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Mnemonic strategies, such as acronyms, effectively increase student retention of course material. We present an acronym based on a popular television character to help students remember the basic steps in the scientific method. Our empirical evaluation of the acronym revealed that students found it to be enjoyable, useful, and worthy of use in future courses.

Do clinically depressed individuals seek favorable or unfavorable information about the self? Self-verification theory makes the counterintuitive prediction that depressed individuals solicit feedback that confirms their negative self-views. To test this prediction, participants were classified on the basis of a structured clinical interview and self-report measures into high self-esteem, low self-esteem, and depressed groups. All participants were offered a choice between receiving favorable or unfavorable feedback; 82% of the depressed participants chose the unfavorable feedback, compared to 64% of the low self-esteem participants and 25% of the high self-esteem participants. Additional evidence indicated that depressed individuals also failed to exploit fully an opportunity to acquire favorable evaluations that were self-verifying. The authors discuss how seeking negative evaluations and failing to seek favorable evaluations may help maintain depression.

A series of 4 experiments demonstrated that when practicing for a test of problem solving, recognition and selection of a particular stopping signal was shown to depend on the within-set variability (statistical noise) of a problem set. When noise was high, participants used a nondiagnostic stopping signal based on the initial size of the problem set. However, when noise was low, access to evidence of learning was possible, resulting in the operation of a stopping signal based on learning curve characteristics. By blocking access to local segments of the learning curve through the use of variability masking, it was demonstrated that participants were sensitive to changes throughout the entire curve. In spite of the long history associated with the psychological study of the learning curve, these results provide the first demonstration of the learning curve as a source of metacognitive judgment and regulation.

Five studies are presented that demonstrate the influence of computationally simple quantity information on judgment and the regulation of behavior. Study 1 revealed that Ss used the height of a pile of pages of text to judge their proofreading performance, even when pile size was obviously not determined by the amount of text proofread. In Studies 2 and 3, Ss also used nondiagnostic size information to regulate the amount of time and effort they spent on the task. In Study 4, Ss regulated the amount of effort they spent on a complex essay-writing task by using nondiagnostic page length information. In Study 5, nondiagnostic size information dominated objective performance information, but only when the completed task was in full view of the S. A linguistic mechanism is suggested to explain the use of a judgment by quantity strategy.

Why do people choose interaction partners who see them as they see themselves? Self-verification theorists propose that a desire to bolster perceptions of predictability and control underlies such activities. In contrast, advocates of positivity strivings argue that people choose such interaction partners in the hope of making themselves feel good. Two studies tested these competing explanations by examining the spontaneous verbalizations of participants as they chose interaction partners. The results suggested that positivity as well as self-verification strivings caused partic with positive self-views to choose partners who appraised them favorably. The epistemic considerations underlying self-verification processes, however, best explained why people with negative self-views chose partners who appraised them unfavorably.

Background: Fear of cancer recurrence (FCR) has a profound negative impact on quality of life (QOL) for many cancer survivors. Breast cancer survivors (BCS) are particularly vulnerable, with up to 70% reporting clinically significant FCR. To the authors' knowledge, evidence-based interventions for managing FCR are limited. Acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) promotes psychological flexibility in managing life's stressors. The current study examined the feasibility and preliminary efficacy of group-based ACT for FCR in BCS.Methods: Post-treatment BCS (91 patients with stage I-III disease) with clinical FCR randomly were assigned to ACT (6 weekly 2-hour group sessions), survivorship education (SE; 6 weekly 2-hour group sessions), or enhanced usual care (EUC; one 30-minute group coaching session with survivorship readings). FCR severity (primary outcome) and avoidant coping, anxiety, post-traumatic stress, depression, QOL, and other FCR-related variables (secondary outcomes) were assessed at baseline (T1), after the intervention (T2), 1 month after the intervention (T3), and 6 months after the intervention (T4) using intent-to-treat analysis.Results: Satisfactory recruitment (43.8%) and retention (94.5%) rates demonstrated feasibility. Although each arm demonstrated within-group reductions in FCR severity over time, only ACT produced significant reductions at each time point compared with baseline, with between-group differences at T4 substantially favoring ACT over SE (Cohen d for effect sizes, 0.80; P < .001) and EUC (Cohen d, 0.61; P < .01). For 10 of 12 secondary outcomes, only ACT produced significant within-group reductions across all time points. By T4, significant moderate to large between-group comparisons favored ACT over SE and EUC with regard to avoidant coping, anxiety, depression, QOL, and FCR-related psychological distress.Conclusions: Group-based ACT is a feasible and promising treatment for FCR and associated outcomes in BCS that warrants testing in larger, fully powered trials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A fundamental assumption of utility-based analyses is that patient utilities for health states can be measured on an equal-interval scale. This assumption, however, has not been widely examined. The objective of this study was to assess whether the rating scale (RS), standard gamble (SG), and time trade-off (TTO) utility elicitation methods function as equal-interval level scales. We wrote descriptions of eight prostate-cancer-related health states. In interviews with patients who had newly diagnosed, advanced prostate cancer, utilities for the health states were elicited using the RS, SG, and TTO methods. At the time of the study, 77 initial and 73 follow-up interviews had been conducted with a consecutive sample of 77 participants. Using a Rasch model, the boundaries (Thurstone Thresholds) between four equal score sub-ranges of the raw utilities were mapped onto an equal-interval logit scale. The distance between adjacent thresholds in logit units was calculated to determine whether the raw utilities were equal-interval. None of the utility scales functioned as interval-level scales in our sample. Therefore, since interval-level estimates are assumed in utility-based analyses, doubt is raised regarding the validity of findings from previous analyses based on these scales. Our findings need to be replicated in other contexts, and the practical impact of non-interval measurement on utility-based analyses should be explored. If cost-effectiveness analyses are not found to be robust to violations of the assumption that utilities are interval, serious doubt will be cast upon findings from utility-based analyses and upon the wisdom of expending millions in research dollars on utility-based studies. Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. Keywords: Utility measurement; Health-state preferences; Cost utility analysis; Cost-effectiveness; Quality-adjusted life; Preference weights; Psychometrics

Mnemonic strategies, such as acronyms, effectively increase student retention of course material. We present an acronym based on a popular television character to help students remember the basic steps in the scientific method. Our empirical evaluation of the acronym revealed that students found it to be enjoyable, useful, and worthy of use in future courses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]