Karin R. Humphreys

Medicine in the Popular Press: The Influence of the Media on Perceptions of Disease

In an age of increasing globalization and discussion of the possibility of global pandemics, increasing rates of reporting of these events may influence public perception of risk. The present studies investigate the impact of high levels of media reporting on the perceptions of disease. Undergraduate psychology and medical students were asked to rate the severity, future prevalence and disease status of both frequently reported diseases (e.g. avian flu) and infrequently reported diseases (e.g. yellow fever). Participants considered diseases that occur frequently in the media to be more serious, and have higher disease status than those that infrequently occur in the media, even when the low media frequency conditions were considered objectively ‘worse’ by a separate group of participants. Estimates of severity also positively correlated with popular print media frequency in both student populations. However, we also see that the concurrent presentation of objective information about the diseases can mitigate this effect. It is clear from these data that the media can bias our perceptions of disease.

Listener vs. speaker-oriented aspects of speech: Studying the disfluencies of individuals with autism spectrum disorders

This study investigates the role of disfluencies such as “um” or “uh” in conversation to discern whether these features of speech serve listener- or speaker-oriented functions by looking at their occurrence (or lack of occurrence) in the speech of participants with autism. Since the characteristic egocentricity of individuals with autism means they should engage in minimal listener-oriented behavior, they are a useful group to differentiate these functions. Transcription, analysis and categorization of 26 spontaneous language samples were derived from age-matched native English-speaking controls and high-functioning individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASDs). Results showed that individuals with ASD produced fewer filled-pause words (ums and uhs) and revisions than controls, but more silent pauses and disfluent repetitions. Filled-pause words therefore appear to be listener-oriented features of speech.

The Role of Medical Language in Changing Public Perceptions of Illness

This study was designed to investigate the impact of medical terminology on perceptions of disease. Specifically, we look at the changing public perceptions of newly medicalized disorders with accompanying newly medicalized terms (e.g. impotence has become erectile dysfunction disorder). Does using “medicalese” to label a recently medicalized disorder lead to a change in the perception of that condition? Undergraduate students (n = 52) rated either the medical or lay label for recently medicalized disorders (such as erectile dysfunction disorder vs. impotence) and established medical conditions (such as a myocardial infarction vs. heart attack) for their perceived seriousness, disease representativeness and prevalence. Students considered the medical label of the recently medicalized disease to be more serious (mean = 4.95 (SE = .27) vs. mean = 3.77 (SE = .24) on a ten point scale), more representative of a disease (mean = 2.47 (SE = .09) vs. mean = 1.83 (SE = .09) on a four point scale), and have lower prevalence (mean = 68 (SE = 12.6) vs. mean = 122 (SE = 18.1) out of 1,000) than the same disease described using common language. A similar pattern was not seen in the established medical conditions, even when controlled for severity. This study demonstrates that the use of medical language in communication can induce bias in perception; a simple switch in terminology results in a disease being perceived as more serious, more likely to be a disease, and more likely to be a rare condition. These findings regarding the conceptualization of disease have implications for many areas, including medical communication with the public, advertising, and public policy.

Learning to fail: Reoccurring tip-of-the-tongue states

This experiment looked at elicited tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) states to test the hypothesis that making an error once makes people more likely to make it again, via an implicit learning mechanism. We present a methodology that allows us to determine whether error reoccurrences are due to error learning or to the fact that some items tend to pose repeated difficulty to participants. We elicited TOTs by asking participants to supply the word that fitted a given definition. Each time participants indicated that they were experiencing a TOT they were randomly assigned a delay of either 10 or 30 seconds, during which they were asked to keep trying to retrieve the item. After the delay, the correct answer was supplied. We argue that this longer delay in a TOT state amounts to greater implicit learning of the erroneous state. A period of 48 hours later, participants returned to the laboratory and were asked to supply the words for the same definitions as those seen on Day 1. Results showed that TOTs were almost twice as likely to reoccur on words that had elicited a TOT and been followed by a long delay than on those that had been followed by a short delay.

The influence of popular media on perceptions of personal and population risk in possible disease outbreaks

Infectious disease outbreaks are uncertain and potentially risky events that often attract significant media attention. Previous research has shown that, regardless of their objective severity, diseases receiving greater coverage in the media are considered to be more serious and more representative of a disease than those receiving less coverage. This study assesses the role of media coverage in estimations of population risk (measured as perceived incidence among a specific population within a 1-year time period) and personal risk (measured as perceived personal likelihood of infection). Diseases with higher media coverage were considered more serious and more representative of a disease, and estimated to have lower incidence, than diseases less frequently found in the media. No difference in estimates of personal risk was found. A significant correlation between estimates of population and personal risk was found for diseases infrequently reported in the media. A weaker correlation between estimates of population and personal risk was found for diseases frequently reported in the media. The correlation remained unchanged when participants were exposed to additional information, including symptoms, mortality and estimates of prevalence.

Phonological facilitation from pictures in a word association task: evidence for routine cascaded processing in spoken word production.

