Nonverbal Communication Between Patients and Medical Practitioners

Proper health care necessitates face-to-face interaction between health providers and their patients. This direct contact is important for two sets of reasons: the provider must assess the special quality and intensity of the patient's symptoms, emotions and pain; and the provider must create positive expectations, provide emotional support, and enlist the patient's cooperation with treatment. Regarding medical diagnosis, patients are often unable or unwilling to describe precisely and completely what is wrong with them. Regarding medical treatment, a number of factors make kind words and verbal prognoses from practitioners insufficient to communicate the expectations essential to "placebo" effects and the sense of commitment known to be therapeutic to a distraught patient. Effective nonverbal communication—through touch, facial expression, voice tone, etc.—is essential for successful patient-practitioner interaction. Major aspects of nonverbal communication that are of direct relevance to health care have been studied scientifically but have not yet been systematically utilized. Promising areas of application are reviewed in this paper.     

Asia educates to brake the population juggernaut

Most of the Asian countries have national programs to provide educat ion on all factors that influence population growth. School children are given information on the effects of high birthrates on family and nation. Sloan Wayland thinks that the Asians will become the world's experts in population education. In all 9 countries (Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Japan, Republic of Korea, Malaysia, Philippines, Sri Lanka, and Thailand) represented at a Meeting of Experts on the Role of University Faculties/Colleges of Education in Population Education in Bangkok, population education in varying degrees had been introduced in primary and secondary schools.     

Occupational sociology as career and employment counseling: Patterns and possibilities

This article contends that career and employment counseling should be viewed as an aspect of the clinical practice of occupational sociology. First, the actual development of career and employment counseling is briefly traced. Then, against this backdrop, past and present linkages between occupational sociology and career/employment counseling knowledge are identified. Finally, sociology training and internship possibilities for the counseling component are suggested.     

Actual and perceived emotional sending and personality correlates

To ascertain whether actual and perceived emotional sending are distinct constructs, the present study investigated the relationship between subjects' ability to facially express six basic emotions and their perceived success at expressing these emotions. Sixty-eight subjects completed a number of standardized personality scales and were videotaped while attempting to portray six basic emotions. Immediately following the videotaping subjects were asked to rate their perceived success in the emotional-sending task. Observers then judged the emotional-sending videotapes to determine subjects' actual sending abilities. A confirmatory factor analytic model indicated that actual and perceived emotional-sending were distinct factors. Zero-order correlations between the traditional personality measures and the actual and perceived sending factors also supported this distinction. These findings have important implications for the construction of standardized measures of individual differences in nonverbal communication skills.This research was supported by a UCR intramural research grant and a UCR NIH Biomedical Support Equipment grant. The authors would like to thank Richard Lippa and Louise Prince.     

Jerome H. Friedman and Nicholas I. Fisher

Many data analytic questions can be formulated as (noisy) optimization problems. They explicitly or implicitly involve finding simultaneous combinations of values for a set of (input) variables that imply unusually large (or small) values of another designated (output) variable. Specifically, one seeks a set of subregions of the input variable space within which the value of the output variable is considerably larger (or smaller) than its average value over the entire input domain. In addition it is usually desired that these regions be describable in an interpretable form involving simple statements (rules) concerning the input values. This paper presents a procedure directed towards this goal based on the notion of patient rule induction. This patient strategy is contrasted with the greedy ones used by most rule induction methods, and semi-greedy ones used by some partitioning tree techniques such as CART. Applications involving scientific and commercial data bases are presented.     

Individual differences in expressive style as a mediator of expectancy communication

This study investigates the role of nonverbal expressiveness and self-monitoring as mediators in the communication of teachers' expectations for student performance to a third party observer. Undergraduates were recruited to be videotaped while teaching a brief lesson to a high school student who was presented as either very bright and motivated or not. Videotapes showing only the teacher were later shown to observers who were asked for their impressions of the student who was being taught. It was hypothesized that teachers who were highly nonverbally expressive would communicate their expectations to the observers, and would thus elicit from them responses quite similar to their own. On the other hand, it was predicted that unexpressive teachers would not communicate their expectations, eliciting observer responses unrelated to their own. The predictions were supported but with a major qualification: it was found that spontaneous expressiveness interacted with self-monitoring in determining expectancy communication. The findings point towards new directions in understanding the occurrence and mediation of expectancy effects.A portion of this paper was presented at the American Psychological Association meetings in Anaheim, California, August, 1983. The research was supported in part by a University of California intramural research grant to the second author, by a UCR minigrant to the third author, and by an NIH biomedical research support equipment grant.     

Spatial inequality and poverty among American children

National-level statistics often mask extreme spatial differentiation in child poverty. Using county-level data from the 1990 US decennial census summary tape file, we show that child poverty is distributed unevenly over geographic space. Child poverty is concentrated in counties in Appalachia, the Mississippi Delta, and the southern black belt. Child poverty rates are strongly influenced by the local industrial composition (e.g., agriculture and manufacturing), but the effects are largely indirect, operating primarily through reduced employment opportunities among adult workers. High county unemployment and underemployment rates contribute directly to children's economic deprivation, as well as indirectly by undermining the formation and stability of two-parent families. Our results highlight existing spatial differentiation and inequality in children's economic well-being, and provide a point of departure for additional research on the geography of child poverty.