Incentive effects of workers' compensation benefits: a literature synthesis.

Increasingly, the health care community and public policymakers are recognizing the role of economic and psychosocial factors in disability in addition to their traditional attention to environmental, physical, and somatic influences on health and illness. In particular, current discussions of health reform include serious consideration of the integration of workers' compensation and health plan benefits. This article synthesizes what is known regarding one important aspect of health policy: the effects on disability behavior of changes in workers' compensation benefits. The best available literature reveals that an increase of 10 percent in workers' compensation benefits is related to a 1 to 11 percent increase in the frequency of workers' compensation claims and a 2 to 11 percent increase in duration per claim. The article examines the sensitivity of these parameter estimates to differences in research design and proposes an idealized study methodology that, the authors hope, would improve the precision of estimates of the incentive effects of workers' compensation payments.

Overprediction and blocking in the McCollough aftereffect.

The Rescorla-Wagner theory (Rescorla & Wagner, 1972) of associative learning offers specific predictions about the associative strength of CS-US pairs when two or more CSs are conditioned to the same US separately and subsequently paired in a compound with the same US. The magnitude of orientation-contingent color aftereffects (AEs) was used as an index of associative strength in this study. The results of experiments using an "overprediction" (Rescorla, 1970) and a "blocking" (Kamin, 1969) paradigm conformed to the predictions of the Rescorla-Wagner theory. In Experiment 1, AEs were established simultaneously for horizontal-vertical and diagonal patterns. When observers subsequently viewed compound induction patterns, AE magnitude was found to be significantly decreased, relative to a condition in which observers did not view such an induction pattern. In Experiment 2, AE magnitude for a given test pattern following inspection of compound induction stimuli was significantly reduced by inspection of the other component prior to viewing the compound induction stimuli. The applicability of associative learning and feature-adaptation models of the McCollough effect is discussed.