Gender disparities in the attribution of cardiac-related symptoms: Contribution of common sense models of illness.

Abstract

The role of common sense models of heart disease in the attribution of cardiac-related symptoms was examined in a sample of healthy young adults (N = 224). Participants were less likely to attribute symptoms to possible cardiac causes for female victims reporting stressful life events (M = 5.14) than for female victims without such stressors (M = 6.82) or for male victims with (M = 6.23) or without (M = 6.48) concurrent stressors. Cardiac attributions remained lowest for female/high-stress victims in additional samples of undergraduates (N = 194), community-residing adults (N = 48), and physicians (N = 45), although this outcome sometimes appeared to reflect additive, rather than interactive, effects. Two final experiments with undergraduate samples (Ns = 48 and 60, respectively) indicated that stereotypes associating heart disease with male gender may account for gender disparities in the attribution of cardiac-related symptoms.

We Discount the Pain of Others When Pain Has No Medical Explanation

“…Another explanation for the finding that psychosocial factors did not overall affect participants" responses may be that the psychosocial influences in our vignettes were rather weak or "benign" in comparison with the psychosocial issues (e.g., clinical mood or anxiety disorders) that are prominent in pain management. 2 This could also explain why our results are not in line with the results of Martin and colleagues 26,27 and Swartzman and…”

“…In support of this idea are the findings in the context of heart complaints. Martin and colleagues 26,27 and Swartzman and McDermid 38 demonstrated that the presence of psychosocial factors was related to a disregard of physical symptoms by observers.…”

The impact of racial stereotypes on eating disorder recognition

“…We would predict that for all except very experienced clinicians (e.g., eating disorder specialists), the same stereotypes found among the undergraduates may also be detected among general clinicians. As the example of heart disease in women shows (Martin et al, 1998), these biases do occur, even among professionals.…”

“…For example, in the views of undergraduate students, community-residing adults, and even physicians (Martin, Gordon, & Lounsbury, 1998), heart disease is stereotyped as a male health problem. However, according to the American Heart Association (2001), cardiovascular disease was the cause of mortality in 53.1% of the 1 women who died in 1998.…”

A contextual approach on sex-related biases in pain judgements: The moderator effects of evidence of pathology and patients’ distress cues on nurses’ judgements of chronic low-back pain

“…It should also be stressed that, if former evidence on judgements of acute chest pain may suggest that such a rule is more often applied to the interpretation of females' pain (e.g. Chiaramonte & Friend, 2006;Martin et al, 1998;Martin & Lemos, 2002), in the present CLBP context, such a rule seems to be equally applied to the interpretation of males' and females' pain experiences. As already argued, the fact that a CLBP scenario suppresses the differences between nurses' representations of males and females ) may account for this result.…”