One of the profound changes in cellular morphology during mitosis is a massive alteration in the organization of microfilament cytoskeleton. It has been recently discovered that nonmuscle caldesmon, an actin and calmodulin binding microfilament‐associated protein of relative molecular mass Mr = 83000, is dissociated from microfilaments during mitosis, apparently as a consequence of mitosis‐specific phosphorylation. cdc2 kinase, which is a catalytic subunit of MPF (maturation or mitosis promoting factor), is found to be responsible for the mitosis‐specific phosphorylation of caldesmon. Because (...) caldesmon is implicated in the regulation of actin myosin interactions and/or microfilament organization, these results suggest that cdc2 kinase directly affects microfilament re‐organization during mitosis. (shrink)

Among Japanese nurses ethics is perceived as being distant and unrelated to their practice, although this is filled with ethical concerns and the making of ethical decisions. The reasons for this dissociation are the primacy of western values in modern Japanese health care systems and the suppression of Japanese nurses’ indigenous ethical values because of domination by western ethics. A hermeneutic study was conducted to listen to the ethical voices of Japanese nurses. Seven ethical concerns were revealed. Although some of (...) these concerns may seem to share similar values with western ethical principles, the basis for the concerns was unique and rooted in the Japanese cultural value system. The meanings of each concern are explicated in conjunction with related background meanings. Listening and trying to understand these nurses’ voices in their own context suggests a way of bridging the gap between abstract and universal ethics and practical and local ethics. (shrink)

Nurses are obliged to provide quality nursing care that meets the ethical standards of their profession. However, clear descriptions of ethical practice are largely missing in the literature. Qualitative research using a phenomenological approach was conducted to explicate ethical nursing practice in Japanese end-of-life care settings and to discover how ethical practices unfold in clinical situations. Two paradigm cases and contrasting narratives of memorable end-of-life care from 32 Japanese nurses were used to reveal four levels of ethical practice: ethical, distressed, (...) uncertain, and unethical. Having the ability to actualize, justify, and recognize what is the good and/or right differentiated between these levels of ethical practice, empirical descriptions of which are given, followed by discussion of how nurses gain the skilled knowledge necessary for ethical practice. (shrink)

A psycho-historical framework for the science of art appreciation will be an experimental discipline that may shed new light on the highest capacities of the human brain, yielding new scientific ways to talk about the art appreciation. The recent findings of the contextual information processing in the human brain make the concept of the art-historical context clear for empirical experimentation.

Esta pesquisa tem como tema a prática da análise de necessidades de formação de professores, e como principal objetivo compreender as condições que favorecem essa prática a se tornar um referencial de saberes para a legitimação das práticas de formação continuada para professores. Para alcançar esse objetivo, serão utilizadas as ferramentas teórico-metodológicas foucaultianas próprias da genealogia e arqueologia na análise de documentos pertencentes ao âmbito da atual política educacional brasileira e de trabalhos científicos sobre a análise de necessidades de professores. (...) Como resultados parciais desta pesquisa, este texto apresenta o levantamento bibliográfico de trabalhos a respeito da temática investigada, nos programas de pós-graduação do Brasil e de Portugal. (shrink)

Empirical research has increasingly turned its attention to distributed cognition. Acts of remembering are embedded in a social, interactional context; cognitive labor is divided between a rememberer and external sources. The present article examines the benefits and costs associated with distributed, collaborative, conversational remembering. Further, we examine the consequences of joint acts of remembering on subsequent individual acts of remembering. Here, we focus on influences on memory through social contagion and socially shared retrieval-induced forgetting. Extending beyond a single social interaction, (...) we consider work that tracks the propagation of socially shared retrieval-induced forgetting throughout larger networks made up of several agents. Although much work has focused on how distributing cognition can augment memory, this is not the primary lesson we draw from the conversational remembering literature. Rather, mnemonic convergence between communicators is a boon to sociality. It allows the formation and maintenance of mnemonic communities, rather than expanding capacity or accuracy of memory per se. (shrink)

While empathy is considered a critical determinant of the quality of medical care, growing evidence suggests it may be associated with both one’s own positive and negative moods among healthcare professionals. Meanwhile, sense of coherence plays an essential role in the improvement of both psychological and physical health. Reportedly, individual SOC reaches full stability after around age 30. The aim of this study was first to evaluate the mediatory role of SOC on the association between empathy and individual moods among (...) 114 healthcare professionals in a general hospital, and then to examine the moderating effect of age on this association. Participants completed a range of self-report demographic questionnaires, Empathy Process Scale, the 13-item Antonovsky’s SOC, and Profile of Mood States. Findings showed that SOC mediated the relations between empathy and both POMS-Vigor and POMS-Depression. Notably, moderated mediation analysis revealed that there was a significant interaction on self-vigor mood in healthcare professionals. The indirect effect of empathy on self-vigor mood through SOC was significant at over mean age “32.83.” Although there was no significant interaction with age regarding the indirect effect of empathy on self-depression mood, in the sub-category level analysis of empathy, we found a significant interaction item [age × empathy for other’s negative affect ] on SOC. This indirect effect was also significant at over mean age “32.83.” Taken, together, the current study highlighted the significant mediator of SOC on that empathy amplifies self-vigor mood and attenuates self-depression mood as a protective factor among the Japanese healthcare professionals. Some components of these processes may depend on the moderating role of age, indicating that we may need to consider the SOC development with age for more effective empathy performance interventions among healthcare professionals. (shrink)

