Spirituality and spiritual care – missing concepts from core undergraduate children’s nursing textbooks

Background: Spiritual care is espoused to be fundamental in children’s nursing; however, the extent to which current fundamental children’s nursing textbooks support and advocate spiritual care delivery by children’s nurses and nursing students is unknown. Aim and objectives: To examine whether or not fundamental undergraduate children’s nursing textbooks include spiritual care content. Methods: Five hundred and nineteen books were sampled from the Nursing and Midwifery Core Collection list (UK) using a survey, the Spirituality Textbook Analysis Tool (STAT) to collect data. Analysis and Results: 519 books were included in the study using the STAT and 13 books included content on children’s spirituality. There were a variety of textbooks in the audit of those that made reference to the search terms in the STAT, it was found that content mainly addressed only two areas; religious faiths and the dying child. Recommendations: Children’s nurses require education about children’s spiritual developmental stage and age appropriate spiritual assessment. A lack of detailed information in core children’s nursing textbooks means that this area of nursing practice may be taught as an adjunct to care and not as an element of holistic care which is the gold standard that children’s nurses should strive for.     

The bark and bite of the logically negative soul: further reflections on Rilke's dog of ‘divine inseeing’

Following on the approach taken in the previous essay, this article critically reflects Rilke's account of his having imaginatively entered into the interior of a passing dog more deeply into itself. In doing so, it illustrates the concepts of logical negativity and absolute negative interiorization, which are core concepts of the speculative turn within analytical psychology that is known by the name ‘psychology as the discipline of interiority’. Just as analytical psychology often thinks in terms of the alchemical figure of ‘the stone that is not a stone’, so in this article the bark and bite of a logically negative ‘dog that is not a dog’ is grappled with. Further insights into what is meant by the author's phrase, ‘the Archimedean‐less interiority of the soul’, are imparted.     

Hypertension reduction through forgiveness training

The objective of this study was to determine if patients with diagnosed stage-1 hypertension could benefit by a forgiveness training program to achieve measurable reductions in anger expression and blood pressure. Twenty-five participants were randomly divided into wait-listed control and intervention groups. The control group monitored blood pressure while the intervention group participated in an 8-week forgiveness training program. At the end of eight weeks, the wait listed group became an intervention group. Those who received forgiveness training achieved significant reductions in anger expression when compared to the control group. While reductions in blood pressure were not achieved by all the participants, those participants who entered the program with elevated anger expression scores did achieve significant reductions in blood pressure. It is suggested that forgiveness training may be an effective clinical intervention for some hypertensive patients with elevated levels of anger.     

The effects of exposure to feminist ideology on women's body image

Body image disturbance has become a common problem among women and there is a need to focus on creating empirically supported treatments. Psychoeducational interventions have reduced body image dissatisfaction, but their impact is limited because they do not offer women adaptive methods of interpreting the many appearance-related messages they receive. This study examined if exposure to a feminist perspective may provide alternative interpretations of cultural messages, thereby increasing body image satisfaction. Participants were randomly assigned to a feminist or psychoeducational intervention, or a control group. Exposure to the feminist condition resulted in increased self-identification as a feminist and greater appearance satisfaction, and changes in feminist identity were related to positive changes in body image. The findings indicate that exposure to feminist theories may serve as an effective intervention strategy.     

The impact of financial and nonfinancial incentives on business-unit outcomes over time

Unlike previous behavior management research, this study used a quasi-experimental, control group design to examine the impact of financial and nonfinancial incentives on business-unit (21 stores in a fast-food franchise corporation) outcomes (profit, customer service, and employee turnover) over time. The results showed that both types of incentives had a significant impact on all measured outcomes. The financial incentive initially had a greater effect on all 3 outcomes, but over time, the financial and nonfinancial incentives had an equally significant impact except in terms of employee turnover.     

Assaultive violence and the risk of posttraumatic stress disorder following a subsequent trauma

Breslau, Peterson, and Shultz (2008) reported that prior trauma alone, in the absence of PTSD, did not predict an increased PTSD risk, relative to no prior trauma. Only prior trauma that resulted in PTSD predicted an increased PTSD risk following a subsequent trauma. Recently, Cougle, Resnick, and Kilpatrick (2009) proposed that the effect of prior trauma might vary by type of prior trauma, a possibility not considered in Breslau et al. They report that childhood sexual or physical assault, in the absence of PTSD, increased the PTSD risk following a subsequent trauma. This report examines the PTSD effects of prior assaultive violence, using data from Breslau et al. (1998). The study assessed PTSD in relation to up to three events. Analysis was performed on the subset with PTSD assessment for two distinct events, the earliest trauma and a subsequent trauma (n = 967), using as reference persons with no prior trauma (n = 972). Neither prior assaultive violence nor other prior traumas, in the absence of PTSD, influenced the subsequent risk of PTSD. In contrast, prior PTSD increased considerably the PTSD risk of a subsequent trauma. The limitations in Cougle et al. (2009) and in this study and future research directions are discussed.     

A Defense of the Principle of Indifference

The principle of indifference (hereafter ‘Poi’) says that if one has no more reason to believe A than B (and vice versa), then one ought not to believe A more than B (nor vice versa). Many think it’s demonstrably false despite its intuitive plausibility, because of a particular style of thought experiment that generates counterexamples. Roger White (2008) defends Poi by arguing that its antecedent is false in these thought experiments. Like White I believe Poi, but I find his defense unsatisfactory for two reasons: it appeals to false premises, and it saves Poi only at the expense of something that Poi’s believers likely find just as important. So in this essay I defend Poi by arguing that its antecedent does hold in the relevant thought experiments, and that the further propositions needed to reject Poi are false. I play only defense in this essay; I don’t argue that Poi is true (even though I think it is), but rather that one popular refutation is faulty. In showing this, I also note something that has to my knowledge gone unnoticed: given some innocuous-looking assumptions the denial of Poi is equivalent to a version of epistemic permissivism, and Poi itself is equivalent to a version of epistemic uniqueness.     

Scientific language inside out

The Scientific Voice, by Scott L. Montgomery, (New York and London: Guilford Press, 1996), 460 pages, $44.50 (cloth); $19.95 (paper)