Text Box:                                Core Research Topic:                                                                                  What is Hot Cognition? My Hot Cognition La

Text Box:    End-of-Life                                                                                 What is Hot Cognition? My Hot Cognition La Text Box:    Decision Making                                                                                 What is Hot Cognition? My Hot Cognition La

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Text Box:     In the spring of 2005, the decision about whether or not to discontinue life-sustaining treatment for a young Florida woman named Terri Schiavo became the focus of worldwide media attention.  What is striking about Terri's notoriety, however, is that she became a household name 15 years after she last took a step, spoke a word, or interacted in any meaningful way with the world around her. Indeed, unlike the brand of celebrity we so often see in today's supercharged media culture--one based almost solely on self-promotion--it was precisely the fact that Terri Schiavo could tell us nothing about herself that led her to become so famous.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Text Box:     The tragic final years of Terri Schiavo's life are emblematic of the new challenges of end-of-life decision making that face the field of medicine today.  New medical technologies can save lives that were beyond hope only a few short years ago, but with this technology comes new decisions about when life is being extended too long, past the point where the individual has a quality of life worth maintaining.   This new and emotionally-charged form of medical decision making has been a focus of our research for last 15 years.      The particular focus of the research in our lab is the use of instructional advance directives, more commonly referred to as "living wills."  Living wills are documents people complete while they are healthy, specifying the kind of medical treatment they would like to receive (or more typically not receive) should illness or injury rob them of the ability to speak for themselves.  Every year thousands of Americans complete living wills in the hope of avoiding Terri Schiavo's sad fate, and ensuring that their wishes about end-of-life medical treatment will be honored.      Unfortunately, policy and law encouraging the use of advance directives developed completely uninformed by empirical data examining a number of key psychological assumptions underlying their effective use. Our research challenges the validity of several of these assumptions.  For example, drawing on state-of-the-art theory and research in the new field of  "affective forecasting," our research questions people's ability to predict their own future wishes about end-of-life treatment.  Other streams of our research have documented a variety of biases people show when trying to predict other's end-of-life wishes, and serious limitations in people's memory for medical decisions they have made in the past.      Overall, our work in this area amounts to a psychological critique of the current state of policy and law guiding end-of-life medical decision making in the U.S. Key Readings:

 

 

 

 

                                 

Text Box: Ditto, P. H., Danks, J. H., Smucker, W. D., Bookwala, J., Coppola, K. M., Dresser, R., Fagerlin, A., Gready, R. M., Houts, R., Lockhart, L. K., & Zyzanski, S.  (2001).  Advance directives as acts of communication:  A randomized controlled trial.  Archives of Internal Medicine, 161, 421-430. Ditto, P. H.  (2006).  What would Terri want?  On the psychological challenges of surrogate decision making.  Death Studies, 30, 135-148. Sharman, S. J., Garry, M., Jacobson, J. A., Loftus, E. F., & Ditto, P. H.  . (in press).  False memories for end-of-life decisions.  Health Psychology. for a full list of papers on this topic. Return to Ditto Home   minar in social psychology, and specialized seminars in social cognition and related topics whenever I can.  Below  links to