Expressions Of Sympathy Research Articles

Seeing for Himself: Harold Holt, Bushfire and Newspaper Depictions of Prime Ministerial Empathy

ABSTRACTThe experience of bushfire continues to challenge Australians and those responsible for leading them. Since Federation, the news media have conveyed prime ministers’ expressions of sympathy and reassurance of recovery to those Australians affected by bushfire. A study of newspaper reports of prime ministers’ responses to exceptional fires—in 1926, 1939, 1967, 1983, 2003 and 2009—reveals an increasing emphasis on prime ministers being physically and emotionally engaged with Australians in the wake of bushfire. This study identifies a turning point during the prime ministership of Harold Holt, who visited Tasmania to view the aftermath of the Black Tuesday fires in 1967. Vividly descriptive newspaper coverage of Holt's witnessing of the damage wrought by the fires is symptomatic of a shift towards journalistic norms seen today; however, it also is symptomatic of the social context in which Holt operated and his personal and political style. By presenting this argument, this article draws attention to an aspect of Holt's prime ministership neglected in popular and scholarly records while advancing an understanding of normative depictions of Australian political leadership by the news media over time.

Supporting Providers After Drug Overdose Death.

Supporting Providers After Drug Overdose Death.

Should Machines Express Sympathy and Empathy? Experiments with a Health Advice Chatbot.

When we ask a chatbot for advice about a personal problem, should it simply provide informational support and refrain from offering emotional support? Or, should it show sympathy and empathize with our situation? Although expression of caring and understanding is valued in supportive human communications, do we want the same from a chatbot, or do we simply reject it due to its artificiality and uncanniness? To answer this question, we conducted two experiments with a chatbot providing online medical information advice about a sensitive personal issue. In Study 1, participants (N = 158) simply read a dialogue between a chatbot and a human user. In Study 2, participants (N = 88) interacted with a real chatbot. We tested the effect of three types of empathic expression-sympathy, cognitive empathy, and affective empathy-on individuals' perceptions of the service and the chatbot. Data reveal that expression of sympathy and empathy is favored over unemotional provision of advice, in support of the Computers are Social Actors (CASA) paradigm. This is particularly true for users who are initially skeptical about machines possessing social cognitive capabilities. Theoretical, methodological, and practical implications are discussed.

Support for Terrorism: The Role of Beliefs in Jihad and Institutional Responses to Terrorism

ABSTRACTPassive support for terrorism refers to expressions of sympathy for acts of terrorism and/or the justifications (ideology) used by terrorist groups to legitimise their beliefs and actions. One form of passive support is whether Muslims feel terrorists have valid grievances. Appealing to a sense of grievance is a key way that violent Islamists attempt to recruit fellow Muslims to their cause. Using survey data collected from 800 Muslims living in Australia, this paper examines factors that lead Muslims to believe that terrorists have valid grievances. Factors examined include beliefs in jihad and attitudes towards counterterrorism policing and laws. Other variables included in the analysis are social identity, age, gender, income, religious denomination (Sunni vs. Shia), religious commitment, i.e., Mosque attendance, and recent contact with police. The most significant predictor of passive support for terrorism was found to be particular beliefs in jihad. The perceived legitimacy of counterterrorism laws and trust in police were also important. Implications for countering extremist ideology and generating community cooperation in counterterrorism will be considered.

Laughter, Ridicule, and Sympathetic Humor in the Early Nineteenth Century

Offering a reevaluation of the place of laughter in the history of ideas, this article suggests that laughter was understood as an act of sympathy in the early nineteenth century. While a sympathetic humor emerged in the eighteenth century to both encourage and endorse the cult of sensibility, laughter’s strong associations with ridicule and its boisterousness meant that it had a complicated relation to sympathy. The writings of William Hazlitt and, particularly, Charles Lamb and Thomas Carlyle, however, illustrate not only a rich engagement with their comic inheritance, but also demonstrate how these Romantic writers identify laughter with the amiable humor in vogue at the time and especially acts of sympathy and the imagination. Detailing the key role laughter plays in human feeling and interaction, and its ethical authority in social pleasures, this article argues for the need to acknowledge laughter’s place among other nonlinguistic modes of communication—such as crying and swooning—as an expression and performance of sympathy.

