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The skin is the first line of defense to cutaneous microbes and viruses, and epidermal keratinocytes play a critical role in preventing infection by viruses and pathogens through activation of the type I interferon (IFN) response. Using RNAseq analysis, here we report that the conditional deletion of C/EBPβ transcription factor in mouse epidermis (CKOβ mice) resulted in the upregulation of IFNβ and numerous keratinocyte interferon-stimulated genes (ISGs). The expression of cytosolic pattern recognition receptors (cPRRs), that recognize viral RNA and DNA, were significantly increased, and enriched in the RNAseq data set. cPRRs stimulate a type I IFN response that can trigger cell death to eliminate infected cells. To determine if the observed increases in cPRRs had functional consequences, we transfected CKOβ primary keratinocytes with the pathogen and viral mimics poly(I:C) (dsRNA) or poly(dA:dT) (synthetic B-DNA) that directly activate PRRs. Transfected CKOβ primary keratinocytes displayed an amplified type I IFN response which was accompanied by increased activation of IRF3, enhanced ISG expression, enhanced activation of caspase-8, caspase-3 and increased apoptosis. Our results identify C/EBPβ as a critical repressor of the keratinocyte type I IFN response, and demonstrates that the loss of C/EBPβ primes keratinocytes to the activation of cytosolic PRRs by pathogen RNA and DNA to induce cell death mediated by caspase-8 and caspase-3.

Stimulated by social scientists' and especially social psychologists' contributions during World War II, as well as by America's post-war economic and population growth, the period from 1945 to 1970 was widely viewed as a “Golden Age” for American social science. Interdisciplinary social psychology arguably was in the vanguard of these developments. Progress since then have been variable and in some ways negative for social psychology, not only as an interdisciplinary field, but also within its parent disciplines of psychology and especially sociology, where social psychology could plausibly become extinct within twenty-five years. The decline of social psychology as a field and a broad influence on the social sciences, society, and public policy has coincided with a rise of economics to an analogous vanguard position. Understanding the reasons for and implications of these trends has been limited, with a focus on analyses of developments within particular disciplines. However, developments across the social sciences, and society more broadly, are equally or more important to understanding these trends. Future prospects also depend heavily on these broader societal forces, but the inertial tendencies of trajectories since 1970 within and between social science disciplines and fields will necessarily play a major role. The twenty-first century offers the prospect of renewed importance of social psychology in a more interdisciplinary and integrated set of social and policy sciences, if social psychologists and the parent disciplines of sociology and psychology are prepared to capitalize on and take leadership of emerging opportunities.

Previous research has shown that involuntary job loss may have negative health consequences, but existing analyses have not adequately adjusted for health selection or other confounding factors that could reveal the association to be spurious. Using two large, population-based longitudinal samples of U.S. workers from the Americans' Changing Lives Study and the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, this analysis goes further by using respondents' self-reports of the reasons for job loss and information about the timing of job losses and acute negative health shocks to distinguish health-related job losses from other involuntary job losses. Results suggest that even after adjustment for numerous social background characteristics and baseline health, involuntary job loss is associated with significantly poorer overall self-rated health and more depressive symptoms. More nuanced analyses reveal that among involuntary job losers, those who lose their jobs for health-related reasons have, not surprisingly, the most precipitous declines in health. Job losses for other reasons have substantive and statistically significant effects on depressive symptoms, while effects on self-rated poor health are relatively small.

