Negative Emotions

You also might be expressing the benign form of sadism without knowing it. You don't necessarily have to hurt someone around you. It may be that you get a certain thrill when you blast your opponents in Mortal Kombat or any other video games. When you are with friends, you may push for them to get into a violent fight that involves breaking bottles and hurting each other really badly. Your favorite genre may be action thrillers that involve battles where many lives are lost. It may be his way of saying, Let's live it up once more. Let's get this trip to Florida in so that we can at least have a memory of having been together in Florida, a dream that we were always dreaming about but were never able to fulfill. After he has completed this unfinished business he will most likely return to the hospital and be a much better patient than if he always nostalgically thinks, If I had only gone to Florida with my wife. It is, again, important that we do not judge these patients because they do not gratify our needs for an immediate hospitalization and that we do not necessarily label them as denial. All that it means is that this man has made a choice; What does a nursing staff do with patients who stay in a complete denial until their death? They treat them just like any other needy human being and remember that some people need denial and that this should not be broken artificially just because we would like them to drop their denial. A man has an inoperable cancer, but the doctors say he probably will be able to live almost normally for a year or so before the decline begins. The wife has decided not to tell him as long as he is living in reasonably good health, then tell him. He should still have enough time to get his affairs in order. That we have begun to level the playing field in terms of access to development opportunities is good news. But, of course, it tells us little about the impact of such access. I am not aware of any rigorous evaluation of leadership development programs for women. Recently, some critical voices were raised. A 2014 study reporting evidence based on interviews with personnel managers in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland went as far as to suggest that these programs might even be counterproductive: Women are stuck in development and coaching programs while the men get the jobs.

In the same year, a McKinsey report, Why Leadership-Development Programs Fail was equally skeptical and offered some suggestions for improvement: tailor programs to focus on the core competencies relevant for the business, couple them with on-the-job projects, and uncover below the surface thoughts, feelings, assumptions, and beliefs that slow or prevent behavioral change. The report concludes by lamenting the absence of rigorous evaluations of existing programs and a call to action, a point echoed by a 2015 Harvard Business Review article entitled Evaluate Your Leadership Development Program. Shockingly, despite the $14 billion that, according to McKinsey, US companies spend on leadership development annually, the impact of leadership training, let alone leadership training specifically targeted at women, is largely unknown. A study that does allow us to make causal inferences about the relevance of leadership training is based on a hybrid program that combined leadership training with mentoring. It stems from an initiative sponsored by the National Science Foundation and the American Economic Association, and was inspired by Frank Dobbin and colleagues' findings that mentoring programs were associated with an increase in diversity in management in the over 800 companies they examined. Perhaps your favorite scene in the series Merlin is when the knights have to fight to the death. Maybe you still relive the scenes in your head. Common in all of these scenarios is that you are gaining pleasure from normal experiences in which cruelty is indirectly experienced. In September 2013, a study named The Behavioral Confirmation of Everyday Sadism was conducted to determine if everyday sadists had a predilection to inflict real, not just imagined, harm to others. The researchers believed that these overt sadists were likely to become more aggressive than normal human beings when provoked. Furthermore, they suggested that sadism is likely to give a unique proclivity for antisocial behaviors above and beyond the traits normally associated with the dark triad personalities. In other words, sadists tend to be much more malicious than narcissists, psychopaths, and Machiavellians. To find out how overt sadism manifests in everyday behaviors, researchers conducted a laboratory task that involved mimicking the type of cursory harm-inducing behavior that people might, knowingly or unknowingly, perform daily. The researchers decided to use bug killing as the test to identify possible sadism in seemingly regular people. According to the lead researcher, the willingness to kill a bug would establish a sadistic desire to inflict harm via direct physical contact. Is this the right approach? This may be the right approach for some patients who need denial themselves, to tell them as late as possible, but this is the exception to the rule. Most patients do better if they are told early that they are seriously ill, but are allowed to have hope, ie, that he can live normally for a reasonable length of time. If the patient should ask the physician directly whether he has a malignancy or not, the patient has the right to be told, and if he is not informed, the physician may in certain circumstances be liable to a suit later on. X, age twenty-two, with cancer, claims to have been miraculously healed.

