Research Groups
Our informal groups of researchers at CBDSM welcome visitors and new members.
Patient Decision Making
The patient decision making research group meets weekly throughout the year to explore topics related to understanding and improving patient decision making about medical issues. In particular, this group pursues research that examines design issues regarding aids for medical decision making and fosters interdisciplinary collaborations and grant proposals among researchers interested in supporting patient involvement in medical care. Recent brainstorming sessions have dealt with topics as diverse as
- patient preferences for treatment of inflammatory bowel disease
- graphical approaches for communicating risk and treatment choices for adjuvant chemotherapy for breast cancer
- presenting information on elective cesareans to pregnant women
- discrepancies in decisions made for oneself versus for others regarding immunization for influenza epidemics
- how variations in patient numeracy should influence the design of decision support materials
For further information, email:
Rosemarie Pitsch, MPH, Project Manager,
rkalaric at med dot umich dot edu
Motivational Influences on Stress and Health Program ("MISH Program")
The MISH Program seeks to understand the implications of self- and
other-focused motivation for stress, health, and well-being. We are
interested in the physiological pathways (e.g., hormonal, cardiovascular)
that are implicated through the process of allocating resources (e.g.,
emotions, time, money) to self and/or others, as well as the links between
activation of these physiological processes and long-term health and mental
health outcomes (e.g., depression).
We are particularly interested in
- the role that stress plays in influencing interpersonal decisions.
- conceiving of stress as the mediator between resource allocation decisions and health.
- the potential moderating role of close interpersonal relationships for understanding resource allocation decisions.
- the link between these decisions and long term health and mental health outcomes.
Our research integrates methods and topics that span many disciplines,
including psychology, economics, medicine, health services, political
science, law, and business. Much of our work also relies on evolutionary
models of altruism and prosocial behavior, and seeks to integrate multiple
levels of causality toward informing the link between resource allocation
decisions and health. In addition to physiological factors, we are
interested in personality factors, social-cognitive factors, and emotions
that may play a role in causing individuals to behave in the interest of
self and/or others, or that may determine how social factors are interpreted
and influence physiological outcomes. We use a combination of basic and
applied approaches, with an eye toward policy implications, to examine these
questions.
Some examples of ongoing work include
- experimental studies that assess the cardiovascular effects of allocating resources to the self versus another person.
- field experiments examining the effectiveness of a positive emotion intervention for reducing depression among dialysis patients.
- large-scale web-based surveys that examine the utility values for depressive illness, the results of which are intended to inform our understanding of how individuals set priorities when they evaluate resource allocation on a policy level.
Our research team includes faculty, postdoctoral fellows, graduate students, and undergraduate research assistants who share the common goal of studying health and medicine in a social context.
For further information, email:
Stephanie Brown, PhD, Assistant Professor (Internal Medicine)
stebrown at med dot umich dot edu