Patient Adherence With Medical Treatment Regimens: An Interactive Approach

Inadequate patient adherence to treatment regimens is a ubiquitous problem in health care and carries a profound personal, societal, and economic cost. This article illustrates a general theoretical framework we believe to be useful for the interpretation, conception, and design of adherence research. The core tenet of this framework is that factors that influence adherence can be better understood by considering the interactive effects of patients' characteristics, type of adherence intervention, and characteristics of the illness and medical treatment context. This framework represents an extension and application of previous theory and research from personality, social, and clinical psychology concerning the value of an interactionalist perspective. We illustrate the framework using some of our past work involving treatment adherence among patients with chronic renal failure.     

How working memory and cognitive modeling functions of the cerebellum contribute to discoveries in mathematics

A theory of how connections between working memory (Science 255 (1992) 556; in: G. Bower (Ed.), The Psychology of Learning and Motivation, Vol. 8, Academic Press, New York, p. 47) and cognitive functions of the cerebellum (Trends Neurosci 16(11) (1993) 448; Curr. Opinion Neurobiol. 9 (1999) 718; Behav. Neurosci. 100 (1986) 443, Behav. Neurosci. 103 (1989) 998) lead to mathematical discovery is presented. It is proposed that (a) patterns of repetitious working memory processing are formed in the cerebellum, and (b) when these cerebellar patterns are subsequently fed back to control processing in working memory, they may become cognized in visuospatial imagery and language as the concepts and axioms that underlie mathematical discovery. It is concluded that a neurophysiological explanation of the cognitive origins of mathematics (L. English (Ed.), Mathematical Reasoning: Analogies, Metaphors, and images, Lawrence Erlbaum, Mahwah, NJ, p. 21, where Mathematics comes from: How the embodied mind brings mathematics into being, Basic Books, New York) can be based upon how conceptual constructions arise from the collaborative interactions of working memory and the cognitive functions of the cerebellum.     

Creative Fixation is No Laughing Matter: The Effects of Funny and Unfunny Examples on Humor Production

How do people come up with humorous ideas? In creative cognition research, exposure to good examples sometimes causes fixation (people get “stuck” on the examples) but other times sparks inspiration (people's responses are more creative). The present research examined the effects of funny and unfunny examples on joke production. A sample of 175 adults read scenarios that they completed with funny responses. All participants were instructed to be funny, but before responding they read (a) funny responses as examples of good responses to emulate, (b) unfunny responses as examples of poor responses to avoid, or (c) no examples. The participants’ own responses were rated for funniness and for similarity to the example responses, and response times were recorded. Reading either funny or unfunny examples, compared to no examples, caused people to come up with funnier jokes. Similarity to the examples was low in all conditions, so fixation was relatively modest, but people who saw unfunny examples spent more time coming up with their responses. Taken together, the findings support the growing literature showing that examples are often inspiring rather than constraining, and they imply that good and bad examples spark creative thought via different paths.