Essential Communication Skills for Healthcare Professionals

Foundations of Effective Communication

Characteristics of Effective Listening

  • Empathy: Putting yourself in the patient’s shoes, trying to perceive the world from their perspective, and understanding their behavior and feelings.
  • Unconditional Acceptance: Respecting and accepting the patient as they are, without critical judgment.
  • Authenticity: Being and appearing as one truly is, without pretense or pretending.

Consequences of Ineffective Communication

  • Patients may become withdrawn and less likely to participate
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Social Psychology Essentials: Group Dynamics & Influence

Why Milgram Experiment Results Were Unpredictable

The results of the Milgram experiment were difficult to predict due to a fundamental attribution error. Researchers and participants alike underestimated the powerful influence of the situation and overestimated the role of individual personality traits in determining behavior.

Conformity vs. Obedience: Key Differences

While both conformity and obedience involve yielding to social pressure, they differ in several key aspects:

  • Conformity: The pressure
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Psychological Science: Historical Roots, Key Theories, and Research Design

Cognitive Biases in Thinking

  • Confirmation bias: Ignoring evidence that opposes our beliefs (e.g., on vaccines).
  • Failing to accurately judge source credibility (e.g., celebrity endorsements).
  • Misunderstanding or not using statistics (e.g., gambler’s fallacy).

Scientific Foundations of Psychology (Antiquity–18th Century)

Psychology originated in philosophy, with roots in epistemology (the study of how we gain knowledge).

Plato: Founder of Rationalism

  • Advocated rational analysis to understand the world
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Effective Data Collection in Observational Research

Challenges in Observational Data Collection

Visual Recording: Reactivity and Privacy Concerns

Visual recording methods often trigger reactivity in research subjects. Cameras, in particular, can be highly intrusive, leading to an explicit loss of anonymity. While their use in open environments might sometimes be overlooked, it frequently faces strong rejection. When observing actions in private spaces, the use of visual recording requires an intense and arduous negotiation process.

Audio Recording:

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Key Concepts in Human Development and Psychology

Language Development Fundamentals

Key Concepts in Language

  • Mutual Exclusivity: A child’s assumption that a given entity has only one name.
  • Gaze Following: The ability to follow another person’s gaze to understand their point of reference.
  • Morphemes: The smallest units of meaning in a language.
  • Phonemes: The smallest units of sound in a language.

Stages of Language Acquisition

  • Prelinguistic Stage: Characterized by babbling, cooing, and crying.
  • Single-word Stage: Uttering single words to convey meaning.
  • Two-
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Child Development: Research Methods & Prenatal Growth

Understanding Processes in Development

What is a Process?

A description of what change happens, along what timeline. Remember that constancy can be thought of as ‘the lack of change’.

Identifying Process Components

Can you identify the cause, mechanism, and outcome of a given process and explain your answer?

  • Cause: The initial factor (e.g., teacher math anxiety).
  • Mechanism: The apparatus, method, or tool – how do we get from cause to outcome?
  • Outcome: The results, change, or lack of change (e.g.,
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