Thinking Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Understanding young adults' anxiety requires applying a multidimensional approach to assess the psychosocial, behavioral, and cognitive aspects of this phenomenon. A hypothesized model of the relationships among coping style, thinking... more

Understanding young adults' anxiety requires applying a multidimensional approach to assess the psychosocial, behavioral, and cognitive aspects of this phenomenon. A hypothesized model of the relationships among coping style, thinking style, life satisfaction, social support, and selected demographics and anxiety among college students was tested using path analysis. A total of 257 undergraduate students aged 18-24 years completed an online survey. The independent variables were measured using the Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support, the Brief Students' Multidimensional Life Satisfaction Scale, the Brief COPE Inventory, the Positive Automatic Thoughts Questionnaire, and the Cognition Checklist-Anxiety. The outcome, anxiety, was measured using the Anxiety subscale of the 21-item Depression Anxiety and Stress Scale. Only negative thinking and maladaptive coping had a direct relationship with anxiety. Negative thinking was the strongest predictor of both maladapt...

Expressive writing, which involves disclosing one's deepest thoughts and feelings about a stressful life event by using a first-person perspective, has been linked to gains in health and well-being, though effect sizes range widely.... more

Expressive writing, which involves disclosing one's deepest thoughts and feelings about a stressful life event by using a first-person perspective, has been linked to gains in health and well-being, though effect sizes range widely. Assuming a third-person perspective is a natural and effective way of coping with highly distressing events. Therefore, the current study examined whether a distanced, third-person approach to expressive writing might be more beneficial than a traditional, first-person intervention for high baseline levels of event-linked intrusive thinking. Randomly assigned participants wrote expressively about traumatic life events by using a first-person or third-person-singular perspective. Linguistic analyses showed that assuming a first-person perspective is linked to higher levels of in-text cognitive engagement, whereas a third-person perspective is linked to lower cognitive engagement. However, in a context of higher levels of intrusive thinking, third-pers...

Pairs of young and elderly Ss participated in a short play and were then instructed to talk about factual or affective aspects of the play or to talk about the play without any particular focus suggested. In both the affective and control... more

Pairs of young and elderly Ss participated in a short play and were then instructed to talk about factual or affective aspects of the play or to talk about the play without any particular focus suggested. In both the affective and control condition, older adults' ability to discriminate what they had said from what the other person had said was poorer than that of young adults. In contrast, when induced to focus on the factual content of the events, older Ss' source monitoring improved, and the age difference was reduced. The pattern was similar when Ss' ability to discriminate what they had said from what they had thought was examined. Furthermore, affective focus lowered the overall level of recall for both young and older Ss and led older Ss, in particular, to introduce more elaborations into their recall. The possibility that age difference in remembering content and source are related to type of focus is discussed.

While neuroimaging studies implicate medial rostral prefrontal cortex (mrPFC) in self-referential processing, simulation accounts of social cognition suggest that this region also supports thinking about other people. This study tested... more

While neuroimaging studies implicate medial rostral prefrontal cortex (mrPFC) in self-referential processing, simulation accounts of social cognition suggest that this region also supports thinking about other people. This study tested the prediction that mrPFC might be involved in appraising the personality traits of another person to the degree that this person is perceived as similar to oneself. We also examined whether recruiting common processes for thinking about oneself and others might impact on subsequent memory for those judgments. Functional MRI was used while two factors were crossed: (i) the requirement to engage in personality trait or episodic source memory judgments and (ii) the reference for these judgments (i.e., oneself or a friend). The results link haemodynamic changes in mrPFC to both personality judgments about oneself and subsequent episodic memory retrieval of these judgments. The degree to which BOLD signal in this region was also associated with thinking about others correlated with perceived similarity in both tasks, thus corroborating simulation accounts. Moreover, participants who perceived themselves as having similar traits to their friends tended to be poorer at remembering whether they had made trait judgments in reference to themselves or their friend. This behavioral effect was reflected in the BOLD signal in mrPFC: there was a positive correlation between signal change for self versus friend judgments and subsequent memory for the reference of such judgments. The results suggest that investigations of mrPFC activity in the context of self/other judgments should take into account this psychological similarity effect.

Objective. The Health Sciences Reasoning Test (HSRT) is a validated instrument to assess critical-thinking skills. The objective of this study was to determine if HSRT results improved in second-year student pharmacists after exposure to... more

Objective. The Health Sciences Reasoning Test (HSRT) is a validated instrument to assess critical-thinking skills. The objective of this study was to determine if HSRT results improved in second-year student pharmacists after exposure to an explicit curriculum designed to develop critical-thinking skills. Methods. In December 2012, the HSRT was administered to students who were in their first year of pharmacy school. Starting in August 2013, students attended a 16-week laboratory curriculum using simulation, formative feedback, and clinical reasoning to teach critical-thinking skills. Following completion of this course, the HSRT was readministered to the same cohort of students. Results. All students enrolled in the course (83) took the HSRT, and following exclusion criteria, 90% of the scores were included in the statistical analysis. Exclusion criteria included students who did not finish more than 60% of the questions or who took less than 15 minutes to complete the test. Signif...

