The Perceptions of Healthcare Staff Regarding Moral Injury and the Impact on Staff Life and Work During COVID-19: A Scoping Review of International Evidence.

The COVID-19 response introduced legal restrictions on social distancing globally, affecting healthcare staff personally and professionally. These restrictions suspended routine hospital visiting, which may have left staff feeling they had to compromise on the care they provided. Such conflict may be experienced as moral injury. This scoping review aimed to synthesise international evidence, to answer this question: "Have COVID-19 restrictions affected healthcare staff's experiences of moral injury? If so, how?" Nine studies met the search criteria. Although healthcare staff seemed to be aware of the risks and effects of moral injury, they were still reluctant to "name" it. Healthcare staff's own emotional and spiritual needs were mostly ignored. Although psychological support is often the recommended approach by organisations, a greater focus on spiritual and emotional support is recommended.

Creating an interprofessional education package on patients' spiritual needs.

This article outlines the experiences of a Scottish healthcare chaplain. After a student nurse expressed a dated view of chaplains, I realised it was my responsibility to refresh it. After reflection I planned, developed and implemented an interprofessional education session for nursing, midwifery and allied health professional (NMAHP) students on clinical placement. I had to develop awareness of learning theories, preferences and styles, and explore different methods of delivery. Since NMAHP students can be undergraduate, postgraduate, school leavers or career changers, the session is multi-generational and interprofessional. Attendee feedback was used to review the learning session. This package was developed and shared with my team but may be of value to other healthcare chaplains or spiritual care educators to introduce spiritual care to NMAHP students on clinical placement. It will also be a useful resource for nurses, midwives and allied health professionals to expand their understanding of the role.

Empathic Accuracy: Worse Recognition by Older Adults and Less Transparency in Older Adult Expressions Compared With Young Adults.

OBJECTIVES: We examined empathic accuracy, comparing young versus older perceivers, and young versus older emoters. Empathic accuracy is related to but distinct from emotion recognition because perceiver judgments of emotion are based, not on what an emoter looks to be feeling, but on what an emoter says s/he is actually feeling. METHOD: Young (≤30 years) and older (≥60 years) adults ("emoters") were unobtrusively videotaped while watching movie clips designed to elicit specific emotional states. The emoter videos were then presented to young and older "perceivers," who were instructed to infer what the emoters were feeling. RESULTS: As predicted, older perceivers' empathic accuracy was less accurate relative to young perceivers. In addition, the emotions of young emoters were considerably easier to read than those of older emoters. There was also some evidence of an own-age advantage in emotion recognition in that older adults had particular difficulty assessing emotion in young faces. DISCUSSION: These findings have important implications for real-world social adjustment, with older adults experiencing a combination of less emotional transparency and worse understanding of emotional experience.

Telling the Tale and Living Well: Adolescent Narrative Identity, Personality Traits, and Well-Being Across Cultures.

This study explored links between narrative identity, personality traits, and well-being for 263 adolescents (age 12-21) from three New Zealand cultures: Maori, Chinese, and European. Turning-point narratives were assessed for autobiographical reasoning (causal coherence), local thematic coherence, emotional expressivity, and topic. Across cultures, older adolescents with higher causal coherence reported better well-being. Younger adolescents with higher causal coherence instead reported poorer well-being. Personal development topics were positively linked to well-being for New Zealand European adolescents only, and thematic coherence was positively linked to well-being for Maori adolescents only. Negative expressivity, neuroticism, conscientiousness, and openness were also linked to well-being. Implications of these cultural similarities and differences are considered for theories of narrative identity, personality, and adolescent well-being.

The Diagnostic Value of Children's Responses to Cross-Examination Questioning.

In response to a widespread belief within the legal system that cross-examination is instrumental in uncovering the truth, we examined the effect of cross-examination questioning on the reports of children who had-and had not-been coached to lie. A group of children, aged 6-11 years (N = 65), played three computer games with one of their parents. For half of the pairs, the parents-who acted as confederates-coached their children to make lies of commission concerning the occurrence of two target activities. For the remaining pairs, these two target activities actually occurred, and there was no coaching. Immediately afterwards, children were interviewed about the two activities. Those who-correctly or incorrectly-reported that both activities occurred were retained for the final sample (n = 56); these children were then interviewed again with both neutral questions and cross-examination-style challenges. Neither style of questioning elicited responses that discriminated between liars and truth-tellers: although the accuracy of children who were lying increased in response to cross-examination questions, the accuracy of truth-telling children saw a corresponding decrease. When asked neutral questions, children's responses tended to be consistent with their earlier responses, whether or not those responses were lies. These findings raise important questions about the function that cross-examination might serve in trials involving child witnesses. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Narratives and traits in personality development among New Zealand Maori, Chinese, and European adolescents.

Narrative and trait levels of personality were assessed in a sample of 268 adolescents from age 12 to 21 from New Zealand Maori, Chinese, and European cultures. Adolescents narrated three critical events and completed a Big Five personality inventory. Each narrative was coded for causal and thematic coherence. NZ Chinese adolescents reported lower levels of extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness, and higher levels of neuroticism, than NZ Maori or European adolescents. Cultural differences were also evident in narrative coherence. Adolescents in all three groups demonstrated age-related increases in thematic coherence, but only NZ European adolescents demonstrated the expected age-related increases in causal coherence. Narrative identity and traits were distinct aspects of personality for younger adolescents, but were linked for middle and older adolescents. These findings support the importance of both narrative identity and traits in understanding personality development in adolescents across cultures.

Are co-witnesses special? Comparing the influence of co-witness and interviewer misinformation on eyewitness reports.

