Courses: Interpersonal Health Communication, Communication in Health Care Settings. Objectives: This lesson is designed for health profession students whose work will involve direct interaction with patients. It is designed to help students (a) better understand how to diagnose patients' needs for both informational and emotional support when…

Despite a wealth of qualitative and quantitative data regarding the positive effects of higher education mentoring programs on faculty satisfaction, retention, tenure, and promotion, mentoring programs are not widespread. The authors examine evaluative data from the first four years of the Faculty Mentoring Program at West Chester University. Of…

The purpose of this study was to identify and compare the perceptual characteristics of counselors at the elementary, secondary, and community college levels. Counselors (N=45) were asked to write "human relations incidents." There were no significant differences between groups. All counselors held positive perceptual characteristics. (NG)

Pre- and posttest ratings on measures of helping skills such as empathy, respect, concreteness, and genuineness were obtained in the preliminary and advanced training. A significant training effect was obtained for both groups. Desensitization treatment was a significant source of variance for the experimental subjects in training. (Author/LA)

This empirical study tested the effects of a systematically-designed training program to help medical students develop empathetic responses to patients and to attend not just to disease symptoms. Results indicate the success of the program. (Editor/LBH)

Twenty-one upper level psychology students underwent 24 hours of paraprofessional training, followed by 15 hours of practica experience. When compared to controls, experimental subjects' attitudes toward three target groups (institutionalized patients, graduate students in psychology, and undergraduates in psychology) became significantly more…

A problem with current methods for teaching and evaluating interpersonal skills is addressed: the failure to include a wide range of behaviors reported in the literature as contributing to patient dissatisfaction and noncompliance. A comprehensive interpersonal skills training program and pretest-posttest evaluation are described. (Author/LBH)

Progress on a research project at the University of New South Wales that has attempted to develop a test of the interpersonal communication skills of medical students is summarized. The test, which used films of doctor-patient interactions, was designed to measure the ability to respond appropriately to the emotional content of the interactions.…