Barbara Lehman

Western Washington University | WWU · Department of Psychology

Background and objectives: This study examined concurrent and delayed emotional and cardiovascular correlates of naturally occurring experiences with subjective social evaluative threat (SSET) and tested whether individual differences in social interaction anxiety moderated those associations. Methods: Sixty-eight participants wore ambulatory bl...

The biopsychosocial model has dominated research and theory in health psychology. This article expands the biopsychosocial model by applying systems theories proposed by developmental scholars, including Bronfenbrenner's ecological models and Sameroff's transactional model, as well as contemporary philosophical work on dynamic systems. The proposed...

Most prior research on culture and the dynamics of social support has focused on the emotional outcomes for social support recipients. Though an existing body of research has identified cross-cultural differences in the emotional correlates of receiving different types of social support, researchers have seldom examined possible cultural difference...

Culturally appropriate social support predicts better psychological outcomes. Motivation for providing social support may vary cross-culturally, with more independent cultures valuing self-esteem and more interdependent cultures valuing closeness. Participants in the U.S. (N = 85) and Singapore (N = 78) reported on emotions and social support recei...

Objective: This study examined the associations between COVID-19-related financial strain and the stress, mental health, physical health symptoms, and health behaviors of American university students. Participants: Online data were collected from 485 participants between May 2020 and March 2021. Participants were majority female and majority white....

The relation between religiosity and well-being is one of the most researched topics in the psychology of religion, yet the directionality and robustness of the effect remains debated. Here, we adopted a many-analysts approach to assess the robustness of this relation based on a new cross-cultural dataset (N = 10, 535 participants from 24 countries...

In this chapter we address how cross-cultural comparisons can magnify response biases and provide guidelines for selecting a survey methodology which minimizes these confounds. The tendency for response biases to be compounded by cross-cultural comparison is discussed in terms of momentary and retrospective reporting and organized via Robinson and...

Background and objectives: Mindfulness meditation (MM) training promotes health and well-being. One potential mechanistic link between MM and health may be coping flexibility, (e.g., the ability to monitor and modify coping strategies based on situational needs and strategy effectiveness). We hypothesized that MM training would increase coping flex...

Background Research examining the effects of mindfulness meditation (MM) on emotion seldom considers differences by arousal level or emotion variability. Methods In the present study, 115 participants (64% Female, 72% White, Mage = 19.03) were randomly assigned to a brief MM intervention condition (n = 60) or a wait‐list control condition (n = 51)...

Because young adults often use text messaging to communicate, it is important to consider the modes by which social support (SS) may be received. This study tests whether young adults use texting for academic SS and whether preferred mode of SS (texting, in-person, phone) predicts self-reports of perceived social support (PSS). 208 female undergrad...

Repeated experiences with stress and negative emotion (NE) can decrease psychological and physical well-being. Ruminating on stressful events can further prolong NE responses, especially for those who are pessimistic. For three days participants (N = 68) reported hourly on their current stress, rumination, perceived control, and NE. Tests of mediat...

Stress and health researchers often utilize standardized laboratory stress tasks to evaluate the physical and psychological consequences of challenging experiences. These laboratory sessions usually include multiple measurements of physical and psychological responses collected over time. Multilevel modeling allows researchers to make use of all av...

Previous research suggests that in contrast to invisible social support, visible social support produces exaggerated negative emotional responses. Drawing on work by Bolger and colleagues, this study disentangled social support visibility from negative social evaluation in an examination of the effects of social support on negative emotions and car...

Routine academic events may cause stress and produce temporary elevations in blood pressure. Students who experience test anxiety may be especially prone to cardiovascular activation in response to academic stress. This study drew on self-reported stress and ambulatory blood pressure measurements provided by 99 undergraduate participants (30% men,...

Although laboratory research indicates that social-evaluative threat evokes a physical stress response, naturalistic studies of its situational determinants remain scarce. This work investigates the correlates of naturally occurring social-evaluative threats and tests the effects of situational control and social-evaluative threat on cardiovascular...

Reports an error in "Relationship of early life stress and psychological functioning to blood pressure in the CARDIA study" by Barbara J. Lehman, Shelley E. Taylor, Catarina I. Kiefe and Teresa E. Seeman (Health Psychology, 2009[May], Vol 28[3], 338-346). A URL for supplemental materials was included due to a production error. There are no suppleme...

Low childhood socioeconomic status (CSES) and a harsh early family environment have been linked with health disorders in adulthood. In this study, the authors present a model to help explain these links and relate the model to blood pressure change over a 10-year period in the Coronary Artery Risk Development in Young Adults sample. Participants (N...

Psychosocial resources have been tied to lower psychological and biological responses to stress. The present research replicated this relationship and extended it by examining how differences in dispositional reactivity of certain neural structures may underlie this relationship. Two hypotheses were examined: (a) psychosocial resources are tied to...

Each day for five days, 79 fifth-grade children reported on events that occurred at school and they and their parents described their interactions with each other each evening. Consistent with previous research, it was found that on days when children reported more academic or peer problems during the day at school, they later described more aversi...

Mixed evidence has suggested that homozygous carriers of the short allele (s/s) of the serotonin transporter gene-linked polymorphic region (5-HTTLPR) may be at increased risk for depression, if they have also been exposed to early or current adversity/stress. We address this debate by examining the relation of a stressful early family environment,...

Low socioeconomic status (SES) and a harsh family environment in childhood have been linked to mental and physical health disorders in adulthood. The objective of the present investigation was to evaluate a developmental model of pathways that may help explain these links and to relate them to C-reactive protein (CRP) in the Coronary Artery Risk De...

An early family environment marked by harsh parenting has been related to risk for multiple mental disorders in adulthood, risks that may be mediated, in part, by deficits in emotion regulation skills. This study examined neural mechanisms underlying these consequences of "risky" families (RF) by exploring neural activity to tasks involving respons...

Low SES and a conflict-ridden, neglectful, or harsh family environment in childhood have been linked to a high rate of physical health disorders in adulthood. The objective of the present investigation was to evaluate a model of the pathways that may help to explain these links and to relate them to metabolic functioning (MF) in the Coronary Artery...

A harsh early family environment is related to mental and physical health in adulthood. An important question is why family environment in childhood is associated with these outcomes so long after its initial occurrence. We describe a program of research that evaluates a model linking these variables to each other. Specifically, we hypothesize that...

The vested interest construct suggests that people act in attitudinally consistent ways on important issues of high hedonic relevance. Accordingly, vested individuals should endorse policies consistent with their attitudes. Symbolic politics holds self-interest unrelated to attitude and thus of little use. Three secondary analyses of national elect...