Battlefield humor and patient-physician communication

Dr. Michael Khan explores the pervasiveness of "battlefield humor" in this week's New York Times Cases section. Beyond being dehumanizing, and just plain rude, demeaning humor used to describe patients may have a direct impact on communication with the patient and ultimately on patient care. If a physician automatically assumes that a patient's behavior is because of some character flaw, or because the patient is a "whale" or the patient's "crazy," the physician may miss a real symptom or indication. And the humor certainly creates a barrier to building a trusting relationship between physician and patient.

Physicians certainly work in a stressful environment and certainly not all of their patients are pleasant. But what are some alternative that physician might consider to this battlefield humor? How can communication scholars demonstrate the affect this humor has on patients?

When words, and friends, fail

An essay in The New York Times today highlights the difficulty of going through a health crisis and having friends seemingly disappear. Psychologists are beginning to explore what people experience when they are witness to other's traumas. Part of the difficulty, is that words fail, and friends don't know what to say to a sick friend or how to help. The other difficulty is not so much a lack of empathy, but too much empathy. When a healthy friend can picture herself or her child as sick as the sick friend, it may give them cause to pull away from that friend in need.

Sometimes the right words and the right actions don't come naturally. But knowing our own fears and vulnerabilities may help us think twice and reach out to those in need.

The challenges of psychosocial research

An article in the New York Times today highlights some of the particular challenges of psychosocial research. The article discusses the challenges of personality analysis, specifically as it applies to research of generations. Is it possible to analyze and assess a collective generational personality? Are there flaws in how researchers try to measure personality, behavior and attitude?

Measuring attitude is a difficult task, because even at its best, you have what the participant says and some sort of scale or means of interpreting what it means. There is a lot of room for error: the participant may just say what he thinks the researcher wants to hear, the participant may says what is socially desirable, the researcher may interpret the responses incorrectly or the researcher may think he is measuring one thing when he is actually measuring something else. This is why different mechanisms for validating behavioral scales are so important. The work is extremely valuable in that it can teach us something about ourselves and how we approach our world. But it is indeed a challenge.