Effects of symptom presentation order on perceived disease risk

People are quick to perceive meaningful patterns in the co-occurrence of events. We report two studies exploring the effects of streaks in symptom checklists on perceived personal disease risk. In the context of these studies, a streak is a sequence of consecutive items on a list that share the characteristic of being either general or specific. We identify a psychological mechanism underlying the effect of streaks in a list of symptoms and show that the effect of streaks on perceived risk varies with the length of the symptom list. Our findings reveal a tendency to infer meaning from streaks in medical and health decision making. Participants perceived a higher personal risk of having an illness when presented with a checklist in which common symptoms were grouped together than when presented with a checklist in which these same symptoms were separated by rare symptoms. This research demonstrates that something as arbitrary as the order in which symptoms are presented in a checklist can affect perceived risk of disease.     

Positive emotion and health: going beyond the negative.

This study examined the relationships between positive emotions and health. Two positive emotions were considered, hope and curiosity, in conjunction with 3 physician-diagnosed disease outcomes: hypertension, diabetes mellitus, and respiratory tract infections. Medical data were abstracted over a 2-year period from 1,041 patient records from a multispecialty medical practice, and emotions were assessed through a mailed questionnaire. Across 3 disease outcomes, higher levels of hope were associated with a decreased likelihood of having or developing a disease. Higher levels of curiosity were also associated with decreased likelihood of hypertension and diabetes mellitus. Results suggest that positive emotion may play a protective role in the development of disease.     

Props,not pictures,are worth a thousand words: verbal accessibility of early memories under different conditions of contextual support

When they are tested nonverbally, even young children demonstrate long-term recall. There have been few studies of whether early memories later are verbally accessible; the results of those that exist are mixed. Inconsistencies may be due to differences in the contextual cues provided at the time of recall. In two experiments, children 13–20 months were exposed to multi-step sequences and tested for nonverbal recall after 3–6 months. At age 3 years, they were tested verbally, under varying conditions of contextual support: in the original laboratory with event-related props versus at home with photographs of the props (Experiment 1), and at home with props (Experiment 2). Children younger than 20 months at initial experience of the events did not demonstrate verbal recall. Children who were 20 months at the initial exposure recalled verbally, as long as they had physical props as cues, regardless of whether testing took place at home or in the laboratory. This research informs the conditions under which memories from very early childhood later can be recalled verbally. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Stimulus-response compatibility and the motor system

Three experiments examined stimulus-response (S--R) compatibility relationships with the stimulus array perpendicular to the response array. In Experiments I and II, stimuli indicated right and left positions, while the responses were movements up and down. The mapping right/up and left/down was preferable for the right hand, but the reverse mapping was preferable for the left hand. In Experiment III, the stimuli indicated up and down positions, while the responses were movements to the right and left. In this case, the mapping up/left and down/right was preferable for the right hand, and the reverse mapping was preferable for the left hand. The results are most easily explained by assuming that counterclockwise rotational movements are preferable for the right hand, while clockwise is preferable for the left. These preferences are manifest through combinations of implicit movements towards the stimulus and explicit movements towards the response key. This principle is shown to provide a simpler explanation for some previously reported S-R compatibility effects.