Search PubMed⌕ Search

SEARCH · Search PubMed

Results for “Awareness”

Search indexed PubMed citations on genomics, clinical trials, systematic reviews and public health. Explore titles, authors and supplied subject terms, then open the PubMed record.

Quote a phrase for an exact phrase match. Source license links do not imply unrestricted reuse.

At least 991 records · Page 55Linked to original sources
PubMed2002

Awareness of genetic testing for colorectal cancer predisposition among specialists in gastroenterology.

OBJECTIVES: Adult gastroenterologists practicing in New York State were surveyed to determine their practice with regard to identifying family histories consistent with inherited forms of colorectal cancer, and to assess their awareness of cancer genetic counseling and molecular genetic testing for familial adenomatous polyposis (FAP) and hereditary nonpolyposis colorectal cancer (HNPCC). METHODS: A closed-ended questionnaire was mailed to 815 gastroenterologists identified through the membership Directory of the American Gastroenterological Association (1998). Two mailings resulted in a response rate of 35%. RESULTS: In all, 99% of the gastroenterologists obtained a family history from their patients, and 95% were aware of cancer genetic counseling. However, only 51% would routinely refer patients for genetic counseling before providing cancer predisposition testing. In addition, only 52% were aware of the availability of genetic tests for FAP and 34% for HNPCC. Presented with a family history consistent with HNPCC, 79% could identify the syndrome, 26% recommended genetic counseling for the consultand, and 16% advised appropriate screening, according to current recommendations. CONCLUSIONS: The majority of gastroenterologists do obtain a family history on their patients. However, there is a need for physician education regarding the recognition of pedigrees consistent with inherited colorectal cancer, the genetic counseling process, and the availability of mutation testing for FAP and HNPCC.

Adenomatous Polyposis Coli↗
PubMed2005

Evaluating psychiatric nurses' awareness of evidence-based nursing publications.

BACKGROUND: Research has shown that nurses lack skills to find and appraise research literature, lack time and organisational support to utilise research, and need user-friendly research material to implement evidence-based health care in practice. In Sweden, the concept of evidence-based health care has been introduced by The Swedish Council on Technology Assessment in Health Care (SBU), a concept which the nursing profession quickly adopted. This study was initiated synchronously with the publication of two reports on evidence-based nursing (EBN) in psychiatric care. AIM: To investigate the dissemination and awareness of literature on EBN among psychiatric nurses in Sweden, and more specifically whether nurses were aware of the EBN reports. METHODS: A postal questionnaire was used with a prospective pre-post design. A questionnaire was constructed and distributed to the members in The National Association of Psychiatric Nurses at two occasions--before publication of the two reports and 1 year post-publication. The questionnaire was initially circulated to 2,294 nurses. The response rate for the first distribution was 82% and for the second 72%. RESULTS: Although the results demonstrate an increase in awareness concerning the concept of EBN and access to literature between data collection, there were still many nurses who reported no access to the literature. The reported use of literature in practice was scarce; however, findings demonstrated an increase in opinion about the value of using literature in practice. CONCLUSIONS: The findings of this study demonstrate that the dissemination of literature in EBN, as well as EBN literature in psychiatric care, still requires considerable development to assure its use in practice. IMPLICATIONS: The diffusion and dissemination of evidence-based literature within nursing must be guided by a structured plan followed by concrete examples of its implication(s) for practice.

Adult↗
PubMed2001

Fast backprojections from the motion to the primary visual area necessary for visual awareness.

Much is known about the pathways from photoreceptors to higher visual areas in the brain. However, how we become aware of what we see or of having seen at all is a problem that has eluded neuroscience. Recordings from macaque V1 during deactivation of MT+/V5 and psychophysical studies of perceptual integration suggest that feedback from secondary visual areas to V1 is necessary for visual awareness. We used transcranial magnetic stimulation to probe the timing and function of feedback from human area MT+/V5 to V1 and found its action to be early and critical for awareness of visual motion.

Adult↗
PubMed1998

Classical conditioning and brain systems: the role of awareness.

