Assessing patient beliefs in a clinical trial ofHypericum perforatum in major depression
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Little is known about the beliefs of patients suffering from major depression as to the causes of their illness and effective treatments. This study introduces a new instrument for capturing these beliefs, the Explanatory Model for Depression (EMD) Questionnaire, and explores the beliefs of patients participating in a clinical trial of an alternative medicine, Hypericum perforatum. Although the EMD was originally conceptualized as having five factors pertaining to models of the illness and treatment approaches, the data suggest that patient beliefs are aligned on two factors pertaining to internal and external locus of control. Strong beliefs on either of the EMD locus of control subscales are associated with more severe depression. More importantly, strong beliefs on the external locus of control subscale are associated with less improvement over the 8-week period of observation. These results support the role of patients' beliefs in their recovery from depression and suggest that patients who believe the causes of their depression are outside of their control are less likely to improve over time. It is important to note that beliefs did not mediate the effect of treatment on depression in this study, perhaps because patients were blinded to their treatment condition. Future studies should explore whether patient beliefs have an even greater impact when patients are aware of the treatment they are receiving and can determine whether that treatment is consistent with their beliefs.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.020 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".