Pleas For Help Research Articles

Psycholinguistic and cognitive-semiotic dimensions of constructing fear in horror films: A multimodal perspective

This article addresses an integrative psycholinguistic and cognitive-semiotic perspective on constructing fear in English horror films. At the heart of constructing fear in horror film is the filmmakers’ presumption that viewers can potentially share their joint intention with the filmmakers, can share joint attention, and, as a result, share joint emotion. Drawing on the theory of intersubjectivity, fear in horror films emerges as the result of joint attention between filmmakers and viewers. Fear is viewed as a multimodal construct resulting from the synergistic integration of verbal, nonverbal, and cinematic semiotic resources via audial and visual modes. Each semiotic resource contributes to meaning-making by employing elements specific to horror films. The verbal system contains interjections, descriptive words, emotion-laden words, pleas for help, and violation of the sentence structure. The nonverbal elements include a contorted face, screaming, chaotic gestures, shaking, or stupor. The cinematic resource possesses the meaning-making potential to highlight various aspects of filmic fear through close-ups and middle close-ups, camera angles, dim light, and non-linear disturbing music. The meanings constructed by semiotic elements interact through cross-mapping, contributing to the formation of multimodal blends, which emerge in conceptual integration. Multimodal blends of fear in horror films include two-/three-component, non-parity, and consecutive patterns. From the viewers’ perspective, fear in horror films is perceived as a whole entity with a different level of intensity: from anxiety to horror. The experiment results show that the main indicators of fear for both males and females are pleas for help, voice and facial expressions, and music and close-up. However, while watching horror films, males feel interested more, while females experience negative emotions of fear, disgust, and tension.

He Who Has Hope, Has Everything.

He Who Has Hope, Has Everything.

Early prosociality is conditional on opportunity cost and familiarity with the target

Developmental research in the past decade has painted the picture of a gregarious child ready to engage in a range of prosocial behavior, but less is known about the situational factors that moderate this behavior. The present study investigated the effects of cost and familiarity on children's readiness to help the victim of a moral transgression. Opportunity cost was operationalized as the time and effort expended on providing help, that could otherwise be used to earn a reward from a productive task. Familiarity varied as a function of whether there was prior contact between the child and victim. Five- and six-year-olds in Singapore ( N = 120) witnessed an adult transgressor destroy the victim's tower of blocks, responded to the victim's pleas for help in rebuilding her tower, and shared resources with both actresses. Contrary to our initial predictions, children helped a familiar victim less when cost was high as opposed to low, but helped an unfamiliar victim equally regardless of cost. Additionally, helping rates were low (30–60%) except in the least prohibitive condition (> 80%; Low-Cost, Familiar Victim), stemming from a combination of not having a productive task to occupy one's time and energy, and simultaneously a familiar target which increased one's intrinsic motivation to help. The conditional limits imposed on children's decision to help thus appear to be, “I'll help, if I know you and have nothing better to do!” In terms of resource sharing, children behaved selfishly toward both the victim and transgressor regardless of their familiarity with the victim. Altogether, our findings suggest that children consider self-interest when deciding whether to help and share with others.

Caring is costly: People avoid the cognitive work of compassion.

Compassion-the warm, caregiving emotion that emerges from witnessing the suffering of others-has long been considered an important moral emotion for motivating and sustaining prosocial behavior. Some suggest that compassion draws from empathic feelings to motivate prosocial behavior, whereas others try to disentangle these processes to examine their different functions for human prosociality. Many suggest that empathy, which involves sharing in others' experiences, can be biased and exhausting, whereas warm compassionate concern is more rewarding and sustainable. If compassion is indeed a warm and positive experience, then people should be motivated to seek it out when given the opportunity. Here, we ask whether people spontaneously choose to feel compassion, and whether such choices are associated with perceiving compassion as cognitively costly. Across all studies, we found that people opted to avoid compassion when given the opportunity, reported compassion to be more cognitively taxing than empathy and objective detachment, and opted to feel compassion less often to the degree they viewed compassion as cognitively costly. We also revealed two important boundary conditions: first, people were less likely to avoid compassion for close (vs. distant) others, and this choice difference was associated with viewing compassion for close others as less cognitively costly. Second, in the final study we found that with more contextually enriched and immersive pleas for help, participants preferred to escape feeling compassion, although their preference did not differ from also escaping remaining objectively detached. These results temper strong arguments that compassion is an easier route to prosocial motivation. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Calming emotional 911 callers: Using redirection as a patient-focused directive in emergency medical calls

Callers making an emergency phone call can exhibit emotional displays about a current situation characterized by different forms of conduct such as shouting, howling each spoken word, speech distortion, crying, pleas for help, expressions such as “Oh God” (Whalen and Zimmerman, 1998). Since emotional outbursts can derail the call's progress, emotional callers are considered ‘non-compliant’ with the primary task, and dispatchers face practical challenges with caller management. Findings show how using a modal verb format can redirect callers to focus on a patient's care. Using conversation analysis, this article illustrates dispatchers' methods for redirecting an emotional caller's attention to complete a task, which works to calm callers and sustain their attention for the call's duration.

