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Journal of Mental Health (Abingdon,... Feb 2023Social cognition is often aberrant or impaired in psychotic disorders and related to functional outcomes. In particular, one core social cognitive bias - hostile... (Review)
Review
BACKGROUND
Social cognition is often aberrant or impaired in psychotic disorders and related to functional outcomes. In particular, one core social cognitive bias - hostile attribution bias - is proposed to be implicated in paranoia, anxiety, mood disturbances and interpersonal conflict outcomes. However, questions remain about this domain's specificity to psychosis and its relationship to general functional outcomes.
AIMS
The present paper offers a descriptive and critical review of the literature on hostile attribution bias in psychotic disorders, in order to examine (1) its impact on persecutory symptoms in schizophrenia-spectrum disorders, (2) impact on other related psychopathology among those experiencing psychosis and (3) relationship to functioning.
METHODS
Twenty-eight studies included in this review after parallel literature searches of PsycINFO and PubMed.
RESULTS
Evidence from these studies highlighted that hostile attribution bias is elevated in schizophrenia, and that it is related to anxiety, depression and interpersonal conflict outcomes.
CONCLUSION
While results suggest that hostile attributions are elevated in schizophrenia and associated with symptoms and functioning, there exist numerous persisting questions in the study of this area, including identifying which measures are most effective and determining how it presents: as a state or trait-like characteristic, via dual processes, and its situational variation.
Topics: Humans; Hostility; Schizophrenia Spectrum and Other Psychotic Disorders; Social Cognition; Bias
PubMed: 32228272
DOI: 10.1080/09638237.2020.1739240 -
Canadian Journal of Psychiatry. Revue... Dec 1994The explanatory model perspective of medical anthropology emphasizes the cultural shaping of individuals' efforts to make sense of their symptoms and suffering. Causal... (Review)
Review
The explanatory model perspective of medical anthropology emphasizes the cultural shaping of individuals' efforts to make sense of their symptoms and suffering. Causal attribution is a pivotal cognitive process in this personal and social construction of meaning. Cultural variations in symptom attribution affect the pathogenesis, course, clinical presentation and outcome of psychiatric disorders. Research suggests that styles of attribution for common somatic symptoms may influence patients' tendency to somatize or psychologize psychiatric disorders in primary care. At the same time, symptom attributions are used to negotiate the sociomoral implications of illness. Recent work in social psychology and medical anthropology emphasizes the roots of attributional processes in bodily and social processes that are highly context-dependent, and hence, must be understood as part of the construction of a local world of meaning. Symptom attributions then may be understood as forms of positioning with both cognitive and social consequences relevant to psychiatric assessment and intervention.
Topics: Anthropology, Cultural; Cross-Cultural Comparison; Humans; Patient Care Team; Primary Health Care; Psychophysiologic Disorders; Sick Role; Somatoform Disorders
PubMed: 7828110
DOI: 10.1177/070674379403901002 -
Child Maltreatment Feb 2002Clinicians increasingly use empirically based cognitive-behavioral techniques in their treatment of child victims of sexual abuse. Attribution retraining is often a... (Review)
Review
Clinicians increasingly use empirically based cognitive-behavioral techniques in their treatment of child victims of sexual abuse. Attribution retraining is often a primary component of this work, and it involves various techniques aimed at decreasing abuse-related self-blame and encouraging the child to attribute responsibility for the abuse to the perpetrator This article reviews literature that highlights the complexity of self and other blame for sexually abused children in terms of developmental status, the multifaceted nature and interrelationships of abuse-specific attributions, and the psychological effects of self-blame and perpetrator blame. A review of written attribution retraining techniques developed by diverse authors for use with sexually abused children and their nonoffending parents is provided, including written and verbal techniques and techniques using games and the arts. The relative utility of different approaches with children of various stages of development is discussed, along with the need for empirical research regarding the effectiveness of these techniques.
