Comparing What to What,on What Scale? The Impact of Item Comparisons and Reference Points in Communicating Risk and Uncertainty

The mandated public availability of individual hospital's audit data for children's heart surgery in the UK creates a challenging scenario for communicating these complex and sensitive data to diverse audiences. On the basis of this scenario, we conducted three experiments with the aim of understanding how best to help lay people understand these data and the practical goal of improving the public presentation of these data. The experiments compared different outcome measures for displaying the survival rate (percentage scale versus the ratio of the predicted/observed rates) and presentation formats (individual hospital versus all hospitals shown) for outcomes data presented relative to prediction intervals generated by a risk model that adjusts for case mix. Our data highlight how easily inappropriate comparisons can influence evaluations of complex data: for instance, both a survival ratio of 1 and the presence of other hospitals seemingly provided reference points that resulted in inappropriately harsh evaluations of some hospitals. By drawing on evaluability theory, we demonstrate how to enhance people's understanding of these complex data while also discouraging inappropriate comparisons, which has implications for communicating risk and uncertainty and for choice architecture design in a range of contexts. Copyright © 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Creativity and Dreaming: Correlation of Reported Dream Incorporation Into Waking Behavior With Level and Type of Creative Interest

Dreaming has been postulated to be a functional intrapersonal component of the creative experience. In this study, a previously validated questionnaire is used in a sleep laboratory population (N = 517) to assess levels of dream incorporation into waking behavior. Those responses are correlated with reported levels of involvement and self-defined types of the creative process. Greater involvement in creative process was significantly associated with greater incorporation of dreams into waking behavior. The reported types of creative outlet were divided for analysis between those with a creative product and those without product (experiential). The creative product grouping showed higher levels of reported dream incorporation into behavior than the experiential grouping, with both of these groupings reporting significantly higher levels of dream incorporation into waking behavior than the grouping reporting no creative outlet. Gender differences were found for both incorporation of dreaming into waking (significantly higher responses in females) and types of creative outlet (creative product significantly higher in females, experiential in males). In this study, level of interest in the creative process was positively correlated with reported level of dream incorporation into waking behavior. This study suggests that dreaming is likely to have a functional role in the creative process.     

Between Hippocrates and God: Ugandan mental health professional's views on suicide

A negative attitude towards suicide is generally assumed to be predominant in low-income countries. In order to understand the negative attitude in general it is necessary to look at how religion and morality influence the attitudes. Our aim in this qualitative interview study was to investigate what attitudes professional mental health workers in Uganda bear towards suicide and suicidal persons. The professionals argue for their attitude by employing religious, communal and medical ethics arguments, which draw both in a negative and positive direction. The professionals are in general unambiguously negative towards suicide and positive towards suicidal people who are mentally ill. In cases other than mental illness non-accepting attitudes surface. This is discussed against previous research showing that effective treatment of suicidal people is to be based on a trusting and accepting relationship.     

Darwinian perspectives on the evolution of human languages

Human languages evolve by a process of descent with modification in which parent languages give rise to daughter languages over time and in a manner that mimics the evolution of biological species. Descent with modification is just one of many parallels between biological and linguistic evolution that, taken together, offer up a Darwinian perspective on how languages evolve. Combined with statistical methods borrowed from evolutionary biology, this Darwinian perspective has brought new opportunities to the study of the evolution of human languages. These include the statistical inference of phylogenetic trees of languages, the study of how linguistic traits evolve over thousands of years of language change, the reconstruction of ancestral or proto-languages, and using language change to date historical events.     

The Coping Mechanisms and Strategies of Hypertension Patients in Ghana: The Role of Religious Faith,Beliefs and Practices

This qualitative study explored the role of religious faith, belief and practice systems in the coping mechanisms and strategies of essential hypertension patients in Accra, Ghana. Six participants were recruited for participation, of which five were Christians and one was a Muslim. Interviews were conducted and interpretative phenomenological analysis was used to analyze the data. Results showed that participants used their religious faith, beliefs and practices as coping resources. Participants used a deferring-collaborative style of religious coping, which seemed to have provided them with an avoidance strategy that protected the participants from conscious confrontation with their illness. Religious faith and beliefs also afforded the participants a sense of coherence that enabled the participants to manage their stress, reflect on their external and internal resources to promote effective coping and adaptive functioning in a health promoting manner. Implications of a deferring-collaborative style of religious coping and religious re-appraisal are discussed.     

