Frontiers in psychology
-
Frontiers in psychology · Jan 2014
Emotional exhaustion and workload predict clinician-rated and objective patient safety.
To investigate the role of clinician burnout, demographic, and organizational characteristics in predicting subjective and objective indicators of patient safety. ⋯ At least in the short-term, clinicians seem to be able to maintain safety despite high workload and low predictability. Nevertheless, burnout poses a safety risk. Subjectively, burnt-out clinicians rated safety lower, and objectively, units with high emotional exhaustion had higher standardized mortality ratios. In summary, our results indicate that clinician psychological health and patient safety could be managed simultaneously. Further research needs to establish causal relationships between these variables and support to the development of managerial guidelines to ensure clinicians' psychological health and patients' safety.
-
Frontiers in psychology · Jan 2014
ReviewPrediction of placebo responses: a systematic review of the literature.
Predicting who responds to placebo treatment-and under which circumstances-has been a question of interest and investigation for generations. However, the literature is disparate and inconclusive. This review aims to identify publications that provide high quality data on the topic of placebo response (PR) prediction. ⋯ While results are heterogeneous, some congruence of predictors can be identified. PRs mainly appear to be moderated by expectations of how the symptom might change after treatment, or expectations of how symptom repetition can be coped with. It is suggested to include the listed constructs in future research. Furthermore, a closer look at variables moderating symptom change in control groups seems warranted.
-
Frontiers in psychology · Jan 2014
ReviewIn (or outside of) your neck of the woods: laterality in spatial body representation.
Beside language, space is to date the most widely recognized lateralized systems. For example, it has been shown that even mental representations of space and the spatial representation of abstract concepts display lateralized characteristics. For the most part, this body of literature describes space as distal or something outside of the observer or actor. ⋯ Third, studies pointing to differential contributions of the right and left hemisphere to illusory body (space) will be summarized. Together these studies show hemispheric asymmetries to be evident in body representations at the level of simple somatosensory and proprioceptive representations. We propose a novel working hypothesis, whereby neural systems dedicated to processing action-oriented information about one's own body space may ontogenetically serve as a template for the perception of the external world.
-
The perception of unpleasant stimuli enhances whereas the perception of pleasant stimuli decreases pain perception. In contrast, the effects of pain on the processing of emotional stimuli are much less known. Especially given the recent interest in facial expressions of pain as a special category of emotional stimuli, a main topic in this research line is the mutual influence of pain and facial expression processing. ⋯ However, it was demonstrated that pain selectively enhances the processing of facial expressions if these are pain-related (i.e., facial expressions of pain). Extending a mere affective modulation theory, the latter results suggest pain-specific effects which may be explained by the perception-action model of empathy. Together, these results underscore the important mutual influence of pain and emotional face processing.
-
Frontiers in psychology · Jan 2014
ReviewError management for musicians: an interdisciplinary conceptual framework.
Musicians tend to strive for flawless performance and perfection, avoiding errors at all costs. Dealing with errors while practicing or performing is often frustrating and can lead to anger and despair, which can explain musicians' generally negative attitude toward errors and the tendency to aim for flawless learning in instrumental music education. But even the best performances are rarely error-free, and research in general pedagogy and psychology has shown that errors provide useful information for the learning process. ⋯ In this contribution, we survey recent research in aviation, medicine, economics, psychology, and interdisciplinary decision theory that has demonstrated that specific error-management training can promote metacognitive skills that lead to better adaptive transfer and better performance skills. We summarize how this research can be applied to music, and survey-relevant research that is specifically tailored to the needs of musicians, including generic guidelines for risk and error management in music teaching and performance. On this basis, we develop a conceptual framework for risk management that can provide orientation for further music education and musicians at all levels.