Punishment and Precious Emotions: A Hope Standard for Punishment.

—Each year, hundreds of people in high-income countries take their own lives while they are in prison. Thousands engage in self-harm and thousands abuse other prisoners. Such behaviours often correlate with mental health problems, but they are also often pleas for help and for hope. Some courts have invoked the ideas of hope and the right to hope in the context of life imprisonment, but they have neither subjected the concept of hope to sustained analysis nor specified the role that hope should play in our practices of lawful punishment overall. This article offers a preliminary investigation of the role for hope in lawful punishment. It argues that one standard that both individual modes of punishment and overall systems of punishment must meet to be morally justifiable is that they be compatible with a reasonable person retaining hope both in the present and for his future after punishment. Such a hope standard narrows the scope of legitimate modes of punishment.

Psychoanalyst Examines How Culture Influences Suicide

Psychoanalyst Examines How Culture Influences Suicide

“They Will Keep Seeing Young Women Murdered by Men. Enough Is Enough-We Have Seen too Many Women Lose Their Lives”. Lessons for Professionals Working with Victims of ‘Honour’ Abuse and Violence

The brutal ‘honour’ killing of Banaz Mahmod, aged 20, is still one of the most prominent murder cases of this kind in Britain. This was due partly to its complexity as well as the poor police response to Banaz’s pleas for help before her death—most notably, she reported her abuse on multiple occasions, forewarned them of her murder, and named her killers. This tragic case was a painful example of how professional agencies in the UK fail victims of so called ‘honour’ abuse and violence. Fifteen years on, support services are still naive about the people and communities most vulnerable to ‘honour’ abuse in Britain. More recently, campaigns to include Black, Asian, and other ethnic minority victims in the mainstream domestic abuse agenda have encouraged agencies to be culturally-competent in their support of ‘honour’ abuse victims, to redress previous failings. To facilitate this, this study conducted a focus group discussion with fourteen women (12 victim survivors and 2 support workers) recruited from a support organisation for ethnic minority women dealing with ‘honour’ abuse, to gain insight into their lived experiences. Interviews were analysed using interpretative phenomenological analysis. Three superordinate themes emerged, each with two sub-themes; vulnerability (sub-themes, fear of external organisations and racism); organisational and agency support (sub-themes, education and support from law enforcement), and rules and restrictions (sub-themes, immigration status and agency funding). These themes should be explored by professionals to better understand how to support female victims of ‘honour’ abuse and violence, without disparaging their culture.

Commentary: Harassment protection should not be just for students

Commentary: Harassment protection should not be just for students

Air Medical Evacuation of Nepalese Citizen During Epidemic of COVID-19 from Wuhan to Nepal

In December 2019, the world was disrupted by the news of a new strain of virus known as Novel Corona virus, taking lives of many in China. Wuhan, the capital of Central China's Hubei province is said to be the place where the outbreak started. The city went on a lockdown as the disease spread rapidly. After the lockdown, most countries like India and Bangladesh airlifted their citizens who were studying in Wuhan. Similarly, Nepal also has many youth studying medicine in Wuhan. Pleas for help from the students reached the government. This was a first encounter of such experience for Nepal government. With the help of Health Emergency Organizing committee, Epidemiology and Disease Control Division, Nepal Army Hospital, Nepal Police Hospital, Waste Management team, Nepal Ambulance service, Tribhuwan Airport and Royal Airlines the government of Nepal planned, organized and successfully brought back all the 175 students on 15 the February, 2019 from Wuhan, China. The aim of the present article is to share the experience, the challenges faced and recommendations for future similar cases. Keywords: evacuation; Nepal; Novel Corona virus; Wuhan.

