Research on bad news delivery reveals a reliable temporal delay in the onset of the bad news message from the sender to the receiver. An experiment utilized a false feedback test design to determine whether the delay is better accounted for by negative verbal message planning, functional communication potential, or both. Participant-senders (N = 138) delivered either scripted or unscripted good...

A diverse body of research has demonstrated that people update their beliefs to a greater extent when receiving good news compared to bad news. Recently, a paper by Shah et al. claimed that this asymmetry does not exist. Here we carefully examine the experiments and simulations described in Shah et al. and follow their analytic approach on our data sets. After correcting for confounds we identi...

Companies that use their own stock to finance acquisitions have incentives to increase their market values prior to the acquisition date. This study examines whether such companies strategically disclose good news or withhold bad news in order to boost their high stock prices. I find that stock swap acquirers are not more likely to issue favorable management forecasts during the period before t...

BACKGROUND Breaking bad news to mothers whose children has disability is an important role of physicians. There has been considerable speculation about the inevitability of parental dissatisfaction with how they are informed of their child's disability. Egyptian mothers' preferences for how to be told the bad news about their child's disability has not been investigated adequately. The objectiv...

Most physicians regard the communication of bad news to be a difficult issue in clinical oncology practice. The optimal manner of communicating bad news to patients so that physicians can create maximal understanding in patients and facilitate their psychological adjustment is unknown. A systematic review of the literature was conducted to clarify available knowledge on patient preferences rega...

This module considers different aspects of communicating a cancer diagnosis to the patient. Using a UK study, it looks at who breaks bad news in cancer care, frameworks for breaking bad news and the role of nurses.

Doctors shopping for medical malpractice insurance—when there's a choice available—face the classic good news/bad news scenario. The good news is that rates have started to plateau or even drop, so that physicians in the hardest hit parts of the country are seeing some relief. The bad news is that rates are still so high that too many doctors will continue to do what they have been doing—shop m...