China
Africa
Explore chapters and articles related to this topic
Social Psychology
Published in Mohamed Ahmed Abd El-Hay, Understanding Psychology for Medicine and Nursing, 2019
The fundamental attribution error plays a role in blaming the innocent victim of a crime, disaster, or serious illness, e.g., many people blame the sick for bringing on their illnesses, and battered women and rape survivors for somehow provoking their attackers. Blaming the victim is reinforced by another common cognitive bias, hindsight bias, which refers to the tendency to overestimate one’s ability to have foreseen or predicted the outcome, after an event has occurred. Hindsight bias makes it seem as if the victim was able to predict and prevent what happened (Goldinger, Kleider, Azuma, & Beike, 2003). Blaming the victim reflects the belief that the world is fair, and people deserve what they get and the victim must have done something to deserve his or her fate (just-world hypothesis) (M. Lerner, 1980).
On learning from the experts …
Published in Clarissa Martin, Terence Dovey, Angela Southall, Clarissa Martin, Paediatric Gastrointestinal Disorders, 2019
The conviction that illnesses can be prevented and controlled by doctors is often accompanied by a belief that those who develop them are somehow responsible (Cardillo, 2004). This attributional bias is explained in psychological theory by the ‘Just World’ hypothesis (Lerner and Miller, 1978) and reflects a process in which attributions of blame tend to be made about the victim when something bad happens to him or her. It helps us make sense of a world in which horrible things can happen to us. It makes us feel better to imagine that when these things happen to others, they are somehow complicit in the events. Importantly, these processes occur automatically, rather than being the result of conscious processes: we remain unaware of our own attribution bias and our own efforts to adjust our thinking.
Cognition and stress
Published in Tony Cassidy, Stress, Cognition and Health, 2023
Beck (1976) in his cognitive theory of depression identifies hopelessness as the central theme for the depression-prone person. Beck’s theory of depression is in terms of a cognitive triad, in which the depressed person has a negative view of themselves, their world and their future. Again, from a different source, i.e. working with clinical patients, we find a similar theme emerging. The argument is that this negative thinking is in response to external demands or life stress, and the person who thinks in this way copes poorly with life stress. For Beck, the essence of the negative cognitive triad was a pessimistic attitude or a sense of hopelessness. In fact, Beck’s theory is essentially based on pessimistic versus optimistic thinking about the self, the world and the future. Beck (1976) developed a cognitive-behavioural approach to therapy, which in many ways revolutionised the treatment of depression. It involves training patients to recognise a negative train of thought, to be able to stop the train (thought stopping) and to replace it with a more positive thought. Patients are rewarded and learn to self-reward for effectively engaging in this process. Regarding the relationship between optimism and depression, there is a strong argument that the optimism displayed by those who enjoy positive well-being is in fact unrealistic. In other words, those who become depressed are not so much pessimistic as realistic, having lost the ability among non-depressed individuals to place a positive bias on things. This debate is also taken up in the health arena in the suggestion that the reason many people engage in unhealthy lifestyles is because they have an inaccurate perception of risk (Weinstein, 1984). This is expressed in terms of the fundamental attribution error. This refers to our tendency to attribute the cause for our own bad behaviour to circumstance (I was unlucky to fail the exam) and others bad behaviour to themselves (you failed the exam because you lack intelligence). In addition, we attribute our own good behaviour to ourselves (I passed the exam because I am intelligent) and others good behaviour to circumstance (you passed the exam because you were lucky). As a concomitant of this, we tend to assume that terrible things only happen to other people, not to us. This is partly explained by the just world hypothesis, the belief that bad things happen to bad people. We are not bad; therefore we will not catch that nasty disease. It is perhaps best explained in terms of unrealistic optimism, i.e. the ability to see our own life and future through rose-tinted spectacles. Since optimism-pessimism are generally measured as a single bipolar dimension, it is difficult to make any conclusion whether the literature suggests that ineffective coping is the result of the presence of pessimism or the absence of optimism.
University and Community Resources for Sexual Assault Survivors: Familiarity With and Use of Services Among College Students
Published in Journal of School Violence, 2019
Cortney A. Franklin, Tasha A. Menaker, Hae Rim Jin
Moreover, criminal justice system exposure through core curriculum and elective courses detailing institutional characteristics among criminal justice majors did not have a significant effect on knowledge, familiarity, or resource use when compared to students with alternative discipline-specific backgrounds. This finding is somewhat surprising given the quantity of required courses for a degree in criminal justice, the role that victims have in moving cases through the formal system via cooperation and participation in the investigative and prosecutorial processes, and the focus on victimology in this particular undergraduate degree program. Additionally, those individuals with career aspirations to enter law enforcement demonstrated significantly lower mean scores on several important service use variables compared to those reporting alternative career trajectories in bivariate analyses. While the present study is unable to model the factors that may explain these differences, it is possible that those students interested in a law enforcement career may have been more politically conservative and likely to endorse a “just world hypothesis” where individuals believe that people generally get what they deserve (Lerner & Milleer, 1978). This may decrease their belief that sexual assault is something that could happen to them, and thus, knowledge and familiarity with sexual assault services would be unnecessary.
Treating status migrainosus in the emergency setting: what is the best strategy?
Published in Expert Opinion on Pharmacotherapy, 2018
László Vécsei, Délia Szok, Aliz Nyári, János Tajti
The definition of refractory or intractable migraine is still under debate, with several proposals having been made by different headache specialists. A comprehensive definition of refractory headache is the failure of different acute and preventive medications [9]. Migraineurs who belong to this category are candidates for developing medication overuse, chronic migraine, and, finally, even SM. These patients are victims of the ‘just world hypothesis’ [10]. Patients with migraine with aura can develop complications. When the aura symptoms persist for more than 1 week, it is called ‘persistent aura without evidence of infarction on neuroimaging’. If the aura lasts more than 1 h and less than 1 week, it is referred to as ‘prolonged aura’. The next subtype of complications of migraine is ‘migraine aura status’, with a diagnostic criterion of at least three auras occurring over a period of 3 days [7]. These types of complications of migraine require special intention and aggressive treatment in the emergency department (ED) setting.