Advocacy for Post-Intensive Care Syndrome (PICS) is a critical component of supporting the recovery of survivors of critical illness. Despite its importance, a shared understanding of PICS advocacy remains underrepresented in medical literature. This chapter defines PICS advocacy as an ethical commitment to patient- and caregiver-centered care, encompassing three key dimensions: supporting individuals living with PICS, promoting awareness and prevention within medical and lay communities, and advancing the science surrounding this condition. Current advocacy efforts occur across various levels, including local communities, national organizations, and global collaborations. Central to these efforts is awareness, facilitated by a growing array of educational resources such as books, podcasts, and websites. However, PICS advocacy can further benefit from large-scale public awareness campaigns modeled after successful initiatives by organizations like the American Heart Association and the American Cancer Society. These efforts could amplify public understanding and drive systemic change. Individuals are encouraged to take an active role in PICS advocacy, and this chapter offers practical strategies for engagement. By empowering individuals to champion PICS awareness and support, the healthcare community can foster a more inclusive approach to addressing this condition. Advocacy for PICS is not just a responsibility–it is an opportunity to transform care and improve outcomes for survivors and their families.

Emotionally or motivationally significant stimuli tend to attract, divert, or hold attention more readily than neutral stimuli. These effects arise during numerous tasks, varying as a function of stimulus type or emotional cue. Their neural substrates involve enhanced activity of sensory cortices under direct influence of emotional or reward processing systems, including the amygdala, in combination with other top-down or bottom-up biases that together serve to prioritize behaviorally relevant information for access to conscious awareness. Other indirect influences act through interactions of emotional and motivational systems, with cortical or subcortical networks controlling attention, including executive functions and neuromodulatory pathways. These data reveal that attentional processes encompass multiple biasing signals that can modulate stimulus processing, based not only on space or object representations, as traditionally considered, but also value-based representations. Such mechanisms of emotional attention or affect-driven biases may operate preattentively, involuntarily, or non-consciously, yet nonetheless be regulated by current goals or context.

For many philosophers, the mind-body problem has to be solved in order to explain consciousness. Consciousness can be described by levels of awareness and wakefulness. The evolution of consciousness in animals shows in which taxa of animals awareness and wakefulness have been reached at levels from absence of consciousness to levels similar to humans. The ontogeny of consciousness in human babies reproduces the evolution of consciousness in animals. Brain injury and disorders in humans can throw back consciousness to animal levels.

Chapter 11 summarises the arguments in the book. It concludes that, although the evidence is incomplete, there is little reason to believe that the severe disfigurement provision is inducing positive attitudinal or behavioural change, nor providing an effective remedy for people discriminated against because of the way they look. It concludes by noting that other social changes may bring this issue into sharper focus, and suggests some ways in which holes in the evidence could be filled.

Awareness is the quality of knowing and understanding that something is happening or exists. It means bringing conscious attention to whatever is arising, with as little judgement as possible. On a subconscious level, we respond to what is happening in the moment by applying existing information in our brains to the external event. This response is often habitual or unaware, as we tread well-worn grooves in our brains and follow heuristics which help us to manage the vast amount of information that comes our way every moment. These cognitive shortcuts can be helpful, but they can limit our understanding, undermine our confidence in new situations, and diminish the attention we pay to what our bodies and minds tell us. Deepening awareness involves developing mindfulness, which means paying careful attention to the present moment, simply and directly, rather than being distracted by thoughts, judgements, or interpretations. Traditionally, there are four components or foundations of mindfulness. This framework allows us to develop awareness of all aspects of our experience. These are: (a) mindfulness of the body; (b) mindfulness of feelings or feeling-tone; (c) mindfulness of states of mind or emotions, and (d) mindfulness of thoughts. This chapter offers exercises and guidance for developing deeper awareness and mindfulness in day-to-day life.

The purpose of this ‘Handbook of Compassion in Healthcare: A Practical Approach’ is to help make compassionate care a day-to-day clinical reality for everyone: patients, families, and healthcare professionals. We do not suggest that current health systems are entirely lacking in compassion. All around the world, clinical care is provided by staff who seek to be professional, compassionate, and patient-centered at all times. The very existence of health centres, doctors’ surgeries, outpatient clinics, acute hospitals, daycare centres, dental practices, physiotherapy centres, and many other healthcare facilities is a testament to basic human compassion, to society’s commitment to help the afflicted, and to our fundamental desire to support each other in times of difficulty. We care. At the same time, it is clear that healthcare settings vary widely in relation to compassion, with some already excelling in compassionate care, but others in need of a more conscious or sustained focus on compassion. Many services do well, but most could do better. Improvement is always possible. Health systems are operated by people, for people. Compassion matters deeply. Compassion can be the key value that improves services further and makes our fundamental caring impulses more apparent, more effective, and more human. Always and everywhere, compassion matters.

After attempts to target national and international politics stalled, the network of groups concerned with fair trade regrouped around local activism. This chapter shows how paper was a crucial product to understand the strand of activism which emerged in the 1970s: it served as a medium for groups across Europe to keep in contact but was also the main carrier of information about the injustices the movement tried to address through distributing leaflets, posters, and books. Activism in many places was anchored by so-called world shops, which had first emerged in the Netherlands at the end of the 1960s as meeting places for activists with similar concerns. The model quickly spread throughout Europe, offering activists a way to come together around a diverse set of issues, which they first and foremost addressed in their own neighbourhoods. The chapter offers an alternative reading of 1970s activism, claiming that social activism did not subside but rather shifted towards local activities, which has been less visible to contemporary observers as well as historians.

This chapter explores the foundations of emotions from empirical research in neuroscience, biology, psychology, multiculturalism, and primatology. The phenomenon of emotional experience is depthless and ever complex. The reader learns to appreciate how social and emotional intelligences are necessary if one is to learn the nature of emotions. Cultural meanings, languages, and world paradigms may seek to define emotions. However, this chapter argues that by developing a multicultural humanistic psychology approach to understanding emotions, readers can appreciate their flowing nature that is not known by definition, but through relationship.

In this chapter, we argue that differences in problem-solving experiences can be traced to differences in the activation of brain structures involved in the unconscious processing of information (what we refer to as “the backstage”). Scientists commonly distinguish between two major types of problem-solving experiences: via insight and via analysis. Three properties are often mentioned when describing how insight solutions differ from analytic solutions: (1) Solvers are unable to report much of the processing that leads to the solution which comes to mind in an off–on manner; (2) Solvers experience their solutions together with a feeling of pleasure and reward; (3) Solutions via insight feel correct and they actually are. This is captured by a distinctive response: the Aha! This chapter focuses on these three properties and argues that unconscious processes are important for problem-solving in general, but especially important for insight experiences because most of the processing that leads to the solution happens below awareness. It also argues that the positive affect associated with insight serves an adaptive function.