Roger Bretherton

Understanding emotionally relevant situations in primary dental practice. 2. Reported effects of emotionally charged situations

Background and aims Dentistry is widely reported to be a stressful profession. There is a limited body of research relating to the coping strategies used by dentists whilst in clinical situations. This study aims to use qualitative methods to explore the full extent of the coping strategies associated with stressful events in primary dental practice.Method Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 20 dentists within a 50 mile radius of Lincoln. A thematic analysis was conducted on verbatim transcriptions thereby identifying six themes and 35 codes.Results Participants described both problem-focused and emotion-focused strategies. The strategies used had a variety of outcomes in the context of use. Most dentists denied that their emotions affected their decision-making, but then proceeded to describe how they were influential.Discussion and conclusion Dentists use a wide variety of coping strategies some of which are maladaptive. Training in the development and recognition of appropriate coping decisions would be appropriate as they would, potentially, improve practitioner decision-making and well-being.

“Religion” is complex and diverse

ABSTRACT Religion is a multi-faceted phenomenon including cognition, behavior, experience and more. It is also very diverse; there are many different forms of religion, depending on evolutionary context, culture, personality and so on. In view of this it is misleading to make claims about anything as broad and general as “religion”, without specifying what kind of religion is under the spotlight. There is a danger of erroneous extrapolation from one specific form of religion to religion in general. Another danger is of studying such mixed and diverse forms of religion that there is little prospect of discovering anything that they all have in common. Though there is much that is commendable in these Hilbert papers, their most conspicuous weakness is the tendency to over-generalize about religion.