Social networks: we get by with (and in spite of) a little help from our friends

Studies of social support networks have almost exclusively measured only their positive aspects. In this research, we investigated both the helpful or positive and the upsetting or negative aspects of social networks in a longitudinal study of spouses caring for a husband or wife with Alzheimer's disease, a progressive senile dementia. Measures of helpful and upsetting aspects of the care givers' networks, derived from interviews and daily interaction ratings, were studied for their relations with overall network satisfaction and depression at an initial interview period (n = 68) and at a follow-up period about 10 months later (n = 38). Results from hierarchical multiple regression analyses, in which care givers' age and sex and a measure of the spouses' health status were controlled, showed that the care givers' degree of upset with their networks was strongly associated with lower network satisfaction and increased depression at both time periods. Helpful aspects bore little or no direct relation to either depression or network satisfaction. Helpful aspects of the network did, however, interact with network upset in predicting network satisfaction, and depression (combined probabilities test, p less than .05). Longitudinal predictions of follow-up depression, after age, sex, care givers' health status, and initial depression levels were controlled, showed that changes in upsetting aspects of one's network were predictive of changes in depression over time. We interpreted these results within an attributional framework that emphasizes the salience of upsetting events within a social network.     

Change of reference frame for tactile localization during child development

Temporal order judgements (TOJ) for two tactile stimuli, one presented to the left and one to the right hand, are less precise when the hands are crossed over the midline than when the hands are uncrossed. This ‘crossed hand’ effect has been considered as evidence for a remapping of tactile input into an external reference frame. Since late, but not early, blind individuals show such remapping, it has been hypothesized that the use of an external reference frame develops during childhood. Five‐ to 10‐year‐old children were therefore tested with the tactile TOJ task, both with uncrossed and crossed hands. Overall performance in the TOJ task improved with age. While children older than 5½ years displayed a crossed hand effect, younger children did not. Therefore the use of an external reference frame for tactile, and possibly multisensory, localization seems to be acquired at age 5.     

Depressive thinking and depression: relations with personality and social resources

The mechanisms by which social supports and personality variables may buffer against psychopathology are not well understood. We studied depression, depressive cognitions, social supports, and self-esteem in a sample of 68 spouse-caregivers of patients with Alzheimer's Disease in an attempt to identify possible buffering mechanisms of the latter two variables. Specifically, we hypothesized that the well-known relation of depressive cognitions to depression would vary as a function of satisfaction with social supports and with level of self-esteem. Hierarchical multiple regression analyses conducted to predict depression revealed significant and independent main effects for depressive cognitions (p less than .01), social supports (p less than .025), and self-esteem (p less than .001), with depressive cognitions associated with higher depression and the other two variables associated with reduced depression (R2 = .53 for the three main effects). In addition, the relation of depressive cognitions with depression varied substantially depending on the level of social supports (p less than .01); caregivers with high levels of depressive cognitions had high levels of depression only if social supports were low (R2 = .61 including interaction). Self-esteem and depressive cognitions showed a similar interaction, but it failed to reach significance. Analyses to determine whether self-esteem and social supports were directly associated with lower depressive cognitive activity yielded a main effect for self-esteem only (p less than .03). Thus, whereas social supports and self-esteem were directly associated with lower depression, only the social supports variable was further associated with reduced depression because it apparently buffered the impact of depressive thinking. Self-esteem was also indirectly associated with lower depression via its relation with lower depressive thinking. Implications of our results for cognitive theories of depression and for the psychosocial mechanisms of stress buffering are discussed.     

A comparison of three social-psychological models of attitude and behavioral plan: prediction of contraceptive behavior

We compared the predictive validities of three prominent models of attitudes and behavioral decisions: Rosenberg's instrumentality-value model, Fishbein's belief-evaluation model, and Beach's adaptation of subjective expected utility theory. Seventy female undergraduates rated each of the models' components and reported their attitudes and behavioral plans toward using three different methods of contraception. With the traditional across-subjects prediction procedure, the Rosenberg model generally accounted for 5-25% less variance in subjects' attitudes and behavioral plans than the Fishbein an Beach models, which were not different. With a within-subject prediction procedure, the Rosenberg model was again the least accurate, and the Fishbein and Beach models had similar predictive accuracy. As hypothesized, within-subject predictions were more accurate than across-subjects predictions. The relatively poor performance of the Rosenberg model was attributable to the instrumentality component. In addition, we found that the Beach model could be simplified with no appreciable loss in predictive accuracy. Finally, a subject's personal normative beliefs emerged as a strong independent predictor of behavioral plan.