Revisiting the Purpose of the 1855 Callahan Expedition: A Research Note

Revisiting the Purpose of the 1855 Callahan Expedition:A Research Note Curtis Chubb (bio) On October 1, 1855, 111 Texas Rangers of the Callahan Expedition began crossing the Rio Grande in order to punish the Lipan Apaches who had been raiding Texas frontier settlements and then retreating to Mexico. The Indians had become accustomed to the United States Army soldiers stopping at the border; the governor of Texas, however, had authorized the Rangers to "follow them up and chastise them wherever they may be found."1 Over the past century, many historians have labeled the expedition as a slave-hunting venture. The steady repetition of this interpretation has resulted in unproven allegations now being advertised as fact. For example, the Bullock Texas State History Museum claims on its website that "the announced purpose of the raid was retribution against the Lipan Apache, but most of the activity centered around recovering escaped slaves."2 This research note presents the results of a critical analysis of the evidence that has been used to support the claim of slave hunting. Unexpectedly, the analysis revealed that none of the evidence is convincing. Contemporary nationwide newspaper reports and documents containing statements of those involved with the expedition clearly indicate that the [End Page 417] Rangers crossed into Mexico only to punish the Lipans for the harm they had done to Texans. The Lipans had murdered and kidnapped frontier settlers in addition to stealing their horses and killing their cattle.3 Texas frontier settlements were under increased attacks by Indians in 1855. When the United States Army failed to respond to pleas for help, citizens sent petitions requesting protection to Texas governor Elisha Marshall Pease. A petition from citizens living near Bandera dated September 21, 1855, provides insight about the Indian raids' intensity: "[H]aving no horses (having been robbed of every animal) we cannot follow them or in any way avenge our wrongs."4 A major factor in the increased Indian attacks was the emigration of the Lipans from Texas to Mexico in January 1854.5 The Lipans used Mexico as a sanctuary while executing raids into Texas. Texas state senator Robert Taylor succinctly stated the problem facing Texas: "The reason why appropriate protection has not already been furnished to our Western frontier by the troops of the General Government, under the command of Gen. [Persifor] Smith is that they have never followed these marauding Indian parties into their secret hiding places beyond the Rio Grande."6 On July 5, 1855, Governor Pease responded to citizens' pleas for help by commissioning James Hughes Callahan to muster a company of eighty-eight men for three months of service to protect an area north and west of San Antonio.7 Soon afterwards, Callahan confirmed that the Lipans were the major marauders and organized an expedition to take the battle to their refuge in Mexico. On September 7, Callahan wrote a letter to Pease that constituted a military briefing of his plans to follow the Indians to their homes. He gave the governor the reason for his expedition and his plans for how it would proceed: There has been a great many depredations committed on our frontier lately (as you are aware of) but it is almost an impossibility to catch them as they come in – in small parties, and scatter so that they cannot be trailed. The only recourse that we can have on them is to follow them to their homes. You have granted me the privilege of following them and I intend doing so at an early period. I have made my arrangements to start on the 15th instant [September] with sixty five men belonging to the Company, and about forty gentlemen who have volunteered their services in search of the Indians who have been committing depredations upon us. I am almost confident that I can find them and should I be so fortunate [End Page 418] as to do so, I shall severely chastise them (or at least endeavor to do so). I shall leave the balance of the Company at Camp to protect this portion of the Country in my absence – I will be gone until near the expiration of our term...

Coming Home

Coming Home

A Missed Opportunity: The Public Investigation into the Conduct of the RCMP in Matters Involving Nicole (Ryan) Doucet

Abstract On July 13, 2013, the Commission for Public Complaints released the Report Following a Public Interest Investigation into the Conduct of RCMP Members in Nova Scotia in Respect to Matters Involving Nicole (Ryan) Doucet. After interviewing all parties involved and reviewing 25 incidences involving Ms. Doucet and Mr. Ryan, the Acting Commissioner, Ian McPhail, concluded the RCMP’s policy regarding violence in relationships “was followed at all times.” According to The Report, the RCMP did not fail to protect Ms. Doucet. These conclusions, however, seem to be at odds with the evidence presented in The Report. After discussing coercive control and reviewing R. v. Ryan, the paper analyses the Commission’s findings to argue that the evidence presented to the Commission clearly illustrates that police ignored Ms. Doucet’s repeated pleas for help. The Commissioner missed a real opportunity to review current RCMP policies on domestic violence to bring them in line with current and on-going research on coercive control.

