Rethink "Affirmative Agreement," but Abandon "Assent"

Training in ethics and professionalism is a fundamental component of residency education, yet there is little empirical information to guide curricula. The objective of this study is to describe empirically derived ethics objectives for ethics and professionalism training for multiple specialties. Study design is a thematic analysis of documents, semi-structured interviews, and focus groups conducted in a setting of an academic medical center, Veterans Administration, and community hospital training more than 1000 residents. Participants were 84 informants in 13 specialties including residents, program directors, faculty, practicing physicians, and ethics committees. Thematic analysis identified commonalities across informants and specialties. Resident and nonresident informants identified consent, interprofessional relationships, family interactions, communication skills, and end-of-life care as essential components of training. Nonresidents also emphasized formal ethics instruction, resource allocation, and self-monitoring, whereas residents emphasized the learning environment and resident-attending interactions. Conclusions are that empirically derived learning needs for ethics and professionalism included many topics, such as informed consent and resource allocation, relevant for most specialties, providing opportunities for shared curricula and resources.     

Approaching psychotherapy of the personality disorders from the Millon perspective.

Millon's integrative model for a clinical science begins with a theory that is consistent with current knowledge, establishes a taxonomy for classification, develops a coordinated assessment system, and develops and implements interventions with the guidance of the preceding elements of the model. In recent years, work on the last step of the model, clinical interventions, has accelerated rapidly, and the model now permits the therapist to directly extrapolate specific treatment goals, objective, and techniques to the practice of therapy with the individual patient. This article summarizes how treatment planning and implementation flows logically from the Millon model.     

Acclimating International Graduate Students to Professional Engineering Ethics

This article describes the education portion of an ongoing grant-sponsored education and research project designed to help graduate students in all engineering disciplines learn about the basic ethical principles, rules, and obligations associated with engineering practice in the United States. While the curriculum developed for this project is used for both domestic and international students, the educational materials were designed to be sensitive to the specific needs of international graduate students. In recent years, engineering programs in the United States have sought to develop a larger role for professional ethics education in the curriculum. Accreditation requirements, as well as pressures from the private sector, have helped facilitate this shift in focus. Almost half of all engineering graduate students in the U.S. are international students. Further, research indicates that the majority of these students will remain in the U.S. to work post-graduation. It is therefore in the interest of the profession that these students, coming from diverse backgrounds, receive some formal exposure to the professional and ethical expectations and norms of the engineering profession in the United States to help ensure that they have the knowledge and skills—non-technical as well as technical—required in today’s engineering profession. In becoming acculturated to professional norms in a host country, international students face challenges that domestic students do not encounter; such as cultural competency, language proficiency, and acculturation stress. Mitigating these challenges must be a consideration in the development of any effective education materials. The present article discusses the project rationale and describes the development of on-line instructional materials aimed at helping international engineering graduate students acclimate to professional engineering ethics standards in the United States. Finally, a brief data summary of students’ perceptions of the usefulness of the content and instructional interface is provided to demonstrate the initial effectiveness of the materials and to present a case for project sustainability.     

Eye movement prediction and variability on natural video data sets

We here study the predictability of eye movements when viewing high-resolution natural videos. We use three recently published gaze data sets that contain a wide range of footage, from scenes of almost still-life character to professionally made, fast-paced advertisements and movie trailers. Inter-subject gaze variability differs significantly between data sets, with variability being lowest for the professional movies. We then evaluate three state-of-the-art saliency models on these data sets. A model that is based on the invariants of the structure tensor and that combines very generic, sparse video representations with machine learning techniques outperforms the two reference models; performance is further improved for two data sets when the model is extended to a perceptually inspired colour space. Finally, a combined analysis of gaze variability and predictability shows that eye movements on the professionally made movies are the most coherent (due to implicit gaze-guidance strategies of the movie directors), yet the least predictable (presumably due to the frequent cuts). Our results highlight the need for standardized benchmarks to comparatively evaluate eye movement prediction algorithms.     

The Rorschach Comprehensive System Egocentricity Index in psychiatric inpatients

This paper reports an exploratory study of potential correlates of Exner's Rorschach Egocentricity Index, a measure of self-focusing, in a sample of 70 psychiatric inpatients. We examined the relationship of the Index of the MMPI Ego Strength scale and to other MMPI and Exner Comprehensive System Rorschach variables, using Pearson Product-Moment correlations with partialling of the number of Rorschach responses. There were seven meaningful significant correlations between the Index and Rorschach variables: M, FM, X +%, F +%, Lambda, D, and A%. The Index-MMPI correlations were not significant. Sex differences and differences between these intercorrelations and some reported by Exner (1983) are discussed.     

Love and the addicted physician

This paper reviews the cases of two addicted physicians. One is dead and the other alive and well as a result of the heroic and compassionate effort of his friends. We offer speculations regarding the physicians' special vulnerabilities and the role of a tough love in transcending these vulnerabilities.     

Comparison of the effect of onset asynchrony on auditory grouping in pitch matching and vowel identification

Previous experiments have shown that when a slightly mistuned harmonic of a complex tone starts more than about 80 msec before the remaining components, it makes a reduced contribution to the pitch of the complex. This contribution decreases to zero by about 300-msec onset asynchrony. In vowel perception, however, analogous experiments have shown that a much shorter asynchrony (around 40 msec) is enough to ensure that a component does not influence a vowel’s phonemic category. The three experiments reported here demonstrate that this difference in the utility of onset time as a grouping cue does not arise because of differences in stimulus structure, but rather is due to the perceptual task. They show that the onset asynchrony needed in a pitch-matching experiment to remove the contribution that a mistuned component makes to the pitch of a vowel is the same as that needed to remove the contribution to the pitch of a flat-spectrum complex tone. They further show that a much smaller onset asynchrony is needed to perceptually remove the same harmonic from a vowel for the calculation of vowel quality. The implication of this result for models of auditory grouping is discussed.