Experience Of Confusion Research Articles

Ethical considerations for HIV remission clinical research involving participants diagnosed during acute HIV infection

HIV remission clinical researchers are increasingly seeking study participants who are diagnosed and treated during acute HIV infection—the brief period between infection and the point when the body creates detectable HIV antibodies. This earliest stage of infection is often marked by flu-like illness and may be an especially tumultuous period of confusion, guilt, anger, and uncertainty. Such experiences may present added ethical challenges for HIV research recruitment, participation, and retention. The purpose of this paper is to identify potential ethical challenges associated with involving acutely diagnosed people living with HIV in remission research and considerations for how to mitigate them. We identify three domains of potential ethical concern for clinicians, researchers, and ethics committee members to consider: 1) Recruitment and informed consent; (2) Transmission risks and partner protection; and (3) Ancillary and continuing care. We discuss each of these domains with the aim of inspiring further work to advance the ethical conduct of HIV remission research. For example, experiences of confusion and uncertainty regarding illness and diagnosis during acute HIV infection may complicate informed consent procedures in studies that seek to recruit directly after diagnosis. To address this, it may be appropriate to use staged re-consent procedures or comprehension assessment. Responsible conduct of research requires a broad understanding of acute HIV infection that encompasses its biomedical, psychological, social, and behavioral dimensions. We argue that the lived experience of acute HIV infection may introduce ethical concerns that researchers and reviewers should address during study design and ethical approval.

Confusion and Chinese character learning

ABSTRACT This study explores the relationship between the experience of confusion and the outcomes of Chinese character learning by learners of Chinese as a heritage language (CHL). Based on the claim that impasses triggering confusion can lead to deeper learning of conceptually difficult material, the study employed three impasse-driven tasks. The tasks were designed to trigger a state of cognitive disequilibrium in the participants. After first encountering the tasks in Session 1, the 117 CHL learners were given 1 week to resolve their impasse-driven tasks in their own time for 30 min (limited by the computer system). Afterwards, we announced the correct answer for them to look at for 3 days, and then Session 2 was administered 1 week after the feedback. The results of this study showed considerable improvement in differentiating near-homographs and homophones presented in a sentence, and correcting wrong Chinese characters. The study’s results suggest that incorporating well-designed confusing content into Chinese learning may help CHL learners deepen their learning of Chinese characters.

When social work students meet workers with mental-health lived-experience: a case study

ABSTRACTMental Health Workers with Lived Experience of mental illness (MHWLE) are a growing workforce in countries veering to recovery orientation in mental health services. MHWLE entrance into the workforce challenges conventional role-definitions and practices in mental health services. This case study portrays issues raised by social work students following a workshop with MHWLE as part of their graduate-level training. A workshop with MHWLE was designed for 24 social work graduate students during a mental health seminar. Following the workshop, a focus group was held. The students’ thoughts and experiences during the workshop were collected and analyzed. Thematic analysis of the topics raised by the students included three main categories: (i) Experience of confusion about MHWLE role, (ii) Controversies regarding MHWLE disclosure of lived experience, and (iii) Concerns about boundary setting by MHWLE. Connecting MHWLE with social work students in academic settings can help better prepare social workers for the encounter with peer services in the mental health field, and support harmonization of this new yet rapidly growing workforce in mental health. In addition, the students had an opportunity to self-reflect and explore their own views and experiences regarding fundamental aspects of professional identity and their own practices in general.

The application of appraisal theories of emotions in the case of consumer confusion

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to suggest a novel framework of consumer confusion based on the appraisal theories of emotions. Extant theoretical and empirical evidence on confusion continues to be vague on the connection between the emotional dimensions and behavioural consequences. The appraisal theories of emotions can help to expand the field of inquiry which is related to the topic of consumer confusion.Design/methodology/approachA concept-centric review of 112 publications on consumer confusion and research on emotions provides an integrative critical analysis of the nature of confusion and extends the literature. The review demonstrates that past research has advanced the understanding but not sufficiently explained all of the processes implicated in consumer confusion.FindingsOn the above grounds, the paper suggests that although confusion is environmentally driven, it can be seen as a dynamic process implicating two levels of consumer appraisals. Uncertainty/lack of understanding, goal inconsistency and motivational state form the basis of confusion; agency attribution and coping potential are, however, shaping the development of subsequent emotions and ultimately the expectations on consumer behaviour. Considered as a dynamic process, confusion has coping and behavioural implications. At the most central level, the importance of agency (or attribution) and coping potential is highlighted and the way these appraisals lead to different emotions and behaviours is discussed.Originality/valueThe paper advances extant consumer decision-making literature and proposes diverse emotions that are associated with the experience of confusion, behaviours that are expected, along with marketing implications and actions required for each of them.