The Rattled Bones by S.M. Parker

Reviewed by: The Rattled Bones by S.M. Parker Kate Quealy-Gainer, Assistant Editor Parker, S.M. The Rattled Bones. Simon Pulse, 2017[384p] Trade ed. ISBN 978-1-4814-8204-2 $17.99 E-book ed. ISBN 978-1-4814-8206-6 $10.99 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 8–12 Eighteen-year-old Rilla Brae is initially certain it’s a trick of grief over her father’s death when she sees a young girl on the shores of an uninhabited island while she’s out fishing, but then she hears a song calling her at night and has visions of [End Page 464] the same young girl with a crying baby. She’s not about to tell anyone in her small Maine town, especially with her mother’s history of psychiatric problems, but she’s drawn to Sam, a university student researching the area. When she finally reveals to him what she’s been seeing, he tells her the tragic history of Malaga Island, a history unknown to her and apparently hushed up by the town. Parker bases her story on the real Malaga Island, where nearly fifty mixed-race people were forced from their home in the early twentieth century by the Maine government, with many of them ending up either destitute or institutionalized (a story also addressed in Schmidt’s Newbery and Printz honor title Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy, BCCB 7/04). The tension here is masterfully crafted—the phenomena move from easily explained dreams to incessant tapping at the window to a chair rocking alone to scratched pleas for help underneath Rilla’s window and eventually to a drowning confrontation in the sea. Rilla’s panic at the thought of becoming like her mother is palpable throughout, and it becomes more urgent as the ghost’s anger increases. Readers will fall into a deep internet hole if they seek out further information on Malaga, but even those less curious will find Rilla’s tale—and that of the ghost—compelling. Copyright © 2017 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Deja vu for Petroleum Engineers: A Cautionary Tale

What’s Ahead–From TWA’s Editor-in-Chief I remember my first year in the industry very fondly: it was 2006, oil prices had been climbing steadily for over half a decade, and the “big crew change” was starting to become dinner table discussion. The brain drain that would eventually come from the retirement of senior employees was imminent, experts advised, and it seemed like companies were taking advantage of the good times to hire like crazy as they positioned themselves to hedge the effect on their operations. I vividly remember a recruitment event organized by a large independent during the ATCE for which they rented the entire Sea World theme park in San Antonio and threw a party for us. It was an extraordinarily memorable event for any impressionable recent grad, and the future seemed prosperous. The Petroleum Economist encapsulated the hiring spree by quoting the head of US recruiting for one of the supermajors as saying, “Times are very good for us…and we are expanding– USD 60 [a barrel] oil will do a lot for your business. At the same time…a large number of employees are in their 50s and we need to increase our hiring across the board.” Academia listened to industry’s pleas for help, experiencing a meteoric rise in petroleum engineering enrollment not seen since the 1980s (Fig 1). Unfortunately, those students in the 1980s largely found themselves unemployed upon graduation as a result of cost-cutting measures following the oil price collapse of 1987, the result of which became the very same “lost generation” of talent that evidently now needs to be bridged by the big crew change. Fast-forward to today and, after some wild swings in commodity prices, to be sure, we nonetheless see oil once again hovering at around the same USD 60 mark which I fondly recall from the birth of my career. But a quick study of the headlines paints a starkly different picture this time around, as seemingly every company is either laying off people, freezing hiring, or doing both. An onslaught of such headlines has turned the mood in university campuses to an anxious and somber (if not pessimistic) one, which is completely opposite to the confident euphoria when I was there. I encourage you to read the TWAInterAct section, which features comments from SPE student chapter presidents on how the price drop is affecting students.

The saved and the drowned: Governing indifference in the name of security

The duty to render assistance at sea appears to be a well-established humanitarian norm; nonetheless, in 2011 alone more than 1500 people drowned in the Mediterranean. Witnesses recount that many could have been rescued if fellow seafarers had not ignored their pleas for help. Struggling to understand failures to rescue, many seek to portray indifference as individual failure from the norm. In contrast hereto, this article provides an insight into the governing of indifference in contemporary liberal societies - that is, how people are guided towards becoming indifferent to the lives and sufferings of particular populations. Thus, my focus will be on the workings of law and its potential to produce collective indifference. The drowned, I argue, are not casualties of individual immoral behaviour; through a system of sanctions, fellow human beings are encouraged to look away and even to let people die at borders in the name of security. This not only dilutes the legal duty to rescue but has also had a detrimental impact upon the normative landscape, leading to a distinction between worthy lives that fall within the duty to rescue and charitable lives becoming a question of benevolence.

The Right to Be Out: Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity in America's Public Schools. By Stuart Biegel. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. 300 pp. $19.95 paper.

