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[Analyses of criminal judgments as related to nursing services in the cases of the Supreme Court in Taiwan].

This paper briefly reviewed literature relating to medical disputes and investigated the criminal judgments of the Supreme Court in Taiwan in cases involving nurses and the delivery of nursing services. Past studies of criminal judgments involving medical dispute have usually been presented in the form of case studies. By contrast, this study used a retrospective data, and analyzed the judgments by content analysis and the quantitative research design method. The original written verdicts were obtained from two major online law databases. There have been a total of 70 criminal judgments related to medical disputes since 1927. Among them, 7 cases involved nurses and the delivery of nursing services. These 7 cases were analysed, and the findings will be instructive to those interested in lawsuits related to medical disputes.

Legislation, Nursing↗

Recognition and frequency judgments in young and elderly adults.

Three experiments examined frequency judgments and recognition memory in young and elderly adults. Subjects were presented a long list of words at either a 5-s rate (Experiments 1 & 3) or a 1-s rate (Experiment 2), after which frequency-judgment and recognition memory tasks were administered. Either an absolute (Experiments 1 & 2) or a relative (Experiment 3) frequency-judgment task was used. The recognition test, which involved repeated tests of some items, involved either one incorrect item paired with each correct item (Experiments 1 & 2), or four incorrect items (Experiment 3). Age-related differences in frequency judgments, for the more frequently presented items, were found in all three experiments. For the recognition scores, the predicted interaction between age and successive tests was found only in Experiment 3. The results were interpreted within the framework of age-related differences in elaborative encoding and in distractibility to irrelevant stimuli.

Adolescent↗

Effect of distance instructions on size judgments.

The proposition that in a reduced-cue setting subjects could use cognitive information about an object's distance to make accurate judgments of its size was tested. An improved paradigm was used to determine the effects of distance instructions per se. This paradigm also allowed independent tests of the effectiveness of cue reduction. The data indicated that cue reduction was successful and that the specific distance tendency governed size judgments when there were no distance instructions. When distance instructions were given, they produced size judgments in precisely the ratio predicted by the size-distance invariance hypothesis. However, there was a large constant error, which reflects a tendency of college students to overestimate the amount of distance signified by a verbal instruction. Hence, cognitive information in the form of verbal distance instructions has precise effects on size judgments, but the latter are not veridical, even in the absence of anchor effects from the specific distance tendency and residual perceptual cues.

Cognition↗

Regular- and special-education teachers' judgments about mentally retarded children in an integrated setting.

A three-way design was used to determine whether teachers' judgments about mentally retarded children would be related to characteristics of the children, characteristics of the teacher, and/or characteristics of an integrated free-play setting. Independent variables were integration ratio, area of teacher's specialization, and target child. The dependent variable was teachers' judgments about handicapped children in an integrated setting. Subjects were 15 regular-education teachers and 15 special-education teachers who taught at the primary school level. Judgment ratings by regular-education teachers depended both on the characteristics of the target child and the integration ratio in the free-play activity. Special-education teachers' judgments also were influenced by characteristics of the child observed but not the integration ratio.

Attitude↗

[Effects of probabilistic judgments on negative moods].

Theory and research on the effects of mood on cognition have shown that persons in a negative mood tend toward analytic effortful processing strategies, whereas individuals in a positive mood prefer simplifying heuristic strategies. A review of the literature shows that (a) mainly the influence of mood on cognition and social behavior (e.g., persuasion) has been investigated; and (b) achievements in memory and cognitive tasks were of central concern (Abele, 1991; Schwarz, Bless & Bohner, 1991). With this background, and based on propositional network models of human information processing, the present study investigates influences in the opposite direction, i.e., the effect of cognitive style on feeling states. The compatibility thesis (Otto & Schmitz, 1993), which postulates that an interaction of feeling state and information processing style is necessary for the continuation of a mood state, is generalized to negative feeling states (anxiety) and analytic information processing style (probabilistic judgments). Equivalent emotional states and cognitive productions have to go together to sustain the mood states. In a 2 x 2 x 4 mixed design, 76 male and female students from introductory classes in psychology served as subjects. Using a 15-minute mood induction procedure (autobiographical recollection methodology), a negative, anxiety-prone, or neutral feeling state was elicited in half of the participants. During the next 10 minutes half of each group worked on a list of future life events (Weinstein, 1980), either with the instruction to rate the chances of the items (probabilistic judgments) or with the instruction to rate the items' general applicability (control condition). Repeated sampling of a measurement repetition factor served as a baseline assessment and as a manipulation check, along with measurements of the feeling states while completing the task. The feeling states were assessed by means of a multifactor instrument (Eigenschaftswörterliste; Janke & Debus, 1978). The results support the generalization of the compatibility thesis to negative feeling states (anxiety). Only the group in which a negative feeling state and a probabilistic processing style interacted reported a negative mood and anxious state throughout the task completion. Neither the induced negative (anxious) mood nor the probabilistic judgments alone could sustain a negative feeling state. Moods seem to be best conceivable as a combination of genuine emotional elements (feeling states) and cognitive elements (probabilistic judgments in the case of anxiety).

