No abstract

Overdetection and underdetection of depression and anxiety in primary care are common and may partly reflect individuals' misperceptions of the severity of symptoms they experience. Here, we explore how people's judgments about the severity of their own symptoms are influenced by their beliefs about the distribution of symptoms experienced by the rest of the population. We apply the rank-based decision by sampling cognitive model of judgment to symptom severity. The model proposes that judgments depend on the relative rank of an item within a mental sample of comparable items. It is predicted that judgments of symptom severity will be context dependent and more specifically that an individual's judgments will be invalid to the extent that the individual has inaccurate beliefs about the relevant social context. Two studies found that participants' assessments of symptom severity were rank based. Study 1 elicited participants' beliefs about the social distribution of symptoms and found that participants' judgments of whether they were depressed or anxious were mainly predicted not by their symptoms' objective severity but rather by where participants ranked the severity of their symptoms in comparison with the believed symptoms of others. Study 2 varied symptom distributions experimentally and again found relative rank effects as predicted. It is concluded that the real-world application of contextual models of judgment requires investigation of individual differences in participants' background beliefs

There is an abundance of evidence to suggest that online behavior differs from behaviors in the offline world, and that there are a number of important factors which may affect the communication strategies of people within an online space. This article examines some of these, namely, whether the sex, age, and identifiability of blog authors, as well as the genre of communication, affect communication strategies. Findings suggest that the level of identifiability of the blog author has a limited effect upon their communication strategies. However, sex appeared to influence online behavior in so far as men were more likely to swear and attack others in their blogs. Genre had an important influence on disclosure with more self-disclosure taking place in the diary genre (i.e., blogs in which people talk about their own lives) comparative to the filter genre (i.e., blogs in which people talk about events external to their lives). Age affected both selfdisclosure and language use. For example, younger bloggers tended to use more swearing, express more negative emotions and disclose more personal information about others. These findings suggest that age, sex, genre, and identifiability form a cluster of variables that influence the language style and selfdisclosure patterns of bloggers; however, the level of identifiability of the blogger may be less important in this respect. Implications of these findings are discussed.