What Will You Protect? Redefining Professionalism Through the Lens of Diverse Personal Identities.

INTRODUCTION: Professional identity formation (PIF) encapsulates the process of incorporating a physician's professional identity into existing personal identity. Medical schools shape PIF by reinforcing professional norms defined by a historical physician phenotype. Increasingly, medical students who are underrepresented in medicine must confront the apparent contradictions between personal identities and the often-subjective definitions of professionalism endorsed by faculty, patients, and peers. The lack of a framework for negotiating these conflicts can create barriers to achieving full academic and professional potential. METHODS: We designed a 2-hour professionalism module during the first-year medical student orientation at one medical school. Participating students listened to a physician discuss a defining career moment that required reconciliation of personal and professional identities. Afterwards, students broke into small groups and discussed vignettes illustrating personal identities challenged by professionalism norms. Students then anonymously wrote a reflection about one aspect of their identity they intended to protect during their PIF process. An overwhelming majority of students posted their anonymous reflections on a wall for other students, staff, and faculty to view. RESULTS: We analyzed the written reflective responses to the module. Several broad-ranging themes, including Mission, Identity, and Relationships, were identified. Both participant and facilitator evaluations were analyzed to determine the module's success. DISCUSSION: This module provides a framework for faculty and administrators to create other curricular and pericurricular experiences that positively shape PIF. The session format utilized may generate greater interest in proactively supporting medical students as they navigate formation of their professional identities.

Ethical and Regulatory Considerations for Using Social Media Platforms to Locate and Track Research Participants.

As social media becomes increasingly popular, human subjects researchers are able to use these platforms to locate, track, and communicate with study participants, thereby increasing participant retention and the generalizability and validity of research. The use of social media; however, raises novel ethical and regulatory issues that have received limited attention in the literature and federal regulations. We review research ethics and regulations and outline the implications for maintaining participant privacy, respecting participant autonomy, and promoting researcher transparency when using social media to locate and track participants. We offer a rubric that can be used in future studies to determine ethical and regulation-consistent use of social media platforms and illustrate the rubric using our study team's experience with Facebook. We also offer recommendations for both researchers and institutional review boards that emphasize the importance of well-described procedures for social media use as part of informed consent.

A retinal code for motion along the gravitational and body axes.

Self-motion triggers complementary visual and vestibular reflexes supporting image-stabilization and balance. Translation through space produces one global pattern of retinal image motion (optic flow), rotation another. We examined the direction preferences of direction-sensitive ganglion cells (DSGCs) in flattened mouse retinas in vitro. Here we show that for each subtype of DSGC, direction preference varies topographically so as to align with specific translatory optic flow fields, creating a neural ensemble tuned for a specific direction of motion through space. Four cardinal translatory directions are represented, aligned with two axes of high adaptive relevance: the body and gravitational axes. One subtype maximizes its output when the mouse advances, others when it retreats, rises or falls. Two classes of DSGCs, namely, ON-DSGCs and ON-OFF-DSGCs, share the same spatial geometry but weight the four channels differently. Each subtype ensemble is also tuned for rotation. The relative activation of DSGC channels uniquely encodes every translation and rotation. Although retinal and vestibular systems both encode translatory and rotatory self-motion, their coordinate systems differ.