Adult↗

Direct and judgmental measures of family planning program inputs.

This report compares two different approaches to measuring the strength of family planning programs in Bangladesh and Kenya. The first approach, the judgmental approach, has been used in a number of studies during the past two decades; scores on the characteristics of family planning programs are derived from the responses knowledgeable persons give to a series of questions. The second approach is to obtain direct measures of each item being considered. In Bangladesh, the total score varied trivially between the direct and the judgmental approaches. In Kenya, the total direct score was substantially higher than the judgmental score. The primary advantage of the judgmental approach is that comparative scores can be obtained for a larger number of countries for the same time period at a much lower cost than would be required by the direct approach.

Adolescent↗

Myth of substituted judgment. Surrogate decision making regarding life support is unreliable.

OBJECTIVE: To identify factors predicting the accuracy of surrogate decision making in life support decisions. DESIGN: Questionnaire. SETTING: Urban Veterans Affairs hospital. PATIENTS AND DESIGN: Fifty hospitalized patients and their chosen surrogates were given questionnaires describing life support modalities and four common medical scenarios in which life support would be contemplated. An additional 50 patients also completed the questionnaire. Patients gave their choices of life support in the different scenarios. Surrogates guessed the patients' answers (substituted judgment). Details of the patient-surrogate relationship were asked. Patients completed a depression inventory. MAIN RESULTS: Surrogates correctly guessed patients' wishes about life support overall on 59.3% of the questions, not better than random chance (kappa = .09). The only predictor of accurate surrogate decision making was specific discussion between patient and surrogate about life support. SECONDARY RESULTS: Patients had an overall low desire for life support (35%), and a majority favored euthanasia under some circumstances (62%). There was no relationship between depression score and desire for life support. CONCLUSIONS: Substituted judgment by surrogates is not more accurate than random chance. Discussion between patient and surrogate about life support correlated with more accurate substituted judgment.

Adult↗

Is diagnostic judgment influenced by a bias to see pathology?

The clinical judgment literature suggests that clinicians are biased to see psychopathology. The social cognition literature shows that people can be biased to search for information relevant only to the hypothesis under test and to ignore information relevant to the alternative. In light of these biases, we asked practicing clinicians (N = 106 respondents) in three conditions to read 1 of 9 biographical essays. The conditions called for the clinicians to judge the writer of the essay as (a) psychologically healthy or not, (b) psychologically healthy or unhealthy, or (c) experiencing psychopathology or not The latter condition was expected to produce the highest frequency of negative judgments. The opposite result was obtained. To determine if this was due to the extreme wording in the "psychopathology" condition, 30 additional practicing clinicians assessed whether the writer of the essay was psychologically unhealthy or not. A comparison of these data with those from the two less extreme conditions showed no bias. The results were interpreted as an appropriate level of conservativism in clinical judgment with respect to the extreme diagnosis implied by the term psychopathology.

Humans↗

Clinical judgments of depression.

In an effort to reevaluate Gough's (1954) classic study of common misconceptions about neuroticism, an investigation was undertaken of the degree to which judges could simulate the Basic Personality Inventory (BPI) responses of a clinically depressed patient group. Judgments were recorded of the probability of responding to each of 240 BPI items by a total of 56 university student judges. Judges were assigned randomly to one of two information conditions, one that had only the label "clinical depression" and another that had, in addition, a more extensive definition. Judgmental profiles of depressed patients indicated very high reliabilities (.99) across information conditions, a high association with actual profiles of clinically depressed patients, and differentiation from other psychiatric patients and normal controls. Results were interpreted as supporting the accuracy of judgments of psychopathology, particularly when certain preconditions are met, namely, the use of a meaningful construct of psychopathology and the prediction of behavior relevant to that construct.

Depressive Disorder↗

Procedural debiasing of primacy/anchoring effects in clinical-like judgments.

