Dirty laundry: The nature and substance of seeking relationship help from strangers online

Interpersonal relationships are vital to our well-being. In recent years, it has become increasingly common to seek relationship help through anonymous online platforms. Accordingly, we conducted a large-scale analysis of real-world relationship help-seeking to create a descriptive overview of the nature and substance of online relationship help-seeking. By analyzing the demographic characteristics and language of relationship help-seekers on Reddit (N = 184,631), we establish the first-ever big data analysis of relationship help-seeking and relationship problems in situ among the general population. Our analyses highlight real-world relationship struggles found in the general population, extending beyond past work that is typically limited to counseling/intervention settings. We find that relationship problem estimates from our sample are closer to those found in the general population, providing a more generalized insight into the distribution and prevalence of relationship problems as compared with past work. Further, we find several meaningful associations between relationship help-seeking behavior, gender, and attachment. Notably, numerous gender differences in help-seeking and romantic attachment emerged. Our findings suggest that, contrary to more traditional contexts, men are more likely to seek help with their relationships online, are more expressive of their emotions (e.g., discussing the topic of "heartache"), and show language patterns generally consistent with more secure attachment. Our analyses highlight pathways for further exploration, providing even deeper insights into the timing, lifecycle, and moderating factors that influence who, what, why, and how people seek help for their interpersonal relationships

Health literacy: The need to consider images as well as words

Editorial - no abstract available

The challenges for new academics in adopting student-centred approaches to teaching

The current article provides a perspective on the day-to-day challenges that a group of new teachers experienced as they adopted more student-centred approaches to teaching. Three semi-structured interviews were conducted over two years with 11 new teachers from a range of higher education institutions and subject disciplines. The analysis used case studies, alongside a search for common themes, to provide fine-grained insights into the teachers' development. A main finding was that in using approaches that more actively involved the students, the teachers described challenges specific to their local contexts. In particular, the idiosyncrasy of the topic being taught was a key factor. The second finding was that regardless of the conception of teaching held, all teachers described challenges in translating this way of thinking into practice. Such data provides a useful resource for academic developers to open dialogue with new academics about the challenges they face in developing as teachers

Can consumers learn to ask three questions to improve shared decision making? A feasibility study of the ASK (AskShareKnow) Patient–Clinician Communication Model® intervention in a primary health-care setting

Funded by Informed Medical Decisions Foundation. Grant Number: #0175-1 National Health and Medical Research Council Public Health Training Fellowship. Grant Number: 568962Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Natural emotion vocabularies and borderline personality disorder

Background Emotion dysregulation is a characteristic central to borderline personality disorder (BPD). Valuably, verbal behaviour can provide a unique perspective for studying emotion dysregulation in BPD, with recent research suggesting that the varieties of emotion words one actively uses (i.e., active emotion vocabularies [EVs]) reflect habitual experience and potential dysregulation therein. Accordingly, the present research examined associations between BPD and active EVs across two studies. Methods Study 1 (N = 530) comprised a large non-clinical sample recruited from online forums, whereby BPD traits were measured via self-report. Study 2 (N = 64 couples) consisted of mixed-gender romantic couples in which the woman had a BPD diagnosis, as well as a control group of couples. In both studies, participants’ verbal behaviours were analysed to calculate their active EVs. Results Results from both studies revealed BPD to be associated with larger negative EV (i.e., using a broad variation of unique negative emotion words), which remained robust when controlling for general vocabulary size and negative affect word frequency in Study 2. The association between BPD and negative EV was insensitive to context. Limitations Limitations of this research include: 1) the absence of a clinical control group; 2) typical constraints surrounding word-counting approaches; and 3) the cross-sectional design (causality cannot be inferred). Conclusions Our findings contribute to BPD theory as well as the broader language and emotion literature. Importantly, these findings provide new insight into how individuals manifesting BPD attend to and represent their emotional experiences, which could be used to inform clinical practice

Information for choice: what people need, prefer and use - Executive summary for the National Institute for Health Research Service Delivery and Organisation programme

First paragraph: Choice is at the heart of all Government health policies but is meaningless without information. Information is pivotal to people's experience of choice and self-management. To make optimal choices with confidence and to build on their existing self-management strategies people need the right information, at the right time, with the right support to use it. We already know that people want information but not necessarily for making choices and that people facing complex treatment choices often prefer decisions to be made on their behalf by a well-informed and trusted health professional. SDO 08/1710/153 was commissioned to understand the types of information that people take account of when making choices, the format of information that they prefer, and whether preferences vary systematically according to socio-economic status, ethnicity, gender and age

