Beliefs and Perceptions About Cancer Diagnosis and Treatment-Seeking and Decision-Making Behaviors Among Omani Patients with Cancer: A Single-Center Study

Journal of Religion and Health - A cancer diagnosis is associated with anxiety and psychological distress. Cultural and societal factors greatly affect the complex process of coping mechanisms and...     

On Quine’s Philosophy of Mind

Philosophia - In this paper, I offer a systematic account of Quine’s philosophy of mind. In doing so, I respond to an interpretive problem of reconciling Quine’s admission of...     

Performance in a substitution task and state anxiety following yoga in army recruits

140 men (M age = 30.3 yr., SD = 5.7) from the Indian army in north India participated in the study. They were naive to yoga and were assigned to yoga and breath awareness groups randomly, with 70 in each group. 20 healthy males of comparable age (M age = 33.7 yr., SD = 7.0) formed a comparison group. Their performance in a digit-letter substitution task and a state anxiety subscale was assessed immediately before and after two 45-min. sessions. The two groups of soldiers practiced either yoga or breath awareness. The comparison group listened to meditation music. Digit-letter substitution scores increased in both groups of army personnel and in the comparison group. State anxiety decreased after yoga and listening to meditation music, but not after breath awareness. This suggests that even in army personnel naive to yoga, a yoga-based intervention or listening to meditation music could reduce anxiety while increasing performance on an attention task.     

Social Constructionist Approach to Suffering and Healing: Juxtaposing Cassell, Gergen and Kleinman

To understand the experiences of suffering (overwhelming somatic pain or illness and its anticipation and other forms of severe distress arising in the socio-moral context) and facilitate healing (developing an enabling meaning and value for one??s experiences when faced with suffering) have been the focus of medicine as a social institution throughout human history. However, the goals of Western biomedicine in the last few centuries shifted from taking care of these experiential concerns of the sufferers to predominantly the diagnosis and treatment of the symptoms of a disease. This article attempts to illustrate how the assumptions of the social constructionist paradigm (with its deconstructionist and reconstructionist facets highlighted in the writings of Kenneth J. Gergen) serve as a suitable metatheoretical framework to understand human experiences of suffering and healing. A critical review of the writings of Eric J. Cassell and Arthur Kleinman on endorsing and researching such experiences resulted in four themes that reaffirmed the utility of this new paradigm. These themes help comprehend that biomedicine??s ontological claims may enhance human suffering, suffering and healing experiences are socio-historically contextualized, such experiences are performances within human interaction and dialogic partnership between the researcher and the participant becomes a meaningful medium to study such experiences.     

Sattva, Rajas and Tamas Factors and Quality of Life in Patients with Anxiety Disorders: A Preliminary Investigation

The most common approach to define personality has been in terms of characteristics or qualities within a person. A three-dimensional personality theory based on the Sankhya school of Hindu philosophy postulates human personality in terms of three gunas or factors namely sattva, rajas and tamas (SRT). Disequilibrium in any one of these factors has an adverse effect on one??s health and psychological well-being. This preliminary exploratory study assessed SRT factors and quality of life in persons with anxiety disorders. Thirty persons with anxiety disorders were compared with a community sample of 30 participants on measures of anxiety, SRT and quality of life. Results indicated higher scores on rajas and tamas factors in the clinical sample and scores on sattva factor were found to be higher in the community sample. Quality of life was found to be significantly better in the community sample in comparison to clinical sample. Rajasic and tamasic factors were associated with impaired quality of life in the persons with anxiety disorder.     

Structure of the Personality Beliefs Questionnaire-Short-Form: Smallest Space Analysis

Butler et al. (Cognitive Therapy and Research 31:357?C370, 2007) developed the Personality Beliefs Questionnaire-Short Form (PBQ-SF), from an earlier longer version (Beck and Beck 1991), to assess the types of schemata associated with different personality disorders. This study explored the structure of PBQ-SF using Guttman??s Smallest Space Analysis. Participants were 228 students who volunteered for the study. The two facets (each with two subsets) suggested by the analysis to characterize the structure of the personality disorder subscales were Ego Concerns (self-enhancement versus self-protection) and Control Concerns (feelings lack of control versus need for control). Clinical implications of the findings include targeting major dysfunctional thinking, as suggested by the aforementioned two facets and their subsets, in the treatment of personality disorders.     

Enhanced embodied response following ambiguous emotional processing

It has generally been assumed that high-level cognitive and emotional processes are based on amodal conceptual information. In contrast, however, "embodied simulation" theory states that the perception of an emotional signal can trigger a simulation of the related state in the motor, somatosensory, and affective systems. To study the effect of social context on the mimicry effect predicted by the "embodied simulation" theory, we recorded the electromyographic (EMG) activity of participants when looking at emotional facial expressions. We observed an increase in embodied responses when the participants were exposed to a context involving social valence before seeing the emotional facial expressions. An examination of the dynamic EMG activity induced by two socially relevant emotional expressions (namely joy and anger) revealed enhanced EMG responses of the facial muscles associated with the related social prime (either positive or negative). These results are discussed within the general framework of embodiment theory.     

Enhanced embodied response following ambiguous emotional processing

It has generally been assumed that high-level cognitive and emotional processes are based on amodal conceptual information. In contrast, however, “embodied simulation” theory states that the perception of an emotional signal can trigger a simulation of the related state in the motor, somatosensory, and affective systems. To study the effect of social context on the mimicry effect predicted by the “embodied simulation” theory, we recorded the electromyographic (EMG) activity of participants when looking at emotional facial expressions. We observed an increase in embodied responses when the participants were exposed to a context involving social valence before seeing the emotional facial expressions. An examination of the dynamic EMG activity induced by two socially relevant emotional expressions (namely joy and anger) revealed enhanced EMG responses of the facial muscles associated with the related social prime (either positive or negative). These results are discussed within the general framework of embodiment theory.     

Orientational high-entropy alloys

In high-entropy alloys (HEA), the configurational entropy arising from the presence of multiple elements, stabilizes a disordered solid solution in preference to the possible formation of compounds. In the current work, we identify cluster compounds (of the type AM₄X₈) as orientational analogues of HEA (as a first report on orientational high-entropy systems). In cluster compounds, orientational disorder increases the entropy and plays a role analogous to positional disorder in HEA. In the GaMo₄S₈ compound, at temperatures greater than 50 K, the entropic benefit more than makes up for the strain energy cost and stabilizes the disordered phase in preference to an orientationally ordered compound.     

Large apparent compressive strain of metallic glasses

Very high plastic strains exceeding 20% in uniaxial compression tests, which show an inflection in the stress–strain curves of Zr-based bulk metallic glasses, are shown to be a spurious effect due to mechanical interlocking of cracks with shear bands. This type of stress–strain behaviour is misinterpreted as an actual deformation in the literature. The effect of mechanical interlocking is explained by fractographic analysis.