Graphic and gut-wrenching images of death, violence, and pain fill our news media, despite debate about their effect on audiences and their potential to harm their subjects. This research uses in-d...

This article analyzes the photographic exhibit Yuyanapaq: Para Recordar, which was a product of the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission. It focuses specifically on the curatorial process and political desires shaping Yuyanapaq, and it examines the ways in which photographs were intended to intervene in and script a national consciousness and shared memory during and after Peru’s transition process. Exploring across the three iterations of Yuyanapaq, I ask how we might attempt to bear witness to past conflict without inadvertently perpetuating (...) its logic. (shrink)

Seminary students remain unstudied in the research literature despite their eminent role in caring for the wellbeing of congregants. This study aimed to conduct baseline analysis of their family of origin health, psychological health, and physiological heath by utilizing the Biobehavioral Family Model as a conceptual framework for understanding the associations between these constructs. Statistical analysis utilizing structural equation modeling provided support that the BBFM was a sound model for assessing the relationships between these constructs within a seminary sample. Additionally, (...) seminarians were found to have higher rates of anxiety and depression when compared to the general population. Together, findings indicate that clinical care for seminarians may be best if implemented from a global systemic perspective. (shrink)

Contemporary emphasis on creating culturally relevant and context specific knowledge increasingly drives researchers to conduct their work in settings outside their home country. This often requires researchers to build relationships with various stakeholders who may have a vested interest in the research. This case study examines the tension between relationship development with stakeholders and maintaining study integrity, in the context of potential harms, data credibility and cultural sensitivity. We describe an ethical breach in the conduct of global health research by (...) a arising from the ad-hoc participation of a community stakeholder external to the visiting research group. A framework for reflection is developed from a careful examination of underlying factors and presented with a discussion of consequences and mitigation measures. This framework aims to present lessons learned for researchers working abroad who might face similar situations in their work. (shrink)

When someone encounters an explanation perceived as weak, this may lead to a feeling of deprivation or tension that can be resolved by engaging in additional learning. This study examined to what extent children respond to weak explanations by seeking additional learning opportunities. Seven‐ to ten‐year‐olds (N = 81) explored questions and explanations (circular or mechanistic) about 12 animals using a novel Android tablet application. After rating the quality of an initial explanation, children could request and receive additional information or (...) return to the main menu to choose a new animal to explore. Consistent with past research, there were both developmental and IQ‐related differences in how children evaluated explanation quality. But across development, children were more likely to request additional information in response to circular explanations than mechanistic explanations. Importantly, children were also more likely to request additional information in direct response to explanations that they themselves had assigned low ratings, regardless of explanation type. In addition, there was significant variability in both children's explanation evaluation and their exploration, suggesting important directions for future research. The findings support the deprivation theory of curiosity and offer implications for education. (shrink)

As understanding of the human microbiome improves, novel therapeutic targets to improve human health with microbial therapeutics will continue to expand. We outline key considerations of balancing risks and benefits, optimising access, returning key results to research participants, and potential conflicts of interest.

The Hospital Standardised Mortality Ratio (HSMR) is a commonly used measure of hospital mortality that is standardised for age, comorbidities and other factors. By tradition, this statistic has always excluded patients classified as ‘palliative’. The HSMR has never been validated as a reliable measure of quality of care, and it can be very hard to interpret, partly due to difficulties with defining and applying the term ‘palliative’. In this paper, we review the Canadian experience with the palliative status flag, and (...) explain why it is so difficult to define and apply consistently. We also highlight some potential concerns about clinicians labelling inpatients as ‘palliative’ during their admission. Finally, we propose an organisational ethics framework, and six specific suggestions for hospitals to use when publishing statistics such as the HSMR. (shrink)

Researchers investigating gender and anger have consistently found that White women, but not White men, are evaluated unfavorably when experiencing anger in the workplace. Our project originally aimed to extend findings on White women’s, Black women’s, and White men’s workplace anger by examining whether evaluations are exacerbated or buffered by invalidating or affirming comments from others. In stark contrast to previous research on gender stereotyping and anger evaluations, however, results across four studies (N= 1,095) showed that both Black and White (...) women portrayed as experiencing anger in the workplace were evaluatedmore favorablythan White men doing so. After Study 1’s initial failure to conceptually replicate, we investigated whether perceivers’ evaluations of women’s workplace anger could have been affected by the contemporaneous cultural event of #MeToo. Supporting this possibility, we found evaluations were moderated by news engagement and beliefs that workplace opportunities are gendered. Additionally, we found invalidating comments rarely affected evaluations of a protagonist yet affirming comments tended to favorably affect evaluations. Overall, findings suggest the need for psychologists to consider the temporary, or perhaps lasting, effects of cultural events on research outcomes. (shrink)

