Everyday Preferences Research Articles

"Make Me Feel at Ease and at Home": Differential Care Preferences of Nursing Home Residents.

Assessing and honoring older adults' preferences is a fundamental step in providing person-centered care in long-term care facilities. Researchers and practitioners have begun to develop measures to assess nursing home (NH) residents' everyday preferences. However, little is known about how residents interpret and conceptualize their preferences and what specific clinical response may be needed to balance health and safety concerns with preferences. We used content analysis to examine interview responses on a subset of eight open-ended items from the Preferences of Every-day Living Inventory for Nursing Home (PELI-NH) residents with 337 NH residents (mean age 81). We considered how residents self-define various preferences of care and the associated importance of these preferences. Residents identified preferences for interpersonal interactions (greetings, staff showing care, and staff showing respect), coping strategies, personal care (bathroom needs, setting up bedding), and healthcare discussions. Respondents highlighted specific qualities and characteristics about care interactions that are necessary to fully meeting their everyday preferences. Results contribute to an emergent body of research that utilizes patient preferences to achieve the goals of person-centered care. The complexity of these responses substantiates the use of qualitative inquiry to thoroughly assess and integrate NH resident preferences into the delivery of person-centered care.

Sociologia e letteratura della pratica Zen. Il pane di Shunryu Suzuki

This article begins reminding the reader of the importance in Sociology of Religion of some of the leading figures, characterized by their being intellectually and biographically on the border between worlds and cultures, and by their acting as embodiments and mediators. One such figure, in Buddhism, is that of Shunryu Suzuki. Suzuki, soon renamed «Suzuki-roshi», is portrayed as loyal to the teaching of Master Dogen Zenji, the founder of Soto Zen school and, at the same time modern, eager to test the spirit of Zen in the middle of a «counterculture », made of pacifism, anti-war protest, over-indulgence, rebelliousness towards discipline and social rules. Suzuki’s proposal appears to be nonsectarian, open to discussion and dialogue, characterized by trust in an idea of religion as one extended to all aspects of every-day life, without hierarchies and preferences.

Human preferences are biased towards associative information

There is ample evidence that the brain generates predictions that help interpret sensory input. To build such predictions the brain capitalizes upon learned statistical regularities and associations (e.g., “A” is followed by “B”; “C” appears together with “D”). The centrality of predictions to mental activities gave rise to the hypothesis that associative information with predictive value is perceived as intrinsically valuable. Such value would ensure that this information is proactively searched for, thereby promoting certainty and stability in our environment. We therefore tested here whether, all else being equal, participants would prefer stimuli that contained more rather than less associative information. In Experiments 1 and 2 we used novel, meaningless visual shapes and showed that participants preferred associative shapes over shapes that had not been associated with other shapes during training. In Experiment 3 we used pictures of real-world objects and again demonstrated a preference for stimuli that elicit stronger associations. These results support our proposal that predictive information is affectively tagged, and enhance our understanding of the formation of everyday preferences.

Drivers' preferences and emotional responses to satellite navigation voices

Auditory experiences in vehicles are shaped not only by engine and road noise, but also by the technology used by drivers. The ubiquitous satellite navigation system (satnav) is an easily accessible and widely used device which produces realistic vocal utterances during driving. A desktop study investigated subjects’ responses to satnav voices. Fifty participants rated 36 typical messages provided by 12 different satnav voices using seven-point Likert-style scales. Participants readily assigned human personality-type traits to the voices and indicated different preferences for everyday and one-off use. Strong positive correlations existed between ratings for the trustworthiness, assertiveness, and clarity of a voice and the likelihood of that voice being selected for use everyday. Conversely, strong negative correlations existed between the annoyance and distraction of voices and everyday use. These relationships existed despite the fact that message content and delivery remained equivalent across all voices. Conclusions are drawn regarding the implications for design.

Investigating the Role of the Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex in the Assessment of Brands

The ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) is believed to be important in everyday preference judgments, processing emotions during decision-making. However, there is still controversy in the literature regarding the participation of the vmPFC. To further elucidate the contribution of the vmPFC in brand preference, we designed a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study where 18 subjects assessed positive, indifferent, and fictitious brands. Also, both the period during and after the decision process were analyzed, hoping to unravel temporally the role of the vmPFC, using modeled and model-free fMRI analysis. Considering together the period before and after decision-making, there was activation of the vmPFC when comparing positive with indifferent or fictitious brands. However, when the decision-making period was separated from the moment after the response, and especially for positive brands, the vmPFC was more active after the choice than during the decision process itself, challenging some of the existing literature. The results of the present study support the notion that the vmPFC may be unimportant in the decision stage of brand preference, questioning theories that postulate that the vmPFC is in the origin of such a choice. Further studies are needed to investigate in detail why the vmPFC seems to be involved in brand preference only after the decision process.

Exploring the Cognitive Phenotype of Autism: Weak “Central Coherence” in Parents and Siblings of Children with Autism: II. Real‐life Skills and Preferences

Information on everyday life activities and preferences in both social and nonsocial domains was obtained from parents and children who had taken part in an experimental study of central coherence. Comparisons were made between parents who had a son with autism, parents with a dyslexic son, and families without a history of developmental disorder, as well as the male siblings in these families. Data on everyday preferences and abilities were elicited by means of an experimental questionnaire. Significant group differences in social and nonsocial preferences were found, suggesting that some parents showed similarities with their son with autism, in preference for nonsocial activities and ability in detail-focused processing. A similar experimental questionnaire, completed by parents on behalf of their sons, discriminated between autism group probands and controls, but did not differentiate sibling groups. The relevance of the nonsocial items to central coherence is discussed in the light of the findings in Part I: autism parents who reported more autism-related nonsocial (but not social) preferences, tended to show a piecemeal processing style on the experimental tasks.

Hypnotic susceptibility and holistic/emotional styles of thinking

AbstractIt has been suggested that an everyday preference for holistic and emotional thought is related to the ability to enter hypnosis, although research addressing the idea has often yielded inconsistent results. This study correlated hypnotic susceptibility, as measured by the Harvard Group Scale (Shor and Orne, 1962), with three measures of a holistic/emotional thinking style: the experiential sub‐scale of the Rational Versus Experiential Inventory (RVEI) (Epstein et al., 1995), the right hemisphere sub‐scale of the Human Information Processing Survey (HIPS) (Taggart and Torrance, 1984) and the elaborative processing sub‐scale of the Inventory of Learning Processes (ILP) (Schmeck et al., 1977). A social desirability measure was also included. Only the experiential scale of the RVEI and the social desirability scale showed significant positive correlations with susceptibility; a multiple regression analysis showed the RVEI scale to be the best predictor of susceptibility. The implications of these results for the analytic‐holistic hypothesis in hypnosis are discussed. Copyright © 1998 British Society of Experimental and Clinical Hypnosis