Pleasure in the Transitional Space: Intersubjectivity and Transformation

This article begins by reviewing psychoanalysis's conflicted relationship with pleasure as both a desired and feared goal. Freud implicitly changed his stance on pleasure as he elaborated the meaning of his grandson's fort-da game suggesting that pleasure is necessary for the mastery of loss and trauma. This article discusses several current theoretical aspects of pleasure including a phobic attitude towards pleasure and the experience of confusion and doubt within the transference–countertransference relationship that occurs as a result of shared moments of pleasure. I suggest that shared experiences of pleasure are inherent aspect of change in psychotherapy because they allow externalized disowned aspect of the self to become internalized as active, meaningful subjective experiences. A lengthy clinical illustration is presented in which songs are used as pleasurable and frightening transitional experiences that allow for the expression and symbolization of disowned aspects of the patient's self.

The Hideous Noise of Prayer: The Cloud of Unknowing on the Syllable-Word

This essay is an account of the “litil worde of o silable” mentioned several times in The Cloud of Unknowing. Despite the fact that its utterance makes up a prayer whose practice is the work of unknowing itself, the “litil worde” has been given surprisingly little attention. My aim here is first of all to describe as accurately as possible the procedure of prayer taught in the Cloud, and secondly to suggest that this procedure can best be understood in the terms provided by the medieval linguistic sciences, and notably grammar. As I reconstruct it here, the prayer consists in the production of an utterance that is both a syllable and a word, and thus neither. It occurs in the repetition of this utterance, and the “unknowing” that it brings about is nothing else than the experience of confusion that momentarily afflicts the mind of someone repeating a word to the point of nonsense.

Travelling with Images

During the sixteenth century, Europeans began to travel as they never had before, and the written and pictorial accounts they produced provide essential material for scholars of both Europe and the wider world. Yet, there is something about the traveller's experience that goes against the grain of the scholarly account. For regardless of its goal, whether it was to grow rich, save souls, establish settlements, or create knowledge, travelling was radically disorienting. To leave one's homeland, attend to the physical demands of journeys by sea or land, and encounter strange peoples without understanding them, was to lose any stable and reliable ground for knowledge. Nevertheless, it is from this experience of confusion that economic historians trace patterns of development in global trade, cultural historians articulate European strategies of representing the other, and anthropologists attempt to create coherent accounts of non-European cultures. From the chaos of travel, the scholar brings order and stability to our sense of the past. ‘I hate travelling and explorers’, writes Claude Lévi-Strauss, with a knowing irony, in the famous opening sentence of his own travel account through the Brazilian interior during the 1930s, Tristes Tropiques. He hates them because they are so preoccupied with their own bodily limitations – with ‘months of travelling, hardships and sickening boredom’ – that they distract us from the knowledge that lies beyond these all too embodied experiences. ‘The truths which we seek so far afield’, writes Lévi-Strauss, ‘only become valid when they have been separated from this dross’.1

Using a Psychosocial Stage Recovery Model and Peer Support to Improve Outcomes in Patients with Amputations

Using a Psychosocial Stage Recovery Model and Peer Support to Improve Outcomes in Patients with Amputations

WOMEN'S MIDLIFE CONFUSION: "WHY AM I FEELING THIS WAY?"

Midlife is a multifaceted stage of woman's development, characterized by important transitions. In an ethnographic study of women's midlife experience of their changing bodies, 11 participants voiced their uncertainty and confusion around bodily changes, responses exacerbated by the lack of consistent health-related information in this area. This confusion emerged as one of the major thematic elements of the study. Midlife women's experience of confusion may reflect a much broader problem, the locus of which is not so much in the women themselves, but rather in negative societal attitudes about aging women. This article describes various aspects of confusion that emerged from the data, and offers implications of the research and recommendations for practitioners.

Patients' experience of confusion in the intensive care unit following cardiac surgery.

This article reports a study of postoperative intensive care as experienced by coronary artery by-pass patients. The purpose is to describe and reflect upon the patients' experience of confusion in the intensive care unit (ICU). The study was performed according to the phenomenological-hermeneutic research tradition, with ten patients participating. In a free dialogue, the patients were each asked to discuss their experiences in the ICU. The patients remembered their confusion well; it was a significant, incomprehensible experience for them. They felt anxiety while on the threshold between awareness and unawareness, and the fast-paced activity of the ICU environment threatened to draw them into the 'vicious circle' of confusion. In this situation patients emphasised the importance of closeness with a professional person to whom they could turn. The quality of the presence of the nursing staff was significant for the patients, for it was through the true presence of the nurses that patients felt safe, understood and accepted. Patients' comments concerning their confusion verified the challenge this phenomenon poses in nursing care. A research methodology which highlights the individuality of the patients can uncover other hidden or unquestioned issues in nursing. Accordingly, further areas for study are suggested here.