Waiting for a kidney from a deceased donor: an interpretative phenomenological analysis

Demand for kidneys from deceased donors far outstrips supply. Despite this, there appears to be little research that focuses solely on the experience of waiting for a kidney from a deceased donor. This study uses the qualitative methodology interpretative phenomenological analysis to explore the lives of 10 people on the transplant list, with the aims of illuminating the potential psychological challenges those on the list may face during this time, and providing information to help clinicians more fully support such people in the future. Two themes connected to the experience of waiting – adjustment to the uncertainty of waiting and thinking about receiving a kidney from a living donor – are presented here. Participants describe a sense of confusion and uncertainty around life on the list, and discuss their strategies for dealing with this. Novel complexities around the ambiguous challenge of receiving an organ from a deceased donor are revealed. It is recommended that health care teams provide a forum for this patient group to work through these feelings of confusion and ambiguity.     

Familiality of mood repair responses among youth with and without histories of depression

Affect regulation skills develop in the context of the family environment, wherein youths are influenced by their parents', and possibly their siblings', regulatory responses and styles. Regulatory responses to sadness (mood repair) that exacerbate or prolong dysphoria (maladaptive mood repair) may represent one way in which depression is transmitted within families. We examined self-reported adaptive and maladaptive mood repair responses across cognitive, social and behavioural domains in Hungarian 11- to 19-year-old youth and their parents. Offspring included 214 probands with a history of childhood-onset depressive disorder, 200 never depressed siblings and 161 control peers. Probands reported the most problematic mood repair responses, with siblings reporting more modest differences from controls. Mood repair responses of parents and their offspring, as well as within sib-pairs, were related, although results differed as a function of the regulatory response domain. Results demonstrate familiality of maladaptive and adaptive mood repair responses in multiple samples. These familial associations suggest that relationships with parents and siblings within families may impact the development of affect regulation in youth.     

A Qualitative Analysis of Home‐Based Counselors' Experiences in a Rural Setting

This qualitative study sought to understand the experiences of home‐based counselors working in a rural setting. In‐depth interviews were conducted with 12 counselors who were asked to describe their experiences in the areas of preparedness, professional development, challenges, and gender‐specific experiences. Fourteen coding categories emerged from the interviews, which led to the findings of 3 overarching themes: shared isolation, ethical ambiguity, and the high‐intensity nature of the job. Recommendations for home‐based counselors, agencies, and professional counseling associations are discussed.     

Sibling Death and Adult Maladjustment Indices: A Brief Report

While symptoms of grief pose the most immediate psychological concern in the aftermath of sibling death, emerging research suggests that distal correlates may include strained interpersonal relations and externalized forms of psychological distress. College students with a history of Sibling Loss (n = 36), Parental Loss (n = 32), or No Loss (n = 367) were compared on the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI-2). Sibling Loss was associated with higher Psychopathic Deviate (Pd; d = .62) and Hypomania (d = .42) scores. The relative risk (RR = 2.96) of a Pd elevation (T > 65) was higher after sibling death.     

Integration of spatial information across vision and language

Three experiments investigated whether spatial information acquired from vision and language is maintained in distinct spatial representations on the basis of the input modality. Participants studied a visual and a verbal layout of objects at different times from either the same (Experiments 1 and 2) or different learning perspectives (Experiment 3) and then carried out a series of pointing judgments involving objects from the same or different layouts. Results from Experiments 1 and 2 indicated that participants pointed equally fast on within- and between-layout trials; coupled with verbal reports from participants, this result suggests that they integrated all locations in a single spatial representation during encoding. However, when learning took place from different perspectives in Experiment 3, participants were faster to respond to within- than between-layout trials and indicated that they kept separate representations during learning. Results are compared to those from similar studies that involved layouts learned from perception only.     

Theism, Blame And Perfection

Blame and also punishment do not reach many agents in the sense that many agents are not motivated to ethically self-correct, and in fact, may be worsened by these practices. The main reasons agents may not be reached by them are that (on the most plausible secular or naturalistic ethical theory) (a) the agent's second nature may make inaccessible to him a sound appreciation of ethical considerations, and (b) the fixity of mature character may make ethical self-correction practically impossible. Still, when they are ethically rationalized, blame and punishment seem to be requirements. Even the most plausible secular or naturalistic ethics involves an important kind of incompleteness and unclarity concerning this issue. The Jewish and Christian traditions involve conceptions of the accessibility of ethical considerations and also the possibility of character change (both ultimately grounded in grace) in ways that enable us to overcome the perplexity about blame and punishment. They are not 'good for nothing' even when they fail to improve agents. The religious traditions' conceptions of moral agency and the possibility of perfection enable us to see why there are reasons not to ethically 'write off' even persistently vicious agents. Moreover, we can see that the fulfilling of ethical requirements is an enabling condition for perfection that is not merely ethical. To highlight the contrast between the naturalistic view and the theistic view, Aristotle's moral psychology and moral epistemology are contrasted with those of Maimonides and Aquinas, both of whom borrow heavily from Aristotle, but fundamentally transform what they borrow.     

Technical expertise and the construction of the rural Yishuv, 1882–1948

In fin de sièecle Europe, political economy viewed science as an indispensable tool of state power. Accordingly, in the early 1900s exponents of Zionist political economy saw the World Zionist Organization (WZO) as a government with the responsibility to direct the nation-building enterprise in Palestine. The principle beneficiaries of assistance from the WZO, youthful pioneer laborers from eastern Europe,shared the WZO's reverence for technical knowledge, but distrusted technicians, whom they associated with authoritarianism. In the eyes of the pioneer laborers, a technican should not lead, but rather make vital resources available to the workers to use as they saw fit. Key figures in the WZO's settlement institutions accepted this subordinate status for the technician and employed technical experts to guide,rather than direct, the labor movement in the construction of publicly-funded, co-operative agricultural settlements. From its beginning, however, the Zionist movement featured an alternative conception of technical expertise, drawn more from business economics than political economy, and tending to favor as its model the corporation rather than the state. One characteristic of this approach was the conviction that apolitical experts should direct settlement activity.For a brief period during the 1920s, champions of this approach wielded influence over the WZO's settlement institutions. But as a result of the tumultuous events of the years 1929–1939, the Zionist settlement enterprise fused politics and economics tightly together. From the mid-1930s on to the founding of the state of Israel, technical expertise was mobilized to serve the political and military leadership of the Yishuv. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.