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PubMed2004

Reasons for cannabis use in men with and without psychosis.

Psychoses are relatively low prevalence disorders that have a disproportionately negative impact on individuals and society. Cannabis use is one factor that can exacerbate the negative consequences associated with psychotic disorders. Relatively few studies have examined the effects or reasons for using cannabis self-reported by individuals with psychosis. The present study is the first known to compare directly such factors in individuals with and without psychosis, within a single study. At baseline and follow-up participants with psychosis most commonly reported using cannabis for positive mood alteration (36% and 42%), coping with negative affect (27% and 29%) and for social activity reasons (38% and 29%). The control group most commonly reported using cannabis for relaxation (34% and 43%) and social activity reasons (49% and 51%). Participants with psychosis were less likely to report relaxation as the most important effect after use (27%) or expect it at follow-up (49%) compared to the control group (53% and 70%). In both groups, addiction and positive affect enhancement were the composite variable scores correlated most consistently with concurrent amount and frequency of use.

Adaptation, Psychological↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Quitting among non-treatment-seeking marijuana users: reasons and changes in other substance use.

This study examines the self-reported reasons for quitting marijuana use, changes in other substance use during the quit attempt, and reasons for the resumption of use in 104 non-treatment-seeking adult marijuana smokers. Reasons for quitting were shown to be primarily motivated by concerns about the negative impact of marijuana on health and on self- and social image. The spontaneous quitting of marijuana use is often associated with an increase in the use of legal substances such as alcohol, tobacco, and sleeping aids, but not with the initiation of new substance use. These findings suggest areas for further research on spontaneous recovery from marijuana use.

Adult↗
PubMed2003

Inductive reasoning and the understanding of intention in schizophrenia.

BACKGROUND: The study explored the relationship between the understanding of intention in veiled speech acts and the ability to reason inductively. METHODS: A total of 39 people with DSM-IV-defined schizophrenia with no behavioural signs and 44 healthy participants performed the Hinting Task, a measure of pragmatic language in which the speaker's intention must be inferred, and a measure of inductive reasoning (Aha! Sentences) in which the meaning of ambiguous nonsocial sentences had to be inferred. The participants also completed measures of general intellectual ability, immediate memory for narrative and social problem-solving ability. RESULTS: A substantial correlation was found between performance on the inductive reasoning task and the Hinting Task in the sample of people with schizophrenia. The same relationship was not seen in the normal control sample. The robust relationship between these two measures in this sample survived when the roles of immediate memory for narrative and intellectual ability were controlled for. Furthermore, the relationship was distinctly more compelling for the patients who were currently ill compared to those in remission. CONCLUSION: These data suggest that people with schizophrenia use a different strategy to infer the meaning behind pragmatic language than that used by normally functioning adults. It is suggested that a reliance on different, possibly less specialised, skills in this group to perform this simple social inference task underlies their deficient performance on this and other measures of social inference. The fact that the relationship between the tasks in patients in remission is not as robust implies that the use of specialised skills to perform social inference tasks may be compromised most significantly during acute phases.

Journal Article↗
PubMed2004

Preservation of reasoning in primary progressive aphasia: further differentiation from Alzheimer's disease and the behavioral presentation of frontotemporal dementia.

Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA) is a clinical dementia syndrome characterized by the gradual dissolution of language without impairment of other cognitive domains for at least the first 2 years of illness (M.-M. Mesulam, 1982, 2001). It is difficult to demonstrate the integrity of nonlanguage domains in PPA because most neuropsychological tests of memory, reasoning, and attention require language competence for their performance. In the present study, reasoning and cognitive flexibility were tested nonverbally in patients with PPA using a modified ten-item version of the Visual Verbal Test (Feldman & Drasgow, 1959). This test measures the ability to detect similarities among objects and to sort a single set of objects according to two different principles. The performance of PPA patients (n = 20) was compared with that of patients with dementia of the Alzheimer type (AD) (n = 20), patients with the comportmental/executive dysfunction variant of frontotemporal dementia (FTD) (n = 16), and cognitively intact controls (n = 20). Patients with PPA and controls performed similarly, detecting commonalities among objects and shifting from one sorting principle to another. In contrast, both AD and FTD subjects were significantly impaired on both measures. These results provide evidence of preserved reasoning in PPA, further differentiating this syndrome from other behaviorally focal dementia syndromes.

Aged↗
PubMed2006

Housing tenure and early retirement for health reasons in Sweden.

