Emotion management and occupational therapy student learning on placement: A post-structuralist exploration

Introduction: The role of emotion management and emotional labour has been extensively debated and theorised in nursing and medical literature, but until recently, there has been very little written from an occupational therapy perspective Method: This doctoral research explored the emotional aspects of placement learning with a group of seven third-year occupational therapy students, using a post-structural theoretical framework and methodology. A creative arts–based qualitative methodology was employed. The researcher facilitated creative writing groups in which students produced stories and poems about placement experiences. The writing, the group discussions and the one-to-one conversations were analysed with post-structuralist and narrative theory. Findings: The innovative method produced writing that evokes the placement experiences and captures the students’ endeavours to manage their emotions in order to ‘perform the professional’. The findings reveal the role of emotion management in the discourses of professionalism in the health and social-care environment. Conclusion: The research raises questions for the occupational therapy profession about the hidden emotional aspects of our practice and proposes an alternative view of emotion management to that which is implied in the concept of emotional intelligence

The potential therapeutic benefits of reading poetry to nursing home residents : the road less travelled?

In this paper we report on a project to take poetry into a nursing home, building on the widely-held belief in the benefits of poetry in therapeutic settings. This intervention involved us reading poetry aloud in a nursing home and reflecting on how residents reacted to these texts. Our findings suggest that talking about the poetry allowed members of this community to self-reflect and tell narratives that were important to them. Sometimes the poem served as a catalyst, encouraging the disclosure of poignant stories, while at other times the poems seemed incidental to the stories told by the group. Our subsequent reflections also suggested to us that there were several areas that needed further exploration. The poems are not delivered straight to the listener with no mediation; rather, the poems and the discussion afterwards are mediated by both the general expectations and particular interventions of the audience and the facilitators

Exploring the emotional landscapes of placement learning in occupational therapy education.

This thesis is an account of a research project which explored how 3rd year occupational therapy students negotiate the emotional aspects of their placement learning, an integral part of their university course. The project involved students in producing creative writing that would illuminate a previously unheard/hidden aspect of their learning.The research was based on a wide ranging literature review of emotional labour in health and social care work and a poststructuralist critique of the concept of emotion. The research employed a set of four creative writing groups with student participants who produced stories and poems about their placement experiences. The writing, the group discussions and the one to one conversations based on the writing produced were analysed with poststructuralist and narrative theory. The students' stories reveal the role of emotion management as part of the 'technologies of the self (Foucault, 1988) as they engage with the discourses of professionalism in the health and social care environment.The student participants' work illustrates a constantly changing, complex and sometimes contradictory set of professional discourses which they navigate to perform the professional. Their creative writing is an evocation of their placement learning experience rather than a re-creation, one that provokes the reader to feel what aspects of their placement were like. The stories and poems reveal the impact of place, people and practices on their feelings and emotional expression/management as they constitute themselves as professional occupational therapists. The poststructuralist epistemology and creative research methodology adds a new dimension to the debate about the nature and role of emotional labour within health and social care

‘Working on a rocky shore’: Micro-moments of positive affect in academic work

Neoliberal ideologies, marketization and performative regimes ssociated with recent reforms in universities have exerted considerable pressure on academic working conditions and subjects in recent years. While analysing these pressures is important, it is also productive to consider the ways in which academics engage in moments of resistance by mobilising resources beyond those of critique. This paper therefore focuses on joy and positive affect in the everyday moments of academic life. It utilises the feminist methodology of collective biography to explore ways of making the restricted spaces of our working day more expansive and finding within them unexpected openings for joy. Our analysis of the stories included in this paper traces the mercurial and ambiguous affective atmospheres of academic work. We suggest that joy is founded upon connections with others, that it arises in different academic spaces and that it can lead to revised knowing of ourselves. We argue that the glimpses of joy evident in this paper provoke affective attunement within the everyday, sensitizing us to other fragments of joy and providing strategies to strengthen that resistance

