PubMed Health⌕ Search

Biomedical subjects

S M Solberg

Publications and source records attributed to S M Solberg.

4 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed1993

Caregiver-infant interaction--comforting post-operative neonates.

Analysis of 40 h of videotaped caregiving to four male infants was conducted using ethology. All infants were full term and had major chest surgery 12 h previously. All incidents of caregiver-infant interaction were examined, and the verbal and tactile comforting behavior of the caregiver was coded for duration, context, infant cue and infant state prior and following the interaction. A total of 191 comforting incidents occurred during the study. Stroking was the most common form of touch used. Most of the comforting (60%) was given in the context of caregiving; sleeping infants were touched often (38%); 25.3% of the touches were given to acutely distressed infants, and wide awake infants relatively little. Most of the infants showed no change in infant state after the relatively brief comforting incidents, but in 15.7% of the incidents the infants 'settled' after comforting. The authors conclude that this is a relatively strong effect considering the short duration of the comforting actions.

Caregivers↗
PubMed1992

Exploring empathy: a conceptual fit for nursing practice?

After three decades, the efficacy of empathy in the clinical setting remains undocumented. Recently, concerns have been raised that the concept may be inappropriate and even harmful to the nurse-patient relationship. An analysis of the concept indicates that empathy consists of moral, emotive, cognitive and behavioral components. By tracing the integration of this concept into nursing, we suggest that empathy was uncritically adopted from psychology and is actually a poor fit for the clinical reality of nursing practice. Other communication strategies presently devalued, such as sympathy, pity, consolation, compassion and commiseration, need to be reexamined and may be more appropriate than empathy during certain phases of the illness experience. Directions for future research are suggested.

Behavior↗
PubMed1990

Concepts of caring and caring as a concept.

If caring is to be retained as the "essence" of nursing, and if research in this area is to advance, then the various perspectives of caring must be clarified, the strengths and the limitations of these conceptualizations examined, and the applicability of caring as a concept and theory to the practice of nursing identified. Examination of the concept of caring resulted in the identification of five epistemological perspectives: caring as a human state, caring as a moral imperative or ideal, caring as an affect, caring as an interpersonal relationship, and caring as a nursing intervention. Two outcomes of caring were identified: caring as the subjective experience and as the physiologic responses in patients. The authors concluded that knowledge development related to caring in nursing is limited by the lack of refinement of caring theory, the lack of definitions of caring attributes, the neglect to examine caring from the dialectic perspective, and the focus of theorists and researchers on the nurse to the exclusion of the patient.

Altruism↗