Spiritual healing – we know our patients need it . . . and we want to give it to them. But it can be tough to combine spirituality and practice. If you haven’t talked with your patients about spiritual health before, how do you begin? A pair of researchers in Norway held focus groups with nursing students to hear their experiences integrating spirituality into their education and practice. Their findings contained some illuminating lessons. Many students felt responsible for the spiritual health of their patients, yet they felt that spiritual care was poorly defined and barely focused on professionally. Without…

Have you ever seen colors spelled out using the wrong color font? It’s called the Stroop task and it might look like this: Red Blue Green Yellow. Instead of reading the word, you have to determine the color of the word. Researchers from the University of Toronto, led by psychologist Michael Inzlicht, PhD, examined subjects’ brains during the Stroop task to find out if believers’ and non-believers’ brains functioned differently under stress. Subjects had a split second before having to push a button indicating what color they saw. At the same time, they were hooked up to a brain monitoring…