The purpose of this study was to explore how one person experienced the early years of dementia as she was living through the pre-clinical and earlyclinical stages of Alzheimer’s disease. Interviews were held onfour occasions over a period of three years. The data were analyzed usingthe descriptive phenomenological psychological method, in which theresearcher approached the data from a caring perspective. The livedexperience of early-stage Alzheimer’s disease showed to be acomplex transitional phenomenon that involves a dynamic process of personaladjustment. The process (...) is set in motion as the participant receives thediagnosis and will eventually lead her towards a state of increased opennessand receptiveness toward the disease. The results describe this process asit unfolds in the context of the overall experience, and the variousadjustments that the participant undertakes. Some reflections concerning theplausible needs of patients with early-stage Alzheimer’s diseaseare included in the discussion. (shrink)

Environmental influences on the experiences of people with Parkinson’s diseaseThis study elucidates environmental influences on lived illness experiences. For two consecutive years, persons with Parkinson’s disease (PD) participated in 1 week of daily walking in the Swedish mountains. Daily, low‐intensive walking that is free of intense effort or time pressures associated with group interaction characterized the week. Participants were interviewed 3 months after the mountain stay regarding experiences in the mountains, daily living, and how their experience in the mountains influenced (...) their daily living after returning home. A phenomenological method was used for data analysis. Results point to the close connection between mind, body, and environment. The connection becomes highlighted when people are afflicted with sickness, such as PD, which causes impaired control of body language, impaired voluntary mobility, and lowered energy levels. The results also show how a social context in an environment with suitable physical challenges led to a change in individuals’ perceptions of the manageability of their experienced sicknesses. These results provide a deepened understanding of how individuals with PD experience illness, its influences on daily life, and how a suitable environment opens opportunities for managing daily issues. (shrink)

Dance events as a caregiver intervention for persons with dementiaThe aim of the study was to illuminate the phenomenon of dance events as a caregiver intervention for persons with dementia in one nursing home as described by the caregivers. Seven caregivers were interviewed. The interviews were unstructured and conducted while the caregivers were watching a video of dance events arranged in the nursing home. The analysis was carried out using the phenomenological method developed by Giorgi. The results are presented in (...) five consistent themes: (1) prerequisites for dance events; (2) creating and preparing different kinds of activities related to the dance events; (3) emotional arousal; (4) caregivers’ situational understanding; and (5) dance events and contextual consequences and synthesis into a general structure. The meaning of the dance events as a caregiver intervention was founded not only on the dancing itself but also encompassed the ontological state of ‘being together’. (shrink)

This article analyses problem situations in the context of anaesthesia care. It considers what it means for nurse anaesthetists to be in problematic situations in the anaesthesia care of older patients. Benner’s interpretive phenomenological approach proved useful for this purpose. Paradigm cases are used to aid the analysis of individual nurses’ experiences. Thirty narrated problematic anaesthesia care situations derived from seven interviews were studied. These show that experienced nurse anaesthetists perceive anaesthesia care as problematic and highly demanding when involving older (...) patients. To be in problematic anaesthesia care situations means becoming morally distressed, which arises from the experience or from being prevented from acting according to one’s legal and moral duty of care. An important issue that emerged from this study was the need for an ethical forum to discuss and articulate moral issues, so that moral stress of the kind experienced by these nurse anaesthetists can be dealt with and hopefully reduced. (shrink)

Feeling old: being in a phase of transition in later life The aim of the study was to illuminate very old persons’ experiences of feeling old in order to get a nuanced understanding of the ageing process in later life. Fifteen persons 85–96 years of age, living in their own homes, were interviewed in‐depth. Data were analysed utilising a phenomenological‐hermeneutic approach. Eight persons reported that they felt old. The experience of feeling old entailed four characteristics: being able to date the (...) beginning of feeling old, fear of helplessness and of being unable to manage one’s life situation, not recognising one’s former self, and feeling different from others. These characteristics corresponded to the main properties of a transition process. The comprehensive understanding was that the very old persons who also felt old were in a phase of transition. The distinguishing qualities of those that felt old were also found to be in line with the dystonic dominance in the ninth stage designated by Joan Erikson of the previously described life cycle. Knowledge about transition processes and sensitivity to very old people’s experiences of feeling old are of great importance to nursing in order to provide adequate health care services and prevent unhealthy transitions. (shrink)

