When You Sense Nothing At All

I often don’t like having to ask people to do things for me because I don’t like bothering them. I’m also not a very persuasive person, and I don’t have Puss-in-Boots’ hard-to-say-no-to eyes. So I want and need to learn to improve my persuading skills. Good thing I found an article that could help to do just that!

A study in France by Nicolas Guéguen (2002) found that touching increases compliance to a request. Previous studies had found evidence for this, and the present study wanted to find out whether awareness of the touch had an effect on compliance. Participants of the study were female passersby 18 to 50 years old. The experimenter held a bracelet in front of the women while asking them if they would answer a survey for a marketing class about the piece of jewelry. Those who consented answered the survey, and when they were finished, the experimenter asked another question: “When I came up to ask you to answer the questionnaire, I touched your forearm. Did you notice it?” Those who refused to answer the initial survey were also asked this question. Their answers were noted. 155 of the 227 participants were touched on the forearm. The results were consistent with previous studies showing that touching has a significant positive effect on compliance to a request. It was also found that awareness of the touch had no effect on compliance. Moreover, the research noted that previous studies found that touch can influence people to have a more positive evaluation of the toucher, and positive evaluation of the person making the request increases helping behavior.

Knowing this is very useful information. I now know that a simple touch in making requests could make people more likely to comply. However, I recognize that it is important to consider other factors involved in making requests such as the task difficulty, the gender of the person, the closeness of my relationship with the person, and the mood of the person. Further studies are needed to take these factors into account. Moreover, the context is also important. In our culture, touching may or may not have a positive effect. It would be interesting to study more about this.

Reference:

Gueguen, N. (2002). Touch, awareness of touch, and compliance with a request. Perceptual & Motor Skills, 95(2), 355. Retrieved from EBSCOhost.

Can you last a day without talking? I can't. I'm a talker. I can talk the whole day if you'd let me.

One shouldn't confuse aphasia with dysarthria, which is a deficit in speaking that is caused by weakness and incoordination of speech musculature and other disabilities that is tied to the mechanical aspect of producing speech.

It would interest people to know that a rehabilitation plan to improve language ability for aphasia patients is still a warm spot of research on cerebrovascular disease. In Zhang et al.'s (2006) study, they found out that when blood flow to Wernicke's area is increased, the ability of language improved. This lead the researchers to conclude that hypoperfusion and hypometabolism in the language functional area detected in their study might be the mechanisms of aphasia.

References:

Ardila, A. (2010). Aphasia revisited: A reply to Buckingham, Kertesz, and Marshall. Aphasiology, 24(3), 413-422. doi:10.1080/02687030802553712

Yee, E., Blumstein, S., & Sedivy, J. (2008). Lexical-semantic activation in Broca's and Wernicke's aphasia: evidence from eye movements. Journal Of Cognitive Neuroscience, 20(4), 592-612. Retrieved from EBSCOhost.

Zhang, Y., Wang, Y., Wang, C., Zhao, X., Gong, X., Sun, X., & ... Wang, Y. (2006). Study on the pathogenic mechanism of Broca's and Wernicke's aphasia. Neurological Research, 28(1), 59-65. Retrieved from EBSCOhost.

Adults, especially parents, usually feel sorry when they see that their children are in pain. For instance when my brother and I are sick, my parents would say that they want to do anything to alleviate whatever pain we’re feeling, but the thing is, sometimes there seems to be no way to do so, incidents when only the doctors and nurses, and God, have the ability and power to lessen the pain. I’m sure the same is true for all the parents, especially those whose children are still young, who cannot bear the pain they are feeling and even more for the infants who cannot even express pain (i.e. telling what part of the body hurts) aside from crying.

As pain is considered as one of the major health problems, both in adults and in children (Hasanpour et. al., 2006; cited in Tüfekci et. al., 2009), there have been a number of researches that aims to discover what could lessen it. For instance, in study of Tüfekci, Çelebioğlu and Küçükoğlu (2009), it has been investigated if a distracter, particularly a kaleidoscope, would lessen the perceived pain of children who are undergoing venipuncture.

To take things one by one, let’s first define the terms and variable involved. Venipuncture is the act of collecting blood from the veins— which is of course, painful. In fact, several studies had evaluated venipuncture as the most painful intervention commonly applied to children (Wong & Baker, 1988; Young et al., 1996; Jacobson, 1999; Smalley, 1999; cited in Tüfekci et. al., 2009) , not to mention that procedures made by needles alone are the most common sources of pain in children (Uman et. al., 2006: Tüfekci et. al., 2009).

Aside from such studies that evaluate the pain levels in patients, there had also been investigations on how to reduce pain, specifically in the hospital setting. Bellieni and his colleagues (2006; cited in Tüfekci et. al., 2009) had described two approaches in alleviating pain, the pharmacological and non-pharmacological methods, the latter reported to be more favorable and effective—particularly to the school-age children-- by Vessey and Carlson (1996; cited in Tüfekci et. al., 2009). Non-pharmacological approaches include distraction techniques. “Distraction is a nursing attempt focusing a patient’s attention to any other stimulants to control and reduce pain better (p. 2181; also in McCaffery 1990, Hasanpour et al. 2006)”. Several stimuli had actually been used as a distracter; some of these are party blowers, distracting toys, blowing out air, music through earphones, cartoon watching, and non-procedural talk (Tüfekci et. al., 2009).