AIMS: To assess the association between housing tenure and early retirement for health reasons in Sweden with a view to psychosocial vs. material values of home ownership. METHODS: The data come from linked registers that cover all people resident in Sweden during 1990-2000. The study population consists of 449,233 people aged 40-63 years in 1997. Of these, 19,350 retired early for health reasons in 1998-99. The remaining 429,883 continued their employment without extended sick leave or income decline. None moved during 1990-2000. We calculated the odds of early retirement for four forms of juridical relationship to one's housing (private owner; part owner in a cooperative; private rental; rental from a public housing company), for men and women separately, controlling for age, education, employment income, household disposable income, region, foreign birth, and housing type. RESULTS: Men in cooperative ownership had lower odds of early retirement than those in the three other tenure forms, for which the odds were similar. Among women, public and private renters had similar odds of early retirement, which were higher than those of women in private or cooperative ownership. For both genders, inclusion of housing type in the model after housing tenure explained little additional variance. CONCLUSIONS: The odds of early retirement for health reasons varied across different housing tenure forms in Sweden in 1998-99. The pattern of associations differed as a function of gender. Home ownership appears to involve health resources independent of basic socio-physical factors captured with differences in housing type.

Adult↗
PubMed2006

Mental imagery, reasoning, and blindness.

Although reasoning seems to be inextricably linked to seeing in the "mind's eye", the evidence is equivocal. In three experiments, sighted, blindfolded sighted, and congenitally totally blind persons solved deductive inferences based on three sorts of relation: (a) visuo-spatial relations that are easy to envisage either visually or spatially, (b) visual relations that are easy to envisage visually but hard to envisage spatially, and (c) control relations that are hard to envisage both visually and spatially. In absolute terms, congenitally totally blind persons performed less accurately and more slowly than the sighted on all such tasks. In relative terms, however, the visual relations in comparison with control relations impeded the reasoning of sighted and blindfolded participants, whereas congenitally totally blind participants performed the same with the different sorts of relation. We conclude that mental images containing visual details that are irrelevant to an inference can even impede the process of reasoning. Persons who are blind from birth-and who thus do not tend to construct visual mental images-are immune to this visual-impedance effect.

Adult↗
PubMed2006

The effect of contextual factors on the judgement of informal reasoning fallacies.

Informal reasoning fallacies are arguments that are psychologically persuasive but not valid. In order to judge the validity of these arguments one has to be sensitive to the context in which they appear. However, there is no empirical study that examines students' sensitivity to contextual factors and whether contextual factors actually influence their ability to identify informal reasoning fallacies. We hypothesized that when explicitly presented with different argumentative contexts, students' performance would reflect their sensitivity to the contextual nature of informal reasoning fallacies. The two experiments that we conducted support this hypothesis and emphasize the mediating role of perspective taking in students' ability to identify fallacious arguments.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2000

Training propositional reasoning.

Two experiments compared the effects of four training conditions on propositional reasoning. A syntactic training demonstrated formal derivations, in an abstract semantic training the standard truth-table definitions of logical connectives were explained, and a domain-specific semantic training provided thematic contexts for the premises of the reasoning task. In a control training, an inductive reasoning task was practised. In line with the account by mental models, both kinds of semantic training were significantly more effective than the control and the syntactic training, whereas there were no significant differences between the control and the syntactic training, nor between the two kinds of semantic training. Experiment 2 replicated this pattern of effects using a different set of syntactic and domain-specific training conditions.

Adult↗
PubMed2005

Reasons for choosing and complying with complementary health care: an in-house study on a South Australian clinic.

OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study was to explore the reasons why clients initially consult a complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) practitioner, the reasons that influence clients to seek treatment, and the factors that influence clients to be compliant with their treatment. DESIGN: A combination of quantitative and qualitative methods were used. Quantitative data were obtained via a self-completion survey (n = 158). Qualitative information was derived from eight semistructured interviews. SETTING: The study took place in a clinic in Norwood, South Australia. Participants were primarily residents of the eastern suburbs of Adelaide. SUBJECTS: The study involved a convenience sample of clients. RESULTS: Survey and interview results demonstrated that clients access CAM practitioners not solely for improvement of physical symptoms, with 54% of clients indicating a desire for counseling for general health issues and 50% wanting dietary and nutritional treatment. Of the subjects 36% sought increased self-insight and benefit from a wider perspective of healing. In addition 55% of respondents indicated that quality of relationship between CAM and client has a major impact on compliance and continuity of treatment, which in turn affects the overall success of the treatment. CONCLUSIONS: Clients in this clinic accessed complementary health care for a variety of reasons including gaining another perspective on their health. It suggests that CAM does not replace conventional medicine but may be used as an adjunct to conventional medicine.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1994

Protein secondary structure prediction using two-level case-based reasoning.