Reviewing the literature on political participation and civic engagement, the article offers a critical examination of different conceptual frameworks. Drawing on previous definitions and operationalisations, a new typology for political participation and civic engagement is developed, highlighting the multidimensionality of both concepts. In particular, it makes a clear distinction between manifest “political participation” (including formal political behaviour as well as protest or extra-parliamentary political action) and less direct or “latent” forms of participation, conceptualized here as “civic engagement” and “social involvement”. (...) The article argues that the notion of “latent” forms of participation is crucial to understand new forms of political behaviour and the prospects for political participation in different countries. Due to these innovations it contributes to a much-needed theoretical development within the literature on political participation and citizen engagement. (shrink)

Shpet’s interpretation of Husserl’s phenomenology has caused puzzlement because of the lack of clarity with which he treats the transcendental turn in Appearance and Sense. I suggest that we find a more comprehensive discussion on the topic in Shpet’s 1917 article, “Wisdom or Reason?” There, Shpet reacts to Husserl’s treatment of a cluster of problems related to the latter’s transition to transcendental idealism. I read “Wisdom or Reason?” not only in relation to Husserl’s Logos article of 1911, but also to (...) his 1907 lecture series “The Idea of Phenomenology.” My analysis of Shpet’s phenomenology reveals that he followed through with the transcendental turn, although his philosophy developed in a direction different from Husserl’s transcendental idealism. Shpet postulates a collective consciousness, in which meaning-constitution takes place, and discovers the “word” as the foundation for any cognition. Shpet’s phenomenology remains ontological, as he considers language or culture as the “form of being” in which human beings live. In “Wisdom or Reason?,” Shpet argues that we can have direct knowledge of this meaningful reality: being is not “represented” but “presented” in a word. A certain compatibility thus exists between Shpet’s phenomenology of cultural reality and Husserl’s search for the absolute validity of knowledge. (shrink)

This article addresses Barthes’s development from a structuralist semiotician towards an affectively responding reader in terms of ‘postrational’ subjectivity. In light of his whole oeuvre, Barthes anticipates the understanding of emotion as an integral part of cognition presented in contemporary social neuroscience. To illustrate Barthes’s growing awareness of the importance of this epistemological move, the article starts from his textual ‘reality effect’ as a critical vehicle of realist representation. It then shifts to his attempt at conceptualising an affective reading which (...) resists the universalising idea of one ideologically determined signified. Barthes’s progress towards embracing the actual reader’s embodied self-feeling is prompted by two conceptual milestones: the obtuse meaning found incinematic stills, and the experience of punctum felt in photos. In light of his lectures in the Collège de France, Barthes substitutes the Husserlian disembodied method of introspection with the Chinese wu-wei as a reading practice. As a result, his Zen-Buddhist concentration on bodily feelings elicited by visual/verbal images becomes a method capable of creating a fruitful link between language and wordless cognition. Finally, the article proposes an idea of the ‘embodied reality effect’ by reading affectively two similar scenes interpreted by the early and late Barthes himself. (shrink)

This article addresses Barthes’s development from a structuralist semiotician towards an affectively responding reader in terms of ‘postrational’ subjectivity. In light of his whole oeuvre, Barthes anticipates the understanding of emotion as an integral part of cognition presented in contemporary social neuroscience. To illustrate Barthes’s growing awareness of the importance of this epistemological move, the article starts from his textual ‘reality effect’ as a critical vehicle of realist representation. It then shifts to his attempt at conceptualising an affective reading which (...) resists the universalising idea of one ideologically determined signified. Barthes’s progress towards embracing the actual reader’s embodied self-feeling is prompted by two conceptual milestones: the obtuse meaning found incinematic stills, and the experience of punctum felt in photos. In light of his lectures in the Collège de France, Barthes substitutes the Husserlian disembodied method of introspection with the Chinese wu-wei as a reading practice. As a result, his Zen-Buddhist concentration on bodily feelings elicited by visual/verbal images becomes a method capable of creating a fruitful link between language and wordless cognition. Finally, the article proposes an idea of the ‘embodied reality effect’ by reading affectively two similar scenes interpreted by the early and late Barthes himself. (shrink)

University students from Bulgaria, Estonia, Finland, and Portugal were given a list of morally relevant behaviors, the Schwartz Value Survey and Tangney’s TOSCA, measuring empathic guilt, guilt over norm-breaking, and shame. A factor analysis of MRB yielded 4 dimensions: prosocial behaviors, interpersonal transgressions, antisocial behaviors and secret transgressions. Prosocial behaviors were predicted by self-transcendence–self-enhancement value contrast only while the three transgression categories were associated with both SET and openness to change–conservation contrast. Norm-breaking guilt was more strongly associated with behaviors than (...) were empathic guilt and shame. However, shame was associated with secret transgressions in three countries, after controlling for values. The associations were strongest in Bulgaria and Estonia while fewer associations were found in Finland and Portugal. The implications of the findings for the cross-cultural psychology of morality are discussed. (shrink)

