What good emotional care for miscarriage looks like: A mixed-methods investigation in an Australian private hospital setting.

BACKGROUND: Miscarriage is a common medical occurrence which can be associated with significant psychological distress. Patients and partners are frequently disappointed by aspects of their care, especially with regard to emotional support. Although most published studies investigated the experiences of patients and partners in emergency departments (EDs) of public hospitals, miscarriage is also frequently diagnosed in non-emergency settings, such as during sonography or antenatal appointments, and approximately 25% of Australian women receive maternity care in private hospitals. AIM: Because the experience of miscarriage is known to be setting-dependent, it is important to understand how patients and partners experience care outside the ED. Here, we addressed this gap by investigating the experiences of patients and partners who attended a private maternity hospital for miscarriage using a mixed-methods approach. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Eighteen patients and six partners who had recently experienced a miscarriage were recruited at a private maternity hospital to take part in both semi-structured interviews and online surveys. RESULTS: Overall, patients and partners were highly satisfied with the emotional care they received. Thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews allowed us to identify a total of ten themes that contributed to satisfaction with emotional care. CONCLUSIONS: We provide the first specific insights into the experiences of women and partners who received care for miscarriage in an Australian private hospital setting, and the first example of a healthcare setting that achieves high satisfaction with emotional care around miscarriage. The ten themes we identify provide a framework for improving satisfaction with care also in other settings.

Toward Optimal Emotional Care During the Experience of Miscarriage: An Integrative Review of the Perspectives of Women, Partners, and Health Care Providers.

INTRODUCTION: Miscarriage is frequently associated with significant emotional impact, causing psychological distress, trauma, and grief. Unfortunately, women and partners frequently report dissatisfaction with care around miscarriage, and health care providers report feeling ill-prepared and underequipped to provide emotional support. This integrative review synthesizes the individual perspectives of the woman experiencing the miscarriage, the partner, and the different health care provider roles involved in the care to better understand what future research is necessary to improve the experiences of bereaved parents and their health care providers. METHODS: Electronic databases were searched for studies that covered emotional care around miscarriage from the perspective of women, partners, or health care providers. The review included studies published in English between 2015 and 2022, using either quantitative or qualitative methods. Thematic analysis was carried out, and conclusions from these articles were integrated into themes and subthemes. RESULTS: A total of 60 studies met the inclusion criteria. Two main themes were identified for women: (1) a need for more information and (2) a need for acknowledgment of their loss. Two main themes were likewise identified for partners: (1) a need for more information and (2) a need for recognition. Three main themes were identified for health care providers: (1) a need for additional training, (2) components of quality care, and (3) perceived barriers to providing care. DISCUSSION: There is broad overlap in the needs identified by bereaved parents and their health care providers, as well as general agreement regarding the barriers to providing effective care. Five areas of future research priority were identified to understand how best to meet these needs: empirical evaluation of strategies to meet identified needs, investigation of setting-specific needs, integrated consideration of all relevant roles, investigation of the care needs of diverse groups, and an investigation of the predictors of emotional impact.

Motion extrapolation in the flash-lag effect depends on perceived, rather than physical speed.

In the flash-lag effect (FLE), a flash in spatiotemporal alignment with a moving object is misperceived as lagging behind the moving object. One proposed explanation for this illusion is based on predictive motion extrapolation of trajectories. In this interpretation, the diverging effects of velocity on the perceived position of the moving object suggest that FLE might be based on the neural representation of perceived, rather than physical, velocity. By contrast, alternative explanations based on differential latency or temporal averaging would predict that the FLE does not rely on such a representation of perceived velocity. Here we examined whether the FLE is sensitive to illusory changes in perceived speed that result in changes to perceived velocity, while physical speed is constant. The perceived speed of the moving object was manipulated using revolving wedge stimuli with variable pattern textures (Experiment 1) and luminance contrast (Experiment 2). The motion extrapolation interpretation would predict that the changes in FLE magnitude should correspond to the changes in the perceived speed of the moving object. In the current study, two experiments demonstrated that perceived speed and FLE magnitude increased in the dynamic pattern relative to the static pattern conditions, and that the same effect was found in the low contrast compared to the high contrast conditions. These results showed that manipulations of texture and contrast that are known to alter judgments of perceived speed also modulate perceived position. We interpret this as a consequence of motion extrapolation mechanisms and discuss possible explanations for why we observed no cross-effect correlation.

The rubber hand illusion in children: What are we measuring?

The rubber hand illusion (RHI) is a much-studied bodily illusion that has been used in a wide number of populations to investigate the plasticity of the mental body representation. In adult participants, the wide adoption of the illusion has led to a proliferation of experimental variations of the illusion, and with that, considerable apparent inconsistencies in both empirical results and conceptual interpretations. In turn, this makes it challenging to integrate empirical findings and to identify what those findings together can tell us about the representation of the body in the brain. More recently, scientists have started applying the illusion to populations of children, in order to better understand how body representations develop in both typically developing children and in clinical populations. With this field now starting to expand, we believe it is both urgent and important to prevent unintended methodological variability from hindering the consistency of the paediatric literature as it has the adult literature. With this aim in mind, we review the 12 currently available paediatric RHI studies, and summarise their key methodological choices and conceptual definitions. We highlight a number of important discrepancies, particularly where seemingly equivalent analysis choices might significantly affect the interpretation of results, and make recommendations for future studies. We hope this will allow this important and emerging field to benefit from the synergy that results from multiple studies using convergent and consistent empirical methods.