Biomedical subjects

Jessecae K Marsh

Publications and source records attributed to Jessecae K Marsh.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2006

Beliefs about essences and the reality of mental disorders.

Do people believe mental disorders are real and possess underlying essences? The current study found that both novices and practicing clinicians held weaker essentialist beliefs about mental disorders than about medical disorders. They were also unwilling to endorse the idea that mental disorders are real and natural. Furthermore, compared with novices, mental health clinicians were less likely to endorse the view that there is a shared cause underlying a mental disorder and that one needs to remove the cause to get rid of the mental disorder. Clinicians were polarized on their views about whether mental disorders are categorical or dimensional. These findings reflect current controversies about mental disorders in the field at large.

Attitude of Health Personnel↗

PubMed2006

Order effects in contingency learning: the role of task complexity.

Dennis and Ahn (2001) found that during contingency learning, initial evidence influences causal judgments more than does later evidence (a primacy effect), whereas López, Shanks, Almaraz, and Fernández (1998) found the opposite (a recency effect). We propose that in contingency learning, people use initial evidence to develop an anchoring hypothesis that tends to be underadjusted by later evidence, resulting in a primacy effect. Thus, factors interfering with initial hypothesis development, such as simultaneously learning too many contingencies, as in López et al., would reduce the primacy effect. Experiment 1 showed a primacy effect with learning contingencies involving only one outcome but no primacy effect with two outcomes. Experiment 2 demonstrated that the magnitude of the primacy effect correlated with participants' verbal working memory capacity. It is concluded that a critical moderator for exhibition of the primacy effect is task complexity, presumably because it interferes with initial hypothesis development.

Cues↗

PubMed2002

Effect of theory-based feature correlations on typicality judgments.

In the present study, we examine what types of feature correlations are salient in our conceptual representations. It was hypothesized that of all possible feature pairs, those that are explicitly recognized as correlated (i.e., explicit pairs) and affect typicality judgments are the ones that are more likely theory based than are those that are not explicitly recognized (i.e., implicit pairs). Real-world categories and their properties, taken from Malt and Smith (1984), were examined. We found that explicit pairs had a greater number of asymmetric dependency relations (i.e., one feature depends on the other feature, but not vice versa) and stronger dependency relations than did implicit pairs, which were statistically correlated in the environment but were not recognized as such. In addition, people more often provided specific relation labels for explicit pairs than for implicit pairs; these labels were most often causal relations. Finally, typicality judgments were more affected when explicit correlations were broken than when implicit correlations were broken. It is concluded that in natural categories, feature correlations that are explicitly represented and affect typicality judgments are the ones about which people have theories.

Adult↗