The Development of a Short Form of an Irrational/Rational Beliefs Scale

Journal of Rational-Emotive & Cognitive-Behavior Therapy - This study developed a short form of the Attitudes and Beliefs Scale-2 (ABS-2), a measure of Ellis’s irrational and rational...     

“Am I Going to be Natural or am I Not?”: Canadian Women’s Perceptions and Experiences of Menstrual Suppression

This paper reports on findings from a qualitative interview-based study of women’s experiences and perceptions of menstrual suppression using a diverse sample of 12 women from Vancouver, Canada. The study used open-ended, in-depth interviews to ask women questions related to the following overarching research question: How do Canadian women perceive and experience menstrual suppression? Of the 12 women, six had experience with menstrual suppression, while six had never suppressed their periods. The six women who suppressed their periods cited convenience, pain management, and feeling more positively about their bodies as their reasons for suppression. The six women who had not suppressed their cycles cited fears about compromising their health, worries about altering the “natural” menstrual cycle, and an uneasiness with pharmaceutical products in general as rationales for rejecting menstrual suppression. Ultimately, the findings reveal that there are many considerations and factors involved in women’s decisions about menstrual frequency. While many of the women appreciated the appeal of menstrual suppression, the long-term risks and health uncertainties deterred many of them from reducing their menstrual frequency. The findings are discussed in relation to medical literature which encourages women to suppress their menses, as well as sociological theorizing about menstrual culture within a Foucauldian framework of discipline and control.     

The impact of presentation format on causal inferences

The impact of the presentation format of covariation information on causal judgements was examined in a fictitious virus-disease causal induction task. Six different judgement conditions were created by crossing two levels of virus-disease covariation (0, .5) with three levels of disease base rate (.25, .5, .75). The covariation information was presented differently to three groups of participants. In a first group, it was presented in propositional format summarising the frequencies of the four patient types, namely patients with or without the virus who either did have or did not have the disease. In a second group the same information was presented in a 2×2 table with the cell frequencies represented in terms of countable objects (the presence/absence of virus/disease was shown as schematic faces that varied in expression and colour). In a third group the covariation information was presented in terms of a cumulative frequency tree with the two main branches representing the frequencies of patients with and without the disease which further decomposed into subgroups of those with and without the virus. The ability to discriminate between the levels of covariation was poorest in Group 1; it was significantly improved in Group 2, and was best in Group 3. These results suggest that the format with which covariation information is presented to reasoners exerts a significant influence on causal judgements.