STUDY DESIGN Prospective cohort study. OBJECTIVE This study investigates the role of pain catastrophizing and causal beliefs with regard to severity and persistence of neck complaints after motor vehicle accidents. SUMMARY OF BACKGROUND DATA.: In previous research on low back pain, somatoform disorders and chronic fatigue syndrome, pain catastrophizing and causal beliefs were found to be rela...

What is the best way of figuring out the structure of a causal system composed of multiple variables? One prominent idea is that learners should manipulate each candidate variable in isolation to avoid confounds (known as the “Control of Variables” strategy). Here, we demonstrate that this strategy is not always the most efficient method for learning. Using an optimal learner model which aims t...

Metacognitive theory of emotional disorders (Matthews and Wells, 1994; Wells, 2009) suggests that metacognitive beliefs can play a causal role in the development and maintenance of anxiety symptoms. In this prospective study, we examine the relationships between metacognitive beliefs, perceived stress and anxiety in a non-clinical sample. Participants were 135 undergraduate students who complet...

OBJECTIVES Adjuvant endocrine therapy for early-stage breast cancer has greatly reduced the morbidity and mortality associated with breast cancer recurrence. Despite this, a significant proportion of women report fears of cancer recurrence. This study examined the associations between fear of cancer recurrence (FoR) and illness perceptions, medication beliefs, and treatment side effects in wome...

Illness and treatment perceptions are vital for people self-managing co-morbid conditions with associated cardiovascular disease, such as type 2 diabetes (T2D). However, perceptions of a co-morbid condition and the use of multiple medicines have yet to be researched. This study investigated the illness and treatment perceptions of people with co-morbid T2D. The Brief Illness Perception Question...

Inductive reasoning allows us to go beyond the target hypothesis and capitalize on prior knowledge. Past research has shown that both similarity relations and specific causal knowledge affect the inductive plausibility of hypotheses. The present experiment goes one step further by investigating the role of abstract causal schemas about main effects and interactions. We were interested in explor...

Approximately 50% of patients do not adhere to medical therapy. Religious and spiritual factors may play an important role in determining medication compliance in mental illness. The aim of this paper is to review published evidence documenting a relationship between religion/spirituality (R/S) and treatment adherence in mental illness, in particular in schizophrenia, depression and substance a...

Workplace stress can cause serious physical and mental illness result in billions of dollars lost productivity every year. Researchers have called for the development frameworks through which Human Resource Management (HRM) practices reduce employee stress. Building on HRM attribution theory, this study builds a framework based benevolent attributions. Benevolent attributions are beliefs that t...

There is a tradition of models of causal judgment in which causes and other causal roles are defined and identified in terms of empirical patterns of association with effects. In the present experiments, results conflicting with the predictions of such models were obtained. In one experiment, subjects judged that an interpretation in which a factor constantly present was identified as the cause...