Classical conditioning of the eye-blink response, perhaps the best studied example of associative learning in vertebrates, is relatively automatic and reflexive, and with the standard procedure (simple delay conditioning), it is intact in animals with hippocampal lesions. In delay conditioning, a tone [the conditioned stimulus (CS)] is presented just before an air puff to the eye [the unconditioned stimulus (US)]. The US is then presented, and the two stimuli coterminate. In trace conditioning, a variant of the standard paradigm, a short interval (500 to 1000 ms) is interposed between the offset of the CS and the onset of the US. Animals with hippocampal lesions fail to acquire trace conditioning. Amnesic patients with damage to the hippocampal formation and normal volunteers were tested on two versions of delay conditioning and two versions of trace conditioning and then assessed for the extent to which they became aware of the temporal relationship between the CS and the US. Amnesic patients acquired delay conditioning at a normal rate but failed to acquire trace conditioning. For normal volunteers, awareness was unrelated to successful delay conditioning but was a prerequisite for successful trace conditioning. Trace conditioning is hippocampus dependent because, as in other tasks of declarative memory, conscious knowledge must be acquired across the training session. Trace conditioning may provide a means for studying awareness in nonhuman animals, in the context of current ideas about multiple memory systems and the function of the hippocampus.

Aged↗
PubMed2003

Awareness of human papillomavirus among women attending a well woman clinic.

OBJECTIVES: To assess the level and accuracy of public understanding of human papillomavirus (HPV) in the United Kingdom. METHODS: Women attending a well woman clinic were asked to complete a questionnaire assessing HPV awareness and specific knowledge about the virus. RESULTS: Questionnaires were completed by 1032 women, of whom 30% had heard of HPV. Older women, non-smokers, and those with a history of candida, genital warts, or an abnormal smear result were more likely to have heard of HPV. Even among those who had heard of HPV, knowledge was generally poor, and fewer than half were aware of the link with cervical cancer. There was also confusion about whether condoms or oral contraceptives could protect against HPV infection. CONCLUSIONS: In this relatively well educated sample, awareness and knowledge of HPV were poor. Public education is urgently needed so that women participating in cervical cancer screening are fully informed about the meaning of their results, especially if HPV testing is soon to be introduced.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2003

Orienting of attention without awareness is affected by measurement-induced attentional control settings.

McCormick (1997) concluded that peripheral cues presented below a threshold of awareness could nevertheless attract attention because they facilitated target processing near the cue shortly after its presentation. Yet, whereas an exogenous shift of attention typically exhibits a biphasic pattern (initial facilitation followed by inhibition of return [IOR]), at late cue-target onset asynchronies, IOR was not observed by McCormick. In our study, targets requiring a detection response were preceded by masked and nonmasked, uninformative cues presented under two conditions: one in which the cue was ignored (no report) and one in which the cue was detected and localized following the response to the target (cue report). When participants were required to make cue judgments at the end of each trial, we replicated McCormick's pattern, finding facilitation (but not IOR) following both masked and nonmasked cues. When there was no requirement to judge the presence or location of the cues, IOR was present with and without masks, whereas facilitation was observed only when the cues were not masked. That the assessment of cue awareness increases attentional facilitation and prevents (or delays) the onset of IOR is attributed to attentional control settings put in place to perform the cue-awareness assessments in the cue-report condition.

Attention↗
PubMed2006

Retinal image shifts, but not eye movements per se, cause alternations in awareness during binocular rivalry.

Particularly promising studies on visual awareness exploit a generally used perceptual bistability phenomenon, "binocular rivalry"--in which the two eyes' images alternately dominate--because it can dissociate the visual input from the perceptual output. To successfully study awareness, it is crucial to know the extent to which eye movements alter the input. Although there is convincing evidence that perceptual alternations can occur without eye movements, the literature on their exact role is mixed. Moreover, recent work has demonstrated that eye movements, first, correlate positively with perceptual alternations in binocular rivalry, and second, often accompany covert attention shifts (that were previously thought to be purely mental). Here, we asked whether eye movements cause perceptual alternations, and if so, whether it is either the execution of the eye movement or the resulting retinal image change that causes the alternation. Subjects viewed repetitive line patterns, enabling a distinction of saccades that did produce foveal image changes from those that did not. Subjects reported binocular rivalry alternations. We found that, although a saccade is not essential to initiate percept changes, the foveal image change resulting from a (micro)saccade is a deciding factor for percept dominance. We conclude that the foveal image must change to have a saccade cause a change in awareness. This sheds new light on the interaction between spatial attention shifts and perceptual alternations.

Awareness↗
PubMed1987

Levels of emotional awareness: a cognitive-developmental theory and its application to psychopathology.

