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At least 487 records · Page 27Linked to original sources
PubMed1996

Physiological pushing in the second stage of labour: the future for midwifery care.

Current literature indicates that, during the second stage of labour, directed, sustained pushing is the predominant management. Research demonstrates this management has adverse effects upon the mother and baby. The view that the second stage of labour is of high risk, and needs to be hastened, remains unsupported. It is this view that perpetuates the use of directed, sustained pushing. This article demonstrates that physiological pushing during second stage of labour is the way of the future. When midwives work with normal physiology, they work with, not against the woman during the second stage of labour. Midwives must empower women to trust their own instincts.

Delivery, Obstetric↗
PubMed2003

Short-term adaptations in co-ordination during the initial phase of learning manual wheelchair propulsion.

The purpose of this study was to analyse adaptations in kinematics and muscle activity/co-contraction in novice able-bodied subjects during the initial phase of learning hand rim wheelchair propulsion. Nine able-bodied subjects performed three 4-min practice blocks on a wheelchair ergometer. The external power output and velocity were constant for all blocks, respectively 0.25 W x kg(-1) and 1.11 m x s(-1). Electromyography of 16 arm, shoulder, back and chest muscles and kinematics were measured. Some small changes in the segmental movement pattern were seen during the practice period. Moreover, an increase in muscle activity and co-contraction of several muscles was found over time. The hypothesis that subjects instinctively search for an optimum frequency, in which the recovery phase is related to the eigenfrequency of the arms and, therefore, the least muscle activity, could not be supported. Since co-contraction of antagonist pairs remained the same or even increased, the hypothesis that there would be a decrease in muscle co-contraction as a result of practice, was not confirmed. This study was probably too short for the novice subjects to explore this new task of wheelchair propulsion completely and reach an optimum in terms of cycle frequency and muscle activity/co-contraction.

Adult↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Hope: a concept for home care nursing.

Hope is an important concept to nursing. It is a powerful human response seen in every age group, across all demographic lines, and within all health care settings. Hope is a component of virtually every nurse-patient relationship developed in every field of nursing. Nowhere is the significance of hope more visible than in the home care setting. Whether it is a hospice visit or a postpartum follow-up visit with a new mother and infant, the home care nurse instinctively searches for evidence of hope in the patient and his or her support system. Hope has long been recognized by nurses as not only valuable but also essential to health.

Adult↗
PubMed2002

[Sex and love].

Sex is established as soon as spermatozoid and ovule have met. Except for rare cases of ambiguity, you clearly see at birth whether the baby is a boy or a girl. This mere factual difference evolves into sexual identity through childhood and fully blossoms in teenagers. Is sexual maturity happily completed then? Not always. Unrational sexual pulsions and survival instincts belong to the whole animal species but for man's child, as soon as he is born and until he dies, feelings will be intimately involved with sexuality in all its various stages. Teenagers' sexuality is both the end stage of childhood sexuality, being as such full of psychological traps, and the beginning of a search for a balance between sex and love, which is perhaps our modern way of trying to achieve self-fulfilment and happiness.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1997

Suicide by alcohol overdose.

Alcohol is the most often detected substance in the body of a person who has committed suicide. It may be used to reduce the last instinctive hestitations to taking one's own life. Suicide is common in cancer patients. People with cancer-related depression often use alcohol as a means of coping but they very rarely use it in order to kill themselves through acute intoxication. However, a case of a cancer patient who committed suicide consuming two bottles of spirit was recently investigated and the conclusions are presented. The post-mortem cardiac blood and vitreous humor alcohol level was found to be 9.0 and 6.2 mg/ml respectively.

Journal Article↗
PubMed1999

Using complementary therapies within nursing: some ethical and legal considerations.

Increasing numbers of health professionals are incorporating complementary and alternative (CAM) therapies into their work. Nurses, in particular, are embracing CAM techniques, which may fit well within their philosophy of care for their patients and which may, instinctively, be more holistic than the approach of their medical counterparts. Patients, who may be distillusioned with conventional approaches to treatment, appear to express high levels of satisfaction in receiving these therapies and nurses clearly enjoy giving them. Beyond patient preference for CAM therapies though, there is still a paucity of clinical evidence to support the wider integration of CAM into the NHS. This article focuses on some of the ethical and legal considerations raised by nurses who employ, or are considering employing, CAM techniques as part of their NHS work, looking, in particular, at the need to ensure patient safety whilst at the same time protecting nurses from criticism or censure.

