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The JAND (Judgment About Nursing Decision) as a measure of nurses' perception of moral behaviors.

A comprehensive review of research using the Judgment About Nursing Decisions (JAND) as a measure of nurses' ethical decision making raises numerous concerns about the conceptual basis, reliability, and validity of this widely used instrument. These concerns promoted the present study, which raised specific issues about the JAND. Among these issues are the representatives of ethical dilemmas contained in the JAND, the validity of its scoring scheme, the persistence of low-to-marginal reliability across studies, and questionable validity. Findings from studies using the JAND should be interpreted with caution until the instrument is further refined.

Attitude of Health Personnel↗

Labelling effects in clinical judgments of psychopathology.

This study utilized a model of inferential accuracy to study the effects of deviant labels on clinical judgments. It was hypothesized that labels would lower both treshold and sensitivity, the key components of the model. Analyses of variance yielded significant effects for labels and specific patterns of psychopathology suggested that labels have differential effects on inferences drawn with regard to various types of psychological disorders. Evidence in support of the generalizability of sensitivity and treshold also was obtained.

Alcoholism↗

Short-Term Assessment of Risk and Treatability (START): The case for a new structured professional judgment scheme.

The Short-Term Assessment of Risk and Treatability (START) is a new structured professional judgment scheme intended to inform multiple risk domains relevant to everyday psychiatric clinical practice (e.g. risk to others, suicide, self-harm, self-neglect, substance abuse, unauthorized leave, and victimization). The article describes the processes involved in establishing an interdisciplinary approach to risk assessment and management. The authors present a review of the rationale for START, including the value of dynamic variables, the importance of strengths, and the extent to which clinicians must be attentive to multiple risk domains, reflecting theoretical and scientific evidence of the overlap among risks. Using the development, validation, and implementation of START as an example, the authors describe the processes by which other researchers, clinicians, and administrators could adapt existing assessment schemes or create new ones to bridge some remaining gaps in the risk assessment and management continuum.

Antisocial Personality Disorder↗

Computer utilization and clinical judgment in psychological assessment reports.

The process of assessment report writing is a complex one, involving both the statistical evaluation of data and clinical methods of data interpretation to appropriately answer referral questions. Today, a computer often analyzes data generated in a psychological assessment, at least in part. In this article, the author focuses on the interaction between the decision-making processes of human clinicians and the test interpretations that are computer-based. The benefits and problems with computers in assessment are highlighted and are presented alongside the research on the validity of automated assessment, as well as research comparing clinicians and computers in the decision-making process. The author concludes that clinical judgment and computer-based test interpretation each have weaknesses. However, by using certain strategies to reduce clinicians' susceptibility to errors in decision making and to ensure that only valid computer-based test interpretations are used, clinicians can optimize the accuracy of conclusions that they draw in their assessment report.

Decision Making↗

The role of stimulus factors in making categorical and coordinate spatial judgments.

We report three experiments which investigate the lateralization of categorical and coordinate processing. In all experiments, participants judged the position of a dot relative to a line. We manipulated display luminance (controlling for contrast), polarity (black-on-white versus white-on-black displays), and exposure duration (100, 150, and 200 ms). The results showed a left visual field-right hemisphere advantage for coordinate judgments, but only under highly prescribed conditions. We argue that stimulus and procedural factors are critical in determining the hemisphere by task interaction.

Brain↗

Large visuospatial sex difference in line judgment: possible role of attentional factors.

This article describes a large sex difference on a new, group-administered visuospatial task, the Judgment of Line Angle and Position (JLAP) test, and investigates the role of attentional factors in the difference. On the JLAP, adapted from a neuropsychological task (Benton et al., 1983), participants evaluate spatial attributes of lines. Study 1: College males (N = 48) outperformed females (N = 80), resulting in a large effect for sex (d = 0.85). Errors were more common on oblique (vs horizontal or vertical) lines, especially for females. Study 2: Task attributes were manipulated (N = 33 males and 36 females) to study the role of attentional factors. Findings suggest that males are more likely than females to normally attend to and be aided by geometrical reference cues.

Adolescent↗

Anomaly judgments of subject-predicate relations in Alzheimer's disease.

Claims that patients with probable Alzheimer's disease (AD) have semantic memory difficulty have received equivocal support. A common assumption has been that defining or core information determines the truth value of word meaning on measures requiring semantic memory such as category membership judgments or confrontation naming, but this assumption may not be valid. In the present study, we assessed the comprehension of subject-predicate sentences independent of their truth value by asking AD patients to judge the coherence of statements such as "The tulip is tall" or "*The tulip is jealous." We found that AD patients are significantly more impaired than controls at judging the coherence of these simple subject-predicate sentences. Moreover, AD patients were more successful at judging the coherence of statements that contain attributes with a narrow scope of reference compared to attributes with a broad scope of reference. These findings support the hypothesis that AD patients have a semantic memory impairment and suggest a specific deficit processing the network of semantic relations underlying word meaning in semantic memory.

