Student Nurses' Experiences of The Clinical Psychiatric Learning Environment in an Education Institution

This study investigated lived experiences of student nurses working in a clinical psychiatric learning environment in South Africa. Participants were 29 fourth-year student nurses in the clinical psychiatric learning environment at a nursing education institution (females = 27; males =2). They engaged in focus group discussion on their experiences of the clinical psychiatric learning environment. The data were thematically analyzed using Tesch's method of open coding. The student nurses experienced the environment as growth enhancing on a professional and personal level.     

Explaining Addiction: How Far Does the Reward Account of Motivation Take Us?

ABSTRACT

Choice theorists such as George Ainslie and Gene Heyman argue that the drug-seeking behaviour of addicts is best understood in the same terms that explain everyday choices. Everyday choices, they claim, aim to maximise the reward from available incentives. Continuing drug-use is, therefore, what addicts most want given the incentives they are aware of but they will change their behaviour if and when better incentives become available. This model might explain many typical cases of addiction, but there are hard cases that pose a problem. In these hard cases the addicted individual does not cease using drugs in the face of consequences that are so adverse it is implausible that they are unaware of more rewarding paths of action. These cases force the choice theorist into a dilemma: either these addicts’ drug use does not count as action and so is best described by a neurobiological model, or reference to ‘reward’ in these cases means merely ‘motivated’ and so provides no explanatory power. We propose a different model of motivation that takes self-conception into account. We show how that can better explain the hard cases of addiction and also inform our understanding of recovery and self-control.     

Mental Juggling: When Does Multitasking Impair Reading Comprehension?

The present study investigated the conditions under which multitasking impairs reading comprehension. Participants read prose passages (the primary task), some of which required them to perform a secondary task. In Experiment 1, we compared two different types of secondary tasks (answering trivia questions and solving math problems). Reading comprehension was assessed using a multiple-choice test that measured both factual and conceptual knowledge. The results showed no observable detrimental effects associated with multitasking. In Experiment 2, the secondary task was a cognitive load task that required participants to remember a string of numbers while reading the passages. Performance on the reading comprehension test was lower in the cognitive load conditions relative to the no-load condition. The present study delineates the conditions under which multitasking can impair or have no effect on reading comprehension. These results further our understanding of our capacity to multitask and have practical implications in our technologically advanced society in which multitasking has become commonplace.     

The revelation of the negative side of a mental number line depends on list context: Evidence from a sign priming paradigm

Two parity judgement experiments examined how the activation of spatial-numerical associations of a single, centrally presented digit, reflected by the Spatial-Numerical Association Response Codes (SNARC) effect, is modulated by a preceding + (plus) or ? (minus) prime. The centrally presented prime prior to a digit presentation presumably triggers its positive or negative attributes. When the plus- and minus-primed trials were blocked, the left-small/right-large SNARC effects occurred regardless of prime type. When the plus- and minus-primed trials were randomly intermixed, this left-small/right-large SNARC effect occurred for plus-primed digits, but was reversed for minus-primed digits. The implications of this finding for context-dependent SNARC effects are discussed.     

Disagreement, Ambivalence, and Engagement: The Political Consequences of Heterogeneous Networks

Individuals with similar political orientations may find themselves in dissimilar social and political surroundings, with important consequences for the flow of political information among citizens. Analyses of data from the post-election survey of the 1900 National Election Study show that some individuals reside within extensive networks of political discussion and communication, whereas others are politically isolated. With respect to presidential candidate preference in 1900, some citizens in networks were surrounded by discussants who agreed with their preference, others by discussants who held ambiguous and undetermined preferences, and still others by discussants who held politically divergent preferences. These preference distributions have various implications for the formation of political opinion and for levels of political engagement and turnout.     

Imitation of Self‐Aggressive Behavior: An Experimental Test of the Contagion Hypothesis1

The purpose of the present study was to experimentally examine the influence of a self‐aggressive model on self‐aggressive behavior under controlled laboratory conditions. Participants (N= 94) were given the opportunity to self‐administer electric shock while competing with a fictitious opponent in a reaction‐time task. Participants observed the opponent self‐administer either increasingly intense shock (a self‐aggressive model) or constant low shocks (a non‐self‐aggressive model). Self‐aggression was defined as the intensity of shock that was self‐administered by participants. Results provide support for the notion that social information can influence the expression of self‐aggressive behavior. Specifically, participants attended to the opponent's shock choices in both model conditions, and chose shocks consistent with those of the observed model.     

Keep your eyes open: dispositional vigilance moderates the relationship between operational police stress and stress symptoms

Background: Vigilant coping is characterized by a deep processing of threat-related information. In many cases, vigilant coping increases stress symptoms, whereas avoidant coping decreases negative affect. However, vigilance may be beneficial when stress-eliciting situations involve a risk of injury or escalation as is usually the case in police operations. Design: We investigated the roles of vigilance and cognitive avoidance in police operations in a cross-sectional survey. Methods: The participants were 137 students (104?men, M_age?=?28.54, SD?=?8.04) from the Federal University of Applied Administrative Sciences; 76 of them were already police officers (work experience: M?=?12.59?years), and 61 were police officer candidates who had completed a 3- to 6-month police internship. Participants completed a paper-and-pencil survey and reported their operational stress, dispositional vigilance and cognitive avoidance in police operations, and stress symptoms. Results: We found that vigilance was negatively associated with stress symptoms and moderated the relationship between operational stress and stress symptoms. Cognitive avoidance, on the other hand, just missed the level of statistical significance in our test of whether it was positively associated with stress symptoms. Conclusions: Our findings demonstrate that vigilance may protect against the negative consequences of stress in police operations.     

Computerized assessment of syntactic complexity in Alzheimer’s disease: a case study of Iris Murdoch’s writing

Currently, the majority of investigations of linguistic manifestations of neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease are conducted based on manual linguistic analysis. Grammatical complexity is one of the language use characteristics sensitive to the effects of Alzheimer’s disease and is difficult to operationalize and measure using manual approaches. In the current study, we demonstrate the application of computational linguistic methods to automate the analysis of grammatical complexity. We implemented the Computerized Linguistic Analysis System (CLAS) based on the Stanford syntactic parser (Klein and Manning, Pattern Recognition, 38(9), 1407–1419, 2005) for longitudinal analysis of changes in syntactic complexity in language affected by neurodegenerative disorders. We manually validated CLAS scoring and used it to analyze writings of Iris Murdoch, a renowned Irish author diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. We found clear patterns of decline in grammatical complexity consistent with previous analyses of Murdoch’s writing conducted by Garrard, Maloney, Hodges, and Patterson (Brain, 128(250–260, 2005). CLAS is a fully automated system that may be used to derive objective and reproducible measures of syntactic complexity in language production and can be particularly useful in longitudinal studies with large volumes of language samples.     

Bringing forth spirituality dialogues in family therapy education

Our intention in the following article is to bring forth connections with spiritual resources in teaching and supervision. We construct this focus within a collaborative learning approach. Methods and techniques used include curiosity, reflexivity inquiry, deconstruction, outsider witness practices and re‐authoring conversations. We evaluate how the dialogue has transformed our abilities to relate to spirituality.