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Is modern medicine ill with dehumanization? New article offers a diagnosis, unveils its causes, and prescribes a humanizing cure
“Anyone who has been admitted into a hospital or undergone a procedure, even if cared for in the most appropriate way, can feel as though they were treated like an animal or object,” says Harvard University psychologist and physician Omar Sultan Haque. Health care workers enter their professions to help people; research shows that empathic, humane care improves outcomes. Yet dehumanization is endemic. The results can be disastrous: neglect of necessary treatments or prescription of excessive, painful procedures or dangerous drugs. What are the causes and effects of dehumanization in medicine? And what can be done about it?
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Boost Intelligence by Focusing on Growth
Scientific American: Is intelligence innate, or can you boost it with effort? The way you answer that question may determine how well you learn. Those who think smarts are malleable are more likely to bounce back from their mistakes and make fewer errors in the future, according to a study published last October in Psychological Science. Researchers at Michigan State University asked 25 undergraduate students to participate in a simple, repetitive computer task: they had to press a button whenever the letters that appeared on the screen conformed to a particular pattern. Read the whole story: Scientific American
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How Symptoms Are Presented Online May Affect Whether We Think We Have The Disease
The Huffington Post: If you're one of those people who obsessively Googles your symptoms when you're feeling sick, you should read this. A new study in the journal Psychological Science shows that we're more likely to think we have the sickness or disease if a number of our symptoms are listed consecutively on a website. "People irrationally infer more meanings from a 'streak,'" study researcher Virginia Kwan, a psychologist at Arizona State University, said in a statement.
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Why Bilinguals Are Smarter
The New York Times: SPEAKING two languages rather than just one has obvious practical benefits in an increasingly globalized world. But in recent years, scientists have begun to show that the advantages of bilingualism are even more fundamental than being able to converse with a wider range of people. Being bilingual, it turns out, makes you smarter. It can have a profound effect on your brain, improving cognitive skills not related to language and even shielding against dementia in old age. This view of bilingualism is remarkably different from the understanding of bilingualism through much of the 20th century.
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Lack Of Compassion Can Make People Feel Less Moral, Study Shows
Huffington Post: When a stranger asks for money, people choose not to give for a variety of reasons, even if their hearts want to -- perhaps they're not sure what the money will be used for, or perhaps they'd rather give to an organization that helps people in need. Or maybe they just don't want to part with their cash. But a new study in the journal Psychological Science suggests that there could be a hidden cost to not being compassionate -- it might make you feel a little less moral. "Compassion is such a powerful emotion. It's been called a moral barometer," study researcher Daryl Cameron, of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said in a statement.
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Children whose minds wander ‘have sharper brains’
The Telegraph: A study has found that people who appear to be constantly distracted have more “working memory”, giving them the ability to hold a lot of information in their heads and manipulate it mentally. Children at school need this type of memory on a daily basis for a variety of tasks, such as following teachers’ instructions or remembering dictated sentences. During the study, volunteers were asked to perform one of two simple tasks during which researchers checked to ask if the participants’ minds were wandering. At the end, participants measured their working memory capacity by their ability to remember a series of letters interspersed with simple maths questions.