Topics: Art Therapy; Child; Child Abuse, Sexual; Cognitive Behavioral Therapy; Cognitive Dissonance; Humans; Internal-External Control; Play Therapy; Role Playing
PubMed: 11838516
DOI: 10.1177/1077559502007001006 -
Zoonoses and Public Health Aug 2022Numerous source attribution studies for foodborne pathogens based on epidemiological and microbiological methods are available. These studies provide empirical data for... (Meta-Analysis)
Meta-Analysis
Numerous source attribution studies for foodborne pathogens based on epidemiological and microbiological methods are available. These studies provide empirical data for modelling frameworks that synthetize the quantitative evidence at our disposal and reduce reliance on expert elicitations. Here, we develop a statistical model within a Bayesian estimation framework to integrate attribution estimates from expert elicitations with estimates from microbial subtyping and case-control studies for sporadic infections with four major bacterial zoonotic pathogens in the Netherlands (Campylobacter, Salmonella, Shiga toxin-producing E. coli [STEC] O157 and Listeria). For each pathogen, we pooled the published fractions of human cases attributable to each animal reservoir from the microbial subtyping studies, accounting for the uncertainty arising from the different typing methods, attribution models, and year(s) of data collection. We then combined the population attributable fractions (PAFs) from the case-control studies according to five transmission pathways (domestic food, environment, direct animal contact, human-human transmission and travel) and 11 groups within the foodborne pathway (beef/lamb, pork, poultry meat, eggs, dairy, fish/shellfish, fruit/vegetables, beverages, grains, composite foods and food handlers/vermin). The attribution estimates were biologically plausible, allowing the human cases to be attributed in several ways according to reservoirs, transmission pathways and food groups. All pathogens were predominantly foodborne, with Campylobacter being mostly attributable to the chicken reservoir, Salmonella to pigs (albeit closely followed by layers), and Listeria and STEC O157 to cattle. Food-wise, the attributions reflected those at the reservoir level in terms of ranking. We provided a modelling solution to reach consensus attribution estimates reflecting the empirical evidence in the literature that is particularly useful for policy-making and is extensible to other pathogens and domains.
Topics: Animals; Bayes Theorem; Campylobacter; Cattle; Cattle Diseases; Escherichia coli; Food Microbiology; Foodborne Diseases; Listeria; Models, Statistical; Ovum; Salmonella; Sheep; Sheep Diseases; Swine; Swine Diseases
PubMed: 35267243
DOI: 10.1111/zph.12937 -
Frontiers in Psychology 2022Ostracism is known to cause psychological distress. Thus, defining the factors that can lead to recovery or diminish these negative effects is crucial. Three experiments...
Ostracism is known to cause psychological distress. Thus, defining the factors that can lead to recovery or diminish these negative effects is crucial. Three experiments examined whether suggesting the possible causes of ostracism to victims could decrease or eliminate their ostracism distress. They also examined whether death-anxiety mediated the association between the suggested possible cause for being ostracized and recovery. Participants ( = 656) were randomly assigned to six experimental and control groups and were either ostracized or included in a game of Cyberball. Two control conditions were used: participants who were ostracized but received no explanation and participants who were included. Immediately after the ostracism experience, participants in the experimental groups were presented with one of four causes for being ostracized, using locus of control (internal, external) and stability (stable, unstable), the two causal dimensions of Weiner's attribution theory. After a short delay they were administered a mood or needs-satisfaction questionnaire. The results highlight the interaction between locus of control and stability, and underscore the relative importance of different attributions in alleviating self-reported ostracism distress. Specifically, both external and unstable attributions decreased distress, and an unstable attribution led to complete recovery in some participants. Thus, recovery from ostracism may be accelerated when the victim receives an explanation for ostracism that attributes the incident to unstable, external causes soon after the incident. Death-anxiety fully mediated the association between locus of control attribution and mood, but for on needs-satisfaction or the stability of the attribution.
PubMed: 35645924
DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.899564 -
Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence 2021Literary narratives regularly contain passages that different readers attribute to different speakers: a character, the narrator, or the author. Since literary...
