INTRODUCTION Understanding people's perceptions of disease risk and how these perceptions compare with actual risk models may improve the effectiveness of risk communication. This study examined perceived disease risk and causal beliefs for type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease (CVD), the relationship between self-reported risk factors and perceived disease risk, and the influence of causa...

Multiple psychological theories of causal learning provide case-by-case updating rules: given my current causal beliefs about the world and a novel case, how should I change those beliefs? Most of these theories predict some type of order effect: biased and unbiased sequences of cases will lead to different final causal beliefs, even if the overall statistics are identical. This paper describes...

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the causal relationship between meta-cognitive beliefs about thought suppression and intrusive thoughts. We conducted structural equation modeling using a cross-lagged effect model and a synchronous effect model. Results revealed that the Paradoxical Effect subscale score synchronously increased the frequency of intrusive thoughts. On the othe...

OBJECTIVE Patients' illness beliefs were shown to be more relevant than other psychosocial factors of influence for predicting outcome in back pain in primary care. The aim of this study was to determine whether illness beliefs and beliefs about rehabilitation are predictors of functioning, pain intensity, and coping with pain after rehabilitation in a population with longstanding chronic back ...

The world's population is ageing rapidly. Between 2000 and 2050, the proportion of the world's older adults is estimated to double from about 11% to 22%. In absolute terms, this is an expected increase from 605 million to 2 billion people over the age of 60. Older adults can encounter some specific physical and mental health drawbacks that require being treated efficiently (1). In Alge-ria, app...

BACKGROUND Sarcoidosis is a chronic multisystem disease with a high prevalence of depression although this is often not recognised. It is not known how patients perceive their disease or the medications required for treatment. We hypothesised that perceptions of illness and beliefs about medications may relate to psychological distress in this condition. METHODS 81(42 female) patients with sa...

Many decisions refer to actions that have a causal impact on other events. Such actions allow for mere learning of expected values, but also for causal learning about the structure of the decision context. Whereas most theories of decision making neglect causal knowledge, causal learning theories emphasize the importance of causal beliefs and assume that people represent decision problems in te...

OBJECTIVE The goal of this study was to develop a reliable and valid method for assessing the cancer-related beliefs of parents with a child in treatment for cancer. METHOD One hundred twenty-five families (119 mothers, 56 fathers) completed a measure of cancer-related beliefs written to reflect common themes associated with the diagnosis and treatment of childhood cancer. Participants also c...

Philosophers and scientists have long recognized how useful people find the temporal order of events as a guide to uncovering the causal relations among those events (e.g., Hume, 1739; Lagnado & Sloman 2004, 2006; White, 2006). In this paper we provide evidence for the converse, that beliefs about causation influence the perception of temporal order. Participants that learned the structure of c...