Healthcare Chaplains’ Perspectives on Nurse–Chaplain Collaboration: An Online Survey

The collaboration between nurses and chaplains is essential to provide spiritual support in healthcare institutions. Given challenges in collaboration exist between these disciplines, this study sought to further understand the nature of the chaplain–nurse relationship. Data obtained from an online survey of members of the Association of Professional Chaplains (N = 266) provide a quantified and nuanced picture of how chaplains perceive nurse collaboration and provision of spiritual care. This study not only provides evidence that can inform chaplain and nurse practice, but also an instrument for measuring perceptions about collaboration to provide spiritual care.

     

Feeling activated and acting unethically: The influence of activated mood on unethical behavior to benefit a teammate

Research on the effects of mood in organizations tends to focus on the valence dimension of mood (positive vs. negative), overlooking the activation dimension (activated vs. deactivated). We suggest that activation level prompts unethical behavior. Based on the affective infusion model (AIM; Forgas, 1995), we predict that positive activated and negative activated moods facilitate unethical behavior to benefit a teammate, via the mediating mechanism of a creative mindset. We test our full model using an experience sampling method over 2 weeks, in which mood and creative mindset were assessed in the morning and unethical behavior conducted that day was assessed in the evening. We found that activated moods (both positive and negative) were positively related to unethical behavior to benefit a teammate. Further, creative mindset mediated the relationship between positive activated mood and unethical behavior to benefit a teammate. Consistent with AIM's claim that mood should influence decisions more when they are not personally relevant, we found that moral disengagement propensity moderated this indirect effect. In addition, we conducted two experiments to examine further the mood-creative mindset and creative mindset-unethical behavior to benefit a teammate relationship. Our findings affirm that activated versus deactivated moods facilitate a creative mindset, and that a creative mindset encourages unethical behavior to benefit a teammate. Our findings suggest that activation level of mood plays a critical role in unethical behavior.     

Repressed Memory Accusations: Devastated Families and Devastated Patients

The survey of British families reveals that the disputed ‘recovered memory’ accusations are mostly made by adult women who allege that abuse began prior to their eighth birthday. Therapy was involved in the recovery of memories in the vast majority of cases; satanic ritual abuse was remembered in a minority of cases. The accusations are devastating to the accused and other family members. But family members are not the only devastated group. Data from a recent report on patients who received compensation from a crime victims' compensation fund after recovering extensive histories of abuse in therapy reveal that some patients' lives are devastated after ‘memory’ recovery. Their health declines, they lose their jobs, they get divorced, and in some cases they lose custody of their minor children. Although these data do not prove that it was the therapy itself that made the patients worse, they do ring alarm bells about treatment outcomes for some recovered memory patients, and show a pressing need for information on this topic. © 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Do Prosecutors Use Interview Instructions or Build Rapport with Child Witnesses?

This study examined the quality of interview instructions and rapport-building provided by prosecutors to 168 children aged 5–12 years testifying in child sexual abuse cases, preceding explicit questions about abuse allegations. Prosecutors failed to effectively administer key interview instructions, build rapport, or rely on open-ended narrative producing prompts during this early stage of questioning. Moreover, prosecutors often directed children's attention to the defendant early in the testimony. The productivity of different types of wh- questions varied, with what/how questions focusing on actions being particularly productive. The lack of instructions, poor quality rapport-building, and closed-ended questioning suggest that children may not be adequately prepared during trial to provide lengthy and reliable reports to their full ability. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Perceived physical and social causality in animated motions: spontaneous reports and ratings

Michotte argued that we perceive cause-and-effect, without contributions from reasoning or learning, even in displays of two-dimensional moving shapes. Two studies extend this line of work from perception of mechanical to social causality. We compared verbal reports with structured ratings of causality to gain a better understanding of the extent to which perceptual causality occurs spontaneously or depends on instruction or context. A total of 120 adult observers (72 in the main experiment, 48 in an initial experiment) saw 12 (or 8) different computer animations of shape A moving up to B, which in turn moved away. Animations factorially varied the temporal and spatial relations of the shapes, and whether they moved rigidly or in a non-rigid, animal-like manner. Impressions of social as well as physical causality appeared in both free reports and ratings. Perception of physical causality was stronger than perception of social causality, particularly in free reports. No differences of this nature appear in infants and children, so the asymmetry may reflect learnt knowledge. Physical causality was relatively unspecific initially, but discrimination of causal and delayed control events improved with exposure to multiple events. Experience seems to affect the causal illusion even over a short timeframe; the idea of 'one-trial causality' may be somewhat misleading. Regardless of such effects on the absolute level of responses, the different measures showed similar patterns of variation with the spatio-temporal configuration and type of motion. The good fit of ratings and reports validates much recent work in this area.     

The impact of manipulating personal standards on eating attitudes and behaviour

The relationship between perfectionism and eating disorders is well established and is of theoretical interest. This study used an experimental design to test the hypothesis that manipulating personal standards, a central feature of perfectionism, would influence eating attitudes and behaviour. Forty-one healthy women were randomly assigned either to a high personal standards condition (n = 18) or to a low personal standards condition for 24 h (n = 23). Measures of personal standards, perfectionism, and eating attitudes and behaviour were taken before and after the experimental manipulation. The manipulation was successful. After the manipulation, participants in the high personal standards condition ate fewer high calorie foods, made more attempts to restrict the overall amount of food eaten, and had significantly more regret after eating than those in the low personal standards condition. Other variables remained unchanged. It is concluded that experimental analyses can be of value in elucidating causal connections between perfectionism and eating attitudes and behaviour.     

Preschool children master the logic of number word meanings

Although children take over a year to learn the meanings of the first three number words, they eventually master the logic of counting and the meanings of all the words in their count list. Here, we ask whether children's knowledge applies to number words beyond those they have mastered: Does a child who can only count to 20 infer that number words above 'twenty' refer to exact cardinal values? Three experiments provide evidence for this understanding in preschool children. Before beginning formal education or gaining counting skill, children possess a productive symbolic system for representing number.     

Non-symbolic arithmetic in adults and young children

Five experiments investigated whether adults and preschool children can perform simple arithmetic calculations on non-symbolic numerosities. Previous research has demonstrated that human adults, human infants, and non-human animals can process numerical quantities through approximate representations of their magnitudes. Here we consider whether these non-symbolic numerical representations might serve as a building block of uniquely human, learned mathematics. Both adults and children with no training in arithmetic successfully performed approximate arithmetic on large sets of elements. Success at these tasks did not depend on non-numerical continuous quantities, modality-specific quantity information, the adoption of alternative non-arithmetic strategies, or learned symbolic arithmetic knowledge. Abstract numerical quantity representations therefore are computationally functional and may provide a foundation for formal mathematics.