The current challenging organizational context demands that organizations adapt quickly and continuously in order to survive and maintain their competitive advantage. Considering this need, one of the responses given by companies has been the valorization of work teams and their capacity for innovation, as well as fostering positive skills and emergent states in employees, such as emotional carrying capacity and affective commitment, respectively. The aim of this research is thus to study the relationship between emotional carrying capacity and group innovation, (...) considering affective commitment as the mediating variable. To test these relationships, an empirical cross-sectional study was conducted including 138 Portuguese work teams belonging to different sectors of activity, composed of 625 members and their respective leaders. The results were analyzed through structural equation modeling and showed positive relationships between emotional carrying capacity and affective commitment, as well as between affective commitment and group innovation. In addition, the mediating role of affective commitment in the relationship between emotional carrying capacity and group innovation was also supported. Therefore, the results suggest that a work context in which members openly express their emotions contributes to reinforcing their affective attachment to the group, making them feel more involved and available to test and implement new ideas and procedures. The findings reinforce the benefits of promoting the expression of emotions and the development of healthy bonds between team members. (shrink)

Cause-related marketing has risen to become a popular strategy to increase business value through profit-motivated giving. Despite the growing number of articles published in the last decade, no comprehensive analysis of the most discussed constructs of cause-related marketing is available. This paper uses an advanced Text Mining methodology to conduct a comprehensive analysis of 246 articles published in 40 different journals between 1988 and 2013 on the subject of cause-related marketing. Text Mining also allows quantitative analyses to be performed on (...) the literature. For instance, it is shown that the most prominent long-term topics discussed since 1988 on the subject are “brand-cause fit”, “law and Ethics”, and “corporate and social identification”, while the most actively discussed topic presently is “sectors raising social taboos and moral debates”. The paper has two goals: first, it introduces the technique of CTM to the Marketing area, illustrating how Text Mining may guide, simplify, and enhance review processes while providing objective building blocks to be used in a review; second, it applies CTM to the C-RM field, uncovering and summarizing the most discussed topics. Mining text, however, is not aimed at replacing all subjective decisions that must be taken as part of literature review methodologies. (shrink)

The intention of the present paper is to resettle the importance of the Comte’s thought to the philosophy of science. To do so, we discard certain prejudices about positivism and reassess certain comtean’s concepts, such as the three states law, the science’s classification and the role of hypotheses in order to restore its relevance in the background of the history of the philosophy.

Background: Chronic Pain (CP) has serious medical and social consequences, and leads to economic burden that threatens the sustainability of healthcare services. Thus, optimized management of pain tools to support CP patients in adjusting to their condition and improving quality of life is timely. Although Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) is considered an evidence-based psychological approach for CP, evidence for the efficacy of online-delivered ACT for CP is still scarce. At the same time, studies suggest that self-compassion mediates the change (...) in disability and psychopathological symptoms in ACT interventions for CP, although self-compassion is not a specific target in ACT. Thus, an explicit focus on self-compassion might increase the efficacy of ACT interventions for CP, although this hypothesis has not been tested. This study aims to develop an eHealth ACT and compassion-based self-management intervention for CP, the iACTwithPain, and to compare its efficacy in improving health outcomes to a similar ACT-only intervention and a waiting list group. Methods: The eHealth platform that will host the interventions will be developed using a flat design identity and will be interactive. The iACTwithPain intervention will comprise 8 weekly self-management sessions, and will be developed taking into consideration the psychological flexibility model applied to CP, with the addition of explicit compassion-based components. To analyse whether the iACTwithPain intervention will present superiority in improving CP’s impact and related health markers over the two other conditions, this study will follow a RCT design with three arms. CP patients will be recruited through direct contact with patient associations and healthcare services and a national press release in Portugal. Outcome measurement will be conducted at baseline, post-intervention and at 3- and 6-months follow-ups. The interventions’ acceptability will also be assessed. Discussion: The iACTwithPain intervention is expected to improve CP patients’ psychosocial functioning, quality of life, and empowerment, by promoting adaptive disease management and regulation of pain-related internal experiences. Results will contribute to a better understanding on the pertinence of adding compassion elements to ACT for CP and to reach an optimized intervention for CP. (shrink)