The Charlie Hebdo Attacks on Twitter: A Comparative Analysis of a Political Controversy in English and French

In this article, we propose an original method combining large-scale network and lexicometric analysis to link identifiable communities of Twitter users with the main discursive themes they used in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris, France in 2015. We used this method to compare tweets and user networks in French and in English. We observed that the majority of the users who tweeted about Charlie Hebdo were people without any particular affiliation, who were shocked by the attacks and immediately expressed themselves through emotionally charged messages. But rather quickly their proportion decreased and they participated less in politically polarizing discussions. On the other hand, we found that smaller, highly politicized, and polarized groups had similar attitudes toward the events: they were less engaged immediately after the attacks in emotional expression of sympathy and shock, but they participated vividly in the following days in polemical discussions or engaged themes. Other findings include the central position of mainstream media and the existence of groups of users that aggregated on the basis of nationality. More generally, our results show clearly that even the most dramatic events such as a terrorist attack with innocent victims do not produce homogeneous reactions online. Rather, political engagement and cultural dispositions are keys to understand different attitudes on Twitter.

Committee Opinion No. 681 Summary: Disclosure and Discussion of Adverse Events.

Adverse outcomes, preventable or otherwise, are a reality of medical care. Most importantly, adverse events affect patients, but they also affect health care practitioners. Disclosing information about adverse events has benefits for the patient and the physician and, ideally, strengthens the patient-physician relationship and promotes trust. Studies show that after an adverse outcome, patients expect and want timely and full disclosure of the event, an acknowledgment of responsibility, an understanding of what happened, expressions of sympathy, and a discussion of what is being done to prevent recurrence. Surveys have shown that patients are less likely to pursue litigation if they perceive that the event was honestly disclosed. Barriers to full disclosure are many and include fear of retribution for reporting an adverse event, lack of training, a culture of blame, and fear of lawsuits. To reduce these concerns, it is recommended that health care facilities establish a nonpunitive, blame-free culture that encourages staff to report adverse events and near misses (close calls) without fear of retaliation. Health care institutions should have written policies that address the management of adverse events. Having a responsive process to inform and aid the patient, loved ones, and practitioners is required. A commitment on the part of all health care practitioners and institutions to establish programs and develop the tools needed to help patients, families, health care practitioners, and staff members deal with adversity is essential.

Committee Opinion No. 681: Disclosure and Discussion of Adverse Events.

Adverse outcomes, preventable or otherwise, are a reality of medical care. Most importantly, adverse events affect patients, but they also affect health care practitioners. Disclosing information about adverse events has benefits for the patient and the physician and, ideally, strengthens the patient-physician relationship and promotes trust. Studies show that after an adverse outcome, patients expect and want timely and full disclosure of the event, an acknowledgment of responsibility, an understanding of what happened, expressions of sympathy, and a discussion of what is being done to prevent recurrence. Surveys have shown that patients are less likely to pursue litigation if they perceive that the event was honestly disclosed. Barriers to full disclosure are many and include fear of retribution for reporting an adverse event, lack of training, a culture of blame, and fear of lawsuits. To reduce these concerns, it is recommended that health care facilities establish a nonpunitive, blame-free culture that encourages staff to report adverse events and near misses (close calls) without fear of retaliation. Health care institutions should have written policies that address the management of adverse events. Having a responsive process to inform and aid the patient, loved ones, and practitioners is required. A commitment on the part of all health care practitioners and institutions to establish programs and develop the tools needed to help patients, families, health care practitioners, and staff members deal with adversity is essential.

Attitudes Toward the Insanity Defense: Examination of the Factor Structure of Insanity Defense Attitude-Revised (IDA-R) Scale in Ghana

ABSTRACTDecades of research have revealed the potential of individuals to be partial toward defendants pleading insanity at the time of offense. This study examines the internal structure of the Insanity Defense Attitude-Revised (IDA-R) scale as well as predictors of insanity defense attitude in a Ghanaian sample (N = 253). Using principal component analysis, we identified three distinct latent factors, two (i.e., strict liability, unprofessional behavior and safety concerns) of which corroborate the findings of previous studies, and a unique factor- expression of sympathy. Participants who were highly involved in religious activities were more likely to be sympathetic. Views regarding the causes and treatability of mental illness did not significantly predict insanity defense attitudes.

Sarah Butler’s Irish Tales, a Jacobite Romance

Sarah Butler’s Irish Tales, published in 1716, is a romance set against the historical background of Brian Boru’s victory against the Vikings in 1014. Given the timing of its publication, a year after the Jacobite rebellion of 1715, the work has been read as an allegorical expression of pro-Jacobite sympathy. Yet the tragic romance dominates the work, complicating this interpretation. This article argues that the combination of fictionalized history and romance found in Irish Tales shows the work to be part of a tradition of romance writing by women in support of the royalist or Jacobite cause. Moreover, this article considers how the heroic role played by the female protagonist in these works represents an aesthetic and political response to the failure to restore James ii and his issue to the throne.