Although some research suggests that misinformation provided by a co-witness could be more influential than that obtained from other sources, most of this research has compared the effect of co-witness information against non-social forms of misinformation only. To better understand the influence of co-witnesses we compared the influence of co-witness misinformation with the influence of misinformation provided by an interviewer. Across two experiments using the MORI paradigm we found no evidence that a co-witness is particularly influential relative to another social source of post-event misinformation. In fact, the source of the misinformation delivered by our interviewer was less likely to be correctly recalled than the source of the misinformation delivered by a co-witness. There was some evidence that misinformation delivered by both a co-witness and an interviewer has a stronger effect on witnesses' accuracy and confidence than misinformation obtained from either source alone. Finally, our results suggest that the opportunity to provide an early individual memory account might protect against the effect of subsequently-encountered co-witness misinformation. These results have important implications for the way that criminal investigations are conducted.

Do children recall the birth of a younger sibling? Implications for the study of childhood amnesia.

To establish the parameters of childhood amnesia, researchers often ask adults to recall events for which the exact date is known. One event of this kind is the birth of a sibling, but is this an event that children are likely to understand and encode at the time that it occurs? Here, we report the first examination of age-related changes in the content and accuracy of 2- to 5-year-old children's accounts of the recent birth of a sibling. The interview procedure we used was identical to that used in a prior study with adults, so we had the opportunity to compare children's recall with that of adults who were matched on age at the time of the birth. For both children and adults, the amount of information reported and the number of questions answered increased as a function of age at the time of the birth. Relative to children, adults reported more information and answered more questions. These findings suggest that the failure of adults to recall the birth of a younger sibling that occurred when they were very young may be due primarily to a failure to effectively encode the event in the first place.

Magic memories: young children's verbal recall after a 6-year delay.

This report describes the first prospective study specifically designed to assess children's verbal memory for a unique event 6 years after it occurred. Forty-six 27- to 51-month-old children took part in a unique event and were interviewed about it twice, after 24-hr and 6-year delays. During the 6-year interview, 9 children verbally recalled the event, including 2 who were under 3 years old when the event occurred. This may be the most convincing evidence to date that such early experiences can be verbally recalled after long delays. These data have important implications for current theories of memory development and childhood amnesia and underscore some of the problems associated with evaluating the veracity of early memories under less controlled conditions.

Childhood amnesia.

Childhood amnesia refers to the inability of children and adults to recall events that took place during their infancy and early childhood. Freud originally coined the term on the basis of clinical interviews; subsequent empirical investigations have confirmed many of Freud's original observations, but not his explanation for the phenomenon. Consistent with Freud's view, childhood amnesia is not a unitary phenomenon, but rather consists of at least two separate phases. In this article, we review the evidence for a two-stage phenomenon and highlight some of the major developmental changes that might contribute to each phase. We reject Freud's repression explanation and argue instead that a comprehensive theory of childhood amnesia will require an understanding of neurological, cognitive, language, and social development. WIREs Cogni Sci 2011 2 136-145 DOI: 10.1002/wcs.107 For further resources related to this article, please visit the WIREs website.

Childhood amnesia: Empirical evidence for a two-stage phenomenon.

The term childhood amnesia refers to the inability of adults to remember events from their infancy and early childhood. If we plot the number of memories that adults can recall as a function of age during childhood, the number of memories reported increases gradually as a function of age. Typically, this finding has been used to argue that gradual changes in memory development contribute to a gradual decline in childhood amnesia during the preschool period. Alternatively, it is possible that pooling data across participants has obscured more abrupt, stage-like changes in the remission of childhood amnesia. In the present study we examined the number and distribution of childhood memories for individual participants. Six adults were repeatedly interviewed about their childhood memories. We found that the distribution of adults' early childhood memories may be less continuous than pooled data suggest. This finding has important implications for current explanations of childhood amnesia.

Maternal reminiscing style during early childhood predicts the age of adolescents' earliest memories.

Individual differences in parental reminiscing style are hypothesized to have long-lasting effects on children's autobiographical memory development, including the age of their earliest memories. This study represents the first prospective test of this hypothesis. Conversations about past events between 17 mother-child dyads were recorded on multiple occasions between the children's 2nd and 4th birthdays. When these children were aged 12-13 years, they were interviewed about their early memories. Adolescents whose mothers used a greater ratio of elaborations to repetitions during the early childhood conversations had earlier memories than adolescents whose mothers used a smaller ratio of elaborations to repetitions. This finding is consistent with the hypothesis that past-event conversations during early childhood have long-lasting effects on autobiographical memory.

Eliciting adults' earliest memories: does it matter how we ask the question?

For more than a century, psychologists have debated the age of adults' earliest memories. To date, estimates have ranged from 2 to 6-8 years of age. In this experiment, we examined how the nature of the question used to elicit early memories influenced the age from which memories were retrieved. Young adults provided written descriptions of autobiographical memories and estimated their age at the time of each remembered event. One group was asked to report their six earliest memories. Three other groups were asked to describe memories associated with particular cue words. They were asked to report memories from any time in their lives, to report childhood memories, or to report their earliest memory associated with each word. When participants were asked to report their earliest memories, there was no effect of cue words on the ages of the memories reported. When participants were asked to sample different epochs of their lives, however, the age of the memories they reported differed substantially: asking participants to recall early memories yielded a higher density of events that occurred during the traditional childhood amnesia period. Thus, many early childhood memories may remain available, but may be less accessible than later memories. These data show that the way in which we ask adults to report their early memories affects the age of the memories that are reported, and thus influences the conclusions that may be drawn about the boundary of childhood amnesia.