Personal factors related to compassion fatigue in health professionals

This study examines the role of some personal and professional factors in compassion fatigue among health-care professionals. Research participants included 182 (89 mental and 93 medical) health-care professionals who completed an assessment battery measuring compassion fatigue, emotion management, trait emotional intelligence, situation-specific coping strategies, and negative affect. Major findings indicate that both self-report “trait” emotional intelligence and ability-based emotion management are inversely associated with compassion fatigue; adaptive coping is inversely related to compassion fatigue; and differences exist between mental and medical professions in emotional intelligence, coping strategies, and negative affect. Furthermore, problem-focused coping appears to mediate the association between trait emotional intelligence and compassion fatigue. These findings shed light on the role of emotional factors in compassion fatigue among health-care professionals. Beyond enhancing our knowledge of practitioners' professional quality of life, the current study serves as a basis for the early identification of groups of practitioners at risk for compassion fatigue.     

Does Test Anxiety Bias Scholastic Aptitude Test Performance by Gender and Sociocultural Group?

This study examines the commonly held contention that test anxiety may serve as a source of bias in the scholastic aptitude test performance of gender and ethnic minority groups. In addition, this study examines sex and sociocultural group differences in the level and pattern of test anxiety among Israeli college students. The sample was composed of 163 male and 198 female students sitting for scholastic aptitude tests routinely administered to all student applicants as part of their college admissions procedures. About 67% were of Western cultural extraction whereas the remainder were of Eastern extraction. Significant differences in text anxiety scores for males and females were observed, with greater sex group differentiation on the Emotionality than on the Worry scale. Test anxiety scores were not discernible by ethnicity or social class. Furthermore, test anxiety was not differentially related to aptitude test scores by sex or sociocultural group membership. Thus, this study lends little evidence to the common contention that test anxiety differentially debilitates the aptitude test scores of females and ethnic minority student candidates.     

Characterization of Memory Impairment Following Closed-Head Injury in Children Using the Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test (AVLT)

Memory impairment following closed-head injury (CHI) in children is well documented. Characterization of the memory deficits of children with CHI could contribute to the prediction of academic performance and rehabilitation of these children. Twenty-five children who sustained closed-head injury and 25 matched controls were administered the Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test (AVLT). The advantage of this memory test is that a number of memory components are measured simultaneously, thus enabling us to study the relations between different aspects of memory within the same patient sample. The findings indicate that the Rey AVLT is a good test for characterization of impaired verbal memory in children following CHI. Transformation of scores derived from the Rey AVLT to Z-scores enables us to determine the relative effect of CHI in children on different memory scores. Raw scores were more vulnerable than relational ones, derived as the difference between two raw scores (e.g., learning, Trial 5?1), to closed-head injury in children, and scores reflecting word span were the least vulnerable. The results are discussed in terms of the possible contribution of the frontal lobes, which are frequently affected in closed-head injuries, to memory performance.     

Age-Related Differences in Cued Recall: Effects of Support at Encoding and Retrieval

The literature is unclear about the relative contributions of environmental supporting conditions to younger and older adults’ episodic memory performance. The work reported addresses the conditions under which different support patterns are obtained. In three experiments, younger and older adults learned picture-word pairs and were then tested with a cued-recall task. Supportive conditions included semantic relations between the pair members (all experiments), and first-letter cues for the target words at retrieval (Experiments 2 and 3). Results of the three experiments indicated different patterns of support for younger and older adults, depending on the number and location of the supporting conditions used. These different patterns are in line with the suggestion that whereas younger adults benefit substantially from support at encoding only, older adults require support at both encoding and retrieval. Alternative accounts of the results are also discussed.     

Older adults’ associative deficit in episodic memory: Assessing the role of decline in attentional resources

In this study, we evaluated an associative deficit hypothesis. This hypothesis suggests that the deficit seen in the episodic memory performance of older adults is due, in considerable part, to older adults’ difficulty in binding together unrelated components of an episode into a cohesive entity (Naveh-Benjamin, 2000). The study extended the conditions under which older adults show a differential deficit in tests requiring associations among the episode components to situations in which the item and the associative recognition tests are equated on the response mode used and on the amount of information displayed. In addition, we tested the potential role of a decrease in attentional resources in the associative deficit of older adults by comparing their performance to that of younger adults under conditions of reduced attentional resources. The results of the study, which indicate that younger adults under divided attention do not show an associative deficit, are interpreted as indicating that the associative deficit of older adults is due to factors other than depleted attentional resources.     

Revisiting the definition of homo sapiens

Research in genomics, human cloning, and transgenic technology has challenged bioethicists and scientists to rethink the definition of human beings as a species. For example, should the definition incorporate a genetic criterion and how does the capacity to genetically engineer human beings affect the definition of our species? In considering these contemporary bioethical dilemmas, we revisit an ancient source, the Talmud, and highlight how it provides specific biological, cultural, and genetic criteria to define the human species.     

Pantagruelism: A Rabelaisian inspiration for Understanding Poisoning,Euthanasia and Abortion in The Hippocratic Oath and in Contemporary Clinical Practice

Contrary to the common view, this paper suggests that the Hippocratic oath does not directly refer to the controversial subjects of euthanasia and abortion. We interpret the oath in the context of establishing trust in medicine through departure from Pantagruelism. Pantagruelism is coined after Rabelais' classic novel Gargantua and Pantagruel. His satire about a wonder herb, Pantagruelion, is actually a sophisticated model of anti-medicine in which absence of independent moral values and of properly conducted research fashion a flagrant over-medicalization of human problems. Ultimately this undermines the therapeutic core of medicine itself. We contend that PAS is a case of such over-medicalization and that its institution creates medicophobia. This article does not express an opinion about euthanasia in general. Rather, we claim that physicians should learn from the oath and from Rabelais that they should keep their practice to medical care and not to exploit their expertise and social privileges for the sake of ulterior motives, even when their patients desire those goals.     

Intuitive inventory management: An experimental system

The way people intuitively manage inventories is both an important issue in its own right and a context for research on various basic theoretical questions. The subject has not yet been systematically studied, owing partially to the lack of appropriate research tools. This paper presents some of the key concepts in formal inventory theory and describes an experimental system for the study of intuitive inventory management. This system is a computer program that allows subjects to interact with a simulated inventory system. Numerous system parameters can be manipulated, including demand functions, prices, costs, and the display of data. The usefulness of the system is demonstrated via the study of the effects of three parameters on intuitive inventory management in an illustrative experiment. Possible future uses of the system in basic and applied research and in training are indicated.