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PubMed1997

Breaking ground: combining community service, critical thinking, and writing in a mental health clinical course.

This article describes the experience of a team of nursing educators who, over the course of 2 years, redesigned the delivery of an undergraduate nursing clinical course to reflect the changing face of mental health care near the turn of this century. Case studies of student learning experiences show the value of nontraditional clinical settings such as homeless shelters to the professional growth and training of nursing students. Recommendations offer practical advice for combining nontraditional community-based clinical experiences with critical thinking exercises as key components of the mental health clinical course delivery.

Community Health Nursing↗

PubMed1991

Culture tales. A narrative approach to thinking, cross-cultural psychology, and psychotherapy.

Narrative (or storytelling) approaches to understanding human action have recently become more popular in several areas of psychology. Treating human thinking as instances of story elaboration offers numerous implications for many domains of psychological theory, research, and practice. For example, several instances of cultural diversity take on a different hue when viewed from a narrative perspective. Finally, several authors (e.g., Bruner, 1986; Howard, 1989; Mair, 1989; McAdams, 1985; Polkinghorne, 1988; Sarbin, 1986) see the development of identity as an issue of life-story construction; psychopathology as instances of life stories gone awry; and psychotherapy as exercises in story repair.

Cross-Cultural Comparison↗

PubMed1999

Specificity of reference patterns in depressive thinking: agency and object roles in self-representation.

This study investigated A. T. Beck's (1970) negative cognitive triad as a model of depressive thinking. A mixed clinical sample (N = 126) completed the Sentence Completion Test for Depression (SCD) and self-report measures of depression and anxiety. Two reference patterns were tested: agency roles, people who are the source of thoughts, feelings, and actions (self and others); and object roles, points of reference location (self, other, world, future, and past). Cognitive effects were highly specific to depression. With self in agent role, significant correlations were observed with negative self, world, and future references but not with other people or the past. With others in agent role, only negative self references were correlated with depression (e.g., "Some people would not ... put me out if I was on fire"), suggesting an interpersonal extension to the negative cognitive triad.

Adolescent↗

PubMed1994

Changes in premenstrual symptoms and irrational thinking following cognitive-behavioral coping skills training.

Women reporting severe premenstrual symptoms were allocated nonrandomly to a cognitive-behavioral coping skills treatment (n = 13), a nonspecific treatment (n = 12), or a waiting-list group (n = 12). Repeated measures analyses of variance showed that, compared with control subjects, the coping skills group reported significant reductions in premenstrual symptomatology and irrational thinking at posttreatment and at 9-month follow-up. There were no significant differences between the waiting-list and control intervention groups at any time of testing. It was suggested that the increased irrationality reported at pretreatment should be viewed not as a "cause" of premenstrual problems but as a product of the stresses experienced in the premenstruum phase. The findings of this study indicated that cognitive-behavioral coping skills treatments can reduce the negative effects of premenstrual symptoms and that those reductions can be maintained over time.

Adaptation, Psychological↗

PubMed1997

Think-aloud approaches to cognitive assessment and the articulated thoughts in simulated situations paradigm.

In addition to widely used endorsement methods, one way to get at people's thoughts is to have them verbalize while engaged in a task or situation. The articulated thoughts in simulated situations (ATSS) paradigm is a think-aloud approach to cognitive assessment that has several advantages: an unstructured production response format, on-line rather than retrospective assessment, situational specificity and control, and flexibility of situation and cognitions. The authors review experiments that have examined articulated thoughts in clinically relevant contexts. ATSS does have certain limitations and further research into its psychometric properties is needed, but it seems promising as a versatile and adaptable method of cognitive assessment, especially when little is known of the cognitive terrain of interest.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy↗

PubMed1991

Constructive thinking and coping with laboratory-induced stress.

In a laboratory stress test, poor constructive thinkers produced more negative affective and cognitive responses in all experimental periods and a greater increase in such responses in the stress period than did good constructive thinkers. The groups differed in physiological arousal in the recovery period but not in the stress period. Stressor-instigated negative thoughts and spontaneous negative thoughts produced different patterns of relations with variables measured in the laboratory and with symptoms reported in everyday life. Discriminating patterns of relations were found between measures of cognition and affect in the laboratory and self-reported emotional, physical, and behavioral symptoms in everyday life. The results help explain the relation between maladaptive automatic thinking, on the one hand, and elevated physiological arousal and emotional, physical, and behavioral symptoms, on the other.

Adaptation, Psychological↗

PubMed1995

When less is more: counterfactual thinking and satisfaction among Olympic medalists.

Research on counterfactual thinking has shown that people's emotional responses to events are influenced by their thoughts about "what might have been." The authors extend these findings by documenting a familiar occasion in which those who are objectively better off nonetheless feel worse. In particular, an analysis of the emotional reactions of bronze and silver medalists at the 1992 Summer Olympics--both at the conclusion of their events and on the medal stand--indicates that bronze medalists tend to be happier than silver medalists. The authors attribute these results to the fact that the most compelling counterfactual alternative for the silver medalist is winning the gold, whereas for the bronze medalist it is finishing without a medal. Support for this interpretation was obtained from the 1992 Olympics and the 1994 Empire State Games. The discussion focuses on the implications of endowment and contrast for well being.

