Helping Behavior

OBJECTIVES: In recent years, several clinical trials have assessed effects of distant healing. The basic question raised by these studies is whether a positive distant intention can be related to some outcome in a target person. There is a specific simple experimental setup that tests such a basic assumption. The task is to focus attention and to indicate unwanted mind wandering by a button press while at the same time a second remote person is either supporting this performance or not according to a randomized schedule.

This paper represents the author's Presidential Address to the American Group Psychotherapy Association, delivered at the annual meeting on February 11, 1988, in New York. The author poses a challenge: What can we teach society about how to make our groups more healing and productive? He suggests certain guidelines relating to effective communication, empathic understanding, willingness to assume responsibility, and, most importantly, recognition that groups exist for the individuals who comprise them.

The words 'nurse' and 'nursing' originate in the word 'nurture' which dates back to the 14th century. 'Nurturance' appeared for the first time in the 1976 Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary and in a United States dictionary in 1983. Etymologically and semantically bound to nursing, little is known about the term nurturance.

The purpose of this study was to develop and validate the dimensions of caregiver reciprocity. Social exchange and equity theory served as a conceptual framework for examining recprocal intergenerational exchanges of assistance and support. In the first phase of the study, 12 caregivers of elderly parents, including in-laws, were interviewed to provide narrative data from which items were developed. Content validity was judged by two separate panels of experts.

Presence is an important but confusing concept in nursing. At times, it is used to simply characterize a nurse's physical presence, while, at other times, it is used in a highly metaphysical sense to depict a nurse's full physical, psychological, and spiritual presence. As a concept, presence has not been clearly defined. Its core characteristics need to be identified and separated from those characteristics that reflect its variability.

Social support refers to the presence of individuals providing emotional or material resources. Its four components are: integration, structure, function, and quality. This article presents empirical and theoretical data, as well as criticism of studies which examine the relationship between social support, global health and cardiovascular health, also evaluating direct or moderating contributions to the adoption and maintenance of health behaviours in persons with cardiovascular disease. Concrete implications for nursing practice are reviewed.

The purpose of this study was to answer the research question, What is the structure of the lived experience of feeling cared for? The participants were 10 women volunteers who were struggling with lack of economic, social, or interpersonal resources and who were or had been homeless. The Parse research method, a phenomenological-hermeneutic method, was used to discover the meaning of feeling cared for. The major finding of this study is the structure: Feeling cared for is contentment with intimate affiliations arising with salutary endeavors, while honoring uniqueness amid adversity.

A variety of studies identify friendliness/being friendly in their findings however, no research reports on the phenomenon of nurse friendliness. Moreover, all prior findings are coincidental to the phenomenon under investigation, so nurse friendliness is superficially represented and poorly understood. In turn, the significance of nurse friendliness has gone unnoticed. Because the present study focused on nurse friendliness, it revealed a deeper dimension to this phenomenon and expanded prior, limited understandings.

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) has long-lasting consequences not only for the individual with the injury but also for family members. The aim of this study is to elucidate the meaning of family members' experiences of living with an individual with moderate or severe TBI. The data have been collected by means of qualitative research interviews with 8 family member participants. A phenomenological hermeneutic interpretation (Ricouer, 1976) of the data reveal that family members struggle with their own suffering while showing compassion for the injured person.

Lullabies and laments promote new awareness, enculturation, adaptation, and grief expression. These concepts' relevance to palliative care, however, has not been examined. In this study, a music therapist used a grounded theory-informed design to reflexively analyze lullaby and lament qualities, evident in more than 20 years of personal palliative care practice. Thus, the construct "lullament" emerged, which signified helpful moments when patients' and families' personal and sociohistorical relationship with lullabies and laments were actualized.