The influence of contextual information on lay judgments of childhood mental health concerns.

Decisions about whether a person is in need of mental health care are often made by laypeople with no training in the identification of mental health concerns. For example, the parent of a child displaying problematic behavior has to decide whether this behavior is likely related to mental health concerns and necessitates professional care. The process of identifying mental health concerns is made more complicated by the rich background of real-world environmental factors or contexts in which concerns can present-contexts that might or might not relate to the presence of mental health concerns. We investigated whether laypeople use contextual information to make judgments regarding childhood mental health disorder symptoms. In Experiment 1, we demonstrated that laypeople's judgments of the likelihood of a mental disorder are influenced by non-diagnostic contextual information that surrounds symptoms of the disorder. In Experiment 2, we demonstrated that providing a causal origin for such disorder symptoms accentuates the use of context, regardless of the nature of the causal process (i.e., environmental vs. biological). These findings indicate that contextual influences on judgments about mental health concerns may reflect a more general set of mental reasoning processes than indicated by previous work focused on clinicians' judgments. Consequently, these findings have important implications for how we think about the influence of contextual information on decision making more generally as well as for improving our ability to both reliably identify children in need of mental health care and increase children's access to such care.