This study reveals that older adults have a positivity effect in long-term autobiographical memory and that a positivity bias can be induced in younger adults by a heightened motivation to regulate current emotional well-being. Three hundred nuns, ages 47 to 102 years, recalled personal information originally reported 14 years earlier. They did so under experimental conditions that repeatedly primed them to focus on their current emotional states or on their memory accuracy, or that provided no instructional focus (control condition). Both older control participants and participants who were focused on emotional states showed a tendency to remember the past more positively than they originally reported in 1987. In contrast, both younger control participants and participants who were focused on accuracy tended to remember the past more negatively than originally reported.

Toward a 21st Century Health System is a collection of essays that explore a key element of the health care delivery system -- large multispecialty physician group practices. Edited by policy experts Alain Enthoven and Laura Tollen, and written by a panel of health policy scholars and leaders including Stephen Shortell, Hal Luft, Donald Berwick, James Robinson, and Helen Darling, this resource addresses a variety of topics, including:

• organized delivery systems
• quality of care in prepaid group practice versus other types of managed care
• the role of physician leadership and culture in group practice
• prepaid group practice and the formation of national health policy

The book also covers such topics as pharmacy benefit management, technology assessment, health services research, and employer purchasing of benefits, all as they relate to prepaid group practice.

When teaching my students about what goes into a good doctor-patient interaction, I tell them about the studies that show how quickly doctors interrupt their patients. Male physicians especially, I tell them, are notorious for stopping the patient mid-sentence to redirect the discussion. In one study that I came across, female primary care physicians waited an average of 3 minutes before interrupting the patient to redirect the discussion toward issues more relevant to diagnosis. Male physicians waited an average of 47 seconds.

How long do I wait, I wondered? I decided to try an experiment. I would let my next patient talk as long as he or she needed to explain his or her reason for seeing me. I would watch the clock and see how long a patient might naturally take to explain the presenting complaint. I would hold my tongue.

The patient was in her 70s and greeted me with a smile when I stepped behind the curtain to be with her. "Hello, I'm Dr. Barr. What's the problem that brings you in today?"

She began to describe the past several weeks of her life. As I recall, it had to do with a coworker noticing something, talking with her sister on the phone, and her reluctance to see doctors. The word "cough" surfaced for a second, then quickly became submerged again. Looking at the medicines on the shelf at the drug store and not knowing which to choose. ... Needing to dress warmly ... (Wasn't this weather we'd been having nasty?) ... Sometimes she had trouble sleeping ...

The nurse poked her head through the curtain and silently tapped her watch. The waiting room of our urgent care center was full, and things were starting to back up. I wouldn't budge, though - I turned back to the patient and nodded. However long it took, I would wait for the patient to stop of her own accord. I wouldn't butt in.

It was the cough that was keeping her awake. ... She always got colds more easily than other people. ... Her sister was just a worrier. ... She finally had agreed to come in to see a doctor, just to reassure her friends and family.

Twenty-two minutes, from start to finish. The nurses were never going to forgive me.

The lungs had left-sided rales. The fever was mild, but the white count suggested infection. The chest radiograph showed a large infiltrate on the left and what I feared was a mass. I called the pulmonary specialist across the street and asked if he could squeeze the patient in this afternoon. He did, only to confirm the worst. It appeared the patient had a tumor causing the infiltrate, and there probably were enlarged hilar nodes as well. She probably had lung cancer, and it was probably in an advanced stage. She needed antibiotics right away to get the infection under control, after which further testing would be arranged.

The patient came back to our center for the antibiotics. The specialist had told her what he had found and had given her an indication of the grave prognosis she faced. I stepped back into the patient's space and said with sadness, "This hasn't been a very good day for you, has it?"

She looked at me for a moment with an unmistakable smile on her face. She reached out her hand and patted me on the wrist.

"Oh, don't worry about all that. I've had a good life. But I just wanted you to know - this is the best doctor visit I've ever had. You're the only one who ever listened."

Advances in Health Care Organization Theory is a much-needed volume for faculty and students in health care administration. It highlights and explains key trends in health care organizations and organizational development, specifically, in the 1990s. This book will be essential for doctoral-level students studying health care organizational theory and research, as well as for those studying organizational sociology, organizational psychology, political science, and management.

The Encyclopedia of Psychological Assessment is a landmark reference work and constitutes a definitive resource for academics, practitioners and students working in any field of applied psychological science.

Psychological assessment is a key component of psychological work. Devices of scientific assessment are necessary for adequate describing, diagnosis, predicting, explaining or changing the behavior of all subjects under examination. This double-volume collection offers complete coverage to facilitate action in each of these areas and will consequently be invaluable to psychologists in any applied setting.

The two volumes of the Encyclopedia of Psychological Assessment contain a series of 235 entries, organized alphabetically, and covering a variety of fields. Each entry includes a general conceptual and methodological overview, a section on relevant assessment devices, followed by links to related concepts in the Encyclopedia and a list of references.

The Encyclopedia of Psychological Assessment offers a truly international perspective, both in terms of the selected authors and chosen entries. It aims to provide an integrated view of assessment, bringing together knowledge dispersed throughout several methodological and applied fields, but united in terms of its relevance for assessment. It is an essential purchase for any library with an existing collection or concern with the field of psychological science in general.

We analyze the relationship between the supply of new technologies and health care utilization and spending, focusing on diagnostic imaging, cardiac, cancer, and newborn care technologies. As anticipated by previous research, increases in the supply of technology tend to be related to higher utilization and spending on the service in question. In some cases, notably diagnostic imaging, increases in availability appear associated with incremental utilization rather than substitution for other services. Policy efforts to assess and manage the availability of new technologies could benefit society where the additional spending produced by new services is not associated with strong quality improvements.