A Little Uncertainty Goes a Long Way: State and Trait Differences in Uncertainty Interact to Increase Information Seeking but Also Increase Worry
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study examines the effect of an interaction between intolerance of uncertainty (IU) and situational uncertainty (SU) on worry due to uncertainty and on information seeking. Health providers may benefit from knowing when communicating uncertain information is beneficial. The study was a 2 (IU condition: high vs. low) x 2 (SU condition: high vs. low) experimental design resulting in four conditions to which university students (N = 153) were randomly assigned. IU was manipulated through a linguistic manipulation of responses to an IU questionnaire coupled with written false feedback. SU was manipulated by modifying the information participants read about a fictitious infection. Individuals in the high IU and high SU condition sought the most information and worried most due to uncertainty compared to people in the low IU and low SU condition, who sought the least information and worried least. Findings suggest that high IU may increase positive health behaviors such as screening intentions when individuals are faced with an uncertain health threat, but that it also increases worries due to that uncertainty. Providing opportunities for discussing one's emotional response to uncertainty and providing instrumental support for managing uncertainty (e.g., booking the follow-up appointment) is essential when communicating uncertain information.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it