Information for choice: what people need, prefer and use - Report for the National Institute for Health Research Service Delivery and Organisation programme

First paragraph: Choice is at the heart of all Government health policies (1-5). The SDO's scoping review of the evidence on patient choice in the NHS, commissioned in 2004, suggested that: people want information but not necessarily for making choices; that people facing complex treatment choices often prefer decisions to be made on their behalf by a well-informed and trusted health professional; that wanting the option of choosing a distant hospital for non urgent care is limited to those situations where there is a long wait for a local hospital and there is a history of poor quality care; that wealthy and better educated people are likely to benefit most from choice; and that there is little evidence that giving people more choice will, in itself, improve quality of care (6). It is recognised that information is pivotal to people's experience of choice and self-management; to make optimal choices with confidence and to build on their existing self-management strategies people need the right information, at the right time with right support to use it (7). Lord Darzi's Next Stage Review (8) made it clear that the English NHS was to be focused as: "an NHS that gives patients and the public more information and choice, works in partnership and has quality of care at its heart" (page 7) (our emphasis). SDO 08/1710/153 was commissioned in 2005. The brief called for research to understand the types of information that people take account of when making choices, the format of information that they prefer, and whether preferences vary systematically according to socio-economic status, ethnicity, gender and age. In responding to this brief we focused on two key types of information: 'general facts' and 'personal experience' information. By 'general facts' we mean research-based information about health care interventions and the risks and outcomes associated with them; medical knowledge that reflects consensus based on what has been observed among many patients/people; and other information that is widely accepted to be both reasonably reliable and fairly broadly applicable (e.g. statements of legal requirement or policy). By 'personal experience' information we mean information about the experiences of particular individuals, as communicated by themselves or others

Suited for Success? : Suits, Status, and Hybrid Masculinity

This document is the Accepted Manuscript version. The final, definitive version of this paper has been published in Men and Masculinities, March 2017, doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/1097184X17696193, published by SAGE Publishing, All rights reserved.This article analyzes the sartorial biographies of four Canadian men to explore how the suit is understood and embodied in everyday life. Each of these men varied in their subject positions—body shape, ethnicity, age, and gender identity—which allowed us to look at the influence of men’s intersectional identities on their relationship with their suits. The men in our research all understood the suit according to its most common representation in popular culture: a symbol of hegemonic masculinity. While they wore the suit to embody hegemonic masculine configurations of practice—power, status, and rationality—most of these men were simultaneously marginalized by the gender hierarchy. We explain this disjuncture by using the concept of hybrid masculinity and illustrate that changes in the style of hegemonic masculinity leave its substance intact. Our findings expand thinking about hybrid masculinity by revealing the ways subordinated masculinities appropriate and reinforce hegemonic masculinity.Peer reviewe

Challenges and Opportunities: What Can We Learn from Patients Living with Chronic Musculoskeletal Conditions, Health Professionals and Carers about the Concept of Health Literacy Using Qualitative Methods of Inquiry?

The field of health literacy continues to evolve and concern public health researchers and yet remains a largely overlooked concept elsewhere in the healthcare system. We conducted focus group discussions in England UK, about the concept of health literacy with older patients with chronic musculoskeletal conditions (mean age = 73.4 years), carers and health professionals. Our research posed methodological, intellectual and practical challenges. Gaps in conceptualisation and expectations were revealed, reiterating deficiencies in predominant models for understanding health literacy and methodological shortcomings of using focus groups in qualitative research for this topic. Building on this unique insight into what the concept of health literacy meant to participants, we present analysis of our findings on factors perceived to foster and inhibit health literacy and on the issue of responsibility in health literacy. Patients saw health literacy as a result of an inconsistent interactive process and the implications as wide ranging; healthcare professionals had more heterogeneous views. All focus group discussants agreed that health literacy most benefited from good inter-personal communication and partnership. By proposing a needs-based approach to health literacy we offer an alternative way of conceptualising health literacy to help improve the health of older people with chronic conditions

Local density approximations from finite systems

The local density approximation (LDA) constructed through quantum Monte Carlo calculations of the homogeneous electron gas (HEG) is the most common approximation to the exchange-correlation functional in density functional theory. We introduce an alternative set of LDAs constructed from slablike systems of one, two, and three electrons that resemble the HEG within a finite region, and illustrate the concept in one dimension. Comparing with the exact densities and Kohn-Sham potentials for various test systems, we find that the LDAs give a good account of the self-interaction correction, but are less reliable when correlation is stronger or currents flow