The mentor and the trainee in academic clinical medicine

Medicine is a scientific discipline, but it is sometimes difficult to separate what is scientific and what is a clinical, practical activity. Man is the object, but he is always the subject of medical research and therefore these two elements become closely bound together by a thread of moral interdependencies. Every mentor of a young academic and all institutions dealing with the teaching of and research into medicine must understand multidimensional, multifaceted, and multilevel aspects of their activity and give them due regard in the educational process. The educational mission of an academic institution and of the teacher working there may be summed up in one phrase: Teach thinking! At the same time, the task of a school and the individual mentor is to teach the student to distinguish personal freedom from a lack of the feeling of responsibility. The medieval principle “Universitas magistrorum et scholarium”, and thus the corporation, the community of teachers and students, has not lost any of its relevance and value today. The situation is, in its far-reaching consequences, tragic in which the “insufficiently tutored teach”. Both physician and teacher, and especially physician-teacher, are not only professions, but also callings. This paper was presented at the 6th International Bioethics Conference on the subject of ‘The Responsible Conduct of Basic and Clinical Research’, held in Warsaw, Poland, 3–4 June 2005.     

Learning a complex motor skill from video and point-light demonstrations

The aim of this study was to compare the learning process of a highly complex ballet skill following demonstrations of point-light and video models. 16 participants divided into point-light and video groups (ns = 8) performed 160 trials of a pirouette, equally distributed in blocks of 20 trials, alternating periods of demonstration and practice, with a retention test a day later. Measures of head and trunk oscillation, coordination disparity from the model, and movement time difference showed similarities between video and point-light groups; ballet experts' evaluations indicated superiority of performance in the video over the point-light group. Results are discussed in terms of the task requirements of dissociation between head and trunk rotations, focusing on the hypothesis of sufficiency and higher relevance of information contained in biological motion models applied to learning of complex motor skills.     

Psychiatry Residents' Attitudes on Ethics and Professionalism: Multisite Survey Results

Recent studies show that psychiatry residents express a relatively greater need for ethics curricula than their colleagues in other specialties. Such studies have been limited in their generalizability because they were conducted at one site. This study of 151 psychiatry residents at seven U.S. psychiatry programs aims to address that limitation. Residents were surveyed on issues pertaining to ethics and professionalism education. Participants were found to support such curricula during training and to value its relevance to the practice of psychiatry. Gender differences and the influence of the “hidden curriculum” on such results merit further study.     

Mass psychology of the led and the leaders

Abstract

Some salient features of a Sullivanian perspective are given as a background for a discussion of the case of Anna. Lived experience is mentioned as of equal importance as fantasy. Technically, analytic inquiry in the form of questions is stressed. In his review of the case presentation, the author observes that too much emphasis is given to content, compared to form. He notes that the therapist does not report key transference and non-transference interactions with the patient and further suggests that the patient still has significant narcissistic problems. He suggests that it is time to confront the patient with her characterological ways of relating to the analyst.     

Attentional capture by emotional faces in adolescence

Poor decision making during adolescence occurs most frequently when situations are emotionally charged. However, relatively few studies have measured the development of cognitive control in response to emotional stimuli in this population. This study used both affective (emotional faces) and non-affective (letter) stimuli in two different flanker tasks to assess the ability to ignore task-irrelevant but distracting information, in 25 adults and 25 adolescents. On the non-emotional (letter) flanker task, the presence of incongruent flanking letters increased the number of errors, and also slowed participants’ ability to identify a central letter. Adolescents committed more errors than adults, but there were no age-related differences for the reaction time interference effect in the letter condition. Post-hoc testing revealed that age-related differences on the task were driven by the younger adolescents (11-14 years); adults and older adolescents (15-17 years) were equally accurate in the letter condition. In contrast, on the emotional face flanker task, not only were adolescents less accurate than adults but they were also more distracted by task-irrelevant fearful faces as evidenced by greater reaction time interference effects. Our findings suggest that the ability to self-regulate in adolescents, as evidenced by the ability to suppress irrelevant information on a flanker task, is more difficult when stimuli are affective in nature. The ability to ignore irrelevant flankers appears to mature earlier for non-affective stimuli than for affective stimuli.     

Time-dependent impairment of inhibitory avoidance retention in rats by posttraining infusion of a mitogen-activated protein kinase kinase inhibitor into cortical and limbic structures

Mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) is abundantly expressed in postmitotic neurons of the developed nervous system. MAPK is activated and required for induction of long-term potentiation (LTP) in the CA1 area of the hippocampus, which is blocked by the specific inhibitor of the MAPK kinase, PD 098059. Recently it was demonstrated that MAPK is activated in the hippocampus after training and is necessary for contextual fear conditioning learning. The present work tests the role of the MAPK cascade in step-down inhibitory avoidance (IA) retention. PD 098059 (50 microM) was bilaterally injected (0.5 microl/side) into the CA1 region of the dorsal hippocampus or entorhinal cortex at 0, 90, 180, or 360 min, or into the amygdala or parietal cortex at 0, 180, or 360 min after IA training in rats using a 0.4-mA foot shock. Retention testing was carried out 24 h after training. PD 098059 impaired retention when injected into the dorsal hippocampus at 180 min, but not 0, 90, and 360 min after training. When infused into the entorhinal cortex, PD 098059 was amnestic at 0 and 180 min, but not at 90 and 360 min after training. The MAPKK inhibitor also impairs IA retention when infused into the parietal cortex immediately after training, but not at 180 or 360 min. Infusions performed into amygdala were amnestic at 180 min, but not at 0 and 360 min after training. Our results suggest a time-dependent involvement of the MAPK cascade in the posttraining memory processing of IA; the time dependency is different in the hippocampus, amygdala, entorhinal cortex, or parietal cortex of rats.