Biomedical subjects

Lily A Gutnik

Publications and source records attributed to Lily A Gutnik.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2006

The role of emotion in decision-making: a cognitive neuroeconomic approach towards understanding sexual risk behavior.

Models of decision-making usually focus on cognitive, situational, and socio-cultural variables in accounting for human performance. However, the emotional component is rarely addressed within these models. This paper reviews evidence for the emotional aspect of decision-making and its role within a new framework of investigation, called neuroeconomics. The new approach aims to build a comprehensive theory of decision-making, through the unification of theories and methods from economics, psychology, and neuroscience. In this paper, we review these integrative research methods and their applications to issues of public health, with illustrative examples from our research on young adults' safe sex practices. This approach promises to be valuable as a comprehensively descriptive and possibly, better predictive model for construction and customization of decision support tools for health professionals and consumers.

Adolescent↗

PubMed2005

Interpreting procedures from descriptive guidelines.

Errors in clinical practice guidelines may translate into errors in real-world clinical practice. The best way to eliminate these errors is to understand how they are generated, thus enabling the future development of methods to catch errors made in creating the guideline before publication. We examined the process by which a medical expert from the American College of Physicians (ACP) created clinical algorithms from narrative guidelines, as a case study. We studied this process by looking at intermediate versions produced during the algorithm creation. We identified and analyzed errors that were generated at each stage, categorized them using Knuth's classification scheme, and studied patterns of errors that were made over the set of algorithm versions that were created. We then assessed possible explanations for the sources of these errors and provided recommendations for reducing the number of errors, based on cognitive theory and on experience drawn from software engineering methodologies.

Artificial Intelligence↗

PubMed2005

Risky decisions despite counter evidence: modeling a culture of safer sexual practices.

To create a culture of safe practices, we need to understand how and under what conditions the public makes risky decisions about their health. Because risky sexual behaviors are known to be common in young adults, we investigated their decision making regarding sexual activities that could incur a high risk of HIV infection. Sixty young urban adults maintained journals for two weeks and were interviewed regarding condom use and sexual history. We characterized four patterns of condom use behavior: consistent (35.0%), inconsistent (16.7%), consistent to inconsistent (35.0%), and inconsistent to consistent (13.3%). Directionality of reasoning was analyzed in the explanations provided for condom use decisions. The consistent and inconsistent patterns were associated with data-driven heuristic reasoning, where behavior becomes automated and is associated with a high level of confidence in one's judgment. In the other two patterns, the shift in behavior was due to a significant event that influenced a change in directionality to explanation-based reasoning. We discuss these results within the framework of identifying potentially high-risk groups for whom customized intervention strategies (such as computer-based educational programs) can be used to reduce risk, thereby creating a culture of safer sexual practices.

Adult↗

PubMed2005

Cognitive neuroeconomics: new solutions to old problems.

The current models of decision-making are limited in their ability to provide a comprehensive understanding of the field. We propose the cognitive neuroeconomics model, which, we have used to better understand the process of decision-making in the domain of mental health, namely, young adults' risky sexual behavior. This model can have far reaching implications in developing adequate decision support tools.

Adult↗