Primacy (or anchoring) effects in clinical judgment occur when information presented at an early stage unduly influences a judgment compared to the effect of the same information presented at a later stage. Using recent theoretical models of these effects, three debiasing methods were developed and tested for their efficacy. Contrary to some recent failures to find anchoring effects, both single-cue and sequence anchoring manipulations produced medium-size effects on personality trait ratings and generalized to predictions of behavior. A consider-the-opposite procedure that involved cue sorting by diagnosticity debiased single-cue anchoring, but comparable results were obtained by subjects who simply took notes while reviewing each cue prior to judgment. Bias inoculation was marginally successful at reducing single-cue anchoring. Methodological issues as well as suggestions for future research are discussed.

Analysis of Variance↗

(Im)maturity of judgment in adolescence: why adolescents may be less culpable than adults.

A crucial step in the establishment of effective policies and regulations concerning legal decisions involving juveniles is the development of a complete understanding of the many factors-psychosocial as well as cognitive-that affect the evolution of judgment over the course of adolescence and into adulthood. This study examines the influence of three psychosocial factors (responsibility, perspective, and temperance) on maturity of judgment in a sample of over 1,000 participants ranging in age from 12 to 48 years. Participants completed assessments of their psychosocial maturity in the aforementioned domains and responded to a series of hypothetical decision-making dilemmas about potentially antisocial or risky behavior. Socially responsible decision making is significantly more common among young adults than among adolescents, but does not increase appreciably after age 19. Individuals exhibiting higher levels of responsibility, perspective, and temperance displayed more mature decision-making than those with lower scores on these psychosocial factors, regardless of age. Adolescents, on average, scored significantly worse than adults, but individual differences in judgment within each adolescent age group were considerable. These findings call into question recent arguments, derived from studies of logical reasoning, that adolescents and adults are equally competent and that laws and social policies should treat them as such.

Adolescent↗

Development of neural processes mediating rhyme judgments: Phonological and orthographic interactions.

Development of neural processes underlying integration of phonological and orthographic information were assessed by measuring event-related brain potentials (ERPs), judgment accuracies and reaction times (RTs) in 20 children (9-10 years) and 20 adults performing visual rhyme judgments. Half the trials were phonologically and orthographically congruent across the prime-target pairs (e.g., thrown-own, cake-own), and half were incongruent (e.g., gown-own, cone-own). For both children and adults, behavioral performance was most affected when different phonological representations had to be encoded from similar orthographic representations (e.g., gown-own), and the amplitudes of the N350 reflected effects of both rhyme and phonological/orthographic congruency. Latencies of the N350 were shorter over the left hemisphere only in adults, and phonological/orthographic incongruence produced greater delays in children's processing. Therefore, it appears that neural systems mediating rhyming judgments develop early; however, adults exhibit increased efficiency for left-hemisphere processing and are less affected by interference from incongruent phonological and orthographic codes.

Adolescent↗

Impact of voice on emotional judgment of faces: an event-related fMRI study.

Emotional information can be conveyed by various means of communication, such as propositional content, speech intonation, facial expression, and gestures. Prior studies have demonstrated that inputs from one modality can alter perception in another modality. To evaluate the impact of emotional intonation on ratings of emotional faces, a behavioral study first was carried out. Second, functional magnetic resonance (fMRI) was used to identify brain regions that mediate crossmodal effects of emotional prosody on judgments of facial expressions. In the behavioral study, subjects rated fearful and neutral facial expressions as being more fearful when accompanied by a fearful voice as compared to the same facial expressions without concomitant auditory stimulus, whereas no such influence on rating of faces was found for happy voices. In the fMRI experiment, this shift in rating of facial expressions in presence of a fearfully spoken sentence was correlated with the hemodynamic response in the left amygdala extending into the periamygdaloid cortex, which suggests that crossmodal effects on cognitive judgments of emotional information are mediated via these neuronal structures. Furthermore, significantly stronger activations were found in the mid-portion of the right fusiform gyrus during judgment of facial expressions in presence of fearful as compared to happy intonations, indicating that enhanced processing of faces within this region can be induced by the presence of threat-related information perceived via the auditory modality. Presumably, these increased extrastriate activations correspond to enhanced alertness, whereas responses within the left amygdala modulate cognitive evaluation of emotional facial expressions.

Acoustic Stimulation↗

In praise of clinical judgment: Meehl's forgotten legacy.