In this article, Bakhtin’s early aesthetics is reread in the context of Hermann Cohen’s system of philosophy, especially his aesthetics. Bakhtin’s thinking from the early ethical writing Toward a Philosophy of Act to Author and Hero in Artistic Activity and Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics is followed. In Author and Hero , an individual is in his life conceived as involved in cognitive and ethical action but as remaining without a consummative form; the form, or the ‘soul’, is bestowed upon a (...) person by the creative activity of the artist alone. In his understanding of artistic creativity and the relationship between the ‘hero’ and the author, Bakhtin closely follows Cohen, with the exception that for Cohen the object of artistic form-giving is the universal, idealized man, whereas for Bakhtin it is an individual. In the concept of a ‘polyphonic novel’ as developed in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics , Bakhtin, however, considers this view of the activity of the artist (or the novelist) to apply to the “traditional” novel only, while in a Dostoevskyean novel the characters are not subordinated to any defining power of the author. Bakhtin’s theory of the Dostoevskyean novel is thus a return to the emphasis of the cognitive and ethical autonomy of the individual. His understanding of the encounter between persons as a ‘subject’—‘subject’ or an ‘I’—‘thou’ relation has a predecessor, among others, in Cohen. (shrink)

Emotions are viewed as having evolved through their adaptive value in dealing with fundamental life-tasks. Each emotion has unique features: signal, physiology, and antecedent events. Each emotion also has characteristics in common with other emotions: rapid onset, short duration, unbidden occurrence, automatic appraisal, and coherence among responses. These shared and unique characteristics are the product of our evolution, and distinguish emotions from other affective phenomena.

The current paper plunges into the reality of a European Research and Innovation project on forced migration, with the aim of explaining the challenge of embedding gender equity approach into the entire process. The level of gender sensitivity of the initiative is analysed, as well as the difficulties and benefits in the implementation of gender equity in a culturally diverse and complex research surrounding of a three year H2020 initiative focused on finding tailored attention and inclusion strategies for forced migrants. (...) Findings show the need for additional training at international level, and the quest for genuinely transformative gender equity strategies. (shrink)

The paper deals with the mutual interest of both economic and social theory in exploring a broader concept of the rational and in finding validity claims for rational discourse. Efficiency and effectiveness are discussed as possible validity criteria in evaluating norms in practical discussion. In addition to the problem of defining validity criteria for argumentation on norms and social choices, a major difficulty arises from the lack of a legitimate reflective centre in society which could integrate behaviour with norms and (...) metapreferences. As ways of motivating cooperative, collective action, both norm commitment and self‐interest should be appealed to. (shrink)

Emotions are discrete, automatic responses to universally shared, culture-specific and individual-specific events. The emotion terms, such as anger, fear, etcetera, denote a family of related states sharing at least 12 characteristics, which distinguish one emotion family from another, as well as from other affective states. These affective responses are preprogrammed and involuntary, but are also shaped by life experiences.

The editors of this unique volume have brought together 24 leading emotion theorists with a wide variety of perspectives to address 12 fundamental questions about the subject.

This study explored patients' experiences of participation and non-participation in their health care. A questionnaire-based survey method was used. Content analysis showed that conditions for patient participation occurred when information was provided not by using standard procedures but based on individual needs and accompanied by explanations, when the patient was regarded as an individual, when the patient's knowledge was recognized by staff, and when the patient made decisions based on knowledge and needs, or performed self-care. Thus, to provide conditions for (...) true patient participation, professionals need to recognize each patient's unique knowledge and respect the individual's description of his or her situation rather than just inviting the person to participate in decision making. (shrink)

Background Professional care workers face ethical issues in long-term care settings (LTCS) for older adults. They need to be independent and responsible, despite limited resources, a shortage of skilled professionals, global and societal changes, and the negative reputation of LTCS work. Research aim Our aim was to describe the care workers’ lived experiences of ethical issues. The findings can be used to gain new perspectives and to guide decision-making to improve the quality of care, occupational well-being and nursing education. Research (...) design Focus group interviews were analyzed using a hermeneutic-phenomenological method. The analysis comprised three steps: naïve reading, structural analysis, and comprehensive understanding. Participants and research context We randomly sampled LTCS service providers in Finland and 53 care workers with different educational backgrounds from seven organizations participated in focus group interviews in 2021. Ethical considerations This was a sensitive study, which was connected to the participants’ individual views of the world, professional ethics and social and health care legislation. The participants' provided informed consent and their anonymity was guaranteed. Findings Care workers spoke about their lived experiences of ethical issues in an emotional way, using practical examples. They talked about how they were experts at caring and advocating for residents, balanced the responsibilities of their different roles, and defended their work to the wider society. The care workers said that ethical aspects of their work were too difficult to solve on their own. There were elements of their working environment and practices that caused unnecessary strain and they needed the commitment of managers, organizations, and society to solve ethical issues in LTCS. Conclusions Ethical issues were related to the well-being of both residents and care workers and reflected both internal and external pressures. Some issues could not be resolved by individuals and needed input from managers, organizations, and society. (shrink)