We have developed a two-level case-based reasoning architecture for predicting protein secondary structure. The central idea is to break the problem into two levels: (i) reasoning at the object (protein) level and using the global information from this level to focus on a more restricted problem space; (ii) decomposing objects into pieces (segments) and reasoning at the level of internal structures. As a last step to the procedure, inferences from the parts of the internal structure are synthesized into predictions about global structure. The architecture has been developed and tested on a commonly used data set with 69.5% predictive accuracy. It was then tested on a new data set with 68.2% accuracy. With additional tuning, over 70% accuracy was achieved. In addition, a series of experiments were conducted to test various aspects of the method and the results are informative.

Amino Acid Sequence↗
PubMed2006

Closing the Schiavo case: an analysis of legal reasoning.

The conflict surrounding Terri Schiavo, whom Florida's courts had determined wished not to be kept alive in a persistent vegetative state, played out on a national stage. The dispute between Schiavo's husband and parents engulfed America's legislative, executive, and judicial systems, raising profound questions about the laws and policies that govern advance directives. In this paper, we offer an analysis of the legal reasoning in Schiavo and offer predictions about the case's likely impact on law and policy in the future. We reviewed an extensive collection of case materials that included consensus definitions of persistent vegetative state, media reports, court decisions and briefs, legal chronologies, guardian reports, and Schiavo's autopsy report. We also reviewed cases cited as sources for legal reasoning used in Schiavo, including Quinlan, Cruzan, and Browning. We also examined the political, cultural, and media factors that affected the conflict. Based upon these reviews, we identified the legal reasoning that decided the Schiavo conflict. We found that Florida's constitutional right to privacy, a principle that shaped the Florida statutory and case law, guided the courts' consistent rulings. The conflict that characterized the case reflected profound differences in American politics rather than a failure of the medical and/or legal systems. The outcome of the Schiavo case remained consistent with established Florida statutory and case law, and honored Terri Schiavo's state constitutional right to privacy. Although Schiavo may not affect advance directive law and policy in palliative medicine immediately, evidence suggests it has already increased interest in creating living wills.

Advance Directives↗
PubMed1996

Older and more moral?--age-related changes in performance on Piagetian moral reasoning tasks.

Three age groups (teenage; 50-65 and 65+) completed a written version of Piaget's moral reasoning tasks to determine the general level of moral reasoning and performance on eight separate categories. Significant age effects were found. Though the nature of the age group difference was mixed, younger subjects consistently achieved lower levels of performance. Results indicate that Piaget overestimated all subjects' level of performance on his tasks and that, although there are differences in different areas of moral reasoning, the relationship with age is not uniform in its direction.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2005

Validity of self-reports of reasons for hospitalization by young adults and risk factors for discordance with medical records: the Coronary Artery Risk Development in Young Adults (CARDIA) Study.

This research focused on the validity of young adults' (mean age=33 years; standard deviation, 3.9) self-reports of reasons for hospitalization and factors affecting validity in a longitudinal cohort study of over 5,000 young adults in four US cities (1985-1998). Self-reported reasons were considered discordant if they differed from those in medical records. Of the 321 self-reported hospitalizations, overall concordance was 92.5%; concordance ranged from 80% for infections to 100% for injuries/fractures and procedures/surgeries. There were no significant differences among mail, telephone, or face-to-face methods of collecting self-reports. In generalized estimating equations analyses, Black race (odds ratio=4.23, 95% confidence interval: 1.72, 10.40; p=0.002) and intravenous drug use (odds ratio=6.06, 95% confidence interval: 1.17, 31.22; p=0.03) were positively associated with discordance. Nonetheless, self-reports by Blacks were 90.0% concordant. Self-reports by Whites were 95.7% concordant. These results suggest that young adults' self-reported reasons for hospitalization are overwhelmingly concordant with medical records. This has important implications, since obtaining medical records has become more costly and logistically difficult.

Adult↗
PubMed2002

Excessive recruitment of neural systems subserving logical reasoning in schizophrenia.

