Family units with a terminally ill child have a tendency to withdraw and this isolation may lead to problems in their mental health. A tendency with psychologists, clergy and helpers from other professions is to act as ideal experts on the lives of saddened people. From painful personal experience, this does not seem to enable acquiescence. Therefore, the aim of research on families with termin...

BACKGROUND Personal factors (PFs) are internal factors that determine functioning and the individuals' experience of disability. Their coverage by patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) has not been examined in rheumatoid arthritis (RA) so far. The aims of this study were to identify PFs important in the life stories of people with RA and to determine their coverage by PROMs used in RA. ME...

This study investigates the neuronal correlates of empathic processing in children aged 4-8 years, an age range discussed to be crucial for the development of empathy. Empathy, defined as the ability to understand and share another person's inner life, consists of two components: affective (emotion-sharing) and cognitive empathy (Theory of Mind). We examined the hemodynamic responses of prescho...

As World Wide Web transforms into Web 2.0 in the era of media convergence and becomes a full-fledged computing platform serving Web applications to end users, users' online activities become distinctly performative in nature, in that they perform activities that allow them to form electronic texts by mobilizing the resources offered by online works. Second Life, as an open-source platform that ...

The problems women in peri-urban Namibia are faced with are multi-dimensional. Like women in other communities they face the pressure of having a number of responsibilities, namely working, being a wife and mother, taking care of their families and perhaps caring for aging parents. Sometimes the pressure can be too overwhelming to manage. As a result, many women become depressed. Studies on dep...

Abstract This study identified four themes of personal growth (integrative, intrinsic, agentic, and communal) in adults' stories of life transitions in careers and religions. Specific themes were expected to relate differentially to two forms of personality development (social-cognitive maturity and social-emotional well-being) and to transition satisfaction. Integrative themes correlated prima...

This paper presents two algorithms that enables the MemoryLane system to support persons with mild dementia through creation of digital life stories. The MemoryLane system consists of a Logging Kit that captures context and image data, and a Review Client that recognizes activities and enables review of the captured data. The image filtering algorithm is based on image characteristics such as b...

DUE TO THE ALARMING EPIDEMIC in the modern world of obesity, dyslipidemia, and the parallel increasing prevalence of the related metabolic and cardiovascular diseases such as type 2 diabetes and atherosclerosis, the neutral lipids triglycerides and cholesteryl esters have a notorious reputation. The excessive accumulation of triglycerides reflects energy surplus, which ultimately causes the exc...

Narratives are gaining recognition as important ways occupational therapists and other clinicians can think about the life stories of clients. The purpose of this article is to examine a conceptualization of how changes from one chapter to another occur in life stories, using the metaphor of an adaptive repertoire, and to consider how this notion can be useful in helping clients maintain contin...

I want to tell you a story. This is a story about stories. As in any good story, we’re going to wander down a few storied paths. One of the paths leads back to 3 award-winning stories.* Remarkable stories by remarkable physicians who take seriously the power of stories—who have written powerful stories. Another path is about the importance of stories for human health and well-being from the per...