The Health Behavior of Sri Lankan Buddhist Nuns with Type 2 Diabetes: Duty, Devotion, and Detachment

Sri Lanka has experienced an increase in the rate of type 2 diabetes. Selfmanagement of diabetes among Sri Lanka’s Buddhist nuns, who depend on food donations and limit physical activity in accord with the monastic code of conduct, presents unique challenges and has not been previously studied. The purpose of this focused ethnographic study of 10 Buddhist nuns was to understand how they managed their illness within the restrictions on diet and physical activity. Three themes—duty, devotion, and detachment—explained and described their health behavior regarding type 2 diabetes within the context of their daily routines and obligations.     

Facilitating Collaborative Knowledge Building

This article describes a detailed analysis of knowledge building in a problem-based learning group. Knowledge building involves increasing the collective knowledge of a group through social discourse. For knowledge building to occur in the classroom, the teacher needs to create opportunities for constructive discourse in order to support student learning and collective knowledge building. In problem-based learning, students learn through collaborative problem solving and reflecting on their experiences. The setting for this study is a group of second-year medical students working with an expert facilitator. The analysis was designed to understand how the facilitator provided opportunities for knowledge-building discourse and how the learners accomplished collective knowledge building. We examined episodes of knowledge-building discourse, the questions and statements that the students and facilitator generated throughout the tutorial, the change in their understanding of the problem that they were solving, and the collective knowledge that was constructed. The results indicate that the group worked to progressively improve their ideas through engaging in knowledge-building discourse. The facilitator helped support knowledge building through asking open-ended metacognitive questions and catalyzing group progress. Students took responsibility for advancing the group's understanding as they asked many high-level questions and built on each others thinking to construct collaborative explanations. The results of this study provide suggestions for orchestrating knowledge-building discourse.     

Examining the Relationships Between the Justice Facets and Turnover Intent: The Mediating Roles of Overall Justice and Psychological Strain

We examined how interpersonal justice from coworkers, the traditional justice facets (i.e., distributive, procedural, interpersonal, informational), and overall justice perceptions relate to employee psychological strain and turnover intentions in Canadian Armed Forces personnel. Specifically, we hypothesized that overall justice would mediate the relationships between the justice facets (including coworker justice) and strain, and strain would mediate the relationship between overall justice and turnover intent. We used a cross-sectional correlational design with personnel from 2 military units (total N = 218) as our sample. A 2-step structural equation modeling technique was used to evaluate our hypotheses. Support for our hypotheses was obtained with 1 exception: informational justice did not predict overall justice judgments. Our results suggest that employees’ reactions to individual justice events and different sources of justice exert their effects on strain and turnover intent indirectly through their impact on a global evaluation of justice in their work environment.     

Abusive interactions and burnout: Examining occupation,gender, and the mediating role of community

Abstract

Two studies examined the association of gender and occupational group (nursing versus non-nursing) with perceived risk of abuse (sexual harassment and verbal and physical abuse) as well as the relationship of perceived abuse risk with burnout and sense of community. Study 1, comprising of two settings (tertiary care hospital, N = 3,062; psychiatric hospital, N = 383), found gender and occupational group associated with perceived risk of abuse (women felt greater risk than men; nurses felt greater risk than non-nurses). It also found a gender/occupational group interaction. Study 2, conducted at an Irish tertiary care hospital (N = 892), found nurses felt at greater risk for all three types of abuse than did non-nurses. Further, women perceived themselves at greater risk for sexual harassment and verbal abuse than did men; the study found no gender difference regarding physical abuse. The analysis identified a gender/occupational group interaction for sexual harassment. The study considers methods of reducing perceived risk in regard to the research literature on abuse at work.     

A taxonomy of errors in multiple-target visual search

Multiple-target visual searches are especially error prone; once one target is found, additional targets are likely to be missed. This phenomenon, often called satisfaction of search (which we refer to here as subsequent search misses; SSMs), is well known in radiology, despite no existing consensus about the underlying cause(s). Taking a cognitive laboratory approach, we propose that there are multiple causes of SSMs and present a taxonomy of SSMs based on searchers' eye movements during a multiple-target search task, including both previously identified and novel sources of SSMs. The types and distributions of SSMs revealed effects of working memory load, search strategy, and additional causal factors, suggesting that there is no single cause of SSMs. A multifaceted approach is likely needed to understand the psychological causes of SSMs and then to mitigate them in applied settings such as radiology and baggage screening.     

