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Background Research on mobile health (mHealth) app use during adolescence is growing; however, little attention has been paid to black adolescents, particularly black girls, who are generally underresearched and underserved in psychological intervention research. Cognitive restructuring is an important tool in anxiety and fear management and involves two parts: (1) recognizing and deconstructing erroneous thoughts and (2) replacing negative anxiety and stress-provoking thoughts with positive thoughts. In our work with black adolescent females, we found that cognitive restructuring is a difficult skill to practice on one’s own. Thus, drawing upon the importance of music in the black community, we developed the Build Your Own Theme Song (BYOTS) app to deliver a musical form of the technique to middle-school black girls. Objective Our aim in this mixed methods study is to evaluate the effectiveness of the BYOTS app. We hypothesize that participants will expect the app to be effective in reducing negative thoughts and that the app will meet their expectations and data generated from the app will demonstrate a reduction in negative thinking and anxiety. Methods A total of 72 black or biracial seventh- and eighth-grade adolescent females were enrolled in Sisters United Now (SUN), an eight-session culturally infused and app-augmented stress and anxiety sister circle intervention. Before using the BYOTS app, girls completed the Multidimensional Anxiety Scale for Children 2 and the App Expectations Survey. Usage data collected from the app included an assessment of negative thinking before and after listening to their song. After completion of the intervention, focus groups were held to gather qualitative data on participants’ app experience. Results Results using paired sample t tests indicated negative thinking was significantly lower at day 7 than day 1 ( t 31 =1.69, P =.05). Anxiety from preuse to postuse of the app was also reduced ( t 38 =2.82, P =.004). Four effectiveness themes emerged from the focus groups: difference in behavior and temperament, promoted calmness, helpfulness in stressful home situations, and focused thinking via the SUN theme song. Conclusions The BYOTS app is a useful tool for delivering musical cognitive restructuring to reduce negative thinking and anxiety in an underserved urban population. Changes were supported both quantitatively and qualitatively. Participants, their peers, and their family noted the difference. Findings support expanding the research to black girls of various socioeconomic statuses and geographic diversity. Currently, the app augments SUN, a culturally relevant intervention. Future research will explore BYOTS as a stand-alone app.

Because pay expectations play a role in the persistent gender pay gap, we surveyed 435 undergraduate students to examine the impacts of gender, job intentions, and self-views on the pay expectations of pre-career women and men. Our findings showed a gender gap in which women expected to be paid less than men expected to be paid at the beginning and at the peak of their careers. Findings also showed a gap in job intentions such that women and men who intended to hold female-dominated jobs expected to be paid less than those pursuing male-dominated jobs at both time periods. Further exploration showed that job intentions fully mediated the link between gender and entry-level pay expectations but did not mediate the link between gender and peak-career pay expectancies. After controlling for the gender type of the intended job, self-esteem did not moderate the relationship between gender and pay expectations at either career point, but self-efficacy did at both points. Increased self-efficacy raised the entry-level pay expectations of women and reduced the peak-career pay expectations of men. Our results highlight the importance of encouraging cross-stereotypic job pursuits for both women and men and indicate the importance of self-efficacy in curbing the gap in pay expectations.

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Extensive empirical evidence confirms a depressed entitlement effect wherein women pay themselves less than men for comparable work and believe the allocation fair. The present study tests the hypothesis that status subordination linked to being female underlies at least some of this effect. A 2 × 3 design crossed 180 undergraduates' gender with a control condition, which successfully established the depressed entitlement effect, and two experimental conditions. In one, women's status was enhanced through legitimation of women's task abilities; in the other, both women's and men's status was enhanced by adding educational credentials relevant to task ability. Follow-up analyses of the significant interaction revealed that the gap in self-pay demonstrated in the control condition disappeared when women's status was enhanced such that higher-status women's self-pay equaled that of men and exceeded that of control women. Although these findings confirm that status plays a role in producing depressed entitlement in self-pay, ancillary analyses of participants' perceptions point to the persistence of shifting standards and men's resistance to status threats.In the United States (National Committee on Pay Equity, 2001) and throughout the world (United Nations, 2000), women earn less pay than men. One well-studied explanation for this wage gap focuses on "depressed entitlement," which posits that women feel less deserving than men and thus consider lower wages equitable. In experimental tasks in which women and men work together and are then asked to allocate a fixed reward between them, women tend to take less for themselves and to give more to their partners, even after outperforming the partner (see Major, 1994, for a review). Similar results have been found when participants work alone and allocate money to only themselves (e.g., Jost, 1997). In surveys exploring future pay projections, comparably qualified and trained women consistently undervalue their prospects relative to men (e.g., Desmarais & Curtis, 1997). Not only do women underpay themselves relative to men, but they also report that their underpayment is fair (e.g., Major & Testa, 1989). Thus evidence in support of