When things go wrong during a medical procedure, patients' expectations are fairly straightforward: They expect an explanation of what happened, an apology if an error was made, and assurance that something will be done to prevent it from happening to another patient. Patients have a right to full disclosure; it is also therapeutic in relieving their anxiety. But if they have been harmed by our...

Apologies made by physicians for adverse medical events have been identified as a mitigating factor in whether patients decide to litigate. However, doctors are socialized to avoid apologies because apologies admit guilt and invite lawsuits. An "Apology Law," which specifies that a physician's apology is inadmissible in court, is written to encourage patient-physician communication. Building on...

Conservation tillage (CT) systems have a number of potential benefits including lower crop production costs and the ability to reduce soil erosion that have made them common in several regions of the world. Although CT systems have been researched and successfully implemented on some farms in California's San Joaquin Valley (SJV), overall adoption is low and the reasons for the region's compara...

The present study examined the different levels of (im)politeness strategies in expressing request, apology, and refusal speech acts across intermediate and advanced Iranian EFL learners to identify their attitudinal ratings of their produced structures in terms of pragmatic success and (im)politeness mannerism. A discourse completion test including 2 Likert scales on attitudinal appropriatenes...

This is the second issue featuring a selected piece from the Yale Internal Medicine Residency Program's Writers' Workshop. The annual workshop began in 2003. Abraham Verghese and Richard Selzer, among the best known physician-writers in the United States, have served as workshop leaders, teaching the craft of writing to more than 35 residents. In designing the workshop, Anna B. Reisman, assista...

Do people distinguish between sincere and insincere apologies? Because targets and observers face different constraints, we hypothesized that observers would differentiate between spontaneous and coerced apologies but that targets would not. In Studies 1 and 2 participants either received or observed a spontaneous apology, a coerced apology, or no apology, following a staged offense, and the pr...