Disclosure among youth stopped by the police: Repercussions for mental health

By: Kristin Turney, Amanda Geller & Sarah K. Cowan

Published in Social Science and Medicine - Mental Health 2 (2022)

Police contact is a common and consequential experience disproportionately endured by youth of color living in heavily surveilled neighborhoods. Disclosing police contact to others (including parents, siblings, or friends) may buffer against the harmful mental health repercussions of police contact, but little is known about the relationship between disclosure of police contact and mental health. We use data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, a cohort of urban children born around the turn of the 21st century and followed through age 15, to examine the relationship between disclosure of police contact and mental health among youth. Results suggest three conclusions. First, youth who experience police contact (regardless of whether they disclose this contact) report more depressive symptoms and anxiety than youth who do not experience police contact. Second, among youth who experience police contact, disclosure is associated with significantly less anxiety (but is not significantly associated with depressive symptoms). Third, this protective nature of disclosure is concentrated among Black youth and boys. Taken together, these findings suggest that disclosing police contact, particularly for groups most likely to experience it, may ameliorate some of the harmful mental health repercussions of this contact for youth.

Secrets and Social Networks

By: Sarah K. Cowan

Published in: Current Opinion in Psychology 31 (2020)

Secrets are information kept from others; they are relational. They shape the intimacy of our relationships, what we know of others and what we infer about the world. Recent research has promoted two models of voluntary secret disclosure. The first highlights deliberate and strategic disclosure to garner support and to avoid judgment. The second maintains strategic action but foregrounds that disclosures are made in contexts which shape who is in one’s social network and who may be the recipient of a disclosure. Work outside of this main vein examines the mechanisms and motivations to share others’ secrets as well as the potential consequences of doing so. The final avenue of inquiry in this review considers how keeping secrets can change (or avoid changing) the size and composition of the secret-keeper’s social network and what information is shared within it. Understanding how secrets spread within and form social networks informs work from public health to criminology to organizational management.

“It could turn ugly”: Selective Disclosure of Political Views and Biased Network Perception

By: Sarah K. Cowan, and Delia Baldassarri

Published in: Social Networks 52 (2018)

This article documents individuals selectively disclosing their political attitudes and the consequences for social influence and the democratic process. Using a large, diverse sample of American adults, we find Americans keep their political attitudes secret specifically from those with whom they disagree. As such, they produce the experience of highly homogeneous social contexts, in which only liberal or conservative views are voiced, while dissent remains silent, and often times goes unacknowledged. This experience is not the result of homogeneous social contexts but the appearance of them. Pervasive selective disclosure creates a gap between the objective social network and the perceived social network in which political agreement is over-estimated. On the micro-level, the processes of social influence on the formation and modification of political attitudes that occur when people converse with those with whom they disagree are thwarted and on the macro-level, this mechanism of selective disclosure leads to the perception of a greatly polarized public opinion.