The prefrontal cortex (PFC) subserves reasoning in the service of adaptive behavior. Little is known, however, about the architecture of reasoning processes in the PFC. Using computational modeling and neuroimaging, we show here that the... more

The prefrontal cortex (PFC) subserves reasoning in the service of adaptive behavior. Little is known, however, about the architecture of reasoning processes in the PFC. Using computational modeling and neuroimaging, we show here that the human PFC has two concurrent inferential tracks: (i) one from ventromedial to dorsomedial PFC regions that makes probabilistic inferences about the reliability of the ongoing behavioral strategy and arbitrates between adjusting this strategy versus exploring new ones from long-term memory, and (ii) another from polar to lateral PFC regions that makes probabilistic inferences about the reliability of two or three alternative strategies and arbitrates between exploring new strategies versus exploiting these alternative ones. The two tracks interact and, along with the striatum, realize hypothesis testing for accepting versus rejecting newly created strategies.

Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) is a science policy concept that gained traction from 2000 onwards in the EU and US, in which alignment on purposes and values between different stakeholders is a key aspect. This thought... more

Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) is a science policy concept that gained traction from 2000 onwards in the EU and US, in which alignment on purposes and values between different stakeholders is a key aspect. This thought experiment problematizes this particular notion: ethically acceptable and societally desirable outcomes are not necessarily achieved when alignment is a consequence of early closure. To argue this point, we took the example of the potential development of scanning technology for the detection of paedophilia among job applicants, for which indicators of broad societal support were found in an RRI project on neuroimaging. We analysed this case by looking through several lenses, obtained by structured and non-structured literature searches. We explored how facts and values are masked when a taboo topic is considered. This results in the black boxing of the problem definition, potential solutions and development trajectories. Complex unstructured problems can t...

Lanin-Kettering and Harrow (1985) argue the traditional position that schizophrenia is a thought disorder. Chaika and Lambe (1985) counter that it is a speech disorder at the syntactic-discursive level, and not a thought disorder. On the... more

Lanin-Kettering and Harrow (1985) argue the traditional position that schizophrenia is a thought disorder. Chaika and Lambe (1985) counter that it is a speech disorder at the syntactic-discursive level, and not a thought disorder. On the basis of state-of-the-art research in linguistics, it is suggested that the symptoms of schizophrenia are evidence of neither a thought disorder nor a syntactic-discursive

Leadership behaviors are an important aspect of athletic training and are needed within all allied health care disciples. A two-phase, exploratory, non-experimental research study using a Delphi technique and a randomly selected sample of... more

Leadership behaviors are an important aspect of athletic training and are needed within all allied health care disciples. A two-phase, exploratory, non-experimental research study using a Delphi technique and a randomly selected sample of athletic trainers (n = 161) was conducted to determine leadership competencies perceived to be important for athletic training practice and education. The Delphi technique (phase one) resulted in the Leadership Development in Athletic Training instrument (LDAT). In the national survey (phase two), respondents used the LDAT to rate the importance of leadership competencies for athletic training practice and for athletic training education. Coefficient alphas ranged from α = 0.83 to 0.97 and provided satisfactory estimates of internal consistency. Concurrent, construct, and convergent validity were established. Forty-nine leadership competencies were rated important for practice and 48 for education (M = 1.5, p ≤ 0.001). Exploratory factor analysis r...

Narrative reasoning is a central mode of clinical reasoning in occupational therapy. Therapists reason narratively when they are concerned with disability as an illness experience, that is, with how a physiological condition is affecting... more

Narrative reasoning is a central mode of clinical reasoning in occupational therapy. Therapists reason narratively when they are concerned with disability as an illness experience, that is, with how a physiological condition is affecting a person’s life. In this paper, narrative reasoning is contrasted with propositional reasoning, and two kinds of narrative thinking are examined. The first is the use of narrative as a mode of speech that can be contrasted with biomedical discourse, in which disability is framed as physical pathology. The second involves the creation rather than the telling of stories. Therapists try to “emplot” therapeutic encounters with patients, that is, to help create a therapeutic story that becomes a meaningful short story in the larger life story of the patient.