BackgroundIn the last 2 weeks of January 2021, Portugal was the worst country in the world in incidence of infections and deaths due to COVID-19. As a result, the pressure on the healthcare system increased exponentially, exceeding its capacities and leaving hospitals in near collapse. This scenario caused multiple constraints, particularly for hospital medical staff. Previous studies conducted at different moments during the pandemic reported that COVID-19 has had significant negative impacts on healthcare workers’ psychological health, including stress, anxiety, depression, (...) burnout, post-traumatic stress symptoms, and sleep disturbances. However, there are many uncertainties regarding the professional quality of life of hospital nurses and physicians. To address gaps in previous research on secondary traumatic stress, we focused on healthcare workers working in hospitals affected by a major traumatic event: the third wave of COVID-19.ObjectivesThe aim of the present study was to identify the contribution of personal and work-related contextual variables on professional quality of life of healthcare workers.MethodsCross-sectional study with a web-based questionnaire given to physicians and nurses working in a hospital setting. A total of 853 healthcare professionals participated in the survey assessing professional quality of life compassion satisfaction, secondary traumatic stress, and burnout. Factors of professional quality of life were assessed using regression analysis.ResultsMost of the participants showed moderate or high levels of compassion satisfaction, whereas the majority of them experienced moderate levels of burnout and secondary traumatic stress. The analyzed variables demonstrated no differences between professionals who were directly or not involved in the care of COVID-19 patients. Parental status was found to be a significant factor in compassion satisfaction. Female gender was significantly associated with more susceptibility to secondary traumatization. Factors that may potentially contribute to burnout include years of professional experience and the number of work hours per week.ConclusionThe COVID-19 pandemic has created a new challenge for the healthcare system. Burnout and secondary traumatic stress can lead to medical errors and impact standards of patient care, particularly compromising compassionate care. It is therefore recommended that hospitals develop psychoeducational initiatives to support professionals in dealing with barriers to compassion. (shrink)

BackgroundThis pilot study aims to test the usability of the iACTwithPain platform, an online ACT-based intervention for people with chronic pain, to obtain information on which intervention and usability aspects need improvement and on expected retention rates.MethodsSeventy-three Portuguese women with chronic pain were invited to complete the first three sessions of the iACTwithPain intervention assess their quality, usefulness and the platform’s usability. Twenty-one accepted the invitation. Additionally, eight healthcare professionals working with chronic medical conditions assessed the platform and the intervention (...) from a practitioner’s point of view.ResultsThis study presented a considerable attrition rate (71.43%) among chronic pain participants, with six completers. There were no significant differences in demographic or clinical variables between dropouts and completers except for completed education (participants who dropped out presented less education than completers). Reasons for dropout were related to difficult personal events occurring during the time of the intervention, lack of time, or having forgotten. There seemed to be an overall satisfaction with both the intervention, its contents and form of presentation of information, and the platform, concerning its design, appearance, and usability. Real image videos were preferred over animations or audio by chronic pain participants. Healthcare professionals emphasized the appealing and dynamic aspects of the animation format.ConclusionThis study informs the ongoing improvement of the iACTwithPain platform and provides valuable information on aspects researchers should consider while developing online psychological interventions for chronic pain. Further implications are discussed. (shrink)

O que temos em nossas mãos: uma obra acadêmica a mais, uma outra produção intelectual da Professora Maria Rita? Vários motivos nos conduziram a ter diante dos olhos o presente livro desta admirável profissional, educadora competente e mulher cristã que revela não conseguir pensar sua própria existência senão sendo-com tantas-outras-e-outros... É assim que a percebemos, quando no correr destas páginas vislumbramos bem mais do que um texto escrito. É que, ao apresentar com cuidado e rigor científico o fruto de (...) sua pesquisa, Maria Rita entra em diálogo não apenas com os iniciados ou bem experimentados na proposta educacional do Sempre Presente Paulo Freire. Como naqueles bate-papos em que se pode ir e vir com plena liberdade de um assunto para outro, por qualquer ponto que comecemos a leitura somos cativados a uma participação ativa no que estiver sendo dito. Mas, não nos aconteça ter tal "conversa" de forma inadvertida! Aos poucos, diante da clareza com que esta educadora assume suas opções, recebemos o desafio de também nós nos posicionarmos, de abraçarmos o risco da coerência e do que implica escolher um dos lados de nossa cindida sociedade. (shrink)

Aspectos biográficos -- Aspectos epistemológicos e conceituais -- Diálogos com outros autores -- Aplicação da pedagogia freireana.

Introduction: The high degree of religious/spiritual involvement that brings meaning and purpose to a patients’ life, especially when they are weakened by pain, is among the various reasons to consider the spiritual dimension in clinical practice. This involvement may influence medical decisions and, therefore, should be identified in the medical history of a patient.Objective: To verify the opinion of undergraduate medical students of the Paulista School of Medicine – Federal University of São Paulo regarding the use of a patient’s (...) Spirituality/Religiosity as a therapeutic resource in clinical practice.Method: Quantitative approach of the transversal analytical observational type. The sample was composed of academics’ medical program, from the first to the sixth year, regularly enrolled in 2017. Data collection was performed with a standardized questionnaire divided into three sections: sociodemographic profile; Duke University Religious Index; Spirituality/Religiosity in the clinical and academic context.Results: Participated in the survey 72% of the enrolled students, of which 61.4% had religious affiliation, 26.2% declared themselves agnostic and 12.4% atheists. All of them proposed to answer questions about the insertion of Spirituality/Religiosity in the patient care process. Through the Duke Religiosity Index, we evaluated the importance of religiosity in the student’s personal life and the pertinence of religiosity as a therapeutic insertion for medical treatment. Regarding the clinical and academic context, most participants considered relevant the proposition of didactic-pedagogical actions in medical education related to the spiritual dimension of the patient.Conclusion: We conclude, through our research, that the insertion of the Spirituality/Religiosity of the patient as a therapeutic resource in clinical practice is feasible for most undergraduate students in Medicine of the Escola Paulista de Medicina – Universidade Federal de São Paulo. The result of the research, although it shows only the opinion of medical students at a Brazilian university, indicates that Spirituality/Religiosity is already part of the contemporary medical universe. (shrink)