Harris, Kirsten. Walt Whitman and British Socialism: "The Love of Comrades" [review

Kirsten Harris. Walt and British Socialism: The Love of Comrades. New York: Routledge, 2016. ix + 219 pp.In the late 1880s, when he began visiting Walt daily and writing up their conversations, Horace Traubel also commenced a campaign to make the poet confess that he was a socialist at heart. Patiently, the young radical would watch for an opportunity to make a political thrust; inevitably, the canny old man would parry. Do you have any sympathy for . . . socialism? Traubel asked bluntly at one point. Lots of it-lots-lots, replied. Too much is made of property, here, now, in our noisy, bragging civilization-too little of men. Traubel persisted: But about their political program- how about that? Of that I'm not so sure, told him. rather rebel. I am with them in the result-that's about all I can say. Expressions of general sympathy for people over property were the most Traubel was able to extract from Whitman; the young man acknowledged that as far as was concerned, individualism deservedly carries the day.Despite his profound and frequently expressed skepticism about socialist political activity, for roughly two decades, beginning in the 1880s, Walt was revered among British socialists. One of the most interesting questions in the history of Whitman's international reception is how a Free Soil Democrat became a patron saint of British socialism. Kirsten Harris's Walt and British Socialism is the first book-length response to that question. Employing deep scholarship and flexible, sensitive interpretations of literary and political discourse, Harris makes an important contribution to transnational studies.Harris's lengthy introduction serves as a valuable primer on late-nineteenth-century British socialism. Henry Pierson's tripartite division of the of this period into Marxist, Fabian, and ethical strands, laid out in two influential books published in the 1970s, has dominated understanding of the period. Drawing on recent revisionist accounts, Harris rejects that neat division. She turns to Edward Carpenter's concept of the larger socialism as a useful way of understanding the diverse socialist movements of the era. Socialism overlapped not only with trade unions but with the women's rights movement and local cycling clubs; it drew in workers, artists, vegetarians, and spiritual seekers. Within the heady atmosphere of what socialist editor Robert Blatchford called the new religion of socialism, Whitman's politically vague but emotionally stirring appeals to fellowship made him particularly useful during this multi-faceted early phase. As Harris notes, Able to accommodate overlapping and competing ideas, could speak powerfully to a movement . . . fiercely debating what it was and how it should develop (8-9).The book's first two chapters are on Edward Carpenter and the group of Whitmanites in Bolton, England, known as the Eagle Street College. Harris has dug deeply into the archives, and she offers novel perspectives on these now-familiar figures. Critical conceptions of the relationship of Carpenter's Towards Democracy to Leaves of Grass solidified almost from the moment of the first edition's publication in 1883, when Edward Aveling in an influential review proclaimed Carpenter to be the English Walt Whitman. Aveling intended the label as a compliment, but a similar, widely publicized remark by Havelock Ellis was more critical: when a friend showed Towards Democracy to Ellis at a socialist political gathering in London, he handed it back with the dismissive comment, Whitman and water. Ellis later recanted his hasty judgment, and many British socialists regarded Towards Democracy as a worthy companion-volume to Leaves of Grass.By the time of Carpenter's death in 1929, his poetry had been largely forgotten. It was revived in the 1970s by critics interested in the history of homosexuality, scholars among them. …

Cynical Self-Doubt and the Grounds of Sympathy


 
 
 
 
 The foundational essay of Stanley Cavell’s oeuvre, “Knowing and Acknowledging,” prepares the author’s continued interest in sceptical doubt about the existence of other minds as well as his specific approach to this particular philosophical problem. One useful way of approaching “Knowing and Acknowledging” is to suggest that it addresses the other minds sceptic so as to excavate alongside him the underlying ground from which his doubt about the existence of other minds emerges. Cavell, in other words, appears to compose his argument in such a way as to lead the sceptic along a series of steps that demonstrate that his sceptical doubt does not simply exist as a self-contained or self-standing problem. In doing so, Cavell traces the emergence of sceptical doubt about other minds to a specific anxiety about our reliance on expressions of sympathy as a way of responding to the suffering of others. Cavell argues that the sceptic subsequently intellectualizes this anxiety into sceptical doubt. Cavell explicitly does not seek to refute the sceptic; he even accepts that the sceptic’s intellectual doubt is, in its way, valid. For Cavell, to try to straightforwardly refute sceptical doubt is simply to accept the terms on which it presents itself, and thereby to extend the sceptic’s view. Instead, Cavell tries to get the sceptic to a point where he will regard the nature, and the origins, of his doubt differently than he did before.
 