Successful learning requires that individuals integrate information from the external environment with their own internal representations. In this article, we consider the role that mind wandering plays in education. Mind wandering... more

Successful learning requires that individuals integrate information from the external environment with their own internal representations. In this article, we consider the role that mind wandering plays in education. Mind wandering represents a state of decoupled attention because, instead of processing information from the external environment, our attention is directed toward our own private thoughts and feelings. In principle, because mind wandering is a state of decoupled attention, it represents a fundamental breakdown in the individual’s ability to attend (and therefore integrate) information from the external environment. We consider evidence that mind wandering impairs the encoding of information, leading to failures in building a propositional model of a sentence and, ultimately, impairing the building of a narrative model with sufficient detail to allow generating inferences. Next, because recognizing and correcting for mind wandering is a metacognitive skill, certain client groups, such as those suffering from dysphoria or attention deficit disorder, may be unable to correct for the deficits associated with mind wandering, and so may suffer greater negative consequences during education. Finally, we consider how to apply this research to educational settings.

Teams are the fundamental element of work in the contemporary clinical setting. As interdisciplinary teams become an essential component of the evidence-based framework for clinical practice, their formalization, integration, and... more

Teams are the fundamental element of work in the contemporary clinical setting. As interdisciplinary teams become an essential component of the evidence-based framework for clinical practice, their formalization, integration, and synthesis within the practice framework will become increasingly mandatory. Outlined here is a contextual model for team action that is formalized as the organizational leadership continuously addresses the structural and process components of team dynamics in a continuous and cybernetic frame that assures all of the elements of effective teamwork. The theoretical foundations for team modeling are explicated, the elements of the systems approach to team process are outlined, and a necessary synthesis of team processes is described and established as a foundation for evidence-based clinical practice.

At the close of the Society for the Advancement of Biology Education Research conference in July 2012, one of the organizers made the comment: “Misconceptions are so yesterday.” Within the community of learning sciences, misconceptions... more

At the close of the Society for the Advancement of Biology Education Research conference in July 2012, one of the organizers made the comment: “Misconceptions are so yesterday.” Within the community of learning sciences, misconceptions are yesterday's news, because the term has been aligned with eradication and/or replacement of conceptions, and our knowledge about how people learn has progressed past this idea. This essay provides an overview of the discussion within the learning sciences community surrounding the term “misconceptions” and how the education community's thinking has evolved with respect to students’ conceptions. Using examples of students’ incorrect ideas about evolution and ecology, we show that students’ naïve ideas can provide the resources from which to build scientific understanding. We conclude by advocating that biology education researchers use one or more appropriate alternatives in place of the term misconception whenever possible.

This Monograph aims to contribute to the information processing, the differential, and the developmental modeling of the mind, and to work these into an integrated theory. Toward this aim, a longitudinal study is presented that... more

This Monograph aims to contribute to the information processing, the differential, and the developmental modeling of the mind, and to work these into an integrated theory. Toward this aim, a longitudinal study is presented that investigates the relations between processing efficiency, working memory, and problem solving from the age of 8 years to to the age of 16 years. The study involved 113 participants, about equally drawn among 8-, 10-, 12-, and 14-year-olds at the first testing; these participants were tested two more times spaced one year apart. Participants were tested with a large array of tasks addressed to processing efficiency (i.e., speed of processing and inhibition), working memory (in terms of Baddeley's model, phonological storage, visual storage, and the central executive of working memory), and problem solving (quantitative, spatial, and verbal reasoning). Confirmatory factor analysis validated the presence of each of the above dimensions and indicated that the...

Background: Worry exposure (WE) is a core element of cognitive-behavioral treatment for generalized anxiety disorder (GAD). Its efficacy as a stand-alone treatment method (without further cognitive-behavioral therapy interventions) has... more

Background: Worry exposure (WE) is a core element of cognitive-behavioral treatment for generalized anxiety disorder (GAD). Its efficacy as a stand-alone treatment method (without further cognitive-behavioral therapy interventions) has never been tested.We aimed to examine whether WE alone is as efficacious as the empirically supported stand-alone treatment for GAD, applied relaxation (AR). Methods: In a randomized controlled study, 73 outpatients

Public health strategies have placed increasing emphasis on psychosocial and arts-based strategies for promoting well-being. This study presents preliminary findings for a specific literary-based intervention, Shared Reading, which... more

Public health strategies have placed increasing emphasis on psychosocial and arts-based strategies for promoting well-being. This study presents preliminary findings for a specific literary-based intervention, Shared Reading, which provides community-based spaces in which individuals can relate with both literature and one another. A 12-week crossover design was conducted with 16 participants to compare benefits associated with six sessions of Shared Reading versus a comparison social activity, Built Environment workshops. Data collected included quantitative self-report measures of psychological well-being, as well as transcript analysis of session recordings and individual video-assisted interviews. Qualitative findings indicated five intrinsic benefits associated with Shared Reading: liveness, creative inarticulacy, the emotional, the personal and the group (or collective identity construction). Quantitative data additionally showed that the intervention is associated with enhanc...