Is Dispositional Self-Compassion Associated With Psychophysiological Flexibility Beyond Mindfulness? An Exploratory Pilot Study.

Background: Dispositional mindfulness and self-compassion are shown to associate with less self-reported emotional distress. However, previous studies have indicated that dispositional self-compassion may be an even more important buffer against such distress than dispositional mindfulness. To our knowledge, no study has yet disentangled the relationship between dispositional self-compassion and mindfulness and level of psychophysiological flexibility as measured with vagally mediated heart rate variability (vmHRV).

A psychophysiological investigation of the interplay between orienting and executive control during stimulus conflict: A heart rate variability study.

Background: It has been hypothesized that resting state cardiac vagal activity (CVA) - an indicator of parasympathetic nervous system activity - is a specific psychophysiological marker of executive control function. Here, we propose an alternative hypothesis - that CVA is associated with early stage attention orientation, promoting the flexible uptake of new information, on which the later operation of such executive control functions depends. We therefore predicted that CVA would predict the interaction between orienting and executive control.

Concept Communication and Interpretation of Illness: A Holistic Model of Understanding in Nursing Practice.

To ensure patient communication in nursing, certain conditions must be met that enable successful exchange of beliefs, thoughts, and other mental states. The conditions that have received most attention in the nursing literature are derived from general communication theories, psychology, and ethical frameworks of interpretation. This article focuses on a condition more directly related to an influential coherence model of concept possession from recent philosophy of mind and language.

Regularized Linear Discriminant Analysis of EEG Features in Dementia Patients.

The present study explores if EEG spectral parameters can discriminate between healthy elderly controls (HC), Alzheimer's disease (AD) and vascular dementia (VaD) using. We considered EEG data recorded during normal clinical routine with 114 healthy controls (HC), 114 AD, and 114 VaD patients. The spectral features extracted from the EEG were the absolute delta power, decay from lower to higher frequencies, amplitude, center and dispersion of the alpha power and baseline power of the entire frequency spectrum.

Trait Self-Compassion Reflects Emotional Flexibility Through an Association with High Vagally Mediated Heart Rate Variability.

Converging evidence shows a positive effect of self-compassion on self-reported well-being and mental health. However, few studies have examined the relation between self-compassion and psychophysiological measures. In the present study, we therefore examined the relation between trait self-compassion and vagally mediated heart rate variability (vmHRV) in 53 students (39 female, mean age = 23.

Communication and the Interpretive Principle of Charity in Nurse-Patient Interaction.

A widespread view in nursing literature is that it is important for nurses to understand how patients experience states of disease and illness. To appear to patients as an empathetic practitioner involves more than identifying beliefs patients have about their conditions of ill health; it is also necessary to understand how illness experiences affect patients' well-being and quality of life. This article elucidates this condition of successful nurse-patient interaction by analyzing it in light of an influential theory of charitable interpretation from the philosophy of mind and language.

Social simulation theory: a framework to explain nurses' understanding of patients' experiences of ill-health.

A fundamental aim in caring practice is to understand patients' experiences of ill-health. These experiences have a qualitative content and cannot, unlike thoughts and beliefs with conceptual content, directly be expressed in words. Nurses therefore face a variety of interpretive challenges when they aim to understand patients' subjective perspectives on disease and illness.

The meaning of illness in nursing practice: a philosophical model of communication and concept possession.

It is fundamental assumption in nursing theory that it is important for nurses to understand how patients experience states of ill health. This assumption is often related to aims of empathic understanding, but normative principles of social interpretation can have an important action-guiding role whenever nurses seek to understand patients' subjective horizons on the basis of active or passive expressions of meaning. The aim of this article is to present a philosophical theory of concept possession and to argue that it can shed light on how nurses should seek to understand patients' subjective perspectives on the meaning of illness.

Management in Ambulance Services: Communicative Challenges.

Managers in ambulance services face many communicative challenges in their interaction with employees working as paramedics in prehospital medical practices. This series of three articles will focus on some of these challenges. This first article clarifies the context of manager-employee communication in ambulance work.

Communicative Management in Ambulatory Services: Prehospital Management Communication--Limits and Possibilities.

Poor management communication in healthcare services affects employees' motivation, commitment, and, in the final instance, organizational performance and the quality of patient care. In any area of health management, good communication is, therefore, key to successful management. This article discusses how managers of ambulance stations should secure communication with their paramedic crews.

The importance of reliable information exchange in emergency practices: a misunderstanding that was uncovered before it was too late.

Background: Many medical emergency practices are regulated by written procedures that normally provide reliable guidelines for action. In some cases, however, the consequences of following rule-based instructions can have unintended negative consequences. The article discusses a case - described on a type level - where the consequences of following a rule formulation could have been fatal.

Communicative management in ambulance services: a study of interaction between station managers and paramedics working in frontline units.

This article, the second in a series of three, presents a study of professional communication between ambulance station managers and paramedics. The study used observation and field memos from 20 ambulance stations as a basis for understanding real-life communication in this area of medical practice. The results showed that the unpredictable nature of ambulance work made it difficult for managers and employees to find time for extensive communication, and that the lack of face-to-face contact often led to misunderstanding and poor dialogue.

