The British journal of medical psychology
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Randomized Controlled Trial Clinical Trial
The effects of varying information content and speaking aloud on auditory hallucinations.
The aim of this study was to investigate why requiring hallucinating schizophrenic subjects to read aloud produces large reductions in reports of auditory hallucinations. In Expt 1 hallucinating subjects (N = 9) were required to sort cards quietly into one, two, four, 13 and 26 piles. ⋯ Sorting cards into two piles whilst saying the colour of the card produced the largest reductions in the reports of hallucinations. It was concluded that it was the requirement to make overt motor and verbal response that produced the large reductions in reports of auditory hallucinations in the reading-aloud task.
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Randomized Controlled Trial Comparative Study Clinical Trial
Measuring medical students' empathy skills.
Empathy is an important skill for the medical practitioner or medical students to develop when interviewing patients. It helps the interviewer establish effective communication, which is important for accurate diagnosis and patient management. Two facets of medical education limit students' development of accurate empathy: the traditional format of interviewing training and the social ethos of medical training and medical practice, which stress clinical detachment. ⋯ This paper reviews the range of approaches to the measurement of empathy and reports on a research study designed to evaluate a two-stage measurement technique, involving a pencil-and-paper test of empathy and independent observer ratings of medical students' actual interview behaviours. Results lead to the conclusion that pencil-and-paper tests of empathy cannot incorporate the range of complex cognitive, emotional and behavioural components of the empathy construct. On the other hand, trained observers have been able to use items on a specially developed History-taking Rating Scale to discriminate between the empathic behaviours of a group of students trained in consulting skills with those of a group of control students who each carried out videotaped history-taking interviews with hospitalized patients.