-
Social Science & Medicine (1982) Nov 2021We consider what might be learned from the unintended, apparently unanticipated, consequences of the use of digital health (including alternatives to face to face... (Review)
Review
We consider what might be learned from the unintended, apparently unanticipated, consequences of the use of digital health (including alternatives to face to face consultations, electronic medical records, use of apps and online monitoring) in primary care. We chose a conceptual literature review method, to seek a higher order understanding of the nuanced patterning of unintended consequences of digital health technologies (for people, relationships, organisations and ways of working) which are rarely simply positive or negative. The approach is informed by realist review, which recognises that experiences and outcomes of interventions work (or fail) in different ways in particular contexts. We present three higher order themes to illuminate underpinning mechanisms for unintended consequences in digital health technologies in primary care. These themes are illustrated by case examples, with particular focus on those that have been little discussed in the literature. Following Merton's (1936) differentiation between consequences for the actor(s) and others, which are mediated through the culture and social structure, we discuss consequences that i) disrupt power relations between patients and health professionals or between different groups of health professions, ii) contribute to paradoxical outcomes and iii) result in a potentially corrosive sub-culture of pessimism about digital health. We conclude that when implementing or evaluating digital technologies in primary care, it is wise to consider the 'dark logic' of the intervention (Bonell et al., 2015). Attention to issues of power relations, the potential for paradoxical outcomes, and impacts on the expectations of staff in relation to digital innovation are particularly salient in relation to the dramatic changes in primary care delivery initiated during the Covid-19 pandemic. Fostering a sense of ownership and interest in monitoring the effects that matter to the organisation will likely help counter pessimism and renew interest in deploying those digital innovations that show promise.
Topics: COVID-19; Humans; Pandemics; Pessimism; Primary Health Care; SARS-CoV-2
PubMed: 34619631
DOI: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2021.114419 -
Revista Latino-americana de Enfermagem 2024the aim of this study is to investigate the relationship between death distress, psychological adjustment, optimism, pessimism and perceived stress among nurses working...
OBJECTIVE
the aim of this study is to investigate the relationship between death distress, psychological adjustment, optimism, pessimism and perceived stress among nurses working during the COVID-19 pandemic.
METHOD
this study was designed as cross-sectional/cohort. The population of the study involved 408 nurses from Northern Cyprus, which are registered as full members of the Nurse Council. The sample comprised 214 nurses, who volunteered to participate in the study. The study data was collected using a web-based online survey (Demographic form, the Coronavirus Stress Measure, The Optimism and Pessimism Questionnaire, The Brief Adjustment Scale-6, The Death Distress Scale).
RESULTS
the results indicated that perceived stress significantly and negatively predicted optimism (β = -0.21, p < 0.001) and pessimism (β = 0.38, p < 0.001). Perceived stress had significant and positive predictive effects on psychological adjustment (β = 0.31, p < 0.001) and death distress (β = 0.17, p < 0.01). Further analysis results revealed that pessimism mediates the association of stress with psychological adjustment and death distress; however, optimism only mediates the effect of stress on psychological adjustment among nurses.
CONCLUSION
a low level of pessimism is effective in strengthening nurses' psychological adjustment skills againt perceived stress and death distress. Nurses should consider behavioral strategies to help reduce the level of pessimism during periods such as pandemics.
BACKGROUND
(1) High levels of perceived stress increased higher score of psychological adjustment. (2) Pessimism mediates the association of stress with adjustment and death distress. (3) Optimism only mediates the effect of stress on psychological adjustment among nurses.
Topics: Humans; COVID-19; Cross-Sectional Studies; Optimism; Female; Adult; Male; Pessimism; Middle Aged; Pandemics; Emotional Adjustment; Nurses; Cyprus; Attitude to Death; Adaptation, Psychological; Cohort Studies; Stress, Psychological; Psychological Distress; SARS-CoV-2; Surveys and Questionnaires; Young Adult
PubMed: 38695430
DOI: 10.1590/1518-8345.7068.4173 -
Psychology, Health & Medicine Oct 2022Identifying factors related to healthcare professionals' mental health has become an imperative topic for offering mental health services to foster their psychological...
