RT Journal Article
T1 The diagnosis of mental disorders is influenced by automatic causal reasoning.
A1 Flores, Amanda
A1 Cobos-Cano, Pedro Luis
A1 Hagmayer, York
K1 Enfermedades mentales - Diagnóstico
AB Causal knowledge has been shown to affect diagnostic decisions. It is unclear, however, howcausal knowledge affects diagnosis. We hypothesized that it influences intuitive reasoningprocesses. More precisely, we speculated that people automatically assess the coherencebetween observed symptoms and an assumed causal model of a disorder, which in turnaffects diagnostic classification. Intuitive causal reasoning was investigated in anexperimental study. Participants were asked to read clinical reports before deciding on adiagnosis. Intuitive processing was studied by analysing reading times. It turned out thatreading times were slower when causally expected consequences of present symptoms weremissing or effects of absent causes were present. This causal incoherence effect waspredictive of participants’ later explicit diagnostic judgments. These and related findingssuggest that diagnostic judgments rely on automatic reasoning processes based on thecomputation of causal coherence. Potential implications of these results for the training ofclinicians are discussed.
PB SAGE
YR 2017
FD 2017
LK https://hdl.handle.net/10630/35926
UL https://hdl.handle.net/10630/35926
LA eng
NO Flores, A., Cobos, P.L., & Hagmayer, Y. (2018). The diagnosis of mental disorders is influenced by automatic causal reasoning, Clinical Psychological Science, 6, 1-12
NO Política de acceso abierto tomada de: https://openpolicyfinder.jisc.ac.uk/id/publication/25187
DS RIUMA. Repositorio Institucional de la Universidad de Málaga
RD 21 ene 2026