Journal ArticleDOI
Who talks? The social psychology of illness support groups.
TLDR
Support seeking was highest for diseases viewed as stigmatizing and was lowest for less embarrassing but equally devastating disorders, such as heart disease, and implications for social comparison theory and its applications in health care are discussed.Abstract:
More Americans try to change their health behaviors through self-help than through all other forms of professionally designed programs. Mutual support groups, involving little or no cost to participants, have a powerful effect on mental and physical health, yet little is known about patterns of support group participation in health care. What kinds of illness experiences prompt patients to seek each other's company? In an effort to observe social comparison processes with real-world relevance, support group participation was measured for 20 disease categories in 4 metropolitan areas (New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Dallas) and on 2 on-line forums. Support seeking was highest for diseases viewed as stigmatizing (e.g., AIDS, alcoholism, breast and prostate cancer) and was lowest for less embarrassing but equally devastating disorders, such as heart disease. The authors discuss implications for social comparison theory and its applications in health care.read more
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Cancer Patients' Self-Reported Attitudes About the Internet
TL;DR: Cancer patients displayed a healthy skepticism when presented with the option of divulging their personal health information; however, they were willing to provide personal details if, as a result, a website provided them with individualized information.
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Doctor-patient relationship as motivation and outcome: examining uses of an Interactive Cancer Communication System.
Bret R. Shaw,Jeong Yeob Han,Robert P. Hawkins,James A. Stewart,Fiona McTavish,David H. Gustafson +5 more
TL;DR: Use of the Information services was associated with having a more positive appraisal of the doctor-patient relationship at post-test suggesting that high-quality information on the Internet can serve to improve patients' satisfaction with their doctor.
Journal ArticleDOI
Neural attention with character embeddings for hay fever detection from twitter.
TL;DR: A deep architecture enhanced with character embeddings and neural attention to improve the performance of hay fever-related content classification from Twitter data is proposed, which effectively addresses the out-of-vocabulary problem in the dataset.
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Long-term ill health, poverty and ethnicity
TL;DR: The authors explored the links between long-term ill health and dimensions of poverty across four ethnic groups: Bangladeshis, Pakistanis, White English (White British in the quantitative work) and Ghanaians (Black Africans in the qualitative work).
Journal ArticleDOI
"That's not what we do": evidence that normative change is a mechanism of action in group interventions.
TL;DR: It is posited that normative change is a plausible mechanism and a test of this in an eating disorder prevention group program is provided and a significant reduction in thin-ideal internalization, body dissatisfaction and dieting intentions is experienced.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI
A Theory of Social Comparison Processes
TL;DR: In this article, the authors pointed out that there is a strong functional tie between opinions and abilities in humans and that the ability evaluation of an individual can be expressed as a comparison of the performance of a particular ability with other abilities.
Book
Statistical abstract of the United States
TL;DR: The Red River of the North basin of the Philippines was considered a part of the Louisiana Purchase by the United States Department of Commerce in the 1939 Census Atlas of the United Philippines as discussed by the authors.
Book
The theory and practice of group psychotherapy
TL;DR: Yalom as mentioned in this paper described the course of therapy from both the patient's and the therapist's viewpoint in Encounter Groups: First Facts (1973) and Every Day gets a Little Closer: A Twice-Told Therapy (1974).
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Internet paradox: A social technology that reduces social involvement and psychological well-being?
Robert E. Kraut,Michael Patterson,Vicki Lundmark,Sara Kiesler,Tridas Mukophadhyay,William L. Scherlis +5 more
TL;DR: Greater use of the Internet was associated with declines in participants' communication with family members in the household, declines in the size of their social circle, and increases in their depression and loneliness.
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