Literary narratives regularly contain passages that different readers attribute to different speakers: a character, the narrator, or the author. Since literary narratives are highly ambiguous constructs, it is often impossible to decide between diverging attributions of a specific passage by hermeneutic means. Instead, we hypothesise that attribution decisions are often influenced by annotator bias, in particular an annotator's literary preferences and beliefs. We present first results on the correlation between the literary attitudes of an annotator and their attribution choices. In a second set of experiments, we present a neural classifier that is capable of imitating individual annotators as well as a common-sense annotator, and reaches accuracies of up to 88% (which improves the majority baseline by 23%).
PubMed: 35187471
DOI: 10.3389/frai.2021.725321 -
Clinical Psychology & Psychotherapy 2015The misinterpretation of bodily symptoms as an indicator of a serious illness is a key feature of the criteria and the cognitive-behavioural models of hypochondriasis....
The misinterpretation of bodily symptoms as an indicator of a serious illness is a key feature of the criteria and the cognitive-behavioural models of hypochondriasis. Previous research suggests that individuals suffering from health anxiety endorse attributions of physical disease, whereas persons with elevated general anxiety have the tendency to attribute psychological causes to their symptoms. However, whether a somatic attribution style is specific to patients with hypochondriasis, as opposed to those with anxiety disorders, has not yet been investigated and is therefore part of the present study. Fifty patients with hypochondriasis, 50 patients with a primary anxiety disorder and 50 healthy participants were presented with nine common bodily sensations and had to spontaneously attribute possible causes to the symptoms. Patients with hypochondriasis differed from patients with anxiety disorders and healthy controls in giving significantly fewer normalizing explanations, but attributing more often in terms of moderate or serious diseases. Patients with anxiety disorders also made significantly fewer normalizing attributions and more somatic attributions to a severe illness than healthy controls. There were no differences between the groups in the frequency of psychological attributions and somatic attributions concerning mild diseases. The present study demonstrates that hypochondriasis is associated with a disorder-specific attribution style connecting somatic symptoms primarily with moderate and serious diseases. By contrast, normalizing attributions are largely omitted from consideration by patients with hypochondriasis. The findings conform with the cognitive conception of hypochondriasis and support the strategy of modifying symptom attributions, as practiced in cognitive-behavioural therapy.
Topics: Adaptation, Psychological; Adult; Anxiety Disorders; Cognitive Behavioral Therapy; Comorbidity; Depressive Disorder; Female; Humans; Hypochondriasis; Illness Behavior; Interview, Psychological; Male; Middle Aged; Personality Inventory; Psychometrics; Somatoform Disorders
PubMed: 24123559
DOI: 10.1002/cpp.1871 -
Law and Human Behavior Apr 2023Because confessions are sometimes unreliable, it is important to understand how jurors evaluate confession evidence. We conducted a content analysis testing an...
OBJECTIVE
Because confessions are sometimes unreliable, it is important to understand how jurors evaluate confession evidence. We conducted a content analysis testing an attribution theory model for mock jurors' discussion of coerced confession evidence in determining verdicts.
HYPOTHESES
We tested exploratory hypotheses regarding mock jurors' discussion of attributions and elements of the confession. We expected that jurors' prodefense statements, external attributions (attributing the confession to coercion), and uncontrollable attributions (attributing the confession to defendant naivety) would predict more prodefense than proprosecution case judgments. We also expected that being male, politically conservative, and in support of the death penalty would predict proprosecution statements and internal attributions, which in turn would predict guilty verdicts.
METHOD
Mock jurors (N = 253, M = 47 years; 65% women; 88% White, 10% Black, 1% Hispanic, 1% listed "other") read a murder trial synopsis, watched an actual coerced false confession, completed case judgments, and deliberated in juries of up to 12 members. We videotaped, transcribed, and reliably coded deliberations.
