Music Hath Charms … And Can Influence Helpfulness1

Eighty university students, half men and half women, were distributed evenly among 4 conditions in a one-way design. Three of the groups heard a seven-minute-long musical selection, either soothing, stimulating, or aversive in nature, while the remaining subjects were not exposed to any music and sat still. Ratings indicated that the soothing and stimulating music created some- what different positive moods while the aversive music tended to arouse negative feelings. Those who heard the soothing music were most apt to be helpful immediately afterwards, significantly more so than the aversive music or no music subjects, perhaps because of the ideas evoked by this selection.     

Pain and aggression: Some findings and implications

Consistent with the cognitive-neoassociationistic conception of anger and emotional aggression, a wide variety of studies with animal as well as human subjects demonstrate that pain often gives rise to an inclination to hurt an available target, and also, at the human level, that people in pain are apt to be angry. However, and also in accord with the present formulation, these primitive angry/aggressive reactions can be suppressed, intensified, or modified by cognitive processes.     

On the difference between internal and external reactions to legitimate and illegitimate frustrations: A demonstration

Although it is commonly assumed that the nature of any given frustration (defined as an unexpected barrier to goal attainment) affects the strength of the resulting instigation to aggression, the present paper argues that the type of frustration, ie, whether it is legitimate or illegitimate, can also influence the strength of an overt attack upon an available target independently of instigation intensity. Two groups of university men were unexpectedly kept from winning a money prize for working on a motor task, and one group was induced to attribute this failure to their partner's misbehavior (illegitimate frustration) while the other men were told the failure was due to the apparatus (legitimate frustration). In comparison to a nonthwarted control group, both frustrated conditions displayed the same level of internal arousal. However, when all subjects had an opportunity to “supervise” a second partner on an unrelated task soon afterwards, only those who had been illegitimately thwarted earlier were now more openly punitive toward this “innocent” individual than the control group. Possible reasons for these results are discussed, but it is emphasized that a distinction must be drawn between the internal and external reactions to a frustration.     

Assessing pain behaviour of low-back pain patients in real time: concurrent validity and examiner sensitivity

Several systems for measuring pain behaviour have been developed for clinical settings. The present study reports on a real-time system for coding five categories of pain behaviour for low-back pain patients: guarding, touching, sounds, words, and facial expression. Unique features of the system are the use of refined measures of facial expression and integration of the measurements with a standardized physical examination. 176 sub-acute and chronic low-back pain patients underwent a physical examination while their pain behaviour was coded. Concurrent measures of subjective pain, medically-incongruent signs, and independent global ratings of pain behaviour were taken. Analyses indicated that the pain behaviours, particularly guarding and facial expression, varied systematically with the alternative measures, supporting the concurrent validity of the behaviour observation system. While pain behaviours, especially use of words and facial expressions, were significantly associated with the examiners' independent ratings, the strength of the associations suggested that, in the absence of direct training, examiners' performance was relatively poor. Implications for training of clinicians in detecting pain behaviour are discussed.     

Index to Volume 29

Other Index

Index to Volume 29     

Child’s Play: Anatomically Correct Dolls and Embodiment

Anatomically detailed dolls have been used to elicit testimony from children in sex abuse cases. However, studies have shown they often provide false accounts in young, preschool-age children. Typically this problem is seen as a cognitive one: with age, children can correctly map their bodies onto a doll due to greater intellectual ability to represent themselves. I argue, along with the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, that although cognitive developments aid in the ability to represent one’s own body, a discussion of embodiment is required in order to understand the use and abuse of anatomical dolls in forensic interviews. This paper examines these issues and maintains that a better understanding of embodied perception in both adults and children helps show how phenomenology can provide a more nuanced understanding to a troubling ethical and legal problem.

Ethics Consultation Quality Assessment Tool: A Novel Method for Assessing the Quality of Ethics Case Consultations Based on Written Records

Although ethics consultation is offered as a clinical service in most hospitals in the United States, few valid and practical tools are available to evaluate, ensure, and improve ethics consultation quality. The quality of ethics consultation is important because poor quality ethics consultation can result in ethically inappropriate outcomes for patients, other stakeholders, or the health care system. To promote accountability for the quality of ethics consultation, we developed the Ethics Consultation Quality Assessment Tool (ECQAT). ECQAT enables raters to assess the quality of ethics consultations based on the written record. Through rigorous development and preliminary testing, we identified key elements of a quality ethics consultation (ethics question, consultation-specific information, ethical analysis, and conclusions and/or recommendations), established scoring criteria, developed training guidelines, and designed a holistic assessment process. This article describes the development of the ECQAT, the resulting product, and recommended future testing and potential uses for the tool.