Achievement↗

PubMed1996

Enhancing self-esteem by directed-thinking tasks: cognitive and affective positivity asymmetries.

Insofar as people organize information about and evaluations of important topics in connected and coherent systems, attitudes may be changed from within by enhancing the salience of information already present virtually within the person's belief system without communicating new information from outside sources. A cognitive positivity bias is predicted such that stimulus evaluation (e.g., self-esteem) is affected more by characteristics that the stimulus possesses than by ones it lacks. Experiment 1 tested relations between participants' momentary self-esteem and concurrently salient desirable (vs. undesirable) self-characteristics possessed (vs. lacked). Experiments 2 and 3 changed participants' self-esteem by using directed-thinking tasks to manipulate the salience of desirable (vs. undesirable) self-characteristics possessed (and, to a lesser extent, lacked).

Adult↗

PubMed1996

Individual differences in intuitive-experiential and analytical-rational thinking styles.

Two studies provide evidence for the reliability and validity of a new self-report measure of individual differences in intuitive-experiential and analytical-rational thinking based on cognitive-experiential self-theory (CEST). The Rational-Experiential Inventory (REI) was constructed to measure the 2 independent processing modes with a modified Need for Cognition Scale (NFC, J.T. Cacioppo & R.E. Petty, 1982) and a new scale, Faith in Intuition (FI). In Study 1, a factor analysis yielded 2 orthogonal factors corresponding to NFC and FI. Although heuristic processing was determined primarily by FI, NFC also contributed to heuristic responding, in line with CEST. The relation of FI and NFC to coping ability also was examined. In Study 2, the factor structure of the REI was replicated (N = 973). NFC and FI were differentially related to measures of personality, adjustment, achievement, and interpersonal relations.

Cognition↗

PubMed1996

A longitudinal study of the reciprocal nature of risk behaviors and cognitions in adolescents: what you do shapes what you think, and vice versa.

Adolescents' reckless driving, drinking, and smoking, along with their cognitions about these behaviors, were assessed in a 3-year longitudinal design. Consistent with most models of health behavior, the results indicated that health cognitions predict risk behavior. In addition, the current data demonstrate that increases in risk behavior are accompanied by increase in perceptions of vulnerability and prevalence and by decreases in the influence of concerns about health and safety. Furthermore, the changes in prevalence estimates and concern about health and safety predicted subsequent risk behavior. These results demonstrate reciprocity between risk behaviors and related cognitions and suggest that adolescents are aware of the risks associated with their behavior but modify their thinking about these risks in ways that facilitate continued participation in the behaviors.

Adolescent↗

PubMed2000

Counterfactual thinking about actions and failures to act.

When people think counterfactually about how a situation could have turned out differently, they mentally undo events in regular ways (e.g., they focus on actions not failures to act). Four experiments examine the recent discovery that the focus on actions in the short term switches to inactions in the long term. The experiments show that this temporal switch occurs only for particular sorts of situations. Experiment 1 showed no temporal pattern to the agency effect when 112 participants judged emotional impact and frequency of "if-only" thoughts from both short- and long-term perspectives for an investment scenario. Experiment 2 showed no temporal pattern when 190 participants considered a college choice scenario with a good outcome. Experiment 3 showed no temporal pattern when 131 participants considered an investment scenario even when the situation for the actor and nonactor was bad from the outset. Experiment 4, with 113 participants, showed a focus on actions even when the investment loss was equal for both the actor and nonactor. The implications of the results are discussed in terms of what is explicitly available in the mental representation of actions and inactions.

Adolescent↗

PubMed2000

Vitalism in naive biological thinking.

Vitalism is the belief that internal bodily organs have agency and that they transmit or exchange a vital force or energy. Three experiments investigated the use of vitalistic explanations for biological phenomena by 5- and 10-year-old English-speaking children and adults, focusing on 2 components: the notion that bodily organs have intentions and the notion that some life force or energy is transmitted. The original Japanese finding of vitalistic thinking was replicated in Experiment 1 with English-speaking 5-year-olds. Experiment 2 indicated that the more active component of vitalism for these children is a belief in the transfer of energy during biological processes, and Experiment 3 suggested an additional, albeit lesser, role for organ intentionality. A belief in vital energy may serve a causal placeholder function within a naive theory of biology until a more precisely formulated mechanism is known.

Adult↗

PubMed2003

Retrospection in social dilemmas: how thinking about the past affects future cooperation.