O diálogo, a dialogia, o dialogismo, a dialogicidade são termos recorrentes em inúmeras teorias. São orientadores de práticas pedagógicas que buscam uma educação transformadora. Neste artigo faz-se uma reflexão sobre esses termos a partir de quatro teóricos: Martin Buber, Mikhail Bakhtin e Paulo Freire. A tarefa principal é analisar em obras destes filósofos as semelhanças e diferenças. A questão que nos interessa focalizar refere-se à suposição de que há uma convergência entre esses autores. Nessa direção, o investimento na pesquisa (...) desses autores tem uma dimensão, a um só tempo, introspectiva, já que permite detectar, nas obras dos quatro filósofos, semelhanças e diferenças a respeito das concepções sobre o diálogo, quanto prospectiva, uma vez que abre espaço para a sugestão de indicativos para uma prática que atenda aos desejos de uma educação de qualidade, transformadora de realidades opressivas. Palavras-chave : Diálogo. Dialogismo. Dialogicidade. (shrink)

v. 1. Piaget's genetic epistemology, 1965-1980.--v. 2. Critique of Piaget's genetic epistemology, 1965-1980.

One important issue in moral psychology concerns the proper characterisation of the folk understanding of the relationship between harmful transgressions and moral transgressions. Psychologist Elliot Turiel and associates have claimed with a broad range of supporting evidence that harmful transgressions are understood as transgressions that are authority independent and general in scope which, according to them, characterises these transgressions as moral transgressions. Recently many researchers questioned the position advocated by the Turiel tradition with some new evidence. We entered this debate (...) proposing an original, deflationary view in which perceptions of basic-rights violation and injustice are fundamental for the folk understanding of harmful transgressions as moral transgressions in Turiel's sense. In this article we elaborate and refine our deflationary view, while reviewing the debate, addressing various criticisms raised against our perspective, showing how our perspective explains the existent evidence, and suggesting new lines of inquiry. (shrink)

The purpose of this study was to illuminate the ethically difficult situations experienced by care providers working in a nursing home. Individual interviews using a narrative approach were conducted. A phenomenological-hermeneutic method developed for researching life experience was applied in the analysis. The findings showed that care providers experience ethical challenges in their everyday work. The informants in this study found the balance between the ideal, autonomy and dignity to be a daily problem. They defined the culture they work in (...) as not supportive. They also thought they were not being seen and heard in situations where they disagree with the basic values of the organization. The results are discussed in terms of Habermas’s understanding of modern society. Care settings for elderly people obviously present ethical challenges, particularly in the case of those suffering from dementia. The care provider participants in this study expressed frustration and feelings of powerlessness. It is possible to understand their experiences in terms of Habermas’s theory of modern society and the concept of the system’s colonization of the life world. (shrink)

Steblin's fully updated reference focuses on musical key characteristics during the baroque, classical, and romantic periods. (Music).

The preeminent explicator of mathematical logic to non-mathematicians, John Allen Paulos is familiar to general readers not only from his bestselling books but also from his media appearances, including The David Letterman Show and National Public Radio's "Talk of the Nation" and "Science Friday," as well as articles in _Newsweek, Nature, Discover, Business Week, the New York Times Book Review, The Nation, New York Review of Books,_ and _The London Review of Books._ Paulos originally wrote this charming little book on (...) analytic logic, its mathematics, and its puzzles in 1985. And as in his later books, he uses jokes, stories, parables, and anecdotes to elucidate difficult concepts, in this case, some of the fundamental problems in modern philosophy. (shrink)

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions represented a milestone in the attempt to understand scientific development based on empirical observations. However, in the next decades after the publication of his book, history, psychology, and sociology became increasingly marginal in Kuhn’s discussions. In his last articles, Kuhn even suggested that philosophers should pay less attention to empirical data and focus more on “first principles.” The purpose of this article is, first, to describe this radical transformation in Kuhn’s methodological approach, from his initial (...) naturalism to his later and more strict philosophical stance. Next, I present some of the alleged justifications for explaining this transition, such as his interest in problems more firmly attached to the philosophical tradition and a desire for greater acceptance within this community. Although these factors certainly played a role in explaining Kuhn’s change, I also believe that an important theoretical component exerts a fundamental function in this transition: the idea that scientific development is a kind of evolutionary process, which is better understood through the use of abstract theoretical models, instead of sparse observations of scientific activity. (shrink)

