The purpose of this study was to examine the role of the causal connectivity of the statements ("low-medium-high"), elaboration question condition ("focused on the identification of main ideas-focused on the identification of speakers' emotions") and the modality of presentation of discourse ("oral-written") in the…

Objective: The aim of this study was to investigate the impact of illiteracy on physical health and mental health. Design: Matching methods (nearest neighbour matching, Mahalanobis metric matching, and propensity score matching). Setting: Elderly people at least 65 years old in 22 provinces of China. Methods: The analysis used data from Chinese…

We delineate the underlying homogeneity assumption, procedural variants, and implications of the comparative method and distinguish this from Mill's method of difference. We demonstrate that additional units can provide "placebo" tests for the comparative method even if the scope of inference is limited to the two units under comparison.…

Risk is a fundamental component of well-being and is interconnected with all aspects of child development. The aim of this paper is to explore children's (N = 50) own perspectives and perceptions of risky situations. Semi-structured interviews were conducted and images were used as prompts. Children aged five to six years were asked to identify…

Humans have a unique ability to generate novel norms. Faced with the knowledge that there are hungry children in Somalia, we easily and naturally infer that we ought to donate to famine relief charities. Although a contentious and lively issue in metaethics, such inference from "is" to "ought" has not been systematically…

Individuals have difficulty changing their causal beliefs in light of contradictory evidence. We hypothesized that this difficulty arises because people facing implausible causes give greater consideration to causal alternatives, which, because of their use of a positive test strategy, leads to differential weighting of contingency evidence.…

An important reason to choose an intervention to treat psychological problems of clients is the expectation that the intervention will be effective in alleviating the problems. The authors investigated whether clinicians base their ratings of the effectiveness of interventions on models that they construct representing the factors causing and…

Causal considerations must be relevant for those making decisions. Whether to bring an umbrella or leave it at home depends on the causal consequences of these options. However, most current decision theories do not address causal reasoning. Here, the authors propose a causal model theory of choice based on causal Bayes nets. The critical ideas…

Two studies explored the conditions under which readers update their representation of news reports in the presence of alternative plausible explanations for a target event. To do so, this study asked readers to read news reports that mentioned 2 different causes to explain the occurrence of a single event. This study manipulated which of the 2…

The causal network model of P. Van den Broeck and T. Trabasso (1986) was used to analyze the inferencing processes induced from verbal protocols from reading and thinking-aloud tasks. Results from 66 Dutch 10- and 11-year olds show no correlation between reading and think-aloud performance and comprehensive scores of a closed comprehension test.…

A central theme of research on human development and psychopathology is whether a therapeutic intervention or a turning-point event, such as a family break-up, alters the trajectory of the behavior under study. This paper lays out and applies a method for using observational longitudinal data to make more confident causal inferences about the…

This paper uses the SACMEQ II data to carry out an analysis of classroom context factors that accounted for student scores in reading and mathematics as well as a review of methods used to derive policies in Kenya in order to emphasise the need for evidence-based research for the derivation of policies for the leadership and management of primary…