Schizophrenic patients generally perform poorly on tasks that address executive functions. According to several imaging studies, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is hypoactive in schizophrenic patients during these tasks. It is not, however, clear whether this finding is associated more with impaired performance than with the illness itself, as performance has not been taken into account. We examined brain activity associated with executive function in schizophrenia using an experimental fMRI design that reveals performance effects, enabling correction for performance differences between groups. As this approach has not been reported before, and because brain function can be affected by medication, the effect of antipsychotic medication was also investigated. A task was used that requires logical reasoning, alongside a closely matched control task. Performance was accounted for by including individual responses in fMRI image analyses, as well as in group-wise analysis. Effects of medication were addressed by comparing medication-naïve patients and patients on atypical antipsychotic medication with healthy controls in two separate experiments. Imaging data were analysed with a novel, performance-driven method, but also with a method that is similar to that used in earlier studies, which reported hypofrontality. A modest reduction in performance was found in both patient groups. Brain activity associated with logical reasoning was correlated positively with performance in all groups. In patients on medication, activity did not differ from that in controls after correcting for difference in performance. In contrast, performance-corrected activity was significantly elevated in medication-naïve patients. This study indicates that schizophrenia may be associated with excessive recruitment of brain systems during logical reasoning. Considering the fact that performance was reduced in the patients, we argue that the efficiency of neural communication may be affected by the illness. It appears that in patients on atypical antipsychotic medication, this neural inefficiency is normalized. The study shows that performance is an important factor in the interpretation of differences between schizophrenic patients and controls. The reported association between performance and brain activity is relevant to clinical imaging studies in general.

Adult↗
PubMed2001

Deaf pupils' reasoning about scientific phenomena: school science as a framework for understanding or as fragments of factual knowledge.

Many studies have been conducted on hearing pupils' understanding of science. Findings from these studies have been used as grounds for planning instruction in school science. This article reports findings from an interview study of how deaf pupils in compulsory school reason about phenomena in a science context. The results reveal that there is variation in the extent to which pupils use scientific principles for reasoning about science phenomena. For some pupils, school science seems to have little to offer as a framework for reasoning. The results also generate questions about the need in school instruction of deaf and hard-of-hearing pupils to consider the specific teaching and learning situations in a deaf environment.

Journal Article↗
PubMed2004

The development of analogical reasoning in deaf children and their parents' communication mode.

The purpose of this article is to analyze the results of a study of the development of analogical reasoning in deaf children coming from two different linguistic environments (deaf children of deaf parents--sign language, deaf children of hearing parents--spoken language) and in hearing children, as well as to compare two groups of deaf children to a group of hearing children. In order to estimate the development of children's analogical reasoning, especially the development of their understanding of different logical relations, two age groups were singled out in each population of children: younger (9- and 10-year-olds) and older (12- and 13-year-olds). In this way it is possible to assess the influence of early and consistent sign-language communication on the development of the conceptual system in deaf children and to establish whether early and consistent sign-language communication with deaf children affects their mental development to the same extent as early and consistent spoken-language communication with hearing children. The children were given three series of analogy tasks based on different logical relations: (a) a series of verbal analogy tasks (the relations of opposite, part-whole, and causality); (b) a series of numerical analogy tasks (the relations of class membership, opposite, and part-whole); and (c) a series of figural-geometric analogy tasks (the relations of opposite and part-whole). It was found that early and consistent sign-language communication with deaf children plays an almost equivalent role in the development of verbal, numerical, and spatial reasoning by analogy as early and consistent spoken-language communication with hearing children.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2003

When more is better: number of motives and reasons for quitting as correlates of physical activity in women.

Understanding the mechanisms by which physical activity is influenced is particularly relevant for health promotion efforts aimed at women, who display lower levels of physical activity and may experience more barriers to exercise than men. This study examined the number of motives for exercise and the number of reasons for previous quitting as predictors of exercise behavior. Specifically, the cognitive complexity of motives for exercise and reasons for quitting, as indicators of exercise-related memory associations that reflect cognitive structure, were evaluated. In a sample of 394 women aged 17-54, number of reasons for quitting did not predict current exercise level. However, more elaborated memory networks for motives were highly related to current exercise behavior, except among women with high Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale scores. These results support the predictive superiority of positive over negative memory associations found in studies on attitude accessibility in other behaviors, such as substance use, among women of normal mood and suggest a moderating effect of depression.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1983

Criteria for evaluating a computer aid to clinical reasoning.

The acceptance or rejection of computer aids to clinical reasoning is determined not only by the preferences and prejudices of potential users, but also by whether the output generated by the computer aid represents sound clinical judgment. This paper deals with the issue of the appropriate criteria for evaluating the clinical 'reasoning' of computer aids. Evaluation of a computer aid should include an assessment of the accuracy or appropriateness of its conclusions and an assessment of the scope of its considerations. In order to use a conclusion generated by a computer aid as a basis for clinical action, information must be available on the alternative conclusions that might have been drawn, the degree of confidence in each conclusion, and the consequences that may result from acting upon the wrong conclusion. If this information is not generated as part of the output of a computer aid, it may be obtained through the use of its explanation and display capabilities, if the aid has such capabilities. Explanation and display capabilities permit the examination of the operations of the computer aid. Examination of a computer's operations is also the most feasible means to evaluate the soundness of its 'reasoning'.

Diagnosis, Computer-Assisted↗