Satisfaction at last: Evidence for the “satisfaction” hypothesis for multiple-target search errors

ABSTRACT

Multiple-target visual searches are susceptible to Subsequent Search Miss (SSM) errors—a reduced accuracy for target detection after a previous target has already been detected. SSM errors occur in critical searches (e.g., evaluations of radiographs and airport luggage x-rays), and have proven to be a stubborn problem. A few SSM theories have been offered, and here we investigate the “satisfaction” account: failing to completely finish a search after having found a first target. Accuracy on a multiple-target search task was compared to both how long participants spent searching after finding a first target and their target sensitivity in a separate vigilance task. Less time spent searching and poor vigilance predicted higher SSM error rates. These results suggest that observers who are more likely to miss a second target are less likely to thoroughly search after finding a first target, thus offering some of the first evidence for the “satisfaction” account.     

Age Differences in the Magnitude of the Attentional Blink

When people attend to a target in a rapid sequence of items, their perception of a subsequent target is impaired for about 500 ms. This is termed the attentional blink. In the present experiment, a dual task rapid serial presentation task (Raymond, Shapiro & Arnell, 1992) was used as a measure of inhibitory function of younger and older adults. We found that the attentional blink was larger among older adults as compared to younger adults, supporting Hasher and Zacks' (1988) inhibitory deficit hypothesis and current models of the attentional blink.     

Sex Differences in Cognition are Stable Over a 10-Year Period in Adulthood and Old Age

ABSTRACT

Sex differences in declarative memory and visuospatial ability are robust in cross-sectional studies. The present longitudinal study examined whether sex differences in cognition were present over a 10-year period, and whether age modified the magnitude of sex differences. Tests assessing episodic and semantic memory, and visuospatial ability were administered to 625 nondemented adults (initially aged 35–80 years), participating in the population-based Betula study at two follow-up occasions. There was stability of sex differences across five age groups and over a 10-year period. Women performed at a higher level than men on episodic recall, face and verbal recognition, and semantic fluency, whereas men performed better than women on a task-assessing, visuospatial ability. Sex differences in cognitive functions are stable over a 10-year period and from 35 to 90 years of age.     

Action video game playing is associated with improved visual sensitivity, but not alterations in visual sensory memory

Action video game playing has been experimentally linked to a number of perceptual and cognitive improvements. These benefits are captured through a wide range of psychometric tasks and have led to the proposition that action video game experience may promote the ability to extract statistical evidence from sensory stimuli. Such an advantage could arise from a number of possible mechanisms: improvements in visual sensitivity, enhancements in the capacity or duration for which information is retained in visual memory, or higher-level strategic use of information for decision making. The present study measured the capacity and time course of visual sensory memory using a partial report performance task as a means to distinguish between these three possible mechanisms. Sensitivity measures and parameter estimates that describe sensory memory capacity and the rate of memory decay were compared between individuals who reported high evels and low levels of action video game experience. Our results revealed a uniform increase in partial report accuracy at all stimulus-to-cue delays for action video game players but no difference in the rate or time course of the memory decay. The present findings suggest that action video game playing may be related to enhancements in the initial sensitivity to visual stimuli, but not to a greater retention of information in iconic memory buffers.     

Lay Understandings of Sex/Gender and Genetics: A Methodology That Preserves Polyvocal Coder Input

Lay understandings of the role of heredity and genetics in the production of human sex may be important in perceptions of the relative similarity and difference of men and women and therefore of the appropriateness of behaviors or social policies. We employed 17 focus groups segregated by gender and ethnicity (43 European American and 39 African American) to assess lay understandings of genetics and biological sex. To ensure the inclusion of multiple perspectives in results, we developed and applied a methodology we call “polyvocal coding.” Results show uneven incorporation of basic genetics, with substantial diversity of alternative understandings, especially with regard to sexual orientation. Different individuals, including both coders and participants, may interpret the same information about sex chromosomal inheritance as a fundamental quality of individual identity that constitutes essential and significant difference or as a component with limited impact on each person.