physicians were...

Background: Engaging with human emotions is an integral but poorly understood part of the work of emergency healthcare providers. Patient factors (e.g., irritable behavior; mental illness) can evoke strong emotions, and evidence suggests that these emotions can impact care quality and patient safety. Given that nurses play a critical role in provid...

Study objective: Patients with psychiatric conditions and/or substance use disorders (SUDs) frequently seek care in emergency departments (EDs), where providing care for these populations can involve considerable challenges. This study aimed to develop a comprehensive data-driven model of the complex challenges and unique dynamics associated with c...

This cross-sectional study analyzes responses to a survey about medical error outcomes completed by emergency department attending physicians and advanced practice clinicians.

Background As the COVID-19 pandemic began, frontline nurses experienced many emotions as they faced risks relevant to both patients (e.g., making errors resulting in patient harm) and themselves (e.g., becoming infected with COVID-19). Although emotions are often neglected in the patient safety literature, research in affective science suggests tha...

Stigmatizing attitudes toward children with psychopathology represent a barrier to treatment and well-being, yet almost no research has investigated what contributes to these attitudes. This study examines the effects of medication treatment and genetic etiology on stigmatizing attitudes toward a relatively new and controversial disorder–Disruptive...

The quiet ego-a personality construct characterized by empathy, inclusivity, non-defensiveness, and growth-mindedness in self-other relations-correlates positively with varied health markers. There is also emerging evidence that quiet-ego-based interventions may have a positive impact on health-related outcomes. However, no research has examined wh...

The quiet ego refers to a self-construal that is balanced and growth-oriented in its stance toward the self and others. It is conceptualized as representing the intersection of four characteristics: inclusive identity, perspective taking, detached awareness, and growth-mindedness. As a relatively new construct, the quiet ego has been validated in d...

Although research demonstrates significant stigma toward individuals with mental illness, the relative importance of observed behavior and a psychiatric diagnosis in eliciting stigma remains poorly understood. Using video vignettes, two experiments (ns = 195 and 749) examined the effect of irritable (vs. calm) behavior and the presence (vs. absence...

Psychological research consistently demonstrates that affect can play an important role in decision-making across a broad range of contexts. Despite this, the role of affect in clinical reasoning and medical decision-making has received relatively little attention. Integrating the affect, social cognition, and patient safety literatures can provide...

Study objective: Throughout the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, emergency physicians in the United States have faced unprecedented challenges, risks, and uncertainty while caring for patients in an already vulnerable healthcare system. As such, the pandemic has exacerbated high levels of negative emotions and burnout among emergency...

Objective: Risk aversion is a personality trait influential to decision making in medicine. Little is known about how emergency department (ED) clinicians differ in their attitudes toward risk taking. Methods: We conducted a cross-sectional survey of practicing ED clinicians (physicians and advanced practice clinicians [APCs]) in Massachusetts u...

The quiet ego refers to a self-identity that is balanced and growth-oriented in its stance toward the self and others. As a relatively new construct, its validity has been examined in domains related to balance, compassion, and self-control, it has not been examined in other domains that appear to have conceptual overlap such as emotional intellige...

Patient satisfaction has evolved into a standard measure for quality and value in health care. Given the importance of patient satisfaction to overall hospital quality measures, a growing literature has investigated a number of variables that affect satisfaction in the emergency department (ED). For instance, studies have demonstrated that certain...

Positive and negative affect are most frequently assessed using self‐report measures. Although consensus exists that both valence and arousal are key components of affect, commonly used measures diverge in how they account for these factors. This divergence reflects differences in whether positive and negative affect are viewed as a bipolar dimensi...

Background Emergency department (ED) physicians and nurses frequently interact with emotionally evocative patients, which can impact clinical decision-making and behaviour. This study introduces well-established methods from social psychology to investigate ED providers’ reported emotional experiences and engagement in their own recent patient enco...

Background Despite calls to study how healthcare providers’ emotions may impact patient safety, little research has addressed this topic. The current study aimed to develop a comprehensive understanding of emergency department (ED) providers’ emotional experiences, including what triggers their emotions, the perceived effects of emotions on clinica...