It has been hypothesized that exposure to stress and negative life events is related to poor health outcomes, and that differential exposure to stress plays a role in socioeconomic disparities in health. Data from three waves of the Americans' Changing Lives study (n = 3,617) were analyzed to investigate prospectively the relationship among socioeconomic indicators, five measures of stress/negative life events, and the health outcomes of mortality, functional limitations, and self-rated health. The results revealed that (1) life events and other types of stressors are clearly related to socioeconomic position; (2) a count of negative lifetime events was positively associated with mortality; (3) a higher score on a financial stress scale was predictive of severe/moderate functional limitations and fair/poor self-rated health at wave 3; and (4) a higher score on a parental stress scale was predictive of fair/poor self-rated health at wave 3. The negative effects of low income on functional limitations attenuated to insignificance when waves 1 and 2 stress/life event measures were controlled for, but other socioeconomic disparities in health change remained sizable and significant when adjusted for exposure to stressors. The results support the hypothesis that differential exposure to stress and negative life events is one of many ways in which socioeconomic inequalities in health are produced in society.

Research and theory increasingly suggest that attendance at religious services is protective against premature mortality. However, prior studies are limited and do not extensively explore potential explanations for the relationship, especially in terms of religious beliefs and behaviors associated with service attendance. This study estimates the impact of service attendance on mortality in a national probability sample and provides the most extensive empirical examination of potential explanations. Individuals who report attending religious services once a month or more (just over 50 percent of the population) have a 30–35 percent reduced risk of death over a 7.5 year follow-up period after adjusting for potential confounding factors. Consistent with prior research, 20–30 percent of this effect may be explained by better health behaviors (especially physical activity) among regular service attendees. Surprisingly, other religious beliefs and behaviors do not explain, and often tend to suppress, the association between service attendance and mortality.

Speech-language pathologists (SLPs) are frequently called to serve children with sensory impairments. Although a great deal of literature will support SLPs in providing services to children with hearing impairments, there is significantly less data concerning communication development in the child with visual impairments or deafblindness. As such, SLPs may be poorly prepared to perform evaluative, program planning, and intervention activities with this population. Survey methodology was used to reveal striking differences in the preparation and competence of SLPs regarding various types of sensory impairment. Recommendations for changes in personnel preparation are also discussed, as are implications for future research.

Previous research has demonstrated that mothers and fathers interact differently with their children and these interactions have important consequences for children's social development. The present study examines gender differences in parent-child interactions and the similarity of these patterns in France, Germany, and Italy. Samples in these countries were used because within Western societies they represent differing cultural expectations concerning the behavior of men and women. Parent-child dyads interacting on playgrounds were observed for affection, play, vocalization, showing and sharing, aggression, discipline, caregiving, soothing, and controlling behaviors. Gender and country differences were found. French and Italian fathers engaged in more play than mothers, but the opposite was found in Germany. French children showed and shared more than did the other children. Overall, French and Italian parents and children were more interactive than were German dyads. Although gender generally influences parent and child behaviors, culture modifies the way that these differences are displayed.

The development of social epidemiology and medical sociology over the last half of the 20th century, in which Leo Reeder played a central role, transformed scientific and popular understanding of the nature and causes of physical health and illness. Viewed in the early 1950s as shaped almost entirely by biological processes and medical care, physical health and illness are now understood to be as much or more a function of social, psychological, and behavioral factors. Utilizing a stress and adaptation conceptual framework, social epidemiology has identified a broad range of psychosocial risk factors for health, most notably: (1) social relationships and support; (2) acute or event-based stress; (3) chronic stress in work and life; and (4) psychological dispositions such as anger/hostility, lack of self-efficacy/control, and negative affect/hopelessness/pessimism, with new risk factors continuing to be identified. However, proliferation of risk factors must be balanced by conceptual integration and causal understanding of the relationships among them, their causes, and consequences. One source of such integration and understanding has been the rediscovery of large and persistent socioeconomic and racial-ethnic disparities in health. Socioeconomic position and race/ethnicity shape individuals' exposure to and experience of virtually all known psychosocial, and well as many environmental and biomedical, risk factors, and these risk factors help to explain the size and persistence of social disparities in health. Improving the socioeconomic position of a broad range of disadvantaged socioeconomic and racial-ethnic strata constitutes a major avenue for reducing exposure to and experience of deleterious risk factors for health, and hence for improving the health of these groups and the overall population. This in turn requires better understanding of the macrosocial forces that influence the socioeconomic position of individuals.