BackgroundEthics consultations are established in contemporary health care. Informal ethics consultations often occur and are possibly beneficial, yet they have not been empirically studied. We sought to describe features of informal ethics consultations and to identify facilitators and disruptors of patient participation in such ethics consultations.MethodsWe used a mixed methods (quantitative and qualitative) evaluation design and conveniently sampled 64 sequential informal ethics consultations over a period of 3 years in two academic health care centers in one city in Canada. Data (...) were collected by the two participating ethicists. We used statistical description for the quantitative data and thematic analysis for the qualitative data.ResultsPatients participated in only two (3%) of the informal ethics consultations. Factors that disrupted patient participation in ethics consultations were related to patients’ issues (mental impairments), family issues (family withholding information from the patient), and team members’ issues (efficiency considerations).ConclusionInformal ethics consultations may be used for ethics capacity building of health care providers rather than for engagement with addressed patients. Further research on informal ethics consultations is required, including in different sites. (shrink)

For years, privacy regulators have said that privacy is good for business. Strong privacy management programs and accountability mechanisms build trust with consumers. In the public sector, privacy regulators have seen massive information sharing projects fail when public input or consultation, or independent oversight is not considered. After a sequence of events in 2018, society as a whole began asking questions about what is being done with personal information and questioned whether it is in our best interests. This presentation made (...) at the University of Alberta’s Kule Institute’s event on “AI, Ethics and Society” in May 2019 provides an overview of the shifts that have taken place and how privacy regulators internationally have incorporated discussions about ethical assessments, in addition to traditional privacy impact assessments, as a way to guide current and future tech developments involving personal information in a way that is legal, fair and just. (shrink)

This article is intended to serve as a roadmap to help new healthcare ethics leaders establish or renew an ethics program in a healthcare organization. The authors share a systemic step-by-step process for navigating this early career passage. In this paper, we describe five critical success strategies and provide explanations and concrete tools to help get you on the road to success as quickly and painlessly as possible. We will discuss how to define your role; diagnose your organization’s needs; build (...) important relationships; and develop a strategic plan for starting or revitalizing an ethics program. We also review some of the more personal challenges that may be encountered along the way, and identify social supports and self-care strategies. The advice we provide grows out of reflections on our collective experience as new ethics leaders in three Ontario healthcare organizations. (shrink)

RationaleSurrogates of critically ill patients often have inaccurate expectations about prognosis. Yet there is little research on how intensive care unit clinicians should discuss prognosis, and existing expert opinion-based recommendations give only general guidance that has not been validated with surrogate decision makers.ObjectiveTo determine the perspectives of key stakeholders regarding how prognostic information should be conveyed in critical illness.MethodsThis was a multicenter study at three academic medical centers in California, Pennsylvania, and Washington. One hundred eighteen key stakeholders completed in-depth semistructured (...) interviews. Participants included 47 surrogates of adult patients with acute respiratory distress syndrome; 45 clinicians working in study ICUs, including physicians, nurses, social workers, and spiritual care providers; and 26 experts in health communication, decision science, ethics, family-centered care, geriatrics, healthcare disparities, palliative care, psychology, psychiatry, and critical care.Measurements and main resultsThere was broad support among surrogates for existing expert recommendations, including truthful prognostic disclosure, emotional support, tailoring the disclosure strategy to each family's needs, and checking for understanding. In addition, stakeholders offered suggestions that add specificity to existing recommendations, including: In addition to conveying prognostic estimates, clinicians should help families "see the prognosis for themselves" by showing families radiographic images and explaining the clinical significance of physical manifestations of severe disease at the bedside. Many physicians did not support using numeric estimates to convey prognosis to families, whereas many surrogates, clinicians from other disciplines, and experts believed numbers could be helpful. Clinicians should conceptualize prognostic communication as an iterative process that begins with a preliminary mention of the possibility of death early in the ICU stay and becomes more detailed as the clinical situation develops. Although prognostic information should be initially disclosed by physicians, other members of the multidisciplinary team-nurses, social workers, and spiritual care providers-should be given explicit role responsibilities to reinforce physicians' prognostications and help families process a poor prognosis emotionally.ConclusionsFamily members, clinicians, and experts identified specific communication behaviors that clinicians should use to discuss prognosis in the critical care setting. These findings extend existing opinion-based recommendations and should guide interventions to improve communication about prognosis in ICUs. (shrink)

In India, domestic workers' movements advocated for their own and other workers’ rights both before and during the pandemic. Over the course of the pandemic, however, the political landscape and de...

In online lectures, unlike in face-to-face lectures, teachers lack access to (nonverbal) cues to check if their students are still “with them” and comprehend the lecture. The increasing availability of low-cost eye-trackers provides a promising solution. These devices measure unobtrusively where students look and can visualize these data to teachers. These visualizations might inform teachers about students’ level of “with-me-ness” (i.e., do students look at the information that the teacher is currently talking about) and comprehension of the lecture, provided that (...) (1) gaze measures of “with-me-ness” are related to comprehension, (2) people not trained in eye-tracking can predict students’ comprehension from gaze visualizations, (3) we understand how different visualization techniques impact this prediction. We addressed these issues in two studies. In Study 1, 36 students watched a video lecture while being eye-tracked. The extent to which students looked at relevant information and the extent to which they looked at the same location as the teacher both correlated with students’ comprehension (score on an open question) of the lecture. In Study 2, 50 participants watched visualizations of students’ gaze (from Study 1), using six visualization techniques (dynamic and static versions of scanpaths, heatmaps, and focus maps) and were asked to predict students’ posttest performance and to rate their ease of prediction. We found that people can use gaze visualizations to predict learners’ comprehension above chance level, with minor differences between visualization techniques. Further research should investigate if teachers can act on the information provided by gaze visualizations and thereby improve students’ learning. (shrink)