Identifying factors related to healthcare professionals' mental health has become an imperative topic for offering mental health services to foster their psychological functioning. This study, for the first time, examined the mediating role of optimism and pessimism in the association between parental coronavirus anxiety and depression among Turkish healthcare professionals during the COVID-19 pandemic. Participants included 429 healthcare professionals whose age ranged between 22 and 61 years (50.3% female; = 36.65, = 7.0). Results from mediation analysis revealed that parental coronavirus anxiety had a significant predictive effect on optimism, pessimism, and depression. Optimism and pessimism also had significant predictive effects on depression. Most importantly, optimism and pessimism mitigated the adverse impact of parental coronavirus anxiety on healthcare professionals' depression. The findings suggest that optimism is an essential source in reducing depression symptoms in the face of parental coronavirus experiences. Decision-makers and health organizations may integrate strength-based approaches into their guidelines to address parental coronavirus anxiety and depression.
Topics: Adult; Anxiety; COVID-19; Delivery of Health Care; Depression; Female; Humans; Male; Middle Aged; Optimism; Pandemics; Parents; Pessimism; Young Adult
PubMed: 34382894
DOI: 10.1080/13548506.2021.1966702 -
Philosophical Studies 2021We examine a prominent naturalistic line on the method of cases (MoC), exemplified by Timothy Williamson and Edouard Machery: MoC is given a fallibilist and...
We examine a prominent naturalistic line on the method of cases (MoC), exemplified by Timothy Williamson and Edouard Machery: MoC is given a fallibilist and non-exceptionalist treatment, accommodating moderate modal skepticism. But Gettier cases are in dispute: Williamson takes them to induce substantive philosophical knowledge; Machery claims that the ambitious use of MoC should be abandoned entirely. We defend an intermediate position. We offer an internal critique of Macherian pessimism about Gettier cases. Most crucially, we argue that Gettier cases needn't exhibit 'disturbing characteristics' that Machery posits to explain why philosophical cases induce dubious judgments. It follows, we show, that Machery's central argument for the effective abandonment of MoC is undermined. Nevertheless, we engineer a restricted variant of the argument-in harmony with Williamsonian ideology-that survives our critique, potentially limiting philosophy's scope for establishing especially ambitious modal theses, despite traditional MoC's utility being partially preserved.
PubMed: 34720205
DOI: 10.1007/s11098-020-01493-0 -
Epilepsy & Behavior : E&B Mar 2023The purpose of this study was to investigate the validity of the Revised Optimism-Pessimism Scale (PSM-R) as a measure of attributional style, and the incremental...
The purpose of this study was to investigate the validity of the Revised Optimism-Pessimism Scale (PSM-R) as a measure of attributional style, and the incremental utility of optimism and pessimism as predictors of seizure group, in an intractable seizure disorder sample. Participants included adult patients with epileptic seizures (ES; n = 151) and psychogenic nonepileptic seizures (PNES; n = 173) whose diagnoses were confirmed by prolonged video/EEG monitoring (PVEM). Optimism and pessimism scores were computed from abbreviated versions of the MMPI for all participants. Analyses were conducted to examine the relationships between optimism, pessimism, and MMPI clinical scale scores. Logistic regression analyses were conducted to generate a model for the prediction of seizure group. Results supported the validity of the PSM-R as a measure of attributional style in an intractable seizure disorder sample. Both optimism and pessimism provided significant incremental predictive utility over and above other predictors of seizure group. There are advantages of using the proposed prediction model over other alternative differential diagnostic procedures, including lower cost, greater availability, and increased standardization. Overall, results indicated that attributional style is a clinically relevant index of personality and cognitive response to stress among an intractable seizure disorder sample.
