This article describes the communication skills programme of the International Medical University, which adopts an integrated medical curriculum. The programme, implemented in February 2005, is based on a systematic framework aimed at teaching students basic interpersonal communication skills progressively and continuously throughout the pre-clinical phase.

While computers provide access to a multitude of data, the comprehension of that data for decision making and communication purposes relies on humans. What characteristics emerge as important to the skill of data interpretation and is training possible to develop this skill? This paper assesses user competence for the perception and comprehension of graphical computer displays using a knowledge...

Research into human communication has been grouped under two traditions: referential and sociolinguistic. The study of a communication behavior simultaneously from both paradigms appears to be absent. Basically, this paper analyzes the use of private and social speech, through both a referential task (Word Pairs) and a naturalistic dyadic setting (Lego-set) administered to a sample of 64 childr...

This study examined whether a measure of learning potential could predict work skill acquisition in schizophrenia beyond the prediction offered by a single administration assessment. Fifty-seven outpatients with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder completed a test-train-test version of the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test as a measure of their learning potential. The outpatients were randomly ...

BACKGROUND While both patients and physicians identify communication of bad news as an area of great challenge, the factors underlying this often complex task remain largely unknown. Emotional intelligence (EI) has been positively correlated with good general communication skills and successful leadership, but there is no literature relating EI to the delivery of bad news. PURPOSE Our objecti...

Spatial skills are critical for robot teleoperation. For example, in order to make a judgment of relative direction when operating a robot remotely, one must take different perspectives and make decisions based on available spatial information. Training spatial skills is thus critical for robot teleoperation, yet, current training programs focus primarily on psycho-motoric skills of the task, a...