Despite considerable evidence documenting a strong and persistent relationship between socioeconomic position and mortality, recent research suggests that this association may be weaker among women. In our examination of gender differences in the socioeconomic gradient in mortality, we argue that this inconsistency arises from the failure to consider the ways in which gender is a fundamental constituent of socioeconomic position. The data used are from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. Respondents, including all household heads and their partners, aged 29 years and older in 1972 (N = 5,665; 56% female), were followed until 1991, death, or attrition. Discrete time event history analysis was used to examine the predictors of death between 1972 and 1991. Of the key socioeconomic predictors, years of education was measured at baseline, while earned income was a time-varying covariate. We find no gender differences in the effect of respondents' own socioeconomic positions on their mortality risk. However, increasing spousal income raises men's odds of dying, while the opposite is true for women. Our results raise questions about the prevailing view that the socioeconomic gradient in mortality is weaker among women. Moreover, gender differences in the effects of spousal earnings on mortality risk suggest that their labor market rewards have fundamentally different meanings for women and men.

Much prior research in social psychology indicates that in many domains of social life, individuals' well-being improves in the latter half of the life course. The reason for this pattern is not well understood, however. We argue that objective changes in family composition and in social and economic conditions in middle and later life may explain the later-life increase in well-being. To test this argument we focus on one domain, marital well-being, and examine the curvilinear relationship between marital duration and marital quality, with emphasis on the latter half of the marital life course. Our results show that reduced work and parental responsibilities in later life explain much of the later-life increase in marital satisfaction but do not account for the decrease in thoughts of divorce. Longitudinal research is needed to confirm our results, which are necessarily confined to cross-sectional data.

The way health varies with age is importantly stratified by socioeconomic status (SES)--specifically, education and income. Prior theory and cross-sectional data suggest that among higher SES persons the onset of health problems is usually postponed until rather late in life, while health declines are prevalent in lower SES groups by middle age. Thus, SES differences in health are small in early adulthood, but increase with age until relatively late in life, when they diminish due to selection or greater equalization of health risks and protections. The present paper strengthens our causal and interpretive understanding of these phenomena by showing: (1) that results previously reported for indices of SES hold separately for education and income; (2) that the interaction between age and SES (i.e., education or income) in predicting health can be substantially explained by the greater exposure of lower SES persons to a wide range of psychosocial risk factors to health, especially in middle and early old age, and, to a lesser degree, the greater impact of these risk factors on health with age; and (3) that results (1) and (2) generally hold in short-term longitudinal as well as in cross-sectional data. Implications for science and policy in the areas of aging, health, and social stratification are discussed.

By bringing together a set of papers in the broad social structure and personality tradition of social psychology, this issue of SPQ seeks to manifest its centrality to social psychology, and vice versa. The papers illustrate the utility and necessity of incorporating more careful and more explicit analyses of microsocial and psychological processes into the study of the relationships of macrosocial structures and processes to the thoughts, feelings, and behavior of individual actors

In this article we describe the rationale, design, and selected results of a longitudinal action research project conducted in a component-parts manufacturing plant. This project is aimed at reducing occupational stress and strengthening psychosocial factors (i.e., social support and participation in and influence over decision-making) that may mediate the negative effects of stress on health and quality of worklife. A discussion of the gaps and weaknesses in the existing research and intervention literature on work stress and health is provided, followed by an overview of the theoretical and empirical foundations of the present study. The design of this research addresses previous limitations in three major ways: (1) the project has been implemented within an action research framework that has the potential to enhance both the quality, relevance, and utilization of research findings and the adoption, diffusion, and impact of planned interventions; (2) it combines research and intervention in a single longitudinal study providing data that allow for stronger causal inferences than cross-sectional research, while also ensuring that research findings guide the design and evaluation of the interventions; and (3) it employs multiple methods of research and intervention that enhances the comprehensiveness and validity of the project. We explicate each of these aspects of the design, show how the design has effectively been put in operation, provide evidence of ways in which these features have improved the project over conventional approaches, and address limitations in terms of effectiveness and efficiency.

