Informed consent documents are designed to convey the risks of medical procedures to patients, yet they are often difficult to understand; this is especially true for individuals with limited health literacy. An important opportunity for advancing knowledge about health literacy and informed consent involves examining the theoretical pathways that help to explain how health literacy relates to information processing when patients read consent forms. In this study, we proposed and tested a model that positioned self-efficacy as a mediator of the association between health literacy and patients' comprehension and assessment of informed consent documentation. Findings from structured interviews with patients (n = 254) indicated that lower health literacy predicted lower self-efficacy, which predicted feeling less well informed and less prepared, being more confused about the procedure and its hazards, and wanting more information about risks. Incorporating awareness of self-efficacy into disclosure documents and consent conversations may be a useful means of prompting patients to ask questions that can help them make informed decisions about care.
When people engage in explicit topic avoidance, they risk offending or hurting others. Using a goals theoretical framework, we examined how goal-relevant message features influenced participants' reactions to hypothetical topic-avoidance messages. Participants in this experiment (N = 536) responded to messages that friends might use to deflect a question about a stressful situation. Five types of messages reflected conventionally relevant interaction goals. Results indicated that message features influenced reactions (e.g., judgments of competence, and emotional and verbal responses) and that messages were generally perceived as more competent if they featured secondary relational and identity goals while simultaneously expressing the desire to avoid the subject. Certain secondary goals (e.g., expressing appreciation for the friend's concern) were especially well received compared with others.
There is evidence that social pain or “hurt feelings” and physical pain share the same neural system. Although researchers have found that a physical pain reliever can reduce social pain, studies suggest that sex differences may influence these findings. Our results indicate that women who took ibuprofen felt less hurt or social pain when they were excluded from a game and when they relived a painful experience than did women who took a placebo. Men who took the pain reliever, by contrast, felt more hurt in both situations than did those who took the placebo. Further, the sex difference revealed in men's and women's ratings of their social pain was reflected in their open‐ended verbal descriptions of social and physical pain.
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