This article reports 2 studies investigating the effects of retrospective thought on future cooperation in social dilemmas. Some general theories of cooperation presume, but have not tested, whether retrospection has impact: People may think about the choices they could have made instead, realize that cooperation would have produced larger outcomes, and change their strategy as a result. Across both studies, the authors show that rate of future cooperation is directly related to the number of best-case scenarios and inversely related to the number of worst-case scenarios generated. The 2nd study also shows that the number and type of retrospective thoughts generated can be predicted from the person's social value orientation.

Adult↗

PubMed2004

Think different: the merits of unconscious thought in preference development and decision making.

The role of unconscious and conscious thought in decision making was investigated in 5 experiments. Because of the low processing capacity of consciousness, conscious thought was hypothesized to be maladaptive when making complex decisions. Conversely, unconscious thought was expected to be highly effective. In Experiments 1-3, participants were presented with a complex decision problem in which they had to choose between various alternatives, each with multiple attributes. Some participants had to make a decision immediately after being presented with the options. In the conscious thought condition, participants could think about the decision for a few minutes. In the unconscious thought condition, participants were distracted for a few minutes and then indicated their decision. Throughout the experiments, unconscious thinkers made the best decisions. Additional evidence obtained in Experiments 4 and 5 suggests that unconscious thought leads to clearer, more polarized, and more integrated representations in memory.

Adult↗

PubMed2005

Counterfactual thinking and the first instinct fallacy.

Most people believe that they should avoid changing their answer when taking multiple-choice tests. Virtually all research on this topic, however, has suggested that this strategy is ill-founded: Most answer changes are from incorrect to correct, and people who change their answers usually improve their test scores. Why do people believe in this strategy if the data so strongly refute it? The authors argue that the belief is in part a product of counterfactual thinking. Changing an answer when one should have stuck with one's original answer leads to more "if only . . ." self-recriminations than does sticking with one's first instinct when one should have switched. As a consequence, instances of the former are more memorable than instances of the latter. This differential availability provides individuals with compelling (albeit illusory) personal evidence for the wisdom of always following their 1st instinct, with suboptimal test scores the result.

Adult↗

PubMed2006

The costs and benefits of writing, talking, and thinking about life's triumphs and defeats.

Three studies considered the consequences of writing, talking, and thinking about significant events. In Studies 1 and 2, students wrote, talked into a tape recorder, or thought privately about their worst (N = 96) or happiest experience (N = 111) for 15 min each during 3 consecutive days. In Study 3 (N = 112), students wrote or thought about their happiest day; half systematically analyzed, and half repetitively replayed this day. Well-being and health measures were administered before each study's manipulation and 4 weeks after. As predicted, in Study 1, participants who processed a negative experience through writing or talking reported improved life satisfaction and enhanced mental and physical health relative to those who thought about it. The reverse effect for life satisfaction was observed in Study 2, which focused on positive experiences. Study 3 examined possible mechanisms underlying these effects. Students who wrote about their happiest moments--especially when analyzing them--experienced reduced well-being and physical health relative to those who replayed these moments. Results are discussed in light of current understanding of the effects of processing life events.

Adaptation, Psychological↗

PubMed2006

Thinking within the box: The relational processing style elicited by counterfactual mind-sets.

By comparing reality to what might have been, counterfactuals promote a relational processing style characterized by a tendency to consider relationships and associations among a set of stimuli. As such, counterfactual mind-sets were expected to improve performance on tasks involving the consideration of relationships and associations but to impair performance on tasks requiring novel ideas that are uninfluenced by salient associations. The authors conducted several experiments to test this hypothesis. In Experiments 1a and 1b, the authors determined that counterfactual mind-sets increase mental states and preferences for thinking styles consistent with relational thought. Experiment 2 demonstrated a facilitative effect of counterfactual mind-sets on an analytic task involving logical relationships; Experiments 3 and 4 demonstrated that counterfactual mind-sets structure thought and imagination around salient associations and therefore impaired performance on creative generation tasks. In Experiment 5, the authors demonstrated that the detrimental effect of counterfactual mind-sets is limited to creative tasks involving novel idea generation; in a creative association task involving the consideration of relationships between task stimuli, counterfactual mind-sets improved performance.

Achievement↗

PubMed2000

Critical thinking and nursing scripts: the case for the development of both.

It is argued that contemporary nursing education's emphasis on the conscious development of nurses' critical reasoning skills fails to take account of the complexity of both human cognition and clinical nursing practice. Human cognition centrally includes unconscious or tacit processes and clinical nursing practice is typified by the simultaneous presentation of clinical and non-clinical cues and competing clinical goals. Contemporary emphases on conscious critical thinking are largely consistent with the differing theoretical frameworks which have informed the study of nurses' clinical reasoning in the last 30 years, most of which permit the use of simulated case study. These frameworks, that is, decision theory, information processing and skills acquisition theory, are described and their limitations highlighted. In addition, an alternative theoretical framework, that of schema or script theory, which does take account of the complexities of cognition and practice, is discussed. Its implications for nursing practice and education are also outlined.

Clinical Competence↗