Although ethics consultation is offered as a clinical service in most hospitals in the United States, few valid and practical tools are available to evaluate, ensure, and improve ethics consultation quality. The quality of ethics consultation is important because poor quality ethics consultation can result in ethically inappropriate outcomes for patients, other stakeholders, or the health care system. To promote accountability for the quality of ethics consultation, we developed the Ethics Consultation Quality Assessment Tool. ECQAT enables raters to assess the (...) quality of ethics consultations based on the written record. Through rigorous development and preliminary testing, we identified key elements of a quality ethics consultation, established scoring criteria, developed training guidelines, and designed a holistic assessment process. This article describes the development of the ECQAT,.. (shrink)

Dispositional forgiveness is positively associated with many facets of wellbeing and has protective implications against depression and anxiety in adolescents. However, little work has been done to examine neurobiological aspects of forgiveness as they relate to clinical symptoms. In order to better understand the neural mechanisms supporting the protective role of forgiveness in adolescents, the current study examined the middle frontal gyrus, which comprises the majority of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and is associated with cognitive regulation, and its relationship to (...) forgiveness and clinical symptoms in a sample of healthy adolescents. In this cross-sectional study, larger MFG volume was significantly associated with higher self-reported dispositional forgiveness scores and lower levels of depressive and anxiety symptoms. Forgiveness mediated the relationship between MFG volume and both depressive and anxiety symptom levels. The mediating role of forgiveness in the relationship between MFG volume and clinical symptoms suggests that one way that cognitive regulation strategies supported by this brain region may improve adolescent mental health is via increasing a capacity for forgiveness. The present study highlights the relevance of forgiveness to neurobiology and their relevance to emotional health in adolescents. Future longitudinal studies should focus on the predictive quality of the relationship between forgiveness, brain volume and clinical symptoms and the effects of forgiveness interventions on these relationships. (shrink)

IntroductionThose in mental health-related consumer movements have made clear their demands for humane treatment and basic civil rights, an end to stigma and discrimination, and a chance to participate in their own recovery. But theorizing about the politics of recognition, 'recognition rights' and epistemic justice, suggests that they also have a stake in the broad cultural meanings associated with conceptions of mental health and illness.ResultsFirst person accounts of psychiatric diagnosis and mental health care (shown here to represent 'counter stories' to (...) the powerful 'master narrative' of biomedical psychiatry), offer indications about how experiences of mental disorder might be reframed and redefined as part of efforts to acknowledge and honor recognition rights and epistemic justice. However, the task of cultural semantics is one for the entire culture, not merely consumers. These new meanings must be negotiated. When they are not the result of negotiation, group-wrought definitions risk imposing a revision no less constraining than the mis-recognizing one it aims to replace. Contested realities make this a challenging task when it comes to cultural meanings about mental disorder. Examples from mental illness memoirs about two contested realities related to psychosis are examined here: the meaninglessness of symptoms, and the role of insight into illness. They show the magnitude of the challenge involved - for consumers, practitioners, and the general public - in the reconstruction of these new meanings and realities.ConclusionTo honor recognition rights and epistemic justice acknowledgement must be made of the heterogeneity of the effects of, and of responses to, psychiatric diagnosis and care, and the extent of the challenge of the reconstructive cultural semantics involved. (shrink)

My thanks to Professors Hawkins and Szmukler for their thoughtful commentaries; I am particularly glad to see these scholars' valuable expertise directed toward what raises pressing issues not only for psychiatry but for contemporary society.Prof. Hawkins reasons that the use of forced feeding with some anorexia is justified, while emphasizing that this will occur rarely. She and I are in agreement that a mere handful of cases may be affected by our debate, since anecdotal evidence from clinical settings as well (...) as the studies Hawkins cites suggest that forced feeding will often be contraindicated. Still, the matter can equally well be cast hypothetically, as I implied in my earlier discussion. If forced feeding... (shrink)

Background: Women's health has received renewed attention in the last few years including health rehabilitation options for women affected by breast cancer. Dancing has often been regarded as one attractive option for supporting women's well-being and health, but research with women recovering from breast cancer is still in its infancy. Dancing with Health is multi-site pilot study that aimed to evaluate a dance programme for women in recovery from breast cancer across five European countries.Methods: A standardized 32 h dance protocol (...) introduced a range of Latin American dances presented within a sports and exercise framework with influences from dance movement therapy. Fifty-four women participated in the study who had a breast cancer diagnosis 6 weeks, no indication of metastasis, or scheduled surgery/chemotherapy/radiation treatment for the duration of the intervention. Primary outcome data was collected for anthropometric and fitness measures next to cancer-related quality of life. T-tests and Wilcoxon signed ranked tests were used to establish differences pre and post intervention. Cohen's d was also calculated to determine the effect size of the intervention.Results: Statistically significant changes were found for: weight, right and left forearm circumference and hip; 6 min walking, right and left handgrip, sit-to-stand and sit-and-reach; the EORTC-QLQ C30 summary score as well as the subscales of emotional and social functioning and symptoms. In all cases the direction of change was positive, while Cohen's d calculated showed that the effect of the intervention for these parameters ranged from intermediate to large.Conclusion: Changes on the above anthropometric, fitness and quality of life measures suggest that the intervention was of value to the participating women recovering from breast cancer. Results also advocate collaborative efforts across countries to further research. (shrink)

