Interrelated Attributes Research Articles

Cognitive representations of breast cancer, emotional distress and preventive health behaviour: a theoretical perspective.

Individuals at high risk for developing breast and/or ovarian cancer are faced with difficult decisions regarding genetic testing, cancer prevention and/or intensive surveillance. Large interindividual differences exist in the uptake of these health-related services. This paper is aimed at understanding and predicting how people emotionally and behaviourally react to information concerning genetic predisposition to breast/ovarian cancer. For this purpose, the self-regulation model of illness representations is elaborated. This model suggests that health-related behaviour is influenced by a person's cognitive and emotional representation of the health threat. These representations generate coping behaviour aimed at resolving the objective health problems (problem-focussed coping) and at reducing the emotional distress induced by the health threat (emotion-focussed coping). Based on theoretical considerations and empirical studies, four interrelated attributes of the cognitive illness representation of hereditary breast/ovarian cancer are described: causal beliefs concerning the disease, perceived severity, perceived susceptibility to the disease and perceived controllability. The paper also addresses the complex interactions between these cognitive attributes, emotional distress and preventive health behaviour.

Cognitive representations of breast cancer, emotional distress and preventive health behaviour: a theoretical perspective

Individuals at high risk for developing breast and/or ovarian cancer are faced with difficult decisions regarding genetic testing, cancer prevention and/or intensive surveillance. Large interindividual differences exist in the uptake of these health-related services. This paper is aimed at understanding and predicting how people emotionally and behaviourally react to information concerning genetic predisposition to breast/ovarian cancer. For this purpose, the self-regulation model of illness representations is elaborated. This model suggests that health-related behaviour is influenced by a person's cognitive and emotional representation of the health threat. These representations generate coping behaviour aimed at resolving the objective health problems (problem-focussed coping) and at reducing the emotional distress induced by the health threat (emotion-focussed coping). Based on theoretical considerations and empirical studies, four interrelated attributes of the cognitive illness representation of hereditary breast/ovarian cancer are described: causal beliefs concerning the disease, perceived severity, perceived susceptibility to the disease and perceived controllability. The paper also addresses the complex interactions between these cognitive attributes, emotional distress and preventive health behaviour.

Archaic Uruk Cuneiform

Archaic period cuneiform is set within a context of incipient bureaucracy. Its graphemes are viewed as one of many interrelated attributes of an evolving script system. Its decipherment is described as a process of pattern recognition, diachronic comparison, and conjecture.

Formalism-dependent optical potentials

The most striking characteristic of a recently proposed class of antisymmetrized optical potentials for elastic nucleus-nucleus scattering is their unconventional dependence on the choice of underlying connected-kernel scattering integral equations. The relationship of these two-cluster effective interactions to the more conventional, essentially formalism-independent, optical potential operator is established in detail. The interrelated attributes of formalism independence, Hermitian analyticity, and reality with respect to elastic unitarity are clarified. A concise wave function version of multiparticle scattering is developed as complementary to a transition operator approach and is used to show that a wave function starting point does not identity a preferred class of antisymmetrized effective interactions. The differences in the calculated elastic transition amplitudes that do arise between conventional optical potentials and those of the formalism-dependent variety when the same approximations are made to the auxiliary dynamical equations are identified.

