LRR Focus: NAFTA Monitoring

[Excerpt] A year and a half after the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) took effect, the rosy picture painted by NAFTA supporters has turned grey. A growing number of labor activists, researchers, and academics are developing a more accurate picture of how NAFTA is affecting our lives

The Short-Term Effects of Viewing Relationally Aggressive Media on Hostile Cognitions in College Women

Correlational and experimental research indicates that relationally aggressive media exposure is associated with increased aggression (e.g., Coyne, Archer, & Eslea, 2004; Coyne et al., 2008; 2011). The General Aggression Model (GAM) (Anderson & Bushman, 2002) suggests that cognitions about aggression mediate the relationship between aggressive media exposure and subsequent behavior, but little research has examined this possibility in regards to relationally aggressive media. The goals of this study were (1) to examine the short-term effects of viewing relationally aggressive media on hostile response generation in women, and (2) to examine whether pre-existing relational aggression moderates these effects. 158 college women were randomly assigned to view either a relationally aggressive or neutral movie clip. After viewing, participants read 5 vignettes that described interpersonal conflicts, and then were asked to generate a behavioral response to each scenario. There was a significant interaction of type of movie clip viewed and pre-existing relational aggression. Specifically, watching the relationally aggressive movie clip caused participants who were high on relational aggression to generate significantly more hostile responses than those low on relational aggression. These findings provide evidence that relationally aggressive media exposure affects cognitive processes underlying aggressive behavior, but that these short-term effects are moderated by individual differences in aggression. Implications for future research are discussed

The Trans-Pacific Partnership and regulating capital flows: recommendations for strengthening proposed safeguards in the leaked TPP investment chapter

This repository item contains a policy brief from the Boston University Global Economic Governance Initiative. The Global Economic Governance Initiative (GEGI) is a research program of the Center for Finance, Law & Policy, the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future, and the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies. It was founded in 2008 to advance policy-relevant knowledge about governance for financial stability, human development, and the environment.The leaked text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) Agreement’s investment chapter reveals that negotiators are giving serious consideration to a safeguard intended to allow nations to regulate capital flows. It is critical that the safeguard be drafted in such a way that governments have sufficient policy flexibility to prevent and mitigate financial instability

Overgeneral past and future thinking in dysphoria: the role of emotional cues and cueing methodology

Overgeneral memory, where individuals exhibit difficulties in retrieving specific episodes from autobiographical memory, has been consistently linked with emotional disorders. However, the majority of this literature has relied upon a single methodology, in which participants respond to emotional cue words with explicit instructions to retrieve/simulate specific events. Through use of sentence completion tasks the current studies explored whether overgenerality represents a habitual pattern of thinking that extends to how individuals naturally consider their personal past and future life story. In both studies, when compared with controls, dysphoric individuals evidenced overgeneral thinking style with respect to their personal past. However, overgeneral future thinking was only evident when the sentence stems included emotional words. These findings highlight the importance of investigating the overgenerality phenomenon using a variety of cueing techniques and results are discussed with reference to the previous literature exploring overgenerality and cognitive models of depression

Quality of Care Strategies and the Subsequent Improvement of Kangaroo Care Incidence Rates in Premature Infants

Purpose: The benefits of kangaroo care (KC) has long been studied and proven. Despite the research, incidence rates of KC are low in the neonatal ICU at the Kentucky Children’s Hospital. Some barriers to KC exist in our NICU and this study strives to address them. This study aims to develop and implement strategies to increase utilization of KC from 41% to 75% for eligible infants. Methods: KC occurrence was monitored in 364 infants with birth weight ≤ 1250 grams. Strategies implemented were education of nurses, improved nurse-to-patient ratio, emphasis of KC in multidisciplinary rounding, improved documentation, obtaining securement devices to prevent dislodgement of invasive lines, involvement of respiratory therapists in transferring intubated infants, and providing pamphlets and one-on-one education to patents. Weekly KC occurrence was reviewed on all NICU infants with birth weight ≤ 1250 grams. Results: KC utilization was analyzed in two separate periods- August through December 2016 and January through May 2017. The mean utilization for the 2016 period was 41% and the mean utilization for the 2017 period was 61%. This reflects a 20% increase in occurrence following the measures implemented to improve KC rates (p=0.02, t-test for independent variables). Conclusion: Increased use of KC occurred due to implementation of a variety of measures. These measures and results indicate that establishing kangaroo care as a standard of care in very low birth weight infants is obtainable. Audits will continue being collected each month to verify a continued increase

Making Room in Shelters: Fulfilling the Need for Abused Women, Children and Animals

This paper examines the relationship between abuse to humans and animals by reviewing literature regarding the bond between humans and animals and the ignored problem of abuse. Because women may delay leaving their abusers to keep their animals safe, it is important for organizations to meet the needs of both humans and animals. The following paper evaluate programs that already exist in Minnesota. I examined the best practices in Minnesota shelters to determine what is working to successfully meet the needs of abused women, children and animals. Recommendations were made from the analysis to ensure that the needs of human and nonhuman animals can be met and best practices are developed

Evaluating the RASS and CAP-D in a Pediatric Cardiac Intensive Care Unit

Abstract Problem: Pediatric delirium is highly prevalent in the intensive care setting, as much as seventy to eighty-seven percent. Kalvas & Harrison (2020) found that sixty-six percent of critically ill children in a pediatric intensive care unit suffered from a diagnosis of delirium. Delirium has been widely linked with increased costs, mortality, and length of stay. Methods: The quality improvement (QI) project used a descriptive design to collect retrospective and prospective data before and after an individualized bedside education session was completed. The QI project used a purposive convenience sampling to assess the ability to accurately identify the presence of delirium and its sub-type among patients undergoing cardiac surgery in a pediatric cardiac intensive care unit (CICU). Results: Descriptive statistics and Chi-square tests were ran and although there was not statistical significance between the identification of delirium and its sub-types, however there was a notable shift. A larger sample size may be necessary to show statistical significance. Implications for practice: There should be continued education on the use of the Richmond Agitation Sedation Score (RASS) and Cornell Assessment of Pediatric Delirium (CAP-D), whether that be quarterly or annually. There should also be initial education on the RASS and CAP-D for newly hired staff. The RASS and CAP-D should continue to be used identify delirium and its sub-types accurately. Multiple Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) cycles may be necessary to reach even greater compliance. One such PDSA cycle might include adding delirium specific rounding to practice

A New Definition of Magic Realism: An Analysis of Three Novels as Examples of Magic Realism in a Postcolonial Diaspora

In the world of literature, magic realism has yet to find its place as an established genre or style. The following paper posits that magic realism stems from marginalized writers in a postcolonial diaspora, attempting to make sense of their world without the influence of Western gaze. Gabriel García Márquez in his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, Salman Rushdie in his novel Midnight’s Children, and Toni Morrison in her novel Paradise use similar elements of magic realism in order to establish a grounding mythology for their cultures. These three novels can demonstrate the direction of fiction that uses magic realism: one where the marginalized overturn the characteristics of the dominant discourse and take their place in the world of writing