Person‐centred care is founded on ethics as a basis for organizing care. In spite of healthcare systems claiming that they have implemented person‐centred care, patients report less satisfaction with care. These contrasting results require clarification of how to practice person‐centred ethics using Paul Ricoeur's ‘Little ethics’, summarized as: ‘aiming for the good life, with and for others in just institutions’. In this ethic Kantian morality is at once subordinate and complementary to Aristotelian ethics because the ethical goal needs to be (...) critically assessed and passed through the examination of the norm in each care situation. This paper presents examples that describes a person‐centred care practice that balance a critical review of care activities based on a conviction of aiming for patients' wellbeing. In contrast to patients' experiences of person‐centred care in real life, research projects have shown that if the clinical performers comprehend and apply the practice of person‐centred ethics, patients report positive outcomes. The implementation of person‐centred care therefore demands that stakeholders and managers enables and requires that healthcare staff study ethics in the same way as studying for example pharmacology is required when handling patients' medicines. (shrink)

The right inferior frontal gyrus has most strongly, although not exclusively, been associated with response inhibition, not least based on covariations of behavioral performance measures and local gray matter characteristics. However, the white matter microstructure of the rIFG as well as its connectivity has been less in focus, especially when it comes to the consideration of potential subdivisions within this area. The present study reconstructed the structural connections of the three main subregions of the rIFG using diffusion tensor imaging, and (...) further assessed their associations with behavioral measures of inhibitory control. The results revealed a marked heterogeneity of the three subregions with respect to the pattern and extent of their connections, with the pars orbitalis showing the most widespread inter-regional connectivity, while the pars opercularis showed the lowest number of interconnected regions. When relating behavioral performance measures of a stop signal task to brain structure, the data indicated an association between the dorsal opercular connectivity and the go reaction time and the stopping accuracy. (shrink)

Therapeutic alliance is a central concept in psychotherapeutic work. The relationship between the therapist and the patient plays an important role in the therapeutic process and outcome. In this article, we investigate how therapists work with disaffiliation resulting from enduring disagreement while maintaining an orientation to the psychotherapeutic project at hand. Data come from a total of 18 sessions of two dyads undergoing psychoanalytic psychotherapy and is analyzed with conversation analysis. We found that collaborative moves deployed amidst enduring disagreement can (...) assist the therapist in furthering the disagreement as part of the ongoing psychotherapeutic project. Relying on their collaborative format, therapists utilize collaborative moves to temporarily mend the disaffiliation without necessarily changing their position and re-affiliating with the patient. We show how the relation between the therapist and the patient gets transformed in the moment-by-moment work accomplished in the psychotherapeutic talk. (shrink)

We have national guidelines for the responsible conduct of research (RCR) and procedures for handling allegations of misconduct in Finland. The guidelines have been formulated and updated by the Finnish Advisory Board on Research Integrity (TENK). In this article, we introduce and evaluate the national RCR guidelines. We also present statistics of alleged and proven RCR violation cases and frequency of appeals to TENK on the decisions or procedures of the primary institutions. In addition, we analyze the available data on (...) seven investigated cases in more detail. Positive aspects in the Finnish system are a fairly good infrastructure to investigate suspected RCR violations and a wide concept of RCR violations, which consists of fabrication, falsification, plagiarism, misappropriation, and other misbehaviors. However, the guidelines contain poorly elaborated definitions, do not treat the complainant and the suspect in an equal way, and need to be revised. Confusion about the concepts and criteria of the RCR violations seems to be common in primary institutions and among the complainants. Even if research institutions and universities have officially adhered to the national RCR guidelines, slipping from the guidelines occurs quite commonly. All these factors lead to frequent dissatisfaction with the decisions or procedures applied, high rate of appeals to TENK, and far from optimal functionality of the system. (shrink)

