Doctors and publishing results

As doctors we can improve outcomes if we publish results and outcomes.

How do you think we can do this in General practice? Wouldn't it be great. I am sure we can share and learn something from other doctors for the good of our patients.

Educational Psychology

This may help you remember more stuff. You can skip to the last 2 minutes where he talks about this.

Process information immediately, link it to past memories, and use visualisation.

Memory and its pitfalls

For example, have you ever had a memory in childhood that you were sure happened to you, but actually happened to your brother/sister?

I like the application of this talk towards the end, where it may be possible to lie about a memory and make it real.

How do you make memories seem real? As with previous talks, this is another piece of evidence that adds to my suspicion that there is no difference in our memories of a real memory compared to a vividly imagined memory. How do you vividly imagine a memory? How do we perceive the world? Through our senses?

I will post a talk soon of what NLP calls 'submodalities' - the senses that we perceive the world with, sight, sound, touch, taste, smell...

Personality profiling

 Currently, there is a free trial on a new validate Personality Profiling Tool, the

ECCOS (Eysenck, Cripps, Cook Occupational Scales) is a brand new adaptation of the Eysenck Personality Scales (EPQ) updated for the occupational psychology and human resource sector of commerce, industry, teaching and research.

We hope you find this enjoyable and useful. Click here or on the paragraph above to access the site to get your free password and access to the site. This is available free as a test pilot for a short period of time.

There are  7 dimensions.

The seven dimensions are: 

• Extraversion-Introversion

• Cairng vs Tough-Mindedness

• Anxiety

• Impulsiveness

• Venturesome

• Empathy

• Social Desirability

So perhaps in general practice, you’d like someone who is not anxious or impulsive, but is caring and has empathy, yet can tolerate risk (is more venturesome ).

Do you think a good surgeon may be more predictable, and take fewer risks.

Overall personality profiling for a doctor may be someone who empathises, is not too impulsive and is more caring and not at all anxious…

Male Doctors get more Complaints than Female Doctors

There is an experiment that might explain this...

Men appear to get greater satisfaction than women when witnessing retribution, a brain imaging study funded by the Wellcome Trust biomedical research charity has revealed.

This evidence of male schadenfreude, or pleasure at seeing revenge exacted, was highlighted during an experiment, published online by Nature today(Jan 18th), undertaken to compare empathy in the brains of people watching someone they either liked, or disliked, suffering pain.

A series of tests was undertaken involving 32 male and female volunteers plus four ‘confederates’ who were actually actors, but this was kept secret from the rest of the group.

In the first part of the experiment volunteers played a monetary investment game giving cash to one of the actors who had to then decide how much to give back. During each “transaction” the amount was tripled, so it was beneficial for both volunteer and actor to send as much as possible.

The study was designed to allow one actor to behave fairly, by returning a similar amount, while the other, unfair actor, tended to send back very little, if anything at all.

In the second part of the experiment at the Wellcome Department of Imaging Neuroscience in London, at UCL (University College London)**, the volunteer was placed in a magnetic resonance imaging brain scanner, to allow researchers to measure empathic responses as he or she watched the actors receiving a mild electric shock. When the “fair” players received this stimulation –the equivalent of a short bee sting- both female and male volunteers showed empathy activation in pain related areas of the brain – the fronto-insular and anterior cingulate cortices.

When the unfair actor received a shock the women taking part in the experiment showed empathy with them. However brain images of the male volunteers showed no increased activity in the empathy-related pain areas, but did reveal a surge in the nucleus accumbens, the “reward” region of the brain.

This reward- related activity was not seen in the majority of female participants, who appeared to have empathy for both the fair and unfair actors suffering pain.

Dr Tania Singer, who led the study, said: “During breaks in the tests you could tell from the body language that both the male and female volunteers did not like the actors who had cheated them. They tried to stay away from them as much as possible.

“These emotional responses were later confirmed in questionnaires completed by the volunteers who were asked to judge the actors. They consistently rated the fair player as being more agreeable, more likeable and even more attractive than the unfair actor.

“These results suggest that fairness in social situations shapes the nature of the emotional link we have to other people. We empathize with others if they cooperate and act fairly. But, in contrast, selfish and unfair behaviour compromises this empathic link. So, when the unfair player received a painful shock there was, at most, very little sign of anything registering in the empathy-related region of the men as opposed to the reward-related area where there was activity. They expressed more desire for revenge and seemed to feel satisfaction when unfair people were given what they perceived as deserved physical punishment.

“This type of behaviour has probably been crucial in the evolution of society as the majority of people in a group are motivated to punish those who cheat on the rest. This altruistic behaviour means that people tend to protect each other against being exploited by society’s free-loaders, and evolution has probably seeded this sense of justice and moral duty into our brains.

“We will need to confirm these gender differences in larger studies because it is possible the experimental design favoured men as there was a physical rather then psychological or financial threat involved. However this investigation would seem to indicate there is a predominant role for men in maintaining justice and issuing punishment.”

Ends

Notes to Editors:

* “Empathic Neural Responses are Modulated by the Perceived Fairness of Others.”

Authors: Tania Singer. Ben Seymour. John P O’Doherty. Klaas E Stephan. Raymond J. Dolan. Chris Frith.

**Wellcome Department of Imaging Neuroscience and UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London.

The Wellcome Trust is an independent research-funding charity established in 1936 under the will of tropical medicine pioneer Sir Henry Wellcome.The Trust’s mission is to promote research with the aim of improving human and animal health and it currently spends more than £400m p.a.

How to develop Willpower - imagine using this in terms of exercise and weight loss

What we'll try this time is after watching the video, if you could post your ideas in the comments on how we could use this practically, that would be useful.

I found this entertaining, especially the videos of children with marshmellows. However, getting to the point of it, was rather difficult.

I think he is saying that if you can kick start a habit by tricking your mind with a reward, that eventually you will develop the habit and adopt it unconsciously.

Perhaps with Eating Healthy or Keeping Fit, one could start this with a reward and then as time goes by, this will remain a habit and the person will maintain the new habit and forget the reward, even if it is a high calorie food. I wonder if it is worth a try in practice.

Enjoy

Social Science of Persuasion used in Medical Consultations

Another Another animated video on reminding us all that what we are doing is selling health - we ask patients to give up something they value for something that we are trying to convince them will make their life better. Doctors often forget this fact. I believe we have a lot to learn from the research already done in marketing and social science.

Enjoy this video.