Background: Inherited risk is a family issue. Identifying family members who carry a pathogenic genetic variant that increases risk of cancers and other chronic diseases can be lifesaving for those affected. Objective: The research questions are: (1) which family communication frameworks have been applied, (2) how do intervention strategies employed map to these theories, and (3) to what extent were families receptive to these strategies and communication increased? Methods: Manuscripts published between January 2010 and August 2020 were searched in three databases: PubMed, PsycINFO, and Web of Science. Results: Nine intervention trials were identified. All interventions were evaluated in clinical genetic counseling contexts using at least one individual-level strategy (e.g. increase knowledge). Only three focused on dyadic conversations such as preparing for relatives’ information needs. Conclusions: This systematic review posed the question whether theoretically based approaches have been applied to foster family genetic risk communication. Greater attention needs to be paid to the utilization of dyadic level and family system level theories to guide intervention developments. Practical implications: We conclude by calling for accelerating and broadening the development of interventions to enable family communication about inherited risk that are theory-based, incorporate family-systems thinking, and are conducted outside of specialty clinic settings.
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Recent evidence suggests that grammatical aspect can bias how individuals perceive criminal intentionality during discourse comprehension. Given that criminal intentionality is a common criterion for legal definitions (e.g., first-degree murder), the present study explored whether grammatical aspect may also impact legal judgments. In a series of four experiments participants were provided with a legal definition and a description of a crime in which the grammatical aspect of provocation and murder events were manipulated. Participants were asked to make a decision (first- vs. second-degree murder) and then indicate factors that impacted their decision. Findings suggest that legal judgments can be affected by grammatical aspect but the most robust effects were limited to temporal dynamics (i.e., imperfective aspect results in more murder actions than perfective aspect), which may in turn influence other representational systems (i.e., number of murder actions positively predicts perceived intentionality). In addition, findings demonstrate that the influence of grammatical aspect on situation model construction and evaluation is dependent upon the larger linguistic and semantic context. Together, the results suggest grammatical aspect has indirect influences on legal judgments to the extent that variability in aspect changes the features of the situation model that align with criteria for making legal judgments.