Confidentiality, privacy, and the facilitating role of psychoanalytic organizations

Burgeoning external threats to confidentiality by claims to clinical information create unprecedented challenges for psychoanalysts. Internal threats arise from the use of clinical material for educational, scientific and historical purposes. Traditionally, confidentiality is considered a patient's right and an analyst's obligation; privacy is not usually stated as a professional requirement. Little consideration has been given to the impact of the confidentiality and privacy dilemmas that analysts encounter throughout their careers. There has been no systematic examination of the confidentiality policies of psychoanalytic organizations, nor has their role in facilitating maintenance of patient confidentiality and analysts' privacy been made explicit. The research reported here was undertaken to address these issues and to obtain baseline information about the current confidentiality policies and practices of psychoanalytic organizations in three English-speaking countries (Britain, Canada and the USA). The author discusses survey results in the light of the challenges which arise at each phase of the analytic career. She makes suggestions as to how psychoanalytic organizations can and should facilitate analysts' resolutions of contemporary confidentiality and privacy dilemmas.     

Elliott’s Ethics of Expertise Proposal and Application: A Dangerous Precedent

In a recent paper in Science and Engineering Ethics (SEE) Elliott proposed an ethics of expertise, providing its theoretical foundation along with its application in a case study devoted to the topic of hormesis. The application is based on a commentary in the journal Nature, and it includes assertions of ethical breaches. Elliott concludes that the authors of the commentary failed to promote the informed consent of decision makers by not providing representative information about alternative frequency estimates of hormesis in the literature, thereby hindering the capacity of the scientific community to promote informed consent relating to chemical regulation. This paper argues that Elliott should have incorporated due process into his system of evaluation. His argument is also seriously deficient technically, in that it misinterprets the toxicological issues, misrepresents the scientific literature with respect to the frequency of hormesis, and incorrectly assesses the extent to which the Nature paper revealed opposing/alternative views on hormesis. Given the seriousness of assertions of noncompliance to ethical norms, there must be procedures to protect those whose ethics were called into question, to fairly evaluate the technical justification for an assertion, and to enable corrections in the event of errors. If a journal is willing to publish assertions that individuals acted in an ethically questionable way, it should be guided by a documented code of ethics and meet a standard of responsibility far greater than normal peer-review processes for papers that do not entail such ethical judgments.     

农村健康保障制度与反贫困

从我国农村健康保障现实出发,认为建立农村健康保障制度是反贫困的迫切要求和重要组成部分,并提出了一些政策建议,如树立公共健康投资理念、政府职能转变与市场机制结合等.     

Fear of Infection or Justification of Social Exclusion? The Symbolic Exploitation of the Ebola Epidemic

Public discourse in Western countries on the 2014 Ebola epidemic provided a unique natural opportunity to study the relationship between a disease's sociocultural representation and health policy support. Our main prediction stated that among Western citizens, support for restrictive health policies (e.g., mandatory quarantining) would be determined more through preexisting prejudice towards African immigrants than fears of Ebola infection. A questionnaire study with time‐lagged measurement of predictor and criterion variables employing a German sample (N = 218) that was heterogeneous in terms of gender, age, profession, political orientation, and income level provided clear support for this assumption. Although variables related to fear‐of‐infection were significant predictors, prejudice‐related variables explained several times more variance in participants’ support for restrictive policies. Moreover, the degree to which participants adopted prevalent beliefs regarding the sociocultural origins of Ebola (e.g., eating bushmeat) further intensified the impact of prejudice‐related variables.     

Asians as the model minority: Implications for US Government's policies

Asian Americans are often perceived as a 'model minority'– an ethnic minority that are high achieving, hardworking, self-reliant, law-abiding, as well as having few social and mental health problems. Although the impact of the model minority image on the US government's redistributive policies is a widely contested topic in public discourses, there has been little research on the association between the model minority image, people's worldviews, and attitudes towards the US government's redistributive policies. In an experiment that measured American participants' worldviews and manipulated the salience of the model minority image, we have demonstrated that those who believed in a malleable social reality were relatively unsupportive of government policies that help the Asian American ( vs African American) communities. Theoretical and practical implications of this finding are discussed.     

