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Cognitive Mechanisms and Common-Sense Management of Cancer Risk: Do Patients Make Decisions?

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Handbook of Health Decision Science

Abstract

Our chapter has two primary goals. The first is to describe a model of the mechanisms underlying the “common-sense processes” involved in the everyday management of health risks. The second, intertwined with the first, is to apply the model to decisions and management of cancers in three areas: screening, care seeking, and end-of-life planning. We first spell out two themes underlying how the model represents the processes involved in people’s everyday approach to “decision”-making for managing threats of cancers. The content of the Common-Sense Model (CSM) is spelled out, e.g., prototypes, representations of cancer, and treatments and action planning, as are the processes involved in the activation of mental models. The final sections address how these processes affect decisions to screen, treat, and decide among end of life alternatives.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology and Institute for Health, Rutgers University, 112 Paterson St., New Brunswick, NJ, 08901, USA

    Howard Leventhal

  2. VA Palo Alto Health Care System, Palo Alto, CA, USA

    Jessica S. Yu

  3. Department of Medicine and Institute for Health, Rutgers, RWJ Medical School, Rutgers University, 2 Beekman Place, 7C., New York, NY, 10022, USA

    Elaine A. Leventhal

  4. Department Sociology, Virginia Commonwealth University, 827 West Franklin Street, Richmond, VA, 23226, USA

    Susan M. Bodnar-Deren

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  1. Howard Leventhal
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  2. Jessica S. Yu
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  3. Elaine A. Leventhal
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  4. Susan M. Bodnar-Deren
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Correspondence to Howard Leventhal .

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  1. Department of Urology, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, New York, USA

    Michael A. Diefenbach

  2. Fox Chase Cancer Center, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA

    Suzanne Miller-Halegoua

  3. Department of Community Health Sciences, Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts, USA

    Deborah J. Bowen

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Leventhal, H., Yu, J.S., Leventhal, E.A., Bodnar-Deren, S.M. (2016). Cognitive Mechanisms and Common-Sense Management of Cancer Risk: Do Patients Make Decisions?. In: Diefenbach, M., Miller-Halegoua, S., Bowen, D. (eds) Handbook of Health Decision Science. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-3486-7_7

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