Background: Ethical challenges are considered an integral part of the nursing profession. In these challenges, despite moral courage, nurses experience moral distress. Objectives: This study was conducted to determine the amount of moral courage and moral distress of nurses and their related factors in educational and medical centers in the city of Zanjan. Methods: This descriptive-analytica...

Cancer is frequently compared with war. The daily newspapers report on such-and-such a person’s battle against cancer. A patient declares, “I will fight it with everything I’ve got.” One country has called its peak body “The Association of War against Cancer.” In America the National Cancer Act of 1971 “declared war on cancer” ~Levy, 2005!. Thus is cancer declared the enemy, which must be conqu...

This paper presents a theory of informative communications among agents that allows a speaker to communicate to a hearer truths about the state of the world; the occurrence of events, including other communicative acts; and the knowledge states of any agent — speaker, hearer, or third parties — any of these in the past, present, or future — and any logical combination of these, including formul...

In order to perform effective communication, agents must be able to foresee the effects of their utterances on the addressee’s mental state. In this paper we study the consequences of an utterance on the mental state of a hearer. Given an agent communication language with a STRIPS-like semantics, we propose a set of criteria that allow the binding of the speaker’s mental state to its uttering o...

I propose a model for determining the hearer's attentional state which depends solely on a list of salient discourse entities (S-list). The ordering among the elements of the S-list covers also the function of the backward-looking center in the centering model. The ranking criteria for the S-list are based on the distinction between hearer-old and hearer-new discourse entities and incorporate p...

Our goal is to extend agent communication languages for persuasion dialogues. We distinguish action commitments from propositional commitments, because both limit future moves, but an action commitment is fulfilled when the hearer believes that the action is performed, whereas a propositional commitment is fulfilled only when the hearer concedes to the proposition – where concessions are the ab...

Large group counseling sessions for soldiers following battle have been commonly used since World War II. The author conceptualizes and demonstrates how these mini-marathon sessions can be adapted to support all ages and types of civilians involved in disasters. Mini-marathons take about 3 hours and are divided into three sections: story sharing, symptom sharing, and suggestions for self-help, ...

In the midst of the Holocaust, courageous non-Jews saved Jewish strangers, neighbors and friends from death. Yet, it was only decades after the Holocaust that research begin into what led ordinary people to risk their lives to save others. Over the past 30 years, researchers have identified key orientations (extensive relationships and a sense of responsibility for others) and personality trait...

The paper investigates the dynamical properties of spatially distributed naming games. Naming games are interactions between two agents, a speaker and a hearer, in which the speaker identifies an object using a name. Adaptive naming games imply that speaker and hearer update their lexicons to become better in future games. By engaging in adaptive naming games, a coherent shared vocabulary arise...