The Perceptions of Conscience Questionnaire (PCQ) and the Stress of Conscience Questionnaire (SCQ) have previously been developed and validated within the ‘Stress of Conscience Study’. The aim was to revalidate these two questionnaires, including two additional, theoretically and empirically significant items, on a sample of healthcare personnel working in direct contact with patients. The sample consisted of 503 healthcare personnel. To test variation and distribution among the answers, descriptive statistics, item analysis and principal component analysis (PCA) were used to examine (...) the underlying factor structure of the questionnaires. Support for adding the new item to the PCQ was found. No support was found for adding the new item to the SCQ. Both questionnaires can be regarded as valid for Swedish settings but can be improved by rephrasing some of the PCQ items and by adding items about private life to the SCQ. (shrink)

Background The consistency of codes governing disclosure of terminal illness to patients and families in Islamic countries has not been studied until now. Objectives To review available codes on disclosure of terminal illness in Islamic countries. Data source and extraction Data were extracted through searches on Google and PubMed. Codes related to disclosure of terminal illness to patients or families were abstracted, and then classified independently by the three authors. Data synthesis Codes for 14 Islamic countries were located. Five codes (...) were silent regarding informing the patient, seven allowed concealment, one mandated disclosure and one prohibited disclosure. Five codes were silent regarding informing the family, four allowed disclosure and five mandated/recommended disclosure. The Islamic Organization for Medical Sciences code was silent on both issues. Conclusion Codes regarding disclosure of terminal illness to patients and families differed markedly among Islamic countries. They were silent in one-third of the codes, and tended to favour a paternalistic/utilitarian, family-centred approach over an autonomous, patient-centred approach. (shrink)

Analysis of sportsmen behavior enabled the authors to conduct simultaneous analysis of emotional expression of people from many distinct countries and cultures. In the study, participants from Nigeria and Poland watched all the goals scored in group matches of the 1998, 2002 and 2006 World Cups and assessed the emotions players expressed after scoring each goal on three scales. Based on the assessment of the participants, emotional expression of football players from 51 countries was analyzed. Basing on “Montesquieu hypothesis”, it (...) was shown that players born in warmer climates express more excitement and happiness after scoring a goal. Further cross-cultural differences were also found. The results are discussed in context of previous cross-cultural studies regarding emotional expression. (shrink)

The business of philosophy is “to think things together,” so far as the reality of things and the capacity of thought allow. That reality presents many contrasts, physical, ethical, metaphysical, light and darkness, life and death, good and evil, right and wrong, the One and the many, the Infinite and the finite, the Eternal and the temporal, and what we mention as last, but not least, for our immediate purpose, Being and Becoming, the Constant and the Contingent. The contrasts need (...) not be regarded as contradictions, negations one of another, as thought the Eleatics with their emphasis on Being, or the Heraclitics with their preference for Becoming. To our immediate scrutiny all stands and all flows may be irreconcilable oppositions; but Einstein is teaching us that there is relativity in all our interpretations of reality. We need not with Indian thought declare Brahma alone real, and all else Maya , illusion. (shrink)

One of the annoying habits of philosophers is to substitute without warning a normative for a descriptive theory of the topic they are discussing—that is, in what purports to be a statement of how the subject actually presents itself they tell us instead how it ought to present itself. Current treatments of the elusive topic “meaning” seem to me to supply capital instances of this vice. Defenders of a positivist or an operational theory of meaning often give us no hint (...) that their conclusions are conclusions about how the meaning of words ought to be interpreted, not about how, by and large, it is interpreted. Without such a hint their readers naturally suppose that it is the latter problem with which they are concerned, but this is rarely the case; were it so, emphasis could hardly fail to fall on determinants of meaning that are too often neglected by philosophical analysts. (shrink)

Che gli esseri umani siano i soli animali capaci di ridere e piangere può essere messo in dubbio, ma che siano gli unici a sviluppare degli strumenti a questo scopo, non può esserlo. Tragedia e commedia, i due fronti dell’arte drammatica codificati da Aristotele nella "Poetica", sono proprio questi strumenti. La difficoltà a conferire un significato univoco a questi due magmatici termini, è sintomatica. In questo breve scritto tento di identificare la ragione di questa difficoltà e proporre un’ipotesi di lavoro (...) per risolverla, o per lo meno approcciarla. (shrink)