................................................................................................................ 10 Chapter 1 Introduction ......................................................................................... 12 1.1. Patient satisfaction ................................................................................... 13 1.2. Patient adherence to treatment ...................

Previous placebo-controlled experimental studies have shown that a single dose of MDMA can increase emotional empathy in the multifaceted empathy test (MET) without affecting cognitive empathy. Although sufficiently powered to detect main effects of MDMA, these studies were generally underpowered to also validly assess contributions of additional parameters, such as sex, drug use history, trait...

In 2013, Canadian scholars delivered a 1-week workshop to 30 junior public health professionals in Rwanda. The goal was to improve the Rwandans' skills and confidence with respect to writing scientific papers for submission to international peer-reviewed global health journals. As a result of the workshop, there was a statistically significant improvement in participants' reported confidence in...

There are differences in the way infants learn, perceive, and understand the environment as compared to adults (Bornstein, 1989; Nelson, 2000; Craik and Bialystok, 2006). While an adult has an established, clear perception of his environment, infants are still forming perceptions of the world (Hall et al., 1989; Holt, 1991; Zitelli and Davis, 2007). The mechanisms underlying these differences a...

Novel experience and learning new skills are known as modulators of brain function. Advances in non-invasive brain imaging have provided new insight into structural and functional reorganization associated with skill learning and expertise. Especially, significant imaging evidences come from the domains of sports and music. Data from in vivo imaging studies in sports and music have provided vit...

Previous studies associated psychopathy in adults with deficits in empathy but these studies did not directly compare cognitive and emotional facets of empathy. The present study sought to establish whether psychopathy is associated with impairments in emotional empathy among adult offenders. Participants were 90 male offenders scoring low (n = 29), medium (n = 33) or high (n = 28) on the Psych...

This paper examines how, over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the appreciation of skill in surgery shifted in characteristic ways. Skill is a problematic category in surgery. Its evaluation is embedded into wider cultural expectations and evaluations, which changed over time. The paper examines the discussions about surgical skill in a variety of contexts: the highly...

Synchronized action is considered as a manifestation of shared skill. Most synchronized behaviors in humans and other animals are based on periodic repetition. Aperiodic synchronization of complex action is found in the experimental task of synchronous speaking, in which naive subjects read a common text in lock step. The demonstration of synchronized behavior without a periodic basis is presen...

The clinician-patient relationship is asymmetric in the sense that clinicians and patients have different roles in the medical consultation. Yet, there are qualities of reciprocity and mutuality in many clinician-patient encounters, and we suggest that such reciprocity may be related to the phenomenon of empathy. Empathy is often defined as the capacity to place oneself in another's position, b...

Research shows that altruistic behaviours arise in varying social situations in line with different theories of causes of such behaviours. However most research uses financial costs only, which makes our understanding of altruism currently limited. This study presents findings of three experiments that use a novel and simple laboratory-based task that measures altruism based on the amount of ti...