Consent from the family of a possible donor directly influences organ donation rates. The process of obtaining consent, however, is often addressed during a time in which the family’s ability to make decisions is affected by the psychological trauma related to the sudden and unexpected reality of death. This research study implemented a qualitative interpretive descriptive design to gain insight into the way family members of brain-dead patients try make sense of the conflict they experience while faced with a compelling decision about organ donation. Data was collected during in-depth, unstructured, individual interviews with family members (n=8), representing the diverse population of the Western Cape Province in South Africa. Digitally voice-recorded interviews were transcribed, followed by thematic data analysis. Seven common themes emanated from the data, which clarified the family’s decisional conflict regarding organ donating to a certain degree. Although the findings of the study resonate with several similar international studies, it also brings new insight to the role played by the so-called key decision maker(s) in the family. The key decision maker carries the greatest weight in the family’s final decision, and must acquire an informed understanding of both brain death and organ donation. Understanding the role of the key decision maker may well be crucial to the supporting transplant coordinator during the time of decision-making. Recommendations were formulated for education, policy, practice and further research. / MCur, North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2015

Consent from the family of a possible donor directly influences organ donation rates. The process of obtaining consent, however, is often addressed during a time in which the family’s ability to make decisions is affected by the psychological trauma related to the sudden and unexpected reality of death. This research study implemented a qualitative interpretive descriptive design to gain insight into the way family members of brain-dead patients try make sense of the conflict they experience while faced with a compelling decision about organ donation. Data was collected during in-depth, unstructured, individual interviews with family members (n=8), representing the diverse population of the Western Cape Province in South Africa. Digitally voice-recorded interviews were transcribed, followed by thematic data analysis. Seven common themes emanated from the data, which clarified the family’s decisional conflict regarding organ donating to a certain degree. Although the findings of the study resonate with several similar international studies, it also brings new insight to the role played by the so-called key decision maker(s) in the family. The key decision maker carries the greatest weight in the family’s final decision, and must acquire an informed understanding of both brain death and organ donation. Understanding the role of the key decision maker may well be crucial to the supporting transplant coordinator during the time of decision-making. Recommendations were formulated for education, policy, practice and further research. / MCur, North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2015

Miranda understanding, appreciation, and reasoning abilities are essential to courts' determinations of knowing and intelligent Miranda rights waivers. Despite the remarkable development of Miranda research in recent decades, studies have generally focused on understanding and appreciation of Miranda rights, but have not examined Miranda reasoning and waiver decisions. Therefore, examining the nature of defendants' decisional capacities constitutes a critical step in further developing theoretical and clinical models for competent Miranda waiver decisions. The current study evaluated Miranda waiver decisions for 80 pretrial defendants from two Tulsa-area Oklahoma jails. Previously untested, the current study examined systematically how rational decision abilities affect defendants' personal waiver decisions. Components from general models of legal decision making, such as decisional competence and judgment models, were examined to determine their applicability to Miranda waiver decisions.

Psicóloga / Este estudio explora cómo en un contexto de penalización extrema se configuran los procesos de decisión y gestión del aborto de mujeres universitarias como respuesta a un embarazo no previsto. Es un estudio cualitativo, de carácter exploratorio y descriptivo, y se utilizó el método de análisis de contenido, a entrevistas semi- estructuradas realizadas a mujeres jóvenes universitarias de nivel socioeconómico medio y medio alto, de Santiago. Los principales resultados y conclusiones indican que el aborto no es un evento aislado dentro de las trayectorias biográficas de estas mujeres, más bien, es un evento que adquiere sentido dentro de la individualización de sus trayectorias, cuando han emprendido ya una carrera educacional, donde un embarazo parece no tener cabida. La maternidad pareciera estar calendarizada para ellas, no ocurriendo antes de culminado sus procesos de estudios y adquisición de un trabajo estable, identificando un proceso de decisión que tiene lógicas más sociales que individuales. En cuanto a la gestión de la práctica, se encontró nuevas modalidades en su implementación, lo que da cuenta de cambios en el modo de operar en clandestinidad. El aborto farmacológico aparece como el método elegido y la Internet como el medio por el cual se obtiene el medicamento. Además, se identifica un proceso de decisión y gestión del aborto que se caracteriza por la soledad, el miedo y el peligro, al ser una práctica oculta y que coloca en riesgo su integridad

