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BMC Medical Education Jul 2018Verbal and non-verbal aspects of communication as well as empathy are known to have an important impact on the medical encounter. The aim of the study was to analyze how...
BACKGROUND
Verbal and non-verbal aspects of communication as well as empathy are known to have an important impact on the medical encounter. The aim of the study was to analyze how well final year undergraduate medical students use skills of verbal and non-verbal communication during history-taking and whether these aspects of communication correlate with empathy and gender.
METHODS
During a three steps performance assessment simulating the first day of a resident 30 medical final year students took histories of five simulated patients resulting in 150 videos of physician-patient encounters. These videos were analyzed by external rating with a newly developed observation scale for the verbal and non-verbal communication and with the validated CARE-questionnaire for empathy. One-way ANOVA, t-tests and bivariate correlations were used for statistical analyses.
RESULTS
Female students showed signicantly higher scores for verbal communication in the case of a female patient with abdominal pain (p < 0.05), while male students started the conversations significantly more often with an open question (p < 0.05) and interrupted the patients significantly later in two cases than female students (p < 0.05). The number of W-questions asked by all students was significantly higher in the case of the female patient with abdominal pain (p < 0.05) and this patient was interrupted after the beginning of the interview significantly earlier than the patients in the other four cases (p < 0.001). Female students reached significantly higher scores for non-verbal communication in two cases (p < 0.05) and showed significantly more empathy than male students in the case of the female patient with abdominal pain (p < 0.05). In general, non-verbal communication correlated significantly with verbal communication and with empathy while verbal communication showed no significant correlation with empathy.
CONCLUSIONS
Undergraduate medical students display differentiated communication behaviour with respect to verbal and non-verbal aspects of communication and empathy in a performance assessment and special differences could be detected between male and female students. These results suggest that explicit communication training and feedback might be necessary to raise students' awareness for the different aspects of communication and their interaction.
Topics: Adult; Aged; Analysis of Variance; Child, Preschool; Clinical Competence; Communication; Education, Medical, Undergraduate; Empathy; Female; Humans; Male; Medical History Taking; Middle Aged; Nonverbal Communication; Patient Simulation; Physician-Patient Relations; Sex Factors; Students, Medical; Verbal Behavior; Video Recording
PubMed: 29970069
DOI: 10.1186/s12909-018-1260-9 -
Topics in Cognitive Science Apr 2021For people to communicate with each other, they must tie, or anchor, each of their utterances to the speaker, addressees, place, time, display, and purpose of that...
For people to communicate with each other, they must tie, or anchor, each of their utterances to the speaker, addressees, place, time, display, and purpose of that utterance. Doing this takes coordination. Producers must index each of these entities for their addressees, and addressees must identify each of the entities the producers are indexing. When people are face to face, they have a battery of resources for doing this-speech, gestures of all kinds, and interactive strategies. But when addressees are separated from producers in space, time, or worlds, as on the telephone or in print, the available resources are more limited. The problem is that research on comprehension, production, and communication has often ignored, disguised, or distorted anchoring. As a result, accounts of these processes are often incomplete, misleading, or incorrect.
Topics: Communication; Comprehension; Cues; Female; Gestures; Humans; Male; Mass Media; Speech; Telephone; Verbal Behavior
PubMed: 32202068
DOI: 10.1111/tops.12496 -
Topics in Cognitive Science Apr 2018Conversational repair is the process people use to detect and resolve problems of speaking, hearing, and understanding. Through repair, participants in social... (Review)
Review
Conversational repair is the process people use to detect and resolve problems of speaking, hearing, and understanding. Through repair, participants in social interaction display how they establish and maintain communication and mutual understanding. We argue that repair provides a crucial theoretical interface for research between diverse approaches to studying human interaction. We provide an overview of conversation analytic findings about repair in order to encourage further cross-disciplinary research involving both detailed inductive inquiry and more theory-driven experimental approaches. We outline CA's main typologies of repair and its methodological rationale, and we provide transcripts and examples that readers can explore for themselves using open data from online corpora. Since participants in interaction use repair to deal with problems as they emerge at the surface level of talk, we conclude that repair can be a point of convergence for studying mis/communication from multiple methodological perspectives.
