Background: COVID-19 has increased pressures on caregivers, disruptions to health services and increased health concerns during COVID-19. Reports have been made on informal carers' increased workload and limited support services during the pandemic.
Aims: This study aimed to explore how informal caregivers experienced their well-being during COVID-19 through online discussion forums.
Materials And Methods: A reflexive thematic analysis characterised by theoretical flexibility, organic inductive coding processes and theme development was conducted on online discussion forums. The method highlighted theme reviewing which was done twice to encourage data reflection. The project was conducted on a novel topic which was a new area of research interest. Semantic coding where participants' words were used directly in the interpretation and construction of themes was used.
Results: In the theme 'Locked in or locked away' caregivers worried about continuing care at home, due to limited freedom and worries of hiring help during a pandemic. Some expressed worries about visitation rights and grief of not being present with a loved one if they would reside in a care home. The theme 'Nothing left to give' suggested that COVID-19 exasperated caregivers' loneliness, social isolation and increased responsibilities and challenges with other roles. Bitterness, resentment and anger were felt towards lack of social support and workload. Theme 'Celebrating a virtual way of life' described how caregivers used online forums when other support services were disrupted.
Discussion: We discuss the role of informal caregiver that was described as all-encompassing during COVID-19. We highlight the importance of advanced planning for care home transitions and the use of online forums as a form of support. We suggest further exploration into informal caregivers' role balancing.
Conclusion: COVID-19 seemed to affect informal caregivers negatively, but they reframed their situations and sought online support. With COVID-19-related restrictions and increased workload, COVID-19 added an all-or-nothing aspect to care home transition decisions.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/scs.13199 | DOI Listing |
Behav Res Methods
January 2025
CogNosco Lab, Department of Psychology and Cognitive Sciences, University of Trento, Trento, Italy.
We introduce EmoAtlas, a computational library/framework extracting emotions and syntactic/semantic word associations from texts. EmoAtlas combines interpretable artificial intelligence (AI) for syntactic parsing in 18 languages and psychologically validated lexicons for detecting the eight emotions in Plutchik's theory. We show that EmoAtlas can match or surpass transformer-based natural language processing techniques, BERT or large language models like ChatGPT 3.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNeuroimage
January 2025
Center for Mind/Brain Sciences (CIMeC), University of Trento, 38068, Rovereto, (TN), Italy.
Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) has the potential to yield insights into cortical functions and improve the treatment of neurological and psychiatric conditions. However, its reliability is hindered by a low reproducibility of results. Among other factors, such low reproducibility is due to structural and functional variability between individual brains.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPublic Health
January 2025
Department of Public Health, Erasmus MC, University Medical Center Rotterdam, Rotterdam, the Netherlands.
Objectives: A key element in ensuring appropriate balance of harms and benefits in cancer screening is to develop a priority set of performance and outcome indicators to be used in screening data evaluation systems. These indicators need to be equity-focused, aligned to new screening approaches and broad-based to cover possible opportunistic screening, but at the same time as limited as possible.
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Clinical Epidemiology and Research Center (CERC), Department of Biomedical Sciences, Humanitas University, and IRCCS Humanitas Research Hospital, Milan, Italy, and Fraunhofer Institute for Translational Medicine and Pharmacology ITMP, Allergology and Immunology, Berlin, Germany (H.J.S.).
Description: Artificial intelligence (AI) has been defined by the High-Level Expert Group on AI of the European Commission as "systems that display intelligent behaviour by analysing their environment and taking actions-with some degree of autonomy-to achieve specific goals." Artificial intelligence has the potential to support guideline planning, development and adaptation, reporting, implementation, impact evaluation, certification, and appraisal of recommendations, which we will refer to as "guideline enterprise." Considering this potential, as well as the lack of guidance for the use of AI in guidelines, the Guidelines International Network (GIN) proposes a set of principles for the development and use of AI tools or processes to support the health guideline enterprise.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPsychol Rep
January 2025
Department of Psychology, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK.
The attractiveness halo effect has been discussed for over a century. Physically attractive people are often judged more favourably and accrue many life advantages. Halo effects have been observed in university settings for decades, but perhaps their influence is waning due to increased awareness of unconscious bias.
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