Does Anyone Know the Answer to that Question? Individual Differences in Judging Answerability

The impact of smoking on periodontal status and dental caries

INTRODUCTION

Investigations to explore the relationship between smoking and its oral manifestations are important to clinicians. Among these oral manifestations, periodontal diseases and dental caries have still a controversial association. This study aims to analyze the effect of smoking on periodontal disease and caries and their relevance to each other.

METHODS

Data on demographic and clinical features were retrieved from 7028 patients. Smoking status was categorized as a smoker, non-smoker, former smoker and passive smoker. Each patient received a diagnosis according to the new classification system for periodontal disease, in which periodontal disease is divides into stages (PS). The carries status was diagnosed by evaluating the decayed, missing, and filled teeth (DMFT) index.

RESULTS

Of the patients, 66.6% were non-smoker women, whereas 53.7 % of passive smokers were women. Being a worker and having a Bachelor’s degree was associated with a higher likelihood of getting diagnosed with periodontal disease and caries in smokers. Smoking significantly influences periodontal disease severity and DMFT values (p<0.001). This becomes more evident in former smokers by showing the highest severe periodontal problems (PS3: 29.7% and PS4: 18.9%), and the highest DMFT mean (16.4 ± 7.4) Accordingly, persons having high DMFT had significantly the most severe periodontal disease, namely PS4 (p<0.05).

CONCLUSIONS

Smoking is associated with higher caries prevalence and more severe periodontal disease, and DMFT tend to increase with the severity of periodontitis in the same subjects.

Cultural Differences in Answerability Judgments

Judgments about whether anyone can provide a relevant and correct answer to a question are called answerability judgments. Such judgements can be important in societal planning and decision making and may vary in different cultural contexts. Six hundred participants in each of China, India, and Sweden made answerability judgments of six difficult knowledge questions. For each question, they choose between three options indicating that they thought the question was answerable and a fourth option: "Nobody can answer that question." After each question, they rated their confidence that their judgment was correct. Choosing "Nobody can answer that question" was significantly more common for the Swedes and was uncommon in the Asian samples. The Asian samples showed higher confidence in their judgments. We suggest that these differences may be explained by results from cross-cultural research, but this study did not investigate specific mechanisms. Hence, more research is needed.

What Is the Correct Answer about The Dress' Colors? Investigating the Relation between Optimism, Previous Experience, and Answerability

The Dress photograph, first displayed on the internet in 2015, revealed stunning individual differences in color perception. The aim of this study was to investigate if lay-persons believed that the question about The Dress colors was answerable. Past research has found that optimism is related to judgments of how answerable knowledge questions with controversial answers are (Karlsson et al., 2016). Furthermore, familiarity with a question can create a feeling of knowing the answer (Reder and Ritter, 1992). Building on these findings, 186 participants saw the photo of The Dress and were asked about the correct answer to the question about The Dress’ colors (“blue and black,” “white and gold,” “other, namely…,” or “there is no correct answer”). Choice of the alternative “there is no correct answer” was interpreted as believing the question was not answerable. This answer was chosen more often by optimists and by people who reported they had not seen The Dress before. We also found that among participants who had seen The Dress photo before, 19%, perceived The Dress as “white and gold” but believed that the correct answer was “blue and black.” This, in analogy to previous findings about non-believed memories (Scoboria and Pascal, 2016), shows that people sometimes do not believe the colors they have perceived are correct. Our results suggest that individual differences related to optimism and previous experience may contribute to if the judgment of the individual perception of a photograph is enough to serve as a decision basis for valid conclusions about colors. Further research about color judgments under ambiguous circumstances could benefit from separating individual perceptual experience from beliefs about the correct answer to the color question. Including the option “there is no correct answer” may also be beneficial.