Fear of pregnancy and childbirth in women and men: gender aspects and parenting experience

The article discusses the fear of pregnancy and childbirth as a multidimensional subjective phenomenon. It is noted that the fear of pregnancy and childbirth is a phenomenon associated not only with the period of expectation of a child and (or) preparation for childbirth, but also with existential experience that arises in the subject outside of partnership and the context of procreation, which is recorded from fertile age. However, pregnancy contributes to the understanding and concretisation of this fear in both partners. The sources of fear of pregnancy and childbirth are extensive. At the same time, in Russian literature, the interpretational aspects of fear are revealed mainly in the female sample. An empirical study was carried out to in-depth study of the fear of pregnancy and childbirth as a female and male problem and its dependence on parenting experience or prospects (n=141). The results demonstrate that fear of pregnancy and childbirth is present in both women and men and does not depend on the life context. The content of the main female and male fears is identical, but the female fear of pregnancy and childbirth is more pronounced and structured. The unified fears for women and men are revealed. However, this fear is more pronounced in subjects without experience of pregnancy and parenting.

A Bayesian Network Concept for Pain Assessment (Preprint)

UNSTRUCTURED Pain is a subjective phenomenon caused/perceived centrally and modified by physical, physiological, or social influences. Currently, the most commonly used approaches for pain measurement rely on self-reporting of pain level on a discrete rating scale. This provides a subjective and only semi-quantitative indicator of pain. This paper presents an approach that combines self-reported pain with pain-related biomarkers to be obtained from biosensors (in development) and possibly other sources of evidence to provide more dependable estimates of experienced pain, a clinical decision support system. We illustrate the approach using a Bayes network, but also describe other artificial intelligence (AI) methods that provide other ways to combine evidence. We also propose an optimization approach for tuning the AI method parameters (opaque to clinicians) so as to best approximate the kinds of outputs most useful to medical practitioners. We present some data from a sample of 379 patients that illustrate several evidence patterns we may expect in real healthcare situations. The majority (79.7%) of our patients show consistent evidence suggesting this biomarker approach may be reasonable. We also found five patterns of inconsistent evidence. These suggest a direction for further exploration. Finally, we sketch out an approach for collecting medical experts’ guidance as to the way the combined evidence might be presented so as to provide the most useful guidance (also needed for any optimization approach). We recognize that one possible outcome may be that all this approach may be able to provide is a quantified measure of the extent to which the evidence is consistent or not, leaving the final decision to the clinicians (where it must reside). Pointers to additional sources of evidence might also be possible in some situations.

Computer Mediated Automatic Detection of Pain-Related Behavior: Prospect, Progress, Perils

Pain is often characterized as a fundamentally subjective phenomenon; however, all pain assessment reduces the experience to observables, with strengths and limitations. Most evidence about pain derives from observations of pain-related behavior. There has been considerable progress in articulating the properties of behavioral indices of pain; especially, but not exclusively those based on facial expression. An abundant literature shows that a limited subset of facial actions, with homologs in several non-human species, encode pain intensity across the lifespan. Unfortunately, acquiring such measures remains prohibitively impractical in many settings because it requires trained human observers and is laborious. The advent of the field of affective computing, which applies computer vision and machine learning (CVML) techniques to the recognition of behavior, raised the prospect that advanced technology might overcome some of the constraints limiting behavioral pain assessment in clinical and research settings. Studies have shown that it is indeed possible, through CVML, to develop systems that track facial expressions of pain. There has since been an explosion of research testing models for automated pain assessment. More recently, researchers have explored the feasibility of multimodal measurement of pain-related behaviors. Commercial products that purport to enable automatic, real-time measurement of pain expression have also appeared. Though progress has been made, this field remains in its infancy and there is risk of overpromising on what can be delivered. Insufficient adherence to conventional principles for developing valid measures and drawing appropriate generalizations to identifiable populations could lead to scientifically dubious and clinically risky claims. There is a particular need for the development of databases containing samples from various settings in which pain may or may not occur, meticulously annotated according to standards that would permit sharing, subject to international privacy standards. Researchers and users need to be sensitive to the limitations of the technology (for e.g., the potential reification of biases that are irrelevant to the assessment of pain) and its potentially problematic social implications.