Topics: Communication; Comprehension; Humans; Interpersonal Relations; Verbal Behavior
PubMed: 29749039
DOI: 10.1111/tops.12339 -
Perspectives on Psychological Science :... Jan 2023Women are thought to fare better in verbal abilities, especially in verbal-fluency and verbal-memory tasks. However, the last meta-analysis on sex/gender differences in... (Meta-Analysis)
Meta-Analysis
Women are thought to fare better in verbal abilities, especially in verbal-fluency and verbal-memory tasks. However, the last meta-analysis on sex/gender differences in verbal fluency dates from 1988. Although verbal memory has only recently been investigated meta-analytically, a comprehensive meta-analysis is lacking that focuses on verbal memory as it is typically assessed, for example, in neuropsychological settings. On the basis of 496 effect sizes and 355,173 participants, in the current meta-analysis, we found that women/girls outperformed men/boys in phonemic fluency (s = 0.12-0.13) but not in semantic fluency (s = 0.01-0.02), for which the sex/gender difference appeared to be category-dependent. Women/girls also outperformed men/boys in recall ( = 0.28) and recognition (s = 0.12-0.17). Although effect sizes are small, the female advantage was relatively stable over the past 50 years and across lifetime. Published articles reported stronger female advantages than unpublished studies, and first authors reported better performance for members of their own sex/gender. We conclude that a small female advantage in phonemic fluency, recall, and recognition exists and is partly subject to publication bias. Considerable variance suggests further contributing factors, such as participants' language and country/region.
Topics: Male; Humans; Female; Sex Factors; Verbal Behavior; Memory, Episodic; Neuropsychological Tests; Semantics
PubMed: 35867343
DOI: 10.1177/17456916221082116 -
Journal of Speech, Language, and... Sep 2021Purpose Adults who stutter (AWS) often attempt, with varying degrees of success, to suppress their stuttered speech. The ability to effectively suppress motoric behavior...
Purpose Adults who stutter (AWS) often attempt, with varying degrees of success, to suppress their stuttered speech. The ability to effectively suppress motoric behavior after initiation relies on executive functions such as nonselective inhibition. Although previous studies found that AWS were slower to inhibit manual, button-press response than adults who do not stutter (AWNS), research has yet to confirm a consistent relationship between manual and verbal inhibition. No study has examined verbal inhibition ability in AWS. The purpose of this study, therefore, is to compare verbal response inhibition between AWS and AWNS, and compare verbal response inhibition to both the overt stuttering and the lived experience of stuttering. Method Thirty-four adults (17 AWNS, 17 AWS) completed one manual and three verbal stop-signal tasks. AWS were assessed for stuttering severity (Stuttering Severity Instrument-Fourth Edition: SSI-4) and experience with stuttering (Overall Assessment of the Speaker's Experience With Stuttering [OASES]). Results Results indicate no correlation between manual and verbal inhibition for either group. Generalized linear mixed-model analyses suggested no significant group differences in manual or verbal inhibition. Manual and verbal inhibition did not predict SSI-4 in AWS. However, verbal inhibition was uniquely associated with OASES scores. Conclusion Although underlying manual and verbal inhibition was comparable between AWS and AWNS, verbal inhibition may be linked to the adverse experience of stuttering rather than the overt symptoms of stuttering severity. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.15145185.
Topics: Adult; Humans; Inhibition, Psychological; Speech; Stuttering
PubMed: 34403265
DOI: 10.1044/2021_JSLHR-20-00739 -
Turk Psikiyatri Dergisi = Turkish... 2022The aim of this study was to obtain normative data for Verbal Fluency Test and investigate the effects of age, gender, and education on verbal fluency in native...
