Meta-analysis of the relationship between risk perception and health behavior: the example of vaccination.

BACKGROUND: Risk perceptions are central to many health behavior theories. However, the relationship between risk perceptions and behavior, muddied by instances of inappropriate assessment and analysis, often looks weak. METHOD: A meta-analysis of eligible studies assessing the bivariate association between adult vaccination and perceived likelihood, susceptibility, or severity was conducted. RESULTS: Thirty-four studies met inclusion criteria (N = 15,988). Risk likelihood (pooled r = .26), susceptibility (pooled r = .24), and severity (pooled r = .16) significantly predicted vaccination behavior. The risk perception-behavior relationship was larger for studies that were prospective, had higher quality risk measures, or had unskewed risk or behavior measures. CONCLUSIONS: The consistent relationships between risk perceptions and behavior, larger than suggested by prior meta-analyses, suggest that risk perceptions are rightly placed as core concepts in theories of health behavior.     

Mild Affective Shifts and Creativity: Effects on Idea Generation,Evaluation, and Implementation Planning

This study investigated the impact of mild shifts in affective tone (i.e., pleasant vs. unpleasant) and arousal (i.e., high vs. low) on three creative processes. Undergraduates read short stories designed to induce affective shifts and then were asked to generate solutions to a complex business problem. Shifts in affective tone and arousal interacted to influence idea generation and implementation planning, but not idea evaluation. The strongest creative performance was exhibited by participants who experienced a stable and pleasantly toned, low-arousal (i.e., relaxed) state and by those who shifted to an unpleasantly toned, high-arousal (i.e., angry) state. In contrast, those who shifted to an unpleasantly toned, low-arousal (i.e., sad) state or a pleasantly toned, high-arousal (i.e., happy) state tended to exhibit poorer creative performance. These results demonstrate the need to revisit the popular conception that organizations should promote intense levels of pleasant affect to enhance employee creativity.     

Marital satisfaction,parenting satisfaction,and parenting behavior in early infancy

The relationships between marital adjustment, satisfaction with parenting and actual parental behavior were assessed for a sample of first-time parents. Results indicated that there were consistent relationships between fathers' satisfaction scores and their own behaviors, but few relationships between mothers' behaviors and satisfaction scores. It was suggested that the determinants of the behavior of mothers and fathers may differ. In the absence of specific socialization of fathers into a caregiving role, fathers' caregiving style may become organized and develop primarily in the context of their relationships with their spouses.     

Generating consensus priority interval vectors for group decision‐making in the AHP

Many practical and important decision‐making problems are complicated by at least two factors: (1) the qualitative/subjective nature of some criteria often results in uncertainty in the individual ratings; and (2) group decision‐making is involved and some means of aggregating individual ratings is required. Traditionally, both individual and group priorities have been represented as point estimates, but this approach presents severe limitations for accommodating imprecision in the decision‐making process. This paper examines the group decision‐making problem in the context where priorities are represented as numeric intervals. A set of techniques that could be used at some of the phases of an analytic hierarchy process (AHP)‐based group decision‐making process, which has the objective of generating a ‘consensus’ priority that represents the group's opinion with regards to the relative importance of a set of N objects (e.g. criteria, alternatives), is presented. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The effect of long-term working memory through personalization applied to free recall: Uncurbing the primacy-effect enthusiasm

In this study, a personalization method (Guida, Tardieu, & Nicolas, European Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 21: 862–896 2009) was applied to a free-recall task. Fifteen pairs of words, composed of an object and a location, were presented to 93 participants, who had to mentally associate each pair and subsequently recall the objects. A 30-s delay was introduced on half of the trials, the presentation rate was manipulated (5 or 10 s per item), and verbal and visuospatial working memory tests were administered to test for their effects on the serial curve. Two groups were constituted: a personalized group, for whom the locations were well-known places on their university campus, and a nonpersonalized group, for whom the locations did not refer to known places. Since personalization putatively operationalizes long-term working memory (Ericsson & Kintsch, Psychological Review, 102: 211–245 1995)—namely, the capacity to store information reliably and rapidly in long-term memory—and if we take a dual-store approach to memory, the personalization advantage would be expected to be greater for pre-recency than for recency items. Overall, the results were compatible with long-term working memory theory. They contribute to validating the personalization method as a methodology to characterize the contribution of long-term memory storage to performance in working memory tasks.     

Improving the Performance of Failing Students by Overcoming Their Self-Serving Attributional Biases

The causal impact of attributions on academic performance was examined by changing low-scoring students' attributions regarding their poor performances. Initially, when students who were failing a college course identified the cause of the performance, they emphasized external, uncontrollable causes. Because these self-serving attributions could have perpetuated poor performance on subsequent examinations, students in the experimental condition were exposed to information that suggested that grades in college are caused by internal, controllable factors such as effort and motivation. As predicted, on subsequent tests and on the final examination, these students earned higher grades than control students who received no attributional information. These findings lend support to an attributional model of academic achievement and also suggest that educational interventions that shift attributions away from a self-serving pattern to a performance-facilitating pattern may improve academic outcomes.