Investigation into Complementary and Integrative Health Approaches for Turkish Patients with Gastrointestinal Cancer

Journal of Religion and Health - The study was conducted to determine the levels of usage of complementary and integrative health (CIH) approaches and the symptoms experienced by Turkish patients...     

The Polish adaptation of the Early Childhood Behavior Questionnaire (ECBQ): Psychometric properties,age and gender differences and convergence between the questionnaire and the observational data

The main aim of the study was to determine the psychometric properties of the version of the Early Childhood Behavior Questionnaire (ECBQ) adapted to Polish culture. Since temperament in toddlers was being observed in a laboratory, an external validity of the ECBQ was also provided. Kagan’s observational paradigm was used to test 215 18-month-old children. Their parents completed the ECBQ twice, when the children were 26 and 30 months old. The results showed good internal consistency and confirmed the longitudinal stability of the scale. The same three-factor solution was found in the structure of the scale as in the original American study. The convergence between the observational and parent report data supported the ECBQ’s external validity. Similarities in the structure of the scale observed between the Polish and American data are discussed from a cross-cultural perspective. The usefulness of the Polish ECBQ and the limitations of the obtained results are discussed.     

Body image satisfaction and anxiety of a Turkish sample of university students with skin diseases

The aim of this study was to evaluate perception of body image and anxiety of 221 university students presenting to the dermatology outpatient clinic with a skin disease and 205 students without skin disease. Analysis of anxiety and body image scores yielded differences by sex and age in both groups. The group with skin disease had lower scores on body image. Acne vulgaris seems to be the most disturbing among the skin diseases, and this was more prominent in younger patients.     

Emergency Research without Consent under Polish Law

Although Directive 2001/20/EC of the European Parliament and of Council of 4 April 2001 on the approximation of the laws regulations and administrative provisions of the Member States relating to the implementation of good clinical practice in the conduct of clinical trials on medicinal products for human use does not contain an exception for emergency situations, and requires the informed consent of a legal representative in all cases where research is conducted on legally competent individuals who are unable to give informed consent, in Poland, emergency research can be conducted without consent. Polish regulations on emergency research can hardly be treated as a result of intentional legislative policy. Our provisions arise from multiple and sophisticated interpretations of different regulations that govern medical experiments on human subjects and clinical trials. These interpretations can be summarized as follows: (1) There are two categories of medical experiments: therapeutic and non-therapeutic experiments. Emergency research without consent may be conducted in the category of therapeutic experiment only (therapeutic experiment consists of the introduction by the physician of new or only partially proven diagnostic, therapeutic or preventive methods in order to achieve direct benefit to the health of the patients, and it can be carried out when hitherto applied methods were ineffective or their effectiveness was insufficient). (2). Emergency research may be conducted without consent if there is a situation of great urgency in which the research subject's life is in danger and there is no possibility of obtaining immediate consent from the research subject him or herself, or from his or her legal representative or guardianship court, and the research subject has not refused to give consent for the participation in an emergency therapeutic experiment. The legal representative or guardianship court shall be provided with all the relevant information concerning subject's participation in an experiment as soon as possible. All projects of emergency research with intent to be done without the research subject's consent must be approved by an independent bioethics committee. Because these five requirements seem to provide insufficient protection for a subject's autonomy and rights it is necessary to add to them two other conditions: (1) the emergency research could not be conducted using other research participants capable of giving informed consent; and (2) informed consent for continued participation in the emergency research shall be obtained from either the participant him or herself or the legally authorized representative as soon as possible (requirement of obtaining deferred consent). A consolidated single Act that will govern all aspects of medical experiments on human subjects, including emergency research, should be prepared and enacted as soon as possible.     

