Artificial Intelligence: Promises and Perils for Employer-Sponsored Mental Health and Well-Being Initiatives

The issues and trends in healthcare delivery are constantly changing. The COVID-19 pandemic is one recent issue that wreaked havoc on healthcare systems, causing a shortage of healthcare workers, high demand for medicines and supplies, and increased medical expenditure due to a lack of insurance. Other issues include rising healthcare costs and care fragmentation.
Cost Containment
Payment for healthcare services has historically promoted adoption of costly and often unnecessary or inefficient...

Cognitive psychology is the field of psychology dedicated to examining how people think. It attempts to explain how and why we think the way we do by studying the interactions among human thinking, emotion, creativity, language, and problem-solving, as well as other cognitive processes. Cognitive psychology studies how information is processed and manipulated in remembering, thinking, and knowing.
This field emerged in the mid-20th century, following a period dominated by behaviorism, which...

The halo effect is a cognitive bias in which an individual's overall impression influences judgments about their specific traits. This psychological phenomenon leads people to associate positive characteristics with those they perceive as generally good and negative characteristics with those they view as bad. This effect is particularly influential in social perception, professional evaluations, and decision-making processes.The Psychological Basis of the Halo EffectThe halo effect is rooted...

A heuristic is a general problem-solving framework (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974). You can think of these as mental shortcuts that are used to solve problems. Different types of heuristics are used in different types of situations, and the impulse to use a heuristic occurs when one of five conditions is met (Pratkanis, 1989):

When we hold a stereotype about a person, we have expectations that he or she will fulfill that stereotype. A self-fulfilling prophecy is an expectation held by a person that alters his or her behavior in a way that tends to make it true. When we hold stereotypes about a person, we tend to treat the person according to our expectations. This treatment can influence the person to act according to our stereotypic expectations, thus confirming our stereotypic beliefs. Research by Rosenthal and...

Unrealistic optimism bias is the tendency to overestimate the likelihood of positive outcomes. This cognitive bias makes individuals believe they are less likely to experience failures, setbacks, or risks and more likely to succeed than others. For example, people may assume they are less prone to health issues, accidents, or financial struggles than their peers, even when they share similar risk factors.One key component of this bias is the above-average effect, where individuals perceive...