30泰铢治疗所有疾病——泰国医疗保健制度的一种尝试

随着20世纪90年代民主政府的建立并实施一系列社会、经济和制度的变革以来,泰国的医疗体制也相继发生了变化,特别是30泰铢的普及医疗计划,提高了医疗服务的可及性,但是由于医疗资源配置方式的不健全,仍存在公立部门医务人员短缺、私人医疗机构不断膨胀的问题,为此必须要合理规范医疗市场,避免医疗服务的两极分化。     

ICQ (I seek you) and adolescents: a quantitative study in Hong Kong.

The Hong Kong Government and the education sector encourage the whole population-from toddlers to senior citizens-to utilize information technology, and many do. Yet there are no studies exploring the patterns of adolescents using ICQ (I seek you) in Asian countries. This study was done in Hong Kong, which has the greatest number of ICQ users. A quantitative approach was adopted by administering self-constructed questionnaires to the students of one high school. One hundred and forty-seven adolescents volunteered to participate. The key findings of the study are (1) most of the adolescents have been using ICQ for 1-4 years; (2) most fit one of two patterns of use: either 2 or 3 days per week, or more than 5 days per week; (3) they spend less than 3 h per day on ICQ; (4) the main reasons for using ICQ are entertainment, relaxation, and socializing; and (5) parents are concerned about possible negative impacts on their children's academic performance because of using ICQ. Two main implications are drawn: proper use of ICQ can minimize parental distress and encourage adolescents to be less sedentary.     

VR-based conversation training program for patients with schizophrenia: a preliminary clinical trial.

Schizophrenia is a devastating mental illness and is characterized by hallucinations and delusions as well as social skills deficits. Generally, social skills training designed to help patients develop social skills includes role-playing, but this form of training has typical shortcomings, which are largely due to a trainer's difficulties to project emotion. Virtual reality (VR)-based techniques have the potential to solve these difficulties, because they provide a computer-generated but realistic three-dimensional world and humanlike avatars that can provide emotional stimuli. In this paper, we report on a method of implementing virtual environments (VEs) in order to train people with schizophrenia to develop conversational skills in specific situations, which could overcome the shortcomings of or complement conventional role-playing techniques. The paper reports the efficacy of the proposed approach in a preliminary clinical trial with 10 patients with schizophrenia.     

Recalling a Witnessed Event Increases Eyewitness Suggestibility: The Reversed Testing Effect

ABSTRACT— People's later memory of an event can be altered by exposure to misinformation about that event. The typical misinformation paradigm, however, does not include a recall test prior to the introduction of misinformation, contrary to what real-life eyewitnesses encounter when they report to a 911 operator or crime-scene officer. Because retrieval is a powerful memory enhancer (the testing effect), recalling a witnessed event prior to receiving misinformation about it should reduce eyewitness suggestibility. We show, however, that immediate cued recall actually exacerbates the later misinformation effect for both younger and older adults. The reversed testing effect we observed was based on two mechanisms: First, immediate cued recall enhanced learning of the misinformation; second, the initially recalled details became particularly susceptible to interference from later misinformation, a finding suggesting that even human episodic memory may undergo a reconsolidation process. These results show that real-life eyewitness memory may be even more susceptible to misinformation than is currently envisioned.     

Spatial working memory maintenance: Does attention play a role? A visual search study

Recent studies have proposed that a common mechanism may underlie spatial attention and spatial working memory. One proposal is that spatial working memory is maintained by attention-based rehearsal [Awh, E., Jonides, J., & Reuter-Lorenz, P. A. (1998). Rehearsal in spatial working memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 24(3), 780-790], and so a spatial attention shift during the retention interval of a spatial location should impair its memory performance. In the present study, participants engaged in single-item, parallel or serial search tasks while remembering a spatial location. Although memory tended to bias all searches, the need for an attentional shift during the retention interval impaired memory performance only in single-item search, but not in other searches. These findings suggest that previous evidence for the attention-based rehearsal account does not generalize to visual search. Results are discussed with regard to the relationship between spatial attention and spatial working memory.     

