ABSTRACT
OBJECTIVES: Adopting a social-psychological approach, this research examines whether emotional empathy, an affective reaction regarding another's well-being, fosters hand hygiene as this affects other's health-related well-being extensively. DESIGN: Three studies tested this notion: (a) a cross-sectional study involving a sample of health care workers at a German hospital, (b) an experiment testing the causal effect of empathy on hand hygiene behaviour and (c) an 11-week prospective study testing whether an empathy induction affected disinfectant usage frequency in two different wards of a hospital. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Self-reported hand hygiene behaviour based on day reconstruction method was measured in Study 1, actual hand sanitation behaviour was observed in Study 2 and disinfectant usage frequency in two different hospital wards was assessed in Study 3. RESULTS: Study 1 reveals an association of empathy with hand hygiene cross-sectionally, Study 2 documents the causal effect of empathy on increased hand sanitation. Study 3 shows an empathy induction increases hand sanitiser usage in the hospital. CONCLUSIONS: Increasing emotional empathy promotes hand hygiene behaviour, also in hospitals. Besides providing new impulses for the design of effective interventions, these findings bear theoretical significance as they document the explanatory power of empathy regarding a distal explanandum (hand hygiene).
Subject(s)
Empathy , Hand Hygiene , Medical Staff, Hospital/psychology , Adult , Cross-Sectional Studies , Female , Germany , Hand Disinfection , Humans , Male , Medical Staff, Hospital/statistics & numerical data , Middle Aged , Prospective Studies , Self Report , Young AdultABSTRACT
Functional and quantitative evaluation of analytes in crude extracts or semipure mixtures has been considered challenging due to variation in generated results. Some of the drawbacks have been linked to the texture, form, and content of the samples. The crude extracts contain multiple components and, in oxygen radical absorbance capacity (ORAC) assays, have exhibited complex reaction kinetics due to interference or matrix effect. The conventional ORAC assay utilized a single dilution factor that brought about a wide CV difference (60-110%) in antioxidant activity for each extract compared to other dilution factors applied. Due to precision errors introduced from these extremely high CV% differences, determination of antioxidant capacity based on a single dilution may introduce discrepant results. A novel standardized ORAC (SORAC) assay for the determination of antioxidant capacity of dietary plant extracts is described in this study. Using the SORAC assay, positive linear correlations (R2 = 0.95-0.99) were obtained for the sample extracts tested when a multiple dilution strategy was applied. Thus, on the strength of our observations, SORAC has been proposed as an effective tool for assessing antioxidant analytes in a biological matrix. This technique could also be modified for use in other bioanalytical platforms concerned with the analyte matrix effect.
Subject(s)
Antioxidants/chemistry , Biological Products/chemistry , Free Radicals/chemistry , Oxygen/chemistry , Plant Extracts/analysis , Reactive Oxygen Species , Spectrometry, Fluorescence/methods , Anthocyanins/chemistry , Area Under Curve , Chemistry Techniques, Analytical , Dose-Response Relationship, Drug , Food Analysis/methods , Kinetics , Solanum lycopersicum , Mentha , Mentha piperita , Models, Statistical , Petroselinum , Regression Analysis , Reproducibility of Results , Tea , VitisABSTRACT
One of the traditional methods of cell viability analysis is the use of trypan blue dye exclusion staining. This technique has been the standard methodology used in academic research laboratories and industrial biotechnology plants. Cells were routinely counted manually with a hemocytometer. In recent years, modern automated instrumentation has been introduced to supplement this traditional technique with the efficiency and reproducibility of computer control, advanced imaging, and automated sample handling.
