1,721,150 research outputs found
Varieties of money - Experts' and non-experts' typicality judgments
No full textThe present research aims at testing Snelders et al.'s hypothesis that money category has the same characteristics as other fuzzy (or ill-defined) categories. An experiment was carried out by using a partially different set of exemplars. This decision has been suggested by two aspects: the first concerns the peculiarity of the Italian monetary system; the second aspect concerns the definition and the extension of the sample of the experimental items. Finally, it was investigated the role of expertise (e.g. being a bank clerk) to see whether it affected the representation of the money category. Such hypotheses have been verified by means of a classical task in which the subjects were asked to judge the typicality of a list of money exemplars. The results of the factor analysis showed that in both the students' (non expert) and bank clerks' (expert) samples the category structure is defined by three factors: ready money, bank money and money substitutes. No difference in the category structure was observed between experts and non-experts
Promuovere comportamenti di screening. Framing delle conseguenze ma non solo: il ruolo della valenza lessicale.
No full textEvaluating the effect of frame and lexical valence on colon-cancer screening uptake
No full textWe evaluated the effectiveness of a message promoting colon-cancer screening with actual patients. Two factors were manipulated: verbal framing (gain vs. loss) and lexical valence of the consequences (expressing them with lexically positive vs. negative terms). Previous studies have almost always expressed the consequences of the promoted health behavior with lexically positive terms (e.g., conservative surgery) preceded by a negation term in the loss frame. However, psycholinguistic literature suggests that the message framing would be more effective when using terms lexically coherent (i.e., gain frame expressed with positive terms and loss frame expressed with negative terms, e.g., radical surgery). Based on the different effect that framed messages have depending on the function of the behavior promoted (i.e., detection vs. prevention), we predicted that: a) when promoting a detection behavior, the loss-negative message will be more effective than the loss-positive message, which is usually more effective than the gain-positive message; and b) when promoting a prevention behavior, the loss-negative message will be less effective than the loss-, which is usually less effective than the gain-positive. The results supported partially this prediction: The loss-negative message was more effective than the loss-positive message, but the loss-negative message was as effective as the gain-positive one. We propose that this result depends on the fact that the targeted behavior was described as both a detection and a preventive behavior for colon-cancer. These findings could both explain the weakness of the framing effect resulted in recent meta-analyses and inform cancer screening communication research and practice
Emotion regulation in hospital employees
Full text linkDo service workers regulate their emotions so that they are in line with their job requirements? What effects do such regulation processes have on workers’ psychophysical well-being? What variables mediate their frequency, nature, and effects? To study these issues, Italian men and women (N=180), working as nurses, doctors, or in other technical roles, at a hospital were administered a questionnaire comprising several scales, plus questions on socio-demographic and work-related variables.
Results showed that the regulation of felt emotions, i.e., “Emotional labor” (Hochschild 1983), is a relevant variable of such jobs. Workers performed both (a) surface acting, i.e., vis-a-vis a patient expressed only contextually appropriate emotions (e.g., by smiling to an annoying patient), and (b) deep acting, i.e., tried to actually feel the required emotion; (c) feeling genuine emotions (or emotional consonance), i.e., effortlessly feeling the job-required emotions, was a frequent experience too for employees. Furthermore, results showed that the nature and frequency of such regulation processes have significant relations with both objective job-related features, such as the type of hospital ward to which the worker is associated, and with psychological variables such as burnout, hedonic tone of felt emotions, and overall life satisfaction
Intervento chirurgico o controlli periodici? Dipende dalla diagnosi e dalla esclusività dei trattamenti.
No full textNumeri in medicina: ingredienti per una comunicazione del rischio efficace e trasparente
No full textNowadays, we have much more information about our health than we had in the past, and numerical information is, or should be, commonplace in the communication between doctors and patients. Indeed, evidence-based medicine is the gold standard for public health decisions, for the development of national and international guidelines, as well as for clinical practice on individual patients.
In this perspective, risk communication, conveyed mainly through numerical information, need to take into account how people perceive and understand this information. Psychological research on this issue has shown that people are affected by the way information is presented when making judgments and decisions . This paper aims to illustrate some of the main issues to be considered when designing risk communication in the medical domain.
By examining some examples of non-transparent risk communication, we will illustrate the effectiveness of different types of numerical information (natural frequencies, 1 in n, percentages) and discuss the concepts of absolute and relative risk, highlighting the importance of making explicit the reference class.
Additionally, considering that the same treatment can be described in terms of likelihood of survival or death, and that, although the two information are complementary, people seem to be affected by the communicator’s choice, we will examine the various types of frames used in the medical domain and discuss the more recent research findings.
Making explicit the reference class to which probabilities refer can also help to understand the results of a clinical test. In a simplistic way, people often think that a positive test result means that a disease is present and that a negative test result means that it is not. Even when it is acknowledged that no test is 100% certain, the margin of error and the extent to which it is affected by the frequency of the disease in the population are difficult to grasp, even by experts. For instance, even with a very precise test, a positive test result is associated with a very low likelihood of having the disease (positive predictive value) when the disease is rare.
Research has also shown that people with low numeracy (the ability to reason and to apply simple numerical concepts) are especially susceptible to misunderstanding of numerical information when it is referred to groups of people and that are likely to be affected by stories about single cases (see, for instance, the current debate about childhood vaccinations).
Finally, we will discuss about the new frontiers of medical research, resulting in a continuous increase in the complexity of risk communication. For example, with the progress of medical genetics and the possibility to determine the presence of genetic mutations that can be linked to the risk of developing diseases, the complexity of the information to be communicated is clearly increasing. Even if people are driven by the desire to know, we need to remember that it is not always possible to act upon the information obtained (e.g., would you want to know whether you have a genetic predisposition for Alzheimer, considering that at present there is no effective treatment?) and that the decisions made by our “present Self” might not be the same of those that our “future Self” would made for its health
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