The Resources We Bring: The Cultural Assets of Diverse Medical Students

In response to the need for a more diverse workforce, our medical school developed new policies and procedures that focus on the recruitment and selection of diverse students with a specific focus on those considered underrepresented in medicine. To understand what these students bring to the practice of medicine, researchers investigated their perception of their cultural assets and how they plan to use these assets as physicians. A cross-section of 23 ethnically, culturally, and geographically diverse medical students were interviewed and data were analyzed through phenomenographical methods. The results indicate that students view themselves as having multiple assets that could be of significant value in their future practice of medicine, including: a) an interest in science and access to family members in medicine, b) personal and familial struggles with health, c) self and family as immigrants, and d) strong family and community orientations. Students perceived these as cultural assets because they could directly identify where these assets could be valuable in medicine but questioned how to maintain them throughout medical school. Now that our institution has identified these assets, next steps include administrators' investigation of ways to leverage them through curricular and educational programs.     

Training the next generation of counseling psychologists in the practice of telepsychology

Training programs that integrate the use of technology are needed to prepare students for the future of service delivery in psychology. Training opportunities in telepsychology can equip students to develop, implement, and evaluate innovative modalities for mental health care. However, few options are available for trainees seeking to acquire these experiences, and while guidelines for service provision using technology are emerging, guidelines for and documented examples of training programs in telepsychology are virtually non-existent. The Telehealth Counseling Clinic, located at the Texas A&M Health Science Center, has developed a training model to prepare the next generation of psychologists to work with new technology to provide counseling services to low-income and uninsured individuals living in designated Mental Health Professional Shortage Areas in rural Texas. Training competencies necessary to serve this population through telepsychology are discussed and preliminary evaluation data of the training program are presented.     

Neurodevelopment and chronic illness: Mechanisms of disease and treatment

Successful treatment of many childhood diseases once considered terminal has resulted in the emergence of long-term effects of the disease or consequences of treatment that were previously unrecognized. Many of these long-term effects involve the central nervous system (CNS) and are developmental in the way that they emerge over time. Because we are now able to observe the natural history of childhood diseases such as sickle cell anemia or HIV, or the consequences of treatment of disease such as leukemia, brain tumors, or kidney disease, we are also able to study a number of biological mechanisms that result in long-term neurocognitive impairment. While some of the neurodevelopmental outcomes can be directly linked to structural damage of the CNS, other systems (e.g., hematologic, immunologic, pulmonary) appear to play crucial indirect roles in the development of the CNS and neurocognitive abilities because of the way that they affect the course of brain development and activity of the brain across time. Important interactions between acute disease factors, biological mechanisms, age at the time of disease or treatment effect, and disruptions in patterns of development after successful treatment or management all provide support for a neurodevelopmental model of childhood chronic illness. Testing this model may make it possible to more accurately predict the timing and degree of severity of long-term neurodevelopmental consequences, provide guidance for improved treatment and prevention, and offer better understanding of neurodevelopmental disruptions that occur in other non-chronic illness related disabilities.     

Visual and oculomotor selection: links, causes and implications for spatial attention

Natural scenes contain far more information than can be processed simultaneously. Thus, our visually guided behavior depends crucially on the capacity to attend to relevant stimuli. Past studies have provided compelling evidence of functional overlap of the neural mechanisms that control spatial attention and saccadic eye movements. Recent neurophysiological work demonstrates that the neural circuits involved in the preparation of saccades also play a causal role in directing covert spatial attention. At the same time, other studies have identified separable neural populations that contribute uniquely to visual and oculomotor selection. Taken together, all of the recent work suggests how visual and oculomotor signals are integrated to simultaneously select the visual attributes of targets and the saccades needed to fixate them.     

Due process model of procedural justice in performance appraisal: promotion versus termination scenarios

In a laboratory study, 318 student participants (148 male, 169 female, and one who did not report sex; M age 25.0, SD = 6.0) in introductory organizational behavior classes responded to scenarios in which performance appraisal resulted in either employee promotion or termination. Each scenario had varying levels of three procedural justice criteria for performance appraisal. For both promotion and termination outcomes, analysis showed that, as the number of criteria increased, perceptions of procedural fairness increased. A comparison between the two outcomes showed that perceptions of fairness were significantly stronger for the promotion outcome than for termination.