Nurse's Experience Program In Implementing Intravenal Chemotherapy Treatment In Cancer Patients: A Phenomenology Study

Background: Cancer or malignant tumor is uncontrolled growth of cells or tissue and spreads from abnormal cells, if the spread is uncontrolled it can cause death. Experience is a very dynamic, complex and subjective phenomenon. One of the treatments for cancer patients is chemotherapy.Purpose: The purpose of this study was to explore the experiences of nurses in implementing intravenous chemotherapy treatment programs in cancer patients.Methods: This study uses a qualitative design with a phenomenological approach model to understand one's life experience and existing perceptions. The sampling technique used snow ball sampling. In this study, researchers will perform a snow ball sampling technique of participants who are at the Dr. Soedarso General Hospital. A total of ten nurses who work in the chemotherapy room participated.Result: The perception of nurses in providing intravenous chemotherapy services as a form of carrying out their assigned duties and responsibilities apart from curiosity to carry out chemotherapy and their empathy for patients. Support from nurses in providing intravenous chemotherapy services is obtained from the family even though they are reminded to always be careful (protected), from the hospital, especially the improvement of infrastructure and related policies as well as support from colleagues and doctors. Obstacles for nurses in providing intravenous chemotherapy services arise from the capacity of nurses and specialists who are less trained, the inadequate reporting system between nurses during service changes including infrastructure such as PPE, room size and medicine.Conclusion: Recommendations This study is expected to be used as a reference for future researchers related to the topic of nurse experiences that are still related to chemotherapy clients in cancer

Corpus Routes and Experiments in Language Teaching

Corpus quantitative approach in teaching, which is of growing interest, entails some revision of the L2 vocabulary selection procedures and provides solutions for a wide range of practical problems. The focus throughout is on the discussion of research on the quantitative and qualitative characteristics of language which both teaching content and language acquisition practice could draw on. This research regards human language as a rank distribution, which has serious implications on quantitative aspect of learner’s vocabulary. We also looked into the ways to factor in the data from a small professional discourse corpus in order to target the units that have the greatest statistical prominence. Both BNC and our own collection of texts are explored. The study also elaborates on academic writing cohesive devices and grammar patterns introduction, which is approached through concordancing corpus strings to (i) provide frequency evidence and (ii) introduce a contrast in usage in various corpus genres. Striking differences that are evidenced by the frequency lists could be related not only to register, but also to the choice and instances of academic cohesive clusters which are favoured by the apprentice writers and the expert writers. With the aim of capitalizing on corpus approach a number of small-scale corpus research tasks were developed. This study also uses corpus tools and data to give a seemingly subjective phenomenon of hedging some quantitative measurement. While experimenting on corpus in the classroom, the attention of learners was drawn to various means of hedging, such as lexical bundles or down-toners that manifest themselves as important communicative strategies. Thus, corpus was used to inform both the language instructor and the student in the classroom to look in detail at differences in the use of lexical and grammatical units in different varieties of language, address contrasting register variations, and readily provide contemporary professionally relevant examples of actual language usage. It has to be noted that university students have a tendency not to perceive register violations as language errors on a par with those of grammar, lexis or punctuation. Hence, corpus investigation as raising awareness tool also proved to be an effective teaching material generator. Nowadays syllabi have the opportunity to be rather sensitive to the quantitative evidence that corpora offer us; what is more, as a result of this study, we would conclude that university students are responsive to the small-scale investigation of register differences, lexico-grammatical frequency and patterning, which have been brought directly into the L2 classroom.

