The use of contextualised standardised client simulation to develop clinical reasoning in final year veterinary students

Clinical reasoning is an important skill for veterinary students to develop before graduation. Simulation has been studied in medical education as a method for developing clinical reasoning in students, but evidence supporting it is limited. This study involved the creation of a contextualized, standardized client simulation session that aimed to improve the clinical reasoning ability and confidence of final-year veterinary students. Sixty-eight participants completed three simulated primary-care consultations, with the client played by an actor and the pet by a healthy animal. Survey data showed that all participants felt that the session improved their clinical decision-making ability. Quantitative clinical reasoning self-assessment, performed using a validated rubric, triangulated this finding, showing an improvement in students’ perception of several components of their clinical reasoning skill level from before the simulation to after it. Blinded researcher analysis of the consultation video recordings found that students showed a significant increase in ability on the history-taking and making-sense-of-data (including formation of a differential diagnosis) components of the assessment rubric. Thirty students took part in focus groups investigating their experience with the simulation. Two themes arose from thematic analysis of these data: variety of reasoning methods and “It’s a different way of thinking.” The latter highlights differences between the decision making students practice during their time in education and the decision making they will use once they are in practice. Our findings suggest that simulation can be used to develop clinical reasoning in veterinary students, and they demonstrate the need for further research in this area

Business Ethics: The Promise of Neuroscience

Recent advances in cognitive neuroscience research portend well for furthering understanding of many of the fundamental questions in the field of business ethics, both normative and empirical. This article provides an overview of neuroscience methodology and brain structures, and explores the areas in which neuroscience research has contributed findings of value to business ethics, as well as suggesting areas for future research. Neuroscience research is especially capable of providing insight into individual reactions to ethical issues, while also raising challenging normative questions about the nature of moral responsibility, autonomy, intent, and free will. This article also provides a brief summary of the papers included in this special issue, attesting to the richness of scholarly inquiry linking neuroscience and business ethics. We conclude that neuroscience offers considerable promise to the field of business ethics, but we caution against overpromise

Self-Compassion, emotion regulation and stress among australian psychologists: Testing an emotion regulation model of self-compassion using structural equation modeling

Psychologists tend to report high levels of occupational stress, with serious implications for themselves, their clients, and the discipline as a whole. Recent research suggests that selfcompassion is a promising construct for psychologists in terms of its ability to promote psychological wellbeing and resilience to stress; however, the potential benefits of self-compassion are yet to be thoroughly explored amongst this occupational group. Additionally, while a growing body of research supports self-compassion as a key predictor of psychopathology, understanding of the processes by which self-compassion exerts effects on mental health outcomes is limited. Structural equation modelling (SEM) was used to test an emotion regulation model of self-compassion and stress among psychologists, including postgraduate trainees undertaking clinical work (n = 198). Self-compassion significantly negatively predicted emotion regulation difficulties and stress symptoms. Support was also found for our preliminary explanatory model of self-compassion, which demonstrates the mediating role of emotion regulation difficulties in the self-compassion-stress relationship. The final self-compassion model accounted for 26.2% of variance in stress symptoms. Implications of the findings and limitations of the study are discussed

Wearable Biomonitoring Platform for the Assessment of Stress and its Impact on Cognitive Performance of Firefighters: An Experimental Study

Background: Stress is a complex process with an impact on health and performance. The use of wearable sensor-based monitoring systems offers interesting opportunities for advanced health care solutions for stress analysis. Considering the stressful nature of firefighting and its importance for the community’s safety, this study was conducted for firefighters. Objectives: A biomonitoring platform was designed, integrating different biomedical systems to enable the acquisition of real time Electrocardiogram (ECG), computation of linear Heart Rate Variability (HRV) features and collection of perceived stress levels. This platform was tested using an experimental protocol, designed to understand the effect of stress on firefighter’s cognitive performance, and whether this effect is related to the autonomic response to stress. Method: The Trier Social Stress Test (TSST) was used as a testing platform along with a 2-Choice Reaction Time Task. Linear HRV features from the participants were acquired using an wearable ECG. Self-reports were used to assess perceived stress levels. Results: The TSST produced significant changes in some HRV parameters (AVNN, SDNN and LF/HF) and subjective measures of stress, which recovered after the stress task. Although these short-term changes in HRV showed a tendency to normalize, an impairment on cognitive performance was found after performing the stress event. Conclusion: Current findings suggested that stress compromised cognitive performance and caused a measurable change in autonomic balance. Our wearable biomonitoring platform proved to be a useful tool for stress assessment and quantification. Future studies will implement this biomonitoring platform for the analysis of stress in ecological settings

Clusters, key clusters and local textual functions in Dickens

The paper argues that corpus linguistics can make useful contributions to the descriptive inventory of literary stylistics. The concept of local textual functions is employed as a descriptive tool for the stylistic analysis of a corpus of texts by Charles Dickens. It is suggested that clusters, i.e. repeated sequences of words, can be interpreted as pointers to local textual functions. The focus is on five-word clusters and five functional groups are identified: Labels, Speech clusters, As If clusters, Body Part clusters and Time and Place clusters. The analysis draws on the identification of key clusters comparing the Dickens corpus with a corpus of nineteenth-century fiction, it identifies links to literary criticism and it gives specific attention to the group of Body Part clusters to illustrate the functional variation of clusters

An analysis of the use and success of online recruitment methods in the UK

The use of online recruitment methods is now widespread among UK organisations, but has not dominated the recruitment market in the way that was predicted by the popular media. This may be because organisations experience mixed success in using online methods of recruitment. This paper reports on the use of a large scale, longitudinal survey of recruitment activity to investigate the usage and perceived success of both corporate and commercial websites by employers. In addition, twenty interviews with users and providers of online recruitment were conducted, in order to provide a deeper exploration of the factors that may affect the success of these methods. The results provide valuable insights into the use and success of online recruitment in the UK and have strong implications for practitioners