Although Paul E. Meehl demonstrated the limits of informal aggregation of data and prognostication by presumed experts, he remained convinced that clinical experience confers expertise of some kind. The authors explore this forgotten side of Meehl's legacy by reconsidering the validity of clinical judgment in its natural context, everyday clinical work. Three domains central to clinical practice are examined: diagnosis, interpretation of meaning, and intervention. It is argued that a more sanguine picture of clinical expertise emerges when the focus shifts from prediction at high levels of inference to (a) judgments at a moderate level of inference, (b) contexts for which clinical training and experience are likely to confer expertise, and (c) conditions that optimize the expression of that expertise (e.g., use of instruments designed for expert observers). The authors conclude by examining domains in which clinical judgment could prove useful in knowledge generation (e.g., hypothesis generation, identification of falsifying instances, item development).

Clinical Competence↗

Investigating fame judgments: on the generality of hypotheses, conclusions, and measurement models.

In this article, we try to clarify some of the issues raised by S.C. Draine, A.G. Greenwald, and M.R. Banaji (1996) concerning our investigation into the gender bias in fame judgments (A. Buchner & W. Wippich, 1996). First, we did not test the general hypothesis and did draw the general conclusion that Drain et al. suggest we did. Second, we did did not reject M.R. Banaji and A.G. Greenwald's (1995) assumptions about the familiarity of male and female names in the fame judgment task, but we showed how one could have come to reject it using a widespread measurement model for the process dissociation procedure. Third, we argue that the processes which Draine et al. suggest should also be included in the measurement model we used are probably negligible, and if they are not, then the validity of the results of a number of fame judgment experiments must be called into question. In general, however, we agree with what seems to be the main message of M.R. Banaji and A.G. Greenwald's (1995) research, namely, that social categories have to be considered whenever priming is investigated within a social domain.

Female↗

Moral judgment in relation to behavioral and cognitive disorders in adolescents.

The capacity for formulating moral judgments shown by 20 emotionally disturbed, cognitively delayed adolescents was related to their social behaviors as observed in a classroom situation. Adolescents reported by their teachers to be shy and submissive were less capable of reasoning about moral issues than were adolescents who were seen as more assertive and socially engaged. The level of moral judgment was not a function of intelligence or ability to understand concrete operations. The implication that social engagement is a critical determinant of moral judgment for these adolescents is discussed.

Adolescent↗

Effects of visual stimuli on temporal order judgments of unimanual finger stimuli.

Successive tactile stimuli, delivered one to each hand, are referred to spatial representation before they are ordered in time (Yamamoto and Kitazawa in Nat Neurosci 4:759-765 2001a). In the present study, we examined if this applies even when they are delivered unilaterally to fingers of a single hand. Tactile stimuli were delivered left-to-rightward relative to the body (2nd-3rd-4th) or in reverse with stimulus onset asynchrony of 100 ms. Simultaneously with the delivery of tactile stimuli, three of nine small squares arranged in a matrix of 3 x 3 were turned on as if they appeared near the tips of the fingers. Although subjects were instructed to ignore the visual stimuli and make a forced choice between the two orders of tactile stimuli, the correct-judgment probability depended on the direction of visual stimuli. It was greater than 95% when the direction of visual stimuli matched that of the tactile stimuli, but less than 50% when they were opposite to each other. When the right hand was rotated counterclockwise on the horizontal plane (90 degrees ) so that the fingers were pointing to the left, the preferred direction of visual stimuli that yielded the peak correct judgment was also rotated, although not to the full extent. These results show that subjects cannot be basing their tactile temporal order judgment solely on a somatotopic map, but rather on a spatial map on which both visual and tactile signals converge.

Adult↗

Confidence and accuracy in trait inference: judgment by similarity.

We examined the confidence and accuracy with which people make personality trait inferences and investigate some consequences of the hypothesis that such judgments are based on similarity or conceptual relatedness. Given information concerning a target person's standing on three global personality dimensions, American and Israeli subjects were asked to estimate the target's self-ratings of 50 trait adjectives and to express their confidence by setting a 90 percent uncertainty range around each estimate. The estimates were positively correlated with the actual ratings obtained from subjects who had evaluated themselves in terms of the 50 traits, but were far too extreme. Furthermore, confidence was negatively correlated with accuracy: People's estimates were most inaccurate and made with greatest certainty when the trait in question was highly similar to the information provided as a basic for judgment. We suggest that intuitive personality judgments overestimate the coherence of the structure underlying trait constructs.

Adult↗