RESUMO
Background: Differential diagnosis of bipolar II disorder (BD-II) and borderline personality disorder (BPD) has always been challenging for clinicians due to symptoms' overlap. This study aimed to compare hot and cold executive functions (EFs) in BD-II patients, as well as BPD and healthy controls (HCs), in order to differentiate these two disorders. Methods: In the present study, 30 BD-II and 30 BPD patients undergoing the drug therapy with mood stabilizers, and 30 HC were examined using EFs evaluated tests. The data were then analyzed using ANOVA and Tukey post hoc test. Results: The BD-II Patients performed significantly less in all cold EFs than the HC. Also, BPD patients had meaningfully lesser performance compared to HC in all cold EFs except sustained attention. No significant difference was perceived between the two patient groups in the cold EFs. In BD-II patients, the risky decision-making as a hot EFs' component was not significantly different from HC; nevertheless, its amount was significantly higher in BPD than in the HC and BD-II patients. Conclusion: These findings underline the differences between the two mentioned disorders based on the hot EFs, which may indicate further disorder in the emotional information processing system among the BPD patients.
RESUMO
BACKGROUND: Nurses are often faced with many stressful situations in life, including personal life challenges, the nature of work that requires standing long and being focused, commitment to patient care, and dealing with patients who need help. RESEARCH OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study was to investigate the relationship between empathy and compassion fatigue in nurses due to the mediating role of feeling guilty and secondary traumatic stress. RESEARCH DESIGN: This is a descriptive-correlation study. PARTICIPANTS: The statistical population consisted of all the nurses in Kerman hospitals in 2017. Five hospitals were randomly selected from among the private and public hospitals in Kerman. The sample size was considered 360, but after the deletion of misleading questionnaires, the final sample of study consisted of 300 nurses. ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS: Approval from the researcher's university Institutional Review Board for ethical review was obtained. FINDINGS: The data analysis in this study was done through the path analysis method using the Amos software. The results showed the mediating role of omnipotent guilt between empathy and compassion fatigue in the nurses, the mediating role of survivor guilt between empathy and compassion fatigue in the nurses, and the mediating role of secondary traumatic stress between empathy and compassion fatigue in the nurses. Also, empathy could explain 77% of the nurses' compassion fatigue through feelings of guilt and secondary traumatic stress. DISCUSSION: Pathogenic empathy-based guilt and secondary traumatic stress may help explain some of the links between clinical empathy and symptoms of compassion fatigue. CONCLUSION: Interventions and training programs targeting pathogenic empathy-based guilt and empathic secondary traumatic stress may be particularly important to help reduce compassion fatigue.
