Welcome to the Nexus of Ethics, Psychology, Morality, Philosophy and Health Care

Welcome to the nexus of ethics, psychology, morality, technology, health care, and philosophy
Showing posts with label Emotional Stability. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Emotional Stability. Show all posts

Monday, February 24, 2020

An emotionally intelligent AI could support astronauts on a trip to Mars

Neel Patel
MIT Technology Review
Originally published 14 Jan 20

Here are two excerpts:

Keeping track of a crew’s mental and emotional health isn’t really a problem for NASA today. Astronauts on the ISS regularly talk to psychiatrists on the ground. NASA ensures that doctors are readily available to address any serious signs of distress. But much of this system is possible only because the astronauts are in low Earth orbit, easily accessible to mission control. In deep space, you would have to deal with lags in communication that could stretch for hours. Smaller agencies or private companies might not have mental health experts on call to deal with emergencies. An onboard emotional AI might be better equipped to spot problems and triage them as soon as they come up.

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Akin’s biggest obstacles are those that plague the entire field of emotional AI. Lisa Feldman Barrett, a psychologist at Northeastern University who specializes in human emotion, has previously pointed out that the way most tech firms train AI to recognize human emotions is deeply flawed. “Systems don’t recognize psychological meaning,” she says. “They recognize physical movements and changes, and they infer psychological meaning.” Those are certainly not the same thing.

But a spacecraft, it turns out, might actually be an ideal environment for training and deploying an emotionally intelligent AI. Since the technology would be interacting with just the small group of people onboard, says Barrett, it would be able to learn each individual’s “vocabulary of facial expressions” and how they manifest in the face, body, and voice.

The info is here.

Friday, May 6, 2016

How Not to Explain Success

By Christopher Chabris and Joshua Hart
The New York Times - Gray Matter
Originally posted April 8, 2016

Here is an excerpt:

This finding is exactly what you would expect from accepted social science. Long before “The Triple Package,” researchers determined that the personality trait of conscientiousness, which encompasses the triple package’s impulse control component, was an important predictor of success — but that a person’s intelligence and socioeconomic background were equally or even more important.

Our second finding was that the more successful participants did not possess greater feelings of ethnocentrism or personal insecurity. In fact, for insecurity, the opposite was true: Emotional stability was related to greater success.

Finally, we found no special “synergy” among the triple package traits. According to Professors Chua and Rubenfeld, the three traits have to work together to create success — a sense of group superiority creates drive only in people who also view themselves as not good enough, for example, and drive is useless without impulse control. But in our data, people scoring in the top half on all three traits were no more successful than everyone else.

The article is here.

Tuesday, August 23, 2011

Professional Competence in the Face of Life-Threatening Illness

The new issue of *Professional Psychology* includes an article: "Preventing Problems of Professional Competence in the Face of Life-Threatening Illness."

The authors are W. Brad Johnson & Jeffrey E. Barnett.

Psychologists are human. Like our clients, we are nearly certain to encounter difficult life stressors such as relational break-downs, emotional low points, phase-of-life problems, serious medical challenges, or the onset of cognitive decline. Sadly, being a psychologist does little to insulate us from life's tribulations.

At some point during his or her career, nearly every mental health professional will confront a significant health problem. Medical issues may run the gamut from relatively minor (e.g., pneumonia, minor surgery, thyroid dysfunction) to life-threatening (e.g., cardiovascular disease requiring open heart surgery, neuromuscular disorders with a short life-expectancy, various forms of cancer).

Because many psychologists expect to work beyond the typical retirement age, with nearly a fifth reporting that they plan to work until death (Guy, Stark, Poelstra, & Souder, 1987), the probability of life-threatening medical diagnoses occurring during the course of one's career are significant.

But even early career psychologists are vulnerable to life-altering and potentially fatal medical problems (Philip, 1993).

Recent epidemiologic data for U. S. adults between the ages of 45 and 64 indicate that 13% suffer from some form of heart disease and 9.4% have been diagnosed with cancer; between the ages of 65 and 74, these numbers jump to 25.8% for heart disease and 22.5% for cancer (Centers for Disease Control & Prevention, 2010).

Although practitioner emotional health is considered essential and fundamental to the delivery of competent services (Vasquez, 1992), few things may threaten a psychologist's emotional stability more acutely than the diagnosis of a life-threatening illness.

Unfortunately, psychologists are not always effective when it comes to accepting their own vulnerabilities, taking time for self-care, and identifying decrements in their own competence due to either emotional or physical distress (Barnett & Johnson, 2008).

In this article, we direct our focus to the prospect of a life-threatening illness in the psychologist and the subsequent implications for professional competence.

By life-threatening we mean a terminal disease or a progressive medical condition leading to increasing disability and, in most cases, premature death.

Although psychologists are enjoined by the Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct (American Psychological Association; APA, 2010) to ensure their own competence, psychologists struggling with life-altering medical problems may be especially vulnerable to problems in this area.

We highlight how seriously ill and subsequently distressed psychologists may be ineffective at self-assessing and monitoring their professional competence, as well as in making essential decisions about continued clinical practice.

We conclude with numerous recommendations for psychologists designed to both prevent and manage threats to professional competence caused by a life-threatening illness.

Thanks to Ken Pope for this information.