Manager-employee interaction in ambulance services: an exploratory study of employee perspectives on management communication.

Managers of ambulance stations face many communicative challenges in their interaction with employees working in prehospital first-line services. The article presents an exploratory study of how paramedics experience these challenges in communication with station leaders. On the basis of a dialogue perspective in qualitative method, 24 paramedics were interviewed in one-to-one and focus group settings.

EEG Spectral Features Discriminate between Alzheimer's and Vascular Dementia.

Alzheimer's disease (AD) and vascular dementia (VaD) present with similar clinical symptoms of cognitive decline, but the underlying pathophysiological mechanisms differ. To determine whether clinical electroencephalography (EEG) can provide information relevant to discriminate between these diagnoses, we used quantitative EEG analysis to compare the spectra between non-medicated patients with AD (n = 77) and VaD (n = 77) and healthy elderly normal controls (NC) (n = 77). We use curve-fitting with a combination of a power loss and Gaussian function to model the averaged resting-state spectra of each EEG channel extracting six parameters.

Should paramedics ever accept patients' refusal of treatment or further assessment?

Background: This case report discusses an ethical communication dilemma in prehospital patient interaction, involving a patient who was about to board a plane at a busy airport. The article argues that the situation raised dilemmas about communication, patient autonomy and paternalism. Paramedics should be able to find good solutions to these dilemmas, but they have not received much attention in the literature on prehospital ambulance work.

The ethics of resuscitation: how do paramedics experience ethical dilemmas when faced with cancer patients with cardiac arrest?

Introduction: Research on prehospital emergency work traditionally has focused on medical issues, but paramedics often have to make ethical choices. The goal of this exploratory study was to understand how paramedics experience difficult ethical dilemmas regarding resuscitation of cancer patients.

Methods: Paramedics from ambulance services in Norway were interviewed about resuscitation of cancer patients with cardiac arrest.

Interactive emergency communication involving persons in crisis.

We studied the dialogue between telephone operators at medical emergency communication centres in Norway and parents of children later diagnosed with sudden infant death syndrome. The aim was to understand how the parents experienced the communication with the telephone operators. The qualitative method involved semi-structured interviews.

Realignment parameter-informed artefact correction for simultaneous EEG-fMRI recordings.

In this work we introduce a new algorithm to correct the imaging artefacts in the EEG signal measured during fMRI acquisition. The correction techniques proposed so far cannot optimally represent transitions, i.e.

Medical explanations and lay conceptions of disease and illness in doctor-patient interaction.

Hilary Putnam's influential analysis of the 'division of linguistic labour' has a striking application in the area of doctor-patient interaction: patients typically think of themselves as consumers of technical medical terms in the sense that they normally defer to health professionals' explanations of meaning. It is at the same time well documented that patients tend to think they are entitled to understand lay health terms like 'sickness' and 'illness' in ways that do not necessarily correspond to health professionals' understanding. Drawing on recent philosophical theories of concept possession, the article argues that this disparity between medical and lay vocabulary implies that it is, in an important range of cases, easier for doctors to create a communicative platform of shared concepts by using and explaining special medical expressions than by using common lay expressions.

Communication and empathy in an emergency setting involving persons in crisis.

The article presents a study of the interaction between paramedics and parents in cases of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS). We have sought to understand how the parents perceived the paramedics ability to communicate as well as empathise and deal with practical aspects of the situation. We have also sought to understand how the paramedics view their role as professional health workers, and how they think they should interact with persons in crisis.

Disturbance of automatic auditory change detection in dementia associated with Parkinson's disease: A mismatch negativity study.

Objective: To investigate whether automatic auditory change detection, as measured by the mismatch negativity (MMN) event-related potential waveform, differs in dementia associated with Parkinson's disease (PDD) and dementia with Lewy-bodies (DLB) as compared to Alzheimer's disease (AD), Parkinson's disease without dementia (PD) and healthy control subjects (HC).

Method: Seventeen DLB, 15 PDD, 16 PD, 16 AD patients and 18 HC subjects participated. A passive MMN event-related potential paradigm and an oddball-distractor reaction time paradigm were presented.

Meaning holism in caring practice.

Drawing on Ludwig Wittgenstein's influential theory of concept possession, the article argues that assumptions about meaning in patients' linguistic communities normally play an important role in nurse-patient communication. Case studies are used to clarify the significance of the sociocultural dimension of understanding in caring practice.

Hemispheric asymmetries in the processing of temporal acoustic cues in consonant-vowel syllables.

Purpose: In order to examine auditory lateralization of prelexical speech processing, a dichotic listening task was performed with concurrent EEG measurement.

Methods: Subjects were tested with dichotic pairs of six consonant-vowel (CV) syllables that initially started with a voiced (/ba/, /da/, /ga/) or a voiceless stop consonant (/pa/, /ta/, /ka/). Electrophysiological correlates were analyzed by a low resolution electromagnetic tomography (LORETA) approach to estimate the sources of N1 event-related potentials (ERP) in the 3D brain.