Self‐esteem as a source of evaluative conditioning

This study was designed to examine whether self‐esteem can be used as a source of evaluative conditioning, and whether implicit or explicit self‐esteem was more predictive of the evaluative conditioning effect. Moreover, the role of contingency awareness in the acquisition of the evaluative conditioning effect was also examined. Words related to the self and a general other were served as unconditioned stimuli (USs) in the evaluative conditioning process in order to see whether the evaluation could be transferred to neutral, abstract paintings after 10 times of pairing. An evaluative conditioning effect was demonstrated in that the evaluation of the paintings became more positive after repeatedly paired with words about the self but not words about general others. Implicit self‐esteem predicted the magnitude of the evaluative conditioning effect, while the association between explicit self‐esteem and the evaluative conditioning effect was nonsignificant, both with and without the effect of contingency awareness being controlled for. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Neural correlates of Traditional Chinese Medicine induced advantageous risk-taking decision making

This fMRI study examined the neural correlates of the observed improvement in advantageous risk-taking behavior, as measured by the number of adjusted pumps in the Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART), following a 60-day course of a Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) recipe, specifically designed to regulate impulsiveness in order to modulate risk-taking behavior. The 14 participants recruited for this study were randomly assigned to the experimental and control groups and the TCM recipe (Panax, 520 mg; Astragalus membranaceous Bunge, 520 mg; Masnetitum, 840 mg; Ostrea gigas Thumb, 470 mg; Thinleaf Milkwort Root Radix Polygalae, 450 mg; and Os Draconis, 470 mg) was administered, as a diet supplement, to the seven participants in the experimental group. The neural activity of the two groups was monitored by a 3T MRI scanner, before and after the 60-day treatment. Associated with the improved advantageous risk-taking behavior seen in the experimental group, significantly stronger blood oxygenation level dependent (BOLD) responses were observed in the bilateral dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), left putamen, left thalamus, right insula, and right anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), regions which have previously been reported as being involved in risk-taking decision making. The effect of the TCM in improving advantageous risk-taking decision making appears to have been related to the enhanced efficiency of the cognitive affective system, the PFC–ACC–insula–striatum network, which functions to inhibit impulsiveness, to sensitize reward-related information, and to allow the opportunity, during risk estimation, to evaluate potential gains and losses. The findings of this study suggest that interventions acting on factors modulating risk-taking decision making could have a beneficial effect in terms of optimizing risk-taking behavior.     

Toward an intersectional understanding of violence and resilience: An exploratory study of young Southeast Asian men in Alameda and Contra Costa County, California

There is a nascent, but growing, literature on Southeast Asian youth violence that focuses on the role of acculturation, portraying violence as a problem of maladaptation. However, scholars overlook the ways in which violence holds meaning for the youth who experience it and how violence may be related to racial and gender identity formation. We conducted a qualitative study with young Southeast Asian men to elicit the role violence plays in their understanding of what it means for them to be Southeast Asian and male. We conducted focus groups and semi-structured individual interviews with an ethnically diverse group of 21 young Southeast Asian men 13–17 years of age from Alameda and Contra Costa Counties, California. Data were analyzed using the extended case method approach. Our findings illustrate that violence and engagement with community-based organizations are situational tools that these young Southeast Asian men use to navigate their social contexts in an attempt to be resilient in ecological contexts marked by alienation and discrimination, as well as to construct accepted and successful racial and gender identities. Furthermore, we found that their actions were guided by gendered codes of conduct, such as a “code of the street.”     

The Professional Identity of Contributors to the Journal of Counseling & Development: Does It Matter?

R. K. Goodyear (2000) criticized the methodology and results of a study which demonstrated that during the editorial terms of Goodyear (1984–1990) and Claiborn (1990–1993) there was a trend toward publishing articles written by psychologists as opposed to counselors in the Journal of Counseling & Development (JCD). The issue of journal content goes to the heart of professional identity. The authors assert that professional affiliation of contributors matters less than the content of the articles published in JCD (i.e., articles must “speak” the language of counselors and not the language of some other mental health professional).     

Dimensionality and correlates of problem solving: the use of the Problem Solving Inventory in the Chinese context.

The dimensional structure of the Problem Solving Inventory (PSI) was investigated using data collected from a sample of 499 Chinese university students in teacher training. While the original three-factor model provided poor fit to the data, the revised two-factor model provided more adequate fit but failed to consider a PSI construct tapped in the original PSI formulation. The newly constructed PSI scales based on the present data provided viable alternative scales reflecting constructs of self-efficacy, rational coping and dysfunctional coping. These newly developed problem-solving scales were predictive of indices of psychological adjustment in terms of depression, burnout, and perceived self-efficacy toward helping others. The use of the PSI in the Chinese context is discussed.