Although it is clear that the outcome devaluation technique has been extremely fruitful (having arguably laid the foundation for this entire field of study), it suffers from one key limitation: It cannot determine whether outcome-insensitive behaviors arise due to a strengthening of stimulus response habits, a weakening of goal-directed choices, or a combination of both.
It has become clear that histological analysis is not, by itself, adequate in predicting clinical outcome and insensitive in identifying the optimal therapeutic strategy in many cancers [ 2].
Some of these studies may fail to identify the most appropriate outcomes to evaluate, use of insensitive outcome measures, or fail to include or identify a subgroup of cancer survivors who may benefit from SCPs more than others.
We have also experienced that clinical evaluations of pin sites are an insensitive outcome, i.e., an intervention that showed highly significant differences in positive bacterial cultures and use of antibiotics but no differences in clinical pin-site infections according to the Checketts Otterburns classification [6, 8].
However, static outcome pyramids are insensitive to temporal changes.
Specifically, our results suggest that simultaneous modulation of T-helper differentiation and TGF-beta pathways may improve clinical outcome of hormone insensitive breast cancers over treatments that target only one of these pathways.
These items are considered Weak because they are difficult to score or do not contribute to the overall outcome and largely insensitive to individual differences in the lower or moderate range of symptom severity and produce floor effects.
Roughly speaking, the probabilities for the outcomes are relatively insensitive to the probabilities over the various initial conditions — think of how the probabilities of outcomes of spins of a roulette wheel apparently do not depend on who is spinning the wheel, sometimes vigorously, sometimes feebly.
Because of the complex interactive effects of various exposures and exposure routes and the timing and duration of these exposures, currently available methods of studying the associations between environmental exposures and pregnancy outcomes are fairly insensitive, making measurement of these associations difficult (Hertz-Picciotto et al. 1996).
Taking it a step further, neuroscientists showed that administering stress hormone-like substances rendered people insensitive to outcome devaluation, and thus made their behavior habitual.
