Denying the foreseeability of an event as a means of self-protection. The Impact of Self-Threatening Outcome Information on the Strength of the Hindsight Bias

The hindsight bias represents the tendency of people to falsely believe that they would have predicted the outcome of an event, once the outcome is known. Two experiments will be presented that show a reduction or even reversal of the hindsight bias when the outcome information is self-threatening for the participants. Participants read a report of an interaction between a man and a woman that ended with different outcomes: The woman was raped vs. the woman was not raped vs. no outcome information was given. Results of the first experiment indicated that especially female participants, who did not accept rape myths, showed a reversed hindsight bias, when they received the rape outcome information. The more threatening the rape outcome had been, the lower was their estimated likelihood of rape. Results of the second experiment confirmed those of the first. Female participants, who did not accept rape myths and perceived themselves highly similar to the victim, showed a strong reversed hindsight bias, when threatened by the rape outcome, whereas female participants, who did believe in rape myth and were not similar to the victim, showed a classical hindsight bias. These effects were interpreted in terms of self-serving or in-group serving functions of the hindsight bias: Participants deny the foreseeability of a self-threatening outcome as a means of self-protection even if they are not personally affected by the negative information, but a member of their group.

Statistical issues on studies of mixed longitudinal design

Mixed longitudinal designs are important study designs for many areas of medical research. Mixed longitudinal studies have several advantages over cross-sectional or pure longitudinal studies, including shorter study completion time and ability to separate time and age effects, thus are an attractive choice. Statistical methodology used in general longitudinal studies has been rapidly developing within the last few decades. Common approaches for statistical modeling in studies with mixed longitudinal designs have been the linear mixed-effects model incorporating an age or time effect. The general linear mixed-effects model is considered an appropriate choice to analyze repeated measurements data in longitudinal studies. However, common use of linear mixed-effects model on mixed longitudinal studies often incorporates age as the only random-effect but fails to take into consideration the cohort effect in conducting statistical inferences on age-related trajectories of outcome measurements. We believe special attention should be paid to cohort effects when analyzing data in mixed longitudinal designs with multiple overlapping cohorts. Thus, this has become an important statistical issue to address. ^ This research aims to address statistical issues related to mixed longitudinal studies. The proposed study examined the existing statistical analysis methods for the mixed longitudinal designs and developed an alternative analytic method to incorporate effects from multiple overlapping cohorts as well as from different aged subjects. The proposed study used simulation to evaluate the performance of the proposed analytic method by comparing it with the commonly-used model. Finally, the study applied the proposed analytic method to the data collected by an existing study Project HeartBeat!, which had been evaluated using traditional analytic techniques. Project HeartBeat! is a longitudinal study of cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk factors in childhood and adolescence using a mixed longitudinal design. The proposed model was used to evaluate four blood lipids adjusting for age, gender, race/ethnicity, and endocrine hormones. The result of this dissertation suggest the proposed analytic model could be a more flexible and reliable choice than the traditional model in terms of fitting data to provide more accurate estimates in mixed longitudinal studies. Conceptually, the proposed model described in this study has useful features, including consideration of effects from multiple overlapping cohorts, and is an attractive approach for analyzing data in mixed longitudinal design studies.^

The Effect of Proximity, Explicitness, and Representation of Basic Science Information on Student Clinical Problem-Solving

Problem: Medical and veterinary students memorize facts but then have difficulty applying those facts in clinical problem solving. Cognitive engineering research suggests that the inability of medical and veterinary students to infer concepts from facts may be due in part to specific features of how information is represented and organized in educational materials. First, physical separation of pieces of information may increase the cognitive load on the student. Second, information that is necessary but not explicitly stated may also contribute to the student’s cognitive load. Finally, the types of representations – textual or graphical – may also support or hinder the student’s learning process. This may explain why students have difficulty applying biomedical facts in clinical problem solving. Purpose: To test the hypothesis that three specific aspects of expository text – the patial distance between the facts needed to infer a rule, the explicitness of information, and the format of representation – affected the ability of students to solve clinical problems. Setting: The study was conducted in the parasitology laboratory of a college of veterinary medicine in Texas. Sample: The study subjects were a convenience sample consisting of 132 second-year veterinary students who matriculated in 2007. The age of this class upon admission ranged from 20-52, and the gender makeup of this class consisted of approximately 75% females and 25% males. Results: No statistically significant difference in student ability to solve clinical problems was found when relevant facts were placed in proximity, nor when an explicit rule was stated. Further, no statistically significant difference in student ability to solve clinical problems was found when students were given different representations of material, including tables and concept maps. Findings: The findings from this study indicate that the three properties investigated – proximity, explicitness, and representation – had no statistically significant effect on student learning as it relates to clinical problem-solving ability. However, ad hoc observations as well as findings from other researchers suggest that the subjects were probably using rote learning techniques such as memorization, and therefore were not attempting to infer relationships from the factual material in the interventions, unless they were specifically prompted to look for patterns. A serendipitous finding unrelated to the study hypothesis was that those subjects who correctly answered questions regarding functional (non-morphologic) properties, such as mode of transmission and intermediate host, at the family taxonomic level were significantly more likely to correctly answer clinical case scenarios than were subjects who did not correctly answer questions regarding functional properties. These findings suggest a strong relationship (p < .001) between well-organized knowledge of taxonomic functional properties and clinical problem solving ability. Recommendations: Further study should be undertaken investigating the relationship between knowledge of functional taxonomic properties and clinical problem solving ability. In addition, the effect of prompting students to look for patterns in instructional material, followed by the effect of factors that affect cognitive load such as proximity, explicitness, and representation, should be explored.

Moving from medical to health systems classifications of deaths : extending verbal autopsy to collect information on the circumstances of mortality

Funding A Health Systems Research Initiative Development Grant from the UK Department for International Development (DFID), Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), Medical Research Council (MRC (and the Wellcome Trust (MR/N005597/1) funds the research presented in this paper. Support for the Agincourt HDSS including verbal autopsies was provided by The Wellcome Trust, UK (grants 058893/Z/99/A; 069683/Z/02/Z; 085477/Z/08/Z; 085477/B/08/Z), and the University of the Witwatersrand and Medical Research Council, South Africa.

PseudoBase: structural information on RNA pseudoknots

PseudoBase is a database containing structural, functional and sequence data related to RNA pseudo­knots. It can be reached at http://wwwbio.LeidenUniv.nl/∼Batenburg/PKB.html. For each pseudoknot, thirteen items are stored, for example the relevant sequence, the stem positions of the pseudoknot, the EMBL accession number of the sequence and the support that can be given regarding the reliability of the pseudo­knot. Since the last publication, information on sizes of the stems and the loops in the pseudoknots has been added. Also added are alternative entries that produce surveys of where the pseudoknots are, sorted according to stem size or loop size.

New information on the evolution of the Bradyodont Chondrichthyes / Richard Lund --.

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