This paper reports data from the Tecumseh Community Health Study relating measures of occupational characteristics and stresses collected in 1967-69 to biomedical and questionnaire assessments of health behavior and morbidity taken at the same time, and to mortality over the succeeding nine-to-twelve-year period. Overall, our findings show only slight evidence of associations between job characteristics or stresses and health behavior and morbidity. Consistent with prior research, however, the few positive associations found among the employed-irrespective of sex-are strongest between job pressures or demands, and health behavior and morbidity. By contrast, job rewards and satisfactions and occupation-education discrepancies show little consistent relation to health behavior and morbidity, while differences by occupation and self-employment are modest. None of the 1967-69 reported job characteristics and stresses, all of which were ascertained in a single data collection, predicts mortality by 1979. However, in a subsample of 288 men first interviewed in 1967-69 and still working and reinterviewed in 1970, those with moderate to high levels of job pressures or tensions at both interview points were three times as likely to die between 1970 and 1979 as men whose level of pressure or tension was low on at least one interview point, even if high at the other. Future research must monitor subjectively experienced stress over time if we are to relate such stress to types of morbidity or mortality that have a long etiology.

The present paper is concerned with the buffering hypothesis that social support ameliorate. the impact of occupational stress on job-related strain and health. Previous studies of this hypothesis have yielded conflicting results. Our purpose, therefore, is twofold. First, we summarize the literature in this area and review several studies in detail, all of which found main effects of social support on perceived occupational stress and on some health outcome measures. Three of the studies were specifically designed to examine the buffering effects of support. Of the three, two found little or no evidence for buffering (LaRocco and Jones, 1978a; Pinneau, 1975), whereas the third reported buffering effects (House and Wells, 1978). Second, we attempt to reconcile these different conclusions by reanalyzing one data set-first analyzed by Caplan et al. (1975) and then by Pinneau (1975)-using a moderated regression technique identical to that used in the LaRocco and Jones (1978a) and House and Wells (1978) studies. The data usedfor this analysis consist of a randomly stratified sample of men from 23 occupations (N 636). Our review andfindings support the buffering hypothesis for mental and physical health variables (anxiety, depression, irritation, and somatic symptoms), but, as in the previous three studies, fail to support the buffering hypothesis in regard to job-related strains (job dissatisfaction, boredom, dissatisfaction with work load).

A paradigm for stress research is used to integrate existing evidence on the 'relationship of occupational stress to heart disease, and to suggest directions for future research. Although several objective and/or subjective indicators of occupational stress (i.e., low job satisfaction, job pressures such as work overload, status inconsistency, and/or job mobility) have been consistently related to heart disease, research is needed that delineates (1) individual and situational variables specifying these relationships and (2) the nature and consequences of adaptive responses to stress. Populations studied should increasingly include previously neglected groups (e.g., women and blacks) and consider relationships between stress and traditional biomedical variables.

Premiere synthese des resultats d'une enquete sur le chomage dans le sud-est du Michigan. On a mis l'accent sur les circonstances et le contexte de la perte de travail pour eliminer le biais de selection dans l'estimation des effets du chomage. L'analyse documente l'impact substantiel du chomage sur la sante physique, la somatisation, l'angoisse et la depression

We report results from a large-scale survey of the effects of unemployment on emotional functioning. The study design explicitly considers the possibility that prior emotional functioning may influence the risk of unemployment and chances for reemployment. We document substantial effects of unemployment on distress as well as positive emotional effects of reemployment. Contrary to initial expectations, the probability of reemployment is unrelated to baseline emotional functioning. The elimination of elevated distress after reemployment suggests that the worst psychological effects of job loss can be minimized if opportunities exist for reemployment.