Indian Journal of Psychological Medicine, Ahead of Print.
Exploring Psychiatrists’ Experiences During Transition from Mental Health Act, 1987 to Mental Healthcare Act, 2017 in Goa, India
Indian Journal of Psychological Medicine, Ahead of Print.
Background:Mental Healthcare Act 2017 (MHCA) came into force on 29 May 2018. Goa State Mental Health Authority (GSMHA) notified the Mental Health Review Board on 8 February 2022, completing the important process of implementation of the act. The transition comes with challenges.Methods:A qualitative study was conducted with 18 practicing psychiatrists who had worked under Mental Health Act 1987 as well as MHCA 2017 through purposive sampling across Goa. Data was collected through individual interviews; analysis was done by Braune and Clarke’s framework of Thematic Analysis.Results:Eighteen psychiatrists participated: 4 private, 3 secondary and 11 from tertiary levels. The themes extracted were work during MHA 1987, transition, and after the implementation of MHCA 2017. Some participants reported difficulties, felt an increase in workload, and had negative emotions, while a few were neutral, indicating mixed perceptions.Conclusion:This study highlights the administrative struggles and moral dilemmas faced by psychiatrists in handling the new legislation. It’s imperative that the implementation of new act should be carried out with sufficient resource allocation and monitoring mechanisms.
Background:Mental Healthcare Act 2017 (MHCA) came into force on 29 May 2018. Goa State Mental Health Authority (GSMHA) notified the Mental Health Review Board on 8 February 2022, completing the important process of implementation of the act. The transition comes with challenges.Methods:A qualitative study was conducted with 18 practicing psychiatrists who had worked under Mental Health Act 1987 as well as MHCA 2017 through purposive sampling across Goa. Data was collected through individual interviews; analysis was done by Braune and Clarke’s framework of Thematic Analysis.Results:Eighteen psychiatrists participated: 4 private, 3 secondary and 11 from tertiary levels. The themes extracted were work during MHA 1987, transition, and after the implementation of MHCA 2017. Some participants reported difficulties, felt an increase in workload, and had negative emotions, while a few were neutral, indicating mixed perceptions.Conclusion:This study highlights the administrative struggles and moral dilemmas faced by psychiatrists in handling the new legislation. It’s imperative that the implementation of new act should be carried out with sufficient resource allocation and monitoring mechanisms.
Counseling practices of speech-language pathologists working with aphasia: “I did not have adequate training in actual counseling strategies.”
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Aging decreases the precision of visual working memory
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Focused on the negative: emotions and visuospatial attention in generalized anxiety disorder
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“I Need A Break or I Might Quit”: STEM Academics’ Pandemic Experiences
The Counseling Psychologist, Ahead of Print.
This research highlights the voices of 103 STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) women in academia who responded to a series of open-ended questions regarding the impact of COVID-19 on their work and tenure. The current study also sought to compare these responses to similar questions that were collected a year prior (n = 84) during the earliest months of the pandemic (Dunn et al., 2022). Consensual qualitative research-modified (CQR-M; Spangler et al., 2011) was utilized to analyze the data. The main findings reveal substantial concerns about the pandemic’s negative impact on academic work, highlighting research disruptions, difficulty balancing demands on time (e.g., extra responsibilities at work, navigating work and family conflicts), impacts on mental health and burnout for women faculty in STEM, and an increase in negative effects from 2020 to 2021. Clinical implications, future research directions, and social advocacy interventions in the context of COVID-19 will be discussed.
This research highlights the voices of 103 STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) women in academia who responded to a series of open-ended questions regarding the impact of COVID-19 on their work and tenure. The current study also sought to compare these responses to similar questions that were collected a year prior (n = 84) during the earliest months of the pandemic (Dunn et al., 2022). Consensual qualitative research-modified (CQR-M; Spangler et al., 2011) was utilized to analyze the data. The main findings reveal substantial concerns about the pandemic’s negative impact on academic work, highlighting research disruptions, difficulty balancing demands on time (e.g., extra responsibilities at work, navigating work and family conflicts), impacts on mental health and burnout for women faculty in STEM, and an increase in negative effects from 2020 to 2021. Clinical implications, future research directions, and social advocacy interventions in the context of COVID-19 will be discussed.
