Should Extremely Premature Babies Get Ventilators During the COVID-19 Crisis?

Abstract

In a crisis, societal needs take precedence over a patient’s best interests. Triage guidelines, however, differ on whether limited resources should focus on maximizing lives or life-years. Choosing between these two approaches has implications for neonatology. Neonatal units have ventilators, some adaptable for adults. This raises the question of whether, in crisis conditions, guidelines for treating extremely premature babies should be altered to free-up ventilators. Some adults who need ventilators will have a survival rate higher than some extremely premature babies. But surviving babies will likely live longer, maximizing life-years. Empiric evidence demonstrates that these babies can derive significant survival benefits from ventilation when compared to adults. When “triaging” or choosing between patients, justice demands fair guidelines. Premature babies do not deserve special consideration; they deserve equal consideration. Solidarity is crucial but must consider needs specific to patient populations and avoid biases against people with disabilities and extremely premature babies.     

Memory and consciousness: trace distinctiveness in memory retrievals

The aim of this article was to provide experimental evidence that classical dissociation between levels of consciousness associated with memory retrieval (i.e., implicit or explicit) can be explained in terms of task dependency and distinctiveness of traces. In our study phase, we manipulated the level of isolation (partial vs. global) of the memory trace by means of an isolation paradigm (isolated words among non-isolated words). We then tested these two types of isolation in a series of tasks of increasing complexity: a lexical decision task, a recognition task, and a free recall task. The main result of this study was that distinctiveness effects were observed as a function of the type of isolation (level of isolation) and the nature of the task. We concluded that trace distinctiveness improves subsequent access to the trace, while the level of trace distinctiveness also appears to determine the possibility of conscious or explicit retrieval.     

Are Psychiatric Residents Still Interested in Psychoanalysis? A Brief Report

In spite of the efficacy of the psychodynamic psychotherapies, the number of young psychiatric residents interested in psychodynamic therapies is decreasing. Our psychoanalytical group, Genden (Genève-Denver), explored the possible reasons for psychiatric residents' hesitation to get psychoanalytic training. Five psychoanalytical psychotherapists met weekly for a year in order to debate that question, focusing on personal feedbacks from all of our 100 residents in psychiatry working with us for at least 4 years. Following the residents' responses, our focus group proposed ten commonsense feedbacks for psychoanalysts regarding stimulating young psychiatric residents' interest in psychoanalytic approaches.     

Is the Self other to the self? Why does the numinosum feel like another? The relevance of Matte Blanco to our understanding of the unconscious

Using Ignacio Matte Blanco’s approach to the unconscious, this paper attempts to explain why the experience of the Self or the unconscious, for example in dreams, is difficult for the ego to understand. Matte Blanco believes that the logic of the unconscious is radically different from the logic of consciousness. The unconscious uses processes that Matte Blanco refers to as symmetry and generalization. Symmetry means that the converse of any relationship is identical to it, so that asymmetrical relationships are treated as if they were symmetrical. Generalization means that the unconscious treats any object as belonging to a larger class of objects that is a subset of an even larger class which is in turn a subset of a wider class ad infinitum. Hence Matte Blanco’s idea of the unconscious as infinite sets. These unconscious mechanisms, combined with the possibility that the unconscious has more dimensions than consciousness, contribute to the difficulty of understanding dreams, and help to explain why the Self is experienced as other to the ego.     

Responses to Persons with AIDS: Fear of Contagion or Stigma?1

Recently it has been argued that responses to persons with Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) are more a function of the association of AIDS with homosexuality than they are concerns about contagion. This research provided a further test of these arguments using an experimental design in which the target disease's contagiousness and association with homosexuality were manipulated. The results indicated that willingness to interact with a disease victim was strongly related to the contagiousness of the disease but only weakly related to its association with homosexuality. These findings are in line with recent research on lay conceptions of physical illness and argue that avoidance of disease victims, including persons with AIDS, primarily reflects concerns over contracting the disease. The implications of these findings for lay illness conceptions and how lay people respond to disease victims are discussed.     

Demand characteristics of music affect performance on the Wonderlic Personnel Test Of Intelligence

This study examined whether demand characteristics concerning music can change subjects' performance on the Wonderlic Personnel Test of intelligence. Participants (N= 60) were randomly assigned and informed either that Mozart's music typically enhances cognitive performance or diminishes it. They then completed the Wonderlic Personnel Test while listening to a Mozart piano sonata. The subjects with a positive set answered significantly more items correctly on the test (14%) than those with a negative set (p = .03). This result may hold implications for the study of the 'Mozart effect'.