 
 

PD17-03 IMPACT OF APOLOGY LAWS ON LITIGATION LENGTH

You have accessJournal of UrologyGeneral & Epidemiological Trends & Socioeconomics: Practice Patterns, Quality of Life and Shared Decision Making II1 Apr 2016PD17-03 IMPACT OF APOLOGY LAWS ON LITIGATION LENGTH Patrick H McKenna, Thomas W Bentley, and Christina J Sauder Patrick H McKennaPatrick H McKenna More articles by this author , Thomas W BentleyThomas W Bentley More articles by this author , and Christina J SauderChristina J Sauder More articles by this author View All Author Informationhttps://doi.org/10.1016/j.juro.2016.02.1168AboutPDF ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints ShareFacebookTwitterLinked InEmail INTRODUCTION AND OBJECTIVES Thirty-eight states have apology laws which allow defendants to exclude statements or expressions of sympathy regarding medical errors in liability lawsuits. Most states with apology laws simply protect physicians from expressions of sympathy (partial apology law), while a few go further and protect physicians against admission of fault (full apology law). Apology laws are meant to improve communication between patient and physician regarding medical errors. This should reduce patient anger, decrease litigation, and speed up settlements. We assessed whether state apology laws impact litigation length using data from the National Practitioner Databank Public Use Data File (NPDB), which contains information on all malpractice cases from 1991 to 2014. METHODS Using data from the NPDB, litigation length was compared between states with and without apology laws. In states with apology laws, litigation length was compared before and after the laws were enacted and between states with partial and full laws. RESULTS Litigation length was 3.3 ± 2.0 years in states with (N=38,940) and 5.6 ± 3.7 years in states without (N=102,528) apology laws (p<.001). In states with apology laws, litigation length was 4.4 ± 3.3 years before the law was enacted (N=165,556) and 3.3 ± 2.0 years afterwards (N=38,940) (p<.001). Litigation length was 2.6 ± 1.4 years in states with full apology laws (N=2281) and 3.3 ± 2.0 in states with partial laws (N=36,659) (p<.001). CONCLUSIONS Apology laws appear to expedite resolution of medical malpractice cases. Full apology laws appear to be more effective at this than partial laws. States benefit the most with implementation of full apology laws. © 2016FiguresReferencesRelatedDetails Volume 195Issue 4SApril 2016Page: e399-e400 Advertisement Copyright & Permissions© 2016MetricsAuthor Information Patrick H McKenna More articles by this author Thomas W Bentley More articles by this author Christina J Sauder More articles by this author Expand All Advertisement Advertisement PDF downloadLoading ...

Candor Laws Growing, but Are They Effective?

Candor Laws Growing, but Are They Effective?

Implications of sympathy, empathy and apathy in medico-legal practice

The terms sympathy and empathy have subtly different meanings. Sympathy is the caring, concern and understanding for the suffering of others while empathy refers to being-putting oneself in the place of an aggrieved party. A pathy means lack of feeling, emotion, interest or concern which leads the individual to a state of indifference. This article is aimed at creating a dialogue among medico-legal practitioners as to what extent should empathy or sympathy be shown to their clients. Expression of sympathy or empathy by medico-legal professionals in Sri Lanka may be limited because of several reasons. As the prime concern of a medico-legal professional is to gather information for a court of law, this may require him to be more factually oriented without taking emotions into account. Emotional involvement in a case may cloud the professional’s judgement. Furthermore, as medico-legal professionals see many emotionally agonising cases on a daily basis, one might find it traumatising to become emotionally involved in each case. Unless the practicing doctors are appropriately trained in life skills such as the desired method of reacting in front of the patients, bereaved relatives and other concerned parties, the overwhelming reactions to emotions would make the practitioner trespass the professional boundaries. However if one reacts with apathy and indifference, the investigation process may be deficient and incomplete. It is important to strike a balance between ‘caring too much’ and ‘caring too little’. However it is not easy to lay guidelines as to how much to react in a given setting. It should be judged by the practicing doctor using common wisdom and past experience. Therefore it is important to address the matter from the very first stages of post-graduate training in Forensic Medicine. Sri Lanka Journal of Forensic Medicine, Science & Law Vol.6(1): 21-24 (2015)

