The psychologist's role in assessing and facilitating patients' knowledge of advance directives in medical settings: A preliminary investigation

In a time of budgetary shortfalls in the medical industry, an aging population, and an increased emphasis on health care choices, psychologists are being called upon to administer advance medical directive programs to patients. This study reports preliminary findings from a program to assess and facilitate patients' knowledge of advance directives (ADs) by the Psychology Service at the Ann Arbor VA Medical Center. The participant pool included 243 male veteran patients admitted to medical and surgical wards at the hospital. The intervention included the use of a computer-generated prompt for consultation, which was sent to the psychology staff in response to a patient inquiry regarding ADs. It also involved an increased emphasis on the delivery of written material on ADs by the admissions clerks. The intervention appeared to result in a modest increase in patients' knowledge of advance directives. Suggestions are offered for areas that should be emphasized in future attempts to increase patients' knowledge and utilization of advance directives.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/44859/1/10880_2005_Article_BF01996131.pd

Nothing at Stake in Knowledge

In the remainder of this article, we will disarm an important motivation for epistemic contextualism and interest-relative invariantism. We will accomplish this by presenting a stringent test of whether there is a stakes effect on ordinary knowledge ascription. Having shown that, even on a stringent way of testing, stakes fail to impact ordinary knowledge ascription, we will conclude that we should take another look at classical invariantism. Here is how we will proceed. Section 1 lays out some limitations of previous research on stakes. Section 2 presents our study and concludes that there is little evidence for a substantial stakes effect. Section 3 responds to objections. The conclusion clears the way for classical invariantism

The Gettier Intuition from South America to Asia

This article examines whether people share the Gettier intuition (viz. that someone who has a true justified belief that p may nonetheless fail to know that p) in 24 sites, located in 23 countries (counting Hong Kong as a distinct country) and across 17 languages. We also consider the possible influence of gender and personality on this intuition with a very large sample size. Finally, we examine whether the Gettier intuition varies across people as a function of their disposition to engage in “reflective” thinking

Happiness around the world: A combined etic-emic approach across 63 countries

What does it mean to be happy? The vast majority of cross-cultural studies on happiness have employed a Western-origin, or "WEIRD" measure of happiness that conceptualizes it as a self-centered (or "independent"), high-arousal emotion. However, research from Eastern cultures, particularly Japan, conceptualizes happiness as including an interpersonal aspect emphasizing harmony and connectedness to others. Following a combined emicetic approach (Cheung, van de Vijver & Leong, 2011), we assessed the cross-cultural applicability of a measure of independent happiness developed in the US (Subjective Happiness Scale; Lyubomirsky & Lepper, 1999) and a measure of interdependent happiness developed in Japan (Interdependent Happiness Scale; Hitokoto & Uchida, 2015), with data from 63 countries representing 7 sociocultural regions. Results indicate that the schema of independent happiness was more coherent in more WEIRD countries. In contrast, the coherence of interdependent happiness was unrelated to a country's "WEIRD-ness." Reliabilities of both happiness measures were lowest in African and Middle Eastern countries, suggesting these two conceptualizations of happiness may not be globally comprehensive. Overall, while the two measures had many similar correlates and properties, the self-focused concept of independent happiness is "WEIRD-er" than interdependent happiness, suggesting cross-cultural researchers should attend to both conceptualizations

The economic well-being of nations is associated with positive daily situational experiences

People in economically advantaged nations tend to evaluate their life as more positive overall and report greater well-being than people in less advantaged nations. But how does positivity manifest in the daily life experiences of individuals around the world? The present study asked 15,244 college students from 62 nations, in 42 languages, to describe a situation they experienced the previous day using the Riverside Situational Q-sort (RSQ). Using expert ratings, the overall positivity of each situation was calculated for both nations and individuals. The positivity of the average situation in each nation was strongly related to the economic development of the nation as measured by the Human Development Index (HDI). For individuals’ daily experiences, the economic status of their nation also predicted the positivity of their experience, even more than their family socioeconomic status. Further analyses revealed the specific characteristics of the average situations for higher HDI nations that make their experiences more positive. Higher HDI was associated with situational experiences involving humor, socializing with others, and the potential to express emotions and fantasies. Lower HDI was associated with an increase in the presence of threats, blame, and hostility, as well as situational experiences consisting of family, religion, and money. Despite the increase in a few negative situational characteristics in lower HDI countries, the overall average experience still ranged from neutral to slightly positive, rather than negative, suggesting that greater HDI may not necessarily increase positive experiences but rather decrease negative experiences. The results illustrate how national economic status influences the lives of individuals even within a single instance of daily life, with large and powerful consequences when accumulated across individuals within each nation

Neuronal plasticity: historical roots and evolution of meaning.

In this paper, we outline some important milestones in the history of the term "plasticity" in reference to the nervous system. Credit is given to William James for first adopting the term to denote changes in nervous paths associated with the establishment of habits; to Eugenio Tanzi for first identifying the articulations between neurons, not yet called synapses, as possible sites of neural plasticity; to Ernesto Lugaro for first linking neural plasticity with synaptic plasticity; and to Cajal for complementing Tanzi's hypothesis with his own hypothesis of plasticity as the result of the formation of new connections between cortical neurons. Cajal's early use of the word plasticity is demonstrated, and his subsequent avoidance of the term is tentatively accounted for by the fact that other authors extended it to mean neuronal reactions partly pathological and no doubt quite different from those putatively associated with normal learning. Evidence is furnished that in the first two decades of the twentieth century the theory was generally accepted that learning is based on a reduced resistance at exercized synapses, and that neural processes become associated by coactivation. Subsequently the theory fell in disgrace when Lashley's ideas about mass action and functional equipotentiality of the cortex tended to outmode models of the brain based on orthodox neural circuitry. The synaptic plasticity theory of learning was rehabilitated in the late 1940s when Konorski and particularly Hebb argued successfully that there was no better alternative way to think about the modifiability of the brain by experience and practice. Hebb's influential hypothesis about the mechanism of adult learning contained elements strikingly similar to the early speculations of James, Tanzi and Cajal, but Hebb did not acknowledge specifically these roots of his thinking about the brain, though he was fully aware that he had resurrected old ideas wrongly neglected for a long time. Lately the concept of neural plasticity has been complicated by attributing considerably different meanings to it. A scholarly paper by Paillard is used to show how an analysis in depth can clarify some confusion engendered by an unrestricted use of the concept and term of neural plasticity