Combined carbonate carbon isotopic and cellular ultrastructural studies of individual benthic foraminifera : method description

Author Posting. © American Geophysical Union, 2010. This article is posted here by permission of American Geophysical Union for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Paleoceanography 25 (2010): PA2211, doi:10.1029/2009PA001846.Carbon isotopes of foraminiferal tests provide a widely used proxy for past oceanographic environmental conditions. This proxy can be calibrated using live specimens, which are reliably identified with observations of cell ultrastructure. Observations of ultrastructures can also be used for studies of biological characteristics such as diet and presence of symbionts. Combining biological and isotopic studies on individual foraminifera could provide novel information, but standard isotopic methods destroy ultrastructures by desiccating specimens and observations of ultrastructure require removal of carbonate tests, preventing isotope measurements. The approach described here preserves cellular ultrastructure during isotopic analyses by keeping the foraminifera in an aqueous buffer (Phosphate Buffered Saline (PBS)). The technique was developed and standardized with 36 aliquots of NBS-19 standard of similar weight to foraminiferal tests (5 to 123 μg). Standard errors ranged from ± 0.06 to ± 0.85‰ and were caused by CO2 contaminants dissolved in the PBS. The technique was used to measure δ13C values of 96 foraminifera, 10 of which do not precipitate carbonate tests. Calcareous foraminiferal tests had corrected carbon isotope ratios of −8.5 to +3.2‰. This new technique allows comparisons of isotopic compositions of tests made by foraminifera known to be alive at the time of collection with their biological characteristics such as prey composition and presence or absence of putative symbionts. The approach may be applied to additional biomineralizing organisms such as planktonic foraminifera, pteropods, corals, and coccolithophores to elucidate certain biological controls on their paleoceanographic proxy signatures.Support was provided by NSF grants OCE‐0550396 (to J.B.M.), OCE‐0551001 (to J.M.B.), and OCE‐ 0550401 (to A.E.R.)

Evaluation of polygenic risk scores for breast and ovarian cancer risk prediction in BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutation carriers

Background: Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified 94 common single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) associated with breast cancer (BC) risk and 18 associated with ovarian cancer (OC) risk. Several of these are also associated with risk of BC or OC for women who carry a pathogenic mutation in the high-risk BC and OC genes BRCA1 or BRCA2. The combined effects of these variants on BC or OC risk for BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutation carriers have not yet been assessed while their clinical management could benefit from improved personalized risk estimates. Methods: We constructed polygenic risk scores (PRS) using BC and OC susceptibility SNPs identified through population-based GWAS: for BC (overall, estrogen receptor [ER]-positive, and ER-negative) and for OC. Using data from 15 252 female BRCA1 and 8211 BRCA2 carriers, the association of each PRS with BC or OC risk was evaluated using a weighted cohort approach, with time to diagnosis as the outcome and estimation of the hazard ratios (HRs) per standard deviation increase in the PRS. Results: The PRS for ER-negative BC displayed the strongest association with BC risk in BRCA1 carriers (HR = 1.27, 95% confidence interval [CI] = 1.23 to 1.31, P = 8.2 x 10(53)). In BRCA2 carriers, the strongest association with BC risk was seen for the overall BC PRS (HR = 1.22, 95% CI = 1.17 to 1.28, P = 7.2 x 10(-20)). The OC PRS was strongly associated with OC risk for both BRCA1 and BRCA2 carriers. These translate to differences in absolute risks (more than 10% in each case) between the top and bottom deciles of the PRS distribution; for example, the OC risk was 6% by age 80 years for BRCA2 carriers at the 10th percentile of the OC PRS compared with 19% risk for those at the 90th percentile of PRS. Conclusions: BC and OC PRS are predictive of cancer risk in BRCA1 and BRCA2 carriers. Incorporation of the PRS into risk prediction models has promise to better inform decisions on cancer risk management

BRCA2 polymorphic stop codon K3326X and the risk of breast, prostate, and ovarian cancers

