A Review of Clinical Informatics Competencies in Nursing to Inform Best Practices in Education and Nurse Faculty Development.

Aim: The aim of this literature review was to determine the state of the science related to clinical informatics competencies of registered nurses and to determine best practices in educational strategies for both nursing students and faculty.

Background: Continued emphasis on the provision of evidence-based patient care has implications for requisite informatics-focused competencies to be threaded throughout all levels of nursing educational programs.

Method: Whittemore and Knalf's five-step integrative review process guided this research.

Hope over experience: desirability and the persistence of optimism.

Many important decisions hinge on expectations of future outcomes. Decisions about health, investments, and relationships all depend on predictions of the future. These expectations are often optimistic: People frequently believe that their preferred outcomes are more likely than is merited.

When self-affirmations reduce defensiveness: timing is key.

Research on self-affirmation has shown that simple reminders of self-integrity reduce people's tendency to respond defensively to threat. Recent research has suggested it is irrelevant whether the self-affirmation exercise takes place before or after the threat or the individual's defensive response to it, supposedly because the meaning of threats is continuously reprocessed. However, four experiments revealed that affirmations may be effective only when introduced prior to the initiation of a defensive response.

Accuracy, error, and bias in predictions for real versus hypothetical events.

Participants made predictions about performance on tasks that they did or did not expect to complete. In three experiments, participants in task-unexpected conditions were unrealistically optimistic: They overestimated how well they would perform, often by a large margin, and their predictions were not correlated with their performance. By contrast, participants assigned to task-expected conditions made predictions that were not only less optimistic but strikingly accurate.

The effects of mindset on behavior: self-regulation in deliberative and implemental frames of mind.

The effects of deliberative and implemental mindsets--cognitive and motivational states associated with predecisional and postdecisional frames of mind, respectively--were examined in the context of the self-regulation of behavior. Participants who had been induced to deliberate the merits of participating in a specified task formulated more pessimistic expectations about this task than did participants who had been induced to imagine implementing a plan to complete the task. Moreover, participants in the deliberation condition underperformed relative to the participants in the implemental condition, demonstrating that deliberative and implemental thinking can influence behavior as well as cognition.