The doctor patient relationship starts with a story. Doctors' notes, a patient's chart, the recommendations of ethics committees and insurance justifications all hinge on written and verbal narrative interaction. The "practice" of narrative profoundly affects decision making, patient health and treatment and the everyday practice of medicine. In this edited collection, the contributors provide conceptual foundations, practical guidelines and theoretical considerations central to the practice of narrative ethics.

Across two studies, a wide age range of participants was interviewed about the nature of death. All participants were living in rural Madagascar in a community where ancestral beliefs and practices are widespread. In Study 1, children (8–17 years) and adults (19–71 years) were asked whether bodily and mental processes continue after death. The death in question was presented in the context of a narrative that focused either on the corpse or on the ancestral practices associated with the afterlife. Participants (...) aged 8 years and older claimed that death brings an end to most bodily and mental processes. Nevertheless, particularly in the context of the religious narrative, they claimed that certain mental processes continue even after death. This assertion of an afterlife was more evident among adults than children, especially with respect to cognitive processes, such as knowing and remembering. In Study 2, 5‐ and 7‐year‐olds were asked similar questions in connection with the death of a bird and a person. Seven‐year‐olds consistently claimed that bodily and mental processes cease at death, whereas 5‐year‐olds were unsystematic in their replies. Together, the two studies replicate and extend findings obtained with Western children showing that, in the course of development, different conceptions of death are elaborated—a biological conception in which death terminates living processes and a religious conception in which death marks the beginning of a new form of spiritual existence. (shrink)

This paper discusses “impartiality thought experiments”, i.e., thought experiments that attempt to generate intuitions which are unaffected by personal characteristics such as age, gender or race. We focus on the most prominent impartiality thought experiment, the Veil of Ignorance (VOI), and show that both in its original Rawlsian version and in a more generic version, empirical investigations can be normatively relevant in two ways: First, on the assumption that the VOI is effective and robust, if subjects dominantly favor a certain (...) normative judgment behind the VOI this provides evidence in favor of that judgment; if, on the other hand, they do not dominantly favor a judgment this reduces our justification for it. Second, empirical investigations can also contribute to assessing the effectiveness and robustness of the VOI in the first place, thereby supporting or undermining its applications across the board. (shrink)

In this timely and highly original merging of theory and practice, conflict photographer and critical theorist Rita Leistner applies Marshall McLuhan's semiotic theories of language, media, and technology to iPhone photographs taken during a military embed in Afghanistan. In a series of what Leistner calls iProbes—a portmanteau of iPhone and probe—Leistner reveals the face of war through the extensions of man. As digital photography becomes more ubiquitous, and as the phones we carry with us become more advanced, the process (...) of capturing images becomes more democratic and more spontaneous. Leistner's photos result from both access and impulse. Looking for Marshall McLuhan in Afghanistan will appeal anyone with an interest in the conflicts in the Middle East, the seminal communications theorist, or iPhone apps and photography. (shrink)

This essay collects four decades of my own reflections, as an anthropologist and feminist, on gender and coloniality across various contexts in Latin America. It also highlights the decolonial methodology and vocabulary that I have had to develop in my various roles as scholar, public intellectual, and expert witness over the years. Briefly, what I present here is a decolonial feminist perspective that argues for the existence of a patriarchal political order in communal societies before colonization. Yet, in my view, (...) precolonial gender has a dual structure that is plural in essence and differs markedly from the binary gender structure of colonial-modern societies, which works in terms of a One and its marginalized others. As I argue, the capturing and transformation of precolonial dual gender structures by the modern gender system exacerbates inequality, increases violence against women, and disempowers them politically. For that reason, I speak of “low-intensity” and “high-intensity” patriarchal systems. (shrink)

Digital technology is transforming life and is beginning to have a profound effect on individual psychic life and the wider social milieu. This article seeks to understand the nature of the new technology and its implications for personal life, culture, and education. The scene is set by comparing the introduction of printing to the revolution inaugurated by digital technology. This new age is often called “postmodern,” and some of the characteristics of the age suggested by Lyotard, Baudrillard, McLuhan, and others (...) are identified. The cultural impact of technology, according to Heidegger, is outlined, together with the interpretation in terms of digital technology proposed by Dreyfus and Spinosa. This is illustrated with examples and compared with the position of other thinkers. Finally, the consequences for education, including universities, are presented, and some proposals for approaches to education in terms of meaning, embodiment, and teacher-student relationship are considered. (shrink)