Background: The K3326X variant in BRCA2 (BRCA2*c.9976A>T; p.Lys3326*; rs11571833) has been found to be associated with small increased risks of breast cancer. However, it is not clear to what extent linkage disequilibrium with fully pathogenic mutations might account for this association. There is scant information about the effect of K3326X in other hormone-related cancers. Methods: Using weighted logistic regression, we analyzed data from the large iCOGS study including 76 637 cancer case patients and 83 796 control patients to estimate odds ratios (ORw) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) for K3326X variant carriers in relation to breast, ovarian, and prostate cancer risks, with weights defined as probability of not having a pathogenic BRCA2 variant. Using Cox proportional hazards modeling, we also examined the associations of K3326X with breast and ovarian cancer risks among 7183 BRCA1 variant carriers. All statistical tests were two-sided. Results: The K3326X variant was associated with breast (ORw = 1.28, 95% CI = 1.17 to 1.40, P = 5.9x10- 6) and invasive ovarian cancer (ORw = 1.26, 95% CI = 1.10 to 1.43, P = 3.8x10-3). These associations were stronger for serous ovarian cancer and for estrogen receptor–negative breast cancer (ORw = 1.46, 95% CI = 1.2 to 1.70, P = 3.4x10-5 and ORw = 1.50, 95% CI = 1.28 to 1.76, P = 4.1x10-5, respectively). For BRCA1 mutation carriers, there was a statistically significant inverse association of the K3326X variant with risk of ovarian cancer (HR = 0.43, 95% CI = 0.22 to 0.84, P = .013) but no association with breast cancer. No association with prostate cancer was observed. Conclusions: Our study provides evidence that the K3326X variant is associated with risk of developing breast and ovarian cancers independent of other pathogenic variants in BRCA2. Further studies are needed to determine the biological mechanism of action responsible for these associations

What is an intelligent building? Analysis of recent interpretations from an international perspective

In recent years, the notion of intelligent buildings (IBs) has become increasingly popular due to their potentials for deploying design initiatives and emerging technologies towards maximized occupants’ comfort and well-being with sustainable design. However, various definitions, interpretations, and implications regarding the essence of IBs exist. Various key performance indicators of IBs have been proposed in different contexts. This study explores the notion of IBs and presents an analysis of their main constituents. Through a comparison of these constituents in different contexts, this study aims to extract the common features of IBs leading to an evolved definition which could be useful as a reference framework for design, evaluation, and development of future IBs. Findings also scrutinize the long run benefits of IBs, while demonstrating the constraints and challenges of the current international interpretations

Elevated circulating levels of succinate in human obesity are linked to specific gut microbiota

Gut microbiota-related metabolites are potential clinical biomarkers for cardiovascular disease (CVD). Circulating succinate, a metabolite produced by both microbiota and the host, is increased in hypertension, ischemic heart disease, and type 2 diabetes. We aimed to analyze systemic levels of succinate in obesity, a major risk factor for CVD, and its relationship with gut microbiome. We explored the association of circulating succinate with specific metagenomic signatures in cross-sectional and prospective cohorts of Caucasian Spanish subjects. Obesity was associated with elevated levels of circulating succinate concomitant with impaired glucose metabolism. This increase was associated with specific changes in gut microbiota related to succinate metabolism: a higher relative abundance of succinate-producing Prevotellaceae (P) and Veillonellaceae (V), and a lower relative abundance of succinate-consuming Odoribacteraceae (O) and Clostridaceae (C) in obese individuals, with the (P + V/O + C) ratio being a main determinant of plasma succinate. Weight loss intervention decreased (P + V/O + C) ratio coincident with the reduction in circulating succinate. In the spontaneous evolution after good dietary advice, alterations in circulating succinate levels were linked to specific metagenomic signatures associated with carbohydrate metabolism and energy production with independence of body weight change. Our data support the importance of microbe-microbe interactions for the metabolite signature of gut microbiome and uncover succinate as a potential microbiota-derived metabolite related to CVD risk