The authors present a cognitive-developmental theory of emotional awareness that creates a bridge between normal and abnormal emotional states. Their primary thesis is that emotional awareness is a type of cognitive processing which undergoes five levels of structural transformation along a cognitive-developmental sequence derived from an integration of the theories of Piaget and Werner. The five levels of structural transformation are awareness of bodily sensations, the body in action, individual feelings, blends of feelings, and blends of blends of feelings. The authors suggest applications of this model to current unresolved problems in psychiatric theory, research, and practice.

Affective Symptoms↗
PubMed1996

Suicidal behavior in schizophrenia and its relationship to awareness of illness.

OBJECTIVE: Suicidal behavior is prevalent in individuals with schizophrenia. Although a relationship between greater awareness of illness and suicidal behavior has been posited, the question has not been systematically studied. The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between suicidal behavior and various aspects of insight in 218 patients with schizophrenia. METHOD: Patients who were participating in the DSM-IV field trial for schizophrenia were assessed with the Scale to Assess Unawareness of Mental Disorder and an instrument that was developed for the field trial study that measured multiple aspects of psychopathology, including suicidal behavior. RESULTS: The prevalence of suicidal thoughts and behavior found in this study was consistent with previous published reports. Schizophrenia patients with recurrent suicidal thoughts and behavior were generally more aware of their negative symptoms and delusions than were nonsuicidal patients. Contrary to expectations, general awareness of having a mental disorder did not predict suicidal behavior. CONCLUSIONS: The notion that insight may be associated with greater suicidality was partially supported.

Adult↗
PubMed1990

Phonological awareness tasks as predictors of decoding ability: beyond segmentation.

The performance of 38 male third- and fourth-grade reading disabled/poor decoders and above-average readers/good decoders was compared on a series of six measures of phonological awareness, including tasks that required the ability to segment, blend, and manipulate phonemes. Performance on these tasks was also correlated with phonetic decoding of pseudowords. Significant but varying intercorrelations were obtained among tasks in both groups. For the poor decoders, deletion was the most highly correlated with the other tasks. However, all good decoders performed at ceiling level on this task. For the poor decoders, deletion was significantly correlated with phonetic decoding (r = .74 and r = .78 for timed and untimed decoding measures, respectively). While all good decoders had good phonological awareness, not all those with good phonological awareness were good decoders. The results suggest that tasks that require blending and manipulation of phonemes, in addition to segmentation, may predict decoding ability best.

Awareness↗
PubMed1998

Ethical awareness and healthcare professionals.

Reports the results of a survey that sought to measure the "ethical awareness" of healthcare professionals at a number of area hospitals and nursing homes. Notes that the survey was helpful in isolating areas for needed inservices on ethical issues. Indicates that in creating the ethical environment necessary for the making of ethical decisions, pastoral care staff can offer encouragement to administrators in assessing the ethical awareness of the hospital's employees in such a way that not only clinical staff, but support staff and administrators as well, become more aware that many "non-clinical" situations are also the arena for ethical decision-making.

Attitude of Health Personnel↗
PubMed1996

Habits, tics, and stuttering. Prevalence and relation to anxiety and somatic awareness.

This study examines the prevalence of nervous habits, tics and stuttering in 256 college students, as well as the relationship between these behaviors and self-reported general anxiety and awareness of bodily sensations. Improving on previous studies, this study strengthens the operational definition of a nervous habit by using a more stringent operational definition, giving what is arguably a more valid set of prevalence statistics. Participants were asked to complete self-report measures of general anxiety and somatic awareness. Relationships were found between number of nervous habits and tics that participants endorsed and their self-reported awareness of bodily sensations, as well as between number of habits endorsed and self-reported general anxiety. This article concludes with suggestions for future research in the area of nervous habits and motor tics.

Adult↗
PubMed2003

Watching your troubles away: television viewing as a stimulus for subjective self-awareness.

Three studies explored the role of television viewing in eliciting subjective self-awareness and positive self-feelings. Study 1 assessed the effects of self-awareness manipulations via exposure to a neutral television program on actual-ideal discrepancies. Those who watched television showed significantly smaller self-discrepancies than those who did not, independent of mood. Study 2 demonstrated the ecological validity of this finding by replicating it with people watching television in their own homes. Study 3 investigated whether manipulations of self-feelings affected television watching. Results indicated that those who received failure feedback watched television longer than those in a control condition who likewise watched television longer than those who received success feedback. Television appears to be an effective stimulus to direct the focus away from oneself and to render people less aware of how they are falling short of their standards.