The use of list-learning paradigms to explore false memory has revealed several critical findings about the contributions of similarity and relatedness in memory phenomena more broadly. Characterizing the nature of “similarity and relatedness” can inform researchers about factors contributing to memory distortions and about the underlying associative and semantic networks that support veridical memory. Similarity can be defined in terms of semantic properties, lexical/associative properties, or structural properties. By manipulating the type of list and its relationship to a non-studied critical (...) item, we review the effects of these types of similarity on veridical and false memory. All forms of similarity reviewed here result in reliable error rates and the effects on veridical memory are variable. The results across a variety of paradigms and tests provide partial support for a number of theoretical explanations of false memory phenomena, but none of the theories readily account for all results. (shrink)

Ruchkin et al. ascribe a pivotal role to long-term memory representations and binding within working memory. Here we focus on the interaction of working memory and long-term memory in supporting on-line representations of experience available to guide on-going processing, and we distinguish the role of frontal-lobe systems from what the hippocampus contributes to relational long-term memory binding.

Although O'Regan & Noë (O&N) claim that the world may serve as the viewers' external visual memory, findings from the field of memory research have demonstrated the existence of internal visual representations. These representations are stored in the viewer's brain, contain information regarding visual objects and their relations, guide subsequent exploration of the visual world and promote change detection.

This chapter explores what Kant means by “life”, the “feeling of life”, the “feeling of the promotion of life”, and related notions, such as the idea of a “vital power”, through the contrast between Kant’s account of the beautiful and his account of the sublime. We argue that it is significant that Kant characterizes the feeling of the beautiful as a feeling of the promotion of life but the feeling of the sublime in terms of vital powers. We account for (...) this difference by showing that in experiences of beauty, we are aware of ourselves as rational but embodied human beings, as part of nature. In the feeling of the sublime, by contrast, we are aware of ourselves as pure rational beings. This entails that in the beautiful, we experience nature as deeply life-promoting, while in the sublime, we experience the independence of our supersensible vocation from nature. (shrink)

Evolutionary developmental biology (evo-devo) has undergone dramatic transformations since its emergence as a distinct discipline. This paper aims to highlight the scope, power, and future promise of evo-devo to transform and unify diverse aspects of biology. We articulate key questions at the core of eleven biological disciplines—from Evolution, Development, Paleontology, and Neurobiology to Cellular and Molecular Biology, Quantitative Genetics, Human Diseases, Ecology, Agriculture and Science Education, and lastly, Evolutionary Developmental Biology itself—and discuss why evo-devo is uniquely situated to substantially improve (...) our ability to find meaningful answers to these fundamental questions. We posit that the tools, concepts, and ways of thinking developed by evo-devo have profound potential to advance, integrate, and unify biological sciences as well as inform policy decisions and illuminate science education. We look to the next generation of evolutionary developmental biologists to help shape this process as we confront the scientific challenges of the 21st century. (shrink)

This paper examines the claim that the two final articles of Rav Kook’s book Ikvei Hatzon were written as a response to a lecture given by Hermann Cohen. It first reviews Cohen’s lecture showing that, regarding the concept of God, Cohen argues for the compatibility of Judaism and Kantianism in denying the dogmatic-mythological preoccupation with the existence of God in favor of understanding God as the basis of morality. Second, it analyzes Kook’s articles, demonstrating that he accepts (...) the compatibility of Judaism and Kantianism together with the denial of the dogmatic relation to God as a substance. Nevertheless, Kook is not satisfied with the critical view that denies the dogmatic relation to the substance altogether, since it formulates a merely negative relationship with God. Instead, he develops his concept of the Divine Ideals, which synthesizes the dogmatic preoccupation with substantiality and the critical denial of it. The Divine Ideals are the moral progression of man, through which man gradually becomes identical to God. Within the Divine Ideals, dogmatism becomes an emotional striving to be identical with God as a substance, while criticism is the intellectual negation of the possibility of such identity, which ensures that the process will continue indefinitely. (shrink)

Recent, well-publicized scandals, involving unethical conduct have rekindled interest in academic misconduct. Prior studies of academic misconduct have focussed exclusively on situational factors (e.g., integrity culture, honor codes), demographic variables or personality constructs. We contend that it is important to also examine how␣these classes of variables interact to influence perceptions of and intentions relating to academic misconduct. In a sample of 217 business students, we examined how integrity culture interacts with Prudence and Adjustment to explain variance in estimated frequency of (...) cheating, suspicions of cheating, considering cheating and reporting cheating. Age, integrity culture, and personality variables were significantly related to different criteria. Overall, personality variables explained the most unique variance in academic misconduct, and Adjustment interacted with integrity culture, such that integrity culture had more influence on intentions to cheat for less well-adjusted individuals. Implications for practice are discussed and future research directions are offered. (shrink)

It has been a decade since the phrase virtue argumentation was introduced, and while it would be an exaggeration to say that it burst onto the scene, it would be just as much of an understatement to say that it has gone unnoticed. Trying to strike the virtuous mean between the extremes of hyperbole and litotes, then, we can fairly characterize it as a way of thinking about arguments and argumentation that has steadily attracted more and more attention from argumentation (...) theorists. We hope it is neither too late for an introduction to the field nor too soon for some retrospective assessment of where things stand. (shrink)