Attitudes towards complementary and alternative medicine among medical and psychology students

The use of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) is increasing in Europe as well as in the USA, but CAM courses are infrequently integrated into medical curricula. In Europe, but also especially in the USA and in Canada, the attitudes of medical students and health science professionals in various disciplines towards CAM have been the subject of investigation. Most studies report positive attitudes. The main aim of this study was to compare the attitudes towards CAM of medical and psychology students in Germany. An additional set of questions concerned how CAM utilisation and emotional and physical condition affect CAM-related attitudes. Two hundred thirty-three medical students and 55 psychology students were questioned concerning their attitudes towards CAM using the Questionnaire on Attitudes Towards Complementary Medical Treatment (QACAM). Both medical students and psychology students were sceptical about the diagnostic and the therapeutic proficiency of doctors and practitioners of CAM. Students' attitudes towards CAM correlated neither with their experiences as CAM patients nor with their emotional and physical condition. It can be assumed that German medical and psychology students will be reluctant to use or recommend CAM in their professional careers. Further studies should examine more closely the correlation between attitudes towards CAM and the students' worldview as well as their existing knowledge of the effectiveness of CAM.     

Maximal care considerations when treating patients with end-stage heart failure: ethical and procedural quandaries in management of the very sick

Deciding who should receive maximal technological treatment options and who should not represents an ethical, moral, psychological and medico-legal challenge for health care providers. Especially in patients with chronic heart failure, the ethical and medico-legal issues associated with providing maximal possible care or withholding the same are coming to the forefront. Procedures, such as cardiac transplantation, have strict criteria for adequate candidacy. These criteria for subsequent listing are based on clinical outcome data but also reflect the reality of organ shortage. Lack of compliance and non-adherence to lifestyle changes represent relative contraindications to heart transplant candidacy. Mechanical circulatory support therapy using ventricular assist devices is becoming a more prominent therapeutic option for patients with end-stage heart failure who are not candidates for transplantation, which also requires strict criteria to enable beneficial outcome for the patient. Physicians need to critically reflect that in many cases, the patient’s best interest might not always mean pursuing maximal technological options available. This article reflects on the multitude of critical issues that health care providers have to face while caring for patients with end-stage heart failure.     

How Work-Family Research Can Finally Have an Impact in Organizations

Although work-family research has mushroomed over the past several decades, an implementation gap persists in putting work-family research into practice. Because of this, work-family researchers have not made a significant impact in improving the lives of employees relative to the amount of research that has been conducted. The goal of this article is to clarify areas where implementation gaps between work-family research and practice are prevalent, discuss the importance of reducing these gaps, and make the case that both better and different research should be conducted. We recommend several alternative but complementary actions for the work-family researcher: (a) work with organizations to study their policy and practice implementation efforts, (b) focus on the impact of rapid technological advances that are blurring work-family boundaries, (c) conduct research to empower the individual to self-manage the work-family interface, and (d) engage in advocacy and collaborative policy research to change institutional contexts and break down silos. Increased partnerships between industrial-organizational (I-O) psychology practitioners and researchers from many industries and disciplines could break down silos that we see as limiting development of the field.     

Process arrangements for variety,retention, and selection

This article argues that process management aimed at introducing variety, retention, and selection into complex decision-making processes can make a substantial contribution to improving them. It also describes process arrangements for variety, retention, and selection. He received his Ph. D. in public administration at Erasmus University, Rotterdam. He is also program director at the Netherlands School of Public Administration and director of the TUD research program on multi actor systems. His research concerns networks and network-organizations, with a strong focus on governance and management issues in networks. He is the author on a number of internationally recognized books on these issues. His conceptual approach of these issues has been applied in research on the open source movement, frequency allocation, the design of policy instruments and mediation (e.g. interconnection disputes). He is program leader of the Bsik research program Next Generation Infrastructures. He holds the post of chair research within the faculty.     

暴力的哲学还是哲学的暴力?--与冈特·嫩宁的谈话

布洛赫重申自己是一个马克思主义哲学家.对他来说,唯物主义问题并不是简单的唯物主义问题,马克思主义中一开始就包含了唯心主义,哲学的最伟大业绩多半是唯心主义思想家完成的.暴力是阶级社会特有的现象,国家乃是暴力的潜力本身,国家的消亡是一个无暴力的、和平的过程.被压迫者的革命运动依然存在,大学生运动不会消亡.无神论与基督教并不是二者择一的问题,无神论与基督教的对话也不是一场徒劳的对话.世界过程本身处于过程之中,而这一过程尚未被获取,但也尚未被挫败."已知的希望"取决于把科学投入于希望的国度之中.存在第二真理,即乌托邦的-具体的真理问题,这是真理所固有的问题.     

Viewpoint dependence in visual and haptic object recognition

On the whole, people recognize objects best when they see the objects from a familiar view and worse when they see the objects from views that were previously occluded from sight. Unexpectedly, we found haptic object recognition to be viewpoint-specific as well, even though hand movements were unrestricted. This viewpoint dependence was due to the hands preferring the back "view" of the objects. Furthermore, when the sensory modalities (visual vs. haptic) differed between learning an object and recognizing it, recognition performance was best when the objects were rotated back-to-front between learning and recognition. Our data indicate that the visual system recognizes the front view of objects best, whereas the hand recognizes objects best from the back.     

The effect of induced anxiety on cognition: threat of shock enhances aversive processing in healthy individuals

Individuals with anxiety disorders demonstrate altered cognitive performance including (1) cognitive biases towards negative stimuli (affective biases) and (2) increased cognitive rigidity (e.g., impaired conflict adaptation) on affective Stroop tasks. Threat of electric shock is frequently used to induce anxiety in healthy individuals, but the extent to which this manipulation mimics the cognitive impairment seen in anxiety disorders is unclear. In this study, 31 healthy individuals completed an affective Stroop task under safe and threat-of-shock conditions. We showed that threat (1) enhanced aversive processing and abolished a positive affective bias but (2) had no effect on conflict adaptation. Threat of shock thus partially models the effects of anxiety disorders on affective Stroop tasks. We suggest that the affective state of anxiety—which is common to both threat and anxiety disorders—modulates the neural inhibition of subcortical aversive processing, whilst pathologies unique to anxiety disorders modulate conflict adaptation.     

Mood-congruent attentional bias in dysphoria: maintained attention to and impaired disengagement from negative information

Attentional bias to negative information has been proposed to be a cognitive vulnerability factor for the development of depression. In 2 experiments, the authors examined mood-congruent attentional bias in dysphoria. In both experiments, dysphoric and nondysphoric participants performed an attentional task with negative, positive, and neutral word cues preceding a target. Targets appeared either at the same or at the opposite location of the cue. Overall, results indicate that dysphoric participants show maintained attention for negative words at longer stimulus presentations, which is probably caused by impaired attentional disengagement from negative words. Furthermore, nondysphoric participants maintain their attention more strongly to positive words. These results are discussed in relation to recent developments in the pathogenesis and treatment of depression.     

Happy but still focused: failures to find evidence for a mood-induced widening of visual attention

In models of affect and cognition, it is held that positive affect broadens the scope of attention. Consistent with this claim, previous research has indeed suggested that positive affect is associated with impaired selective attention as evidenced by increased interference of spatially distant distractors. However, several recent findings cast doubt on the reliability of this observation. In the present study, we examined whether selective attention in a visual flanker task is influenced by positive mood induction. Across three experiments, positive affect consistently failed to exert any impact on selective attention. The implications of this null-finding for theoretical models of affect and cognition are discussed.