Psyche, Science, and Society

Gallup: Republicans have better mental health

Gallup reports that Democrats have much worse mental health than Republicans. The result holds up even when they control for other variables, such as income. The results are very interesting. My own, relatively small-scale research did not find similar differences. One possible alternative explanation could be that Republicans are less likely to admit to mental health problems. Or, they might just be “healthier”:

Republicans Report Much Better Mental Health Than Others

Relationship persists even when controlling for other variables

by Frank Newport

PRINCETON, NJ — Republicans are significantly more likely than Democrats or independents to rate their mental health as excellent, according to data from the last four November Gallup Health and Healthcare polls. Fifty-eight percent of Republicans report having excellent mental health, compared to 43% of independents and 38% of Democrats. This relationship between party identification and reports of excellent mental health persists even within categories of income, age, gender, church attendance, and education.

The basic data — based on an aggregated sample of more than 4,000 interviews conducted since 2004 — are straightforward.

The differences are quite significant, as can be seen. While Democrats are slightly less likely to report excellent mental health than are independents, the big distinctions in these data are the differences between Republicans and everyone else.

One could be quick to assume that these differences are based on the underlying demographic and socioeconomic patterns related to party identification in America today. A recent Gallup report (see “Strong Relationship Between Income and Mental Health” in Related Items) reviewed these mental health data more generally, and found that men, those with higher incomes, those with higher education levels, and whites are more likely than others to report excellent mental health. Some of these patterns describe characteristics of Republicans, of course.

But an analysis of the relationship between party identification and self-reported excellent mental health within various categories of age, gender, church attendance, income, education, and other variables shows that the basic pattern persists regardless of these characteristics. In other words, party identification appears to have an independent effect on mental health even when each of these is controlled for.

The accompanying graphs display the relationship between party identification and self-reported mental health crossed by categories of a number of relevant variables. In almost all cases, Republicans are more likely to report excellent mental health across the various categories.

For example, Republicans are significantly more likely to report excellent mental health than are independents or Democrats among those making less than $50,000 a year, and among those making at least $50,000 a year. Republicans are also more likely than independents and Democrats to report excellent mental health within all four categories of educational attainment.

Gallup also conducted a separate multivariate analysis that looked at the impact of a list of variables — including party identification — on self-reported mental health. This analysis showed that even when the impact of these other variables is controlled for statistically, there is an independent and highly significant impact of being a Republican on mental health.

The accompanying table displays the result of this analysis, showing the regression coefficients that represent the relationship of each variable to mental health while controlling for the other variables in the model. (Coefficients marked with an asterisk are significant at the .000 level.)

The table shows that income, education, gender, church attendance, and being a Republican are significantly related to self-reported mental health — each such relationship occurring even when the impact of the other variables is taken into account.

Discussion

What are the implications of these findings?

Correlation is no proof of causation, of course. The reason the relationship exists between being a Republican and more positive mental health is unknown, and one cannot say whether something about being a Republican causes a person to be more mentally healthy, or whether something about being mentally healthy causes a person to choose to become a Republican (or whether some third variable is responsible for causing both to be parallel).

Previous analysis (see Related Items) shows that a number of variables are related to self-reported mental health — including, in particular, income. Because Republicans have on average higher incomes than independents or Democrats, part of the explanation for the relationship between being a Republican and having better mental health is a result of this underlying factor. The same is true for several other variables.

But the key finding of the analyses presented here is that being a Republican appears to have an independent relationship on positive mental health above and beyond what can be explained by these types of demographic and lifestyle variables. The exact explanation for this persistent relationship — as noted — is unclear.

Survey Methods

Results are based on an aggregated sample of telephone interviews with 4,014 national adults, aged 18 and older, conducted in November 2004, November 2005, November 2006, and November 2007. For results based on the total aggregated sample of national adults, one can say with 95% confidence that the maximum margin of sampling error is ±2 percentage points. The margin of error for smaller subsamples reported in this analysis will be larger.

In addition to sampling error, question wording and practical difficulties in conducting surveys can introduce error or bias into the findings of public opinion polls.

1 comment November 30th, 2007

APA President Brehm to discuss interrogations at Indiana U

Indiana Daily Student News reports that American Psychological Association President Sharon Brehm was today to discuss APA’s shameful policy on psychologists participating in detainee interrogations with concerned faculty and students at Indiana University, Bloomington, where she teaches.