Aged↗

English derivational suffix frequency and children's stress judgments.

Considering the importance of word and stem frequency in the adult lexical processing literature, and the effect of input frequency on children's acquisition of words (Tardif, Shatz, and Naigles, 1997), it was hypothesized that children's acquisition of English morphologically conditioned stress alternations would be affected by the frequency with which children were exposed to different stress-changing suffixes (e.g., -tion, -ity, and -ic). Study 1 determined the proportional representation of suffixes in a children's literature corpus, thereby allowing the suffix variable to be established. Study 2 empirically examined the effect of suffix frequency on school-aged children's judgments of primary stress placement. Findings suggest that age and suffix frequency both play a role in children's awareness of stress placement.

Child↗

Competition, inhibition, and semantic judgment errors in Parkinson's disease.

Semantic processing errors are symptoms of an up-regulation (schizophrenia) or degradation (Parkinsonism) of dopaminergic pathways. A recent connectionist model attributed errors in the schizophrenic processing of context to increased gain in competitive neural processes. This study extends this "gain hypothesis" by comparing the sensitivity to reduced gain of a simulation of semantic route activation to characteristic semantic judgment errors made by Parkinson's patients in an open search task. Under normal gain conditions, the dominant sense of polysemous words "wins" through competition and lateral inhibition at the word sense level (beta(inh)). For words with very different sense frequencies, decreasing gain by increasing beta(inh) resulted in the dominant word sense winning; however, for words with similar sense frequencies, increasing beta(inh) resulted in the dominant word sense winning only for low to moderate values. At high levels, no clear winner emerged after 200 epochs, with the least dominant sense reaching the maximum activation value. These results are discussed in the context of the Yerkes-Dodson Law, which may provide a theoretical basis for understanding normal and impaired semantic performance in catecholaminergic disorders.

Aphasia↗

Effects of perceptual fluency on judgments of truth.

Statements of the form "Osorno is in Chile" were presented in colors that made them easy or difficult to read against a white background and participants judged the truth of the statement. Moderately visible statements were judged as true at chance level, whereas highly visible statements were judged as true significantly above chance level. We conclude that perceptual fluency affects judgments of truth.

Association↗

Area judgment from width and height information: the case of the rectangle.

We assessed the effect on performance of shifting from a perceptual area judgment situation, in which the physical quantity to be judged (the area) is present in the stimulus, to a situation in which it is not present in the stimulus. Adults, 9-year-olds, and 5-year-olds were shown combinations of horizontal and vertical lines of various sizes, presented on the same wall or on different walls, and asked to estimate the corresponding area. The following main results were obtained (a) When width and height information items were completely separated, 5- and 9-year-old children gave the same weight to both dimensions in their estimations; (b) when width and height information items were on two different walls, adults gave a greater weight to the larger dimension; (c) when width and height were joined, 9-year-old children gave a greater weight to the larger dimension but when they were separated, they did not.

Age Factors↗

Familial correlations in the judgment of numerousness.

Results from analyses of 100 families' judgments of 5 to 90 dots suggest that the absolute error in "subtizing" (up to 8 objects) may have a genetic component. "Estimating" larger numbers of items is more complex and, in this study, does not seem to be under genotypic control.

Family↗

Competency and practical judgment.

At least four different frameworks--psychiatric, cognitive, functional and decision-making--are used in the evaluation of competence, all of which remain more or less unrelated in the literature. In the first section of this paper we consider various meanings of "competence," in order to arrive at a definition of the term relevant to the medical and legal setting. Patient or client "competence," we conclude, refers to the practical abilities that individuals employ in pursuing their own autonomous goals in life. We then show how a systematic categorization of these practical abilities--which we call a taxonomy of practical judgment--allows us to show when the traditional frameworks for the evaluation of competence may or may not be useful in the evaluation of a particular competence. In the final section we explore some of the normative considerations underlying the taxonomy. For instance, competence is not only related to intrinsic abilities but to resources available in the community. Here we touch on questions related to the fair distribution of community resources.

Aged↗

When grammar wins over sense: children's judgments of extraposed relatives.

A sentence judgement task was used to test 4- to 5-year-old children's knowledge of coreference possibilities for extraposed relatives. The overall pattern of children's performance in the first experiment reported here is similar to that of a control group of adult subjects and is consistent with knowledge of the linguistic constraints that restrict extraposition in the adult grammar. Performance on a follow-up experiment argues against a nongrammatical explanation of the results of the first experiment. Children's performance on the judgement task shows that they are capable of abstracting away from the pragmatics of the immediate situation in making judgments and can be construed as evidence that children construct mental representations for the sentences they judge in which an NP over NP S structure is constructed for relative clauses at a level distinct from the surface structure string. The comparative lack of response patterns found in some previous work is discussed in the context of models of sentence processing.

Adult↗

Audiovisual temporal order judgments.