Complementary Therapies↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Midwife or doctor: a study of pregnant women making delivery decisions.

Eighty-eight women from diverse educational backgrounds were interviewed as they made several important and related life decisions during their pregnancies. In this article, the focus is on the choice of birth attendant. There were few differences between those women who did and did not consider a midwife. Women who selected a midwife reported feeling more knowledgeable about birth attendants, more in control over the birth attendant decision, more satisfied about their delivery decisions, more in control of and satisfied with pain medication decisions, more autonomous in their pregnancy decision making, and more in agreement with "alternative birth" philosophies. and less in agreement with "conventional birth" philosophies. The participants also reported receiving more approval from spouse/significant other and friends, were more likely to use "gut instinct" and previous experience or habit to make pregnancy decisions, and were more ready to make these decisions than were women who had not selected a midwife as their primary birth attendant.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2003

Auguste Forel on ants and neurology.

Auguste Forel was born in 1848 in the French part of Switzerland. He developed a lifelong passion for myrmecology in his childhood, but chose medicine and neuropsychiatry to earn his living. He first undertook a comparative study of the thalamus under Theodor Meynert in Vienna and then, from 1872 to 1879, he worked as Assistant Physician to Bernhard von Gudden in Munich. This led in 1877 to his seminal work on the organization of the tegmental region in which he provides the first description of the zona incerta and the so-called H (Haubenfeld) fields that still bear his name. In 1879, Forel was appointed Professor of Psychiatry in Munich and Director of the Burghölzli cantonal asylum. He became interested in the therapeutic value of hypnotism, while continuing his work on brain anatomy and ants. His neuroanatomical studies with Gudden's method led him to formulate the neuron theory in 1887, four years before Wilhelm von Waldeyer, who received most of the credit for it. Forel then definitively turned his back on neuroscience. After his retirement from the Burghölzli asylum in 1898. and despite a stroke in 1911 that left him hemiplegic, Forel started to write extensively on various social issues, such as alcohol abstinence and sexual problems. Before his death in 1931 at the age of 83, Forel published a remarkable book on the social world of the ants in which he made insightful observations on the neural control of sensory and instinctive behavior common to both humans and insects.

Animals↗
PubMed2001

Culture, social minds, and governance in evolution.

In the past quarter century, the concept of culture has undergone change as evolutionary scientists have come to include social behavior in their purview. Evolutionary psychology is the newest field to concern itself with culture by claiming that most specific human behaviors are generated by minds specifically designed for these behaviors -- and not from a general-purpose mind -- as a result of adaptations made during the Pleistocene. Thus, mental behaviors are explained as having formed independently of cultural learning. In defending the concept, however, the leading proponents practically slough off culture as significant in human affairs. I argue that they have neglected the powerful explanatory statement of Darwin regarding at least one general-purpose adaptation of social animals, namely, the instinct for sociability, a position supported by recent neurological studies. Expanding the Darwinian concept, modern research shows that (1) the human brain was selected for sociability, which explains the origin and strength of culture, as well as its variability; (2) the development of complex culture in a pre-human primate initiated the two-and-one-half million-year evolution to modern humans; and (3) there are political contributions to cultural evolution that rest on the nature of groups (competitive and cooperative).

Journal Article↗
PubMed1998

The neosexual revolution.

The affluent societies of the Western world have witnessed a tremendous cultural and social transformation of sexuality during the 1980s and 1990s, a process I refer to as the neosexual revolution. Up to now, this recoding and reassessment of sexuality has proceeded rather slowly and quietly. Yet both its real and its symbolic effects may indeed be more consequential than those brought about in the course of the rapid, noisy sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. The neosexual revolution is dismantling the old patterns of sexuality and reassembling them anew. In the process, dimensions, intimate relationships, preferences, and sexual fragments emerge, many of which had been submerged, were unnamed, or simply did not exist before. In general, sexuality has lost much of its symbolic meaning as a cultural phenomenon. Sexuality is no longer the great metaphor for pleasure and happiness, nor is it so greatly overestimated as it was during the sexual revolution. It is now widely taken for granted, much like egotism or motility. Whereas sex was once mystified in a positive sense--as ecstasy and transgression, it has now taken on a negative mystification characterized by abuse, violence, and deadly infection. While the old sexuality was based primarily upon sexual instinct, orgasm, and the heterosexual couple, neosexualities revolve predominantly around gender difference, thrills, self-gratification, and prosthetic substitution. From the vast number of interrelated processes from which neosexualities emerge, three empirically observable phenomena have been selected for discussion here: the dissociation of the sexual sphere, the dispersion of sexual fragments, and the diversification of intimate relationships. These processes go hand in hand with the commercialization and banalization of sexuality. They are looked upon as being controlled individually through the mechanisms of a fundamentally egotistical consensus morality. In conformity with the general principles at work in society, the outcome of the neosexual revolution could be described as self-disciplined and self-optimized lean sexuality.

