Browsing by Subject "Thinking"

Now showing 1 - 6 of 6

Open Access
A few of our favorite unconfirmed ideas.
(Crit Care, 2015) Marini, John J; Gattinoni, Luciano; Ince, Can; Kozek-Langenecker, Sibylle; Mehta, Ravindra L; Pichard, Claude; Westphal, Martin; Wischmeyer, Paul; Vincent, Jean-Louis
Medical practice is rooted in our dependence on the best available evidence from incremental scientific experimentation and rigorous clinical trials. Progress toward determining the true worth of ongoing practice or suggested innovations can be glacially slow when we insist on following the stepwise scientific pathway, and a prevailing but imperfect paradigm often proves difficult to challenge. Yet most experienced clinicians and clinical scientists harbor strong thoughts about how care could or should be improved, even if the existing evidence base is thin or lacking. One of our Future of Critical Care Medicine conference sessions encouraged sharing of novel ideas, each presented with what the speaker considers a defensible rationale. Our intent was to stimulate insightful thinking and free interchange, and perhaps to point in new directions toward lines of innovative theory and improved care of the critically ill. In what follows, a brief background outlines the rationale for each novel and deliberately provocative unconfirmed idea endorsed by the presenter.
Open Access
Cognitive and Interpersonal Features of Intellectual Humility.
(Personality & social psychology bulletin, 2017-06) Leary, Mark R; Diebels, Kate J; Davisson, Erin K; Jongman-Sereno, Katrina P; Isherwood, Jennifer C; Raimi, Kaitlin T; Deffler, Samantha A; Hoyle, Rick H
Four studies examined intellectual humility-the degree to which people recognize that their beliefs might be wrong. Using a new Intellectual Humility (IH) Scale, Study 1 showed that intellectual humility was associated with variables related to openness, curiosity, tolerance of ambiguity, and low dogmatism. Study 2 revealed that participants high in intellectual humility were less certain that their beliefs about religion were correct and judged people less on the basis of their religious opinions. In Study 3, participants high in intellectual humility were less inclined to think that politicians who changed their attitudes were "flip-flopping," and Study 4 showed that people high in intellectual humility were more attuned to the strength of persuasive arguments than those who were low. In addition to extending our understanding of intellectual humility, this research demonstrates that the IH Scale is a valid measure of the degree to which people recognize that their beliefs are fallible.
Open Access
Inner speech and bilingual autobiographical memory: a Polish-Danish cross-cultural study.
(Memory, 2002-01) Larsen, Steen Folke; Schrauf, Robert W; Fromholt, Pia; Rubin, David C
Thirty years after fleeing from Poland to Denmark, 20 immigrants were enlisted in a study of bilingual autobiographical memory. Ten "early immigrators" averaged 24 years old at the time of immigration, and ten "late immigrators" averaged 34 years old at immigration. Although all 20 had spent 30 years in Denmark, early immigrators reported more current inner speech behaviours in Danish, whereas late immigrators showed more use of Polish. Both groups displayed proportionally more numerous autobiographical retrievals that were reported as coming to them internally in Polish (vs Danish) for the decades prior to immigration and more in Danish (vs Polish) after immigration. We propose a culture- and language-specific shaping of semantic and conceptual stores that underpins autobiographical and world knowledge.
Open Access
The frequency of involuntary autobiographical memories and future thoughts in relation to daydreaming, emotional distress, and age.
(Conscious Cogn, 2015-11) Berntsen, Dorthe; Rubin, David C; Salgado, Sinue
We introduce a new scale, the Involuntary Autobiographical Memory Inventory (IAMI), for measuring the frequency of involuntary autobiographical memories and involuntary future thoughts. Using the scale in relation to other psychometric and demographic measures provided three important, novel findings. First, the frequency of involuntary and voluntary memories and future thoughts are similarly related to general measures of emotional distress. This challenges the idea that the involuntary mode is uniquely associated with emotional distress. Second, the frequency of involuntary autobiographical remembering does not decline with age, whereas measures of daydreaming, suppression of unwanted thoughts and dissociative experiences all do. Thus, involuntary autobiographical remembering relates differently to aging than daydreaming and other forms of spontaneous and uncontrollable thoughts. Third, unlike involuntary autobiographical remembering, the frequency of future thoughts does decrease with age. This finding underscores the need for examining past and future mental time travel in relation to aging and life span development.
Open Access
"Thinking too much": A systematic review of a common idiom of distress.
(Soc Sci Med, 2015-12) Kaiser, Bonnie N; Haroz, Emily E; Kohrt, Brandon A; Bolton, Paul A; Bass, Judith K; Hinton, Devon E
Idioms of distress communicate suffering via reference to shared ethnopsychologies, and better understanding of idioms of distress can contribute to effective clinical and public health communication. This systematic review is a qualitative synthesis of "thinking too much" idioms globally, to determine their applicability and variability across cultures. We searched eight databases and retained publications if they included empirical quantitative, qualitative, or mixed-methods research regarding a "thinking too much" idiom and were in English. In total, 138 publications from 1979 to 2014 met inclusion criteria. We examined the descriptive epidemiology, phenomenology, etiology, and course of "thinking too much" idioms and compared them to psychiatric constructs. "Thinking too much" idioms typically reference ruminative, intrusive, and anxious thoughts and result in a range of perceived complications, physical and mental illnesses, or even death. These idioms appear to have variable overlap with common psychiatric constructs, including depression, anxiety, and PTSD. However, "thinking too much" idioms reflect aspects of experience, distress, and social positioning not captured by psychiatric diagnoses and often show wide within-cultural variation, in addition to between-cultural differences. Taken together, these findings suggest that "thinking too much" should not be interpreted as a gloss for psychiatric disorder nor assumed to be a unitary symptom or syndrome within a culture. We suggest five key ways in which engagement with "thinking too much" idioms can improve global mental health research and interventions: it (1) incorporates a key idiom of distress into measurement and screening to improve validity of efforts at identifying those in need of services and tracking treatment outcomes; (2) facilitates exploration of ethnopsychology in order to bolster cultural appropriateness of interventions; (3) strengthens public health communication to encourage engagement in treatment; (4) reduces stigma by enhancing understanding, promoting treatment-seeking, and avoiding unintentionally contributing to stigmatization; and (5) identifies a key locally salient treatment target.
Open Access
Understanding the Complex Relationship between Critical Thinking and Science Reasoning among Undergraduate Thesis Writers.
(CBE life sciences education, 2018-01) Dowd, Jason E; Thompson, Robert J; Schiff, Leslie A; Reynolds, Julie A
Developing critical-thinking and scientific reasoning skills are core learning objectives of science education, but little empirical evidence exists regarding the interrelationships between these constructs. Writing effectively fosters students' development of these constructs, and it offers a unique window into studying how they relate. In this study of undergraduate thesis writing in biology at two universities, we examine how scientific reasoning exhibited in writing (assessed using the Biology Thesis Assessment Protocol) relates to general and specific critical-thinking skills (assessed using the California Critical Thinking Skills Test), and we consider implications for instruction. We find that scientific reasoning in writing is strongly related to inference, while other aspects of science reasoning that emerge in writing (epistemological considerations, writing conventions, etc.) are not significantly related to critical-thinking skills. Science reasoning in writing is not merely a proxy for critical thinking. In linking features of students' writing to their critical-thinking skills, this study 1) provides a bridge to prior work suggesting that engagement in science writing enhances critical thinking and 2) serves as a foundational step for subsequently determining whether instruction focused explicitly on developing critical-thinking skills (particularly inference) can actually improve students' scientific reasoning in their writing.