RESULTS
Most mock jurors (53%) rendered a guilty verdict. Participants made more prodefense than proprosecution statements, more external than internal attributions, and more internal than uncontrollable attributions. Participants infrequently mentioned various elements of the interrogation (police coercion, contamination, promises of leniency, interrogation length) and psychological consequences for the defendant. Proprosecution statements and internal attributions predicted proprosecution case judgments. Women made more prodefense and external attribution statements than men, which in turn predicted diminished guilt. Political conservatives and death penalty proponents made more proprosecution statements and internal attributions than their counterparts, respectively, which in turn predicted greater guilt.
CONCLUSIONS
Some jurors identified coercive elements of a false confession and rendered external attributions for a defendant's false confession (attributing the confession to the coercive interrogation) during deliberation. However, many jurors made internal attributions, attributing a defendant's false confession to his guilt-attributions that predicted juror and jury inclinations to convict an innocent defendant. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).
Topics: Humans; Male; Female; Middle Aged; Decision Making; Social Perception; Judgment; Law Enforcement; Police; Criminal Law
PubMed: 37053386
DOI: 10.1037/lhb0000529 -
PloS One 2023Double-blind peer review is considered a pillar of academic research because it is perceived to ensure a fair, unbiased, and fact-centered scientific discussion. Yet,...
Double-blind peer review is considered a pillar of academic research because it is perceived to ensure a fair, unbiased, and fact-centered scientific discussion. Yet, experienced researchers can often correctly guess from which research group an anonymous submission originates, biasing the peer-review process. In this work, we present a transformer-based, neural-network architecture that only uses the text content and the author names in the bibliography to attribute an anonymous manuscript to an author. To train and evaluate our method, we created the largest authorship-identification dataset to date. It leverages all research papers publicly available on arXiv amounting to over 2 million manuscripts. In arXiv-subsets with up to 2,000 different authors, our method achieves an unprecedented authorship attribution accuracy, where up to 73% of papers are attributed correctly. We present a scaling analysis to highlight the applicability of the proposed method to even larger datasets when sufficient compute capabilities are more widely available to the academic community. Furthermore, we analyze the attribution accuracy in settings where the goal is to identify all authors of an anonymous manuscript. Thanks to our method, we are not only able to predict the author of an anonymous work but we also provide empirical evidence of the key aspects that make a paper attributable. We have open-sourced the necessary tools to reproduce our experiments.
Topics: Authorship; Deep Learning; Double-Blind Method; Electric Power Supplies; Neural Networks, Computer
PubMed: 37390072
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0287611 -
International Journal of Psychology :... Dec 2010The paper addresses the causal attribution theory, an old and well-established theme in social psychology which denotes the everyday, commonsense explanations that... (Review)
Review
The paper addresses the causal attribution theory, an old and well-established theme in social psychology which denotes the everyday, commonsense explanations that people use to explain events and the world around them. The attribution paradigm is considered one of the most appropriate analytical tools for exploratory and descriptive studies in social psychology and organizational literature. It affords the possibility of describing accident processes as objectively as possible and with as much detail as possible. Causal explanations are vital to the formal analysis of workplace hazards and accidents, as they determine how organizations act to prevent accident recurrence. Accordingly, they are regarded as fundamental and prerequisite elements for safety management policies. The paper focuses primarily on the role of causal attributions in occupational and industrial accident analyses and implementation of safety interventions. It thus serves as a review of the contribution of attribution theory to occupational and industrial accidents. It comprises six sections. The first section presents an introduction to the classic attribution theories, and the second an account of the various ways in which the attribution paradigm has been applied in organizational settings. The third and fourth sections review the literature on causal attributions and demographic and organizational variables respectively. The sources of attributional biases in social psychology and how they manifest and are identified in the causal explanations for industrial and occupational accidents are treated in the fifth section. Finally, conclusion and recommendations are presented. The recommendations are particularly important for the reduction of workplace accidents and associated costs. The paper touches on the need for unbiased causal analyses, belief in the preventability of accidents, and the imperative role of management in occupational safety management.
Topics: Accidents, Occupational; Causality; Culture; Defense Mechanisms; Humans; Internal-External Control; Occupational Health; Safety Management
PubMed: 22044080
DOI: 10.1080/00207594.2010.501337