Commercial advertisements are considered informative discourse, whereas the manipulative effects of their verbal and visual strategies have been ignored. According to van Dijk (2006), manipulation in mass media is performed by drawing the audience’s attention to information A rather than to B, by providing irrelevant or incomplete information, and by playing emotional games. Since the analysis of manipulative effects of semiotic features used in advertisements is scarce, the present research project investigates the potential manipulative effects of semiotic aspects used in (...) Persian printed advertisements, and the influence of the Iranian sociocultural context on designing these visual messages. A corpus of 160 Persian printed advertisements was analyzed; the results revealed that their semiotic features, especially those which are meaningful based on the sociocultural context of Iran, tend to inculcate relevant information and meaning in consumers, in order to control their minds and subsequently their purchases. The findings of this study include six theme-based categories of semiotic manipulation strategies: Celebrity images, Creative images, Punctuation marks, Natural images, Seasonal images, and Cultural images. The results are discussed along the lines of research methodology in discourse and semiotic analysis. (shrink)

Background: One of the main concerns in critical care units is the development of humanistic approaches. In this regard, recognizing the factors affecting humanistic nursing can contribute to humanizing nursing care in these units. Objective: The objective was to recognize the influential factors of humanistic nursing in critical care units. Research design: This qualitative study was carried out using a phenomenology method. Thirty-nine in-depth unstructured interviews were performed. The data were analyzed using the phenomenological nursology approach. To guarantee trustworthiness, prolonged (...) engagement, member check, triangulation of resources, and maximum variation sampling were used. Participants and research context: Purposeful sampling was employed to select 10 nurses, 8 patients, and 4 patient’s relatives from the intensive care unit and critical care unit departments. Ethical consideration: This study was approved by the ethics committee of Lorestan University of Medical Sciences with the code of LUMS.REC.1395.121. Finding: The participants’ experiences were reflected in the following three main concepts: moral, educational, and existential nature of the two humans involved in the interaction; maintenance of the nurses’ dignity; and interactions in the cultural and social context. Discussion: The nurse and patient, organizational environment, and society give rise to a set of intertwined characteristics which influence the realization of humanistic nursing. By affecting the nurses’ educational background and maintaining their dignity, the atmosphere of the hospital and cultural readiness of the society pave the way for delivering the humanistic care. (shrink)

Recently, researchers have shown an increased interest in achievement goal orientation correlates. What is not yet clear is the detailed relationships among students’ goal orientation, students’ personality traits, and parenting style. In so doing, this research responds to the need to analyze the importance of parenting styles and students’ traits in explaining the achievement goal orientations. In the exploratory correlational study, 586 Iranian students along with their parents were selected as the sample so as to evaluate the structure of the (...) relationships between these variables. The results indicate that students’ psychoticism and neuroticism predict students’ goal orientations while extraversion did not. Only the authoritative style predicts mastery approach and psychoticism trait. Permissive and authoritarian styles do not directly or indirectly predict students’ goal orientations. (shrink)

While often presented as promising assistive technologies for motor-impaired users, electroencephalography (EEG)-based Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs) remain barely used outside laboratories due to low reliability in real-life conditions. There is thus a need to design long-term reliable BCIs that can be used outside-of-the-lab by end-users, e.g., severely motor-impaired ones. Therefore, we propose and evaluate the design of a multi-class Mental Task (MT)-based BCI for longitudinal training (20 sessions over 3 months) of a tetraplegic user for the CYBATHLON BCI series 2019. In (...) this BCI championship, tetraplegic pilots are mentally driving a virtual car in a racing video game. We aimed at combining a progressive user MT-BCI training with a newly designed machine learning pipeline based on adaptive Riemannian classifiers shown to be promising for real-life applications. We followed a two step training process: the first 11 sessions served to train the user to control a 2-class MT-BCI by performing either two cognitive tasks (REST and MENTAL SUBTRACTION) or two motor-imagery tasks (LEFT-HAND and RIGHT-HAND). The second training step (9 remaining sessions) applied an adaptive, session-independent Riemannian classifier that combined all 4 MT classes used before. Moreover, as our Riemannian classifier was incrementally updated in an unsupervised way it would capture both within and between-session non-stationarity. Experimental evidences confirm the effectiveness of this approach. Namely, the classification accuracy improved by about 30% at the end of the training compared to initial sessions. We also studied the neural correlates of this performance improvement. Using a newly proposed BCI user learning metric, we could show our user learned to improve his BCI control by producing EEG signals matching increasingly more the BCI classifier training data distribution, rather than by improving his EEG class discrimination. However, the resulting improvement was effective only on synchronous (cue-based) BCI and it did not translate into improved CYBATHLON BCI game performances. For the sake of overcoming this in the future, we unveil possible reasons for these limited gaming performances and identify a number of promising future research directions. Importantly, we also report on the evolution of the user's neurophysiological patterns and user experience throughout the BCI training and competition. (shrink)