In the future, robots will become our companions and co-workers. They will gradually appear in our environment, to help elderly or disabled people or to perform repetitive or unsafe tasks. However, we are still far from a real autonomous robot, which would be able to act in a natural, efficient and secure manner with humans. To endow robots with the capacity to act naturally with human, it is important to study, first, how humans act together. Consequently, this manuscript starts with a state of the art on joint action in psychology and philosophy before presenting the implementation of the principles gained from this study to human-robot joint action. We will then describe the supervision module for human-robot interaction developed during the thesis. Part of the work presented in this manuscript concerns the management of what we call a shared plan. Here, a shared plan is a a partially ordered set of actions to be performed by humans and/or the robot for the purpose of achieving a given goal. First, we present how the robot estimates the beliefs of its humans partners concerning the shared plan (called mental states) and how it takes these mental states into account during shared plan execution. It allows it to be able to communicate in a clever way about the potential divergent beliefs between the robot and the humans knowledge. Second, we present the abstraction of the shared plans and the postponing of some decisions. Indeed, in previous works, the robot took all decisions at planning time (who should perform which action, which object to use…) which could be perceived as unnatural by the human during execution as it imposes a solution preferentially to any other. This work allows us to endow the robot with the capacity to identify which decisions can be postponed to execution time and to take the right decision according to the human behavior in order to get a fluent and natural robot behavior. The complete system of shared plans management has been evaluated in simulation and with real robots in the context of a user study. Thereafter, we present our work concerning the non-verbal communication needed for human-robot joint action. This work is here focused on how to manage the robot head, which allows to transmit information concerning what the robot's activity and what it understands of the human actions, as well as coordination signals. Finally, we present how to mix planning and learning in order to allow the robot to be more efficient during its decision process. The idea, inspired from neuroscience studies, is to limit the use of planning (which is adapted to the human-aware context but costly) by letting the learning module made the choices when the robot is in a "known" situation. The first obtained results demonstrate the potential interest of the proposed solution.

Many sources suggest a folklore procedure to determine if a smooth curve of genus 1 has a rational point. This procedure terminates conditionally on the Tate-Shafarevich conjecture. In this thesis, we provide an exposition for this procedure, making several steps explicit. In some instances, we also provide MAGMA implementations of the subroutines. In particular, we give an algorithm to determine if a smooth, genus 1 curve of arbitrary degree is locally soluble, we compute its Jacobian, and we give an exposition for descent in our context. Additionally, we prove there exists an algorithm to decide if smooth, genus 1 curve has a rational point if and only if there exists an algorithm to compute the Mordeil-Weil group of an elliptic curve. / Master of Science / It is unknown whether an algorithm can determine if an equation with rational coefficients has a solution in the rational numbers. This thesis examines the simplest class of such equations: those representing so called smooth curves of genus 1. We demonstrate that an algorithm can decide if these equations have a rational solution if and only if there is an algorithm that can compute all rational solutions given a single rational solution. A procedure exists for the latter, but its success relies on a conjecture. Assuming this conjecture, we explicitly construct the corresponding algorithm to decide if an equation representing a smooth curve of genus 1 has a rational solution.

Introduction: This research portfolio set out to examine service user defined recovery in psychosis. A systematic review was undertaken to examine the evidence-base for the effectiveness of psychosocial interventions on personal recovery, empowerment and other recovery-related outcomes. An empirical study was conducted to examine the relationships between self-stigma, decisional capacity for treatment and personal recovery in service users with psychosis. Methods: A review of published literature identified ten randomised controlled trials investigating the effects of psychosocial interventions on personal recovery. A narrative synthesis was reported for findings relating to primary and secondary outcomes, and standardised effect sizes were calculated to quantify within-group change from pre-to post-intervention and follow-up. Studies were assessed for risk of bias. The empirical study recruited twenty-four participants with diagnoses of non-affective psychosis. Semi-structured interviews and self-report measures were administered to assess self-stigma, decisional capacity for treatment, psychopathology, emotional distress and personal recovery. Results: A small number of studies found that recovery-focused psychosocial interventions improved personal recovery. There were more consistent effects on psychiatric symptoms, functioning and depression. The empirical study found that self-stigma and personal recovery were associated with each other. Large effect sizes were found for the associations between self-stigma and symptoms. These associations persisted when controlling for personal recovery scores. Understanding of treatment was predicted by excitement symptoms, but no other prediction model emerged for decisional capacity. Conclusion: Taken together, the systematic review and empirical project support service user definitions of recovery which highlight the role of psychosocial factors. The systematic review found some evidence for the role of recovery-focused psychosocial interventions in improving personal recovery. Further research is needed so that interventions specifically targeting the processes in personal recovery can be developed. The findings from the empirical project suggested that interventions designed to overcome self-stigmatising beliefs and reduce emotional distress are likely to improve personal recovery outcomes in psychosis. More research is needed to develop a broader conceptualisation of decisional capacity in psychosis, to support the active participation of service users in their recovery journey.

