The effect of varied physician affect on recall, anxiety, and perceptions in women at risk for breast cancer: an analogue study.

Evaluated the effect of varied physician affect on subject recall, anxiety, and perceptions in a simulated tense and ambiguous medical situation. Forty women at risk for breast cancer viewed videotapes of an oncologist presenting--with either worried or nonworried affect--mammogram results. Although the mammogram results and the oncologist were the same in both presentation, analyses indicated that, compared to the women receiving the results from a nonworried physician, the women receiving the results from a worried physician recalled significantly less information, perceived the clinical situation as significantly more severe, reported significantly higher levels of state anxiety, and had significantly higher pulse rates. These results suggest that physician affect plays a critical role in patient reaction to medical information. Implications for compliance research, patient satisfaction, and physician training are discussed.     

Ethnic pride and self-control related to protective and risk factors: test of the theoretical model for the strong African American families program.

OBJECTIVE: To test a theoretical model of how ethnic pride and self-control are related to risk and protective factors. DESIGN: A community sample of 670 African American youth (mean age = 11.2 years) were interviewed in households. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Measures of cigarette smoking, alcohol use, and sexual behavior (lifetime to past month). RESULTS: Structural modeling analyses indicated parenting was related to self-control and self-esteem, and racial socialization was related to ethnic pride. Self-control and self-esteem variables were related to levels of deviance-prone attitudes and to perceptions of engagers in, or abstainers from, substance use and sexual behavior. The proximal factors (behavioral willingness, resistance efficacy, and peer behavior) had substantial relations to the criterion variables. Participant gender and parental education also had several paths in the model. Results were generally similar for the 2 outcome behaviors. CONCLUSIONS: In this population, self-esteem and self-control are related to parenting approaches and have pathways to attitudes and social perceptions that are significant factors for predisposing to, or protecting against, early involvement in substance use and sexual behavior.     

Auditory and temporal factors in the modality effect

Subjects in five experiments read nine-digit memory lists from a cathode ray tube for immediate recall. Reading aloud always produced a localized and reliable advantage for the last item, compared to reading silently. Two experiments on whispered and mouthed lists, with or without simultaneous broadband noise, falsified expectations derived from the theory of precategorical acoustic storage. Three additional experiments showed no enhancement of recency in the silent conditions when the digits were drawn or spelled gradually on the screen, a result that is inconsistent with the changing-state hypothesis. The classic auditory-visual modality effect is large and reliable, but still poorly understood.     

Liturgy, Art and Politics

This article examines the category of "liturgy" in its relation to aesthetics, ethics and politics. It is argued that liturgy occupies a unique mediating position between art and politics, for, on the one hand, it ensures that the political points perpetually beyond itself, and, on the other hand, the artistic is prevented from lapsing into a "magic circle" of compensatory reality or merely "fine" art. Alternative aesthetic formulations, for example, that of Adorno, are examined and shown to be problematic and ultimately nihilistic and unrealizable. By contrast, a liturgical aesthetic is shown to have a genuine ethical practicability. Modernity is then examined. It is argued that late capitalist structures—including (contra Paul Piccone) is apparently opposed structures, such a post-Fordist organicism—can be seen as a kind of anti-liturgy liturgy, or, one might say here, "ritual" (for all the latter term's more dubious post-nineteenth century assumptions can here be assumed), which has produced an entirely self-perpetuating minimal automated subjectivity. Finally, it is concluded that the manifold problems faced by non-liturgical aesthetics and politics can be reduced to this separation of the ideal from the real. This separation is further examined. The lineaments of a specific liturgical tradition—in this case, the Christian—and especially its eucharistic focus—are analyzed, and it is suggested that here one might find suggestions as to a fusion of the ideal and the real, and hence indications of how one might begin to outwit several of the problems in aesthetic and political theory already shown to involve difficulties.