From the Galleries to the Clinic: Applying Art Museum Lessons to Patient Care

Increasingly, medical educators integrate art-viewing into curricular interventions that teach clinical observation—often with local art museum educators. How can cross-disciplinary collaborators explicitly connect the skills learned in the art museum with those used at the bedside? One approach is for educators to align their pedagogical approach using similar teaching methods in the separate contexts of the galleries and the clinic. We describe two linked pedagogical exercises—Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) in the museum galleries and observation at the bedside—from “Training the Eye: Improving the Art of Physical Diagnosis,” an elective museum-based course at Harvard Medical School. It is our opinion that while strategic interactions with the visual arts can improve skills, it is essential for students to apply them in a clinical context with faculty support—requiring educators across disciplines to learn from one another.     

Merleau‐Ponty and the Phenomenological Reduction

It is commonly believed that Merleau‐Ponty rejected Husserl's phenomenological reduction in favour of his existentialist account of être au monde. I show that whilst Merleau‐Ponty rejected what he saw as the transcendental idealist context in which Husserl presents the reduction, he nevertheless accepts the heart of it, the epoché, as a methodological principle. Contrary to a number of Merleau‐Ponty scholars, être au monde is perfectly compatible with the epoché, and Merleau‐Ponty endorses both. I also argue that it is a mistake to think that Merleau‐Ponty's liberal use of the results of empirical psychology signifies a rejection of the epoché. A proper understanding of his views on the relation between phenomenology and psychology is that, at least in Merleau‐Ponty's eyes, the methods of phenomenology and the empirical sciences are largely similar. I conclude that we have every reason to think that Merleau‐Ponty accepted Husserl's demand that the phenomenologist place the world in brackets.     

Monaural Loudness Adaptation for Middle-Intensity Middle-Frequency Signals: The Importance of Measurement Technique

Using the Simple Adaptation technique (SA) and the Ipsilateral Comparison Paradigm (ICP), the authors studied monaural loudness adaptation to a middle-intensity [60 dB(A)] tone at signal frequencies of 250, 1000, and 4000 Hz in the left and right ears. Adaptation effects were absent when the SA procedure was used. However, they were observed uniformly across all frequency values with the ICP, a result that challenges the assertion in the literature, on the basis of SA measures, that loudness adaptation for middle-intensity signals occurs only at frequencies above 4000 Hz. The ICP features periodic intensity modulations (±10 dB relative to the base signal) to accommodate listeners' needs for referents by which they can gauge subtle changes in the loudness of the adapting tone, a key component that is missing in the SA method. Adaptation effects in this investigation were similar in both ears, supporting the equal susceptibility assumption common in loudness adaptation studies.     

Sex Differences in Vigilance Performance and Perceived Workload

Female and male subjects monitored the repetitive presentation of a pair of lines for occasional changes in height (spatial task) or duration (temporal task). Perceptual sensitivity for critical signals favored men in the spatial task, whereas no sex differences in signal detectability existed in the temporal task. Measurements of perceived workload using the NASA-TLX scale mirrored these performance effects. Women tended to rate the overall workload associated with the spatial task to be greater in comparison with men. In addition, women found the spatial task to be significantly more frustrating, mentally demanding, and effortful than men did and rated their own performance lower than their male counterparts did. In contrast, no sex-linked differences in perceived workload were noted in regard to the temporal task. The results support the suggestion by Dittmar, Warm, and Dember (1987) that sex differences in sustained attention are task specific.     

Demand Transitions and Sustained Attention

A recent report by the National Research Council (Huey & Wickens, 1993) has identified transitions in task demand as an important dimension for study in vigilance research. This experiment tested the possibility that the effects of such transitions follow a relatively simple psychophysical rule—they are characterized by contrast effects. Transitions in task demand were achieved by shifting subjects from single-task to dual-task monitoring and vice versa. These transitions produced changes in subjects' sensing and decision-making functions that were far more intricate than simple contrast effects. The demand transition issue offers a complex research challenge on both basic and applied levels and warrants further investigation.     

Connotative Meaning as a Determinant of Response to Test Item Content

The purpose of this study was to determine if responses of like or dislike to Perceptual Reaction Test (PRT) designs — and thus, its ability to discriminate among criterion groups — were related to the connotative meaning of the designs. Seventy-four Ss were administered the PRT designs to which they responded on the traditional like-dislike alternatives as well as rating each design on a semantic differential. Correlations between the like-dislike dimension of the PRT designs and the semantic differential ratings of those designs indicated that when a S checks like for a design, he is expressing a positive evaluation of that design and probably sees it as less potent than those designs for which he checked dislike. Expression of like or dislike for a design appears to be inconsistently related to the activity dimension of meaning.     

Affect Dysregulation in Individuals With Borderline Personality Disorder: Persistence and Interpersonal Triggers

We hypothesized that affect dysregulation among individuals with borderline personality disorder (BPD) would involve greater persistence of negative affect between interpersonal events and heightened reactivity to stimuli indicating risk of rejection or disapproval, specifically perceptions of others’ communal (agreeable-quarrelsome) behaviors. A total of 38 participants with BPD and 31 controls collected information about affect and perceptions of the interaction partner's behavior during interpersonal events for a 20-day period. Negative and positive affect persisted more across interpersonal events for individuals with BPD than for controls. In addition, individuals with BPD reported a greater increase in negative affect when they perceived less communal behavior and a smaller increase in positive affect when they perceived more communal behavior in others. Findings indicate the importance of interpersonal perceptions in the affect dysregulation of individuals with BPD.     

Constructs,inferences, and mental measurement

The ‘construct’ concept occupies a significant place in psychology and, yet its role is misunderstood. Psychologists think that theorising in the area of psychological testing involves conjuring constructs, which are operationally defined and measured via psychometric tests. However, the ‘construct’ concept is unworkable and laden with confused philosophical baggage accrued under the hegemony of logical empiricism, and its real function in psychology is obscured. Via an analysis of its history and logic, I expose its flawed conception of the relation between theoretical and observable concepts and the way in which it serves the myth of mental measurement. Finally, it is shown how the actual logic of theorising in science, which entails that theories are best inferred from relevant phenomena, not imaginatively constructed, oppugns this myth and promises to coordinate theoretical concepts with the phenomena to be explained.     

The Use of Priority Information in Performance Feedback

To provide the most value to an organization, individuals must focus efforts on those outputs that have maximum value to the organization. However, the realities of the workplace are that information about performance and how individuals can add value to an organization is complex; that is, determining which activities to focus on is a fairly complex task because such information is nonlinear, whereby the importance of a certain activity may change depending on the level of performance at any given time. This article empirically examines whether providing complex, nonlinear feedback that reflects the complexities of the real world will result in a change in work outputs that reflect these nonlinearities. This article assesses whether employees can and do use complex feedback that reflects the complexity of the real world in the intended ways. In addition, this article examines whether individuals use feedback that includes priority information beyond feedback that reports on simple relative importance. Data were analyzed from 9 work units for time periods averaging a little over a year. Results indicate that, as predicted, when individuals have access to both complex, nonlinear priority information and simple, linear relative importance information, individuals can and do use the complex data in the intended way.