While most authors now agree that the language production system is in principle cascaded, the strength with which cascaded lemma-to-phoneme activation typically occurs is debated. Picture naming has been shown to be facilitated by phonologically related distractor pictures, but no such facilitation from pictures has been shown for word reading. Picture–picture paradigms have recently been suggested to represent an attentionally facilitated and unusually strong case of cascaded phonological facilitation, not typical of a more general weakly cascaded production system. We used a novel procedure based on picture–word interference paradigms, where participants made speeded verbal free association responses to presented words, with irrelevant picture distractors that were phonologically related to their predicted high-associate responses. Phonological facilitation effects from related picture names were observed on free associate verbal production latencies. These findings represent a far more general demonstration of routine cascaded language production and suggest that the strength and extent of cascaded activation is more substantial than that suggested by traditional picture–word paradigms.

A case of foreign accent syndrome: Acoustic analyses and an empirical test of accent perception

Abstract Foreign Accent Syndrome (FAS) is a rare acquired syndrome following stroke, manifesting as a perceived change in the speaker’s accent. We present acoustic-phonetic analyses of the speech of a patient, RD, with FAS presenting as an apparent accent shift from Southern Ontarian to Atlantic Canadian who was first described in Naidoo, Warriner, Oczkowski, Sevigny, and Humphreys (2008) . As well as more fully documenting this case, this paper also seeks to examine whether the accompanying articulatory deficits constitute a mild form of some other motor speech disorder such as apraxia of speech (AOS) or dysarthria. Acoustic-phonetic analyses showed increased vowel formant variability, overlap of voice onset times for phonemically contrastive stops, inconsistent consonant distortions, and global prosodic attenuation. These, combined with the patient’s fluent speech, can account for the perception of a foreign accent as opposed to disordered speech. The observed inconsistency of consonant distortions coupled with other articulatory deficits suggest that at least in this case, FAS can be considered to be a mild form of AOS.

Tip-of-the-tongue states reoccur because of implicit learning, but resolving them helps.

In six experiments, we elicited tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) states, to investigate the novel finding that TOTs on particular words tend to recur for speakers, and examine whether this effect can be attributed to implicit learning of the incorrect mapping from a lemma to phonology for that word. We elicited TOTs by asking participants to supply the word that fit a given definition, and then retested participants on those same definitions in a second test. In Experiments 1-3 we investigated the time course of learning that occurs during TOTs, and found that TOTs are likely to recur with a five-minute test-retest interval, that this error learning can still be measured following a one-week interval, and that they recur for both monolingual and bilingual speakers. We also report the novel finding that error learning can be corrected when individuals resolve their TOT, making them less likely to re-experience a TOT for that word on a later test. In Experiment 4 we showed that these learning effects are not modulated by a priori knowledge of future tests. In Experiments 5a and 5b we show that orthographic cues can help individuals resolve their TOTs, and that these cued-resolutions lead to corrective learning in much the same way as self-resolutions. In Experiment 6 we demonstrate that effortful retrieval is critical to finding differences in error learning when manipulating the duration of unresolved TOTs. We conclude that the error-repetition effect is highly robust, and is best explained by implicit learning of the erroneous state. These findings reinforce the notion that the language production system is dynamic, and continually learning from experience, even when that experience is errorful.

Emotional cues do not increase the likelihood of tip-of-the-tongue states

In a recent article, Schwartz (Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 17:82–87, 2010) reported the effects of emotion on tip-of-the-tongue states (TOTs). He found increased TOTs for emotion-inducing questions, as well as a carryover effect in which high TOT rates were observed following emotion-inducing questions. In the present study, we sought to replicate these findings while controlling for word frequency, but we found an increased TOT rate neither for emotion-inducing questions nor following emotion-inducing questions. We report three attempts to replicate Schwartz’s (Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 17:82–87, 2010) effect that focused on systematic differences in word frequency between stimulus sets in the original study; none of the key findings reported by Schwartz (Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 17:82–87, 2010) were found in any of the experiments. These results fail to support prior claims concerning the effects of emotion on TOTs Schwartz (Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 17:82–87, 2010). The discussion focuses on the importance of controlling for systematic differences in word characteristics between groups of items.

Brief Report: Animacy and Word Order in Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders

Individuals with autism or autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) are known to have difficulties discriminating animacy and are less likely to attend to animate stimuli, which may underlie the social deficits of autism. For individuals without ASD, animacy also affects word order choices: speakers choose syntactic structures (active vs. passive) that place animate entities as the grammatical subject, as a result of their conceptual salience. This study tested whether highly verbal adults with ASD would show sensitivity to animacy in a picture description task. Results showed that individuals with ASD were as sensitive to animacy as controls, and overwhelmingly placed animate entities as the grammatical subject. One stimulus proved an exception, where only individuals with ASD placed an inanimate entity (a clock) in subject position in preference to an animate one (a boy), which coincides with previous observations that individuals with autism find clocks highly salient. This study provides converging evidence of the role of conceptual salience in word order choices, and furthermore shows animate entities to be highly salient for individuals with ASD, at least as it pertains to these word order choices.