The growing importance of researching online activities, such as cyber-deviance and cyber-crime, as well as the use of online tools (e.g. questionnaires, games, and other interactive tools) has created new ethical and legal challenges for researchers, which can be even more complicated when researching adolescents. In this article, we highlight the risks emerging from the current European legal and ethical landscape when researching potentially vulnerable groups, with a special focus on online research. It is not always clear how to differentiate (...) research ethics consent from consent for data processing activities: when can an adolescent independently consent to research, or when is parental consent needed? Additional problems emerge when parents do not consent to research activities, but their adolescent children do. A serious ethical challenge can arise when the parents do not communicate with researchers, but the adolescent wishes to participate, especially when weak parental oversight is coupled with research on sensitive topics. We offer some guidance on what to keep in mind when conducting online research with adolescents and highlight possible ways that these issues can be dealt with in pan-European projects. (shrink)

The purpose of this study was to explore the views and experiences of adult cancer patients about patient participation in care and decision making and the preconditions for this participation. The data were collected by means of focused interviews; in addition the patients completed depression and problem-solving instruments. The sample comprised 34 cancer patients from the haematological and oncological wards of one university hospital in Finland. The results revealed considerable variation in the patients’ views on their participation in care and (...) decision making. Some of the patients understood participation either in terms of contributing to the decision making or in terms of expressing their views on treatment options. Some considered that their participation in care was impossible. Patient participation in care and decision making was promoted by good health, access to information, assertiveness, good interactive relationships with nurses and physicians, and encouragement by nurses and physicians to participate. Factors restricting such patient participation were poor health, ignorance, anxiety, age, time pressures of staff, lack of time, high staff turnover and poor interactive relationships. With regard to participation in medical decision making, the patients were divided into three groups: active participants, patients giving active consent, and patients giving passive consent to medical decisions. (shrink)

The primary means for psychotherapy interaction is language. Since talk-in-interaction is accomplished and rendered interpretable by the systematic use of linguistic resources, this study focuses on one of the central issues in psychotherapy, namely agency, and the ways in which linguistic resources, person references in particular, are used for constructing different types of agency in psychotherapy interaction. The study investigates therapists' responses to turns where the client complains about a third party. It focuses on the way therapists' responses distribute experience (...) and agency between the therapist and the client by comparing responses formulated with the zero-person to responses formulated with a second person singular pronoun that refers to the client. The study thus approaches agency as situated, dynamic and interactional: an agent is a social unit whose elements are distributed in the therapist-client interaction. The data consist of 70 audio-recorded sessions of cognitive psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, and the method of analysis is conversation analysis and interactional linguistics. The main findings are that therapists use the zero-person for two types of responses: affiliating and empathetic responses that distribute the emotional experience between the client and the therapist, and responses that invite clients to interpret their own experiences, thereby distributing control and responsibility to the clients. In contrast, the second person references are used for re-constructing the client's past history. The conclusion is that therapists use the zero-person for both immediate emotional work and interpretative co-work on the client's experiences. The study suggests that therapists' use of the zero-person does not necessarily attribute “weak agency” to the client but instead might strengthen the clients' agency in the sense of control and responsibility in the long term. (shrink)

While empirical studies of research ethics and integrity are increasingly common, few have aimed at national scope, and even fewer at current results from Central and Eastern Europe. This article introduces the results of the first national research integrity survey in Estonia, which included all research-performing organisations in Estonia, was inclusive of all disciplines and all levels of experience. A web-based survey was developed and carried out in Estonia with a call sent to all accredited Estonian research institutions. The results (...) indicate that the vast majority (89%) of respondents consider research ethics and integrity issues important and view falsification, fabrication, and plagiarism (FFPs) as the most severe forms of misconduct. Self-reporting of FFPs is generally comparable to levels published in other studies (6.2%). Gift authorship (41%) and hampering the work of a colleague (32%) were problematic practices most noticed among colleagues. At the same time, two of the noticed questionable research practices (QRPs) – salami-slicing and misuse of research funding – were seen as less severe, hinting at the existence of counter-norms that career advancement rules and structural factors like funding policies may encourage. The availability of research ethics and integrity guidelines was considered good. Ethical aspects of studying potentially stigmatising data in a very small research community are discussed in the article and results are analysed through counter-norms and normative dissonance frames. (shrink)

In this article I discuss the problem of embodied subjectivity, viewed from the perspective of spatiality. The questions I address arise from my ethnographic study on chronic pain. My main argument is that, in contrast to philosophical understanding of space as an a priori, or as a container, space and spatiality are shaped and reshaped through the body in pain. What characterizes most patients' experiences of space is movement. This can be understood through Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological theory of the lived body (...) but needs in addition a cultural contextualization. Because of biomedical thinking, in Western settings chronic pain is liminal. It does not fit the biomedical categories of disease or space. This profoundly shapes patients' understanding of their subjectivity as homeless, and their experience of spatiality as estranged and exiled. (shrink)