Laypersons’ Judgments of Patient Credibility and the Study of Illness Representations

  • J. A. Skelton
Chapter
Part of the Contributions to Psychology and Medicine book series (CONTRIBUTIONS)

Abstract

You listen as your spouse complains about a throbbing headache. A professor listens as a student cites a recent bout of flu to justify a request for an extended term paper deadline. A supervisor listens to an employee’s description of back pain that has reduced the employee’s productivity. In each case, a perceiver is presented with a report of a victim’s health problems and is expected to respond in some fashion, based on secondhand information to which only the illness victim can have direct access. The central problem of this chapter is to explain how perceivers accomplish the daunting task of making sense of victims’ reports of illness, pain, and physical symptoms and, specifically, which characteristics of these reports make them more or less credible to perceivers.

Keywords

Sore Throat Patient Credibility Illness Representation Patient Problem Throat Culture 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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© Springer-Verlag New York Inc. 1991

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  • J. A. Skelton

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