• Journal of women's health · May 2012

    Role stress, role reward, and mental health in a multiethnic sample of midlife women: results from the Study of Women's Health Across the Nation (SWAN).

    • Teresa Lanza di Scalea, Karen A Matthews, Nancy E Avis, Rebecca C Thurston, Charlotte Brown, Sioban Harlow, and Joyce T Bromberger.
    • Department of Psychiatry, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA.
    • J Womens Health (Larchmt). 2012 May 1; 21 (5): 481-9.

    BackgroundLittle is known about the independent associations of reward and stress within specific roles with multiple measures of mental health in an ethnically diverse community sample of midlife women. The objective of this study is to examine if (1) role reward (within each role and across roles) contributes directly to mental health and buffers the negative impact of role stress and (2) associations among role occupancy, role stress, and role reward and mental health vary by race/ethnicity.MethodsWith separate logistic regression analysis, we investigated cross-sectional relationships between role stress and role reward with presence/absence of high depressive symptoms (Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale [CES-D≥16]), anxiety symptoms (feeling tense or nervous, irritable or grouchy, fearful for no reason, and heart pounding or racing total score≥4), or low social functioning (bottom 25th percentile of the Short-Form-36 [SF-36] social functioning subscale) in 2549 women participating in the third visit of the Study of Women's Health Across the Nation (SWAN), a longitudinal population-based study of menopause.ResultsHigh reward across roles attenuated the negative impact of role stress on social functioning but not on anxiety or depression. High reward marriage buffered the impact of marital stress on depression, and high reward mothering buffered the effect of maternal stress on depression and social functioning. Compared to Caucasians, Hispanics and Chinese with high stress across roles had better social functioning, and African American mothers had lower odds of high depressive symptoms.ConclusionsRole reward buffers the negative impact of stress on social functioning and depression, but not on anxiety. Minorities may respond to role stress by seeking social support.

      Pubmed     Copy Citation     Plaintext  

      Add institutional full text...

    Notes

     
    Knowledge, pearl, summary or comment to share?
    300 characters remaining
    help        
    You can also include formatting, links, images and footnotes in your notes
    • Simple formatting can be added to notes, such as *italics*, _underline_ or **bold**.
    • Superscript can be denoted by <sup>text</sup> and subscript <sub>text</sub>.
    • Numbered or bulleted lists can be created using either numbered lines 1. 2. 3., hyphens - or asterisks *.
    • Links can be included with: [my link to pubmed](http://pubmed.com)
    • Images can be included with: ![alt text](https://bestmedicaljournal.com/study_graph.jpg "Image Title Text")
    • For footnotes use [^1](This is a footnote.) inline.
    • Or use an inline reference [^1] to refer to a longer footnote elseweher in the document [^1]: This is a long footnote..

    hide…