This research sought to elicit HIV/AIDS peer counselors' perspectives about delivery formats for a counseling intervention. Peer counselors identified personal contact as the major advantage of the face-to-face format. Personal contact afforded counselors better opportunities to understand and assess clients' physical, emotional, and environmental status and allowed them to connect with peers i...

This paper presents work on the design rationale and architecture of ReMindMe. ReMindMe aims to provide agent-based support for people with Alzheimer’s disease and their social environment by playing music with a strong personal meaning to the patient so as to activate personal memory recall. ReMindMe stimulates reminiscence and self-disclosure of personal memories. Through long-term interactio...

Introduction. This paper deals with secular, spiritual, and religious existential concerns during severe illness. Materials and Methods. Qualitative research interviews were made before and after surgery with women who underwent final diagnostics, surgery, and chemotherapy for ovarian cancer. By applying a phenomenological-hermeneutic text interpretation methodology the findings were systematic...

Narrative approach suggests that finding or creating meaning in one's own negative experience is important, and one of psychotherapeutic goals may be making it possible for the person to tell his/her in experience to others in a more positive way than otherwise. On the other hand, recent studies of self-disclosure have suggested that disclosure of negative experience could be harmful to well-be...

Medical and psychological discourse on end-of-life care has steadily shifted over the years from focusing primarily on symptom control and pain management to incorporating more person-centred approaches to patient care. Such approaches underscore the significance of spirituality and meaning making as important resources for coping with emotional and existential suffering as one nears death. Tho...

BACKGROUND Confronting the loss of a loved one leads us to the core questions of human existence. Bereaved parents have to deal with the rupture of a widely shared concept of what is perceived to be the natural course of life and are forced into meaning reconstruction. OBJECTIVE This study aims to expand upon existing work concerning specific themes of meaning reconstruction in a sample of be...

A phenomenological approach was used to describe the lived experience of disability of a woman who sustained a head injury 21 years ago. Data were collected through 11 face-to-face interviews and 72 e-mail messages over the period of 11 weeks. An iterative, fluid process of questioning, information-giving, analysis, and verification was characteristic of the whole study, alternating between ana...

Objective: The cognitive-constructivist psychotherapy approach considers the self as a continuous regulation process between present and past experience, in which attributions of meaning is characterized by the use of internal rules. In this conception, everyone would be driven by a specific inner coherence called Personal Meaning Organization (PMO). Such approach has never been applied to neur...

Documents are used extensively by professionals in their execution of their own work and to share information with others. Professionals use and manage their documents in ways that are woven into their work activities and leave most of the context unsaid because the documents are understood as belonging to a certain ongoing activity. Contrary to this, organisations have a strong interest in sto...