Role of health locus of control beliefs and expectations of treatment efficacy in adjustment to cancer

We examined the effects of health locus of control beliefs (self-, doctor, and chance control) and expectations of treatment efficacy on short-term psychological adjustment in a sample of newly diagnosed cancer patients. The role of these beliefs and expectations in moderating the relation between (perceived and actual) disease severity and depression was also examined. The data were collected within one week of diagnosis. The relation between perceptions of disease severity and depression was weaker for those who believed that they could personally control their health and for those who held positive expectations about the effects of complying with medical treatment. Similar patterns were found when disease severity was defined in terms of prognosis for survival. Strong negative correlations between self-control/treatment expectations and depression were found for those who perceived that their illness was very severe. The results for chance and doctor control were less consistent. The stability of health control beliefs and treatment expectations over the course of a serious long-term illness is discussed.     

The development of risk-taking in children

Since clear relationships exist between age, gender, and the occurrence of different kinds of accident, safety researchers and educators need to take account of recent work in developmental and environmental psychology, which is leading to a revised view of children’s environmental competence. Studies of the development of risk perception and risk-taking are first reviewed: these have identified three broad phases through which children proceed, culminating in an understanding of the interaction between their own perspective, that of other participants, and characteristics of the situation itself in the causation of accidents. This broad picture is in line with the reformulations of Piagetian stage theory which have occurred in recent years: rather than being “pre-operational” or “egocentric” in a global sense, young children’s main limitations seem to be in applying the principles of routines or drills from one setting to another, and studies of attention and memory show that the amount of information children are able to process improves with age, as does their resistance to distraction. Three aspects of individual differences seem to have an influence upon risk-taking, namelygender, reflection-impulsivity, andfamily structure, and the findings are reviewed in each case. As children get older they experience an increasingly wide variety of unfamiliar situations, and it is essential to understand the interaction between these age changes in environmental circumstances and mechanisms of developmental change in formulating programmes for safety education.