Topics: Adult; Humans; Pessimism; Epilepsy; Conversion Disorder; Personality; Drug Resistant Epilepsy; Seizures; Optimism; Electroencephalography
PubMed: 36736238
DOI: 10.1016/j.yebeh.2023.109094 -
Psychology and Aging Feb 2024Research across a number of different areas in psychology has long shown that optimism and pessimism are predictive of a number of important future life outcomes....
Research across a number of different areas in psychology has long shown that optimism and pessimism are predictive of a number of important future life outcomes. Despite a vast literature on the correlates and consequences, we know very little about how optimism and pessimism change across adulthood and old age and the sociodemographic factors that are associated with individual differences in such trajectories. In the present study, we conducted (parallel) analyses of standard items from the Life Orientation Test (Scheier & Carver, 1985) in three comprehensive data sets: Two-wave data from both the Berlin Aging Study II (N = 1,423, aged 60-88; M = 70.4, SD = 3.70) and the Midlife in the U.S. Study (N = 1,810 aged 60-84; M = 69.12, SD = 6.47) as well as cross-sectional data from the Survey of Health, Aging, and Retirement (N = 17,087, aged 60-99; M = 70.19, SD = 7.53). Using latent change-regression models and locally weighted smoothing curves revealed that optimism is on average very stable after age 60, with some evidence in Survey of Health, Aging, and Retirement of lowered optimism in very old age. Consistent across the three independent studies, pessimism evinced on average modest increases, ranging between .25 and .50 SD per 10 years of age. Of the sociodemographic factors examined, higher levels of education revealed the most consistent associations with lower pessimism, whereas gender evinced more study-specific findings. We take our results to demonstrate that age-related trajectories and correlates thereof differ for optimism and pessimism. Older adults appear to preserve into older ages those levels of optimistic expectations they have had at 60 years of age and show only modest increases in pessimism. We discuss possible reasons for these findings. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).
Topics: Humans; Aged; Adult; Cross-Sectional Studies; Pessimism; Aging; Educational Status; Individuality
PubMed: 38358694
DOI: 10.1037/pag0000789 -
Scientific Reports Jul 2020Scores on an optimistic-pessimistic personality scale have been associated with mortality, but optimism and pessimism scores are separable traits and it is unclear which...
Scores on an optimistic-pessimistic personality scale have been associated with mortality, but optimism and pessimism scores are separable traits and it is unclear which has effects on health or longevity. The Life Orientation Test (LOT), containing items for optimism and pessimism, was included in a twin study on health of Australians aged over 50 in 1993-1995. After a mean of 20 years, participants were matched against death information from the Australian National Death Index. 1,068 out of 2,978 participants with useable LOT scores had died. Survival analysis tested for associations between separate optimism and pessimism scores and mortality from any cause, and from cancers, cardiovascular diseases or other known causes. Age-adjusted scores on the pessimism scale were associated with all-cause and cardiovascular mortality (Hazard Ratios per 1 standard deviation unit, 95% confidence intervals and p-values 1.134, 1.065-1.207, 8.85 × 10 and 1.196, 1.045-1.368, 0.0093, respectively) but not with cancer deaths. Optimism scores, which were only weakly correlated with pessimism scores (age-adjusted rank correlation = - 0.176), did not show significant associations with overall or cause-specific mortality. Reverse causation (disease causing pessimism) is unlikely because in that case both cardiovascular diseases and cancers would be expected to lead to pessimism.
Topics: Aged; Aged, 80 and over; Body Mass Index; Cardiovascular Diseases; Female; Humans; Kaplan-Meier Estimate; Male; Middle Aged; Optimism; Pessimism; Proportional Hazards Models
PubMed: 32724068
DOI: 10.1038/s41598-020-69388-y -
Information Processing & Management May 2022This paper proposes a new deep learning approach to better understand how optimistic and pessimistic feelings are conveyed in Twitter conversations about COVID-19. A...
