Previous research has shown that high socially anxious individuals lack the benign interpretation bias present in people without social anxiety. The tendency of high socially anxious people to generate more negative interpretations may lead to anticipated anxiety about future social situations. If so, developing a more benign interpretation bias could lead to a reduction in this anxiety. The cu...

Surveillance has been recognized as a fundamental component in the control of antimicrobial- resistant infections. Although surveillance data have been widely published and utilized by researchers and decision makers, little attention has been paid to assessment of their validity. We conducted this review in order to identify and explore potential types and magnitude of bias that may influence ...

health consequences of industrialization and urbanization. This interpretation, however, relies on sources subject to selection bias. Our meta-analysis shows that the declining height during industrialization emerges primarily in selected samples. We also develop a parsimonious diagnostic test that reveals, but does not correct for, selection bias in height samples. When applied to four represe...

BACKGROUND Theoretical accounts of attentional and interpretation biases in pain suggest that these biases are interrelated and are both influenced by perceived threat. A laboratory-based study was conducted to test whether these biases are influenced by threat and their interrelationship and whether attention or interpretation biases predict pain outcomes. METHODS Healthy participants (n = 8...

Auditory streaming and visual plaids have been used extensively to study perceptual organization in each modality. Both stimuli can produce bistable alternations between grouped (one object) and split (two objects) interpretations. They also share two peculiar features: (i) at the onset of stimulus presentation, organization starts with a systematic bias towards the grouped interpretation; (ii)...

HIGHLIGHTS Application of Kronecker product to construct parsimonious structural equation models for multivariate longitudinal data.A method for the investigation of measurement bias with Kronecker product restricted models.Application of these methods to health-related quality of life data from bone metastasis patients, collected at 13 consecutive measurement occasions.The use of curves to fac...

Verification bias can influence the interpretation of the most important screening test for prostate cancer, measurement of prostate-specific antigen (PSA). Such bias arises when the presence or absence of prostate cancer has not been verified by prostate biopsy in all subjects in the screened population. In this issue of the Journal, Punglia et al. report on how verification bias alters the se...

OBJECTIVE We examined how assessments of risk of bias of primary studies are carried out and incorporated into the statistical analysis and overall findings of a systematic review. DESIGN A cross-sectional review. SAMPLE We assessed 200 systematic reviews of randomised trials published between January and March 2012; Cochrane (n=100), non-Cochrane (Database of Reviews of Effects) (n=100). ...