Quality of life is a process not an outcome

Quality improvement mechanisms increasingly use outcome measures to evaluate health care providers. This move toward outcome measures is a radical departure from the traditional focus on process measures. More radical still is the proposal to shift from relatively simple and proximal measures of outcome, such as mortality, to complex outcomes, such as quality of life. While the practical, scientific, and ethical issues associated with the use of outcomes such as mortality and morbidity to compare health care providers have been well rehearsed, the specific concerns associated with the use of quality of life measures in quality of care research have received little attention. As with much research on quality of life there is a tendency to assume that the disadvantages are outweighed by the general virtue of ??listening?? to patients. In this paper we disagree with this assumption and argue that quality of life is a process, not an outcome.     

Reliability of the Go/No Go Association Task

The Go/No Go Association Task (GNAT; Nosek & Banaji, 2001) is an implicit measure with broad application in social psychology. It has several conceptual strengths to recommend it over other implicit methods, but the belief that it has poor reliability coupled with the absence of a method for calculating this important psychometric property has hindered its wider acceptance and use. Using data obtained from six GNAT studies covering a wide range of content areas, Study 1 compares the properties of different methods for estimating reliability of the GNAT. Study 2 demonstrates a resampling procedure to investigate how reliability varies as a function of block length. Study 1 shows that with appropriately chosen stimuli the GNAT can be a very reliable measure, while Study 2 indicates that as an empirical rule of thumb 50 to 80 trials per block should yield adequate to very good reliability. However, researchers are urged to calculate their own reliability coefficients, to this end we discuss GNAT design issues and provide procedures for calculating GNAT reliability which we hope will enhance the utility of the GNAT as a measure and promote its use in studying implicit cognition.     

Stereotype threat: Antecedents and consequences for working women

Three studies investigated antecedents and consequences of stereotype threat for female employees. The results of Studies 1 and 2 suggest that social comparisons with men are associated with feelings of stereotype threat whereas social comparisons with women are not. Stereotype threat, in turn, was associated with conflict surrounding women's identity as female employees and with decreased perceived likelihood of achieving career goals. Study 3 extended these findings by demonstrating that feelings of stereotype threat are also negatively related to workplace attitudes and turnover intentions. Furthermore, the effect of stereotype threat on these job attitudes and intentions was itself mediated by identity conflict and perceived likelihood of achieving career goals. Implications and limitations of these findings are discussed. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Attitudes of Mothers of Children with Down Syndrome Towards Noninvasive Prenatal Testing

Noninvasive prenatal testing (NIPT) allows for highly sensitive detection of Down syndrome early in pregnancy with no risk of miscarriage, therefore potentially increasing the number of pregnancies identified with Down syndrome. This study assesses how mothers of children with Down syndrome perceive NIPT, especially the impact they think it will have on their families and other families with children who have Down syndrome. Seventy-three self-reported mothers of children with Down syndrome responded to an anonymous online survey emailed to, and posted on, message boards of various Down syndrome support groups and networks. Data analysis included chi-square tests and thematic analysis. Fifty-nine percent of respondents indicated they would use NIPT in the future; respondents who had not used prenatal testing in the past were significantly less likely to report interest in using NIPT in the future than those who had prenatal testing previously (p?MOST important factor. They also highlight the need to provide a diagnosis of Down syndrome in a balanced and objective manner.     

Stressors and Social Resources at Work: Examining the Buffering Effects of LMX,POS, and Their Interaction on Employee Attitudes

Journal of Business and Psychology - Numerous advancements have been made regarding how aspects of job roles and organizational environments affect work attitudes. However, less attention has been...     

Mechanisms of motivation–cognition interaction: challenges and opportunities

Recent years have seen a rejuvenation of interest in studies of motivation–cognition interactions arising from many different areas of psychology and neuroscience. The present issue of Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience provides a sampling of some of the latest research from a number of these different areas. In this introductory article, we provide an overview of the current state of the field, in terms of key research developments and candidate neural mechanisms receiving focused investigation as potential sources of motivation–cognition interaction. However, our primary goal is conceptual: to highlight the distinct perspectives taken by different research areas, in terms of how motivation is defined, the relevant dimensions and dissociations that are emphasized, and the theoretical questions being targeted. Together, these distinctions present both challenges and opportunities for efforts aiming toward a more unified and cross-disciplinary approach. We identify a set of pressing research questions calling for this sort of cross-disciplinary approach, with the explicit goal of encouraging integrative and collaborative investigations directed toward them.     

Van Inwagen and the Quine-Putnam indispensability argument

In this paper I do two things: (1) I support the claim that there is still some confusion about just what the Quine-Putnam indispensability argument is and the way it employs Quinean meta-ontology and (2) I try to dispel some of this confusion by presenting the argument in a way which reveals its important meta-ontological features, and include these features explicitly as premises. As a means to these ends, I compare Peter van Inwagen’s argument for the existence of properties with Putnam’s presentation of the indispensability argument. Van Inwagen’s argument is a classic exercise in Quinean meta-ontology and yet he claims – despite his argument’s conspicuous similarities to the Quine-Putnam argument – that his own has a substantially different form. I argue, however, that there is no such difference between these two arguments even at a very high level of specificity; I show that there is a detailed generic indispensability argument that captures the single form of both. The arguments are identical in every way except for the kind of objects they argue for – an irrelevant difference for my purposes. Furthermore, Putnam’s and van Inwagen’s presentations make an assumption that is often mistakenly taken to be an important feature of the Quine-Putnam argument. Yet this assumption is only the implicit backdrop against which the argument is typically presented. This last point is brought into sharper relief by the fact that van Inwagen’s list of the four nominalistic responses to his argument is too short. His list is missing an important – and historically popular – fifth option.