Family Relations↗
PubMed2002

Taking care of one's own: justice and family caregiving.

This paper asks whether adult children have a duty of justice to act as caregivers for their frail, elderly parents. I begin (Sections I. and II.) by locating the historical reasons why relationships within families were not thought to raise issues of justice. I argue that these reasons are misguided. The paper next presents specific examples showing the relevance of justice to family relationships. I point out that in the United States today, the burden of caregiving for dependent parents falls disproportionately on women (Sections III. and IV.). The paper goes on to use Rawls' theoretical tool of the veil of ignorance to argue that caring for parents should not be linked to a person's sex and more generally, that there is no duty of justice to assume the role of caregiver for dependent parents (Sections V.). Although justice does not provide the moral foundations for parent care, I show that it nonetheless places important limits on the instinct to care. I conclude that the voice of justice should be audible, and is intrinsically present, within families.

Adult↗
PubMed2003

Sperm motion characteristics of Garole rams raised for a prolonged period in a semi-arid tropical environment.

The Garole is a prolific but less well known and rare breed of small sheep found in the hot and humid Sunderban region of West Bengal. An ability to breed throughout the year and to graze in knee-deep water, resistance to foot rot and a strong mothering instinct are some of the special features of this breed. Garole rams could provide germplasm to incorporate prolificacy traits by artificial insemination of the nonprolific sheep breeds found in abundance in the semi-arid and arid tropical climates of India. The aim of the present study was to evaluate the semen production by Garole rams maintained in a semi-arid climate for three years and to objectively assess their semen quality by a computer-assisted sperm analysis technique. The donor rams were randomly selected each year from the original flock procured from their natural habitat or from the offspring born at the Institute farm. Semen was collected weekly for three weeks each autumn for three consecutive years from 8 rams each year. The overall means (SD) of the traits that did not differ significantly with age or year were volume, concentration, curvilinear velocity, average path velocity, amplitude of lateral head displacement, beat frequency, motility and the percentages of rapid motile sperms and of slow motile sperms. The age of the rams had a significant effect (p<0.05) on the straight-line velocity but this was not significantly affected by the length of exposure to the semi-arid climate. However, the age and year had significant effects (p<0.05) on linearity, straightness and the percentage of medium motile sperms. It was concluded that Garole rams are capable of producing good-quality semen even after a prolonged period of exposure to a semi-arid tropical climate.

Animals↗
PubMed2005

[Hans Asperger and his patients--a retrospective examination of the spectrum of autistic disorders].

In 1944 the Viennese paediatrician Hans Asperger described for the first time a number of boys with so-called "autistic psychopathy" but failed to give a detailed quantitative-descriptive phenomenology of the condition. The aim of this second part of a retrospective analysis of the clinical case records of children diagnosed by Asperger and his team is to provide a quantitative, in-depth description of these children, as well as to investigate Asperger's idea of a transition from autistic psychopathic personality traits towards "normality". We examined 181 case records of children seen between 1950 and 1986 who were either clearly diagnosed with autistic psychopathy (AP) or showed autistic features (AZ). Consequently, features common to both the AP and AZ groups and the differences between them are described and compared to the current ICD-10 criteria for Asperger's syndrome. Children with AZ shared the high intelligence, the social handicap and the impairment of "instincts", but showed less severe symptoms and more distinct skills, as well as fewer co-morbid disorders than children with AP. Results suggest that there is indeed something like an "autistic phenotype" with certain deficits and assets that can be found in less handicapped children with autistic impairments. The current ICD-10 criteria do not seem to fully capture Asperger's original account of the syndrome and should be discussed anew if Asperger's syndrome is reconsidered for inclusion into diagnostic criteria in the future.