THEORETICAL - METHODOLOGICAL BASES FOR THE FORMATION OF NATIONAL IDENTITY IN PRESCHOOL CHILDREN

The article highlights the modern approaches to organization of education of preschool children in multicultural environment, states some basic principles and conditions for the formation of national identity, socialization of children in modern multicultural society, where multicultural education is based on the attitude of children to their homeland, family and immediate environment, to cultures of neighboring nations, from the expression of interest and sympathy towards people of other nationalities to learning their traditions and customs, developing knowledge about them, friendly relationship and respect to them. The article presents scientific positions in the context of philosophical, ethnographic, sociological researches, which reconsider the understanding and interpretation of the concept of "multicultural education" in the context of such categories as "internationality", "nationality", "humaneness". It defines and explains the most effective means of the formation of spiritual and moral character of a growing person, such as literature and theatre. The article presents the project enhancing the formation of national identity among preschool children, reflecting the multicultural traditions of Irkutsk region by fiction writers of the Angara region and Siberia.

“I didn't know her, but…”: parasocial mourning of mediated deaths on Facebook RIP pages

This article examines the use of six Danish “Rest in Peace” or (RIP) memorial pages. The article focuses on the relation between news media and RIP page use, in relation to general communicative practices on these pages. Based on an analysis of press coverage of the deaths of six young people and a close analysis of 1,015 comments extracted from the RIP pages created to memorialize them, it is shown that their deaths attracted considerable media attention, as did the RIP pages themselves. Comment activity seem to reflect the news stories in the way the commenters refer to the context of death and the emotional distress they experience, but mainly comments on the RIP pages are conventional expressions of sympathy and “RIP” wishes. The article concludes that public RIP pages might be understood as virtual spontaneous shrines, affording an emerging practice of “RIP-ing.”

The ripple of fear, sympathy and solidarity during the Boston bombings

The Boston Marathon bombing presents a rare opportunity to study how a disruptive event can trigger inter-communal emotions and expressions - where members of one community express feelings about and support for members of a distant community. In this work, we use over 180 million geocoded tweets over an entire month to study how Twitter users from different cities expressed three different emotions: fear, sympathy and solidarity, in reaction to the bombings. We capture spikes in fear in different cities by using sentiment and time-series analyses, and track expressions of sympathy and solidarity based on the emergent use of two hashtags, #prayforboston and #bostonstrong, widely adopted after the bombings. We find first that the extent to which communities outside Boston express these emotions is correlated with their geographic proximity, social network connections, and residents’ direct, physical experiences with Boston (captured by the number of citizens who had visited Boston recently). This general effect shows interesting differences across the different kinds of emotions, however. Analyses show that the extent to which residents of a city visit Boston is the best predictor of fear and solidarity expression, as well as a strong predictor of the expression of sympathy. The expression of fear is also directly related to the expression of solidarity. Our study has theoretical implications regarding the diffusion of information and emotional contagion as well as practical implications for understanding how important information and social support can be effectively collected and distributed to populations in need.

Obituary: A Remembrance: Henry Alexander Yancey Jr. MD (1933-2013)

Obituary: A Remembrance: Henry Alexander Yancey Jr. MD (1933-2013)

The pragmatic markers anyway, okay, and shame: A South African English corpus study

Pragmatic markers are “a class of short, recurrent linguistic items that generally have little lexical import but serve significant pragmatic functions in conversation” (Andersen 2001:39). While pragmatic markers are receiving growing consideration in the literature, pragmatic markers in South African English have been given little attention compared to other varieties of English. This paper provides a description of the distribution and functions of the pragmatic markers okay, anyway and shame as they occur in the spoken component of the South African version of the International Corpus of English (ICE). Using the commercially available Concordance program, WordSmith Tools, all instances of okay, anyway and shame were identified in the corpus and all non-pragmatic marker instances were then excluded. The remaining instances of okay, anyway and shame were then hand-coded to determine the primary functions that these elements exhibit. The classification of the functions of the pragmatic markers was carried out according to Fraser’s (1996, 1999, 2006) framework for identification of pragmatic markers. The findings of the corpus investigation included identifying the functions of okay as both a conversation-management marker and a basic marker, as well as its role in turn-taking. Anyway was found to function as an interjection, a mitigation marker, a conversation-management marker and a discourse marker. Shame, as a uniquely South African pragmatic marker, was found to function both as an interjection and as a solidarity marker, as an expression of sympathy or sentiment.