Right to Be Out: Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity in America's Public Schools. By Stuart Biegel. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. 300 pp. $19.95 paper.Stuart Biegel's Right to Be Out offers an expansive treatment of legal and policy issues facing LGBT students and educators in America's public schools. Separated into two parts, first surveys the legal principles underlying right to be and second sets forth research-based principles that inform proactive focus on school climate (p. xix). Both parts begin with an introductory overview that is followed by three case studies. author describes project as a series of building blocks, with chapter expanding on what has come before. Although book stands as an integrated whole, each of eight chapters is also designed to stand alone (p. xix).Chapter 1, The Legal Foundations of Right to Be Out, begins with observation that right to be out is combination of First and Fourteenth Amendment principles. Here, author quickly summarizes and synthesizes key public forum and right-to-an-education cases before turning brief attention to student organization cases of 1970s and 1980s. story of Jamie Nabozny, Wisconsin teenager who suffered relentless torment at hands of his classmates while school officials ignored his pleas for help, is given slightly greater attention in order to spotlight waning judicial tolerance for such cavalier administrative apathy. Nabozny sued and ultimately won sizable settlement in federal court, success from which Biegel draws hopeful jurisprudential conclusion: all such treatment must end (p. 12). Discussions of Lawrence v. Texas (2003) and selection of Religion Clause cases are then marshaled in support of author's argument that in educational settings there is constitutional support for right to be out.Chapters 2, 3, and 4, address, respectively: emerging rights of LGBT students; challenges for LGBT educators; and curriculum, religion, morality, and values. Echoing Nabozny, what Chapter 2 shows most clearly is that while LGBT students were once seen as disruptive problem in educational settings, judges have begun to understand that bullying and administrative disregard are intolerable behaviors that must be changed. Chapter 3 shows that something similar is becoming true for LGBT educators. Whereas LGBT educators were once almost certainly subject to dismissal if they came out, courts have started to protect their right to be out on job. …

Being Difficult for the Patient

Being Difficult for the Patient

Micro-blogging as a Rapid Response News Service in Crisis Reporting: the 2011 Wenzhou Train Crash

This paper studies the role of Sina Weibo (a Chinese equivalent to Twitter) in disseminating vital information among the general public after the Wenzhou train crash in July 2011. Consuming low bandwidth while being capable of broadcast, information sent via micro-blogging can be quickly disseminated among a large population and provide first-hand accounts of the disaster. Micro-blogging seems therefore an ideal tool in the case of emergency news dissemination. Meanwhile, Weibo’s social network nature enabled information sent via Weibo to be used in pleas for help, in searching for dislocated people, and in the coordination of rescue efforts, as well as in voluntary activities. During the Wenzhou train crash, due the political nature of the incident, Weibo was also used as a platform for channelling public opinion, and it featured criticism of the official rescue efforts. This paper argues that Weibo’s strength in crisis communication lies in its real-time streaming of facts, perspectives and opinions, and in its reach. In this sense, Weibo adds new dimensions to the understanding of Web 2.0 technologies in emergency communication and shows potential for redistributing power among the government, the officially controlled news media, and citizen media.

Private prayer as a suitable intervention for hospitalised patients: a critical review of the literature

This critical review seeks to identify if there is evidence that private (personal) prayer is capable of improving wellbeing for adult patients in hospital. The review was conducted in the belief that the spiritual needs of hospitalised patients may be enhanced by encouragement and support to engage in prayer. Systematic review. A systematic approach was used to gather evidence from published studies. In the absence of experimental research involving this type of population, evidence from qualitative and correlational studies was critically reviewed. Results. The findings indicate that private prayer, when measured by frequency, is usually associated with lower levels of depression and anxiety. Most of the studies that show positive associations between prayer and wellbeing were located in areas that have strong Christian traditions and samples reported a relatively high level of religiosity, church attendance and use of prayer. Church attenders, older people, women, those who are poor, less well educated and have chronic health problems appear to make more frequent use of prayer. Prayer appears to be a coping action that mediates between religious faith and wellbeing and can take different forms. Devotional prayers involving an intimate dialogue with a supportive God appear to be associated with improved optimism, wellbeing and function. In contrast, prayers that involve pleas for help may, in the absence of a pre-existing faith, be associated with increased distress and possibly poorer function. Future research needs to differentiate the effects of different types of prayer. Encouragement to engage in prayer should be offered only following assessment of the patient's faith and likely content and form of prayer to be used. Hospitalised patients who lack faith and whose prayers involve desperate pleas for help are likely to need additional support from competent nursing and chaplaincy staff.