The Persian Cosmopolis

The Persian cosmopolis refers to the vast territory between the Balkans and Bengal in which, for 1000 years, an integrated sense of moral, social, political, and aesthetic order was informed by the circulation of normative Persian texts. Several centuries after the Arab conquest of the Iranian plateau, a spoken form of a hybridized Middle Persian and Arabic emerged in written form, using a modified Arabic script. What had begun as a regional vernacular swiftly became a transregional, literary medium as regional courts in Khurasan and Central Asia patronized Persian literature and used that language in their bureaucracies, building on a tradition of professional writers that had served Persian empires for centuries. The technology of paper-making, recently introduced from China, facilitated the rapid movement of Persian texts across space, while Firdausi’s epic poem the Shah-nama (1010) celebrated Iranian mythology and pre-Islamic history in ways that connected widely scattered peoples of different ethnicities. Territorial conquests by Persianized Turks, followed by Mongol invasions that drove peoples of Central Asia and Khurasan into new lands, also served to expand the geographical extent of the Persian cosmopolis. By the 14th and 15th centuries, the political, aesthetic, and moral order elaborated in a growing Persian canon—for example, the principle of justice—had become associated with a prestigious, cosmopolitan style that was emulated and absorbed by widely scattered peoples of diverse ethnicities and religions. Persianate architecture, attire, urban design, music, cuisine, and numismatic traditions were also assimilated by such peoples. With the translation of a rich store of romance literature into vernacular tongues, the Persian cosmopolis became as much a subjective phenomenon, inhabiting people’s collective imagination, as it was an objective, mappable zone in which popular, discursive, and normative texts circulated along networks that connected royal courts, provincial notables, Sufi lodges, merchant communities, and schools.

HOW DO CHILDREN RESPOND TO DIFFERENT ARTISTIC GENRES?

Art is as beautiful as sunshine and as important as nourishment to our body. Though art is a stimulating aspect, art appreciation is regarded as a highly subjective phenomenon. Art education and art appreciation is known to enrich the lives of children. Various factors including one’s experience, knowledge, and exposure to arts as well as processing fluency are known to influence one’s aesthetic appreciation. The objective of the present study is to examine children’s expressions of art appreciation. The quantitative study examines how children respond to artworks from different artistic genres. The participants in this study are sixty grade IX children in the age group of 13-15 years, from rural and urban backgrounds from the state of Telangana. The study employed equal number of boys and girls. Images of nine famous artworks depicting landscapes are used as stimuli. The images of artworks belonged to three artistic genres: representational, semi-representational, and abstract artworks. The artworks are selected from Western, Middle Eastern and Oriental paintings. Images of paintings are shown randomly to children to elicit their responses. The results of analysis of children’s descriptions of paintings indicate that children appreciated representational artworks more than semi-representational artworks and their appreciation of abstract artworks is minimum. Children’s appreciation of artworks according to the type of paintings indicate differences in appreciation among western, middle eastern and oriental paintings. The statistical analysis of overall appreciation of three genres of artworks depending on the type of paintings reveal that there exists a statistically significant difference in the appreciation of three types of artworks depending on the genre of artworks. The findings of this study can be used to enlighten the development of art education curricula. <p> </p><p><strong> Article visualizations:</strong></p><p><img src="/-counters-/edu_01/0748/a.php" alt="Hit counter" /></p>

THE IMPORTANCE OF COMPENSATORY SKILLS OF VISUALLY IMPAIRED FOR THE CREATIVE WORK OF A MUSICIAN

The article focuses on questions related to the general characteristics of music making for the visually impaired in the field of culture and skills. The system of skin-motor sensations gives diverse information to the person, it becomes the most important organ of interaction of a blind musician with the surrounding world. Sensations are characterized as the simplest mental process, as a reflection of individual qualities or properties of objects and phenomena directly affecting the sensitive organs at a given moment. In this case the sensation depends on the acting analyzer, which has a three-part structure: receptors, nerve ways, the corresponding sections of the brain. Great significance is attached to the principles of the internal and external motivation, which among blind students consists in an interest to improve professional skill and increase the general culture of the musician. The use of different methods in the formation of musical interest is considered, as well as the methods that actively influence the musical creativity of the blind. The article also examines the components of a person's creativity in the context of musical skill — musical experience, along with artistic imagery as a subjective phenomenon. The author reveals the range of creative activities of a visually impaired musician, defines such forms of musical activity as perception while listening to music, performance and creativity, as well as musical and educational activities. Creative activity is distinguished by its interpretative nature. Special role in the learning process is assigned to community relations — communication, patience, tolerance.