In Tüfekci et. al.’ study (2009), they had used a kaleidoscope to serve as a distracter to children. A kaleidoscope is toy which is played simply by looking through a hole where colorful patterns can be seen when the cylinders are rotated. These patterns consist of various colors and shapes of beads that form unique designs (Tüfekci et. al., 2009). Thus with such visual elements, it draws the attention an interest of the children who plays it. Since it calls the attention of children, Tüfekci et. al. (2009) hypothesized that it will lessen the pain the children would feel during venipuncture, at the same time, they also hypothesize that some characteristics of children affect the perception of pain.

To test the hypotheses, the study had to conduct an experiment consisting of a control and an intervention group. The 206 participants are children, between ages 7 to 11, who were scheduled to have venipuncture on a specific day and reported not having any chronic diseases and/or developmental problem or disabilities which would make communication more complex. The treatment that differ the two groups is that for the intervention group, after the children, accompanied by their parents—who gave an approval for their children to be a part of the study-- were admitted to the waiting room for venipuncture, a kaleidoscope was introduced each of them. Instructions on how to use it were also given.

By using the Visual Analogue Scale (VAS) and Wong-Baker FACES Pain Rating Scale (WB-FPRS), the former providing qualitative data while the latter quantitative, the pain perceived by each children, in both treatment groups, were evaluated. An additional form determined the general characteristics of the participants (i.e. gender, age, previous experience of venipuncture, level of fear) (Tüfekci et. al., 2009).

Results, both from VAS and WB-FPRS, show that participants in the intervention group (mean: 3.14; SD: 1.41) perceived lesser pain compared to the control group; thus the first hypothesis was supported. Likewise, the second hypothesis was supported when the study found that other characteristics that were enumerated above affected the children’s perception of pain. For instance, female children felt less pain than did the male children which might have an implication on cultural roles of male who are expected to endure pain; also, children who had four or more experience of venipuncture experienced less pain. On another note, children who feared the procedure and had 1 to 3 experiences of venipuncture perceived higher levels of pain.

These results suggest that nurses should take into account the gender and other characteristics of the children, especially when performing needle procedures such as venipuncture to them. The result may also be beneficial for the parents and caretakers of the children, suggesting simple tips on how to reduce the pain their children are feeling.

reduce perceived pain during venipuncture. Journal of Clinical Nursing. 18(15). p.2180-2186. Retrieved from

EBSCOhost.

Simply Amazing!

In the natural setting, we are bombarded by a large amount of sensory input, which makes great demands on the processing ability of the human brain. Have you ever wondered how our speech perception system deals with this complexity. The following research by Laukka(2005) demonstrated categorical perception in which given a wide range of stimuli, human beings are able to classify them into limited number of categories.

Anger, fear, happiness, and sadness were the emotions used in the study. Discrimination and identification tests were performed. In the discrimination tests, participants were asked to discriminate between pairs of expressions in this form, ABX, by deciding whether X is the same as A or B. In the identification test, the listeners were asked to judge the emotion of each synthesized expression by means of forced choice. The alternatives that the listeners could choose from were the same as the two end-emotions of the continuum to which the respective expression belonged.

The results for the identification part revealed that every continuum fell into two clear regions. Each region corresponded to the emotion category of the prototype, with an abrupt shift from one category to the other around or at the center of the continuum.

In the discrimination tests, peak pairs were easier to discriminate than non-peak pairs. In addition to this, for all continua, discrimination for peak pairs were more accurate as compared to non-peak pairs.

To put things together, the results showed that identification and discrimination are not independent. Meaning, the identification performance, to some extent, predicted the discrimination performance.

Due to the limitation of the procedure in the first experiment, highly demanding to the short-term memory that could probably affect the results, the researchers made a slight modification of the procedures in experiment one so as to eliminate the said problem. For this part, the decoding accuracies for all synthesized expressions were gotten. The results were consistent as with the results of the first experiment for the identification test. The discrimination test also provided similar results as with the results of the first experiment such that peak pairs were favored.

All in all, Identification results revealed that the continua were perceived as 2 distinct sections separated by a sudden category boundary. Also, discrimination accuracy was generally higher for pairs of stimuli falling across category boundaries than for pairs belonging to the same category. These results suggest that vocal expressions are perceived categorically.

In reality, I had difficulty comprehending the research since it is highly technical, and I believe that my background on perception is not sufficient to understand easily the ideas and concepts presented in this study.


Source:
Laukka, P., (2005). Categorical Perception of Vocal Emotion Expressions. Emotion, Vol. 5, 277-295.