title: What is suicide? Will suicidologists ever agree?
abstract: 51 students and 20 experts judged 20 behaviors which might be considered to be suicide in a similar fashion with the exception that the experts were less likely to see a dog who refuses to eat and dies as a suicide. Applying models proposed for how people categorize objects, it is argued that both experts and lay people use a prototypical approach rather than a feature comparison approach for defining suicide.
authors.affiliation: Psychology Program, The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey, Jimmie Leeds Road, Pomona, NJ 08240-0195, USA. lesterd@stockton.edu
authors.forename: David
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Lester
authors.forename: Jessica
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Fleck
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D000818:Animals; D001293:Attitude to Death; D002648:Child; D004285:Dogs; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007600:Judgment; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D008960:Models, Psychological; D009042:Motivation; D011361:Professional Competence; D013405:Suicide / Q000523:psychology*; D055815:Young Adult