Table 2. Study hypotheses.

From: Effects of scarcity on women’s cognitive ability to manage mental health and substance use after prison release

1. Randomized experiment with exposure to hypothetical scarcity during incarceration

At the 2nd visit (1 week after baseline), we randomized women to think about how they would address a scarce/depleting hypothetical re-entry scenario (large trade-offs, few community resources) or a less-scarce/depleting scenario (few trade-offs, more resources), to induce a scarcity or non-scarcity mindset. Outcomes were measured immediately afterward using unrelated cognitive tasks. We hypothesized that, relative to those given the less-scarce re-entry scenarios, women given the scarce set would show greater decrements from baseline on:

a. Fluid intelligence and ability to inhibit impulses (primary)

b. Cognitive and physical persistence, perceived ability to find and persist in post-release mental health and substance treatment, and actual ability to generate reasons for doing so

c. Craving for/perceived ability to resist substances, risky sex, and crime.

2. Naturalistic assessment of cognitive processing over re-entry.  We hypothesized that:

a. Preoccupation with re-entry-related worries would increase and that fluid intelligence, ability to inhibit impulses, attention, and cognitive and physical would decrease from baseline to 1 month before release (when anticipating post-release scarcity), and from baseline to 1 month post-release (when experiencing scarcity).

b. More post-release scarcity would be associated with worse post-release clinical outcomes.

c. More post-release scarcity would be associated with worse post-release cognitive functioning.

d. Worse post-release cognitive functioning would be associated with worse post-release clinical outcomes.

e. Post-release cognitive functioning would mediate the relationship between post-release scarcity and post-release clinical outcomes.

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