Control beliefs are widely acknowledged to play a critical role in self-regulation and well-being, but their impact on decisions to approach or avoid situations that vary in emotional valence remains unclear. We propose that two contradictory, yet equally intuitive, predictions can be made about the impact of control beliefs on emotional situation...

Research suggests that anger promotes global, abstract processing whereas sadness and fear promote local, concrete processing (see Schwarz & Clore, 2007 for a review). Contrary to a large and influential body of work suggesting that specific affective experiences are tethered to specific cognitive outcomes, the affect-as-cognitive-feedback account...

Two studies tested the affect-as-cognitive-feedback model, in which positive and negative affective states are not uniquely associated with particular processing styles, but rather serve as feedback about currently accessible processing styles. The studies extend existing work by investigating (a) both incidental and integral affect, (b) out-group...

Despite decades of research demonstrating a dedicated link between positive and negative affect and specific cognitive processes, not all research is consistent with this view. We present a new overarching theoretical account as an alternative – one that can simultaneously account for prior findings, generate new predictions, and encompass a wide r...

Despite decades of research demonstrating a dedicated link between positive and negative affect and specific cognitive processes, not all research is consistent with this view. We present a new overarching theoretical account as an alternative-one that can simultaneously account for prior findings, generate new predictions, and encompass a wide ran...

Past research has examined the relationship between religious beliefs and intergroup bias but has not investigated the relationship between specific religious practices and bias. The current work fills this gap by investigating differences in racial prejudice between individuals engaged in an active compassion-based meditation practice and those wh...

Two experiments investigated the impact of affect on the working self-concept. Following an affect induction, participants completed the Twenty Statements Test (TST) to assess their working self-concepts. Participants in predominantly happy and angry states used more abstract statements to describe themselves than did participants in predominantly...

Over the past three decades research has overwhelmingly supported the notion that positive affect promotes global, abstract, heuristic information processing whereas negative affect promotes local, detailed, and systematic processing. Yet despite the weight of the evidence, recent work suggests that such a direct relationship may be highly tenuous....

Research on meditation has examined many variables across a wide range of techniques. Research on loving-kindness meditation has investigated its impact on affective variables, but has not yet investigated its impact on cognition. The present study investigated the impact of loving-kindness meditation on an affective variable not yet examined in th...

Research indicates that affect influences whether people focus on categorical or behavioral information during impression formation. One explanation is that affect confers its value on whatever cognitive inclinations are most accessible in a given situation. Three studies tested this malleable mood effects hypothesis, predicting that happy moods sh...

In large classes, students' feelings of anonymity and interpersonal distance from the instructor can be particularly detrimental to those who struggle with course material. We tested a simple method for connecting with struggling students to improve their performance. We randomly divided students who scored 75% or lower on the first exam into 2 gro...

This paper explores the effects of emotional suppression toward astereotyped target as a function of the perceivers' prejudice. Heterosexual male participants watched a video of a gay couple with emotional suppression instructions or no instructions. Similar to the emotional regulation literature, low prejudice participants reported less positive e...

We designed a classroom activity to foster students' understanding of what schemas are and how they function. We used a video of the instructor as an infant to illustrate how schemas influence gender stereotyping. Before the video, we told students that the baby was either a boy or a girl. After the video, students rated whether the baby would grow...

This study investigated the extent to which women disregard inadmissible evidence in a simulated rape case as a function of when they receive a judge's global legal instructions concerning presumption of innocence, burden of proof, reasonable doubt, and inadmissible evidence. We hypothesized that participants would be more likely to disregard incri...

Two studies investigate manipulating implicit theories as a function of participants' self-theories. Women were primed with a malleable or fixed view of math intelligence before completing a math test. Study 1 utilized highly skilled participants and revealed that entity theorists experienced less anxiety when exposed to a malleable prime versus a...