Gender differences in burnout: A meta-analysis

The literature on male-female differences in burnout has produced inconsistent results regarding the strength and direction of this relationship. Lack of clarity on gender differences in organizationally relevant phenomena, such as work burnout, frequently generates ungrounded speculations that may (mis)inform organizational decisions. To address this issue, we conducted a meta-analysis of the relationship between gender and burnout using 409 effect sizes from 183 studies. Results challenge the commonly help belief that female employees are more likely to experience burnout than male employees, revealing instead that women are slightly more emotionally exhausted than men (δ = .10), while men are somewhat more depersonalized than women (δ = −.19). Although these effects are small, they are practically noteworthy when translated into a percent overlap statistic. Moderator analyses further revealed some intriguing nuances to the general trends, such as larger gender differences in the USA compared to the EU. In contrast, gender differences did not vary significantly in male-typed vs. female-typed occupations. Our analyses also suggest discontinuation of the use of overall burnout measures because they are highly consistent with the emotional exhaustion dimension of burnout only.     

The relationship between perceived leadership styles and organisational constraints: An empirical study in Goleman's typology

Introduction

The style of a leader's work influences their subordinates’ motivation and performance as well as the organisation's climate. Supervisors can either eliminate or exaggerate obstacles that impede employees’ pursuit of organisational goals. One of the sources of job stress is organisational constraints. Leaders may influence the degree of such impediments by helping employees or by creating additional demands, depending on how well they understand what their subordinates need. Therefore, a leader's emotional intelligence might be an important factor.

The governance of religious diversity in stateless nations: the case of Catalonia

Academic literature dealing with the governance of religious diversity in Europe has gained saliency in recent years. However, most existing research is based on state-level policies, while the role of regional government is receiving far less attention. To address this lacuna, this article focuses attention on the role of the regional government in the regulation of religious diversity in Catalonia. The article reflects on the increasing relevance of religious affairs in the Catalan policy agenda and examines the emergence and configuration of a specific, distinct and prominent regional policy programme on religious diversity. The case of Catalonia is especially relevant since its ongoing nation-building project bestows additional complexity and strategic relevance on the policy approach towards religious issues.     

Development and validation of the organisational cooperation questionnaire

IntroductionCooperation is an essential framework for the functioning of organisations and society. The limitations of current measures of organisational cooperation led us to construct the measure herein presented.ObjectiveThe paper aims to describe the development and psychometric validation of an organisational cooperation measure based on how the cooperating members view and experience the cooperation process.MethodBased on relevant literature, the items were built and submitted to a panel of experts and fine-tuning procedures. The instrument (31 items) was applied to 1354 employees in local authorities. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis were performed (2 sub-samples), as well as validation procedures through Pearson correlation with the Knowledge Management Questionnaire.ResultsResults showed good statistical indicators of a 22-items three-factor structure: principles of cooperative relationship; formal regulation of cooperation; and cooperation focused on organisational mission. The factors are interpreted theoretically and present high internal consistency. The validation process suggests the suitability of the instrument for the population studied.ConclusionThis instrument can be used as a starting point for organisational intervention when cooperation-intensive processes are relevant. It can be useful to characterize the existing cooperation in organisations and to foster cooperation in organisations, especially in the intended dimensions. Future studies can apply the instrument to various sectors of activity. It will also be worth studying cooperation in its relationship with other organisational variables, namely those concerning cooperation-intensive processes.     

Compassionate Politics: Support for Old-Age Programs Among the Non Elderly

This study examines the existence of compassionate support for old-age programs such as Social Security and Medicare among the non-elderly. Past research has focused on merit and equality as a basis for support of social welfare programs by examining views of recipients' deservingness; in contrast, this study considers the extent of program support based on recipients' perceived need. Analysis of data from the 1984 National Election Study and from a local survey (Suffolk County, New York, 1989) shows that non-elderly individuals who view older people as financially impoverished are more likely to support government benefits for the aged. Moreover, compassionate support for old-age programs is distinct from liberal ideology; indeed, political conservatives, not liberals, are most likely to support such programs out of compassion for older people, a finding at odds with Sniderman's (Sniderman & Carmines, 1997) notion of principled conservatism. The analysis also revealed that response to elderly need does not convey the effects of long-term and family-based interests; this result substantiates that support of old-age programs can be considered as other-regarding (i.e., reflecting a concern for individuals that is unrelated to one's personal circumstances). Short-term and long-term interests tend to eclipse rather than promote compassionate support of old-age programs, consistent with the findings of traditional research on self-interest.