Groups to question psych professor on torture policy;
Critics: Psychologists should stay away from interrogations

Following a controversial anti-torture resolution passed by the American Psychological Association last summer, concerned faculty and students will have a chance to discuss the policy Friday with the association’s president, IU psychology professor Sharon Brehm.

Brehm, who was elected leader of the association in 2006, has been criticized by many of her constituents for not doing enough to end the psychological torture of foreign terror suspects, specifically the presence of psychologists during the detainees’ interrogations.

While the 2007 resolution reaffirms the organization’s stance against all types of torture – something many psychologists have called a step in the right direction – it did not include a proposal to suspend psychologists’ involvement in interrogations at U.S. prisons for foreign detainees. The Progressive Faculty Coalition, the Bloomington branch of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom and the IU chapter of Amnesty International will sponsor the discussion. It will begin at 4:30 p.m. Friday in the Psychology Building, Room 128.

Brehm has been depicted in human-rights circles as a barrier to ending prisoner torture. But professor Cynthia Hoffman, a member of the Progressive Faculty Coalition, said the discussion will not focus on Brehm’s personal beliefs, but instead aims to examine her organization’s torture policy. Hoffman disagreed with the American Psychological Association’s current torture policy of not removing the association’s psychologists from U.S. interrogations of foreign prisoners.

“I think that we as citizens need to have a lot of information about what has happened, how often and who has been involved,” Hoffman said.

Already, the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association have passed similar provisions to the one the American Psychological Association rejected last summer.

Despite the scrutiny she is under, Brehm has maintained her belief in the importance of psychologists’ presence at government interrogations.

“Our members have a responsibility to intervene to stop acts of abuse wherever they occur and to report such incidents to the appropriate authorities,” Brehm wrote in a January 2007 letter to Washington Monthly magazine.

The American Psychological Association’s 2007 resolution is largely modeled off a similar 2006 enactment. And while this year’s resolution did not provide for the removal of psychologists from interrogation sites like many had hoped, it lays out a set of specific ethical guidelines for psychologists working with government interrogators.

Friday’s meeting will be a focus on policy, not personality, Hoffman said. The discussion will follow an open-floor model where Brehm will have the opportunity to explain her organization’s resolution. The public are invited to attend and take part in the discussion.

“My expectation is that (Brehm) will listen to our concerns,” Hoffman said.

I anyone from IU reads this, I’d love to have a report of the discussion.

1 comment November 30th, 2007

McCain condemns waterboarding, Romney waffles

There are not many things that I agree with Senator McCain about. But his response to a question about waterboarding at the Republican debate is one of them.

It is too bad that, when he had the opportunity to stop it, with the Military Commissions Act of last year, he folded and endorsed a “compromise” that allowed the administration to redefine the Geneva Conventions Common Article 3. And when the President issued a signing order nullifying, he claimed, the McCain Amendment, the Senator remained mum. Alas, the prospect of becoming President was more alluring than that of stopping abuse.

November 30th, 2007

Bromwich: The torture compromise of 2007

David Bromwich, on Huffington Post, reminds us of the extent to which our country, Republicans and Democrats alike. has accepted torture as an inevitable part of modern life, in the:

The Torture Compromise of 2007

A friend at a dinner party on the East coast found herself in an argument in which she was the only person opposed to torture. The other invitees, all graduates of favored preparatory schools and Ivy League colleges, worked in the law, investment banking, urban planning and the arts. They agreed that President Bush was incompetent and untrustworthy; but his fundamental mistake about torture had been to go after the law. Torture, they said, cannot be a policy, and a law that permits torture cannot be on the books. What is wanted is a leader who will break the law selectively, in a way we can trust. Torture should be allowable, but only by the right people and for the right reason. To a man and woman, the guests who held this view were supporters of Hillary Clinton.

Go back a year. A scholar-adviser of Democratic candidates was addressing a group of journalists shortly before the 2006 election. Confident of a victory, he rattled off the legislative successes that would come soon after the Democratic majority was in place. Prescription drugs, minimum wage. As the discussion wound down, a deferential question came from a liberal editor at the back of the room. “Can we expect the Democrats to repeal the suspension of habeas corpus and the Military Commissions Act?” The answer was (slowly), No. “Of course, we’re all against those things, but they can’t be a primary concern to a new majority. The laws should be changed. And things will get better; but I wouldn’t expect this to be at the top of the Democratic agenda.”