In this article, the authors consider the use of a “Playlist of My Life Assignment” in helping social studies (SS) and English language arts (ELA) teacher candidates (TCs) conceptualize multimodal and humanizing SS and ELA curricula. The Playlist Assignment asked teacher candidates to center the music, texts, land, spaces, and places that are most important to them, and potentially relate these back to their own pedagogies as SS and ELA teachers. Taken from two qualitative studies of two teacher education courses (...) at two separate, large research universities in the U.S. Southwest, this article examines teacher candidates’ understandings of their disciplines as humanizing and multimodal, and as centered in their and their students’ communities, through the Playlist Assignment. Data included the Playlist Assignment, curated by TCs in each methods course, and TCs’ class response journals. TCs offered profound texts they carried within them throughout their lives, demonstrating (1) their multimodal disruptions of the definition of a “text” and (2) the empowering and limiting effect of life texts for humanizing curricula. This work has implications for SS and ELA teacher educators interested in supporting teacher candidates as they conceptualize multimodal and humanizing curricula with and for their future students. (shrink)

Background: Demand for organisational ethics capacity is growing in health organisations, particularly among managers. The role of clinical ethicists in, and perspective on, organisational ethics has not been well described or documented in the literature. Objective: To describe clinical ethicists’ perspectives on organisational ethics issues in their hospitals, their institutional role in relation to organisational ethics, and their perceived effectiveness in helping to address organisational ethics issues. Design and Setting: Qualitative case study involving semi-structured interviews with 18 clinical ethicists across (...) 13 health organisations in Toronto, Canada. Results: From the clinical ethicists’ perspective, the most pressing organisational ethics issues in their organisations are: resource allocation, staff moral distress linked to the organisation’s moral climate, conflicts of interest, and clinical issues with a significant organisational dimension. Clinical ethicists were consulted in particular on issues related to staff moral distress and clinical issues with an organisational dimension. Some ethicists described being increasingly consulted on resource allocation, conflicts of interest, and other corporate decisions. Many clinical ethicists felt they lacked sufficient knowledge and understanding of organisational decision-making processes, training in organisational ethics, and access to organisational ethics tools to deal effectively with the increasing demand for organisational ethics support. Conclusion: Growing demand for organisational ethics expertise in healthcare institutions is reshaping the role of clinical ethicists. Effectiveness in organisational ethics entails a re-evaluation of clinical ethics training to include capacity building in organisational ethics and organisational decision-making processes as a complement to traditional clinical ethics education. (shrink)

This paper shows that in late seventeenth-century Scotland there existed a sizeable virtuoso community whose leaders were abreast of European developments in philosophy, history and science. Moreover, by c. 1700, Sir Robert Sibbald was attempting to organize a learned society modelled upon those he knew in Europe and upon London's Royal Society. The interests of the virtuosi and their attempts to institutionalize their pursuits laid much of the ground work for the Scottish Enlightenment. The Royal Society of Scotland which (...) Sir Robert hoped to found never became a reality, but the academic ideals which he propounded came to fruition in the Philosophical Society of Edinburgh and later bodies such as the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland. The intellectual inquiries and achievements of Sir Robert and his friends, particularly those in medicine and natural history, continued to be of interest to later Scots. They, thanks in part to the influence of the Newtonian physician Archibald Pitcaire, improved upon Sibbald's naïve Baconianism, but to a surprising degree their concerns had also been his. (shrink)

In response to scholarship which has shown that seventeenth-century Scottish scholasticism was influenced by John Duns Scotus (1265/66–1308), Jean-Pascal Anfray has argued that Scottish scholasticism was only indirectly influenced by Scotism, especially by Jesuit thinkers like Francisco Suárez (1548–1618), using the Aberdeen Doctor James Sibbald (1595–1647) and his theory of the body-soul composite as a litmus test. In reply to Anfray’s claims, this article undertakes three interconnected tasks. First, it renews calls for philosophical Scotism to be defined according to (...) a principles-based approach focusing on Scotus’s metaphysics of essence in contrast to a quasi-falsificationist approach. Second, it shows how Sibbald adopts the Scotist metaphysics of essence over the very different Suárezian metaphysics of essence. Third, it demonstrates how Sibbald endorses Scotus’s qualified pluralism in accounting for the body-soul composite. Sibbald thus turns out to be more directly Scotist (and less Suárezian) than first thought. (shrink)

(1996). Geography, science and national identity in early modern Britain: The case of Scotland and the work of Sir Robert Sibbald (1641–1722) Annals of Science: Vol. 53, No. 1, pp. 29-73.