Parkinson's disease: Addressing health care practitioners' automatic responses to hypomimia.

Hypomimia/reduced facial mobility in individuals living with Parkinson's disease can lead to negative impressions and judgments by nurse practitioners and other health care practitioners. Negative impressions and judgments can affect the quality of an episode of care. To attenuate automatic judgments, nurse practitioners must self-monitor and correct, recognizing that hypomimia is due to an underlying neurological condition and does not provide information on the personality or character of the person living with Parkinson's.

Name that neurotransmitter: using music to teach psychopharmacology concepts.

The purpose of this article is to discuss the use of music (i.e., two original songs, "Neurotransmitter Twitter" and "Parkinson's Shuffle") to teach aspects of psychopharmacology to students in the course Psychiatric/Mental Health Nursing.

Friends and social support in dementia caregiving. Assessment and intervention.

The purpose of this article is to explore the topic of friends as a spontaneously occurring response in open-ended interviews with dementia caregivers and to propose guidelines for assessment and intervention based on current knowledge. The sample includes 176 open-ended baseline interviews with dementia caregivers drawn from the National Caregivers Training Study, a 4-year multi-site, randomized, community-based, psycho-educational intervention study. References to friends were present in 60 of the 176 baseline transcripts.