Intimacy usually involves the body. Its dependence on and the difficulties in transcending this are explored by discussing some of the problems those with neurological impairment have in this regard. These impairments are considered in relation to intimacy with one’s own body, with others and with the world. Intimacy is also often expressed through touching, and work on the neural basis for the...

This paper examines how illness narratives are used in medical education and their implications for clinicians' thinking and care of patients. Ideally, collecting and reading illness narratives can enhance clinicians' sensitivity and contextual thinking. And yet these narratives have become part of institutionalizing cultural competency requirements in ways that tend to favor standardization. S...

BACKGROUND The Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) Adverse Event Reporting System (FAERS) is a repository of spontaneously-reported adverse drug events (ADEs) for FDA-approved prescription drugs. FAERS reports include both structured reports and unstructured narratives. The narratives often include essential information for evaluation of the severity, causality, and description of ADEs that ar...

Cultural narratives such as those mentioned in religious texts and folk stories are instrumental in teaching core cultural moral values. In this paper, we investigate the role of cultural narratives in understanding novel moral situations. We examine whether the processes by which core cultural narratives are applied in people‘s lives follow the principles of analogical retrieval and mapping. I...

This study investigated the specific emotional lexicons in narratives created by persons diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder (ASPD) to test the hypothesis that individuals with ASPD exhibit deficiencies in emotional language. Study participants consisted of 60 prison inmates with ASPD, 40 prison inmates without ASPD, and 60 men without antisocial tendencies who described situations i...

The purpose of information systems post-evaluation ought to be to improve the use of systems. The paper proposes the use of narratives as a tool in post-evaluations. The potential in narratives is that they can convey meanings, interpretations, and knowledge about the system, which may potentially lead to action. The paper offer three main suggestions: 1) evaluations should form the basis for a...

Because of personal motives and the architecture of the mind, it may be difficult for people to know themselves. People often attempt to block out unwanted thoughts and feelings through conscious suppression and perhaps through unconscious repression, though whether such attempts are successful is controversial. A more common source of self-knowledge failure is the inaccessibility of much of th...

Social cognitive deficits in schizophrenia are well documented and related to functional outcome. Current social cognition measures are often not psychometrically validated, too heterogeneous for standardization, and focus principally on one domain of social cognition rather than the simultaneous activation of multiple domains. Also, few if any allow for personalization of stimuli and interpret...

Synthol is an injectable oil used by bodybuilders to make muscles appear bigger. Widely available on the Internet, it is reported to carry a wide range of health risks and side effects such as localised skin problems, nerve damage and oil-filled cysts, as well as muscle damage and the development of scar tissue. Given the tension between health risk and quick muscle enlargement, how lay users e...