Processing Illness Information: The Role of Disease Prototypes

Abstract

Recently Bishop and Converse (1986) proposed that information about physical symptoms is interpreted by relating those symptoms to preexisting disease prototypes. The two present studies further examined this formulation by testing hypotheses concerning the speed of processing symptom information as well as associations made to sets of physical symptoms as a function of prototypicality. As predicted, Experiment 1 showed that response time to highly prototypical symptom sets was significantly shorter than that for symptom sets containing irrelevant symptoms. Also as predicted, the results of Experiment 2 showed significant differences in the associations made by experiment participants to symptom sets as a function of the prototypicality of the symptoms in those sets. Participants made more category-based associations to highly prototypical symptom sets than to those lower in prototypicality but made more associations to individual symptoms for symptom sets low in prototypicality. Implications for the prototype hypothesis and for understanding the processing of illness information are discussed.

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