Decisions About Testing and Termination of Pregnancy for Different Fetal Conditions: A Qualitative Study of European White and Pakistani Mothers of Affected Children

The aim of this study is to explore reasons for and against prenatal testing and termination for a range of conditions in women from two different ethnic backgrounds. A total of 19 Pakistani and European women in West Yorkshire, UK, who either had a child with a genetic condition or had terminated a pregnancy for one, completed a questionnaire about their attitudes regarding prenatal testing and termination for 30 different fetal conditions and were interviewed about their reasons for their responses. There were more similarities than differences between the Pakistani and European white women. The most important factor in most women’s decisions about termination of pregnancy was their perception of the quality of the life of a child with the genetic condition, in particular, whether the child would be “suffering.” This was described as either physical suffering, as a result of medical treatment, or as emotional suffering, as a result of psychological and/or social factors. These findings highlight the need for detailed information about the potential quality of life for the child and the child’s family to enable parents to make informed choices, particularly the extent to which the child is likely to suffer, the nature of such potential “suffering” and the extent to which the child could lead a “normal” life. The findings also challenge stereotypes about cultural differences in attitudes about termination of pregnancy.     

Willingness to seek counselling, and factors that facilitate and inhibit the seeking of counselling in Indonesian undergraduate students

This paper describes a study designed to investigate Indonesian undergraduates' attitudes to counselling. It focuses on the results derived from data analyses of a questionnaire measuring the level of willingness to seek counselling, factors inhibiting and facilitating the seeking of counselling in Indonesian students. The exploration was differentiated into professional counselling outside the university and the university counselling services. The self-administered questionnaire was distributed among 1,279 students. The results indicated that the level of willingness to seek counselling was low. The use of social networks was the most important discouraging factor. Wide dissemination of information about counselling services, efforts to enhance confidentiality in counselling and counsellors' understanding of students' world and ways of thinking were strongly suggested to encourage students to seek counselling.     

The development of sustained attention in children: the effect of age and task load.

This study explored how children's sustained attention develops and the effect of manipulating task parameters on sustained attention. The sample comprised 57 children (5-12 years) who completed CogState and Score! (Test of Everyday Attention for Children). Novel variability and traditional indices indicated rapid development from 5-6 to 8-9 years on all measures and a developmental plateau from 8-9 to 11-12, with growth evident on some measures. Findings suggest that sustained attention improves to age 10, then plateaus with only minor improvements. Further, performance was generally poorer on high load tasks compared to low load, with the same developmental pattern uncovered.     

Remembering helpers and hinderers depends on behavioral intentions of the agent and psychopathic characteristics of the observer

Individual differences in proneness towards granting benefits (i.e., helping) or imposing costs (i.e., hindering) may have led to processes that detect and remember people who are prone to help or hinder. We examined two factors that might influence such memory: the intentionality of the acts and individual differences in psychopathy characteristics. Participants viewed several videos of computer-animated agents that helped or hindered another agent, either intentionally or unintentionally. Afterward, participants had better memory for agents that acted intentionally. Additionally, participants with more psychopathic tendencies had enhanced memory for helpers, suggesting that certain individual characteristics might result in heightened memory for people who are prone to granting benefits.     

A multicultural framework in counsellor training: A preliminary evaluation

The multicultural module of a postgraduate Diploma in Counselling was evaluated. The evaluation focused both on former students' experience of the relevance of multiculturalism to their counselling and on which of three perspectives on multiculturalism they most agreed with. The findings confirmed and illustrated the relevance of multiculturalism to practice. The counsellors also expressed a clear preference for an integrationist perspective, with a structuralist approach their second choice.     

Goal-setting in diabetes self-management: A systematic review and meta-analysis examining content and effectiveness of goal-setting interventions

Background: Goal-setting is recommended and widely used within diabetes self-management programmes. However, empirical evidence around its effectiveness lacks clarity. This review aims to evaluate the effectiveness of goal-setting interventions on diabetes outcomes and to determine which behaviour change techniques (BCTs) are frequently used within these interventions.