Adult↗
PubMed2003

Self-awareness, deindividuation, and social identity: unraveling theoretical paradoxes by filling empirical lacunae.

In an effort to examine paradoxes involving self-awareness, deindividuation, and social identity, this article reports the results of a study that examines the effects of a range of manipulation operationalizations of self and social identity on a complement of measurement operationalizations of self and social identity. Specifically, participants completed measures of self-awareness and ethnic social identity while confronted with their mirror image, while wearing a mask, or while exposed to a family tree delineating their ethnicity. Patterns of mean levels of self-awareness and ethnic social identity are used to examine the paradox of depersonalization and deindividuation, the paradox of (a)symmetrical activation of components of identity, and the paradox of deindividuation and the search for identity. Discussion considers the limitations of this approach and considers the implications of these results for the long-standing study of the interplay between self and social identity.

Awareness↗
PubMed2006

The effect of psychotherapy on self-awareness in incarcerated and nonincarcerated alcoholics: a pilot study.

Changes in self-awareness in incarcerated and nonincarcerated male alcoholics are measured before and after disaccustoming therapy based on Alcoholics Anonymous principles. The four-mode conception of self-awareness of Zaborowski is employed. The results show significant and expected changes in incarcerated participants (in defensive, individual, and reflective modes of self-awareness) and almost no changes in nonincarcerated individuals. An effect of motivation on therapy is also identified. Incarceration appears to be more conducive to recovery than to conditions outside the prison.

Adult↗
PubMed1993

The Australian Incident Monitoring Study. Patient awareness during anaesthesia: an analysis of 2000 incident reports.

Amongst the first 2000 incidents reported to the Australian Incident Monitoring Study were 16 cases in which patient recall of perioperative events was consistent with awareness. Awareness that occurred in 3 of 10 cases during anaesthesia was attributed to low concentrations of volatile anaesthetic agent; the conduct of anaesthesia appeared to be unremarkable in the other 7. The remaining 6 cases involved the inadvertent paralysis of patients prior to induction of anaesthesia, most commonly by "syringe swap" when suxamethonium was given instead of fentanyl. Some of these patients were significantly distressed. These preliminary findings suggest that incident monitoring should be useful in the study of awareness associated with anaesthesia and the development of strategies to prevent it.

Anesthesia↗
PubMed1987

What do children know about preventing sexual assault? How can their awareness be increased?

Recent awareness of the pervasiveness of sexual abuse of children has resulted in a move to implement prevention programs. In conducting these programs the question of effectiveness is frequently asked. In an attempt to answer some of this concern, a questionnaire was developed and tested to determine children's base level of knowledge. The video format prevention program, "Feeling Yes, Feeling No", available from the National Film Board (Canada) was tested as a method of increasing awareness. A school with a cross section of town and rural children, with differing socioeconomic backgrounds, participated in the study. The study consisted of a pretest of knowledge, a structured video interactive classroom prevention program, and a post-test measure of change. One hundred and thirty-seven students in grades 4, 5, and 6 participated. The program took 4 weeks to complete. When asked about their feelings with regard to the program, 97% of the children stated that they enjoyed it. The results indicated that while most children have a basic level of self-protective knowledge and assertiveness, they can, in a classroom setting, learn significant and additional facts about avoiding sexual assault. Eight of twenty-nine knowledge questions elicited a large change in response, suggesting increased awareness of self-protection. The most significant changes occurred with girls, the same group apparently most at risk.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1997

Extending the theory of awareness contexts by examining the ethical issues faced by nurses in terminal care.

The breaking of bad news in a hospital setting, particularly to patients in a terminal condition, highlights some complex and often emotive ethical issues for nurses. One theory that examines the way in which individuals react to bad news such as a terminal illness, is the theory of awareness contexts. However, this theory may be limited by failing to recognize the complexity of the situation and the ethical issues involved for nurses caring for terminally ill patients. Furthermore, contexts of awareness are influenced to a much greater extent by relationships with nurses than simply by the delivery of medical information. Even when information is given to the client and the family, the nurse is involved in helping them to know the meaning of this information. In a hospital, the nurse is faced with emotional demands by clients, families and colleagues, complex issues of advocacy, and professional boundaries and responsibilities. It is the author's wish to examine the reality of clinical practice for nurses, thus further extending the theory of awareness contexts.

Awareness↗