Changing people with programmes
David Jones in Working with Dangerous People, 2018
A criticism of the ‘nothing works’ literature was that the ‘nothing works’ conclusion had been drawn from interventions which had targeted aspects of an individual’s problems which had little relevance to offending.9 A scepticism developed towards addressing psychological functioning or mental health needs which were not assumed to be related to recidivism as illustrated succinctly by Andrews: ‘If recidivism reflects anti social thinking, don’t target self esteem, target anti social thinking’ (p. 13).8 Furthermore, factors regarded as being related to personal distress and ‘. . . vague emotional complaints . . . whether assessed by way of sociological constructs of anomie, strain and alienation or by way of clinical constructs of low self esteem, anxiety, depression, worry or officially labelled “mental disorder” are identified as minor or less promising targets for treatment (p. 37).10 For example, turning somebody into a better person where any definition of better person is not linked to recidivism is regarded as, at best, a less promising target for intervention.7 Interventions with offenders which sought to alleviate psychological functioning and personal well-being as their primary treatment goal were considered to be driven by a theoretical framework of little relevance to the reduction of recidivism.
Editorial Introduction
John R. Cutcliffe, José Carlos Santos, Paul S. Links, Juveria Zaheer, Henry G. Harder, Frank Campbell, Rod McCormick, Kari Harder, Yvonne Bergmans, Rahel Eynan in Routledge International Handbook of Clinical Suicide Research, 2013
Part VI begins with Chapter 27 by Darien Thira examining the transition from suicidal crisis to activism among members of the Kwakwaka'wakw and Coast Salish nations of British Columbia. In the author's research, healing is redefined from the reduction of personal distress to an increased state of harmony within the self/community life-world. Thira posits that individualized interventions are often necessary, but are not sufficient. If, as the results suggests, resistance to the alienation (disconnection), hostile dependency (disempowerment), victim-identity, and anomie promoted by the colonial enterprise is resilience, then community mobilization and the encouragement of activism (i.e., actively increasing available self/community engagements) are a preferred focus of intervention.
The lost subject of medical sociology
Graham Scambler in Sociological Theory and Medical Sociology, 1987
For Richards, psychology could articulate such a self-consciousness powerfully because it theorized the self itself. If the model of the self were harmonious, organic, and hierarchical, then the individual in society naturally carries these same features. Even more: the growth of psychological services in the early twentieth century could care for the psychologically injured individuals, thereby reconstituting socially and politically structured contradictions of self-in-society as personal distress; by providing caring services, the distressed individual came even more to depend on the parental care-giver. Such a relationship of dependency was fostered both in the provision of services and in the theories of self that were based on harmonious dependency of parts to the whole, with the parts drawn into relationship with each other. Here again, we have a object relational analysis of the service relationship and of the traduction it entails: but where Parsons saw the irreducible nub of the collectivity and the point at which benign influence could actuate recovery, Richards sees a destructive and addictive relationship, which also becomes a model of the relationship of citizens to society and the state.
Impact of traumatic brain injury on social cognition in adolescents and contribution of other higher order cognitive functions
Published in Neuropsychological Rehabilitation, 2018
Béatrice Tousignant, Philip L. Jackson, Elsa Massicotte, Miriam H. Beauchamp, Amélie M. Achim, Evelyn Vera-Estay, Gary Bedell, Katia Sirois
This self-reported questionnaire, measuring dispositional empathy, consists of four 7-item subscales reflecting both affective and cognitive components of empathy: empathic concern and personal distress reflect the affective aspects of empathy, whereas fantasy and perspective taking reflect the cognitive aspects. The empathic concern subscale measures the respondents’ tendency to experience feelings of concern or compassion for others. The personal distress subscale assesses the tendency to experience distress or discomfort in response to others’ emotional distress. The fantasy subscale refers to people's propensity to get involved in fictional situations and to identify with fictional characters in books, movies, or plays. Finally, the perspective-taking subscale assesses the ability to adopt another's perspective or point of view. Each item was assessed on a 5-point scale ranging from 1 (“does not describe me well”) to 5 (“describes me very well”). The validity of the IRI has been well documented and its subscales constitute valid measures of these four facets of empathy; each subscale can therefore be analysed separately (Davis, 1983). The total raw score of each subscale thus served as four separate dependent variables. A French translation of the IRI was used in this study as in previous work (Achim, Ouellet, Roy, & Jackson, 2010).
The intergroup empathy bias among incoming medical students
Published in Medical Education Online, 2018
Julian A. Nasello, Marie-Sophie Triffaux, Jean-Marc Triffaux
The IRI scale is a self-reported questionnaire composed of 28 items measures with a 5-Likert scale (i.e., from ‘strongly disagree’ to ‘strongly agree’) that assesses four empathy dimensions. The four dimensions are: 1) Empathic concern (EC: individuals’ feeling of compassion and concern for others); 2) Personal distress (PD: the extent that an individual feels uneasiness or worry when exposed to the negative experiences of others); 3) Fantasy (FS: the likelihood that a person identifies with a fictional character); 4) Perspective taking (PT: unplanned attempts to adopt others’ points of view). As previously mentioned, the IRI questionnaire was completed under three primed situations. The scale displayed good internal consistency: for the general form (α = .81); for the peers’ form (α = .82); and for the patients’ form (α = .80).
Lessons Learned about the Need for Early Screening for Depression during the First Months of the COVID-19 Pandemic in the United States
Published in Issues in Mental Health Nursing, 2022
Akuekegbe Uwadiale, Millie Cordaro, Kaitlin Brunett, Mark Stern, Krista Howard
This study used two of the subscales of the IRI: Empathic Concern and Personal Distress (Davis, 1983). Each of the subscales has seven items measured on a 5-point Likert scale with responses ranging from does not describe me well to describes me very well. The Empathic Concern subscale evaluates feelings of sympathy and concern for unfortunate others. An example on the Empathic Concern subscale is, “I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me.” The Personal Distress subscale gauges feelings of personal anxiety in stressful situations. An example from the Personal Distress subscale is, “In emergency situations, I feel apprehensive and ill-at-ease.” The Empathic Concern subscale in this sample (M = 4.17, SD = 0.28) achieved an alpha reliability of .762, and the Personal Distress subscale in this sample (M = 2.39, SD = 0.59) achieved an alpha reliability of .841.
Related Knowledge Centers
- Anxiety
- Emotional Contagion
- Empathy
- Mirror Neuron
- Psychology
- Worry
- Comfort
- Sympathy
- Common Coding Theory