Mystical Experience of Eternity as a Limit of Time Experience

This article aims to clarify two traditions of understanding time, namely the rationalistic, which includes the scientific (in the West, going back to the ‘Physics’ of Aristotle) and philosophical (going back in the West to Augustine), and mystical (the most methodically sustained is the Yogic tradition of Classical India and Sufism). The article contains several sections: Introduction raises the problem of time and sets the subject boundaries. The main part is comprised of the following sections: 1. Time as found in objects: a brief summary of the rational scientific and quasi scientific trend of time interpretation from Aristotle’s Physics to Reichenbach’s “Philosophy of Time and Space”. The physical one-sidedness of the consideration of time is completely immersed in the object domain. 2. Time as associated with the ontological subject: essential points of purely philosophical understanding of time beginning with St. Augustine via Kant up to Heidegger. This philosophical approach is no less one-sided, and comprehends time almost exclusively as a subjective phenomenon (memory, contemplation, desire, one’s own nature etc.) Both trends lack any discrimination between the initial indication of the phenomenon of time (the answer to the question ‘what is time as a phenomenon?’) and the interpretation of the meaning of this phenomenon (the answer to the question ‘how to understand the phenomenon of time?’). 3. Interpretations of the time phenomenon are implicitly based on the everyday mode of awareness. The problem of time is one of the most difficult problems to comprehend. The main thesis of the article is that the pra-phenomenon of time is revealed to consciousness from the necessarily occurring switching and comparison between two processes: orientation in the external world and attention to cogitation, i.e., between the external and internal. This duality coincides with the duality that is realized in the elementary unit of rational thought - judgment, the subject of which is recognized as belonging to the external world, and the predicate – to the internal. Separately, it is planned to consider the understanding of time in the mystical tradition. We will focus on two ways of understanding time - the rationalistic (philosophical), represented by the teachings of Kant, and the mystical, represented by the Sufis and Yogis (with an indication of the fundamental difference between them). Note that these two methods are not opposed by us, although in a sense they exclude each other. 4. Lapse of time and the notion of a mode of awareness. The ordinary mode of awareness called vikṣipta ‘dispersed’ in Yoga philosophy is characterized by a fundamental dualism of inner and outer worlds’ events. Both are processes and the non predicative comparison of their pace constitutes the ordinary experience of the lapse of time. This mode is the most habitual one and the very mode within which it is possible to speak and compose texts, however it is not unique. There exist other possibilities. 5. One-pointed awareness mode and the atemporal process. Voluntarily achieved one-pointedness has no distinction between the outer and inner world and is therefore ‘out of’ or ‘above’ time. It is well known in mystical literature (exemplified by the text by eminent Sufi author, Niffari). In European rational philosophy this position was explained by Hegel, but not in his ‘Philosophy of Nature”, usually associated with the concept of time, it was in the ‘Science of Logic’ (in the timeless unfolding of absolute knowledge). The Conclusion presents a summary. The crucial point which enables a thinker to overcome the traditional scientific and philosophical one-sidedness of the conceptualization of time is the notion of a mode of awareness and comprehension of the fundamental duality of outer world processes and cogitations’ succession. A non-ordinary awareness mode is methodologically elaborated in Yoga philosophy, witnessed in mystical Sufi texts, and finally, grasped in Hegel’s concept of a speculative proposition.

On emotional pain

This chapter continues the discussion of recognition by focusing on the second area of service users’ inner worlds that needs to be recognized—the emotional pain connected to poverty. The chapter presents excerpts from women’s accounts of the existence of emotional pain in their lives. Since pain is a subjective phenomenon, in order to recognize it social workers are forced to adopt service users’ perspectives regarding their emotional pain. Unlike pathology, which is determined by the social worker with or without the approval of service users, pain can be defined and determined only by service users. The chapter presents women’s strategies for dealing with their pain—including concealment. Hence, the recognition of pain requires close and trustful relationships. The chapter discusses the role pain plays in the interactions between people in poverty and social workers.