Sustained peripheral somatosensory stimulations, such as high-frequency repetitive somatosensory stimulation (HF-RSS) and vibrated stimulation, are effective in altering the balance between excitation and inhibition in the somatosensory cortex (S1) and motor cortex (M1). A recent study reported that whole-hand water flow (WF) stimulation induced neural disinhibition in the M1. Based on previous results, we hypothesized that whole-hand WF stimulation would lead to neural disinhibition in the S1 because there is a strong neural connection between M1 and S1 and aimed to (...) examine whether whole-hand WF stimulation would change the neural balance between excitation and inhibition in the S1. Nineteen healthy volunteers were studied by measuring excitation and inhibition in the S1 before and after each of the four 15-min interventions. The excitation and inhibition in the S1 were assessed using somatosensory evoked potentials (SEPs) and paired-pulse inhibition (PPI) induced by single- and paired-pulse stimulations, respectively. The four interventions were as follows: control, whole-hand water immersion, whole-hand WF, and HF-RSS. The results showed no significant changes in SEPs and PPI following any intervention. However, changes in PPI with an interstimulus interval (ISI) of 30 ms were significantly correlated with the baseline value before whole-hand WF. Thus, the present findings indicated that the whole-hand WF stimulation had a greater decreased neural inhibition in participants with higher neural inhibition in the S1 at baseline. Considering previous results on M1, the present results possibly show that S1 has lower plasticity than M1 and that the duration (15 min) of each intervention may not have been enough to alter the balance of excitation and inhibition in the S1. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Decolonizing MemoryLaurence J. Kirmayer*, MD (bio)In this far-reaching essay, Emily Walsh explores the significance of memory for coming to grips with the enduring legacy of colonialism in psychiatry. She argues that "for reasons of self-preservation, racialized individuals should reject collective memories underwritten by colonialism." Psychiatry can enable this process or collude with the structures of domination to silence and disable those who bear the brunt of the colonialist history (...) of violence and its current global incarnations. In this brief commentary, I want to underscore the importance of Walsh's argument, link it to contemporary work in cognitive and social science on the dynamics of memory, and point to some resources for implementing these insights in health services and clinical practice.Memory as Psychological Process, Social Practice and Cultural InstitutionMemory is not simply an individual psychological process of accessing images, stories, and knowledge of the past, but a reconstructive process of building a narrative (Kirmayer, 1996). This narrative is profoundly shaped by available templates, metaphors and models that are provided by the tacit, normative and official histories of society (Hirst, Yamashiro & Coman, 2018). But memory is also shaped by cultural affordances that guide attention and by narrative practices, which depend on other people (Ramstead, Veissière, & Kirmayer, 2017). In effect, remembering is not a matter of reaching down into one's memory archive or sedimented experience, but an embodied and enactive process of thinking with and through others (Laanes & Meretoja, 2021; Veissière, Constant, Ramstead, Friston, & Kirmayer, 2020). Memory then depends on community and on a shared understanding of history and of possible futures through which one can anchor and elaborate one's individual story.A direct consequence is that disconnecting a person from others, disembedding them from their social milieu, will lead to disruptions in memory and in the continuity of self. When the environment is toxic, this severance may sometimes be (partly) beneficial—but it always comes at a cost. Figuring out those costs, making them explicit, and ensuring that those whose history is being suppressed or overwritten by others have a chance to reclaim and write their own, is an ethical and pragmatic imperative.The denial of vital memories (recent or remote, personal or collective) causes fractures in the self that may disorganize the individual, install false consciousness, and cement the exclusionary and disvalued position of colonized, racialized, and [End Page 243] marginalized subjects. This process is not only—or even primarily—about memory. It is part of the structure of everyday life, inscribed in institutions and practices where colonial histories, racism, and economic exploitation are deeply entangled. Representations of the past are part of the way we construe the present and anticipate the future—but not every interpretive frame is a memory; there are structures in and of the moment that condition how we think about ourselves in health and illness and these too convey interests and biases disguised as "just the way things are."Fanon's Politics of Postcolonial Memory and IdentityWalsh offers a reading of aspects of Fanon's philosophy to reveal the workings of colonialism in and through memory. She is concerned with specific subsets of collective memories that are affectively charged and related to the identity of a group (Wertsch & Roediger, 2008). These memories are collective not simply they are shared by or distributed among the members of a group but because they define or constitute the collective itself.History is written largely by the powerful who create dominant or 'master' narratives that serve their own projects of legitimation and self-mystification (Trouillot, 2015; Lindqvist, 2021). But the creation of dominant narratives is not solely the province of those in power. There are many kinds of self-serving collective memory (Baumeister & Hastings, 2013)—from those related to the creation of nation states, which may ignore not only colonized peoples, but all ethnicities, religions or linguistic groups subordinated to the ideals of the dominant group (Anderson, 2006; Gunew, 2013; van Alphen & Carretero, 2015), to other forms of collective identity, even to those created by liberatory movements. These are maintained by institutionalization, ceremonial repetition and reenactment... (shrink)