Background:Maintaining patient’s dignity in intensive care units is difficult because of the unique conditions of both critically-ill patients and intensive care units.Objectives:The aim of this study was to uncover the cultural factors that impeded maintaining patients’ dignity in the cardiac surgery intensive care unit.Research Design:The study was conducted using a critical ethnographic method proposed by Carspecken.Participants and research context:Participants included all physicians, nurses and staffs working in the study setting. Data collection methods included participant observations, formal and informal interviews, and (...) documents assessment. In total, 200 hours of observation and 30 interviews were performed. Data were analyzed to uncover tacit cultural knowledge and to help healthcare providers to reconstruct the culture of their workplace.Ethical Consideration:Ethical approval for the study from Ethics committee of Isfahan University of Medical Sciences was obtained.Findings:The findings of the study fell into the following main themes: “Presence: the guarantee for giving enough attention to patients’ self-esteem”, “Instrumental and objectified attitudes”, “Adherence to the human equality principle: value-action gap”, “Paternalistic conduct”, “Improper language”, and “Non-interactive communication”. The final assertion was “Reductionism as a major barrier to the maintaining of patient’s dignity”.Discussion:The prevailing atmosphere in subculture of the CSICU was reductionism and paternalism. This key finding is part of the biomedical discourse. As a matter of fact, it is in contrast with dignified care because the latter necessitate holistic attitudes and approaches.Conclusion:Changing an ICU culture is not easy; but through increasing awareness and critical self-reflections, the nurses, physicians and other healthcare providers, may be able to reaffirm dignified care and cure in their therapeutic relationships. (shrink)

Interdisciplinary efforts from developmental psychology, phenomenology, and philosophy of mind, have studied the rudiments of social cognition and conceptualized distinct forms of intersubjective communication and interaction at human early life. Interaction theorists consider primary intersubjectivity a non-mentalist, pre-theoretical, non-conceptual sort of processes that ground a certain level of communication and understanding, and provide support to higher-level cognitive skills. We argue the study of human/neurorobot interaction consists in a unique opportunity to deepen understanding of underlying mechanisms in social cognition through synthetic (...) modeling, while allowing to examine a second person experiential access to intersubjectivity in embodied dyadic interaction. Concretely, we propose the study of primary intersubjectivity as a 2PP experience characterized by predictive engagement, where perception, cognition, and action are accounted for an hermeneutic circle in dyadic interaction. From our interpretation of the concept of active inference in free-energy principle theory, we propose an open-source methodology named neural robotics library for experimental human/neurorobot interaction, wherein a demonstration program named virtual Cartesian robot provides an opportunity to experience the aforementioned embodied interaction to general audiences. Lastly, through a study case, we discuss some ways human-robot primary intersubjectivity can contribute to cognitive science research, such as to the fields of developmental psychology, educational technology, and cognitive rehabilitation. (shrink)