Curious about threats: Morbid curiosity and interest in conspiracy theories in US adults
Abstract
Conspiracy theories allege secret plots between two or more powerful actors to achieve an outcome, sometimes explaining important events or proposing alternative understandings of reality in opposition to mainstream accounts, and commonly highlight the threat presented by the plot and its conspirators. Research in psychology proposes that belief in conspiracy theories is motivated by a desire to understand threats and is predicted by increased anxiety. Morbid curiosity describes the tendency to seek out information about threatening or dangerous situations and is associated with an interest in threat-related entertainment and increased anxiety. Across three studies, we investigated the relationship between morbid curiosity and conspiracy theories in US-based samples. We found that higher trait morbid curiosity was associated with higher general conspiracist beliefs (Study 1) and the perceived threat of conspiratorial explanations of events (Study 2). Using a behavioural choice paradigm, we found that participants who chose to investigate morbidly curious stimuli were more likely to choose to learn about conspiratorial explanations for events (Study 3). Greater curiosity about the minds of dangerous people was consistently the strongest predictor of conspiratorial ideation and interest. These results suggest that morbid curiosity is an important but hitherto unstudied predictor of conspiratorial interest and belief.
Technology Acceptance of Socially Assistive Robots Among Older Adults and the Factors Influencing It: A Meta-Analysis
Journal of Applied Gerontology, Ahead of Print.
The purpose of this study was to deeply understand older adults’ acceptance of socially assistive robots and their influencing factors and to compare the strength of the correlation between each influencing factor variable and the acceptance. The literature search was performed in five databases from their inception to January 17, 2023. The meta-analysis was performed using Review Manager 5.4 and Stata 16.0 software. Thirteen papers were included in this study. The mean value of acceptability after using the inverse variance method was 3.68. Education level is strongly related to technology acceptance; perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness, technology experience, technology attitude, perceived hedonism, and convenience are moderately related; anxiety is only weakly related.
The purpose of this study was to deeply understand older adults’ acceptance of socially assistive robots and their influencing factors and to compare the strength of the correlation between each influencing factor variable and the acceptance. The literature search was performed in five databases from their inception to January 17, 2023. The meta-analysis was performed using Review Manager 5.4 and Stata 16.0 software. Thirteen papers were included in this study. The mean value of acceptability after using the inverse variance method was 3.68. Education level is strongly related to technology acceptance; perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness, technology experience, technology attitude, perceived hedonism, and convenience are moderately related; anxiety is only weakly related.
Best Practice in Post-Stroke Aphasia Services According to People with Lived Experience. A Modified Nominal Group Technique Study
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Self as a prior: The malleability of Bayesian multisensory integration to social salience
Abstract
Our everyday perceptual experiences are grounded in the integration of information within and across our senses. Due to this direct behavioural relevance, cross-modal integration retains a certain degree of contextual flexibility, even to social relevance. However, how social relevance modulates cross-modal integration remains unclear. To investigate possible mechanisms, Experiment 1 tested the principles of audio-visual integration for numerosity estimation by deriving a Bayesian optimal observer model with perceptual prior from empirical data to explain perceptual biases. Such perceptual priors may shift towards locations of high salience in the stimulus space. Our results showed that the tendency to over- or underestimate numerosity, expressed in the frequency and strength of fission and fusion illusions, depended on the actual event numerosity. Experiment 2 replicated the effects of social relevance on multisensory integration from Scheller & Sui, 2022 JEP:HPP, using a lower number of events, thereby favouring the opposite illusion through enhanced influences of the prior. In line with the idea that the self acts like a prior, the more frequently observed illusion (more malleable to prior influences) was modulated by self-relevance. Our findings suggest that the self can influence perception by acting like a prior in cue integration, biasing perceptual estimates towards areas of high self-relevance.