The influence of causal connections between symptoms on the diagnosis of mental disorders: Evidence from online and offline measures

Abstract

An experiment conducted with students and experienced clinicians demonstrated very fast and on-line causal reasoning in the diagnosis of DSM-IV mental disorders. The experiment also demonstrated that clinicians’ causal reasoning is triggered by information that is directly related to the causal structure that explains the symptoms, such as their temporal sequence. The use of causal theories was measured through explicit, verbal diagnostic judgments and through the on-line registration of participants’ reading times of clinical reports. To detect both on-line and off-line causal reasoning, the consistency of clinical reports was manipulated. This manipulation was made by varying the temporal order in which different symptoms developed in hypothetical clients, and by providing explicit information about causal connections between symptoms. The temporal order of symptoms affected the clinicians’ but not the students’ reading times. However, off-line diagnostic judgments in both groups were influenced by the consistency manipulation. Overall, our results suggest that clinicians engage in fast and on-line causal reasoning processes when dealing with diagnostic information concerning mental disorders, and that both clinicians and students engage in causal reasoning in diagnostic judgment tasks.