abstract: Recommendations made by expert groups are pervasive throughout various life domains. Yet not all recommendations--or expert groups--are equally persuasive. This research aims to identify factors that influence the persuasiveness of recommendations. More specifically, this study examined the effects of decisional cohesion (the amount of agreement among the experts in support of the recommendation), framing (whether the message is framed as a loss or gain), and the domain of the recommendation (health vs. financial) on the persuasiveness of the recommendation. The participants consisted of 1,981 undergraduates from Arizona State University. The participants read a vignette including information about the expert group making a recommendation--which varied the amount of expert agreement for the recommendation--and the recommendation, which was framed as either a gain or loss. Participants then responded to questions about the persuasiveness of the recommendation. In this study, there was a linear main effect of decisional cohesion such that the greater the decisional cohesion of the expert group the more persuasive their recommendation. In addition, there was a main effect of domain such that the health recommendation was more persuasive than the financial recommendation. Contrary to predictions, there was no observed interaction between the amount of decisional cohesion and the framing of the recommendation nor was there a main effect of framing. Further analyses show support for a mediation effect indicating that high levels of decisional cohesion increased the perceived entitativity of the expert group--the degree to which the group was perceived as a unified, cohesive group¬--which increased the recommendation's persuasiveness. An implication of this research is that policy makers could increase the persuasiveness of their recommendations by promoting recommendations that are unanimously supported by their experts or at least show higher levels of decisional cohesion. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.A. Psychology 2013

No description available.

Dans un contexte économique marqué par la saturation des marchés et l’évolution perpétuelle de l’environnement, la pérennité des stratégies de différentiation classiques basées sur l’innovation de produit, ou la baisse des prix est de plus en plus affaiblie. Une nouvelle approche d’évolution pour les entreprises industrielles consiste à proposer une offre de service qui peut se substituer à l’offre de produit initialement proposée par l’entreprise, il s’agit de proposer un ensemble intégré de produits et de services sous la forme de système produit-service (PSS). L’utilisateur pourrait ainsi bénéficier de la disponibilité des produits pour répondre à ses besoins sans pour autant les posséder. Le développement de la transition vers ces offres de PSS au sein de l'industrie manufacturière représente un mouvement scientifique qualifié de «servitization of manufacturing» ou de servicisation. La servicisation constitue un enjeu majeur de gestion pour les décideurs des entreprises industrielles. Il s’agit d’une transition qui implique d’importants défis techniques, managériaux, et culturels. Son déploiement dans l’entreprise porte différents risques et confronte les décideurs à plusieurs problématiques décisionnelles. Ce travail de thèse propose alors un cadre méthodologique global permettant d’intégrer la prise en compte des risques décisionnels dans la gestion de la transition vers un modèle d’offre intégrée de PSS. Nous considérons alors la servicisation comme un processus décisionnel porteurs de risques, qui peuvent être caractérisés et diagnostiqué, dans l’objectif d’améliorer les capacités décisionnelles de l’entreprise. Ce cadre méthodologique est structuré autour des composantes de modélisation du processus décisionnel de servicisation (selon un formalisme inspiré du cadre de modélisation d’entreprise GRAI) et de modélisation des risques, il est composé de trois phases successives :La phase A nommée « l’exploration du processus de servicisation », son objectif étant de rendre une représentation formalisée du processus décisionnel de servicisation de l’entreprise industrielle étudiée selon un modèle décisionnel de référence que nous avons construit au préalable; La phase B nommée « l’évaluation et la caractérisation des risques décisionnels », où il s’agit de caractériser les risques décisionnels selon leurs domaines d’occurrence et d’effet, afin d’en déduire une évaluation de la criticité des risques potentiels portés par le processus; Et la phase C nommée « le diagnostic et la remédiation des risques décisionnels », sa finalité consiste à rendre une interprétation des résultats de diagnostic, afin de proposer des pistes d’action pour les décideurs de l’entreprise étudiée, dans l’objectif de leurs apporter une aide au processus décisionnel.Deux études de cas sur des PME industrielles ont permis d’illustrer ce travail de thèse. / The economic context marked by market saturation and constantly changing environment, the sustainability of traditional differentiation business strategies based on product innovation or decreased prices, is increasingly weakened. A new approach to development for industrial companies is to provide a service offering that can be substituted to product supply initially proposed by the company, it consists in offering an integrated product-service system (PSS). The user can thus benefit from the availability of products to meet his needs without owning them. The development of the transition to PSS within the manufacturing industry is a qualified scientific movement known as “servitization of manufacturing”.Servitization represents a major change for the management of industrial enterprises. This is a transition that involves significant challenges that can be: technical, managerial, and cultural. Its deployment in the enterprise carries different risks and confronts decision makers to several issues.This thesis proposes an overall methodological framework for integrating the consideration of decision risks in managing transition to an integrated PSS supply model. We consider servitization as a decision-making process carrying decisional risks that can be characterized and diagnosed with the purpose of improving decision-making capabilities of the business.This methodological framework is structured around the components of modeling servitization decision process (according to a formalism based on GRAI business modeling framework) and risk modeling; it is composed of three phases:Phase A named “explorating servitization process”, its purpose consists of making a formal representation of the industrial enterprise’s servitization decision-making process studied according to a decision-making reference model that we defined previously; Phase B named “evaluation and characterization of decisional risks” comes to characterize the decision risks according to their areas of occurrence and effects, in order to deduce a criticality assessment of potential risks carried by the process; And phase C named “diagnosis and remediation of decisional risks”, its purpose is to make an interpretation of diagnosis results and to propose a remedial plan to assist decision-makers in their decision making process. Two case studies on industrial SMEs are used to illustrate this thesis.