Asperger Syndrome↗
PubMed2004

"Scared stiff": catatonia as an evolutionary-based fear response.

Catatonia, long viewed as a motor disorder, may be better understood as a fear response, akin to the animal defense strategy tonic immobility (after G. G. Gallup & J. D. Maser, 1977). This proposal, consistent with K. L. Kahlbaum's (1874/1973) original conception, is based on similarities between catatonia and tonic immobility ("death feint") as well as evidence that catatonia is associated with anxiety and agitated depression and responds dramatically to benzodiazepines. It is argued that catatonia originally derived from ancestral encounters with carnivores whose predatory instincts were triggered by movement but is now inappropriately expressed in very different modern threat situations. Found in a wide range of psychiatric and serious medical conditions, catatonia may represent a common "end state" response to feelings of imminent doom and can serve as a template to understand other psychiatric disorders.

Animals↗
PubMed2005

Affect, risk, and decision making.

Risk is perceived and acted on in 2 fundamental ways. Risk as feelings refers to individuals' fast, instinctive, and intuitive reactions to danger. Risk as analysis brings logic, reason, and scientific deliberation to bear on risk management. Reliance on risk as feelings is described with "the affect heuristic." The authors trace the development of this heuristic across a variety of research paths. The authors also discuss some of the important practical implications resulting from ways that this heuristic impacts how people perceive and evaluate risk, and, more generally, how it influences all human decision making. Finally, some important implications of the affect heuristic for communication and decision making pertaining to cancer prevention and treatment are briefly discussed.

Affect↗
PubMed2006

Amygdala size and hypothalamus size predict social play frequency in nonhuman primates: a comparative analysis using independent contrasts.

The amygdala and hypothalamus become sexually differentiated by gonadal hormones giving rise to sexually differentiated behaviors, which include play behavior. Phylogenetic comparative analyses test for relationships between social play and brain structure volumes. Relative volume of the amygdala and hypothalamus correlated with social play, but not nonsocial play, even after controlling for the size of other brain structures. The authors propose that behaviors such as social assessment, recognizing and responding to facial expression, and social response appropriateness, which are mediated by the amygdala, are developed through social play. Additionally, the hypothalamus may regulate the motivation to engage in play through positive reinforcement of pleasurable activity. Thus, the instinctive socio-emotive aspects of play in primates appear to be those regulated by the amygdala and hypothalamus.

Amygdala↗
PubMed2003

Three pioneers of comparative psychology in America, 1843-1890: Lewis H. Morgan, John Bascom, and Joseph LeConte.

Scientific comparative psychology in America dates from the mid-1890s, but there is a body of earlier literature on the topic, written during a period of theistic debates over Darwinian evolution. The anthropologist Lewis H. Morgan rejected instinct as an explanation of animal behavior in 1843 and defended the mental similarities between animals and humans, although he was not an evolutionist. John Bascom's textbook Comparative Psychology (1878) is the earliest American work to use that title, and its theistic approach anticipates some arguments found in much later evolutionary works. Beginning in 1860, the geologist Joseph LeConte, who is well known for defending the compatibility of evolution and religion, wrote several articles in which he outlined a comparative evolutionary approach to psychological problems. However, these writers did not establish a coherent research tradition and were ignored by the "New Psychologists" of the 1880s.

History, 19th Century↗
PubMed2000

Behaviourally driven gene expression reveals song nuclei in hummingbird brain.

Hummingbirds have developed a wealth of intriguing features, such as backwards flight, ultraviolet vision, extremely high metabolic rates, nocturnal hibernation, high brain-to-body size ratio and a remarkable species-specific diversity of vocalizations. Like humans, they have also developed the rare trait of vocal learning, this being the ability to acquire vocalizations through imitation rather than instinct. Here we show, using behaviourally driven gene expression in freely ranging tropical animals, that the forebrain of hummingbirds contains seven discrete structures that are active during singing, providing the first anatomical and functional demonstration of vocal nuclei in hummingbirds. These structures are strikingly similar to seven forebrain regions that are involved in vocal learning and production in songbirds and parrots--the only other avian orders known to be vocal learners. This similarity is surprising, as songbirds, parrots and hummingbirds are thought to have evolved vocal learning and associated brain structures independently, and it indicates that strong constraints may influence the evolution of forebrain vocal nuclei.

Animals↗