Methods: A systematic search identified 14 studies, describing 12 interventions targeting diabetic-control which incorporated goal-setting as the main intervention strategy. Study characteristics, outcome measures and effect sizes of the included studies were extracted and checked by two authors. The BCT taxonomy v1 was used to identify intervention content. Meta-analyses were conducted to assess intervention effects on the primary outcome of average blood glucose levels (HbA1c) and on body-weight. Psycho-social and behavioural outcomes were summarised in narrative syntheses.

Results: Significant post-intervention improvements in HbA1C were found (?.22, 95% CI, ?.40, ?.04) across studies. No other main effects were identified. The BCT ‘goal-setting (behaviour)’ was most frequently implemented and was identified in 84% of the interventions.

Conclusions: Goal-setting interventions appear to be associated with reduced HbA1C levels. However, the low numbers of studies identified and the risk biases across studies suggest more research is needed to further explore goal-setting BCTs in diabetes self-management.     

Bilingual comparison of Mandarin and English cognitive bias tasks

Most research into cognitive biases has used Western samples, despite potential East-West socio-cultural differences. One reason is the lack of appropriate measures for non-Westerners. This study is about cross-linguistic equivalence which needs to be established before assessing cross-cultural differences in future research. We developed parallel Mandarin and English measures of interpretation bias and attention bias using back-translation and decentering procedures. We assessed task equivalence by administering both sets of measures to 47 bilingual Mandarin-English speakers. Interpretation bias measurement was similar and reliable across language versions, confirming suitability of the Mandarin versions for future cross-cultural research. By contrast, scores on attention bias tasks did not intercorrelate reliably, suggesting that nonverbal stimuli such as pictures or facial expressions of emotion might present better prospects for cross-cultural comparison. The development of the first set of equivalent measures of interpretation bias in an Eastern language paves the way for future research investigating East-West differences in biased cognition.     

The Mediated Breast: Technology,Agency, and Breast Cancer

Women intimately interact with various medical technologies and prosthetic artifacts in the context of breast cancer. While extensive work has been done on the agency of technological artifacts and how they affect users’ perceptions and experiences, the agency of users is largely taken for granted hitherto. In this article, we explore the agency of four women who engage with breast cancer technologies and artifacts by analyzing their narrative accounts of such engagements. This empirical discussion is framed within the tradition of science and technology studies, philosophy of technological mediation and phenomenology of embodied agency as ‘I can/not’. This approach leads to the conclusions that women’s technologically mediated agencies range from being restricted to extended, take place on different bodily levels, within complex temporal structures, and are determined by certain socio-cultural contexts. Furthermore, it reveals that such agency shaping does not imply a one-way conditioning relationship between technologies and users, but rather involves a reciprocal relationship in which both subject and object are co-constituted. We therefore suggest that the ‘material turn’ in philosophy of technology also needs to take into account technologically mediated, material human beings in order to gain a better understanding of human existence.     

Living with Death in Rehabilitation: A Phenomenological Account

This paper uses an ongoing ethnography of childhood rehabilitation to rethink the Heideggerian phenomenology of death. We argue that Heidegger’s threefold perishing/death/dying framework offers a fruitful way to chart how young people, their parents, and practitioners address mortality in the routine management of muscular dystrophies. Heidegger’s almost exclusive focus on being-towards-death as an individualizing existential structure, rather than the social life with and around death, is at odds with the clinical experience we explore in this paper. After looking to the basic structures of Heidegger’s philosophy of death, we point to recent work by Leder, Svenaeus, Aho, and Carel, bringing health and the spaces of healthcare into our purview. Turning to ethnographic data, we argue that a revised phenomenology of death gives a nuanced account of how health care practitioners address death, dying, and perishing, and outline some steps toward a more ontologically sensitive clinical space. These revisions are in line with recent work in disability studies, that see disability as more than a death sentence. We advocate adjusting phenomenological reflections on disability, to be framed as a way of life, rather than as a deficient or especially deadly mode of human existence.