OBJECTIVE
The aim of this study was to obtain normative data for Verbal Fluency Test and investigate the effects of age, gender, and education on verbal fluency in native Turkish-speaking individuals.
METHOD
A pilot study was conducted to determine 3 letters with differing levels of difficulty for completing the phonemic fluency task. First names and animals were chosen for the semantic fluency task, and an alternating semantic task (first name-animal) was also used. In total, 415 participants (208 male and 207 female) were recruited and stratified based on the age and education levels.
RESULTS
Level of education had a main effect on all verbal fluency tasks; people with higher education performed better. Age and gender were found to have no effect on phonemic verbal fluency. Only the < name production task was affected by gender, women performed better. Younger age groups produced more words in name generation and semantic alternating fluency tasks.
CONCLUSION
The effects of age, gender and education on verbal fluency are in accordance with many previous reports. Analysis of various errors were also conducted. Results for Turkish are presented and discussed in the light of literature.
Topics: Animals; Educational Status; Female; Humans; Male; Neuropsychological Tests; Pilot Projects; Semantics; Verbal Behavior
PubMed: 35343581
DOI: 10.5080/u25553 -
Behavior Research Methods Apr 2018This article provides norms for general taboo, personal taboo, insult, valence, and arousal for 672 Dutch words, including 202 taboo words. Norms were collected using a...
This article provides norms for general taboo, personal taboo, insult, valence, and arousal for 672 Dutch words, including 202 taboo words. Norms were collected using a 7-point Likert scale and based on ratings by psychology students from the Erasmus University Rotterdam in The Netherlands. The sample consisted of 87 psychology students (58 females, 29 males). We obtained high reliability based on split-half analyses. Our norms show high correlations with arousal and valence ratings collected by another Dutch word-norms study (Moors et al.,, Behavior Research Methods, 45, 169-177, 2013). Our results show that the previously found quadratic relation (i.e., U-shaped pattern) between valence and arousal also holds when only taboo words are considered. Additionally, words rated high on taboo tended to be rated low on valence, but some words related to sex rated high on both taboo and valence. Words that rated high on taboo rated high on insult, again with the exception of words related to sex many of which rated low on insult. Finally, words rated high on taboo and insult rated high on arousal. The Dutch Taboo Norms (DTN) database is a useful tool for researchers interested in the effects of taboo words on cognitive processing. The data associated with this paper can be accessed via the Open Science Framework ( https://osf.io/vk782/ ).
Topics: Adolescent; Adult; Affect; Arousal; Female; Humans; Language; Male; Netherlands; Regression Analysis; Reproducibility of Results; Social Behavior; Social Values; Taboo; Verbal Behavior; Young Adult
PubMed: 28409486
DOI: 10.3758/s13428-017-0890-x -
Scientific Reports Feb 2022The Down syndrome (DS) phenotype is usually characterized by relative strengths in non-verbal skills and deficits in verbal processing, but high interindividual...
The Down syndrome (DS) phenotype is usually characterized by relative strengths in non-verbal skills and deficits in verbal processing, but high interindividual variability has been registered in the syndrome. The goal of this study was to explore the cognitive profile, considering verbal and non-verbal intelligence, of children and adolescents with DS, also taking into account interindividual variability. We particularly aimed to investigate whether this variability means that we should envisage more than one cognitive profile in this population. The correlation between cognitive profile and medical conditions, parents' education levels and developmental milestones was also explored. Seventy-two children/adolescents with DS, aged 7-16 years, were assessed with the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence-III. Age-equivalent scores were adopted, and Verbal and Non-Verbal indices were obtained for each individual. The cognitive profile of the group as a whole was characterized by similar scores in the verbal and non-verbal domain. Cluster analysis revealed three different profiles, however: one group, with the lowest scores, had the typical profile associated with DS (with higher non-verbal than verbal intelligence); one, with intermediate scores, had greater verbal than non-verbal intelligence; and one, with the highest scores, fared equally well in the verbal and non-verbal domain. Three cognitive profiles emerged, suggesting that educational support for children and adolescents with DS may need to be more specific.
