Aims: To explore how patients with COPD experience helplessness. Methods:In-depth interviews with 29 patients with moderate to very severe COPD. Data were analysed using a general inductive approach.Results: All patients focused on acute symptoms and expressed feelings of helplessness in the management of their condition; little attention was paid to longer-term strategies. For one group of patients, mostly European, self blame appeared to intensify feelings of helplessness. For a second group, mostly Pacific, a focus on faith in God, Church and family provided a more positive affect and existed alongside helplessness.Conclusions: Clinicians seeking to support patients to include longer term strategies in their self management will need to coach patients to experiences of short-term success, and be aware of the ways that patients experience and interpret their helplessness. Clinicians need to address self blame, and recognise patients' priorities of faith and family.
In order to assess the impact of culture on state behavior in international crises, specifically with regard to mediation and its outcome, this study tests hypotheses rooted in both the international relations and the cross-cultural psychology literatures, implementing analysis at both the international-system level and the domestic-state-actor level. At the international system level, the study finds that cultural difference between adversaries affects whether or not mediation occurs during an international crisis but has no effect on tension reduction. At the domestic state actor level, we find that there are certain facets of cultural identity that make a state more or less open to requesting or accepting third-party mediation during an international crisis, but that these facets have no effect on tension reduction.
The rapid dissemination of technology such as the Internet across geographical and ethnic lines is opening up opportunities for computer agents to negotiate with people of diverse cultural and organizational affiliations. To negotiate proficiently with people in different cultures, agents need to be able to adapt to the way behavioral traits of other participants change over time. This paper describes a new agent for repeated bilateral negotiation that was designed to model and adapt its behavior to the individual traits exhibited by its negotiation partner. The agent's decisionmaking model combined a social utility function that represented the behavioral traits of the other participant, as well as a rule-based mechanism that used the utility function to make decisions in the negotiation process. The agent was deployed in a strategic setting in which both participants needed to complete their individual tasks by reaching agreements and exchanging resources, the number of negotiation rounds were not fixed in advance and agreements were not binding. The agent negotiated with human subjects in the U.S. and Lebanon in situations that varied the dependency relationships between participants at the onset of negotiation. There was no prior data available about the way people would respond to different negotiation strategies in these two countries. Results showed that the agent was able to adopt a different negotiation strategy to each country. Its average performance across both countries was equal to that of people. However, the agent outperformed people in the United States, because it learned to make offers that were likely to be accepted by people, while being more beneficial to the agent than to people. In contrast, the agent was outperformed by people in Lebanon, because it adopted a high reliability measure which allowed people to take advantage of it. These results provide insight for human-computer agent designers in the types of multi-cultural settings which we considered, showing that adaptation is a viable approach towards the design of computer agents to negotiate with people when there is no prior data of their behavior.
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