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Is waiting bad for subjective health?

Journal of Behavioral Medicine volume 39, pages 652–664 (2016)Cite this article

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Abstract

The present study examined the possibility that waiting is bad for one’s subjective health. Specifically, we examined longitudinal trends in the self-reported health, self-reported sleep disruption, distress, and emotion regulation strategies of law school graduates waiting for their bar exam results. Multilevel analyses suggest that waiting was particularly detrimental to participants’ self-reported health and sleep disruption at the beginning and end of the waiting period. Moreover, distress and most emotion regulation efforts were associated with poorer subjective health on average, and personal increases in distress and emotion regulation were largely associated with personal increases in poor self-reported health and sleep disruption. Our results suggest that waiting periods can take a toll on subjective health and that individual and temporal variations in distress and emotion regulation efforts are associated with these health trajectories.

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Fig. 1
Fig. 2

Notes

  1. When we report scale properties (e.g., internal consistency, measures of central tendency), we give the average across all time points.

  2. In all models we used a conservative covariance structure that assumed no correlation between time points (i.e., variance components structure). Importantly, opting to allow nearby measurements to correlate most with one another (i.e., a diagonal covariance structure) or even adopting a completely unstructured covariance structure (i.e., allowing all time points to correlate according to the data) produced no substantive difference in the pattern of results.

  3. The ICC is calculated as between person variance/(between person variance + within person variance).

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Acknowledgments

This material is based on work supported by a grant to the second author from the National Science Foundation under Grant Number BCS-1251672 and by a National Science Foundation Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Ohio University, 200 Porter Hall, Athens, OH, 45701, USA

    Jennifer L. Howell

  2. University of California, Riverside, Riverside, CA, USA

    Kate Sweeny

Authors
  1. Jennifer L. Howell
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  2. Kate Sweeny
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Correspondence to Jennifer L. Howell.

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Conflict of interest

Jennifer L. Howell and Kate Sweeny declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Human and animal rights and Informed consent

All procedures followed were in accordance with ethical standards of the responsible committee on human experimentation (institutional and national) and with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975, as revised in 2000. Informed consent was obtained from all patients for being included in the study.

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Howell, J.L., Sweeny, K. Is waiting bad for subjective health?. J Behav Med 39, 652–664 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10865-016-9729-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10865-016-9729-7

Keywords

  • Waiting
  • Uncertainty
  • Emotion regulation
  • Well-being
  • Sleep
  • Subjective health