Sherrod Brown confirmed the accuracy of that prediction was he was asked, a few days after the election, whether he would work to repeal the Military Commissions Act, and he replied that he could vote to repeal it but would not sponsor a bill to that effect, because he had other priorities. Hillary Clinton, in turn, vouched for the understanding claimed by her supporters when she gave her reasoning against the confirmation of Michael Mukasey: “In the event we were ever confronted with having to interrogate a detainee with knowledge of an imminent threat to millions of Americans, then the decision to depart from standard international practice must be made by the president, and the president must be held accountable.” Careful words. Leave aside the pandering to “the ticking-bomb scenario” by which the doctrine of torture has been sugar-coated to drug the popular mind these past several years. If interrogation is done against the law, and if the interrogation is ordered and superintended by the president alone, what can it mean to hold the president “accountable”?

The Scottish patriot Ross, in act 4 of Macbeth, is given to utter words that now seem piercing:

Alas, poor country!

Almost afraid to know itself.

We Americans are watching a process which, if allowed to continue to its logical end, will change what it means to be an American. It will change us morally, politically, and socially.

Alfred McCoy, in his extraordinary book A Question of Torture, recounts the history of the techniques designed in the 1950s and 1960s and tested on real- life political subjects through the 1980s, which aim at destroying the identity and breaking down the resistance of suspects. There is a direct progression from American and Canadian state-funded behavioral experiments, to the instruction given by U.S. special forces to the secret police of client states, to our own adoption of the same techniques in Afghanistan, Guantanamo, and Iraq. The final step down, in which we do the thing ourselves, may mark a change of kind rather than degree. In any case, the climb out of this limbo of barbarism will not be easy; and a policy of reform can hardly commence until the question is answered: “How came we here?”

Accurate history must include the fact that the earliest large-scale approval of extraordinary renditions occurred in the administration of Bill Clinton. Nor can it fail to remark that the Clinton-Blair NATO war against Serbia was a rehearsal for the war on Iraq. In the same way that many non-political Americans forget (even though they have heard) that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11, most liberals have forgotten (though they once heard) that the pretext for the Serbia bombing, the supposed massacre of tens of thousands of Kosovars, was a fabrication thoroughly exposed in the aftermath of that war.

Buried with the motives and causes of our humanitarian wars, lies an elaborate system of excuses and consolations. We give ourselves the right to conduct wars of choice, with destructive effects on others out of all proportion to the risk to ourselves, because we know we are not the sort of people who enjoy wars. So, too, we may reserve the right to torture when torture is really necessary, just because we are not the sort of people who torture. By contrast, the enemy must be fought by tremendous and disproportionate means precisely because the enemy are the sort of people who do torture. Hunted back to its hiding place, this train of thought would perhaps disclose the premise that it is better to be killed by Americans than it is to be killed by other people.

We have not yet come to terms with a fundamental self-deception. Such practices as rendition and torture and the indefinite detention of military-age Arab men, from street sweeps, where no charges are made and no names supplied (a tactic whose large-scale innovation is partly responsible for the reduction of violence in Baghdad)–these practices follow us home. Think of the post-2001 method of corralling anti-war demonstrators by police phalanx into intersection-sized boxes to be moved forward block by block against their will. Or the unwarranted mass arrests of demonstrators in New York City to “protect” the 2004 Republican convention.

Such have been some of our domestic experiments. But we have gone further. In August of this year, a Miami jury convicted of terrorism-conspiracy charges an American citizen, José Padilla, who had been tortured in prison, against whom the evidence was of exactly the character that would have convicted a Miami black man of rape in the year 1927. These things are happening. And yet, in the middle of the longest presidential campaign in our history, the only candidates to speak against the degradation that is now in progress are Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul–both of them ignored or, as often, ridiculed by the mainstream media. Their speech, and the silence or reticence or politic circumlocution of others, is the largest symptom of the silent crisis at home. How can we place ourselves again in the track of constitutional liberty unless we reject all of the persons and all of the means by which it has been betrayed?

November 30th, 2007