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Interprofessional collaboration (IPC) is important for delivering safe patient care and can be enhanced through interprofessional education (IPE). In postgraduate medical education, the most effective model for delivering IPE remains unclear. A multi-site non-randomized mixed methods study was undertaken to investigate the effectiveness of a simulation-based IPE (SB-IPE) intervention on changing attitudes among higher specialty trainee (HST) physicians in general internal medicine and registered nurses (RNs). The intervention, underpinned by intergroup contact theory, is comprised of paired participants (HSTs:RNs) undertaking six simulated scenarios. The Jefferson Scale of Attitudes toward Interprofessional Collaboration (JeffSATIC) was administered pre-and-post intervention. Focus groups were conducted to explore participants' perceptions of IPC and the SB-IPE intervention. Fifty-six participants attended the SB-IPE intervention and 37 completed focus group interviews. Overall, attitudes toward IPC changed positively (p .001), with greater change among HSTs (p = .001) compared to RNs (p = .12). Attitudes to "working relationships" significantly increased for HSTs (p .001) but not RNs (p = .047). Focus group analysis identified three processes by which SB-IPE led to attitudinal change: 1) Shared vulnerability, 2) Positive affirmation, and 3) Negotiating professional hierarchies, mainly through relationship building. Further research is needed to investigate the long-term impact of attitudinal change, including the extent to which benefits transfer into practice.

Sadness has typically been associated with failure, defeat and loss, but it has also been suggested that sadness facilitates positive and restructuring emotional changes. This suggests that sadness is a multi-faceted emotion. This supports the idea that there might in fact be different facets of sadness that can be distinguished psychologically and physiologically. In the current set of studies, we explored this hypothesis. In a first stage, participants were asked to select sad emotional faces and scene stimuli either characterized or not by a key suggested sadness-related characteristic: loneliness or melancholy or misery or bereavement or despair. In a second stage, another set of participants was presented with the selected emotional faces and scene stimuli. They were assessed for differences in emotional, physiological and facial-expressive responses. The results showed that sad faces involving melancholy, misery, bereavement and despair were experienced as conferring dissociable physiological characteristics. Critical findings, in a final exploratory design, in a third stage, showed that a new set of participants could match emotional scenes to emotional faces with the same sadness-related characteristic with close to perfect precision performance. These findings suggest that melancholy, misery, bereavement and despair can be distinguishable emotional states associated with sadness.

The theory of universal emotions suggests that certain emotions such as fear, anger, disgust, sadness, surprise and happiness can be encountered cross-culturally. These emotions are expressed using specific facial movements that enable human communication. More recently, theoretical and empirical models have been used to propose that universal emotions could be expressed via discretely different facial movements in different cultures due to the non-convergent social evolution that takes place in different geographical areas. This has prompted the consideration that own-culture emotional faces have distinct evolutionary important sociobiological value and can be processed automatically, and without conscious awareness. In this paper, we tested this hypothesis using backward masking. We showed, in two different experiments per country of origin, to participants in Britain, Chile, New Zealand and Singapore, backward masked own and other-culture emotional faces. We assessed detection and recognition performance, and self-reports for emotionality and familiarity. We presented thorough cross-cultural experimental evidence that when using Bayesian assessment of non-parametric receiver operating characteristics and hit-versus-miss detection and recognition response analyses, masked faces showing own cultural dialects of emotion were rated higher for emotionality and familiarity compared to other-culture emotional faces and that this effect involved conscious awareness.

Delayed reward discounting (DRD) is a form of decision-making reflecting valuation of smaller immediate rewards versus larger delayed rewards, and high DRD has been linked to several health behaviors, including substance use disorders, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, and obesity. Elucidating the underlying neuroanatomical factors may offer important insights into the etiology of these conditions. We used structural MRI scans of 1038 Human Connectome Project participants (Mage = 28.86, 54.7% female) to explore two novel measures of neuroanatomy related to DRD: 1) sulcal morphology (SM; depth and width) and 2) fractal dimensionality (FD), or cortical morphometric complexity, of parcellated cortical and subcortical regions. To ascertain unique contributions to DRD preferences, indicators that displayed significant partial correlations with DRD after family-wise error correction were entered into iterative mixed-effect models guided by the association magnitude. When considering only SM indicators, the depth of the right inferior and width of the left central sulci were uniquely associated with DRD preferences. When considering only FD indicators, the FD of the left middle temporal gyrus, right lateral orbitofrontal cortex, and left lateral occipital and entorhinal cortices uniquely contributed DRD. When considering SM and FD indicators simultaneously, the right inferior frontal sulcus depth and left central sulcus width; and the FD of the left middle temporal gyrus, lateral occipital cortex and entorhinal cortex were uniquely associated with DRD. These results implicate SM and FD as features of the brain that underlie variation in the DRD decision-making phenotype and as promising candidates for understanding DRD as a biobehavioral disease process.