However, all indications are that he is in terminal stages. What role can we play? Is he simply playing this game for the family's sake and does he really recognize his true state? If a young man with terminal cancer makes a statement that he is miraculously healed, this means to me that he wants to believe in a miracle in spite of the fact that from a medical point of view he's regarded as terminally ill. I would sit with him and say, Yes, miracles do sometimes happen and wait for a while and continue to visit with him so that he has an opportunity to share with you his feelings about his terminal illness or his belief that he has been cured. Indeed, they reported that mentoring programs went hand in hand with the successful increase in diversity among all seven traditionally discriminated-against groups, namely, white women as well as African American, Hispanic, and Asian American men and women. While there is more research to be done, coupling leadership training with mentoring offers great promise. In 2004, the Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession decided to offer a special workshop to female assistant professors. The program would turn into a much-loved and highly valued experience. Former doctoral students of mine who have had the good fortune of participating describe it as wonderful and absolutely invaluable. In an exit survey, most participants gave the workshop the highest possible mark. But we do not only have to trust my students' word or even just judge from their exit comments whether and how the participants benefited from the program. The founders, four leading professors of economics, Francine Blau, Rachel Croson, Janet Currie, and Donna Ginther, designed the program so that it would allow us to draw conclusions based on hard evidence. They designed a randomized controlled trial examining its impact. Like most other professions, the field of economics suffers from a leaky pipeline. To test this theory, the participants were offered a choice to perform certain unpleasant tasks, with the option of killing bugs, as well as other unpleasant but non-sadistic options. They agreed on three options (including bug killing) as tasks that a participant could choose: helping somebody else kill bugs, putting their hand in a barrel of ice water, and cleaning dirty toilets. To fish out the overt sadists among the participants, the team used the Short Sadistic Impulse Scale--developed in 2011 by a team of psychologists from the University of College Cork. The team also included questionnaires on dark triad traits to distinguish the qualities of sadism from narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism. Expectedly, individuals with high levels of sadism chose to kill the bugs than over the other options.

After concluding the task, they also reported that they enjoyed that specific task the most. Interestingly, those who had chosen an alternative task regretted not choosing the bug-killing task. In the second part of the laboratory test, the highly sadistic individuals were rated in comparison with those that were less cruelty-inclined. They were willingly asked to participate in a button-pushing competition that involved attacking a participant that they feel would not attack them back. Throughout the test, the participants were given the privilege to explode white noise into their opponents' headset for each trial they won. It is not your role, whether you are a member of a helping profession or a family member, to break down a defense. It is your role to help the patient, and if he needs to believe that he is cured, it is cruel and untherapeutic to tell him there are no such things as miracles. If you do not believe, yourself, that miracles do happen sometimes, you can simply ask him to tell you more about it. He may even end up convincing you. Over the last eight years we have had several patients who had been given up, and from a medical point of view had no practical chance of recovery, but who are still alive several years after the predicted date of their death. I have a patient dying now. She's behaving as if she doesn't know it or she may be denying it. How can I grind this out? How can I make her comfortable and what can I talk about? I think it is important that you do not grind it out. Many more women get PhDs in economics than there are tenured female economics professors. As in any profession, the causes of this are many, but one particularly striking feature in academic economics departments is the gender gap in promotion rates. Depending on the specific study, time frame and controls included, researchers have found a promotion gap of between 14 and 21 percentage points. Even granting for systemic gender inequality, this finding is notable. Women are less likely to be promoted to tenure in economics than in political science, statistics, the life sciences, physics, and engineering.

To the discipline's credit, the committee decided not only to start a mentoring program to assist female junior faculty in overcoming the tenure hurdle, but to do so in a way that allowed them to judge its efficacy. Since its inception in 2004, the program has been repeated every two years. After the first three iterations, the creators of the program took stock. Of the applicants to the 2004, 2006, and 2008 workshops, a bit more than half had been randomly assigned to receive the training. The others were relegated to a control group that did not receive the additional support. Of course, there was no actual opponent. However, the participants were made to believe that they wouldn't be attacked back by their opponents after being ear-blasted. The second aspect of the laboratory test was to answer if the highly sadistic individuals would willingly continue to attack and cause distress to a non-attacking opponent. The result was that those who were rated as being highly sadistic did not only take the opportunity to harm their supposed opponents, but they also worked extra hard for the chance to blast their opponents some more. It gave them a certain sort of thrill and satisfaction to know that they were hurting another person with no chance of being reprehended or attacked back. The dark triad traits, in the bug killing tasks, didn't accurately predict the outcome of the noise-blasting inclinations--but sadism did. Hence, there is good evidence to suggest that people who score high on a sadism measurement scale or questionnaire are inclined to behave in casual ways that are similar to the laboratory tasks. It is hard to say exactly what the cause of sadism is; The very idea is difficult to grasp for the average person. Yet many people embrace this kind of lifestyle, willingly or otherwise. If she appears to be in pain ask her if she has enough pain relief. If she is restless, sit with her and hold her hand and ask her simply, What can I do to make you comfortable? The patient will then tell you what her needs are. I think we are always trying to play a strange guessing game, perhaps pretending to ourselves that we are all-knowing, omnipotent human beings. If you don't know how to help a patient, simply ask her.