Corporate Operating Income Forecasting Ability

Recently, interest has materialized in the business, investment and governmental communities regarding the propriety, possibility and potential consequence of allowing or requiring publicly held corporations to routinely report income forecasts. The SEC, for example, has conducted rather extensive formal hearings to assess the attitudes, arguments and problems that might arise if accounting-based income projections or other forecasts such as expected capital expenditures are routinely included in annual financial statements (10-Ks) filed with the Commission. The SEC has tentatively concluded that corporations falling under its jurisdiction will be permitted, but presently not be required, to incorporate income projections [11]. Empirical study presupposes that public reports be decomposed into a number of properties and attributes. At least three important underlying income forecasting properties can be identified: feasibility, reliability and validity. Feasibility has two interrelated attributes: ability and capability. Forecasting ability specifies the forecasting error (accuracy and variability) that results from applying forecasting models or methods (mechanical and judgmental) to a set of data to create income projections. Forecasting ability can be established by ranking various models in terms of their forecasting error and variability. Elton and Gruber [2] used the ability criterion solely to decide whether security analysts produce more accurate income projections than those generated by mechanical methods. They concluded that there was no significant difference in terms of the accuracy of forecasting error between income projections of analysts and mechanical methods. Both ability and capability considerations must be considered. Capability, as used here, focuses on the annual incremental cost of deploying resources, such as additional man hours and so forth, to prepare, publish and revise annual income forecasts for investors and others. The significance of incremental capability costs seems to be one of the major concerns underlying the SEC's decision to permit, but not require, corporations to include income projections in required filings [10]. If the estimator is corporate management, then incremental capability costs that must be incurred to produce income budgets solely for internal use would be excluded from the analysis. Once accumulated the annualized incremental capability costs directly associated with income forecasts should be related to the measures of forecasting ability. The determination of feasibility is a form of cost/benefit analysis where cost references incremental forecasting capability, and benefit denotes the forecasting error and variability that results from a given forecasting model.

A Comparison of Indexes of Socio-Economic Status

IN the past twenty years many indexes have been devised as measures of the of individuals. The task has been complicated by the fact that investigators have not agreed upon precise definitions of the term socio-economic status (or its several synonyms); therefore they sought a short and usable index for a loosely defined and unmeasured variable.' This variable has been conceived of in different ways: as a unidimensional attribute that could be directly measured if we had adequate tools; as a unidimensional attribute, but one that must be measured indirectly; as a unidimensional composite that cannot be directly measured, made up of several interrelated attributes that are measurable and can be combined in an index; as a complex of attributes that are interrelated, but do not form a single dimension and thus should not be measured, directly or indirectly, as a totality. Many researchers have avoided the logical and definitional problems by using a measurement that supposedly maximized prediction of certain behavioral consequences of position, however it be defined. Usually these investigators have offered a new index that proved useful in the context of a given research situation without indicating how it was related to other measurement devices. The result has been proliferation and confusion, with only a few attempts to study the relations among the indexes themselves.2 This article reports an additional study of the inter-correlations among standard measurement tools. Information was collected from over two hundred adult men; 19 scores were computed for each respondent which measured some aspect of his status; these scores were then inter-correlated and subjected to factor and cluster analysis. The 19 measures were not all independent; many were simply alternative ways of scoring the same variable (such as occupation), for the field worker needs guidance about their relative efficiency. Some additional data are presented comparing open-ended and closed questions on the self-identification of the respondents.

Social Consequences of the Industrialization of Southern Cities

seen to be of primary importance for the development of status symbols and levels. Status symbols and ranking in Sucre inevitably lag behind the acquisition of economic or political power, at times by as much as one or two generations. It is moreover possible for symbols of high status and actual social class position to persist after the vanishing of the power which achieved them. This lag and persistence is of limited duration, and does not deny the fundamental relationship. On the other hand, it has probably been responsible for obscuring this connection, and for the production of so many divergent views on the meaning of social and economic class. Yet for the purposes of sociological arrangement, separate values can be seen to lie in each of these classifications. Many of the facts of observation are more readily classifiable by the status and ethnic concepts than by the economic. For each type of sociological problem a tentative preliminary analysis should indicate the relative utility of the three concepts, or might develop other modes of classification yet more suitable to the specific problem. It may be stated in summary that the concept of status stratification is an undoubted aid in the study of a Latin American urban community, but it cannot supersede the other concepts. The close relationship of status stratification, along with that of social mobility, to economic class should be kept in mind. Although the ethnic stratification retains some greater separateness because of the inclusion of the racial factor, these three ways of classifying the data from this community reveal a fundamental convergence. This study suggests that social stratification depends on a complex set of interrelated attributes rather than operating as a function of one variable.3'