This paper proposes a new deep learning approach to better understand how optimistic and pessimistic feelings are conveyed in Twitter conversations about COVID-19. A pre-trained transformer embedding is used to extract the semantic features and several network architectures are compared. Model performance is evaluated on two new, publicly available Twitter corpora of crisis-related posts. The best performing pessimism and optimism detection models are based on bidirectional long- and short-term memory networks. Experimental results on four periods of the COVID-19 pandemic show how the proposed approach can model optimism and pessimism in the context of a health crisis. There is a total of 150,503 tweets and 51,319 unique users. Conversations are characterised in terms of emotional signals and shifts to unravel empathy and support mechanisms. Conversations with stronger pessimistic signals denoted little emotional shift (i.e. 62.21% of these conversations experienced almost no change in emotion). In turn, only 10.42% of the conversations laying more on the optimistic side maintained the mood. User emotional volatility is further linked with social influence.
PubMed: 36569234
DOI: 10.1016/j.ipm.2022.102918 -
Journal of Affective Disorders Aug 2022Rumination and worry represent two types of repetitive negative thinking (RNT), and their predictive and maintaining roles are well-established in depression and... (Review)
Review
BACKGROUND
Rumination and worry represent two types of repetitive negative thinking (RNT), and their predictive and maintaining roles are well-established in depression and anxiety, respectively. Furthermore, there is an emerging literature on the link between RNT and psychological wellbeing in the perinatal period.
METHODS
We conducted a scoping review of studies that have investigated the relationship between RNT and perinatal depression and anxiety. We identified 87 papers eligible for inclusion in the review; they included cross-sectional and longitudinal studies, as well as treatment evaluations (pilot trials and randomised controlled trials).
RESULTS
Cross-sectional studies provided evidence of an association between RNT (i.e., rumination and worry) and depression and anxiety, in both pregnancy and postpartum. Longitudinal findings were mixed. Whilst antenatal worry consistently predicted subsequent depression and anxiety (both later in pregnancy and postpartum), rumination did not consistently predict depression. However, there was some evidence that rumination interacted with other processes to predict later psychopathology. Three randomised controlled trials evaluated whether psychological treatments reduce RNT in the perinatal period, only one of which included a clinical sample.
LIMITATIONS
No experimental investigations were eligible for inclusion in the review.
CONCLUSIONS
Further studies are needed to further our understanding of the nature and role of RNT in pregnancy and postpartum, and its consequences for maternal mental health. These include (but are not limited to) experimental investigations, studies with large clinical samples, and RCTs evaluating the effectiveness of psychological interventions targeting RNT to prevent and treat perinatal depression and anxiety.
Topics: Anxiety; Cross-Sectional Studies; Depression; Female; Humans; Pessimism; Pregnancy; Surveys and Questionnaires
PubMed: 35597469
DOI: 10.1016/j.jad.2022.05.070 -
Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews.... Jan 2023This article presents theories of attention that attempt to derive their answer to the question of what attention is from their answers to the question of what it is for...
This article presents theories of attention that attempt to derive their answer to the question of what attention is from their answers to the question of what it is for some activity to be done attentively. Such theories provide a distinctive account of the difficulties that are faced by the attempt to locate processes in the brain by which the phenomena of attention can be explained. Their account does not share the pessimism of theories suggesting that the concept of attention is defective. Instead it reconstrues the explanatory relationship between attention and the processes that constitute it, in a way that is illustrated here by considering the relationship between attention and the processes that are identified by the biased competition theory. After considering some of the ways in which an adverbialist approach might be developed, the article concludes by suggesting some possible solutions to a problem concerning distraction, by which prominent adverbialist theories of attention have been dogged. This article is categorized under: Psychology > Attention Philosophy > Metaphysics Philosophy > Foundations of Cognitive Science.
Topics: Humans; Animals; Dogs; Philosophy; Metaphysics; Brain; Cognitive Science
PubMed: 35019242
DOI: 10.1002/wcs.1588