In two experiments, we examined the extent to which audiovisual temporal order judgments (TOJs) were affected by spatial factors and by the dimension along which TOJs were made. Pairs of auditory and visual stimuli were presented from either the left and/or right of fixation at varying stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs), and participants made unspeeded TOJs regarding either "Which modality was presented first?" (experiment 1), or "Which side was presented first?" (experiment 2). Modality TOJs were more accurate (i.e. just-noticeable differences, JNDs, were smaller) when the auditory and visual stimuli were presented from different spatial positions rather than from the same position, highlighting an important potential confound inherent in previous research. By contrast, spatial TOJs were unaffected by whether or not the two stimuli were presented in different modalities. A between-experiments comparison revealed more accurate performance (i.e. smaller JNDs) when people reported which modality came first than when they reported which side came first for identical bimodal stimulus pairs. These results demonstrate that multisensory TOJs are critically dependent on both the relative spatial position from which stimuli are presented and on the particular dimension being judged.

Acoustic Stimulation↗

Collision judgment of objects approaching the head.

Recent investigations have indicated that human perception of the trajectory of objects approaching in the horizontal plane is precise but biased away from straight ahead. This is remarkable because it could mean that subjects perceive objects that approach on a collision course as missing the head. Approach within the horizontal plane through the eyes and the fixation point (the plane of regard) is special, as general motions will also have a component of motion perpendicular to the plane of regard. Thus, we investigated three-dimensional motion perception in the vicinity of the head, including vertical components. Subjects judged whether an object that moved in the mid-sagittal plane was going to hit below or above a well-known reference point on the face like the center of the chin or the forehead (perceptual task). Tactile and proprioceptive information about the reference point significantly improved precision. Precision did not change with distance of the approaching target or with fixation direction. Bias was virtually absent for these vertical motions. When subjects pointed with their index finger to the perceived location of impact on their face (visuo-motor task), they overestimated (1.7 cm) the horizontal eccentricity of the point of impact (pointing task). Vertical bias, however, was again virtually absent. Interestingly, when trajectories intersected the plane of regard, higher precision was observed in the perceptual task regardless of the other conditions. In contrast, neither bias nor precision of the pointing task changed significantly when the trajectories intersected the plane of regard. When asked to point to the location where a trajectory intersected the plane of regard, subjects overestimated the depth component of this intersection location by about 3 cm. The absence of perceptual and pointing bias in the vertical direction in contrast to the clear horizontal bias suggests that different (combinations of) cues are used to judge these components of the trajectory of an approaching object. The results of our perceptual task suggest a role for somatosensory signals in the visual judgment of impending impact.

Analysis of Variance↗

Agreement of expert judgment in causality assessment of adverse drug reactions.

BACKGROUND: Global introspection is, with operational algorithms and Bayes' theorem, one of the three main approaches used to assess the causal relationship between a drug treatment and the occurrence of an adverse event. OBJECTIVE: To analyze and compare the judgments of five senior experts using global introspection about drug causation on a random set of putative adverse drug reactions. METHODS: A random sample of 150 drug-effect pairs was constituted. For each pair, five senior experts had to independently assess the probability of drug causation from 0 to 1 by using a 100 mm visual analog scale (VAS). For analysis, those probabilities were secondarily split into seven levels of causality: excluded (0-0.05); unlikely (0.06-0.25); doubtful (0.26-0.45); unassessable/unclassifiable (0.46-0.55); plausible (0.56-0.75); likely (0.75-0.95); and certain (0.95-1). Agreement among the five experts was assessed using kappa coefficients (kappa). RESULTS: The overall agreement between experts was poor (kappa=0.20), although significantly different from chance, and varied according to the level of causality. It was lower for the unlikely, doubtful, unassessable/unclassifiable, and plausible categories (kappa=0.03, 0.03, -0.01, and 0.13, respectively) than for VAS extremes: excluded, likely, and certain (kappa=0.40, 0.32, and 0.30, respectively). CONCLUSION: This study confirms that experts express marked disagreements when assessing drug causality independently. The agreement rate was lower for intermediate levels of causality, especially when strong evidence was lacking for confirming or ruling out drug causality. Therefore, in a decision-making context, a step-by-step consensual approach such as the Delphi method seems necessary to make the assessment of such cases more reliable.

Adverse Drug Reaction Reporting Systems↗

Temporal order judgment in dyslexia.

Hari et al. (Brain 174:1373-1380, 2001) demonstrated that dyslexics showed a sluggish attention capture in both visual hemifields. Additionally, they indicated a left-right asymmetry in the perception of temporal order of two visual stimuli (they performed worse than controls only if the stimulus in the left hemifield preceded that in right hemifield). They suggested that a left-sided minineglect is associated with dyslexia. We hypothesized that if a kind of neglect syndrome is responsible for the asymmetry they found, dyslexics should not only show a left-right asymmetry in temporal order judgment of two laterally presented stimuli but also perform equally well as controls when the stimuli are vertically aligned. Our results indicated that in both tasks dyslexics performed generally worse than normal readers. The results suggest that dyslexics suffer from a more general problem of order discrimination.

Adolescent↗