Management of a dying patient in group therapy

In the last few years there has been an increased interest in the psychosocial aspect as well as in the therapeutic needs of the dying patient. Although much has been written about the treatment of the dying patient, most of these works were done in the individual setting, either with out-patients or with hospitalized patients. However, relatively little attention has been paid to the treatment and management of the dying patient in a group therapy setting. In this paper the authors describe their experience in working with a dying patient in an ongoing therapy group. The effect on the group, on the individual patient and on the therapist are discussed. Moreover, the conflicting needs of the individual patients versus those of the remaining group members are discussed and compared to similar reports from the group therapy literature.     

Retrieval improvement is induced by water shortage through angiotensin II

Angiotensin II (ANGII) has an evolutionary preserved role in determining adaptative responses to water-shortages. In addition, it has been shown to modulate diverse phases of memory. Still, it is not clear whether ANGII improves or spoils memory. We demonstrated that endogenous angiotensins enhance consolidation of a long-term associative memory in the crab Chasmagnathus and that water shortage improves memory consolidation through brain ANGII actions. Here, we show that weakly trained crabs, when water-deprived, exhibit enhanced retrieval. Subsequently, memory retention is indistinguishable from that of strongly trained crabs. ANGII, but not angiotensin IV, is a necessary and sufficient condition for such enhancing effect. We conclude that ANGII released due to water shortage leads to enhanced memory retrieval. Thus, it seems that ANGII has an evolutionary preserved role as a multifunction coordinator that enables an adaptative response to water-shortage. The facilitation of memory consolidation and retrieval would be among those coordinated functions.     

'You get used to it': Working with trauma in a burns unit of a South African children's hospital

I report here on the first stages of my work as a consultant clinical psychologist in a burns unit of a South African children's hospital. I show how the enormous trauma of the work leads inevitably to the adoption of defences on the part of staff against the pain and load of their work. I use the writing of Menzies Lyth and other authors as a basis for understanding staff defences in their daily work. I then describe the process whereby it has become possible to institute a form of group support for the staff. It has been important to think not only of the maladaptive but also of the helpful function of defences, and to recognize the staff's need for continuity and acceptance on the part of the consultant.     

Individual differences in perceptual sensitivity and response bias in anxiety: Evidence from emotional faces

We investigated the perception of emotional stimuli in anxious individuals and non-anxious cohorts. Signal detection theory analysis was applied to the discrimination of emotionally charged faces at several points along a continuum of emotional intensity. This design permitted the derivation of multiple measures of sensitivity and response bias for fearful and for happy faces. Anxious individuals lacked a conservative bias in judging fearful stimuli and a liberal bias in judging positive stimuli compared with non-anxious individuals. In addition, anxious participants had lower perceptual sensitivity (d′) than non-anxious participants for mildly threatening stimuli, as well as a trend towards lower perceptual sensitivity for moderately positive stimuli. These results suggest that the processing of threat information in anxiety is affected by sensitivity and bias differently at different levels of affective intensity.     

How training and promotion opportunities,career expectations,and two dimensions of organizational justice explain discretionary work effort

Contemporary work is highly interdependent, requiring discretionary work effort (DWE) in response to colleagues and customers. According to social exchange theory, organizational support encourages DWE as a form of employee reciprocation. Our model integrating social exchange and expectancy theory anticipates future career returns from organizational support in the form of training and promotion opportunity. Positive career expectations strengthen feelings of employee obligation that are realized in higher levels of DWE. In addition, career expectations are heightened when these opportunities are provided under procedurally just conditions. Furthermore, the relationship between career expectation and felt obligation is strengthened when interactional justice is high. Using structural equation modeling, these hypotheses are successfully tested on a survey of 201 bank employees and their supervisors. Implications for research and practice are discussed.     

Relationships between emotional labor, job performance, and turnover

The present study investigates the relationship between the emotional labor strategies surface acting and deep acting and organizational outcomes, specifically, employees' overall job performance and turnover. Call center employees from two large financial service organizations completed an online survey about their use of surface and deep acting. Their responses were matched with supervisors' ratings of overall job performance and organizational turnover records obtained 9 months later. Results indicate that surface acting is directly related to employee turnover and emotional exhaustion and that the relationship between surface acting and job performance is indirect via employee affective delivery. Deep acting was not linked to these outcomes. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed from the perspective of emotional labor theories.     

Managing Coworker Assistance Through Organizational Identification

This article investigates how different sources of management support promote coworker helping behavior in organizations. We contend that senior management, managers responsible for Human Resource practices, and team leaders contribute to coworker assistance by encouraging employees to identify with the organization. Based on survey evidence drawn from nine Australian (N?=?1,349 employees) and six Chinese firms (N?=?828 employees), and using structural equation modeling, we show that organizational identification mediates the effects of perceived support from these three sources on coworker assistance. Differences in the strength of relationships between the variables are highlighted and discussed.     

ADHD Symptoms in Post-Institutionalized Children Are Partially Mediated by Altered Frontal EEG Asymmetry

Individual differences in the propensity for left versus right frontal electroencephalogram (EEG) asymmetry may underlie differences in approach/withdrawal tendencies and mental health deficits. Growing evidence suggests that early life adversity may shape brain development and contribute to the emergence of mental health problems. The present study examined frontal EEG asymmetry (FEA) following the transition to family care in children adopted internationally from institutional care settings between 15 and 36 months of age (N = 82; 46 female, 36 male). Two comparison groups were included: an international adoption control consisting of children adopted from foster care with little to no institutional deprivation (N = 45; 17 female, 28 male) and a post-adoption condition control consisting of children reared in birth families of the same education and income as the adoptive families (N = 48; 23 female, 25 male). Consistent with evidence of greater approach and impulsivity-related behavior problems in post-institutionalized (PI) children, PI status was associated with greater left FEA than found in the other two groups. In addition, left FEA served as a mediator between institutionalization and age 5 ADHD symptoms for girls. Age at adoption and other preadoption factors were examined with results suggesting that earlier adoption into a supportive family resulted in a more typical pattern of brain functioning. Findings support the idea that the capacity of brain activity to evidence typical functioning following perturbation may differ in relation to the timing of intervention and suggest that the earlier the intervention of adoption, the better.     

A developmental study of the role of word order in comprehending Hebrew

Monolingual Hebrew-speaking subjects, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 11 years old, as well as adults, were asked to interpret utterances consisting of two nouns and a verb. Some utterances included only word order cues while others included direct object marker and subject-verb gender agreement cues. Even though Hebrew word order is relatively free, when subjects used word order as an interpretive cue they generally assigned sentence relations according to the dominant SVO order of modern Hebrew. This trend was less strong for the interpretations of NNV utterances than of NVN and VNN utterances. There was no evidence of a developmental sequence for word order strategies. In addition, there was no evidence that word order, for any age group, was necessarily a dominant cue for assigning sentence relations when other linguistic information was available.