Biomedical subjects

D R Lehman

Publications and source records attributed to D R Lehman.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed1994

Should this child be removed from home? Hypothesis generation and information seeking as predictors of case decisions.

Two vital aspects of the investigative process in child abuse and neglect (CAN) cases are (a) generating as many plausible hypotheses as possible and (b) seeking out as much uncontaminated information as possible. Alternatively, unwarranted assumptions about the nature of CAN cases can impair investigative decision making. We examined whether the numbers of (a) unwarranted assumptions, (b) hypotheses generated, and (c) requests for additional information concerning a hypothetical reported case of CAN predicted level of agreement with a premature decision to remove a child from home among a group of CAN professionals. As expected, lower levels of agreement with the intervention were associated with (a) less unwarranted assumptions, (b) a greater number of hypotheses generated, and (c) more requests for information concerning the case. Compared with a group of undergraduates, a significantly greater percentage of CAN professionals requested information, and a significantly smaller percentage of professionals made unwarranted assumptions. Interestingly, however, no significant difference in mean level of agreement with the intervention was observed between professionals and undergraduates. Directions for future research are discussed.

Adult↗

PubMed1987

Teaching reasoning.

Twentieth-century psychologists have been pessimistic about teaching reasoning, prevailing opinion suggesting that people may possess only domain-specific rules, rather than abstract rules; this would mean that training a rule in one domain would not produce generalization to other domains. Alternatively, it was thought that people might possess abstract rules (such as logical ones) but that these are induced developmentally through self-discovery methods and cannot be trained. Research suggests a much more optimistic view: even brief formal training in inferential rules may enhance their use for reasoning about everyday life events. Previous theorists may have been mistaken about trainability, in part because they misidentified the kind of rules that people use naturally.

Education↗

PubMed1987

Long-term effects of losing a spouse or child in a motor vehicle crash.

In this article we examine the long-term effects of the sudden, unexpected loss of a spouse or child. In the spouse study, interviews were conducted with 39 individuals who had lost a spouse in a motor vehicle crash 4 to 7 years ago and with 39 matched controls. In the parent study, interviews were conducted with 41 parents who had lost a child in a crash and with 41 matched controls. Control respondents were matched to bereaved respondents case-by-case on the basis of sex, age, income, education, and number and ages of children. Significant differences between bereaved spouses and controls were revealed on several indicators of general functioning, including depression and other psychiatric symptoms, social functioning, psychological well-being, reactivity to good events, and future worries and concerns. For the most part, these differences persisted when variables such as present family income and present marital status were statistically controlled. Comparisons between bereaved and control parents also revealed significant differences on some measures of general functioning (especially depression), but these were not as pervasive as the differences obtained in the spouse study. Responses to questions about current thoughts and feelings suggest that the deceased continued to occupy the thoughts and conversations of bereaved spouses and parents. Moreover, a large percentage of respondents (from 30% to 85%, depending on the question), continued to ruminate about the accident or what might have been done to prevent it, and they appeared to be unable to accept, resolve, or find any meaning in the loss. Taken together, the data provide little support for traditional notions of recovery from the sudden, unexpected loss of a spouse or child.

Accidents, Traffic↗