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This paper examines dominant sources of social power and influence that affect the degree to which patients adhere to recommended regimens for prevention or treatment and their rate of recovery. Referent power of health-care practitioners, as contrasted with their expert, coercive, reward and legitimate power, is expected to he most effective when internalization of medical recommendations by the patients is essential. The paper explores specific ways that a health-care professional can gain referent power, using weight control treatment as an example. It presents a conceptual framework that provides a rationale for a number of relationship-building techniques and offers evidence that referent power is effective in promoting adherence to treatment and more healthful behavior, and in influencing critical outcome measures such as weight loss. Analysis of the relative efficacy of various methods of building and using referent power and the possible limiting conditions on its effectiveness are also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Robotic “pets” are being marketed as social companions and are used in the emerging field of robot-assisted activities, including robot-assisted therapy (RAA). However, the limits to and potential of robotic analogues of living animals as social and therapeutic partners remain unclear. Do children and adults view robotic pets as “animal-like,”“machine-like,” or some combination of both? How do social behaviors differ toward a robotic versus living dog? To address these issues, we synthesized data from three studies of the robotic dog AIBO: (1) a content analysis of 6,438 Internet postings by 182 adult AIBO owners; (2) observations and interviews with 80 preschoolers during play periods with AIBO and with a stuffed dog; and (3) observations and interviews with 72 children, aged 7–15 years, who played with AIBO and a living dog. Overall, the studies revealed that “hybrid” cognitions and behaviors about AIBO emerged: the robotic dog was treated as a technological artifact that also embodied attributes of living animals, such as having mental states, being a social other, and having moral standing (although this latter finding remained difficult to interpret). Implications for use of robotic pets as companions and in interventions or therapy are explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the relationships between housing and health inequalities. It locates housing within a network of health resources that can either promote well-being or increase susceptibility to disease. Housing thereby contributes to the accumulation, or depletion, of the health capital of individuals and communities. Qualitative interviews in three British regions help specify the links between health capital, on the one hand, and the network of resources, environments, events, institutions, and social relations comprising the housing system, on the other. The findings show why, from a health capital/health-resources-network perspective, a segment of the housing system (owner-occupation) that generally appears therapeutic can have the opposite effect for people whose resilience is low or whose health is in decline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The interpersonal relationship between physician and patient involves a highly charged affective component. As a result, patients' satisfaction with medical care, their compliance with treatment regimens, and the outcome of treatment tend to be substantially related to their physicians' ability to satisfy their socio-emotional needs in the health care encounter. This critical aspect of health care is termed "rapport." While it is not yet clear exactly how rapport with patients can be achieved, evidence reviewed here suggests that a physician's ability to establish rapport with patients is at least partially dependent upon his or her communication skills, especially the ability to decode and encode nonverbal messages of affect. Implications for teaching physicians the elements of empathic communication are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses common assumptions, dimensions, and problems of Pathway Organizations. Currently all facilities engaged in easing the community restoration of the discharged mental patient are groping, more or less intuitively, toward answers to problems of practice that in some degree affect all of them. While systematic research of the order discussed in the preceding section is necessary for definitive knowledge, it seems possible that by raising and objectively facing these questions in terms of knowledge of everyday practices and policies tentative answers may be found. The editors are aware of the fact that no agency can succeed in its operations without a high level of therapeutic enthusiasm on the part of its staff. Practitioners must believe in what they are doing for their practices to have beneficial effects. But optimism, however necessary to the therapeutic and rehabilitative process, is in itself no guarantee that the goals of the agency are being reached. Obscuring defects and playing up successes in a best-of-all-possible-worlds manner can only serve in the long run to deceive clients, sponsors, public and the agency itself. Honest appraisal of procedures and weighing of shortcomings may not always serve to make the agency a sensational success, but it will insure that its future operations will be based on sounder knowledge and undoubtedly increase the probability of true success.

This article discusses the relation among illness, therapy and the modern urban American family. The analogy of physician, and parents in part is simple and obvious. These are the stronger and more adequate persons on whom the child and the sick person, respectively, are made to rely; they are the ones to whom he must turn to have those of his needs fulfilled which he is incapable of meeting through his own resources. As people shall maintain, these analogies must not be pressed too far. But they do constitute a convenient jumping off place for the analysis. The primary psychodynamically relevant reasons researchers find in the special character of the American urban family, which is extremely vulnerable to certain types of strain. Mechanisms have developed which relieve the family of the additional stresses which would be imposed upon it by making the care of the sick one of its principal functions. At the same time, most cases of illness with psychological components are probably more effectively cared for in the special circumstances of the society by professionalized agencies than they would be in families.