A study of preschoolers' and adults' understandings of the domain of illness.

Psychologists have traditionally been interested in people's understanding of illness because of the practical importance of the subject. A second reason for studying illness is to explore the organization of illness concepts as part of a domain-specific cognitive psychology. This dissertation focuses on questions of how children's concepts of illness and related issues might cohere as a particular domain of cognition. Four studies of 4- and 5-year-olds are reported. Study 1 demonstrates that children do understand a particular invisible mechanism (germs) that figures in cases of illness causation. Study 2 reinforces these findings, but also demonstrates that children recognize a variety of ways illness can be caused. Preschoolers do not identify illness with germs. Study 3 tests a set of hypotheses regarding how children (and adults) might define illness. No simple set of social, psychological, and/or biological features are sufficient to identify all and only those conditions recognized as illness. Neither do there seem to be a unique set of inferences that go along with the ascription of illness. Study 4 tests whether the general concept of illness might, instead, serve to constrain inferences that can be made at a lower level of specificity. Knowing that a novel category is a type of illness allows preschoolers (and adults) to infer that certain features will likely be shared among instances of the category (e.g., cause) while other features may not (e.g., psychological effects). These results suggest that there is no unique causal model for illness phenomena. Instead, the domain of illness may be organized around a set of dimensions, and categories which predict values on those dimensions. This level of organization would characterize a type of domain intermediate between naive theories and simple collections of associations.PhDPsychologyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/103614/1/9332096.pdfDescription of 9332096.pdf : Restricted to UM users only