The role of attitudes and beliefs in differential health care utilisation among Chinese in Singapore

Abstract

One hundred and twenty-eight Chinese patients at two Western medical practices and two Chinese medical practices in Singapore completed a questionnaire regarding perceptions of illnesses. Health beliefs and attitudes towards different medical practitioners. Results indicate significant differences between those who consult only allopathic physicians (Western doctors) and those who consult both practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine (sinsehs) and Western doctors. Individuals consulting both Western doctors and sinsehs perceived a smaller proportion of “general” illness attributes (those found in both Western and Chinese medicine) to be relevant to specific diseases and showed greater endorsement of Chinese health beliefs than did individuals seeking help only from Western doctors. Also individuals consulting both types of practitioners expressed less satisfaction with the doctor's treatment than did those consulting only Western doctors and also rated sinsehs as more concerned with patient well-being and as listening more to their patients.     

Attitude and knowledge changes in collegiate dancers following a short-term, team-centered prevention program on eating disorders

Eating knowledge, nutritional knowledge, and psychological changes among female collegiate dancers were examined before and after a 4-wk. team-centered program on sport nutrition, exercise, and disordered eating consequences. Collegiate female dancers from two NCAA Division I institutions participated in a control (n = 19; M age = 19.1 yr., SD = 1.0) or intervention (n = 21; M age = 19.2 yr., SD = 1.2) group. Measures were administered to both groups before and after intervention to assess eating disorders, depression, and nutritional and disordered eating knowledge. There was a statistically significant increase in scores on nutritional and overall eating disorder knowledge in the intervention group compared to the control group. Mean scores on depression, drive for thinness, body dissatisfaction, and maturity fears decreased in the intervention group.     

The normatively relativised logical argument from evil

It is widely agreed that the ??Logical?? Argument from Evil (LAFE) is bankrupt. We aim to rehabilitate the LAFE, in the form of what we call the Normatively Relativised Logical Argument from Evil (NRLAFE). There are many different versions of a NRLAFE. We aim to show that one version, what we call the ??right relationship?? NRLAFE, poses a significant threat to personal-omniGod-theism??understood as requiring the belief that there is an omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly good person who has created our world??because it appeals to value commitments theists themselves are likely to endorse. The ultimate success of this NRLAFE will rest on developing a theological ethics of right relationship that rejects as morally flawed the exercise of omnipotence first to sustain horrors and then to redeem them. Yet a vindicated NRLAFE of this sort need not require atheism, but only rejection of the standard conception of God as a personal omniGod.     

Is auditory discrimination mature by middle childhood? A study using time‐frequency analysis of mismatch responses from 7 years to adulthood

Behavioural and electrophysiological studies give differing impressions of when auditory discrimination is mature. Ability to discriminate frequency and speech contrasts reaches adult levels only around 12 years of age, yet an electrophysiological index of auditory discrimination, the mismatch negativity (MMN), is reported to be as large in children as in adults. Auditory ERPs were measured in 30 children (7 to 12 years), 23 teenagers (13 to 16 years) and 32 adults (35 to 56 years) in an oddball paradigm with tone or syllable stimuli. For each stimulus type, a standard stimulus (1000 Hz tone or syllable [ba]) occurred on 70% of trials, and one of two deviants (1030 or 1200 Hz tone, or syllables [da] or [bi]) equiprobably on the remaining trials. For the traditional MMN interval of 100–250 ms post-onset, size of mismatch responses increased with age, whereas the opposite trend was seen for an interval from 300 to 550 ms post-onset, corresponding to the late discriminative negativity (LDN). Time-frequency analysis of single trials revealed that the MMN resulted from phase-synchronization of oscillations in the theta (4–7 Hz) range, with greater synchronization in adults than children. Furthermore, the amount of synchronization was significantly correlated with frequency discrimination threshold. These results show that neurophysiological processes underlying auditory discrimination continue to develop through childhood and adolescence. Previous reports of adult-like MMN amplitudes in children may be artefactual results of using peak measurements when comparing groups that differ in variance.     

Considerations for the Use of Sentence Completion Tests

Often, sentence completion tests are administered to clients without a clear sense of the clinical questions to be investigated, and, therefore, the appropriate sentence completion instrument to be used. The multitude of forms that have evolved in the last fifty years have made it difficult for clinicians to make informed decisions about which form to use and for what purpose. This article presents ten general guidelines or considerations for the effective use of this popular but sometimes misused psychological assessment method. Practitioners are urged to consider such issues as oral versus written presentation of items, item content in terms of positive or negative stimulus pull, the structure of sentence stems, the original purpose of a given test in regard to intended population and theoretical orientation of the author, and the empirical validity of tests.     

The impact of contextual priors and anxiety on performance effectiveness and processing efficiency in anticipation

It is proposed that experts are able to integrate prior contextual knowledge with emergent visual information to make complex predictive judgments about the world around them, often under heightened levels of uncertainty and extreme time constraints. However, limited knowledge exists about the impact of anxiety on the use of such contextual priors when forming our decisions. We provide a novel insight into the combined impact of contextual priors and anxiety on anticipation in soccer. Altogether, 12 expert soccer players were required to predict the actions of an oncoming opponent while viewing life-sized video simulations of 2-versus-2 defensive scenarios. Performance effectiveness and processing efficiency were measured under four conditions: no contextual priors (CP) about the action tendencies of the opponent and low anxiety (LA); no CP and high anxiety (HA); CP and LA; CP and HA. The provision of contextual priors did not affect processing efficiency, but it improved performance effectiveness on congruent trials. Anxiety negatively affected processing efficiency, but this did not affect the use of contextual priors or influence performance effectiveness. It appears that anxiety and prior contextual information impact attentional resources independent of each other. Findings are discussed with reference to current models of anticipation and anxiety.     

Examining a model of the relation between religiosity and suicidal ideation in a sample of African American and White college students

In this study, a model of certain aspects of religiosity, social support, and depressive symptomatology that would examine how African Americans may be, differentially, protected from suicide was proposed. Intrinsic religiosity was found to be negatively related to depressive symptoms which were positively related to suicide ideation in a sample of 459 college students. Though the model was expected to produce more robust results for African American compared to White students, we did not find this. Further investigation of religiosity and related phenomena (e.g., spirituality) are warranted across age, socioeconomic, and ethnic groups.     

Prejudiced or not? Hidden sectarianism among students in Northern Ireland

The authors developed a new measure of implicit prejudices of students in Northern Ireland, which they derived from a study by G. Haddock, M. Zanna, and V. M. Esses (1993). Using two student surveys, the authors modified and tested the new implicit prejudice measure, which was based on a "Budget Survey." The present study's results indicate that the measure is valid and useful in the student context. Investigators can easily adapt the measure to groups other than students in Northern Ireland, and it may hence be useful for the future investigation of hidden prejudice in a society that experiences low-level ethnopolitical conflict.