Understanding pregnant women's decision making concerning prenatal screening

OBJECTIVE: This study is aimed at enhancing understanding prenatal screening decision making through testing a hypothesized decision model based on decision theory and health behavior theory. DESIGN: We obtained questionnaires from 1,666 pregnant women who were offered prenatal screening for Down's syndrome. Path analysis (using LISREL) resulted in a final model with reasonable model fit, which was verified by split-sample cross-validation. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: These included perceived probability, perceived severity, attitude toward termination, response efficacy, attitude toward prenatal screening, subjective norm, child-related anxiety, and intention to undergo prenatal screening. RESULTS: Attitude toward termination of pregnancy, perceived test efficacy, and subjective norm regarding the desirability of having prenatal screening determined a woman's attitude toward having a prenatal test. Anxiety was influenced by perceived risk and perceived severity of having a child with Down's syndrome, and by subjective norm, but this appeared to be a weak predictor of intention to test. Pregnant women with a positive attitude toward prenatal screening, and who perceived a subjective norm in favor of undergoing prenatal screening, showed a greater intention to have prenatal screening done. CONCLUSION: These findings suggest that more attention should be paid toward the values and social context of pregnant women during the counseling process.     

Letter to the editor,Schools on Islands,a journal as a Ferry

In an electronic brainstorming session, experts and users of methods for multi-criteria decision analysis discussed editorial policies for a journal which is confronted with the conflicts between isolated schools of thought. The present paper describes the session and highlights how experts in multi-criteria decision analysis view the applications of their own methods on their own decision problems.     

Personality and Creativity: The Dual Pathway to Creativity Model and a Research Agenda

To better understand the relation between personality traits and creativity, we invoke the Dual‐Pathway to Creativity model (DPCM) that identifies two pathways to creative outcomes: (1) flexible processing of information (cognitive flexibility) and (2) persistent probing, and systematically and incrementally combining elements and possibilities (cognitive persistence). DPCM further proposes that dispositional or situational variables may influence creativity through either their effects on flexibility or persistence. Here, we propose the idea that approach‐related traits (e.g., openness to experience, extraversion, positive affectivity, and power‐motivation) may lead to greater creativity because they link to enhanced cognitive flexibility, whereas avoidance‐related traits (e.g., negative affectivity and neuroticism) under the right circumstances may lead to greater creativity because they link to enhanced cognitive persistence. Empirical support for this proposition is discussed, and a research agenda for future work on personality and creativity is set.     

Creative production by angry people peaks early on, decreases over time, and is relatively unstructured

Anecdotes and introspective reports from eminent scientists and artists aside, a systematic test of the putative creativity-enhancing effect of anger is missing. This article fills this void with three experiments examining creativity as a function of anger (vs. sad or a mood-neutral control state). Combining insights from the literatures on creativity and on mood and information processing the authors predicted that anger (vs. sadness and a mood-neutral control state) triggers a less systematic and structured approach to the creativity task, and leads to initially higher levels of creativity (as manifested in original ideation and creative insights). Following work on resource depletion, the authors further predicted that anger more than sadness depletes resources and that, therefore, creative performance should decline over time more for angry than for sad people. Results supported predictions. Implications for creativity, information processing, and resource depletion are discussed.     

Chance‐corrected measures for 2 × 2 tables that coincide with weighted kappa

Cohen's kappa is presently a standard tool for the analysis of agreement in a 2 × 2 reliability study, and weighted kappa is a standard statistic for summarizing a 2 × 2 validity study. The special cases of weighted kappa, for example Cohen's kappa, are chance‐corrected measures of association. For various measures of 2 × 2 association it has been observed in the literature that, after correction for chance, they coincide with a special case of weighted kappa. This paper presents the general function, linear in both numerator and denominator, that becomes weighted kappa after correction for chance.     

Embodied representation of the body contains veridical spatial information

In two experiments, the extent to which mental body representations contain spatial information was examined. Participants were asked to compare distances between various body parts. Similar to what happens when people compare distances on a real visual stimulus, they were faster as the distance differences between body parts became larger (Experiment 1), and this effect could not (only) be explained by the crossing of major bodily categories (umbilicus to knee vs. knee to ankle; Experiment 2). In addition, participants also performed simple animate/inanimate verification on a set of nouns. The nouns describing animate items were names of body parts. A spatial priming effect was found: Verification was faster for body part items preceded by body parts in close spatial proximity. This suggests automatic activation of spatial body information. Taken together, results from the distance comparison task and the property verification task showed that mental body representations contain both categorical and more metric spatial information. These findings are further discussed in terms of recent embodied cognition theories.     

Some Paradoxical Results for the Quadratically Weighted Kappa

The quadratically weighted kappa is the most commonly used weighted kappa statistic for summarizing interrater agreement on an ordinal scale. The paper presents several properties of the quadratically weighted kappa that are paradoxical. For agreement tables with an odd number of categories n it is shown that if one of the raters uses the same base rates for categories 1 and n, categories 2 and n−1, and so on, then the value of quadratically weighted kappa does not depend on the value of the center cell of the agreement table. Since the center cell reflects the exact agreement of the two raters on the middle category, this result questions the applicability of the quadratically weighted kappa to agreement studies. If one wants to report a single index of agreement for an ordinal scale, it is recommended that the linearly weighted kappa instead of the quadratically weighted kappa is used.     

‘Numerical trap’. A new look at outcome representation in studies on choice behaviour

In almost all experimental studies on choice behaviour the consequences of choices are limited to denumerable goods (usually money) and represented in a numerical way. It is argued that a different way of representing consequences would cause differences in social orientations. In an exploratory study (1) the kind of consequences (money, satisfaction with money and satisfaction with the situation) and (2) the way of representing consequences (numbers, rectangles, and faces) were varied. No differences were found between the three kinds of consequences represented by rectangles. Representation of money by numbers did not differ from representation of money by rectangles. However, subjects in the condition in which satisfaction with money was represented by faces were more cooperative and altruistic and less equality-oriented than subjects in the corresponding condition in which satisfaction with money was represented by rectangles. Additional correlational analyses showed differences between ways of representing consequences. It was concluded that both for theory and for future research it is important to consider how consequences are represented.     

Matching the message to the process: the relative ordering of knowledge,attitudes, and practices in behavior change research

The authors empirically investigated the relative ordering of knowledge, attitudes, and practices in behavior change models and its relation to communicating health-related information. Considerable research has been conducted in the area of behavior change to identify and measure the presence of knowledge, attitudinal, and practice levels for many behaviors. The literature is reviewed. The authors' investigation consisted of interviewing 1680 men and women in Lima, Cusco, Huaraz, Puno, and Chimbote--5 large Peruvian cities--in 3 urban probability household surveys conducted in August 1994, January 1995, and January 1996. Six possible knowledge, attitude, and practice permutations are developed with regard to contraception in Peru. People may use contraceptive methods before they become fully knowledgeable about their chosen methods. In so doing, these users may become misinformed about contraceptive practice and become dissatisfied contraceptive users who discontinue contraceptive use. Media campaigns designed to inform the public can help produce a more satisfied and sustainable contraceptive user base. The informed choice approach can be the basis for effective communication strategies.