INDIVIDUALS MAKE an astonishing number of decisions each day. They decide on mundane matters (what to wear, drink, and read), important matters (whether one has prepared enough for a test, whether to hire a person, and whether one is persuaded by an argument), and occasionally on life-altering matters (whom to marry, where to move, and if one shoul...

The effects of participants’ gender and propensity to sexually harass were examined in a sexual harassment case in which the gender of the harassers and victim were manipulated systematically. Male and female participants scoring either high or low on the Likelihood to Sexually Harass (LSH) scale (Pryor, 1987) reviewed an ostensibly real hostile wo...

Pictures can often facilitate the comprehension of a person's behavioral descriptions. However, this is not always the case. When the implications of several diVerent behaviors at various points in time must be combined to form an overall impression of someone, the eVect of pictures on this impression depends on how the behavioral descriptions are...

Political figures and events often elicit strong emotional responses in citizens. These responses have the power to impact judgments and information processing, as well as the types of information that individuals seek out. Recent examples of political events that have elicited strong emotional reactions are easily accessible. The fiasco in Florida...

Two experiments demonstrate that affect influences the extent to which individuals seek global versus specific target information when forming impressions. Experiment 1 relied on natural differences in individuals' moods and found that relatively happy participants were more likely than relatively unhappy ones to seek global before specific target...

Many students have beliefs about interpersonal relationships that are inconsistent with empirical research. For example, some students report that attractiveness is less important than personality when choosing romantic partners; however, evidence suggests the opposite (Sprecher & Regan, 2002). Our activity in which students wrote personal ads and...

Two experiments investigated the effects of mood on the use of global trait information in impression formation tasks. Participants in both experiments formed an impression of a target based on traits and a series of behaviors that were both consistent and inconsistent with the traits. In Experiment 1, participants in happy moods, relative to those...

Research on minimal groups demonstrates that arbitrarily creating 2 groups leads to the development of in-group favoritism. Experiments using the minimal groups paradigm show students how easily in-group biases can be created simply by categorizing others. This article describes an in-class activity that demonstrates the power of categorization. St...

I describe the goals, content, and format of an undergraduate course in political psychology. The purpose of this course is to teach students about the psychological factors that explain political behavior and increase students' political awareness, interest, and behavior. Multiple teaching methods and assignments engage students and help them to e...

This article examines the relationship between gender, hostile sexism, benevolent sexism and reactions to a seemingly innocuous genre of sexist humor, the dumb blonde joke. After hearing an audiotaped conversation in which two students swapped dumb blonde jokes, participants high in hostile sexism rated the jokes as more amusing and less offensive...

This article examines the relationship between gender, hostile sexism, benevolent sexism and reactions to a seemingly innocuous genre of sexist humor, the dumb blonde joke. After hearing an audiotaped conversation in which two students swapped dumb blonde jokes, participants high in hostile sexism rated the jokes as more amusing and less offensive...

It seems self-evident that political figures arouse passion and emotion in the electorate. Vivid examples can be found throughout all of political history. In 1864, Harper’s Weekly described Abraham Lincoln as a “monster”, a characterization that is clearly emotionally evocative (Jamieson, 1992). John F. Kennedy, the “Camelot” president, evoked fee...

Citizens and Politics: Perspectives from Political Psychology brings together some of the research on citizen decision making. It addresses the questions of citizen political competence from different political psychology perspectives. Some of the authors in this volume look to affect and emotions to determine how people reach political judgements,...

It is noted that the most active area of research and theory of social information processing that emerged in the past two decades concerns the cognitive determinants and consequences of affect and emotion. This chapter illustrates development of conceptualization that incorporates the implications of diverse phenomena's such as creativity, persuas...

Participants were induced to feel either happy or sad while reading an article that described a politician’s stand on issues. When participants were unmotivated to evaluate the candidate at the time they read the article, they evaluated him more favorably when they were happy than when they were not. However, when participants were either intrinsic...

Three experiments investigated the effects of participants' mood during exposure to target information on delayed judgments of the target. Participants were exposed to a mood induction immediately before they acquired information about a political candidate and then reported their evaluation of the candidate at a later time. Effects of mood on judg...