OBJECTIVE This study explored and compared medical students' attitudes toward communication skills and empathic tendency before and after communication skills training. METHODS Fifty-nine first-year students voluntarily completed a questionnaire consisting of the Communication Skills Attitudes Scale and the Empathic Tendency Scale before and after training. K-means cluster analysis and Studen...

This study examined the differential effects of familial configuration and support system failures in a sample of 256 college students. Regarding familial configuration, the results indicated that individuals who had experienced parental divorce were significantly more likely to have encountered parental hostility and/or lack of care, inadequate supervision when not in school, lack of concern b...

OBJECTIVE To characterize dyadic and general friendships of youth with spina bifida (SB). METHODS Families of youth with SB recruited a peer to participate; 106 dyads participated. Youth with SB and peers completed questionnaires and interviews regarding characteristics of the dyadic friendship and each individual's general friendships. RESULTS Youth with SB and their peers were similar in ...

Dynamic skill theory was utilized to explain the multiple mechanisms and mediating processes influencing development of self-regulatory and language skills in children at 14, 24, and 36 months of age. Relations were found between family risks, parenting-related stresses, and parent-child interactions that contribute either independently or through mediation to the child's acquisition of self-re...

Using a contextual approach to social skills assessment in the peer group, this study examined the criterion-related validity of contextually relevant social skills and the incremental validity of peers and teachers as judges of children's social skills. Study participants included 342 (180 male and 162 female) students and their classroom teachers (N = 22) from rural communities. As expected, ...

The proposal that friendships provide a context for the development of social skills is widely accepted. Yet little research exists to support this claim. In the present study, children and adolescents (N = 912) were presented with vignettes in which a friend encountered a social stressor and they could help the friend and vignettes in which they encountered a stressor and could seek help from ...

The information that is posted to social networking sites as has had many effects on the personal and professional lives of the people that use them. However, much of the studies that investigate these effects have focused on the information posted by the people that own the social networking site profile while little attention has been given to how social networking site users are affected by ...

Drawing upon Bloom's taxonomy of educational objectives as a theoretical framework, this study examines attitudes toward communication skills training, knowledge of appropriate provider-patient communication, and confidence communicating with patients between first-year and fourth-year medical students at a large medical school in the southern United States. The study findings indicate that fou...

The aim of this study was to introduce email as a form of interaction for a group of six children who used augmentative and alternative communication. In a 12-week exploratory study, aspects of the email messages sent were analyzed. The content of the messages was analyzed by an inductive qualitative method, and seven descriptive categories emerged. The most frequently occurring categories were...