Scott Soames argues that consideration of the practice of legal judgement gives us good reason to favor the partial-definition/context-sensitive theory of vagueness against epistemicism. Despite the fact that the value of power-delegation through vagueness is evidenced in practice, Soames says, epistemicism cannot account for it theoretically, while the partial-definition/context-sensitive theory is capable of it. In this paper, I examine the two possible arguments against epistemicism that can be extracted from Soames’s account: (i) an argument based on unknown obligations, and (ii) (...) an argument based on power-delegation through vagueness. The first argument tries to convince us that, as based on epistemicism, the law has already decided the borderline cases, so that judges have obligatory decisions even in such cases: therefore epistemicism is inconsistent with the discretion of judges in borderline cases. I show that even if we sympathize with Soames’s intuitions concerning the legal practice, the argument he offers is not conclusive since it is either invalid, unsound, or paradoxical. The second argument holds that only the gaps which the partial-definition/context-sensitive theory predicts give judges the possibility of lawmaking in borderline cases. However, by categorizing the vague laws as imperfect laws, the judges can claim the right of lawmaking without any need to refer to gaps in the law. By neutralizing these arguments, I argue that epistemicism is able to explain the phenomena just as well as the partial-definition/context-sensitive theory. (shrink)

This qualitative study describes ethical challenges faced by Iranian nurses in the process of pain management in surgical units. To address this issue, semistructured interviews were conducted with 26 nurses working in surgery units in three large university hospitals in Tehran. An analysis of the transcripts revealed three main categories: institutional limitations; nurses' proximity to and involvement with pain and suffering; and nurses' fallibility. Specific themes identified within the categories were: insufficient resources, medical hierarchy; difficulties with believing patients' complaints regarding (...) pain and suffering; and experiencing the consequences of poor judgments. Our findings lead us to conclude that, as nurses are much closer to patients' pain and suffering than other health professionals, being aware of their ethical problems, and being able to reflect on them and discuss and learn from them, will reduce the burden of the ethical challenges faced. The findings will help nurses in other countries to devise suitable ways to reduce the ethical burdens they bear in their daily practice. (shrink)

Journal of Applied Philosophy, EarlyView.

Background Care is the basis of the nursing profession and nurse’s caring behavior is one of the important factors in patient satisfaction. On the other hand, psychological empowerment can improve the provision of care services, and leaders have a significant impact on the behavior of followers. This study determined the correlation between ethical leadership, psychological empowerment, and caring behavior from nurses’ perspective. Methods This cross-sectional descriptive study was conducted in 2019. A total of 200 nurses were selected by stratified random (...) sampling. Data were collected with ethical leadership, caring behavior and psychological empowerment questionnaires and analyzed with descriptive statistics and inferential statistics using SPSS20. Results The findings showed a significant correlation between ethical leadership, psychological empowerment and caring behavior of nurses. Also, there was a significant correlation between psychological empowerment and nurses’ caring behavior. The regression analysis showed that ethical leadership and psychological empowerment are a predictor of caring behavior of nurses. Conclusion Applying an ethical leadership style by nursing managers can lead to nurses’ improved psychological empowerment and caring behaviors and ultimately, patient care quality. Thus, considering guidelines at the team and organizational levels and programs such as providing workshops and periodic counseling to cultivate ethical nurse leadership can lead to better caring behavior. (shrink)