Topics: Adolescent; Adolescent Behavior; Adolescent Development; Age Factors; Biological Variation, Population; Child; Child Behavior; Child Development; Child Language; Cognition; Down Syndrome; Education of Intellectually Disabled; Educational Status; Female; Humans; Intelligence; Male; Persons with Mental Disabilities; Verbal Behavior; Vocabulary
PubMed: 35121796
DOI: 10.1038/s41598-022-05825-4 -
Autism Research : Official Journal of... Mar 2023Fine motor skill is associated with expressive language outcomes in infants who have an autistic sibling and in young autistic children. Fewer studies have focused on...
Fine motor skill is associated with expressive language outcomes in infants who have an autistic sibling and in young autistic children. Fewer studies have focused on school-aged children even though around 80% have motor impairments and 30% remain minimally verbal (MV) into their school years. Moreover, expressive language is not a unitary construct, but it is made up of components such as speech production, structural language, and social-pragmatic language use. We used natural language sampling to investigate the relationship between fine motor and speech intelligibility, mean length of utterance and conversational turns in MV and verbal autistic children between the ages of 4 and 7 while controlling for age and adaptive behavior. Fine motor skill predicted speech production, measured by percent intelligible utterances. Fine motor skill and adaptive behavior predicted structural language, measured by mean length of utterance in morphemes. Adaptive behavior, but not fine motor skill, predicted social-pragmatic language use measured by number of conversational turns. Simple linear regressions by group corrected for multiple comparisons showed that fine motor skill predicted intelligibility for MV but not verbal children. Fine motor skill and adaptive behavior predicted mean length of utterance for both MV and verbal children. These findings suggest that future studies should explore whether MV children may benefit from interventions targeting fine motor along with speech and language into their school years.
Topics: Infant; Child; Humans; Child, Preschool; Autistic Disorder; Motor Skills; Autism Spectrum Disorder; Language; Speech; Verbal Behavior
PubMed: 36578205
DOI: 10.1002/aur.2883 -
CoDAS 2023Evaluate the performance in the Semantic and Phonemic Verbal Fluency tests in relation to the cognitive components of clustering and switching and explore the changes in...
PURPOSE
Evaluate the performance in the Semantic and Phonemic Verbal Fluency tests in relation to the cognitive components of clustering and switching and explore the changes in development in elementary school.
METHODS
Participants were 68 children from the 2nd to 5th grade of elementary school of a public school in the municipality of Santo André, divided into two groups, Learning Difficulty (LD) and Typical Development (TD).
RESULTS
The Verbal Fluency tests were compared for the number of clusters, mean size of the clusters, and number of switches. All variables compared showed a statistically significant higher score for Semantic Verbal Fluency. Means and standard deviations of the same variables for year and group effect were realized in both Verbal Fluency tests. A statistically significant difference was observed only for the total number of clusters in the Semantic Verbal Fluency test for group effect, with the best performance of the TD group. A high correlation was observed between the total number of correct answers with the total number of clusters and number of switches in both Verbal Fluency tests. In addition, a correlation was observed between the total number of correct answers and the mean size of the clusters only in the Phonemic Verbal Fluency. Linear regression analysis showed greater variance for the total number of clusters, making it more predictable for performance in both verbal fluency tests.
CONCLUSION
Verbal Fluency tests may be sensitive and predictive for the identification of possible differences in school performance associated with reading.
Topics: Humans; Child; Semantics; Cognition; Schools; Educational Status; Cluster Analysis; Verbal Behavior; Neuropsychological Tests
PubMed: 37820096
DOI: 10.1590/2317-1782/20232022003pt