Rethinking Gibbard’s Riverboat Argument

According to the Principle of Conditional Non-Contradiction (CNC), conditionals of the form “If p, q” and “If p, not q” cannot both be true, unless p is inconsistent. This principle is widely regarded as an adequacy constraint on any semantics that attributes truth conditions to conditionals. Gibbard has presented an example of a pair of conditionals that, in the context he describes, appear to violate CNC. He concluded from this that conditionals lack truth conditions. We argue that this conclusion is rash by proposing a new diagnosis of what is going on in Gibbard’s argument. We also provide empirical evidence in support of our proposal.     

Dopaminergic medication alters auditory distractor processing in Parkinson's disease

Parkinson's disease (PD) patients show signs of cognitive impairment, such as executive dysfunction, working memory problems and attentional disturbances, even in the early stages of the disease. Though motor symptoms of the disease are often successfully addressed by dopaminergic medication, it still remains unclear, how dopaminergic therapy affects cognitive function. The main objective of this study was to assess the effect of dopaminergic medication on visual and auditory attentional processing. 14 PD patients and 13 matched healthy controls performed a three-stimulus auditory and visual oddball task while their EEG was recorded. The patients performed the task twice, once on- and once off-medication. While the results showed no significant differences between PD patients and controls, they did reveal a significant increase in P3 amplitude on- vs. off-medication specific to processing of auditory distractors and no other stimuli. These results indicate significant effect of dopaminergic therapy on processing of distracting auditory stimuli. With a lack of between group differences the effect could reflect either 1) improved recruitment of attentional resources to auditory distractors; 2) reduced ability for cognitive inhibition of auditory distractors; 3) increased response to distractor stimuli resulting in impaired cognitive performance; or 4) hindered ability to discriminate between auditory distractors and targets. Further studies are needed to differentiate between these possibilities.     

Development of the Short Version of the Individuation Test for Emerging Adults (ITEA–S) and Its Measurement Invariance Across Slovene and U.S. Emerging Adults

In this study we developed a short version of the Individuation Test for Emerging Adults (ITEA–S) and tested its measurement invariance across Slovene and U.S. samples of emerging adults. The item reduction process resulted in retaining 21 out of 36 items. The content analysis of the retained and discarded items revealed that the ITEA–S adequately measures the 5 individuation domains (support seeking, connectedness, intrusiveness, self-reliance, and fear of disappointing the parent). In our samples, the ITEA–S demonstrated evidence for construct validity and its 5 scales showed adequate internal consistency. The scale scores were also meaningfully associated with the relevant demographic variables in both countries, as well as the three scales of the Psychological Separation Inventory (Hoffman, 1984 Hoffman, J. A. (1984). Psychological separation of late adolescents from their parents. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 31, 170–178.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]; the Slovene sample), and the scales of the Differentiation of Self–Revised questionnaire (Skowron &; Schmitt, 2003 Skowron, E. A., &; Schmitt, T. A. (2003). Assessing interpersonal fusion: Reliability and validity of a new DSI Fusion with Others subscale. Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, 29, 209–222.[Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]; the U.S. sample). The results of multiple group confirmatory factor analyses supported the hypothesis of full metric and partial scalar invariance for both ITEA–S forms (in relation to mother and father) across the 2 country groups.     

How do trainees choose their first psychotherapy training? The case of training in psychotherapy integration

Future trainees go through difficult decision-making processes when starting their first psychotherapy training. The choice of training in psychotherapy integration is a specific type of this process. In this study, qualitative data were obtained from the motivational letters, in-depth semi-structured interviews and e-mail questionnaires of 26 future trainees to answer the research question, ‘How do trainees choose their first psychotherapy training?’ We primarily employed the grounded theory approach as well as consensual qualitative research to shed light on the central category of Gaining Certainty to enter the training. This category was elaborated into a four-phase model, specifically comprised of the: (1) Critical Comparison, (2) Identification, (3) Self-Confirmation and (4) Waiting phases. The model was then discussed in connection with relevant concepts, such as the degree of complexity and flexibility within the epistemological development of trainees [Vasco, A. B., &; Dryden, W. (1994). The development of psychotherapists’ theoretical orientation and clinical practice. British Journal of Guidance &; Counselling, 22(3), 327–341].